2013 started with Sequestration, which resulted in immediate government spending cuts and projections of overall government spending to remain flat, or worse, decline, over the next 10 years.
To combat that challenge, many proactive government contractors took sequestration as a sign that times were changing and developed strategies and implemented processes to maximize efficiency and ultimately win more business.
Many government contractors still have not implemented a CRM application to help them successfully track and manage their new processes as well as continually evolve their business. This is important to note because even contractors with the most efficient processes still require a CRM to realize that efficiency. Without a CRM, they end up with the following challenges:
1. A lack of visibility into key business data
Maximizing growth in this new world of government spending is dependent on the consistent feedback of quality data. This helps government contractors understand the deals and the customers that they support. Without the continual capture and consumption of quality data, many government contractors will lack insight into the following critical information:
- Deals that provide the best chance of winning
- The right partners to align with
- Who should they be connecting with to drive additional business
- Opportunity and real cost to their organization
- How they are viewed by their existing government customers
- If they are in jeopardy of losing business
Without a CRM, critical business decisions are being made from non-reliable and outdated information, which ultimately leads to lower win rates, lost deals, higher cost of sale, decreased revenue and lost customers.
2. Decreased Productivity
Without an effective CRM system to manage their business, most government contractor’s employees
spend several hours a week wasting critical time on the following activities:
- Looking for critical prospect and customer data in multiple locations (GovWin IQ, Fed Biz Opps, financial applications, Outlook, Excel, paper)
- Filing internal paperwork
- Sending internal emails
- Creating internal reports in Excel or PowerPoint to provide to a snapshot view of results to the
- management team
This wasted effort is time which could be spent more effectively interacting with prospects, clients and
partners to identify new projects, win new deals and expand their footprint within a specific account.
3. Decreased Account Continuity
Contractors often hire business development resources based on existing relationships with a particular agency. However, that existing relationship often does not become an agency-contractor relationship, which puts the relationship at risk if that business development resource leaves the organization.
Without a CRM, contractors have to spend months of concentrated time and effort to recreate a relationship with that agency, because they have little to no idea of the key contacts and what has been discussed.
Salesforce.com and Rainmaker Associates, a leading Salesforce.com implementer, have helped
hundreds of government contractors solve the above issues by leveraging their industry leading cloud CRM platform. In order to learn more, register for and attend our upcoming free webinar on Tuesday, November 19th from 10 - 11 AM EST at the button below.
