Back to Basics: Expanding Your Federal Business By Tom Basile Government Business Development LLC If you have a GSA Schedule and are not already doing so, take a look at GSA eBuy. Traditionally, eBuy has been a one step process—meaning they ask for a price quotation and the technical qualifiers are minimal. Thus, lowest bidder wins. However, more and more opportunities are requesting a technical approach, management plan and resumes, and are quite large ($1M+). This presents an opportunity to differentiate you from the competition on more than just price. Recent discussions with several GSA contracting officers have revealed that GSA typically gets less than five bids per opportunity. Not a bad playing field! Next, determining how the government buys what you are selling is critical. This tells you whether your customer is the government, the prime contractor community or both. For example, if you were in the SharePoint business, you would conclude that the majority of SharePoint development opportunities were embedded in much larger procurements. Consequently, large, small and specialty prime contractors would be your primary targets. Assume for a moment that your company is in the hardware maintenance business. Experience and research shows that these services are predominantly purchased outside the GSA schedule; either as a standalone program, a subset of a larger program, or a task order under a multiple-award contract. For standalone opportunities that you decide to prime, the objective is to properly position your company to become one of few firms that have gained the trust of the buyer. To do this takes as much lead time as possible in order to meet the key stakeholders on the program and contracting side that are involved in this procurement. The idea is to determine who will be on the evaluation board and to target your marketing efforts to these people. Meetings for the sake of meeting do not lead to sales. However, the right type of meetings and relationship-building is necessary to properly position the company and differentiate it from the competition. For opportunities that are part of a larger buy, the strategy is to secure a subcontracting position with the two or three lead primes. Getting on a team and securing a solid teaming agreement with a work share or specifically defined “swim lane” means that your value proposition is highly valued by the prime contractor and you are viewed as bringing a differentiator to the team. However, chances of securing a solid teaming agreement are often tied to how well you know the customer and how well the customer knows your company. This is critical in negotiating a strong teaming position. Remember to always include language in the teaming agreement that flows down all work shares to the subcontract agreement. Finally, multiple-award contracts are being used more and more for all types of services. In fact, over 50% of IT-related purchases are done through multiple award contracts. These can be agency-specific or government-wide types of contracting vehicles. Some are mandatory for the agency, while others can be used across the government. For example, the DHS Eagle contract is a multi-award contract for use by DHS and its member agencies. On the other hand, the NIH CIO-SP2 is a multi-award, government-wide vehicle open to any agency including DOD. If you are not on a team, you will not know what is being purchased, since task orders are not published in FedBizOpps. Independent research services typically post task order information long after the award. The basic idea for companies new to the government markets is to focus on a combination of prime and subcontractor opportunities and secure a subcontracting position on some key multiple-award contracts. As you can see, this approach is opportunity-driven with an agency/prime contractor/contract vehicle focus. This approach does not happen quickly. It’s a process that requires time and relationship-building. Copyright 2011 by Government Business Development LLC. For more information visit www.govbusdev.com.