In previous posts we talked a little about first what is a multiple-award IDIQ, then about what happens after you’ve won one. Today we’re talking about choosing target customers and bringing them to this contracting vehicle.
This really goes back to our discussions of knowing your customer base instead of chasing the wrong customers. So if you’ve already been making contacts in the government contracting community, and you know that there’s a target customer that you’d like to work with, a multiple-award IDIQ is particularly valuable because it gives you an opportunity to connect.
Now you can approach the customer to talk not just about their business, but about the opportunity they may have to use this particular vehicle and why that would be valuable to them.
You need to prepare for that conversation in two ways: you must be able to clearly state what your value is and what the vehicle value is to your government customer. This value may be the ease of contracting and, though this may be counterintuitive, the breadth of potential contract bids.
Why do you want to play up the fact that there will be multiple bids besides yours? Because even though you want to minimize competition and be the one to win, your customer wants to ensure that they’ve checked the boxes that there are enough contractors bidding on the job.
Otherwise, they’ll have to write up sole source justifications and all those kinds of things. They don’t mind evaluating proposals, but they don’t want this extra work, and this vehicle being an already-awarded contract helps them avoid that.
So your job here is to prepare your customer to see the benefits of this multiple-award vehicle, and to be clear that you are offering them exactly what they need. And in our next discussion, we’ll talk about how to make sure that you’re the only one who can win.
