Government Contracting and Market Research (Part I)

How does the government find you, and how do you find the opportunity that is right for you?

What is so difficult about getting seen by the government? You would think with all of those steps you just went through that it would be easy to find you. Well, instead, it is very difficult. The government at all levels have a lot of contracts to manage and create, so it is very difficult for them to conduct major market research campaigns, but an effective contractor that conducts major market research campaigns can have a tremendous amount of success with government contracting by getting seen by the government.

Over the next few blogs, we will be evaluating the effectiveness of various strategies of getting seen by the government including Capability Statements, Statements of Qualification, registration on the necessary websites, trade shows and conferences, matchmaking events, mixers, market research, and a few others.

As mentioned in previous blogs, it is important to know who buys what you sell. In the language of government contracting, this is called Market Research. Now, here you fortunate if you have the bandwidth to play at the federal and state levels. In the federal level, you can see every contract on a program called FPDS – Federal Procurement Data System found here: https://www.fpds.gov/fpdsng_cms/index.php/en/ offers a fairly easy and sophisticated website to help you determine if they buy what you sell and for how much, and even better, when they are going to buy again. Another website to help you find this is USA Spending found here: https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/Default.aspx. If you don’t have the resources to invest in researching electronically, then you are going to have to find another way to get this same information, and one of those is to monitor Fed Biz Opps on a daily basis. This will at least help you to find existing contracts, sources sought (where the government is essentially asking who can do this), and current awards. FBO can be found here: https://www.fbo.gov/

At the State of California level, your market research can be found at SCPRS, which is a DGS maintained website. That link can be found here and I would encourage you to look around the entire e – procurement site: http://www.dgs.ca.gov/pd/Programs/eprocure/SCPRSData.aspx. We will continue this into the next blog.