Stand-Up Your Market and Competitive Intelligence Function

Enable your business development success through better MI and CI

Every successful business needs information to make sound business decisions. Many of the fiercest competitors enable their business development and capture teams to thrive through strong support from a market and competitive intelligence (MI and CI) resource. Sadly, many establish such resources through very informal practices ranging from poor hiring decisions, little to no planning to create working business processes, no significant training and ad hoc infrastructure to enable the function to work.

We can help you avoid these mistakes so your MI and CI function actually works.

Establish Your MI and CI Function

Creating a fully functional MI and CI function requires years of experience and skill in MI and CI to do it right. Our team of experts will work with you and your current business development processes to design and implement a MI and CI function so you can fulfill your MI and CI needs. We will:

Evaluate your organization’s business development practices to understand how MI and CI is best integrated to fit how you operate
Design MI and CI business processes to support your operation
Train your personnel how to operate MI and CI business processes
Train your personnel on how to conduct fundamentals of MI and CI
Integrate MI and CI processes into your business development system
Create infrastructure to sustain MI and CI…with a database built specifically to support such a function

Beyond our work to help you create a fully functioning MI and CI function, we have two supplemental offerings to enable a business and its personnel realize better MI and CI capabilities. This does not involve a full-fledged stand-up of a MI and CI function, but rather we furnish some tools and training for you to self-support.

CI Training Course

Are you new to competitive intelligence (CI) within government contracting? Perhaps you just want to refine your CI tradecraft?

FedSavvy Strategies was established in 2012 and CI is our business. We’ve built the FedSavvy Strategies Competitive Intelligence Course to teach you fundamentals in competitive intelligence using core principles in intelligence analysis.

This course takes you through the four fundamental functions of the intelligence process – Modeling, Collections, Analysis, and Production – and how to apply each function to assess the competitive landscape in the government contracting market.

In the Modeling chapter, learn how to define intelligence questions and develop a mental model that serves as the roadmap for the lifecycle of the project.
In the Collections chapters, learn how to effectively navigate, evaluate, and collect open-source material. Create your own Intelligence Collection Plan (ICP) to house and organize your sources.
In the Analysis chapters, leverage both structured and unstructured techniques to evaluate competitors.
In the Production chapter, learn how to pull all other functions together to deliver a credible, actionable report to your decision-maker.

Upon completing this course, you will be equipped with the fundamental skillset crucial to performing competitive intelligence on government contractors. Click here to review the introductory chapter…for free!

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Purchase Training Course

Stand-Up CI Case Study

Challenge

A mid-size government contracting, software development and systems engineering business was working through growth challenges. Among those challenges was having no robust and reliable market and competitive intelligence function. More specifically, the business lacked repeatable processes, training on CI and MI tradecraft and some fundamental infrastructure to sustain a CI and MI function.

Solution

Understand current operations – We first studied their current business development operations in order to understand overall process flow and maturity. This step is instrumental to identify gaps in capabilities. This step also helped us avoid unintentional disruption to operations.
Assessment of capabilities and maturity – The client had generally very good business development processes, but there were gaps in maturity in market planning, competitor analyses, Black Hat reviews, collection of competitive intelligence and application of competitive intelligence gathered throughout the overall business development process.
Emphasize continuous gains and learning – We worked to create CI and MI processes that would build on work done across each stage of business development to leverage previous work. This enabled efficiency and transition of knowledge from one stage of business development to the next.
Create a means of managing competitive intelligence gathered – The client did not have a reliable means of collecting, maintaining and distributing competitive intelligence data. As is typical for most businesses, it is a series of documents loosely shared across MS SharePoint sites, shared drives and some information in a CRM. We developed a MS Teams modification to capture competitive intelligence and to integrate with their practice of using MS Teams to manage capture activities.

Outcome

The client received training, processes and infrastructure to build a self-contained CI and MI function. Instead of overwriting how they operated, the focus was enhancing how they operated. Fundamentals of CI and MI tradecraft were taught and reinforced to ensure lessons learned set them on a path to be self-sufficient.

Blog Resources

Deadly Sins in Proposals: The Hits Keep Coming

March 8, 2022

Oh the mistakes that are made leading to some very expensive losses are ever so avoidable. Bear these in mind so you can avoid spending bid and proposal funds on losing proposals and then more on legal fees for a losing protest. Sin #5: You don’t understand the evaluation tendencies of the agency This sin…

More Deadly Sins In Proposals

March 1, 2022

We continue our journey into the land of deadly sins in proposals with two sins involving the bidder’s failure to connect content and concepts in their proposal to ensure credibility of their proposal. Sin #3: You cut staffing levels without an effective rationalization Although reducing staffing levels is a short cut to significantly lower your…

Deadly Sins in Proposals

February 17, 2022

We’ve covered traps of Black Hat reviews and capture team follies. Now it’s time to reveal some of the most common and deadliest sins in proposals. This blog leverages research and analysis we’ve done on mistakes made by some major U.S. Government contractors. In order to conduct this analysis, we used GAO protest docket data…