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FedSavvy Battle Cards™: Competitor Reference Guides for Federal Capture and BD Teams

A competitor battle card is a quick-reference guide capture and business development teams use to understand a rival’s strengths, weaknesses, and likely behavior. A FedSavvy Battle Card™ is a modular version built on original intelligence collection rather than database records covering a named competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, patterns in their wins and losses, corporate experience relevant to your market, their processes and tools, merger and acquisition history, and known teaming partners.

FedSavvy Battle Cards™ are available as a one-time purchase or as a subscription that keeps the card current between pursuits.

What’s Included in a FedSavvy Battle Card™  

A FedSavvy Battle Card™ is modular. Every card starts with the Base module; you add the modules that fit what you need to know about that competitor.

Base Battle Card

Start here. Required for every card.

The foundation every card is built on, and a reliable reference across a series of business growth activities.

  • Top-level strengths — quantitative and qualitative assessment of the services and products they feature, with narrative assessment and proof points from their intellectual property and past performance
  • Featured processes, tools, certifications, and facilities — what they are likely to lead with, including laboratories and demonstration centers and credentials such as ISO and CMMI that support their differentiation
  • Likely featured corporate experience — analysis of their prime and subcontract work to establish what they will use to demonstrate credibility

The Pack

Add if you need to know who they’ll bring with them, or what an acquisition just gave them.

How the competitor teams, and how acquisitions have changed what they can do.

  • Known prime and subcontracting relationships — who they team with in your chosen market
  • M&A history — the acquisitions and divestitures that added customers, capabilities, and past performance, and what that means for their threat level

Bloodhound

Add if you need to know how they behave in a competition and how they price.

Sniffing out wins and losses to extrapolate a competitor’s typical strengths, weaknesses, and pricing behavior — augmented by our own observations of how they behave in competitions.

Vigilance

Add if this competitor is someone you’ll keep facing and you want to see their next move coming.

Leading indicators of where a competitor is headed, so their next move isn’t a surprise. Vigilance tracks the signals that show up before a big win does: subtle shifts in what they’re winning, early hints of M&A, emerging investments in tools and processes, and hiring activity that points somewhere new including the quieter key hires that never get a press release.

  • Top customer changes, down to the contract modification level
  • Organic versus acquisitive growth strategy and the investments behind it
  • New corporate investments and their likely impact
  • Hiring activity by geography, discipline, and skill
  • Internal promotions and less publicized hiring of key personnel and executives

Vigilance exists so you see the move before they make it and not after they’ve won something you didn’t see coming.

Hunter

Add if you need to keep working the win-loss picture as new competitions resolve.

Ongoing analysis of the wins and losses that reveal how a competitor actually competes. Hunter uses GAO protest decisions among other sources to identify wins and losses and make sense of them, tracking awards and defeats that never get announced but signal real change in the business, and digging into how they fared in evaluations — including where an evaluator found them strong and where they fell down. Bloodhound establishes the pattern; Hunter keeps working it as new competitions resolve.

  • Contract wins and losses that weren’t publicized but reflect significant change in the business
  • Intelligence on their competitive approach, including protests that expose how they fared in a bid evaluation

Battle Card Use Cases

The FedSavvy Battle Card™ is your go-to tool to understand and monitor your core competitors within a given market. Subtle shifts in people, performance, and processes are all indicators of your competition’s future moves. Have your Battle Card ready for:

Early Qualification of Pursuits

Learn more about your prospects before you make a big investment. Assessing the landscape early in the evaluation process helps you avoid a potential loss of business development resources.

Assess A Potential Partner

The lines of competitor versus partner depend on the details of the situation. Find out whether the player could be friend or foe to you in the future and what their strengths and weaknesses could be.

Enable Executive Decision-Making

Spending time querying databases, doing ad hoc searches, etc. is not usually good enough to help executives make decisions in a timely manner. Use Battle Cards as a reliable and simple tool to enable such business decisions.

Account Planning

Your competitor's leading indicators can help you inform your next moves. Plan your business growth strategically, with more in-depth information to evaluate potential competitors.

Learn More About Battle Cards

Check out our entire product spotlight series on the benefits battle cards can provide when you need easily accessible, ready-to-use competitive intelligence. If you still have questions about what battle cards can do for you, reach out to the team.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can Battle Cards™ improve our early Bid/No-Bid decision-making?
What is the difference between a company profile and a FedSavvy Battle Card™?
What ``hidden`` data points are most critical for understanding a competitor's strategy?
How do we use a competitor’s ``Patterns of Loss`` to our advantage?
Can Battle Cards™ help identify the right teaming partners for a specific pursuit?
How can Battle Cards™ improve our early Bid/No-Bid decision-making?

Reliable intelligence prevents “emotional bidding” and resource drain. By mapping a competitor’s Customer-Specific Penetration (their “human capital” and relationship depth at a specific agency) against their Proven Technical Capabilities, a Battle Card™ provides a realistic “Probability of Win” (Pwin) assessment.

If the data shows a competitor has a “locked-in” relationship with the Program Manager and a flawless delivery record on the exact technical solution required, a Battle Card™ helps you decide if you have a disruptive “X-factor” to unseat them—or if you should save your B&P budget for a pursuit where the competitor is technically overextended or has a declining reputation with that specific customer.

What is the difference between a company profile and a FedSavvy Battle Card™?

A company profile is a collection of facts (locations, revenue, leadership). A Battle Card™ is an intelligence product designed for “war-gaming.” It analyzes a competitor’s behavioral patterns—where they have successfully unseated incumbents, where they tend to over-promise on technical solutions, and their specific “win themes” that consistently resonate with certain agencies. It tells you not just who they are, but how they will try to beat you.

What ``hidden`` data points are most critical for understanding a competitor's strategy?

Beyond contract awards, the most critical “tells” are Teaming Patterns and M&A activity. A Battle Card™ tracks who a competitor consistently teams with—and who they’ve recently stopped working with. Combined with an analysis of their recent acquisitions, you can see where they are “buying” their way into a new market, signaling a shift in their long-term growth strategy before it’s reflected in a solicitation.

How do we use a competitor’s ``Patterns of Loss`` to our advantage?

Every contractor has a “kryptonite.” By analyzing a competitor’s public and proprietary loss data, we identify recurring themes: perhaps they are consistently under-scored on “Management Approach” or have a history of “price-to-win” strategies that result in poor execution. You can then “ghost” these weaknesses in your own proposal, positioning your firm as the low-risk alternative to their known failures.

Can Battle Cards™ help identify the right teaming partners for a specific pursuit?

Absolutely. Effective intelligence identifies “The Enemy of My Enemy.” If a Battle Card™ shows a major competitor has a fractured relationship with a niche technical firm that holds key past performance, that firm becomes your primary teaming target. Battle Cards™ allow you to build a team that doesn’t just fill technical gaps but actively weakens your competitor’s position.