Time to read: 5 min
Are people buying what you're selling? Are they buying enough of it to keep your business in operation? Before searching for government contracts, you need to conduct market research to validate your efforts and estimate their potential value.
Finding government contracts is different from acquiring commercial work. Common questions to keep in mind during the contract search include:
- What keywords are most relevant and yield the best results?
- What are my NAICs codes?
- Who are my target customers?
Market Research for New Entrants
Finding the right answers can be time-consuming and intimidating. You need to look through resources and decide whether government work is beneficial to pursue. It’s easy to lose motivation before you even start, with the many barriers new entrants face, such as long and bureaucratic vetting procedures.
New companies need to fill out the SAM.gov registration and find their NAICs codes to search for new contracts. This process takes a lot of time and is very detailed. Ultimately, it can leave vendors frustrated, thus creating more of an emotional barrier for new entrants to the market. Another obstacle is sifting through market research. Most findings only explain high-level observations, so additional analysis is still needed. For example, general keywords and codes are not very useful and are non-actionable.
Moving from generalized observations about a market to creating a real work plan is quite a hurdle. Current solutions are not helpful. You can choose from a few keywords to pull data from in SAM.gov. It is hard to know which keywords to use. Each keyword in each system requires a different search. As a result, new contractors may see a lot of false positives in their searches.
Analyze Your Searches
The second challenge is being able to analyze data systematically at a complex level. It takes several hours to collect the data, and hours of tedious work to understand it. Current tools are inadequate for the multi-level data analyses required. When searching for government contracts, vendors need to do the following:
- note code prevalence and code quality
- identify whether the contracts are false positives or good matches by reading through them
- cross-reference opportunities
- note award values
How FedScout Helps New Government Contractors
FedScout assumes that users have no prior government contracting knowledge. We aim to help you from the ground up to get you comfortably on your feet. For example, FedScout identifies keywords that previously yielded good results to help vendors find newer, more relevant keywords. FedScout also suggests NAICs codes that align with your searches, based on the contracts you liked and the keywords used. FedScout also provides you with a reasonable customer distribution list, determined after users answer a series of yes/no questions.
With this information, you can determine which contracts seem promising, see the bounds of your market potential, and find the right people to connect with.
Benefits of Using FedScout for Your Contract Search
Explore More Ideas, More Quickly
FedScout speeds up the contract search and data analysis so you have more time for experimentation. Experimenting with new ideas is very valuable for new vendors. If this process took a couple of hours, you would need to decide whether it was worth investing that time in a particular market. Because FedScout cuts down on research time, you can cycle through a half-dozen concepts until you find the one that really jumps out. We help people to explore more varied ideas more quickly than other solutions. FedScout removes the barriers to traditional industry knowledge for new, prospecting government contractors.
Use FedScout as Your Coach
In most cases, it would be helpful to conduct searches with the support of a coach or an experienced person at PTAC. With FedScout as your coach, you can confidently search for opportunities and arrive at a great outcome—in record time. Our free tool saves the search criteria you enter and creates a saved search for you based on it. Once it’s completed, you’ll automatically be matched to contracts. Start seeing potential contracting opportunities in no time with FedScout.
