Federal Marketplace Strategy

If you follow these four steps and successfully execute at each stage of our plan you can usually completely transform your business in a 3–4-year timeframe.

Federal Marketing Strategy Validity

We have 20 years in federal marketing consulting and through working with our customers both strategically and through some trial and error we have learned that this is the most consistent strategy for being successful in the federal marketplace.

Over the past two decades, we have served as a de facto incubator for many successful small businesses. Currently, our small business clients have over a billion dollars per year in federal sales. There are many factors that are inherent to each client that contribute to their success and failure therefore we recommend you call and discuss with one of our analysts to help you build the correct plan for your firm.

Step 1: Getting your Company Ready for Federal Business.

Company Factors – These are factors that a company should have before it attempts to market to the federal government. If one or more of these factors are not present your firm may need to refine its business model before you attempt to enter the federal space.

Technical capabilities of the firm or its products. Is your product something the government uses and are you competitive with other firms in your field?
Geographical service location of the business. What agencies are in your service area and can you service them?
Niche, have you carved out a niche in your industry that gives you an advantage over other firms that would be useful to the government?
Willingness to invest the time and resources needed to make your first sale.

Step 2: Obtaining any Preference, you can for your Business.

Preference in Federal Contracting – These SBA certifications provide a firm with an advantage when bidding on federal contracts. While having a certification is not “everything” over the past decade we have seen a shift from firms with only the small business designation to SBA certification holders.

8(a) Program participation.
HUBZone
SDVOSB (Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business)
EDWOSB or WOSB (Economically Disadvantaged / Woman Owned Small Business)

Step 3: Getting your first contract(s)

Obtaining Past Performance – The federal buyers are like the purchasing agents at large businesses. They are leery of firms that they do not have a history of doing business with. This makes the initial sale always the hardest. Therefore, here are what we consider the two best ways to obtain past performance.

Sole Source Contracts obtained using your SBA certification. You basically meet with a federal contracting officer, agree on a price and they can directly award the contract to you without placing the contract out for a bit. In many instances, a firm starts off small but over time as the contracting officer gains faith in your ability to fulfill the contracts gets larger and larger.
GSA Schedule contracts, allow a firm to use GSA e-buy, provide visibility for federal buyers conducting market research as well as provide a governmentwide contracting vehicle. This gives your firm the ability to make initial sales and with the 12,000 small businesses each having over 1 million per year in sales from their GSA Schedule contract alone, it provides many small businesses with a nice piece of federal work.

Step 4: Time to Leverage Your Past Performance!

Leveraging Past Performance – This is the point you have been working to get to. Once you have gotten in the door and now have past performance it is now time to leverage that past performance to turn your firm into a larger federal contractor. We do this through the following two mechanisms.

Firms with SBA Certifications should now set their sights on contracts that are set aside for their specific type of certification. These contracts are generally much larger than sole source contracts, and past performance helps increase the firm’s win rate. The average number of firms responding to a set-aside RFQ is generally around three. Therefore, a win rate above 1/3 is achievable provided the firm has past performance and that that rating is “good” or better.
Obtaining positions on key GWAC and IDIQ Contracts also leverages the past performance you have obtained. These contracts are formed when an agency or group of agencies wants to create a pool, they can access that will be better at servicing that agency’s mission than going back to a pool of new contractors each time. These large blocks of money, generally on the low side in the hundreds of millions and on the large side tens of billions of dollars give access to large blocks of money with just a few recipients.

Step 5: Call us to Discuss.

In this call we will go over your firm’s current capabilities, your eligibility for any SBA certifications, and GSA Schedules. Then we can develop a plan to get your firm to Step 4.

We work with small businesses like yours every day so we have designed our services to both work and be affordable for small businesses.

Federal Marketplace Strategy