For Requests for Information (RFI) and Sources Sought (SS), always write to win, assuming that the government may be sufficiently impressed with your response to move directly to bid by invitation only, establish an informal down select, or, in the best of all worlds, award a sole source contract to your firm.

On this latter point, in fiscal year 2023, the government awarded 15,840 direct 8(a) awards, i.e., contracts the government issues to one contractor without competition. While many such awards indeed derived from existing relationships between the government and the awardee, don’t automatically assume that the RFI/SS vector to sole source is limited to only those relationships.

GovCon master sales specialist, Neil McDonnell, founder of the GovCon Chamber of Commerce, offers this and much more advice. He is known for using techniques that he states are “repeatable and predictable.”

No matter how realistic you believe it is for the government to summarily award a contract from an RFI/SS, always maintain core principles in your response strategy:

• keep your offering focused tightly on the government requirements
• be prepared to back up your response with SMEs in case oral discussions emerge from your response
• demonstrate via past performance that your firm can perform on day one of the contract
• present your firm as one who can reliably perform over 50% of the work

Check out the Neil McDonnell’s training video, How I Helped My Customer Win a Federal Contract. In addition to daily trainings at noon ET every workday, Neil offers hundreds of training videos for free that address a wide range of issues related to GovCon sales and Business Development.