High Value Targeting (Business Development) in the Defense Sector
By: Dan Callahan

The world is changing in small as well as large ways.  If you’re not adapting, you may be losing ground to your competitors.  In fact, I’m working evenings and weekends, to gain the competitive edge right now… possibly on your company.

 

I have spent some time with a couple of new federal procurement and databases recently, and I’m very excited.  (check out www.bgov.com )  Information is time and time is money!  When you are trying to penetrate a market, every day matters, if--over the course of a year, you can shave weeks off of your time-to-target … this definitely puts you ahead of your competition.  Combined with a tight focus on the kind of business you are pursuing, you may be able to win projects that would otherwise go unnoticed.

 

Here is what I’m talking about:  Do you have a good source of data to understand not only the broader events, trends and issues in your market, but the transactional details as well?  If you don’t, you should consider this.

 

The intelligence community and defense agencies have become more and more open, and--as you know,  increasingly exposed to federal procurement databases, news outlets, reporters, blogs, tweets, etc., etc.   Who in your organization is mining one or more of these outlets for the intelligence about your intelligence and defense targets?  Sensitive but unclassified, Secret, Top Secret,… it does not matter.     The days of relying only on www.fedbizopps.gov are over!  Similarly, the acquisition portals run by several of the IC Agencies are not known for their user friendly interfaces, either.  Yes, there is motivation to pursue IC business but I have always said, a dollar is a dollar is a dollar.  One from the CIA is not any larger than a dollar from the US Army.  In fact it’s less, if it took you an extra six months to secure it.  It may have a higher margin, or may not.  Each business much weigh the opportunity in a cost-benefit analysis.

BTW: did you notice that AFCEA is hosting…on September 20-21, 2012, the AFCEA Global Intelligence Forum in Brussels, Belgium, This is a first: an international unclassified intelligence conference.

It’s a new world out there.  Are you keeping up?   Can you leave a comment and suggest any ways to do this better?

Next Blog:  high value targeting (laser business development).

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