Shop Talk 1: Where Does B2G Business Development Start
This is the start of a series of blogs that will take you on a journey through the various stages of B2G Business Development, and it is best to start at the start, which is not with BD at all! OK, not exactly, because the BD team has to be involved in building Step 1: a Go-to-Market Strategy. Yes, when asked, most companies say they have one - "we provide information technology and we want to sell to DOD and DHS because they have lots of money." It's a start, but not even close to a finish.
Some ideas - 1) develop a detailed description from an execution point of view on each area of your business [not what's on your web site but the real nitty-gritty of what you do], 2) develop a list of words and phrases that support that description [think search and qualification criteria], 3) develop a list of geographic areas where you are comfortable you can pursue the work [everyone is parochial to some degree], 4) research agency buying patterns and develop a list of agencies that buy what you sell, but keep in mind your geographic interests, 5) list who your primary competitors will be and examine their contract history with your potential customer base, 6) develop tags that characterize all the existing work you have done based on the SOWs you responded to [if you are really small you can just pick some you would have performed on if you had the chance], 7) ignore the NAICS codes you put into your SAM profile and study the NAICS of the opportunities you decide to put in your pipeline, 8) keep track of the amount of work you do by PSC so you can give a higher priority to re-compete opportunities in those codes, 9) place a priority rating on each item in every list (keywords/phrases, geography, agencies, etc.) [oh yeah, painful]. ----- Now you have a set of criteria that defines the scope of your market, which you can use to decide where to look for and how to pick the opportunities you will pursue. You just need a methodology to apply it.
A couple of items that need additional thought. When it comes to business area descriptions, keywords/phrases, and SOW/PWS profiles, they are most useful when they can be seen against the backdrop of what the government buys, and how it describes those purchases. Of course, the SOW/PWS for the opportunity is a key starting point, but it is one sample from a large universe. You have probably heard about GSA’s Category Management initiative, which places every procurement into one of 21 major acquisition categories. If you had a broad understanding of what is in these categories, and how you map to them, and how your opportunity maps to them, you can see in greater depth just how well positioned, from a technical standpoint, you are to be the prime bidder for this work. This is a knowledge base that CLEVER has built, and the graphic below shows a sample of how a company and its pursuit opportunity might look to each other with this category management world as its background (you might notice that CLEVER has 25 categories, a slight expansion of the GSA set.) When you have a high level of alignment, like the sample in the graphic, you should prime. When you do not align in all, or most areas, you are probably better off as a sub. This is how building a strong Go-to-Market Strategy can be used, when you have the analytical methodology to do so, to make good business decisions.
The other area that needs some additional thought is the agencies you decide to focus on. Yes, knowing which ones buy what you sell is critical, but you also need a way in the door. You can try some serious marketing (which you should be doing anyway), but an entrance via a relationship (perhaps one of your employees knows someone at a senior level) or a teaming partner are also important. Consider these in your planning efforts as you prioritize those agency selections.
Of course, you could simply feed some basic info to CLEVER, and he will put it into his Smart Selector, which will build a sophisticated model of your business using everything listed above and more, and applying its methodology, match you to opportunities, providing you a rating of how good a match it is! It isn't just smart search, it's smart selection and we will show you more about that in a later Shop Talk.
Remember, details matter! And, deals are investments, not costs, so manage them like they are a portfolio of opportunities, not an expense. Have an investment strategy, and then investigate each investment. That's the CLEVER way. Next up is Pipeline Planning - coming next week.