The third best practice GovCon keeps ignoring

Your organization lost a recompete you should have won, or worse, you are about to lose one.

The debrief covers technical strengths, transition approaches, or variations on best value. What it doesn't tell you is the real reason you lost: the winner knew more about the customer and their needs.

They did not win because they had a better CRM or a better business development process. They won because their team knew how to engage customers, ask questions, and share that intelligence internally long before the RFP was released.

Your team sat in program reviews. They exchanged pleasantries in the hallway. The difference is that one organization turned those interactions into intelligence. Yours did not.

Let’s explore why.

Two Things GovCon Got Right

GovCon has built two best practices in BD infrastructure — and they are worth protecting.

The first is Shipley. The Business Development Lifecycle is one of the most disciplined pursuit frameworks ever built. Gate reviews, bid/no-bid discipline, win theme development — for organizations that follow it, it works.

The second is CRM software (Deltek, Salesforce). Pipeline visibility, key contact tracking, and aggregated opportunity data. When used correctly, these best practices provide real competitive advantages.

The problem is not either of those things. The problem is that both depend on a third capability that most organizations assume exists rather than measure. Without it, Shipley runs on assumptions, and your CRM records organized guesses.

What the Process Cannot Do For You

Look at your BD process (Shipley or derivative) from opportunity identification through proposal submission, and count the inputs that require real, current, first-person customer intelligence. Customer hot buttons. Incumbent vulnerabilities. Acquisition strategy direction. Source selection weighting.

At every major gate, the process assumes your team has been in front of the customer and has gathered the intel needed to make the right decisions.

Now open your CRM and look at the probability of win for your top pursuits. Ask yourself: When was the last time someone on your team had a conversation with this customer that produced intelligence you did not already know? Not a check-in. Not a status update. A real engagement where your team learned something that changed your approach, solution, pricing, or vehicle?

Before assuming your firm is the exception, answer these four questions:

• Can your program managers consistently articulate the customer's emerging priorities without having to call BD?
• Can you identify which employees generated customer intelligence in the last 90 days?
• Do you have a reliable method for measuring relationship quality across active programs?
• Is customer insight changing pursuit strategy, or simply validating assumptions already made?

If you are not sure how to answer those questions, your organization has less customer intelligence gathering capability than you think. That is not a criticism. It is a blind spot. And blind spots are expensive.

Consider the cost. A contractor pursuing $100s of millions in opportunities annually can add millions in revenue from a single percentage-point improvement in win rate.

Most firms spend heavily on proposal operations, CRM systems, and market intelligence tools. Almost none invest in the capability that generates the customer intelligence those tools depend on.

No Passive Nodes

The firms with high win rates have a team capable of gathering and sharing customer intelligence from every individual who touches a customer—not just from those with business development in their titles.

Your program managers are on site every week. Your technical leads are in the room when priorities shift. Your contracts staff hear things during modifications that your BD team will never hear.

Every one of them is sitting across from a customer, hearing things that could change their approach, themes, or solutions—and most of that intelligence dies in the room where it was heard.

Not because your team is withholding it. Because nobody trained them to recognize it, and no expectation was established that gathering and sharing intel is part of everyone's job.

In a mature intelligence network, every node is active. Most organizations are filled with passive nodes — employees who interact with customers every day but have never been taught how to convert those interactions into intelligence. Not because those people cannot contribute, but because they were never activated.

Leidos' chief growth officer, Jason Albanese, described this operational reality in a recent Washington Technology interview: every one of their 51,000 employees has the power to strengthen or damage a customer relationship. Not just the BD team.

Every employee. Leidos has held the top position on the Washington Technology Top 100 for the better part of a decade. That is not coincidence. That is what an activated network looks like at scale.

The Question Your Proposal Can Never Answer

There is a moment in every proposal review where someone asks the question that determines whether you win: why us?

If the honest answer is that you read the RFP, studied the incumbent on USASpending, and synthesized the themes — you do not have a why us. You have a guess dressed up in proposal language. So does every other bidder in the competitive range.

Winning proposals are built on customer intelligence that competitors never uncovered. Win themes that were tested against the customer before they were written and solutions vetted before the RFP drops.

You cannot manufacture that at proposal kickoff. You cannot buy it from a data aggregator. You cannot generate it with AI. By the time the RFP drops, the intel gathering window has all but closed.

In the same interview, Albanese described right-to-win as a discipline, not an aspiration. Before committing resources to a pursuit, you need an honest assessment of whether your organization is positioned to win. That decision requires customer intel.

Aspiration plus assumptions is not a right to win. It is your B&P budget waiting to be wasted.

The Third Best Practice

The third best practice — the one that makes the first two work the way they were designed to — is a systematic, trained, organization-wide human engagement capability that generates the customer intelligence your process needs and your CRM is supposed to hold.

This is not a personality hire. It is not a culture initiative. It is a skills investment — teachable, measurable, and tied to win rate. The firms that build it are less likely to submit proposals built on assumptions. They know what the customer wants because someone knew how to ask and had the relationship to get the real answer.

If your firm is growing, this capability is often what separates sustained growth from temporary success. If your firm is flat or declining, it may explain why investments in process, tools, and infrastructure have not produced the results you expected.

The question for growth leaders is not whether customer intelligence matters. The question is whether you have an objective way to measure your organization's ability to generate it.

Most firms can tell you their pipeline value, win rate, and book-to-bill ratio. Very few can tell you whether their people know how to consistently uncover the intelligence those metrics depend on.

If you have never measured that capability, you may be operating on assumptions about your organization in the same way your proposals operate on assumptions about your customer.

That may be the most important unmeasured capability in GovCon today.

Nic Coppings is Managing Partner at Hi-Q Group, where he works with federal contractors on the relationship and engagement skills that drive on-contract growth, protect recompetes, and surface new opportunities. He has more than 20 years of experience in federal contracting and can be reached at ncoppings@hi-qgroup.com.