Why winning intelligence comes from connection, not collection

Sarah earned her reputation as a world-class Capture Manager. Her record was impeccable, her processes were ironclad, and her gate reviews were feared throughout the company. Her latest pursuit was perfectly executed, and her team had ticked every box.

Then came the loss. She was stunned. They had done everything right! They’d lost despite meeting all technical requirements and having competitive pricing. The customer feedback was unexpected: “The winner better understood our challenges and constraints.”

They had collected customer intel, but their competitor had real customer understanding. GAO protest data consistently shows that “understanding customer needs” is often more important than the incumbency advantage. This gap between collected data and real customer understanding is a fundamental reason organizations lose.

The Elephant in the Briefing Room: Why Intelligence Without Understanding Fails

The problem isn’t necessarily your internal processes or even a lack of customer intelligence. It’s rooted in what your customer isn’t telling you. That unspoken customer intelligence often holds the key to winning or losing.

Beyond the FAR: The Human Element in Federal Decisions

Even though government procurement follows strict rules (FAR), people still make the final choices. Like all of us, government personnel are driven by emotions, context, and how interactions make them feel.

Remember Maya Angelou’s words, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” That’s true in GovCon, too, where customers remember how you made them feel long after they’ve forgotten your capability briefings and premature solutions.

The Cost of Self-Centered Engagement

Surprisingly, surveys find that almost all contractors think they have great engagement skills, but most are unaware of what a high quality engagement looks and sounds like. This overconfidence often only becomes painfully clear during a losing debrief.

Many contractors aren’t even aware of their self-centered behaviors. They drive their own agenda based on intelligence needed for the next gate review, rigidly following internal qualification checklists or even “leading the witness” with questions that serve their needs rather than trying to understand what matters most to the customer.

A former senior government executive revealed, “When I felt I was just being “pumped for intel,” I would shut down. I’d answer their questions but wouldn’t get into much detail about our priorities, potential solutions, or the program challenges. I saved that intelligence for the contractors I felt cared about us and who weren’t just working through their intel needed list.”

This kind of intelligence sets up your true discriminators. It helps your proposal team articulate the “why us” in a way that genuinely resonates with evaluators because it is based on customer understanding rather than assumptions.

Connection Over Collection: Are You on the Wrong Side of the Competitive Divide?

Consider two different contractor approaches, collection vs connection:

• Contractor A arrives with 15 questions required for their upcoming gate review. They methodically work through this list, steering conversations back to their agenda when discussions stray. They’re not fully present—instead of truly listening, they’re mentally preparing their next question. They leave with completed forms and congratulate themselves on a “successful meeting.” Meanwhile, the customer feels like they’ve just been interrogated.
• Contractor B begins by acknowledging the program’s recent budget constraints. They lean in and ask with genuine concern, “How is this uncertainty affecting your team?” They’re fully present—focused on understanding, not just collecting data points. The conversation flows organically, covering the same technical territory as Contractor A but within the context of real human challenges. They gather the same intel plus something far more valuable—trust and insight into what truly matters to the customer.

Both contractors gather intelligence. Only one builds a relationship that translates directly into a competitive advantage and gets invited back for a follow-on conversation..

Building Trust: The Currency of GovCon Growth

When customers feel understood, respected, and genuinely cared for, they are far more likely to share ‘deeper’ intelligence, take your meeting requests, introduce you to other stakeholders, and partner with you on solutions. Just think about the difference in the quality of conversations and intelligence shared by a trusted customer versus a new contact.

Winning organizations know what their customers care about—they don’t have to make assumtpions.

The Leadership Blind Spot You Can’t Afford to Ignore

As a leader who hires experienced people and expects them to perform, you may create a competitive blind spot by assuming their people skills are equal to their technical expertise. This is rarely the case without training, and lack of people skills is becoming even more costly in the current environment.

Customer-focused engagement becomes the differentiator in federal contracting, where technical capability is table stakes. It enables contractors to build the trust necessary for early engagement, shape requirements before RFPs are released, and position themselves as partners rather than merely vendors.

Common Engagement Pitfalls

Our research shows that over 90% of executives, BD professionals, capture managers, and program managers attending our Masterclass training think they have highly effective engagement skills, this number drops dramatically after their first role-playing session, where they witness the actual impact of their approach.

So, what do they do to realize it? Often, it’s things like:

• Not being fully present—thinking about what to ask next instead of listening
• Inability to ask meaningful follow-up questions that show understanding
• Rigidly sticking to prepared questions rather than following the customer’s lead
• Asking “leading” questions that serve their agenda, not the customer’s
• Demonstrating little empathy or ability to “read the room.”
• Rushing the conversation instead of building a connection first.Rushing to provide solutions before fully understanding the customer’s real needs

These aren’t complex skills. Most are common sense but aren’t common practice in today’s fast-paced business environment.

“People Skills” are “Survival Skills”

Good people skills can completely change how your team works with customers. Customers rarely talk about their feelings openly, but those feelings greatly affect their decisions. Things like genuinely caring, listening carefully, and showing empathy are common sense, but they’re often the real secret to winning contracts. These small, positive interactions are frequently the reason why contracts are awarded.

Could your team pass the engagement test? Use the Hi-Q Quotient Test to assess how well your growth and program teams apply the critical engagement best practices that build trust and win contracts.

Case Study: How Customer Understanding Trumps Technical Expertise

In a recent Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) task order, Noblis unseated the incumbent, Booz Allen Hamilton. They didn’t win by having a lower price or amazing new tech, but specifically, because their proposal showed a “thorough approach and understanding of requirements” that made them “clearly the best overall value.” Even though both companies got identical technical scores, Noblis won because they showed they deeply understood what the customer cared about—and that understanding only comes from real connection.

From Industry Leader to Cautionary Tale: The Cost of Inaction

Consider the case of a dominant defense contractor that followed textbook capture processes but failed to evolve its customer engagement approach. Despite their technical expertise, they watched their win rate decline as smaller, more agile companies built deeper customer connections.

This changed when they started measuring relationship quality alongside traditional capture metrics, and the correlation with win rates was undeniable.

The customer perspective is equally revealing. A government program manager candidly admitted after receiving exceptional support from a non-incumbent: “Guess who I call first now when I need honest advice? And guess who I trust to really understand our requirements?”

Case Study: Tripling Win Rates Through Connection

When Mark became Chief Growth Officer at a mid-tier defense contractor, he inherited a dismal 15% win rate. He focused on improving his team’s customer engagement skills rather than revamping capture processes or lowering prices.

Everyone engaging with customers received specialized training to enhance their emotional intelligence skills. They learned to be interested rather than interesting, to compete through caring, and to say a lot by saying very little. Within 18 months, their win rate tripled.

Transforming the Approach: From Checklist to Connection

“We stopped treating every customer meeting like an interrogation,” Mark explains. “Instead of asking ourselves, ‘What intel do we need to get?’ we asked, ‘ What is important to them? What challenges are they facing? How are they feeling about this situation?'”

The Strategic Choice Facing Every GovCon CGO Today

GovCon leaders today face a choice: continue treating customer engagement as checklist-driven data collection exercises or as opportunities for authentic connection and deeper understanding.

The former might check boxes on your capture plan and fill your CRM with data points. The latter wins contracts, enables shaping opportunities, and builds sustainable, differentiated growth.

Your government customers are human beings operating in complex, pressure-filled environments. They’re navigating organizational politics, evolving missions, and resource constraints that they rarely articulate in formal settings. They’re looking for partners who truly understand their world and challenges rather than just their stated requirements.

What they’re not telling you matters more than what they are. And they’ll only share it with those they trust.

The Competitive Advantage Clock Is Ticking: Why 2025 Is Your Decision Year

Industry experts writing in Washington Technology emphasize that “forward-thinking organizations engage customers early, proactively understanding challenges and influencing priorities. They establish themselves as trusted partners long before the RFP drops.” Waiting for the draft RFP means you’ve likely already lost… the opportunity to develop winning relationships with all stakeholders, shape requirements, and gather game-changing intel.

Organizations that commit to formally developing these critical customer engagement skills see measurable improvements in relationship quality and pipeline conversion within 6-9 months. With procurement cycles underway for FY2026 opportunities, your window to impact next year’s revenue pipeline is rapidly closing. Delaying means potential opportunities could be lost to competitors who are building deeper connections right now.

It’s not a question of whether your team needs these skills. The real question is whether you, as a CGO, will prioritize them and train your team before your competitors train theirs.

In today’s government market, the unspoken needs are what matter most. And customers will only open up to teams who show they genuinely care about their success.