The GovCon Pipeline Cliff

In this episode, Michael LeJeune addresses the common issue of an empty pipeline and shares actionable strategies to avoid the dreaded "pipeline cliff." Learn how to maintain a steady flow of opportunities by implementing the Rule of 300, which emphasizes daily prospecting and building a long-term pipeline. Discover the importance of consistently adding high-quality opportunities and tracking them over 24 to 36 months. Whether you're struggling with a weak pipeline or falling into the trap of sporadic prospecting, this episode offers practical advice to help you achieve sustained success in government contracting. Tune in to transform your sales approach and ensure a robust pipeline year-round.

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Read Transcript Here:

Michael LeJeune: [00:00:00] Do you find yourself regularly in a place where leads have dried up? Your pipeline is empty. I call this the pipeline cliff. And if you find yourself in this situation regularly, this podcast is going to open your eyes to a handful of things you can do to fix that. What I found is a lot of clients get in this hamster wheel, treadmill, or whatever you want to call it mode where you're really busy on the front end, putting opportunities in your pipeline because you have a lot of time. Then, as time goes on, you have less and less time. As a result, you start doing less and less prospecting, and next thing you know, your pipeline has just dried up. It's always difficult to re-engage, restart the treadmill, and start putting more opportunities back in your pipeline. So, today's podcast is really about getting over this and avoiding that pipeline [00:01:00] cliff. Once you fall off the pipeline cliff, it's always difficult to restart. In fact, I would say it takes anywhere from three to six months to re-engage your pipeline. So, what you want to do is avoid that situation by doing a handful of things we're going to talk about today.

The first thing that you can do to avoid the pipeline cliff is something that I call the rule of 300. This is where you prospect six days a week, leaving time off for one day a week, every week. Plus, it gives you two weeks off a year for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or whatever holidays. The goal here is to prospect roughly 300 days of the year. If you can prospect 300 days a year, you're going to see a situation where there's always something going in the pipeline. This rule of thumb is contrary to the way most people prospect. Most people prospect a lot like they shop at a grocery store. They keep putting things in the cart until the cart is full, regardless of what they need. It's like, "Well, the cart's [00:02:00] not full. Let me keep putting stuff in it." That's how most people grocery shop. You just keep filling it up. Even if you get to a point where the grocery cart is full, that's where you stop. Even if you need more.

Let me say that again. Even if you need more, you stop when the cart is full because you're like, "The cart is full." Well, what if today when you shopped, you grabbed the bulk size of toilet paper, the bulk size of dog food, and the bulk size of a couple of other things, and you only have three or four things in the cart? And most of them are not groceries. You've got to keep shopping, right? It's the same thing with your pipeline. If your goal is, "I need to add five opportunities to the pipeline," but part of the goal is also, "I need to add a million dollars worth of opportunities," and you add those five in because that was your first goal, and those five only amount to $250,000 worth of opportunities, you're still short $750,000. But you're like, "Well, I've added five opportunities," but you're still short. So, you need to add [00:03:00] more. Some people will just stop at those five because their goal was to add five. They've kind of forgotten about the bigger goal of the number they needed to hit or the bigger goal of not stopping just because you hit your goal.

Just because you hit the goal of a million bucks in your pipeline doesn't mean you should stop. If there are other opportunities and other ways to do it, keep doing it. Here's another example. A salesperson hits their goal on Monday and doesn't prospect the other four days of the week. How often does that happen? They'll have one day a week, and it's usually Monday. It's the first day of the week, hardest day of the week. They'll get out there and hit it hard, and by the end of the day Monday, they've met their goal for the week. So, the other four days of the week, they don't prospect. Why? Why is that? Because they hit their goal. That's really the only reason. The goal should be to prospect 300 days out of the year. At least when you start out in this business, until you can pass that on to somebody else, you should be doing that. It doesn't have to be five [00:04:00] hours a day, 10 hours a day, or anything like that. It could be an hour a day, but an hour a day, you need to prospect and put something in your pipeline. Because if you're putting something in your pipeline, even if it's just updating contact information, email addresses, things like that, maybe you didn't get through to somebody, but you found somebody's information. That's been hard to get to like, "Oh man, I finally figured out who the PM is over at Fort Hood," or "I finally figured out who the contracting officer is that's in charge of this contract vehicle," or "I finally figured out who the teaming partner is that's been winning this stuff." That information will help turn into an opportunity at some point, but you've got to be doing that pre-work, the research, the phone calls, the reaching out to people.

300 days a year. You've got to be doing it 300 days a year. If you're not, you're going to be in a situation where this is going to dry up. It's just inevitable. Again, if you're, if in the process of or you're under the philosophy of one day a week, that's [00:05:00] four days a month. Four days a month, and you take time off for Christmas and New Year's and Thanksgiving and Arbor Day or whatever it is, and maybe you're only doing 40 days a year because you've taken off two months' worth of Mondays, right? Because most holidays fall on Monday. So you're doing 40 days a year. So 40 days a year versus 300 a year. Can you see the difference? It's a massive difference to think about 40 versus 300. And that's why salespeople that are doing the 300 rule are hitting their numbers or exceeding them. And people that are only doing the 40 rule, or I should say the 40 or less rule, are not hitting their goals. They're just not putting enough in consistently.

Narrator: If you're struggling to win government contracts, the answer is not quitting. The answer is finding the right information you need and the right mentors you need. And I've got a quick solution for you. The quick [00:06:00] solution is a book that I just wrote. It's called "I'm New to Government Contracting. Where Do I Start?" It's a great book that walks you through all of the fundamentals that you need. So if you're struggling with getting contracting officers to call you back, getting teaming partners to call you back, if you're struggling with bidding and losing all the time, if you're struggling with the proposal process, if you're struggling with anything in this business, this book covers it. It's going to walk you through A to Z, everything you really need to know about government contracting and give you not only the foundational education you need, it's going to give you a lot of advanced tactics and strategies that most people don't teach. And it's all in that book. You can go grab it right now on Amazon. Now, back to this episode.

Michael LeJeune: The other thing about the 40 plan is when you're doing that just once a month, you're missing stuff. You know, there are things that needed to get turned in, and they have a two- or three-day turnaround. And because you checked on Monday, and then now you're checking again on Monday, you're [00:07:00] like, "Oh man, this came out on Friday, but now I don't have enough time to get to it," or "It came out on Wednesday or Tuesday and I don't have enough time to get to it because I only check on Mondays." And as soon as this came out on Tuesday, it had a three-day turnaround, a five-day turnaround, seven-day turnaround, and I totally missed it for whatever reason. Because it happens, right? There are a lot of opportunities. There are two agencies that we make fun of all the time, but I won't say them here, that do it all the time, where they'll put out an RFQ and it's a three-day turnaround. It happens all the time. And if you're only doing prospecting once a week, there's a good chance you're going to miss that. There's a really good chance you're going to miss that. So, the rule of 300, prospecting 300 days a year, that will change the game for you. The other big shift here is focusing on building a long-term pipeline. And when I say long-term, I'm talking 24 to 36 months. So, most people focus on what I would consider a short-term pipeline. At best, it's six months out. Most have a three-month pipeline where it's like, "Hey, I know this is dropping or this just [00:08:00] dropped, I saw it on Sam." And that's where I always say, "Is that how you're building your pipeline? Just the stuff that drops on Sam?" "Yeah, that's where most of it's coming from." "Okay. That's the problem." You've got to start building a long-term pipeline, 24 to 36 months out, even longer if possible. One of the key ways to do this is when you hear the government talking about an opportunity, you start tracking it. You put it in your pipeline. So, if you see something on the forecast and it's 2024, and you see that it's end of 25, put that in your pipeline. If you compete on an RFP and you lose, and it's a five-year contract, put that in your pipeline and track it for when it comes back around.

That's how you build a 24 to 36-month pipeline. Every opportunity that comes across your desk goes in the pipeline. Even if you can't compete on it. Because I know some people will say, "Hey, Michael, I'm a small business. I just lost this contract, and I'm going to be too big to compete on it next time." I understand that. Do you have any [00:09:00] small friends, small business friends, partners, things like that, that you can partner with next time? Absolutely. And what if you're not too big? Or what if the rules change? What if it comes out as full and open next time? Well, Michael, I might be too big to be a subcontractor. Maybe, maybe not. But wouldn't it be better to be tracking it? So, whether you're tracking it for yourself, your teammates, or both, you've got to put these opportunities in your pipeline so that you are ahead of the game. That long-term pipeline is the key.

Then, when you look at the long-term pipeline, you start to see, "Hey, I'm going to start seeing some consistency here because we have opportunities that are dropping every single month." Every single month, things are coming in the pipeline. And if they're not coming in the pipeline, then you need to start filling them in. But you need to start having opportunities that are coming in the pipeline on a consistent basis every single month, quarter, year. Because if they're not, you're just going to [00:10:00] continue to see these peaks and valleys. So, the only way to get around that is to have that long-term pipeline. The other thing that I find that a lot of companies are struggling with is a weak pipeline. This goes back to the analogy I used a few minutes ago about your grocery cart. You've got to have goals for your pipeline. So, in order to hit the goal of, "Hey, I need $10 million a year," or "I need $1 million a year," whatever your goal is, there's a ratio. We all know there's a ratio. For the majority of us, it's one out of ten.

So, for every ten opportunities we put in the pipeline, we win one. And so, that means if I need a million dollars in revenue, I need $10 million in opportunities in my pipeline. But that's just step one. Most people only do that. They say, "Hey, I need $10 million in my pipeline. This is great." But they're not measuring. "Is this $10 million in my pipeline? Is that the right $10 million? Am I looking at that and I'm saying, 'Hey, 70% of that is an easy [00:11:00] $7 million we should win,' or is it, 'Ah, maybe only 30% of that is something we should win?'" You should be qualifying these opportunities so that you can feel like, "Hey, the $10 million in my pipeline is at least 60, 70, 80% really high-quality pipeline." And you can get into your own scoring metrics and things like that. There are a lot of ways you can do that, but the bottom line is you need to look at your pipeline to ensure it's not just a good number, but it's the right kind of opportunities in the pipeline that make sense for you. And so, if you don't know how to do that, we can talk about that on another podcast, but that's really the key to not having a weak pipeline.

So, again, don't fall into the trap of only prospecting once a week. It's an easy trap to fall into, and it feels like it's productive because you're doing it every week, but you've got to prospect 300 days a year. Build that long-term pipeline, focus on having a strong pipeline, and you will see those results change. Thanks for listening to Game Changers for Government Contractors. I hope you'll subscribe and join us next time.

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