GovCons are of two minds when assessing the ability to ‘shape’ a procurement, i.e., the guiding of government acquisition sources to produce RFP requirements that favor an offeror’s position in the coming competition. 

Group A – They believe the customer is resistant to any overture by the company on shaping activity.

or

Group B- They believe their relationship with the direct customer is so strong that the customer will instinctively understand how to draft solicitation to make it easy to award work to their company without explicit conversation about best values or differentiators. 

Group A GovCons fail to understand that once they learn the roles, responsibilities, and limitations for players at all the layers in the account, they can legitimately shape vendor selection to the benefit of the buyer and their company.

Group B GovCons who believe they have strong customer intimacy but haven’t looked closely at the players at all the layers likely overstate their position. This overconfidence is often drawn from one or two close customer relationships, rather than the full client stack that needs to be managed.

If either situation sounds like your company, you may be at risk of needlessly losing an opportunity you could win…with just a small shift in perspective.

Help is here. Judy Bradt, CEO of Summit Insight, provides a powerful guidepost on how contractors, no matter their grouping, can best shape a procurement : PALM – The Players and Layers Methodology ™.

The process of shaping requires GovCons to know who within an agency’s organizational stack can meaningfully affect requirements She enumerates the relationship building that needs to occur between contractor and government, identifying 5 layers: 

• Contracting 
• End User 
• Stakeholder 
• Small Business Specialist Industry 
• Industry/Primes 

Judy, a BD dynamo with decades of experience in crafting winning bid strategies, shares how ‘Opportunity Illusion’ wastes time for government contractors. This illusion arises from the inability to understand what constitutes a realistic win scenario. To convert illusion into reality, discovery, engagement, and relationship management at each layer need attention. 

Judy’s sequence is simple in explanation, hard in execution:  

1. Choose your target agency.  
2. Define your broad opportunity to serve a specific program in that agency.  
3. Discover your players at all 5 layers.  
4. Match each person’s goals with yours.  
5. Take consistent action to create constant mutual wins for all.

For more on this topic, we recommend you check out Judy’s site – summitinsight.com. She can be reached at judy.bradt@summitinsight.com.