You’re most likely here because you feel the pressure mounting. That sense of uncertainty isn’t just stress, it’s a clear warning sign for the need to take action.
Many in government contracting are currently sitting back and “laying low,” waiting for further communication. But to survive this storm, you must be more proactive in your approach.
This perfect storm is reshaping everything:
- Contract consolidations
- Increased scrutiny
- Budget uncertainty and continuing resolutions
- Economic recession warnings
- Heightened competition
- Customer upheaval from sweeping personnel changes
This isn’t just a market correction. It’s a fundamental reshaping of the competitive landscape and a huge challenge for leadership.
The hard truth? Many organizations won’t survive this transition, and those that do will likely emerge looking significantly different. Your ability to adapt and anticipate disruption will determine whether your organization thrives or becomes another casualty.
We’ve received a significant number of calls from GovCon leaders in the last year. Below we’ll cover 5 ways they’ve pivoted this year to anticipate market changes.
Have you made any of these changes with your team yet?
1. more than one contact is not optional
Your primary client contact announces their retirement, and you realize your team hasn’t executed the account penetration strategy, leaving you with no intel source on a “must-win” opportunity.
Remember when one good contact was enough? Those days are long gone.
This disruption has made this once occasional risk to a prominent risk on many contracts.
Forward-thinking companies are currently developing account maps and establishing strong customer stakeholder networks, ensuring resilience even when key individuals leave.
The risk of a single point of failure in a customer is more risk than they are willing to accept.
To be sure, your contacts may have just as much information as your team does at this point, but even reaching out with empathy to stay in touch and make broader connections will put your team top-of-mind more than just sitting back in a waiting game.
Is your team currently working to build relationships in this storm?
2. intel is your most valuable commodity
This is a costly mistake we hear time and time again from leaders.
During a project meeting, your customer openly shares their frustrations about critical mission gaps. Your program manager nods politely and quickly changes the subject to the first item on their agenda. This happens again and again in organizations we’ve analyzed.
As recessionary fear surfaces, BD and Marketing are often the first focus to cut overhead. This leaves your pipeline at the mercy of team members whose primary responsibility isn’t growth.
Winning happens one engagement at a time. Every engagement is an opportunity to gather intel, and your delivery team will have hundreds, if not thousands of meetings with the customer.
What your delivery team doesn’t yet know is every interaction they have with customers holds critical intelligence—but only if they know how to recognize it.
Most contractors ignore this gold mine, allowing vital intelligence to slip away.
Forward-thinking organizations are currently training their technical and delivery roles to proactively gather and share valuable customer insights.
These roles must understand why and how to integrate intelligence gathering into everyday responsibilities. Growth is a team effort, and with the right training and revenue incentives, leaders can see an increase in intelligence and revenue as teams rally around a growth mindset.
3. early engagement is key to winning
While you wait for an RFP to drop, your competitors are hard at work understanding the customer needs, submitting white papers, and shaping the solicitation to their strengths.
Here’s the truth many often ignore: When most significant RFPs drop, the winners and losers have already been decided.
Not engaging early in a turbulent environment or reaching out to stay top-of-mid often means you’ve already lost the next opportunity.
Forward-thinking organizations are engaging customers early, right now in fact, to proactively understand challenges and influencing priorities. They’re actively working to position themselves as trusted partners long before an RFP is released.
We recently talked to leadership from an established organization who lost to a smaller business, despite the fact they outspent them by large margins to win the opportunity.
Why they lost: Their team didn’t realize until later the smaller firm had been working with the customer on a solution for 18 months before the RFP dropped.
4. proposals full of ai & assumptions lose
The last proposal you lost likely wasn’t because of your price or capabilities.
More likely, your competitor prioritized relationships and intel gathering, making their proposal focused on real customer intelligence while yours was filled with assumptions.
Your team’s lack of customer intelligence isn’t just a disadvantage; it’s the reason you’re losing. Contractors pour millions into proposals but overlook the need for early and accurate intelligence.
We’ve seen companies spend millions on proposals that missed the mark because they relied on assumptions rather than actual customer intelligence.
Although AI can provide some value in certain contexts, it simply doesn’t hold a candle to the type of intelligence you get first-hand. Many teams are over relying on AI-generated content as a quick fix to their underlying problem, with similar results.
Winning companies understood clearly what the customers wanted. No assumptions needed.
5. Complacent teams kill recompetes
We receive calls about this every month, yet warnings often fall on deaf ears.
The scenario: A “guaranteed” recompete is unexpectedly lost to a competitor who offers a more compelling solution. With fewer new opportunities, winning your recompetes is no longer optional. It’s a matter of survival.
Your competitors are inside the agencies today, influencing how your recompetes will look tomorrow.
Forward-thinking organizations ensure their teams understand customer priorities, regularly introduce innovations, and proactively demonstrate ongoing value.
A complacent incumbent is a vulnerable incumbent.
Many teams are playing the “waiting game” to see what happens next…
But organizations taking decisive steps will emerge stronger when the storm passes.
The rest may not survive.
The only question remaining: Are you preparing to win, or are you preparing to be forgotten?
[This training] will create a team enabled to build deep embedded partnerships that provide the business long term, sustainable and desirable results across the organization.
I can easily see a 10x return on this course [for my team] in the next 18 months.
