How does your team manage the 3 R’s of BD?

October 22nd, 2015

Three critical elements that underlie a successful business development process are the 3 R’s – Research, Relationships, and Requirements. These sound like straightforward concepts but are complex to manage day-to-day. Research is about more than simply finding opportunities; it is about bidding on the right opportunities for your company. Relationships are essential to winning new business as we all know, and unique opportunity requirements can be tricky to align with core competencies.

This raises several questions:

• How do you conduct bid / no-bid decisions?
• How do you maintain relationships with contacts?
• What are the costs incurred from these bids?

Many BD teams do not have clear answers to these questions. GovBD was designed so that your BD team can instantly answer these questions at all times.

Every opportunity features a Bid-no Bid score card equipped with specific / accountable metrics your team can use to match capabilities with requirements. It serves as a Customer Resource Management tool so you can store all contacts, schedule meetings, and assign them to related opportunities and agencies. Finally, BD teams can track B&P spending by opportunity to ensure your team is spending amounts proportional to contract value.

If you have questions about how GovBD can help you manage the 3 R’s, contact the GovBD sales team at GovBDSales@reisystems.com to schedule a demo today.

Managing a Winning Team

September 29th, 2015

Everyone knows that teaming is fundamental to success in today’s public sector. Unfortunately, managing teams is a complicated process that involves finding the right partners, supporting active collaboration, and evenly allocating work share. BD teams need support to organize these moving parts into a winning formula.

GovBD gives your BD team the tools to master this process and track performance at the same time. Any solid team will need robust Teaming Agreements or NDAs, but how do you store them? Perhaps more importantly, how do you track work share or define roles on your team? What about key contacts – are they included as well?

To address these pivotal questions, GovBD developed a unique teaming module that accurately tracks your teams and competitor teams. BD teams can easily track incumbents and primes, store key agreements, define specific roles, and even assign estimated workshare at the opportunity level. Post award results are compiled to provide insight into why your team lost the bid. Did the competitor simply out spend your team or were your partners inadequate?

Going forward, your BD team has the concrete data to conduct honest Post Award debriefs and past performance analysis in GovBD helps your team apply lessons learned for future wins.

If you would like to start managing winning teams today, contact us at GovBDSales@reisystems.com to schedule a demo to see our solution live.

Capture Plans Made Easy

September 22nd, 2015

Capture plans often serve as the basis for BD strategy on any given opportunity. Ideally, a capture plan should increase efficiency, improve bid decisions, and baseline opportunity requirements to drive better decision-making.

Unfortunately, the process of generating / maintaining quality capture plans is time consuming to prepare and riddled with inaccurate information, especially when manually creating documents.

GovBD streamlines this process and mitigates the risk of human error inherent in Excel spread sheets and Power Point documents. The process is simple:

• First, the GovBD team uploads a Capture Plan template based on ones your BD team already uses.
• Second, after opportunity data has been entered in GovBD, users can auto-populate their Capture Plan template at the click of a button.
• Finally, users can edit the document as needed to make any final changes or tweaks.

As a GovBD user, your team can use multiple templates to generate capture plans as Microsoft Word, Power Point, PDF, or Excel document types. After using GovBD for a few weeks, BD teams save countless labor hours and cut meeting time by as much as 25%.

To learn more, contact us at GovBDSales@reisystems.com or schedule a demo to see our solution live.

Preparing for BD Turnover

July 27th, 2015

One of the perennial challenges BD teams face is turnover. Collaboration and accountability among BD team members is easily disrupted when BD leads come and go as often as they do. Predictably, a team's ability to handle the loss of a key member is hard, especially avoiding gaps in work-flow and getting new people up to speed as quickly as possible.

Fortunately, the GovBD team built a BD tool capable of resolving these issues. As a central repository for all information, BD teams can securely house everything from resumes and technical manuals to proposal documents in a single location. Read/Write information control is an integral part of GovBD so when a team member leaves or arrives, system admins can quickly grant or remove access as needed.

Having a tool like GovBD makes it far easier for BD hires to plug into their new role. Not only does GovBD track the history of user actions like a log of past events, it also shows first-time users a clear overview of the BD pipeline in terms of revenue forecasts, opportunities organized by owner, and even a backlog of contract wins; forget about lost contacts, conversations, or emails.

Acclimating new users is a top priority for the GovBD team. We provide free training to all new GovBD users to help orient them in the system. Further, GovBD is based on the Shipley process, which makes learning how to qualify opportunities or define roles and responsibilities intuitive and simple to understand.

To learn more about how GovBD can allay your turnover concerns and revamp your BD efforts overall, you can find more information about our product on www.GovBDapp.com

Moving to the Cloud with GovBD

July 14th, 2015

Similar to commercial businesses, GovCons are increasingly turning to cloud technology to get leaner and more competitive. GovCons of all sizes are eliminating in-house operations and foregoing on premise IT infrastructure in favor of the cloud. Perhaps three reasons stand above the rest to explain why:

• Eliminating overhead expenses
• Increased Collaboration
• Data Management

These benefits are particularly applicable to business development. Given how unique, complex and long the federal sales cycle can be, moving BD to the cloud is tricky. GovCons need tools to help their BD teams collaborate, store information that is easy to find and organize, and of course generate ROI. Basically, selecting the right cloud-based BD solution is paramount, especially in a time of shrinking budgets and increased competition.

The GovBD development team considered these advantages when designing a more intuitive, cost-effective, and specially customized pipeline management CRM for GovCons. We successfully combined the world class security and sales oriented work flow of the Salesforce Cloud platform with first-hand experience and knowledge of government contracting.

Eliminating Overhead Expenditures

GovBD cuts administrative labor hours significantly. Now that BD teams have key information (revenue projections, capture plans, and important dates and action items) updated in real-time, they no longer need to spend countless hours generating complex reports from scratch. GovBD tracks all lines of business smoothly, following current customers and opportunities you are pursuing at the click of a button.

Increased Collaboration

Many BD teams are spread across different states and regions, which requires the flexibility to work in tandem from different platforms at different times, and at odd hours. GovBD allows BD teams to communicate directly via Chatter, where users can make quick comments, add documents, or take polls on new ideas. GovBD users can also assign tasks and setup meetings that can be pushed to Outlook.

Data Management

Data management might be the most important aspect of GovBD's cloud computing. Sending emails back and forth can be an effective way to communicate, but it fails to provide a central repository, what we refer to as a "Single Source of Truth," and controlled access to all information. GovBD stores contacts and partners, key opportunity dates and contract details, even resumes and certifications are captured for staffing purposes.

Overcoming Top Challenges Facing GovCons in 2015

June 19th, 2015

As BD teams jockey for position to win in uncertain, hyper-competitive public markets, several obstacles stand in their way. According to a recent industry survey - the top 3 business development challenges facing Govcons this year are:

• Limited BD Resources
• Increased Competition
• More Restrictive Spending

While there is little that can be done to lift government spending, BD initiatives are refocusing on improving competitive analysis and optimizing resources - basically, accomplishing more with less. This strategy make sense but a key missing ingredient for many contractors is technology. The Deltek Clarity Report put it this way, "Interestingly, despite the search for advantage, technology does not seem to be a priority area of investment yet within the Business Development function."

Improve Resource Management

GovBD leverages the best sales technology platform in the world to give BD teams this advantage for minimal cost and maximum results. GovBD turns the corner on limited BD resources by providing granular tracking of all resources in a single place: contacts and internal employees, partners and competitors, B&P spending and real-time revenue projections.

Better Competitive Analysis

Getting ahead of the competition is easier with precision partner analysis, which allows BD teams to track awards, NAISC / PSC codes, Teaming Agreements, even related contract vehicles.

Cut Costs and Win More

This kind of detailed tracking lends itself to advanced reporting into how, where, and why resources are deployed the way they are. One BD team saved over $140K in costs after 1 year of acquiring GovBD because they could finally get a clear picture of their pipeline. These savings are big, but the investment up front required the vision to make technology a short term priority for long term success.

This mindset is particularly true in terms of pipeline management systems. Reportedly, 1 in 3 Govcons are still relying on Excel spreadsheets to manage opportunities. Using Excel may be cheaper in the short term, but these same companies suffer disproportionately from slower response time to task orders and RFPs, less actionable information, and poorly managed resources. Moreover, maintaining spreadsheets requires overhead itself to share / update information across an organization. Changing this pattern in any meaningful sense means embracing new technology tailor made to manage the contracting lifecycle.

To learn more about how GovBD has helped Govcons get ahead of the competition, check out Customer Insights www.GovBDapp.com/customerinsights

25 Questions that every federal Contractor should be able to answer (about themselves!)

November 7th, 2014

In today's fiscal climate, winning government business is especially challenging - sales cycles are long, the capture process intensive, and the competitive landscape cluttered. As we begin our strategic planning for 2015, understanding what worked and what didn't from a business development perspective in 2014 is critical.

The following quiz provides a quick assessment of where you stand in really knowing the ins-and-outs of your BD processes, approach, and strategy.

Do you really know your bid-win percentage?

• Do you know your bid-win percentage last year? (bid-win percentage = bids won / total bids submitted)
• Which Department / Agency had the highest bid-win percentage?
• Which Department / Agency had the lowest bid-win percentage?
• Bonus: Rank your top 5 customers by bid-win percentage.

Is your pipeline healthy?

• Do you have revenue targets for the next 3 years?
• Does your qualified pipeline support your go-get financial goals?
• Are you on track to meet your 2015 revenue goals based on your current pipeline?

Are you teaming successfully?

• Based on past successes, teaming with which partner(s) gives you the highest win rate?
• Based on past losses, teaming with which partner(s) gives you the lowest win rate?
• Bonus: What is your win-loss ratio for your 5 most frequent teaming partners?

How well are your Proposal Managers doing?

• Which of your Proposal Managers had the highest win rate on submitted bids last year?
• Which of your Proposal Managers had the lowest win rate on submitted bids last year?
• Are any of your Proposal Managers overworked i.e., working on substantially more bids than the others?

Are Opportunities moving through your Pipeline?

• How many of the opportunities that were qualified last year went through a thorough capture process?
• Which Capture Manager had the highest win rate on submitted bids?
• Which Capture Manager had the lowest win rate on submitted bids?

Are you going through the formal Review Process?

• On average, how many color team reviews are held before a bid is submitted?
• Is there a correlation between formal color team reviews and bid-win rate?

How strong are your customer relationships?

• How often are you following up with existing customers to cultivate organic opportunities?
• Do you know what percentage of your new business is organic growth?

How many Opportunities slipping between the cracks?

• How many qualified opportunities never went through capture but should have?
• How many opportunities were accidently forgotten despite resource investment in pursuit?

How efficient is your BD operation?

• How much in bid and proposal costs does the average winning bid take?
• How much in bid and proposal costs does the average winning bid take?
• How much could you save in B and P each year without sacrificing wins?
• Bonus: How much did you spend in total B and P dollars last year?

Are you maximizing your Contracts?

• What percentage of the allocated funding for a particular IDIQ/Contract Vehicle did you realize?
• Which of your Contract Vehicles have the most remaining allocated funding in FY2015?

All done? How deep is your insight into your BD operations, processes, and strategy?

Scoring Guidance:

If you scored 0-10: Uh oh! It looks like your 2015 Strategy Planning could benefit a great deal from a deeper look into your BD processes. Generating new contract wins in the upcoming year may require that you invest time and energy in enhancing how BD is done.

If you scored 11-15: It looks like you have a few blind spots when it comes to winning federal contracts. To really amp up your win rate in 2015, pay attention to key performance indicators (KPIs) and stick with your internally defined processes.

If you scored 16-20: You clearly know your stuff when it comes to business development! Be sure to brush up on topic areas where you weren't so confident, though. The competitive landscape for government contractors is getting tougher and tougher.

If you scored 21+: 2015 should be a great year for you! Keep looking for ways to be more analytical when it comes to your business development operations in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Regardless of your performance on the BD Quiz, you and your organization could benefit from deploying a powerful pipeline management and analytics tool like GovBD. Learn more about GovBD and why so many BD organizations are using it to transform how BD is done: www.govbdapp.com

The 5 Fundamental Business Development Questions to Ask Yourself

May 19th, 2014

We all know that the key to winning more government contracts is pursuing opportunities with the highest win probability (pWin). Easier said than done. To correctly identify these opportunities, business development team members need to have access to the right information at the right time without too much hassle. Tools exist today to help. Many BD teams have access to their organization's current information and are able to answer questions like: What does my organization's pipeline look like? How many proposals are being worked on right now? How many bids are awaiting award? But the answers to these basic questions do not give business development team members the required insights needed to win more government business. These questions do not go deep enough. They aren't strategic enough.

Ready to know the REAL questions to ask yourself?

Below are the 5 fundamental questions that every BD person wishes they knew the answer for in order to win more government business:

1. Who should I really partner with?

Partnering with the right companies increases your pWin more than most other factors. To make the best partnering decisions, you must know your historic win rate for each of your partners. But just as importantly, you must have access to the partner work share split analysis of these successful past bids. After all, winning the business is just the start. Revenue must follow. Knowing your average dollar distribution on a deal-by-deal basis for each of your partners will let unlock tremendous value in the future.

2. Are my B&P dollars being wasted?

Every BD team has time limitations and budget constraints. No BD team can afford to overinvest in any single opportunity - especially those that yield middling revenue benefits. Knowing what percentage of a BD director or Capture Manager's time is spent on a particular opportunity sheds insight into performance. Having visibility into how much of the total BD budget is being spent on a given opportunity (especially relative to budget) could be a key factor in determining the right size opportunities to target. Effectively allocating time and dollars to the right opportunity pursuits is what distinguishing average revenue performance from outstanding revenue performance.

3. How (specifically) do I meet my business goals for the rest of the year?

How are we tracking against goals? How do we make up for gaps or delays in awards? How can we ensure we still meet our annual revenue targets? These are complex but critically important questions. Honing your bid-no bid approach, enhancing your proposal methods, and refining your teaming strategy will drive pWins, reduce performance uncertainty, and mitigate business risks. Armed with the specific information that guides the tangible steps needed to achieve these objectives is priceless.

4. Where and how does my BD team spend its time?

Given today's hyper-competitive government contracting landscape, growth must come from both expanding existing customer relationships and cultivating new ones. Many BD teams spend most of their time in meetings for new customers, but it is far easier to grow revenues through existing contracts. Having visibility into how team members are spending their time and with whom they are spending it on will allow you to refine or re-calibrate activity.

5. Writing proposals is expensive. How do I make smarter bid decisions?

One of the key decision points in the business development life-cycle is the actual "Bid-No Bid"" decision. After all, submitting a winning proposal is a cost and time intensive endeavor. Establishing the organizational habit of systematically evaluating all potential bids against a set of criteria / factors before each bid decision is vital. But having a mechanism to honestly evaluate each bid is just the start. Having a system of record to keep track of all historic decisions and the associated wins / losses would unlock a treasure trove of insight into how to improve bid decisions over time.

Going beyond the basic pipeline health questions is critical to succeeding in today's government contracting environment. Want to learn more about how to answer these 5 critical BD questions? Check out GovBD and find out how our customers are driving business growth and pWin success.

2014 - A New Era for GovBD

Jan 6th, 2014

We are opening 2014 with a bang! We enter 2014 with more than 10 active customers but are also proud to announce the release of the latest version of GovBD in January.

This new version has many new features and several performance optimizations. Once again, we are very thankful to our rapidly growing list of current clients whose wonderful suggestions have helped us build a better product designed to address the challenges of government contractors and system integrators.

As always we treat our product as a work in progress and our team is working tirelessly to incorporate all of our customers' suggestions into subsequent releases. Please email your suggestions and feedback to GovBDsupport@reisystems.com

A summary of the new features in GovBD for Q1 2014 are:

1. The Executive Dashboard:

The executive dashboard, our biggest addition in this new version, is designed to provide a comprehensive view of corporate-level information to the "C-Team". With a single click, your executive team can determine progress against pre-set targets for metrics such as Revenue, New Business Wins, and Win Rate.

The Executive Dashboard is designed to avoid operations and financial surprises at the end of the year and provides a mechanism for continuous feedback. The enhanced UI and Analytics of the Executive Dashboard is must have tool for all Government contractors.

2. New Insights Charts:

Our current customers have given great positive feedback on our existing analytics module. In this new version of GovBD, we are proud to announce the expansion of our analytics to go much deeper into the BD Life Cycle.

The new Insights charts include: robust teaming analytics, capture and proposal effectiveness measures, mapping integration, historical snapshots of opportunity data, and much more.

3. New License Types:

GovBD has now been enabled with different user types. Instead of a single user type, we can now offer customers a passive read-only user type. We have now also enabled teaming partner collaboration directly in GovBD using Portal licenses. Now there is a GovBD license for every member of the BD team.

4. Simpler but more Powerful GovWin IQ Connector:

Save both money and time by using a new, simpler GovWin IQ connector that automatically creates and updates opportunities from GovWin into GovBD.

5. Meeting Scheduler for Better Customer Outreach:

Keeping in touch with your existing customers is critical to growing revenues over time. The Customer Outreach module allows users to set up recurring meetings with customers directly from the application.

6. Bid-No Bid Scorecard:

The 100% customizable Bid-No Bid scorecard helps organizations make better decisions and more effectively deploy limited resources. Users are given the flexibility to change the bidding criteria, allocate weights, and visually see the strengths and weakness of their organization in the form of a spider chart before making the big decision.

7. USASpending.gov Integration:

GovBD already provided the ability to download partner data from sources like FPDS. Now, customers can also track all of the contracts that have been awarded to your Partners by the Government. The USASpending.gov integration allows you to search for new partners, search contracts won by existing partners, and even add contracts awarded to the Partner page.

8. Opportunity Timelines:

The Opportunity timeline module shows users all of the key dates related to the Opportunity, key events, and activity dates when a key decision was made. Now all of the BD activity for a given opportunity can be determined quickly, at a glance.

9. Faster is Better:

GovBD has never been faster. Despite all of the new bells and whistles in this latest version, customers will see lightning-fast load times and performance. GovBD is truly accessible anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

A new GovBD just in time for Fiscal Year End!

September 25th, 2013

Despite all the doom and gloom surrounding Washington, we are tremendously excited to announce a new version of GovBD for Q3 of 2013. We are very grateful to our wonderful customers. They provided many fantastic suggestions that will go a long way in our effort to continually improve GovBD and make it an unparalleled BD tool.

We are working tirelessly towards implementing all of our customers' suggestions in upcoming versions. The opinion of our customers is very valuable to us, so please continue to provide your feedback at GovBDsupport@reisystems.com

The latest and greatest version of GovBD has the following key features:

1. Color Team Review Calendar:

Holding meaningful color team reviews is the key factor in building successful proposals. The new Color Team Calendar allows users to schedule color team reviews on opportunities, add participants to the review, and generate meeting invites using Outlook or Gmail. Moreover, the organization-wide color team calendar displays all of the upcoming color team reviews based on various search parameters.

2. Filterable Insights Charts:

Customers love our Insights tab. Guess what? We just made Insights better! The Insights page now has built in filters that makes GovBD Insights even more powerful. Users can quickly filter the graphical data displayed by lead organization, user, or by market segment. As always, our visualizations can be downloaded as a JPG, PNG or PDF.

3. Outlook (and other calendar) Integration:

Now your GovBD action items, call plans, and color team reviews have Outlook integration. Clicking on the calendar icon in any section of GovBD allows userse to add the action item, call plan, or color team review as an Outlook calendar invite. GovBD also offers users the option to download items into their Google calendar, Mac calendar, etc. Using this calendar integration functionality, users will never miss a task that could be crucial to winning new government business.

4. Quals Database:

Any Proposal Manager will tell you, a lot of time is spent on finding and re-purposing boilerplate content for proposals and RFI responses. Using GovBD's Quals database, Proposal Managers can quickly search on previously used proposal content based on keywords and add them to their proposals. Just imagine the time savings!

5. Opportunity Analysis:

Time is a BD team member's most precious asset. As such, understanding which opportunities deserve the most attention - read prioritization - is crucial to winning new business. GovBD's Opportunity Analysis chart depicts the relationship between the value of a given opportunity, the probability of winning it, and the BD time spent on each Opportunity. Stop wasting time pursuing opportunities you can't win or that won't move the revenue needle.

6. Employee Database:

Staffing a project with the right team members is an important aspect of winning government business. Many organizations have come to rely on dated information provided by HR to determine the right employees to name in a proposal. Using GovBD's new Employees tab, customers can now find the right personnel for a proposal without having to leave their desk or GovBD. The customized search on the Employee tab allows users to find the right personnel for winning the job at hand.

7. Enhanced UI:

After detailed consultation with UI experts and in-depth market research, we have enhanced GovBD's look and feel. Additional changes have been implemented throughout GovBD to improve readability, usability, and portability.

9. Plus lots more!

Note: The latest version of GovBD is available to all new customers. Our existing customers will be upgraded shortly. Please contact GovBDsuppport@reisystems.com for any questions regarding the upgrade.

GovBD Listed on Salesforce's AppExchange

Aug 21st, 2013

We are excited to announce that GovBD, the first cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that is built specifically for federal government contractors, is now available on Salesforce's AppExchange. You can see our listing here: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000B3LcOEAV

We decided to double-down on the Salesforce.com platform because we believe it provides the greatest functionality and scalability of any commercially available cloud. Indeed, GovBD takes advantage of many of the native benefits of the Salesforce platform including inherent collaboration through Chatter, mobile-readiness, and process-driven work flows.

Go ahead and take a free tour of GovBD today!

Lots of new features in GovBD's Q2 Release

June 19th, 2013

We are excited to announce that a new version of GovBD has been released. The latest version of GovBD has the following key features:

1. Proposal Calendar:

When multiple proposals are due at the same time, effectively allocating proposal resources becomes a challenge. GovBD's new proposal calendar gives you visibility into all upcoming proposals, the number of days available before the proposal's submission date, and the proposal manager assigned to lead the effort. With the Proposal Calendar, customers can effectively allocate time and resources to crafting a winning a proposal.

2. FBO Integration:

Customers can now search for opportunities in FBO.gov from GovBD and pull the data directly into GovBD opportunities. GovBD's FBO integration tool can also be configured with pre-determined search parameters. When new opportunities matching the pre-determined search parameters are created in FBO, those records are automatically displayed in GovBD as "Recommended Opportunities". Most importantly, any updates that happen in FBO are automatically reflected in GovBD

3. FPDS Integration:

Finding the right partner to work with makes a huge difference in winning or losing when it comes to government contracting. Using GovBD's new FPDS integration, customers can now search for other organizations to work with. Users can now add partners from FPDS to the GovBD partner database in a single click!

4. Partner Recommendation and Scoring Engine:

Based on the NAICS code of the opportunity in question or the socio-economic category listed, GovBD now recommends partners to work with. GovBD also calculates a partner score to indicate how "friendly" other contractors are to your company. These recommendations enable your organization to form a winning team while bidding for an opportunity.

5. Record Completeness Indicator:

We strongly believe that more data is better data. GovBD's new record completeness indicator encourages users to enter more data for germane records rather than filling in the required fields alone. To make the best bid-no bid decisions, the record completeness indicator should be Green in color. After all, green is the color of money!

6. Flexible Revenue Forecasting:

Forecasts are only as good as their accuracy. It is not uncommon for the award date of a contract to proceed the revenue start date for most government projects. Moreover, projects ramp up and then phase out. Project revenue is seldom equally distributed during the project period. GovBD's Flexible Revenue Forecasting empowers the users to override any automatic revenue calculations and enter more accurate projected revenue forecasts.

7. Personalized Opportunity and Task Calendar:

Users of GovBD can now switch calendar views on the Launch page between organization-wide opportunities, user-owned opportunities, and user-owned action items and call plans. This personalized calendar will enable BD users to prioritize their tasks and plan their capture proposal process in minutes.

8. Configurable Page Layouts:

Users of GovBD can now switch calendar views on the Launch page between organization-wide opportunities, user-owned opportunities, and user-owned action items and call plans. This personalized calendar will enable BD users to prioritize their tasks and plan their capture proposal process in minutes.

9. Plus lots more...!

Note: The latest version of GovBD is available to all new customers. Our existing customers will be upgraded shortly. Please contact GovBDsuppport@reisystems.com for any questions regarding the upgrade.

GovBD goes Live!

May 20, 2013

GovBD is now live! GovBD is the first cloud-based Software as a Service solution that is built specifically for federal government contractors. It is a pipeline health management tool providing Business Development (BD) professionals with the resources needed to be successful in the full BD lifecycle, from tracking the opportunity and capture, to crafting effective proposals and winning federal business.

Built on Salesforce.com, GovBD takes advantage of many of the native benefits of the Salesforce platform, including inherent collaboration, mobile-readiness, and process-driven work flows. The application is based on four core principles:

• Simplicity
• Centralization
• Connection
• Insights

As a SaaS product, GovBD pricing varies on the type of license and is priced on a per user, per month basis. GovBD is available for both trial and purchase, so feel free to contact GovBDSales@reisystems.com for more information.

5 Reasons why Traditional CRM does not fit Government Contractors

May 1st, 2013

At REI Systems, we have been implementing traditional CRM systems for our customers for more than 8 years. Our team has worked with more than 150 clients across industries and has completed more than 450 implementations of all types and sizes.

Of all the CRM implementations we have done, we faced the biggest challenges when working with Government contractors. Ironically, REI Systems is a government contractor at its core and has served public sector customers for more than 20 years. Implementing a traditional CRM solution for Government Contractors (including for ourselves) was extremely challenging. At its core, the business development lifecycle for procuring federal government business is fundamentally different from the B2B or B2C business model most CRM address.

At REI Systems, we have used Salesforce.com for the last 5 years to manage our public sector BD pipeline. As with all of our Salesforce.com implementation projects, we customized the system to meet our BD team's needs. Despite our efforts, we could not get the system to be used by everyone. To encourage greater adoption and usage, we established a process whereby if a user needed a change in the system, he or she could create a ticket and it would be implemented. We tried this process for more than 3 years. In the end, we had a system that was undoubtedly highly customized, but it was not at all user-friendly and housed very bad data. Not surprisingly, it got to the point where the users actually stopped using the system and reverted to email, Microsoft Excel, and Sharepoint.

Looking back on our aggregate experiences implementing CRMs for government contractors and system integrators, our own failure should not have been a surprise. Traditional CRM simply cannot work for those selling to government entities. There are 5 overarching reasons for why this is the case.

1. The Government BD Lifecycle is unique:

One of the biggest learnings for our implementation team was that you CANNOT alter the Government BD cycle to fit a traditional CRM system. Nor can you customize the traditional CRM system to really fit the Government BD cycle. Processes like capture management, gate reviews, color team reviews, teaming agreements, OCIs, task order management, etc. are unique to government contractors.

2. The importance of the Bid-No Bid decision:

Pursuing an opportunity from qualification, to capture, to bid and proposal can cost an organization upwards of a hundred thousand dollars. Unlike most commercial companies where the sales process is far simpler, Government contractors cannot pursue anything and everything they find in the market. The companies have to be very cautious and discerning when it comes to choosing which opportunities to pursue. Traditional CRM systems don't support better decision-making. Their focus is on pipeline management and forecasting. As a result, they fail to address the challenges associated with bid/no bid decision making - especially with the context of the relevant data on hand.

3. Working as a team - with internal and external members:

Everyone knows that earnestly pursuing an opportunity in the Government world is a huge endeavor. It involves contributions from many team members internally such as the BD director, Capture Manager, Proposal Manager, and more. But opportunity pursuit typically involves outside parties as well. Support from teaming partners is commonplace when going after government business due to socio-economic set asides or IDIQ/GWAC task orders. Traditional CRMs do not address the complexities associated with managing internal and external teams harmoniously.

4. Constant organizational learning is key:

The sales cycle for winning government contracts is painfully lengthy. Each opportunity can take many months, even years, before it is awarded. Once an opportunity runs its course and is awarded, your BD lifecycle management tool should be able to offer useful insights to improve performance in the future. That is, any meaningful BD support tool should improve how BD is done going forward.

With the best tools in hand, your organization should be able to learn why it won or lost each and every opportunity. From there, it should be able to make improvements to its processes, approach, and actions. The reporting functionality offered by the Traditional CRMs is not designed to offer actionable, strategic insights. Winning new business requires staying ahead of the competition with data analytics that transcend basic graphs and charts.

5. Easy integration with public data sources:

All of the basic information related to new government opportunities is public. While this makes finding opportunities easier, the sheer volume of data is at times overwhelming. For this reason, users often find themselves wasting large amounts of time manually creating new opportunities and entering in all of the corresponding data e.g., Contracting Officer, Proposal Due Date, Set-Aside Status, etc. Customizing a CRM system to interact with the external systems like FedBizOpps, USASpending.gov, and FPDS to reduce data entry is one of the biggest pain points for all Government contractors.

So what's the answer to the CRM problem? Taking our aggregate learning from being a CRM implementation partner for years and combining it with our experience as a Government Contract for over 20 years, we decided to build a product that would uniquely address all of the challenges faced by the Government contractors today. This offering - called GovBD - addresses all of the 5 challenges listed in this post. Moreover, it was also built with usability and data sanctity in mind.

GovBD was designed with 3 principles in mind:

• A single place for all data and documents related to any aspect of the business development life-cycle. A one-stop shop for all things BD.
• Customers should have a tool that reinforces their proprietary BD processes and supports decision-making in real-time.
• Data should be alive. Transform data from the system into actionable, winning insights.

You can always find more information about our product in http://www.Govbdapp.com

Defend Against Capture Process Obsolescence

April 5th, 2016

Recent modifications to government procurement procedures have left many BD teams baffled with internal BD, capture, and proposal strategies that no longer achieve winning contracts. Previously effective approaches may have become cumbersome, unmanageable, and lack the proper direction to win new business. Reengineering the BD process is a low cost option to boost bid effectiveness while neglecting to do so could mean a downward spiral for BD operation effectiveness.

Repurposing time and effort towards optimizing BD processes is a recommended option to increase win rates and more effectively manage an increased number of deals. Process improvement will immediately contribute to your business’s bottom line.

Incorporating GovBD into your organization’s BD process reengineering can simplify the evolution. GovBD is optimized, based on industry best practices, to provide BD teams an efficient structure to work within “out of the box”. Unique business processes can be mapped into the system providing rigid framework for your BD team to work within. Also, future process adjustments can be made on the fly saving BD teams highly valuable and limited resources – time and money!

To learn more about how GovBD can provide newfound structure to your BD, capture, and proposal strategy simply contact the GovBD sales team at GovBDSales@reisystems.com to schedule a demo today.