Shop Talk 3: The Right Deal Selection Helps Save Big & Win Big

This is, unfortunately, the step where most people start, and hopefully, if you are keeping up with our series Shop Talk, you already know that starting here is not a good idea. Two things needed to precede this: 1) a Go-to-Market Strategy that included detailed information about what you do, what you want to do, who you want for customers, who the competition is, and several other factors discussed earlier, and 2) a Pipeline Model driving an implementation plan for your Strategy. If you have not read these issues, go to the earlier Blog pages and catch up. They are short reads and worth the time (we think).

Now that your strategy and plan are in place, you can begin searching for opportunities to pursue, but searching itself is not enough. You also need to apply your Strategy and your Plan to selecting amongst the opportunities your searches return. And the more exact you can make the application of the details (such as your business area profiles) the more likely you end up pursuing the deals you are best suited to win – and that is worth its weight in gold (or diamonds, or crypto, or just good old US dollars). How to go about it is a good question, and we generally don’t have a good answer, so lets look at the possibilities.

Let’s see – you probably have a subscription to some data service that provides a stream of opportunities from government sources such as SAM.gov, FPDS, and others. Well, no doubt about it, you need that data stream. And most of these services provide a set of search criteria to choose from, with some even promising your search is AI assisted. But AI cannot be smarter than the data it has to work with. So, let’s consider an example, and start with a big one – keywords. Of course you provided these for the search. But most of the data services are just searching project titles, so how many of your keywords are going to be there? And how descriptive is the title of the actual work (you know the answer to this, often not even close)? Others do search descriptions of the work they captured when there are documents available, and at least one we know can look in the documents. This is all great, except for one thing – how are they applying the keyword matches? Are they just looking for a match, then giving you a lot of deals to look through that are way off base? Are they counting the number of times the keyword appears, which is better, but still, there was a reason CLEVER’s AI aligned keywords and phrases into groups and applied a relativity ranking based on your Strategy. Assuming you vendor is at least counting frequency of occurrence, If a word appears 5 times is that better than a highly relative phrase appearing once?

We could go through more examples, but we would end up with significant shortcomings on all of them. Does the AI favor agencies you named, or ones you worked with before? Are you able to tell it about new capabilities, and if you do, how does the AI treat that compared to your previous work? As you can see, it is not that hard to render the AI somewhat useless. Most AIs are working off of a very limited set of data points, as compared to all the descriptive elements we discussed in the Strategy blog. The end result, while better than it used to be, is you still get too much stuff you have to look through to whittle down to what you want, and that can take hours of looking through documents and trying to do some competitive analysis (if you even thought about that as a criteria at this stage), asses your ability to market the customer given geographic considerations, determine if there is enough time to position yourself to win, assess whether the revenue value range fits your needs, examine the full scope of the work to assess your ability to prime, and more. In an ideal world, all these criteria, and the associated rankings assigned in your Strategy, come together to provide you with a set of rated deals that ideally suit your capabilities and resources for pursuit.

Now, no one has figured out how to fully automate this process, there are too many factors and data to collect and analyze, but that is why CLEVER comes with a personal support team. Yes, the robot has an AI model (called the Smart Selector – how original😊) to handle the analysis, but it needs all the right data, and your support team is there to make sure it gets it. That is why we call it Search & Selection, even to the point of telling you whether you should prime or not.

 No doubt everyone’s AI will get smarter, providing you work to feed it and the vendors provide the mechanism allowing that feed, but for now (as far as we know) CLEVER may be the only (human assisted) robot in town that can really tell you what you should pursue. Below is an example of CLEVER’s Smart Selector output – we are happy to explain the details to you.

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, investigate each investment, make the right purchases, track its performance, . That's the CLEVER way.