How Rainmaker’s Salesforce Government Contracting Framework Gives Federal Government Contractors an Advantage
Government contracting is a competitive and lucrative business. How lucrative?
The Government Accounting Office (GAO) notes that 40% of all federal spending went to private contractors in 2018 – i.e., $550 billion. More than $3.6 trillion of federal spending has been proposed in the first 100 days of the Biden administration, including a 16% annual budget increase and a $2 trillion infrastructure plan.
The next two years will be a cornucopia of opportunity for federal government contractors. Yet, according to a Market Connections analysis, 65% of government contractors participate in the RFP process without using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or similar technological support.
Now is the perfect time to take advantage of other contractors’ failure to embrace CRM technology. Salesforce CRM offers a slate of tools for contract management and federal government procurement. It also differentiates itself from all other CRMs. How? It has Salesforce Lightning.
Below we describe what Salesforce Lightning is, and how it makes Salesforce the ultimate federal government contracting tool. We then explain how Rainmaker’s Government Contracting methodology, built into Salesforce Lightning, can give you a leg up on competing contractors – regardless of whether they use technology or not.
An (Insanely) Quick Overview of Why You Need Salesforce CRM
The first step to outmaneuvering your federal contracting competition is to use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software package – specifically Salesforce, the world’s largest CRM.
What is Salesforce CRM and What Does It Do?
Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM. It’s supplemented by a robust ecosystem of software add-ons, plugins, and apps.
Salesforce can automate and streamline nearly anything you would ever need to manage during contract bidding, project management, and the quote-to-cash (QTC) cycle. The platform allows your business to streamline opportunity sourcing, relationship mapping, business development, capture planning, and even teaming partner management. The CRM allows your employees to synchronize their interactions, edit and track changes over the contract lifecycle, and efficiently navigate the quote-to-cash (QTC) process.
Salesforce has grown into the world’s best-selling CRM. Salesforce’s ecosystem of industry-specific, cloud-based add-ons has made it nearly hegemonic throughout all industries. One of its killer platform features is Salesforce Lightning.
What is Salesforce Lightning?
The Salesforce Lightning Experience (LEX) transforms Salesforce’s award-winning SaaS database into a platform for innovating new user and customer experiences. It enables organizations to streamline and optimize the user experience for a given persona/functional user through custom or pre-built components that are designed to help the user do their job more effectively, with fewer clicks, less searching, and less confusion.
Salesforce Lightning Experience
Lightning Experience represents the latest user interface (UI) for Salesforce and its apps. It is infinitely flexible and customizable, allowing your teams to create personalized dashboards and web pages via the addition and arrangement of different tools and components.
Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS)
The Salesforce Lightning Design System – commonly referred to as SLDS – is a pre-built app component library that makes creating websites and personalized apps easy.
What’s an app component? It’s a small snippet of pre-engineered code (or code you build to suit) that does something useful.
Lightning Components allow you to automatically insert common app features (like calendars, buttons, task lists, and graphs) into your Lightning Experience. You can personalize user experience across interfaces easily without the need to use code, ensuring that team members and customers see only what you want or what they need.
Salesforce Lightning Framework
The Salesforce Lightning Framework provides even novice coders an opportunity to design customer-specific Salesforce tools. All it takes to develop your apps is proficient knowledge of JavaScript and CSS, and the ability to learn a bit of HTML-esque Salesforce tagging. Creating your custom data-fueled components will help streamline team efficiency throughout the contract lifecycle.
Common Challenges Facing Federal Government Contractors
Bidding on and securing a federal contract is often a waiting game. It’s almost always a long process. Regulation checks, compliance issues, and multiple approvals typically follow even a successful RFP submission.
The length and uncertainty of the federal contracting process can cause management issues that strictly B2B contractors rarely face.
Some of the most common management hurdles include:
- Contract Pipeline Variability
- RFP Vetting and Capture Planning
- Bid and Contract Management
- Project and Performance Management
Typical CRM Challenges for Government Contractors
It is common for government contractors to have multiple silos of information (i.e. Outlook, Excel, etc.). Implementing Salesforce helps contractors overcome many inefficiencies, including:
Lack of Real-Time Data Visibility
Salesforce allows everyone on the team to see how many unqualified opportunities, pursuits, and dollars in revenue are generated per marketing source. Everyone can observe how healthy the pipeline is at any time, and which deals have the highest chance to close. Salesforce also highlights which contracts are coming up for renewal.
Wasted Productivity
Your employees shouldn’t be contacting one another to collect information about a project. Salesforce cuts out inefficient busy work. Internal phone calls and emails to find the status of an account or opportunity will become nonexistent. Reports will be automatically generated from real-time data, instead of manually – and often manically – created right before meetings.
Inability to Ensure Account Continuity
Don’t put the future of your company in the hands of one or two employees who can leave the company at any time. Salesforce ensures that information about all contracts and clients is available to the company as a whole. Relationships and communications can continue uninterrupted, even when a key staff member departs.
Rainmaker’s Salesforce Government Contracting methodology can help your company overcome these challenges and inefficiencies.
The Advantage of Using Rainmaker’s Salesforce Government Contracting Methodology
Implementing Rainmaker’s Government Contracting methodology built with Salesforce Lightning automation tools and workflows will give you a competitive edge over less tech-savvy firms. Here’s how.
The Rainmaker Government Contracting Framework Accelerates Every Aspect of the Government Contracting Process
Rainmaker has developed the ultimate CRM government contract solution natively in Salesforce Lightning. The Government Contracting Accelerator is designed specifically to automate, track, and manage much of the business development and capture planningprocess.
Salesforce is Linked Directly to the Federal Government Contract Opportunity Database
Rainmaker makes finding federal contract opportunities a snap. Its proprietary SAM.Gov Opportunity Finder connects directly to federal contracting opportunity databases – right in Salesforce!
Simply choose from more than 25 contract parameters and let the SAM Gov Opportunity Finder app find what you need. You can review the opportunities retrieved and add them as leads, or quickly link them to a more relevant department’s account. Rainmaker’s SAM Gov allows your team to identify and strategize about RFPs before competitors even have time to discover an opportunity exists.
Boost Overall Contract Efficiency
Rainmaker’s Govcon Accelerator streamlines communications among your workers, partners, suppliers, and third-party collaborators. It complies with – and enforces – DFAR, NIST, and ITAR requirements. Our Govcon Accelerator not only boosts productivity and efficiency, but the government allows you to eliminate many redundant internal applications, reducing overall IT maintenance costs.
Start Using Rainmaker’s Government Contracting Methodology to Your Advantage
Federal contracts will likely grow substantially over the next two years before the next midterm elections.
Don’t get outmaneuvered by the competition. Work with an experienced Salesforce vendor to help streamline and speed up your firm’s federal contract workflow using apps built into Salesforce Lightning.
Rainmaker has worked with over 45 government contractors to optimize every facet of business development, capture planning, and contract management. We can help you too. Contact us today.
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