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so one of the first things I wanted to talk about as it relates to finding opportunities before you can go find an opportunity you have to have a clear focused offer you have to know what your company sells right and this is really important I want to pause for a second and just talk about uh this idea of having a niche and understanding that um when you have a niche and what a niche means is that you're narrowing down on one thing you might sell I had a customer who's in construction they did multiple things like flooring and painting Etc but they actually when we worked with them they narrowed it down to elevators for two reasons one was because that's the work they really kind of wanted and it was a highly profitable one but it was also really easy for them to get in and do work and then expand once they're in saying yes we do this other type of construction work and I'm working with uh other companies other than cyber security and helping them zero down no pun intended on zero trust architecture which is kind of a buzzword in the cyber security world right now but if you can get in with a niche like that that really helps um and so think about your Niche this is why I'm saying in the chat put what does your company do right I'm uh I'm looking at one person here and I just see e-learning development in section 508 at George that's really good because I it dries into my head especially section 508 but e-learning right that's niching down um and sometimes this can feel difficult or it can be difficult because you're feeling fomo right fear of missing out if I if I say I Niche down on just elevators or just zero trust then I'm not able to do this other stuff well the reality is if you say you do everything any most people will look at you and say well I'll come back when I have a need for everything but right now I have a need for something and you want to get known for something to start to get going and especially when you're trying to find Opportunities when you have a clear focused offer and you've niched down it not only makes it really easy to identify what slam dunks are slam dunk opportunities are because if I say that I do SharePoint migrations well now I'm looking for opportunities that are share Point migration type opportunities I might expand that up and say I do SharePoint services so now I'm looking for SharePoint migration SharePoint application development but I'm still looking for SharePoint right so I it I have this ability to really know what a slam dunk opportunity is when I see it because I have a clear focused offer when I also have that Niche down clear focused offer it helps me understand who I would go into which offices are best or most likely to be having requirements that I can support So SharePoint it might be an I.T shop um I wanted to share a quick story just on somebody I was working with this past week uh I don't know if it was this week was last week and um we were talking about her niched offer her focused offer and when we were saying okay what do you sell what do you what do you say you sell right now there was two kind of main components one was acquisition support or contract support inside of a contract shop within an agency and that was one thing and that's kind of unique because a lot of people will shy away from that type of work because there might be conflict of interest if you're not familiar with this if you do work within a Contracting shop sometimes you're not able to participate on other opportunities because they're worried about a conflict of interest where your company might be aware of things that competitors are not right so this a concern many companies have and they don't want that that work in the acquisition shop but she likes that work in fact if she could build a company all around that specialty she would love it and the reality is there's Contracting shops everywhere right DOD has 185 000 acquisition Personnel there's a lot of room for her to grow a business in that space the other thing she's said that she sells is um she called it facility support but she was also describing it as administrative support So Think mail services or document management records management things like that and the idea uh when we're looking at that is it was too um it was too different and what I was asking her was um if somebody comes along and says you know do you want to do this kind of uh just mail services over here or something that's not what you said you want to build you said you want to build an acquisition type company a Contracting thing and what we did is took these uh admin support services and said look those are enablers they're enablers to the contract activity that you want to do so we do contract support acquisition support for federal agencies and these items are enablers and so this is a way you can kind of Niche down I've done it with other firms where you have technology thing you do but really those are enablished to some bigger thing and so in order to find good opportunities you want to Niche down right you want to have that clear focused offer put that into the chat um here just put clear focused offer into the chat or better yet just put two or three words that so I can go hey that you're getting the clear focused offer um okay so as we do that and as you do that in chat if you're uh participating in there I want to move on to what are opportunities and and it sounds like such a weird question right we all know what an opportunity is why are you even talking about this the biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it took place at all and and the reason I like that quote so much the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it took place at all the reason I like it so much is because I've experienced this my entire career in project management teams where you go in and people are talking to each other around each other um and you're thinking you're agreeing to stuff and you walk away and you come back it's like that's not what we agreed to and so communication is vital that you take the time to make sure that we that we agree so when I said that you need small businesses need to be writing for proposals it's like well how on Earth can we do that that's so many proposals out there you're crazy um I'm not crazy all right well now I feel crazy but anyways when you're writing four proposals per month right that seems like a lot until you begin to understand where could those opportunities come from so I want to talk about 11 opportunities really quick or 11 paths right remember the tip at the very beginning of the training for those of you who were here early and on time I said Thank outside the box think of many different paths and so in this case I want to talk about 11 types of opportunities that could fill your pipeline in in no particular order and none of these should be surprising what should be surprising is when I say it you go oh yeah oh yeah that's what I'm really looking for when I share something with you I'm not trying to share some secret sauce There Is No Secret Sauce there's only a process right and so uh the first place that you would find Opportunities first type of opportunities not even place first type of opportunities are opportunities that are forecasted the agencies are saying hey we plan on having this opportunity in one way or another they let us know that's the first one these are forecasted opportunities in the future the second type of opportunities that you can find to add to your opportunity are expiring opportunities so these are opportunities that have happened in the past and they're expiring in the next six to 12 to 24 months or whatever right and so these are expiring contracts contracts we see in the future and contracts that are expiring sometimes you might also hear them called new and recompete third one is new ideas this is my all-time favorite as a salesperson new ideas is this ability to go into a government agency and talk to them about what you sell your services your products I talked about this person who wants to be in the Contracting shop just this morning I posted a I don't know if you saw this on LinkedIn but I posted a it's not a forecast but it's kind of a briefing to Industry about all these key opportunities and what I liked about it is it's in the Army and this is where she wants to go and where she's got past performance the part that's beautiful is none of the opportunities are what she wants but every single one of the opportunities on this 30 or 40 page slide deck has a one or two Contracting officers responsible for that opportunity that is who she can call right but so you can um she can go in and just talk to these people and often you might find that they haven't put it down as a formal hey we want to we have this requirement we want to go forward but when you come in and you talk about it you might be able to get them thinking about it moving forward fourth one um so the fourth and fifth one right these are uh uh different ways you can look at this but Prime task orders and then Prime contract vehicles and so uh the type of opportunities that could go in or prime task orders anything you would see in any of the tools uh or on contract vehicles and the fifth one is prime contract Vehicles you want to get Contract Vehicles into your pipeline right the the new this the earlier you are in um the newer you are to Federal Contracting the less you want to focus on vehicles at the moment and just get on teams and subcontract et cetera and then in task orders but as you move forward you absolutely always want to have contract vehicles in your pipeline and task orders task orders are any way you want to describe a contract but basically here's the requirement here's the money contract Vehicles there is no money that's the only big difference if you haven't tracked on the task order contract vehicle so six through eleven are about subcontracting and these are the ones I want you to think about opportunities that could go into your pipeline how you can think about finding opportunities you could sub under a large business number seven you can sub under a small business you can sub under an eight a business you can sub under a woman on small business you can sub under a hubzone business and you can sub under a service disabled veteran on small business when we look to our Pipeline and when I'm filling a pipeline I'm looking at each one of those groups in particular the small business programs because there's unique set-asides for each one of them I'm working with a customer right now who's on 8i Stars three we track heavily that contract vehicle so these opportunities are set aside to a vehicle and they're set aside to a um a small business program the 8A program right and so we track on those we want to find a day opportunities to get into our pipeline because we're not an 8A or let's say I'm not an 8A then the only way I'm getting on those is subcontracting but when I'm trying to fill my pipeline if I was a uh your you know your boss and I'm looking at how you're filling the pipeline you tell me you're going after DHS or whatever I would look at all 11 of these and say hey have you identified hubzone opportunities that you can participate on as a team do you even have strategic partners that you can go after so keep that in mind as you go forward there are many types of opportunities that could be filling your pipeline and you should be trying to get as many of those going into your pipeline again this goes back to how hard would it be to write four proposals a month if you had a whole bunch of teaming Partners in all these different categories in addition to your Prime opportunities and your writing proposals so that was just a quick thing on what are opportunities you know because I want you to think about uh what they are and where you know as I tell you get ready to tell you where you can find them the broader you see the definition of what is an opportunity the more chance you're going to see opportunities and you're going to begin to think outside that box so let's talk about some tools you can use to find Opportunities um I want to talk about five I don't know why I hide my thumb behind my hand I want to talk about five opportunities or five tools that you can use to find Opportunities and none of these are radical right again first one agency forecast so the agency is telling you you want to be tracking on like DHS has a very fancy tool very sophisticated tool other agencies and commands they just use a spreadsheet doesn't matter what it is you want to find in your target agency the agency forecasting you will find Opportunities on there coming up soon and going out a couple years often the second one is fpds so I talked about expiring contracts fpds is a list of all the contracts that have been awarded you can look to find ones that are expiring we do this all the time I look for particular contract vehicles and I see what's expiring on that vehicle and I know it's going to be coming up for generally coming up for recompete right this is an awesome place to find Opportunities it doesn't mean I pick it up dump it right into my pipeline by the way I pick it up and I say well let me look a little bit more I might do a quick call to the Contracting officer and say do you expect this to come out again I might go look into Sam or somewhere else that I can find it and that brings me to number three the third place that uh tool that you can use to find Opportunities is Sam so Sam has uh Awards so you can look in there to find expiring contracts as well but it also has new solicitations coming out new sources sought or rfis that are dropping so you um in there you can find a lot Sam does not have every opportunity that's out there it's really important to keep in mind gov win if you're a person who uses gov win come win does not have every opportunity that's out there first off they only have what they have as it relates to Prime contracts but they don't have access to a lot of vehicles um and there's certain agencies where they just have less traction because as far as I can tell they just don't call into those agencies and so it's important when you look at Sam or gov winner any of these tools they're just one spot but they're not the definitive Source there's many places you're going to look but Sam is a fantastic resource to be able to find opportunities that might fit for you in your target agency USA spending is similar to fpds right it has the previous data it just has a different way of looking at it I love it because it's a very user-friendly system to be able to look at I can see spending a lot easier if I'm targeting a particular set of opportunities and maybe I'm looking at my competitor a particular competitor and they're doing let's say 50 or 100 million dollars and I want to get traction on that I can go into USA spending and look at where they're where they've been getting their money and how it's I can see a lot of different reports very quickly let's just show me which agencies are supporting agencies are getting it from how much money they've been winning and then what are the opportunities so I can dig further into them often what I do is I go into USA spending find somebody and then go back to Sam and find the original documentation that'll tell me more about the opportunity so I can learn about it and decide if I want to put it into my Pipeline and the fifth one last one I want to share about what tools you can use to find Opportunities are industry date decks I just mentioned this earlier about the Army and I've done multiple briefing decks about the Army recently in the last month or two um and in this one I just shared today I think uh I should have numbered it but there was at least 20 different opportunities that they had in there and and most of these opportunities were like a hundred million plus which is kind of the world I like playing in right so there are 100 million plus but you can be a very new business and if it makes sense you can be reaching out to the incumbents that are on there and see if there's room on the team or if you're trying to get into the army in this particular case I can I can learn about the opportunity and then through my relationships let's say uh with another small business but it's doing 20 million dollars a year I can say I know you're in the Army are you going after this bigger opportunity is there room for me right A Little Piece a bigger piece what can I provide but that's a way to find Opportunities you can both Prime as uh or to find that you like and you know you can fill one part of it and identify companies so you can subcontract with so hopefully that makes sense on those tools if any of them surprised you let me know if any of them are your favorite tell me which one's your favorite in the chat I'm curious okay so I'm gonna wrap up today's training with a lot with I want to tell you who you can talk to so I talked a minute ago about what tools you can use to find Opportunities right typical tools now I want to talk about who you can talk to who will tell you about opportunities and I've got 12 different types of people that could tell you about opportunities and so I want you to think about these um these people as I talk about them every one of them has the potential of letting you know about an opportunity coming down the pike and if any of them are your favorite put it in the chat let other people know hey these are my favorite these are the best kind of thing if any surprise you put it in let me know okay so starting off we're gonna go through 12 of these and at some points I'll just go through pretty fast other points I might talk about why um you really want to pay attention to it but before I get started um I just want to talk about it's very important to be building relationships we say this all the time in Government Contracting but really it's fundamental to sales in order to be successful in sales you must build relationships you must start and build relationships through these relationships you will be able to hear about opportunities you'll be able to learn about your agency you'll be able to find other people to get introduced to right so you want to build relationships as you go out there I've got a whole set of uh training that I've done on building relationships for those of you in the cupcon Chamber of Commerce sustaining members I think I have a whole course on starting and building relationships in there but just for anybody else on YouTube I've got a ton of videos on building relationships because it's so important how do you build relationships is what my training is about so the um and again no particular order but the first place or first person who can tell you about opportunities is small business Specialists build a relationship with them stay on their radar throughout the years and when they hear about opportunities they will remember you because you keep coming back saying you know hey we do um SharePoint services for example if you're on their radar once a month you're coming back and just touch and base just checking in when they have an opportunity it comes internally to them says hey do you know anybody they're going to know and this will be common for everybody right is you want to stay on the radar building that relationship so they know who you are so that when the time comes that they need somebody like you or company like yours they'll remember you it's the same reason I say help buyers remember who you are by putting your core competency into the chat second one at an agency is the contract Specialists and Contracting officer right these people are um awesome because they hear about opportunities at the earliest stage when a program office is beginning to decide and they're going down this formal process then they engage the acquisition personnel and so building a relationship being on the radar of a Contracting officer or specialist will allow you to get that traction I told the story earlier about Shawna Weatherly a friend of all of ours on LinkedIn here and in the community uh sustaining member thank you Shawna she she's a 4 former Contracting officer and supervisor Contracting officer branch chief or whatever she spent her career in the government as a Contracting professional and she talked about a small business coming in and staying on her radar they didn't really have a lot of experience early on in the federal space they had skills but they stayed on there and because they did their homework on her agency she was willing to keep talking with them through the year and eventually they actually got a first contract because they happen to have this relationship and then they eventually got their ideal contract with that agency and all of it came from just again that starting and building the relationship with somebody so those three were in the agency or those yeah those three were in the agency small business Specialists Contracting specialist Contracting officer the next one is the small business two the next two were small business administration Personnel so this one is the PCR the procurement Center representative in particular if your company is doing let's say 5 million plus then you should know who the PCR is because one of the pcr's uh biggest roles in in my way of saying it is to stop opportunities that could go small going large well if that's the case then really the likelihood of the opportunity going large is realistic and so they need to see companies in my opinion doing 5 million plus 20 million for example but are still Smalls and so you need to be on their radar and they hear about opportunities from all the agencies that they support there's an official process to it talk with a PCR ask them about that process and understand it and how you fit in and again just stay on their radar go to the events that they speak at whatever okay the next one at the SBA is the district office in particular there's a particular role called the business opportunity specialist they tend to focus a lot of their effort on 8A and managing the 8A program but they're there for all of us small businesses but they often could hear about opportunities from the agencies that they support they might reach in and say hey we're looking for a hubzone firm that does this for example or a woman on small business and so having a relationship with them um is important it's the same thing with number six this is the PTAC counselor right they call themselves APAC now but um PTAC counselors these these folks are often contacted by the agencies that are in their geographical area saying hey we're looking for small businesses to come in and talk to our program offices or to participate on an opportunity um next one program office Personnel this one should be a given but you want to get to know program office Personnel yesterday I think it was yesterday I posted a uh a link I did a LinkedIn post and this one in there it was a slide deck again and in there it listed all these different program Personnel from sisa that you could reach out to so homeland security sisa agency um you can reach out there and talk to them but by having a relationship with them understanding their needs talking about their goals by having a relationship you can begin to hear about opportunities you know what we don't have anything now but I know next year we've got this big initiative coming down you should track on that right they're not giving you inside information they're just engaging industry the talking and so you want to have that relationship the last five I want to mention are on industry sites so for small businesses you want to engage small business owners an example is if I'm trying to get my customer I was talking about into the army I'm gonna go see who's winning in the Army and then I'm going to find the small business owner for the small businesses each one of those five categories that I talked about I'm going to find the business owner and through the relationship with them I might hear about opportunities you know we got this opportunity coming out it's got an artificial intelligence component that we don't do AI you know I'd love to have you come in and do that since that's your specialty right that kind of thing in a large business there's four type of people that I'd encourage you to pay attention to who can let you know about opportunities mostly about opportunities to subcontract with them right but the first one is the small business liaison officer sblo right the next one is the uh it's I group them together but business developers in a large business and capture people it's the same as everywhere else business developers are trying to churn up opportunities to learn about the agencies is a capture of driving home the wind right but those those groups of people are focused on obviously opportunities that they can bring into their business but they're wanting to build teams as well so building a relationship with them that lasts over the years you will hear opportunities from these people and when you have strategic relationships you're meeting on a regular basis with folks like these guys um number 11 is large business program managers on the task order so the ones who are working at the customer site or or you know for the contract on the delivery side that program manager if you can find them and build a relationship this is especially easy when you're in the same uh agency let's say and you've got one small contract they got this big one um you can begin to build that relationship but I've also introduced people through a small business specialist to a large Prime program manager doing the work at an agency and then they have been able to hear about opportunities and the last one that's the delivery program manager the last one is large is this contract vehicle program managers so they run Oasis or all the GSA vehicles or seaport next gen Etc so they're tracking on the opportunities coming in if you build a relationship with them get on their radar when people on their inside their business are looking to go after opportunities using that vehicle or they hear about opportunities using that vehicle this person might be able to let you know about an opportunity there might be a fit for you um in there on this so keep in mind without process right everything's going to seem difficult but when you follow a process finding opportunities for your pipeline it's just going to get easier and easier if you found today's training valuable do me a favor become a sustaining member of the govcon Chamber of Commerce and if your company is already making money but you want some help going to the next level uh consider my BD accelerator Workshop you just ping me on LinkedIn and we could talk more about it and remember Government Contracting it is not a secret it's just a process I'll see in the next training