Market and Competitive Intelligence Services for Government Contractors
FedSavvy Strategies provides market and competitive intelligence across the full federal business development lifecycle — from deciding which markets and agencies to invest in, through assessing named competitors on a specific pursuit, to simulating how those competitors will bid. Our offerings cover market intelligence, agency evaluation behavior, competitor profiles, competitor reference guides, Black Hat Reviews, and acquisition targeting.
Click on any of them to find out more.
Offerings for Every Stage
FedSavvy Strategies provides full service market and competitive intelligence offerings across the entire business development life cycle. Explore each service or product and how it enables your success in each stage with a click.
Competitor Scan
Competitor Scans can be added to services to identify players in your market. Competitor Scans analyze competitors' People, Processes, Tools, and Past Performance (PPTP), score strengths and weaknesses, recommend potential teammates, and provide a comprehensive view of your competitive market landscape.
Market Intelligence
Which federal markets, customers, and opportunities are worth your investment. Delivered in three modules: Frontier for commercial businesses assessing whether federal is worth entering, Magellan for contractors evaluating a new market or customer, and Galileo for contractors who need a pipeline built and prioritized.
Best for: deciding where to invest before you commit to pursuits.
FedAgency Insight™
How a specific federal agency evaluates and awards contracts — whether they behave as a value buyer or a discount buyer, their evaluation criteria and risk tolerance, which proposal features earn strengths, and where bidders get assessed weaknesses.
Best for: shaping solution and price to how your target agency actually decides.
Rapid CI™
Opportunity-specific competitor profiles. We assess each named competitor on People, Process, Tools, and Past Performance as they apply to one pursuit, and deliver in days to about a week.
Best for: go/no-go decisions, teaming evaluation, and Black Hat preparation.
FedSavvy Battle Cards™
A modular reference guide on a named competitor in a market you define, covering strengths and weaknesses, win and loss patterns, teaming, and M&A history. Five modules, available one-time or on a refresh subscription.
Best for: core competitors you face repeatedly.
Black Hat Review Sessions
A capture exercise modeling how each likely competitor will bid a specific opportunity — run as a high-realism simulation rather than a SWOT, using independently researched profiles, then converted into evaluation-scoring advantages.
Best for: major pursuits well before RFP release.
Mergers & Acquisitions Targeting
Identifies federal contractors worth acquiring — specifically companies that are not for sale. Targets are mapped against the barriers to your expansion and assessed on growth capacity, market alignment, and recompete exposure.
Best for: buyers who want strategic fit rather than whatever is on the market.
Wondering which offering is right for you? Just ask us.
What to Look For in a GovCon Competitive Intelligence Firm
Six things worth asking about before you hire anyone.
How they handle competing clients
Ask directly what happens when two of their clients want the same contract. FedSavvy’s rule is one deal, one client: when we are meaningfully involved in a pursuit — running a Black Hat, for example — we do not work that same pursuit for a competitor around the same time. Some firms staff with 1099 contractors who take whatever work is available, or claim they can firewall people internally. Treat that as a red flag. It means you may be receiving recycled analysis from a competitor’s engagement, or that the firm is working both sides of your bid.
Where the intelligence comes from
Reselling database records is not the same as original collection. Ask what sources they use beyond the commercial subscriptions you could buy yourself.
Whether the work is pursuit-specific
A general company profile is not useful for a specific bid. The analysis should be framed against the opportunity and its evaluation criteria.
Independence
A firm with no stake in your internal politics will tell you your capture plan has a hole in it. Someone inside the organization often won’t.
Turnaround
Intelligence that arrives after the decision has been made is an expense, not an advantage. Ask how long the work actually takes.
What you receive
A data dump transfers the analytical work back to you. You should get insights and informed opinions. You are paying for expertise, not some pile of data.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is competitive intelligence in government contracting?
Competitive intelligence in government contracting is analysis of the companies you compete against on federal opportunities — who they are, how they win, and where they can be beaten. It goes beyond contract records to assess a competitor’s people, processes, tools, and past performance as they apply to a specific pursuit, so a capture team can predict how that competitor will bid and position against it. The point is prediction, not description.
What is the difference between market intelligence and competitive intelligence?
Market intelligence tells you where to compete. Competitive intelligence tells you how to win once you’ve decided. Market intelligence answers which agencies and markets are worth your investment, how large they are, and what it takes to enter. Competitive intelligence answers who you’re up against on a given pursuit and what their bid will look like. Most contractors need both, at different points — market intelligence before the pipeline exists, competitive intelligence once a pursuit is real.
What's the difference between a competitive intelligence firm and a subscription database?
A database tells you what already happened. Contract awards, obligations, and vehicle history are all lagging indicators — accurate, and two years behind. Competitive intelligence interprets leading indicators: teaming shifts, personnel movement, certifications a competitor has recently pursued, M&A activity that changed what they can offer.
The larger difference is who does the work. A subscription hands you what its system holds, and the quality of what you get out depends entirely on what went in and on your ability to interpret it. An intelligence firm applies trained analysts and structured tradecraft to decide what the signals mean. That distinction matters most on complex pursuits, where the question isn’t what a competitor has won but how they win — and answering it takes analysts who have worked those pursuits and won them.
Databases are useful, and most competitive intelligence work uses them as one input. The difference is that a database hands you records and an intelligence firm hands you an assessment.
Where can I find competitive assessments of my competitors?
Competitor assessments in government contracting come from three places: subscription databases, in-house business development teams, and independent competitive intelligence firms. Databases give you the historical record. In-house teams know the customer but tend to carry the organization’s assumptions with them. An independent firm produces the assessment from original collection and has no stake in the answer. FedSavvy delivers competitor assessments as Rapid CI™ profiles for a specific pursuit, or as FedSavvy Battle Cards™ for competitors you face repeatedly.
Which type of competitive intelligence do I need at this stage of capture?
It depends on how far along the pursuit is. If you’re deciding which markets and agencies deserve investment, that’s market intelligence. If you’re evaluating a specific opportunity and need to know who else will bid, that’s an opportunity-specific competitor profile. If you’re tracking a handful of rivals you face repeatedly, that’s a standing reference guide. If you’re four to eight months from an RFP on a major pursuit and need to model how each competitor will bid, that’s a Black Hat Review. And if you want to know how the agency itself evaluates, that’s a separate question from who you’re competing against.