In government contracting (GovCon), most professionals are deeply motivated by the mission. As a Growth Leader accountable for growth, you want your team to support the warfighter, advance agency objectives, and provide world-class solutions. However, a critical skill gap exists – one that could be costing your organization not just growth opportunities but the trust and confidence of your customers.

This skill gap, which many executives and professionals are in denial about, isn’t just a minor setback—it’s detrimental to role performance and can sabotage even the most mission-driven growth efforts.

The Engagement Crisis, You Didn’t Know You Had

When I recently asked a seasoned GovCon professional, “What’s one thing you can do right now to better support your customer’s mission?” their hesitation spoke volumes. The issue wasn’t motivation—it was a lack of customer intimacy. The professional struggled with engaging higher-level agency contacts and lacked the confidence to move beyond their program comfort zone. This resulted in excellent program-level knowledge but a big miss on the customer’s strategic vision, other than what was publicly available, and no early insights into their real operational challenges or potential solution preferences.

Professionals in your organization are grappling with this same issue. Your BD or Capture Process outlines ‘what’ intel is needed and ‘when’ it’s needed. But it usually contains little about ‘how’ to engage customers correctly, foster winning relationships, and gather the high-quality intelligence required to optimize decisions in your BD process. This skill gap results in lower customer relationship quality and customer intelligence, hindering your probability of win (PWin) and your organization’s understanding and strategic alignment with the customer.

The Common Missteps Your Team Can’t Afford to Make

Outdated, self-serving traditional sales-based approaches learned from others or through on-the-job training often go unnoticed until it’s too late. Your team may be pushing solutions, driving their agendas, or simply checking boxes to navigate gate reviews, but these methods are often out of sync with what’s necessary to engage and connect with customers.

The result? Missed opportunities, a lack of genuine connection, and assumptions rather than facts driving decisions. Without leadership intervention, these behaviors continue to erode credibility, diminish pipeline quality, decrease your PWin of new pursuits, recompetes, and identify areas for on-contract growth.

A Call to Action for Authentic Engagement

Let’s be clear: traditional sales techniques weren’t effective in the past, and in today’s relationship-driven environment, canned capability briefings and other self-serving approaches are not just outdated—they’re actively reducing your credibility.

Instead of pushing and telling, your team needs to focus on building authentic, winning relationships with prospects and customers. This requires a mindset shift from “What do I need from this conversation?” to “What does the customer need to better achieve their mission?

As a leader, it’s up to you to establish a growth culture, where your team is trained to speak a common growth language, use a standard playbook and repeatable engagement method for deepening customer intimacy, engaging early in the customer acquisition cycle, gathering intelligence and shaping opportunities well before an RFP drops.

The Hidden Habits Hurting Your Team’s Success

We often operate on autopilot, unconsciously repeating habits without realizing their impact. Whether talking too much during meetings, failing to listen, or neglecting to ask tough questions, these simple yet often overlooked bad habits can profoundly affect our customer relationship quality and, in turn, your revenue pipeline health.

Are they aligned with the customer’s mission? Are they comfortable asking the right questions to gain critical intel, or are they avoiding difficult conversations? Encourage your team to assess their habits and behaviors using the free  Hi-Q Skills Assessment. Without this self-awareness, your team will struggle to identify opportunities, prioritize strategic customers, and improve win rates.

Master Customer-Focused Skills:

As a growth leader, you must ensure your team has the tools, skills, and mindset they need to build meaningful customer relationships in today’s highly competitive environment. Programs like Hi-Q Group’s Growth Essentials or Masterclass provide this by focusing on:

1. Relationship building: Foster long-term, trust-based relationships rather than chasing short-term gains. These are the relationships that help you win recompetes and new pursuits alike.
2. Art of Inquiry: Learn to ask the right, probing questions that help gather actionable intelligence. Hi-Q training ensures your team knows how to gain intel that competitors won’t have.
3. Active listening skills: While most professionals believe they listen well, few really do. Learning to be present and listen without thinking is a life skill that will significantly improve all your relationships. It will also vastly improve the quality of intel presented during gate or opportunity reviews.
4. Empathy: Customer engagement requires seeing the world from the customer’s perspective, addressing not only their immediate needs but also their broader mission.

These skills turn superficial exchanges and casual chit-chat into meaningful, collaborative discussions. This engagement fosters winning relationships, improves trust, and helps your team get ahead of competitors. This level of engagement increases your PWin by shaping opportunities early, leading to a more qualified pipeline and less chasing of opportunities where you lack a competitive edge. It also better aligns with the mission-driven values that attract veterans and former government employees to these roles.

The Executive Advantage: Cultivating a Customer-Focused Culture

The impact of adopting a customer-focused approach is profound. When your teams understand customer needs early, engage the right stakeholders, and align solutions with the customer’s mission, your organization transitions from being a contractor to a trusted partner.

This shift doesn’t just help you win more—it creates a ripple effect across your organization. Your team will see fewer stovepipes, speak the same language, and collaborate more effectively. The result? Higher pipeline quality, better intel, and a culture where everyone has a growth mindset enable you to hit your annual revenue and organic growth targets confidently.

By cultivating a growth-oriented culture, you’re improving external relationships and fostering internal collaboration, removing stove pipes, attracting mission-focused talent, and reinforcing your position as a market leader.

Redefining GovCon Success

Success in the competitive GovCon market doesn’t come from slick sales tactics or clever manipulation. It comes from developing winning relationships, deep customer understanding, and unwavering commitment to support their mission.

As a leader, prioritizing these elements will significantly improve customer intimacy, increase on-contract growth, solidify your recompetes opportunities, and deliver significant new growth opportunities.

But this shift is about more than just winning contracts or boosting your organic growth. It’s about making a meaningful difference – for your customers, your organization, and the nation itself.

Are you providing your entire team with the professional development training needed to improve relationships and intel quality, or are you gambling your success on outdated sales methods from unknown sources passed down to your team in their current and past roles?

The choice is yours. Will you lead the charge into a new era of government contracting, or risk being left behind?