Empower your business with pipeline bid management in United States

How to create outlook signature

welcome everybody to this month's Jamis webinar thank you for joining us today I'm Dan Russert with Jamis software corporation this presentation will take approximately 45 minutes to an hour long every month we host at Jamis industry expert spotlight and this month the topic of the presentation is the best practices in opportunity pipeline development and management and our guest today is a company called gov tribe gov tribe provides cutting edge software to help you compete in the federal contracting market it's founded by three former government contractors and tribe believes access to the data and tools that help you win contracts shouldn't cost you an arm and a leg personally we've we came across gov tribe just by simply searching for information out on the web and you know it just stood out to us in particular how well-organized this site is how you know easy to understand the data is and it'll become apparent to to everybody today you know just how well put together gov tribes services are and today our guest for this particular presentation is Marco boatman of Gov tribe he is the co-founder and CFO gov tribe is a federal contracting marketing intelligence and business development productivity platform Marc has 15 years of experience in the federal contracting space the focus on technology data mining government procurement and capture management he and his co-founders founded gov tribe in 2013 in order to apply modern software as-a-service sensibilities to the federal contracting space so welcome a mark to today's meeting thanks Dan thanks everybody for joining today appreciate your time and willingness to take a take a look at gov tribal and what we can offer great I'll be I'll be getting into some some direct questions about gov tribe and some of the services that Mark provides with with this company first just you know to remind everybody who Jameis is if you're not familiar with us on this this particular webinar we've worked in the government contracting industry for for 30 plus years we definitely understand the unique challenges that government contractors face in the industry we know it's highly competitive its cost sensitive and there's complex and ever-changing regulatory requirements that can make life difficult for businesses if you don't have the right people the business systems and policies and procedures in place we've developed a platform that helps cut our customers manage you know once you've actually identified the opportunities bringing that data all the way through to when you're awarded a contract and you know the planning that goes in and around that the time and expenses the accounting and Finance contract management and various other services to help people you know have a seamless you know single source of truth for the whole entire process but what happens before you identify that opportunity we don't that's not something that we specialize in but we know that many of our customers you know face the challenge of of you know like I said a very competitive marketplace and in one that's you know difficult to find you know the right data to help you succeed so you know let's talk about that process let's let's talk about how government contractors are finding new business from our experience government contractors have developed an over reliance on generic expensive subscription services that are used to fill the void of actual meaningful business development you can monitor FBO acquisition gateway USA spend FPDs all day every day but so is everybody else and you can attend you know the various federal contracting and procurement conferences and if but you tend to see the same people sitting on the gunk on panel and offering their advice you know putting your trust into those same expert systems or industry speakers that have all the answers quote-unquote doesn't necessarily allow organizations that you to truly differentiate themselves or give you a competitive advantage so our contractor is developing when winning strategies with real facts and figures and trends and I'll start that off with a first question to mark what are the common challenges that government contractors face when when navigating it for new opportunities that's a good question and there are there are several and they sort of cut across a few different areas you know the first is as you said identifying the right opportunity and there are lots of ways to do that a lot of companies get get their first opportunity give the first federal contract through relationships and you know maybe they come in with a business status that makes it easy to get a new contract like maybe they're a veteran owned business or a women-owned business so they're located in a HUBZone or something like that and they're able to through these specialized programs the government offers you know get a foot in the door but then the question is how do you how do you build on that initial success at you know how do you turn and you know an initial you know sort of lucky win into a sustainable source of revenue for your company so continually identifying those opportunities is is one thing but you know you also have to that make sure you have a good business process around those opportunities for putting together a competitive proposal for understanding which companies you might be bidding against for deciding whether entering the market as a prime contractor or as a subcontractor makes more sense so you know lack of data or availability of data and having the right opportunities in front of you is certainly important but putting that information into context using all of the available data and then making it actionable is really what separates in my experience a interested new federal contractor orig of Simon who's interested in getting in business and someone who's going to be successful in building a sustainable revenue source through federal contracting absolutely so yeah let's talk about that data when when we're talking about the kind of information that people are looking for in the market intelligence within different tools and solutions what are some of the specific things that people should be looking for sure so you know I think table stakes in this industry are having the relevant publicly available government data so that means pulling in opportunity information from the sources of opportunity data posted by the government so FBO the agency specific procurement sites like Navy has one called Necco the VA has one there's a reverse auction sites out there like dibs for DLA there's fed bid which does some reverse auction work for civilian agencies and then there's much of spending data but with prime spending data and subcontract spending data there's data out there about the companies there's data about protests all of which is scattered across a bunch of different government websites so the you know the the the market intelligence tools out there that are you know at all gonna be able to provide any sort of benefit to your company have to at least be pulling in that data and some sort of a reasonably you know frequent basis gov tribe of course does all those things but that by itself is is not what what makes a market intelligence tool useful or actionable to the company you have to be able to then use that data to drive decisions so if you have a given opportunity how much work is it to do information on existing incoming contracts or you know who the competitors might be once you've identify an opportunity you know staying on top of updates in real time and making sure that your team is available that you know is always aware of those changes as soon as they happen and then supporting the the business process around all of that so you know you if you have a list of opportunities but a list of opportunities is not pipeline a pipeline involves people it involves processes it involves you know decisions around whether or not you should expend your business development resources on a given opportunity and it involves you know managing tasks managing documents so those are the sorts of features that we believe the modern federal contractor especially small businesses are interested in and that's why we developed the Gulf Drive platform and on that same topic you know in talking to you about you know why you started gov tribe and some of the things you were having difficulty with in the market what what were some of the things that you thought could be improved on and how did gov tribe come about and what what were the building blocks of this solution and and what makes it sort of you know separate from other solutions they're out there so the existing solutions that when I was a federal contractor most recently I came from Deloitte by to business partners and I worked at Deloitte we started the company in 2013 basically as a response to some of the legacy systems that were out there that were serving this market that we thought were overpriced they were you know built on old technology not very easy to use they had some of the data sources I mentioned but those data sources were not integrated very well or cross-referenced very well and then like I said making taking a given opportunity or taking any market research that you would put together and making it actionable dropping it into a pipeline and having it synched up with those government sources to get notifications as soon as updates came out and to have that data then linked to your internal content you know to your you know decision review gates to the process around associating a key win or an estimated value and projecting future revenue all tied in with that government data that was really what we were trying to do with Gov tribe the legacy players in this space we felt tended to treat the having access to the data as the main value driver in the tool like this but as I said all of this data is publicly available government data there's no magical data sources out there that we have are that any of our competitors have it's taking that data and then making it useful and that's what we felt the other services weren't really doing and that's what we have tried to do with our with our platform and that's that's really what we noticed here and Jamis is you know there's a lot of data out there there's you know information as far as you want to look for it everywhere but the way government our gum tribe was able to for example if you wanted to look up a specific contract vehicle it's very well organized and easy to understand you can see the full history against it all the contracts that were awarded very simple and understand how did you guys go about doing that and and what was your you know thought process when putting all this information together sure so that that that's that that's a great sort of lead into some of the things I wanted to talk about we focused heavily heavily on data data acquisition automation so developing automated algorithms for pulling in data and then making sense of it doing we call energy extraction so pulling out key bits of information to make it searchable indexable and to automatically associate and integrate those data sources so no single government data source is perfect or complete but by using overlapping data sources you can fill in a lot of those gaps and make sense of it and most importantly by doing automated data acquisition and data tagging to do things like as you said associating all awards under a specific contracting vehicle together or making it possible to turn existing contracts that might be expiring into future opportunities and associating that with contact information for both the awardee and for the federal government by doing all this in an automated way we can keep our staff fairly small and offer our tool at a much more competitive price and then we can focus on the process support tools if we're not focused so much on manual data updates we can focus on really driving value with delivering a lot of functionality around pipeline management and task management and document management things like that and then as you say key questions about teaming partners and competitors and incumbent information you know incoming contractors we have been able to develop algorithms for driving recommendations for your company for anticipating who bidders might be for helping recommend possible tini partners for you for anything you have in your pipeline that's great it's really you know taking the data that's out there but aggregating it and bringing it together in a meaningful way to people who are digesting it right so on the how long those lines book one of the things that you see when you look up various you know opportunity management or tools that help you find new opportunities is that oh you know the fears out there that once an you know in our he's been put out if you haven't if you're not already in on it you've already lost many many vendors out there or services providers say that they have ways to anticipate new opportunities and you can find it before it exists what is what does that mean in this industry so that that's a this is a this is a complicated question because it it can mean a number of things and I think some of our competitors tend to rely on confusion over what that means to make it seem like there are there's sort of unique primary information out there that they have that other companies don't have that is not usually true there are always rumors about upcoming contracts that have not been announced that are maybe new requirements usually this is around large programs like you know I think it was last year actually over the last couple of years they're you know there's a huge new G whack a recompete of the Alliant G whack was supposed to be awarded so there was lots of rumors about the timeline for that and when things were gonna be hitting and they were almost always wrong but that's those that is one way to anticipate opportunities is just sort of following federal contracting news and some companies claim to be able to do that better than other companies we don't really play in that space very much because it's a lot of speculation and rumor the other way is to look at contract existing contract awards or existing maybe IDIQ contracts or BPA's that are currently active that are any or in your market you know in your there the type of opportunities that that you would wear the except of contract awards that you would be interested should they come out as opportunities tracking those that are currently active but are maybe gonna be coming up for completion over the next say six nine 12 18 months so looking at current Awards that have a completion date sometime in the near future filtering those down to high probability those that have a high probability of being continuing requirements so if you're looking at let's say you're in the you know IT services industry and you're looking at an Operations in maintenance contract so something that is providing operations maintenance help desk support for some system or set of systems at DHS or something like that that is the sort of thing that when a contract is ending most likely that is a service that is going to continue to be required after that you can take that existing contract award you can link back ideally to the original solicitation data you can find out who the government points of contact are you can add that sort of thing to your pipeline as a future possible recompute opportunity before an RFI or an RFP even hits the street you can do that on gov tribe we make it very clear that that is what you're doing some other companies out there that play in this space try to present that as if there is unique new information about upcoming releases of RFPs that they have done primarily research on that is almost never true though so when we get into the demo I'll show you how we handle that and that we have a clear idea what it is you're looking at actually yeah I've talked a lot about how much you know we like the application how well put together is you know how easy it is that it to digest that data and I'd love to give mark an opportunity right now to walk us through Gulf tribe and show us what it's all about and okay to you more yeah let's do it the ball over to you here we are there we go all right are you seeing my screen I am thank you okay okay so this is Gov tribe this is a logged in gov tribe user account what you're seeing here is my dashboard which is summarizing some information about my company this is showing things about information in my pipeline this bottom section here shows you information about your company's contracts and contract history gov tribe does not do work with the federal government directly so we don't have any contract history but if we did those would show up here I'd be able to see my current active contracts that are expiring soon I break down of my funding my agency over on the left side is where you can navigate the different things that we have on gov tribe this top section of the menu just collapse all these here my under my gov tribe is where all of your account and team content lives so as I said gov tribe is not just the standalone market research tool it is a collaborative platform for teams to run your capture process so as you identify opportunities as you are performing market research you are doing so with a team on the platform you can see this add user button at the top of the page there of the plans on gov tribe are multi user plans meaning you can invite your colleagues to be on that same account and share content with you so this is all shared content here your your pipelines where basically you have these customizable workflow tools where you can move things through a business process each one of these opportunities each one of these boxes and the pipeline is a pursuit that is typically linked excuse me to some some opportunity or past award tribe on top of which you are managing a business development process maybe doing an opportunity review or writing a proposal or something and you can do threaded discussions with your team you can you can manage your files so we pull in all the government data automatically and keep those government files up to date but you can also add your own files like a requirements matrix draft proposal documents qualls anything like that do automated version control as well so with a document you can upload multiple versions and roll back the previous version so you can actually write your proposals here in the system there's a task manager tool you can create and assign tasks to your team members so when you add something to your pipeline there's usually a series of activities or tasks you need to perform to make a bid no big decision or put together the bid package or something like that so if you see some tasks here like finding the incoming contract writing the technical approach gathering qualls writing the key personnel section all assignments from members of my team with associated due dates and then you can see that other things in gov tribe that this pursuit is linked to like the linked contract opportunity the past contracts that were covering these same services so these are the incumbents with the link to the incumbent awardee and the past contract you can see the agency associated with it that makes category and so on and then for highly competitive opportunities they pull up one that's more recent we have this tab that we call likely bidders and this basically uses historical data combined with information about any current opportunity that you are tracking to project who the likely bidders are and show you their most relevant past performance all automatically as soon as you add something to your pipeline so as you are tracking an opportunity that you might want to bid on you can understand who you're likely to be bidding against what the past performance was that is relevant to this new opportunity and if there was an incumbent contract that's where you would find this and if you're looking at an opportunity as a possible subcontractor so if you are someone who wants to do work with the NIH and you provide some subset of the services for a listed requirement and you believe you're gonna have to get on of a bid team these are a list of those companies who are likely to be at a prime based on their past experience and then you know so they're there your your list of possible teaming partners and you can then of course click on any of those companies to check out the profile for that company get contact information for them see their entire performance history things like that so that that's my gov tribe you can see you can see all your pipelines you can see a list of all your pursuits all your tasks all your saved searches which are your shared market research below that the rest of the menu here are all of the different this is all of the government data that were pulled in organized across very you know organized across very different various different search pages so in this opportunities section is where you can search federal contract opportunities so this is solicitation stage notices so this is things where you'll see you know pre solicitations Sources Sought notices RFPs rfqs as well as past Awards cancellations things like that when you first come to the search page you see a bunch of recommended opportunities these are opportunities that we that we are automatically recommending to you based on your company and based on your browsing and searching activity on gov tribe so as you use gov tribe and look at opportunities that interest you these recommendations will refine more and more to show you things that you're interested in sort of like the Amazon recommender so it'll you know show you things that you might be interested based on other things you've seen and things you might be interested based on what other users like you have been looking at and then but then you can of course put together custom searches so you can filter down to a specific agency like the Department of Defense and you can drill down on specific Naik's categories like we'll do five four one five for IT services and then you can do keyword searches like cyber security and when you do a keyword search you can see that it matches in the title and matches in the synopsis it drills down into all of the file attachments to search for those keyword searches and shows you excuse me highlights so you can see where the match is occurring and you can you know you can make your keyword searches more specific like right now when I do a search for cyber space security it's searching for those two words but not necessarily next to each other you can further refine that by doing things like putting quotes around it for exact phrase matching you can use and in or operators to do more complex queries whatever helps you to narrow narrow down your search to get at the types of opportunities that really matter to your company and then you can save those searches and receive email notifications whenever new things get posted that meet those same search criteria and those are the in addition to the recommendations emails that we send you automatically just just for every user account you get recommendations email to you just based on your company in your search history we talked about contract spending as well so in this awards section this is where we use the award and spending data that the government makes available to do a number of things you can first of all just understand market trends and develop market entry strategies using an understanding of any market segment that interests you so if you were interested in say the Health and Human Services market and the Department of Homeland Security market and you provide IT services so just by putting in those couple of criteria we can now go over to the reports tab and see some summaries of what this market segment looks like so some automated live updating visualizations to show you things like total spending quarter by quarter for this market segment or you can change it to month by month or year by year you can set whatever time period matters to you and you have an interactive leaderboard here where you can see things like the top 10 - the top 50 companies in a given market segment so these are the top 50 companies providing IT services to HHS and DHS if you wanted to focus in on say small businesses you can add a filter to see just companies that are winning total small business set-asides and now we're seeing the top 50 small businesses providing IT services to those two agencies you can also switch this to see the top funding agencies so within DHS and HHS here are the different offices and divisions that are spending money in this market segment and how much they're spending you can see the breakdown by next category you can see the breakdown by I don't know ID IQs if you want to see the top multiple award vehicles that are being used to award services at any given industry all of which can help you develop a market entry strategy if you're someone who's trying to break into a new space so if you are trying to get into IT services for instance as a small business you can see here that a very significant portion of this is occurring under a few large contracting vehicles like the first source to IDIQ to learn more about that you can just open up that in a new tab and now we're looking at information just about the first or the first source to IDIQ which is this is an IDIQ that was that is managed by Veterans Affairs for IT hardware and software you can see if you scroll down you can see total amount spent on it you can see the task order distribution so you can see here by different company type you can see a distribution of the companies and how much money they're getting under this vehicle you can see the total task order is broken down maybe you want to see of all the veteran owned businesses who's getting the most task orders into this vehicle and again if you scroll down further you can see it again this interactive leaderboard you can see you know the top ten companies the top ten agencies the top 10 makes categories and so on and you can drill down to all the awards as well so there are 41 awardees under first source 2 you can click on this to see who they are there are 12 over 12,000 contract awards you can drill down on those to see a list of those contract awards and if you were a first source 2 awardee or maybe you were hoping to partner with a first source 2 awardee you can then look at current you can look at all awards under a given contracting vehicle like this and look for the ones that are going to be completing within the next say 12 months so now I'm looking at a list of the looks like about 1400 delivery orders under first source 2 that are set to expire in the next 12 months and I can narrow this down further by saying maybe I only care about competitive 8a set asides under this vehicle there are 53 of those and maybe I only care about ones that have a total potential value of ten million dollars oh that's a little bit too too restrictive I guess we'll say 1 million dollars so there are now three of those and then for each one of these individual awards you can drill down you can go take a look at the awardee you can see what the total value was you can see the funding timeline how it was awarded where the work is being performed all that information so you know this is the sort of data that you can then turn into something actionable so if this were something this contract ends in September of this year current awardee is accurate technologies maybe you're gonna be partnering with someone to try to go after the recompete of this once it comes up in September you can add this right to your pipeline so you identify an opportunity you just select the pipeline it gets added to that pipeline as a new pursuit shared with your team and then you can immediately begin assigning tasks around you know beginning your pursuit of this moving a little further down the list you can also search against all of the all the companies that are performing services for the federal government so you can search for companies by name you can filter based on their company types you can do research on companies that are you know maybe have experience doing work for the VA and that are that are veteran owned businesses and provide construction services and now we have a list here of all service-disabled veteran-owned businesses that have contract history providing construction services to the Department of Veterans Affairs there are eight hundred and thirteen companies you can export this out to excel if you want a list of those companies with contact information you can click on any individual company to see more information about them including contact information who they prime and sub to a link out to all of their awards all of their ID I accuse any multiple award vehicles that there are things like that another thing you could do with this sort of data is I mentioned you know using sort of cross cross-referencing data sources and using overlapping data sources to do really sorts of interesting analysis an example of that might be you know let's say that you are a company that that you're an 8a company and you are interested in identifying a take contracts that are coming up for possible recompete where the incumbent awardee has graduated out of the 8a program so they would not be able to compete for any possible read bit of that because they're no longer an 8a company so one thing you can do is on the on the vendor search page you can search for all companies that who's a 8a expiration date was let's say before December 31st of 2019 so basically that there 8 a certification expired 2019 or earlier but they have a day set aside contracts so competitive 8a or 8 a sole source contracts that have a completion date within the next two years so now we have a list of 500 companies who-who are expiring out of the 8a program or have already expired out of the 8a program but they have current active contracts that they got on an 8a competitive or 80s sole-source basis and you can of course narrow this down to specific mix categories so you can say maybe five four five again if you want to stick with IT services so now we're down to one hundred and sixty-eight companies and then you can look at any one of these companies you can click through to look at all of their contract awards so now I'm looking at all of the awards for this company called MCAS and I can now look at all of their contracts that are going to be completing within the next 24 months and then our eight a set asides so I can see see so this would be an example of that so this here is a contract that AMP kiss one on the a day set aside basis it expires in August and amp kiss is no longer going to be an aid a company as of take a look at their profile I can see that they expire or they expired out of the program in October of last year so should any of their 80s set aside contracts come up for rebid camp kiss will not be able to bid on them so you can use the information that you can find on gov tribe to identify those Awards ideally identify contact information for the federal government make sure that contract officer is aware of your capabilities and your status is an aid a company and begin to get intel on possible rebate opportunities even before anything has been posted and again you can add these to your pipeline and manage this due diligence manage these communications both within your team and with external parties all through the pipeline to along gov tribe so there's just a few examples of the sorts of things you can do here dan is there anything else that you is there any more specific you'd like me to a touch base or they need any attendees if there's anything that anyone would like to see more specifically you can feel free to put that in the chat box or in the questions section of your side panel yeah this is exactly what I was looking to see myself you know I mentioned it's you know data that's that's easy to digest and data that's organized in a way that that's actionable which is a rare thing to find in the market yeah and the thing that we really the thing that we really love about it and that we and that we really focus on is making it actionable not just with an individual but with a team so as you identify things it doesn't get lost or buried in your email or you know siloed off somewhere in a spreadsheet you identify some information you can you can add into a pipeline and then within that pipeline if I go back over to one of these guys you can you can start a discussion about it and you know invite comments from your colleagues you can assign tasks to your team members to you know maybe assign someone make it their responsibility to reach out to the Contracting Officer or if the you wanted to try to build a teaming relationship you could build tasks around that if you wanted to start pulling together documents associated with the possible bid package maybe you're pulling together your key personnel resumes or you want to make sure you're pulling qualls or proposal segments from other successful bits in the past you can all start gathering that here and you and your team are all aware in real time as this content is being added and as these discussions are happening that's actually and by the looks of the application it's a very modern toolset and it looks like you know something that's easy to export data to other sources that correct mark yeah so you can on any of these search pages be it on federal contract awards or opportunities or vehicles all of us is exportable out to a CSV document which you can format and upload into any system you want we are currently working on direct integrations or we're working on a public API and we're going to be doing it our first custom direct integration with Salesforce this later this summer and then other systems integrations to come down the road we currently have a private API and we've done some direct integrations into internal BI tools and CRM s already on an enterprise basis but we're looking to make that even easier and available through the web platform in the coming months so along those lines you know if anybody the Jamis customer on on the webinar today you know we have a modern toolset that's able to work well with other applications you know i'm tribe has the same something if you wanted to sync up your data from your opportunity pipeline and you know bring that over to when you're either you know you know you have a high probability of award or you're awarded a contract and you want to carry over everything that you've been working on that's something we could talk about as well yeah I'd love to get a feedback on if there are Jamis customers who would be interested in a tough time to Jamis integration for today's presentation purposes this is a great high-level overview of the system without put out there I'm gonna switch over to my screen real quick so that everybody can see it if anybody is interested on this call or you know wants to talk to us about working together with tribe feel free to contact me my contact information is here on the screen and have Marc's information here as well if you want to contact him directly and get you know more in-depth overview of the system and ask him any questions about anything that we've covered today or or anything else so yeah as Marc said if you're James customer we definitely are open to making that happen for you as well there you have it seize the day everyone I hope everybody enjoyed today's presentation and got you know a little bit of information out of it and we'll be doing these these webinars each month and focusing in on some of the you know the people and solutions we think are really making a difference in in the industry and I really do think that gov tri-band and mark and everything that they're doing over there is is is you know really really helping their customers and and hopefully some of you as well great thank you very much Stan for having me and thanks everyone for for attending today thank you all very much and you have a great afternoon