How to Identify and Fill Gaps in Your Federal Pipeline

We all know a robust pipeline is critical for growing your federal contracting business, but have you thought about what a robust business development pipeline means for your daily operations?

Here are a couple situations where your opportunity pipeline is your lifeline.

When Your Work Gets Lost

While we’d all like to think we can keep the work we are currently performing forever, it’s just not realistic.

Government program managers change, contracting officers change, and other key decision makers change, resetting some of the relationships you’ve worked for years to cultivate. Sometimes required contract vehicles change, completely altering the list of companies that can even prime the work you’ve held for years. All the more reason it’s important to keep a robust business development pipeline of opportunities to both replace lost revenue and to create growth.

When Your Resources Are Stretched Too Thin

All businesses, regardless of size, face resource constraints.

If you run a small business, all of your proposal resources may be dual-hatted with their “day jobs” being Program Manager, President, Contracts Manager, Accountant, etc., and their work on proposals being considered “additional duties as assigned.” This can limit your company’s ability to respond to proposals one at a time.

On the other hand, if you’re part of a large division at a top federal contractor, you may be pursuing a $2B proposal effort that has dozens of capture and proposal folks tied up with the effort, making it difficult for them to pursue another $2B proposal effort at the same time without bringing in additional resources.

In both cases contractors face limited resources, but with different magnitudes. While federal contractors often joke that the government conspires to drop RFPs as close to each other as possible, finding opportunities that are spread out does allow you to effectively execute capture management and do a thorough job on the proposal – regardless of the size of your business development and capture teams. If you have too many proposals at once, you risk doing a poor job with all of them, and if you have too few, you risk having resources underutilized.

Analytics Gets Your Pipeline Back on Track

OneTeam Analytics can help you find the voids in your pipeline. With just a few clicks you can look at your pipeline sliced and diced any number of ways to determine where you may have voids.

• Want to look at your entire pipeline for the next three years? Click.
• Want to look at just your Engineering Services Division for the next three years? Click.
• Want to look at the pipeline for your Cybersecurity Division, where you’re the prime, for the next two years, and where your PWin is 50% or higher? Click, click, click.
• What if you tweaked that PWin to 35% or higher? Click. Done.
• Need to look at all opportunities in your pipeline from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2022 in the Missile & Aviation Division, whether you’re the prime, sub, or JV team member? Click, click, click.

And this is all out-of-the-box capability using default reports. There’s incredible customization ability if you need even MORE complex reporting capability.

Previously, these were spreadsheet drills fraught with potential error that required significant effort to calculate. Most often, government contractors simply didn’t do them because they required too much manual work.

Now that OneTeam Analytics puts the answers just a click away, you can quickly and easily find any voids and set about filling them. All of these “what if” drills become simple efforts that can be done in seconds, using the data you already have in your OneTeam pipeline, graphically displayed in a way to make it easy to digest and understand.