Is a CRM the Right Platform for Government BD?
Maybe, if you love doing things the hard way!
I always liked this quote "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got." There are several attributions for its origin, but you get the point. So, I will ask you, do you know anyone that has not signed up for a data provider who will let you search public government data and send you results backed up with some additional insights, say who the incumbent is? Then you said, great, but what am I going to do to house all this stuff, organize it, track it, evaluate it, build on it, and use it. Well, a sales system might help, so let’s go get a CRM. Congratulations, you have now completed doing the same thing everyone else does, and you can now expect the same results.
So, what is wrong with a CRM as the foundation for a government contractor business development platform? The answer is nothing, and everything. I know, sounds a little like the last answer you got when you asked the government a question about the RFP you’re bidding on😊 But, let's explain.
Why nothing - because CRMs have a lot of functionality (at least the good ones) to build on. So, if you want to spend the time to take a vanilla system and enhance it for the unique attributes a good government pipeline management tool should have, you can get there. But it is going to take a long time, a lot of work, a fair amount of trial and error, and last but not least - money. And let's not forget, once you have the tool built out to your needs you are still going to be looking at a healthy monthly user fee just to give your people access to a lot of empty data fields someone now has to figure out how to load up with something useful. That ends up requiring you pay for more tools, data feeds and people who can spend the time to do the research to keep that management system you built filled with data. Or, heaven forbid, you will leave it up to expensive BD people to do it all.
So, why do we say everything if, in fact, you can make it work? Because the reality is there is a lot of functionality under the surface of a CRM that is not designed for the world you live in. CRMs are built for marketing, sales, and customer support people who have a very large volume of customers they need to approach, sell, and maintain communications with. We can describe the environment has high volume of opportunity with multiple touch points, with a low volume of data. That is why a vanilla CRM has a lot of buttons for a variety of functions, but very few activated data fields to do it with.
You just do not have high volume sales where you have highly complex data streams that are necessary to manage to obtain the business, i.e., government. Yes, your government environment is exactly the opposite. You have a low volume of opportunities in play at any one point in time, with a limited number of touch points, but massive amounts of information / intelligence you want to gather, organize, and analyze as you prepare for a bid. Also, high volume sales are generally handled by a single salesperson. You are likely to have an entire team of business development, capture management, proposal, and technical staff involved in a single opportunity. So, your environment is more of a data management, analytics, and collaboration challenge. We get a little confused, or sucked into the CRM world, because a lot of the terminology associated with the functionality sounds like it fits. But when you try to get a team of people to collaborate around a large body of data points, documents, complex competitive analysis, customer insights, win strategies, P-Wins, PTWs, and more, you soon find you need features CRMs do not provide, and a depth to the functionality they do not come with.
Overall, you face two major problems driven by the unique circumstances you live in:
You need a breadth and depth of functionality CRMs do not come with, even those that some people have tried to adapt to government business development
You are left with a huge research and data gathering challenge that is expensive to meet internally
Is there a solution? At 90Degrees we spent a decade designing CLEVER and we provide a research and operational support service built around it. It solves both problems at a total cost far less than what you would have to pay to solve these problems internally. And the results are: better opportunity choices, more intelligence before the bid, better bid preparation, increased BD staff productivity - more wins and faster growth. Want to learn more about the CLEVER difference - contact me at 202.618.4555 x101 and talk about how to get on board with a better BD process.