How to Leverage Procurement Forecasts

While forecasts are a crucial tool in the GovCon sales toolkit, this explains why they shouldn't be obsessed over and how to effectively use them to your advantage. Learn the best practices for locating and analyzing procurement forecasts, the key information to look for, and how to approach contracting officers armed with the right data. Enhance your government sales strategy by leveraging these insights to build stronger relationships and secure more opportunities.

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Read Transcript Here:

Michael LeJeune (00:00)

Welcome to another episode of Game Changers for Government Contractors. If you are new to the podcast, my name is Michael. I am the host of Game Changers. I'm an award winning author on the topic of government sales. And we've helped our clients win a little over $14 and a half billion in government contracts. And you could be one of our next success stories.

So with that out of the way, let me dive into the topic that I want to talk about today. I want to talk about reviewing forecast. Everybody says you need to review forecasts and they put this in the sales pipeline strategy discussion and put a lot of emphasis on this. Now, I think this is just one tool in your toolkit. It's worthy of having the discussion. That's why I'm doing the podcast today. It's not worthy of obsessing over. That's the thing. I will tell you the forecasts are not updated that often. That's another part of the reason why you're probably going to look at this once a year.

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In addition to looking at it once a year, you're probably going to peek at it every so often if you get an update or a Google alert, something like that, but this is a document that typically doesn't change a whole lot. The agencies put this out. They try to keep it at once a year and sometimes you'll see some minor updates to it, but it's not something like they're updating once a month or once a week or anything like that. So it doesn't have the traction that Sam does or any other website out there that's tracking other different things. It just doesn't. So when you're looking at a forecast, there's a couple of things that I want you to look for. And there's a couple of ways to look for forecast. One of the ways that a lot of people look for them is they go to acquisition.gov . Acquisition.gov has a bunch of different things on it. But one of them is if you scroll down, it's currently on the right side towards the bottom. There's something that says procurement forecast. And so you'll click on that and you'll get a page that shows all of the agencies on the left and links to their procurement forecast on the right.

Now, one of the good things about that is if you are unaware of what all the agencies are, you're now going to have a list and you're going to have their websites and all of that information. So that's a good thing to have right out of the gate. Cause you may not be thinking about certain agencies and now it's good to have that list, right? So that's one thing. The next thing is you're going to find that sometimes this is more of a journey than anything else.

So let's say you click on the procurement forecast link and it takes you to the agency website and there's a download of the actual forecast. That's great. Sometimes you're going to click on that link and it's going to go to a 404 or a 301 or whatever error. And it's not even going to be a relevant page on the website. Sometimes you're going to click on it and there's everything on that website, but the agency forecast because the links have moved or whatever has happened. Right? So you've got to look at that. Acquisition .gov is a little bit of, you got to take it with a grain of salt because you just don't know when you get there if you're going to be able to click on it and find a procurement forecast, or if you're going to do a lot of gig digging.

For me, a lot of times I just Google it. You can Google the words procurement forecast and the agency that you're looking at, and you'll go right to it. Now that doesn't mean you can't go look at acquisition .gov because there's a lot of other things on there like the FAR and other cool things. There's a lot of things to poke around on there, but that is often one of the things people look at as the procurement forecast.

So with that out of the way, let me dive into what you're actually looking for in the procurement forecast. I've got a list of a handful of things. One of the biggest things you're going to be looking at, of course, is upcoming opportunities. So what are the upcoming opportunities that are coming out in that agency? They're going to be listed by NAICS code, size, all kinds of different other things there. You're going to find expiring contracts. You're going to find when the anticipated release is, you're going to find out contract vehicle information, the place of performance. If it's going to be a set aside. There's often program information. So you'll see the name of the program, but the most valuable thing that you're going to find is often the contact information for the person that is running it. And at the end of the day, that's really what these procurement forecasts are. They're a tool for you to locate a few opportunities in your NAICS. Cause remember procurement forecast is put out for a whole agency. So if there's 50 opportunities or a hundred or 700 opportunities on that thing, there's a chance that only 10 or 20 of them, maybe less are for what you sell. So you're looking for those critical contacts that are in there that you may not know about otherwise, because maybe they don't have a procurement on the street or a history of buying certain things. And now that contracting officer is in charge of it.

So when I'm looking at these forecasts, contact information is probably the number one thing that I'm looking at. And also when you are doing your due diligence, you want to be able to say later on, Hey, I've gathered all of this information. I understand when this is coming out, who's running the program. I understand the, you know, the place of performance and all these other things. Because when you get on the phone with the contracting officer, a PM or the small business rep, you need to know that stuff. Because one of the first things they're going to do, if you say, Hey, can you help me, is they're going to push back and say, have you reviewed the forecast? Have you done your homework on our agency? So instead of saying, Hey, can you help me? You can open up with a line similar to this. Hey, Mr. Small business rep. Hey, Mr. Contracting officer. I've been doing my homework and I noticed this in the forecast. I've reached out to Janice over at army material command or whatever. And I haven't heard back from her. I'm really trying to figure out if this is still going to come out in Q3, if it's still going to be a set aside for SDVOSB or whatever it is, right?

And if you know that information and that's how you start a conversation, you are going to change the game with how they respond to you. They're not going to respond to you with a brush off. A brush off sounds like this. Go check the forecast. Send me your capability statement. If anything pops up, I'll be happy to let you know. Send me your capability statement. I'll forward it onto a few folks. Those are all brush -offs. You stop the brush off when you come in armed with some information that they've put time and effort into. Someone has put time and effort into creating this forecast and for you to not research it shows neglect in the sales process on your part. And that just infuriates these people that they have to give basic directions to people. So bypass that and be one of the few people that actually come armed with some information about the forecast about that agency.

And look, here's the cool thing. The forecast is just one tool. If I were to look at this as an investigator, it's just one tool in a whole bunch of tools that the government has. You have SAM.gov , you have USASpending, you have FPDS, you have GSA tools out there. There's all kinds of tools that you can use to build a picture about your client. And if you build a good enough picture, when you pick up the phone or you send an email and you know what you're talking about, you're going to change the game with them. The other thing is when you are reaching out to teaming partners and you've gathered all of this information, this gives you something to talk about. It's the same as calling up a contracting officer and not knowing your stuff. If you call up a teaming partner and say, Hey, I'd really like to do business with you guys. If you have anything, I'd sure like some of it, like a piece of that pie. They're going to say no, they're also going to give you the brush off. And so if you can go to them with some of this information and have a clearer picture of what you're asking, who you're asking it of. You can name drop some of the contracting officers and folks like that. The odds are that teaming partner is going to take your call.

So that's really about all I wanted to cover with forecast today. There's probably a lot deeper you can go with it, but on the surface level, the majority of what you need to know about these is what I've covered. The majority of how you use these is what I've covered here today. There's probably a dozen or two dozen more strategies on how to use this, but the bulk of what you need is in this very short, simple podcast today. So thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

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