Client Relationship Overview
After recently deciding to diversify into government, a highly innovative order fulfillment company hired us to serve as their government sales team. Company leadership was familiar enough with government contracting to understand the massive information barriers they would have to overcome, and chose to outsource the effort to maximize their leadership team on their core functions.
Challenges
Our team was quickly impressed at the substantial infrastructure our client had in place. Their early investment in technology and their leadership team resulted in advanced reporting and real-time customized dashboards for their Fortune 500 client base. With sophisticated process flows and standard operating procedures to support them, they had been steadily growing their commercial business over the course of 20 years. Despite these successes, our biggest challenge in helping them enter the government space would clearly be developing their past performance – a critical risk mitigation tool when communicating with federal contracting officers.
Solution
JetCo’s capture and proposal management teams met with the leadership team to understand the ideal opportunities – both from a size and functional perspective. Then, we evaluated their commercial sector past performance to identify topics or industries that would resonate with public sector evaluators. (For example, their strong footprint in the health and beauty market made us target human service / health related agencies.)
In addition, their assigned researcher identified target agencies and likely competitors at the federal level, using federal spend data and robust search engines to identify contract targets. At the state level, we used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to identify upcoming solicitations to target, identifying one immediate and one long-term target involving human services. As we worked with them on initial bid responses, we developed a strong proposal library for non-customized content, which could be easily modified and incorporated into quick response opportunities.
Results
Three months after we began working with this client, we had our first contract win – a state level contract valued at almost $1 million. Another important metric – particularly in our early days working with a new client – is the pass rationale. Working through the bid/no-bid evaluation process with them, we documented reasons for every no-bid decision. The primary reasons for the no-bid decisions centered on size and function, which allowed us to hone our key words and other search parameters to better target opportunities.
“…at our kick off meeting today on the data entry project a number of people from the State commented on the very high quality of our bid submission compared with many others they had seen.”
“…I just want to say that the detailed and methodical manner in which you prepared the response to the RFP is going to make preparation of the SOPs easier. Thanks.”