Name: Account Mapping Essentials for Greater Proposal Success
Uploaded: 2025-08-14T16:17:08.262Z
Duration: 50 min 7 s
Description: Account Mapping Essentials for Greater Proposal Success

Transcript for "Account Mapping Essentials for Greater Proposal Success": first of all, thank you, Judy, again, for taking the time to to do this with with GovDash and and myself. And thank you for everyone who has, joined this webinar. We're really excited that to have you here, and I think this will be a great session. Just to kick things off, I want to provide a, a really quick introduction to, Judy. I'm sure most of you already know Judy, but she is the the CEO of Summit Insight, and is a leading authority on, business development, ED generally for federal contractors with over thirty seven years of experience, guiding growth teams to, more than $200,000,000 in federal contracting wins. And as the CEO of Summit Insight, she is helping companies with, basically all of their BD efforts. First of all, leveraging her experience and and expertise when it comes to, working with these agencies directly, and helping them drive those wins. So, Judy, thank you again for being here, and and looking forward to the session. Thanks, John. It's a pleasure to be here and to be part of the GovDash community today. Awesome. So the topic for today is account mapping in the state of account mapping in the federal contracting space. And so just to get right into it, Judy, I'd love to know, or I'd love to get you to set the stage here just with why account mapping is so important and more critical than ever. And what what do you see as the the current state of, account mapping in this this current environment? I love your question, Sean, and what a great place to start. GovDash has always been a relationship game. There's no such thing as selling to the government. People buy from people. And whatever else has changed in 2025, that hasn't changed. But right now, federal humans are in turmoil. In the last six months, federal agencies have experienced unprecedented levels of change, not just changes in leadership and the priorities that we usually see with a new administration, but thousands of federal employees resigning, retiring, or departing due to position cuts and hundreds of programs and contracts being terminated and turning upside down. It's a really tough, scary time. And even large primes, I was on a panel listening to a panel last week, and large primes are admitting that people with established accounts admit they've their long time dependable champions inside the account have dispute. They're not returning calls, and they've realized their networks are not as strong or as deep or as broad as they need to be to just even just sustain work, let alone to grow. And so being able to see who you know, realize who you don't know but need to know, and have methodical ways to knit all of that together, first of all, just to have the snapshot of where you are, and then to have an active plan that relates who you are and why you're good at what you do and why they should care with the people in individual roles in the specific account. That's the whole ballgame, and that is still the essential activity for success, which is what account mapping is all about. Yeah. We're we're seeing a lot of that as well, just given our our position working with many, many federal contractors. I was on a a conversation I had a conversation last week with one of our customers based out of Massachusetts, and almost all of their contacts, at at their primary agency, have left. There's been significant turnover over the last year, and they're just trying to figure out basically how to how to rebuild from there. So, with that, and thank you for setting the stage. I'd love to jump over just into, what you see as, like, the practical steps for, for going about account mapping in today's environment. Absolutely. The critical step starts with focus. Very few gov cons, whether you're two guys in a garage or you're Northrop Grumman, have the ability to sustain deep, active relationship building that translates into substantive federal wins. If a client admits to me that they have no focus or if their top list of priority agencies is more than four or five, we start with a competitive analysis based on past federal contract data. And these days, I now have to make a second pass once I've got data looking back through the administration priorities, executive orders, and run that through a couple of AIs just to see what I might have missed and which AIs are fighting with each other about it to see, alright, what does might looking forward look like and pass that through my gut feel. So but it starts with focus and often giving a client what they need to make a confident choice based on hard data and best gut feel, where they're performing now, and where they wanna be. Judy, when it when it comes to focus, do you have a hard rule for maybe, like, the number of agencies that, somebody should cap out at as they're building out these maps? There's never a hard rule. The DHS is a much bigger place than, say, depart even Department of Agriculture, for example. When someone says, well, DOD is my no. DOD is not your focus agency. And so I would say that three or three four at the most five. Three to five programs, agencies, units where you're gonna be concentrating your effort. If somebody has more than that, they are probably gonna be spreading themselves too thin and not making the kind of deep progress in relationship building that they're gonna need to be successful. You might have footprint in a lot of places, but you've gotta make a hard choice about where you're gonna invest your heavy time and effort for deep relationship building. Got it. So so three to four agencies is, probably the sweet spot there. And and also, I'm curious. Do you do you think that that is the case for companies of all sizes or does that differ by, size of of your business? It, the size of your business and not just the size of your business, but the size of your BD and sales team, absolutely affects that. If you are a really small company and you are concentrating on more than two, I'd be very curious to hear what you're doing and what's been effective, and what that's gonna take. If you're a multibillion dollar company, of course, you've got footprint and awards probably across more than half the federal agencies, but you've still gotta make priority choices for where you're going to be trying to grow organically and building out your networks and relationships and opportunity versus just keeping things ticking over and making sure that you're outperforming in the places where you're doing well. Got it. It makes a lot of sense. K. Well, I know you're going through the the rest of the practical steps there. So I don't know if you have any other thoughts on that. I do have a few follow-up questions, after. Yeah. We you talked about, first steps to take when building an account map, and you're gonna start with agency focus. You're then going to lay out the the framework, which is what I talk about as the players at all five layers, and realize who you know and who you don't know, but the data says you need to know in the roles at five different layers where you're gonna need active relationships in four of them. And then you fill in the framework with what the both the basic data about those individual federal humans and then the part that lights it up, what you know about them personally, their missions, who they love, who the data says they love, and what your team on the ground knows about them, and what you need to find out. When it comes to bad data, this is something I see a lot of companies struggle with just given how many sources there are out there, both free, publicly available, and also paid. What data sources do you trust the most And and, out of those, like, how do you actually validate them? Federal past contract award data is free, it's public, and it's the one I trust. I won't say I don't I don't bother to go about and validate it because that's been scrubbed before it's published by our federal government in the first place. The US federal government does something no other government in the world does, and I know this because I used to be a trade negotiator. The federal government of the United States publishes over 400 fields of data about every contract transaction related to a contract expected to be worth more than $25,000 going back thirty five years, and that's available for free online right now. All of the data services that are offering paid subscriptions are buying and processing that data. They might wrap other services around it, and that's where you're making the decision about whether you're gonna spend time or you're gonna spend money. But all you get to choose is the mix, and that mix is gonna vary over time. So when I'm working with clients, I'm working with the free public data. I start by looking at past award data. And that my top choice for doing that is sam.gov contract data. And that is because sam.gov contract data has three fields that don't get published in, in the other free public sources. So that's created by, approved by, modified by. Those three data fields are providing essential clues that let sales teams identify the legal decision maker who's signing the contract. They aren't the only people you need to know, but that's the essential starting place. If I'm doing a planning a conversation with somebody I'm just meeting, I might pull that data from FPDS, Federal Procurement Data System. That's only gonna give me access to about 26 data fields, but it'll prevent me from going down a rabbit hole and getting real distracted. USA spending, it's gonna give you more data. It does look prettier. It doesn't give you created by, approved by, modified by. So that those are the three major free public sources of data. And, I don't try to run that through any other data validator. I trust it as it is. So, that's looking back. Looking forward then, federal data forecasts federal acquisition forecasts are best guesses. They're not necessarily, they're not historical. And this year, all bets are off. They they aren't required actually by law for the agencies to publish, and many agencies are not publishing or updating them in part because the reason why they were required in the first place was to be of service and help to small business. And many kinds of services and support for small business in the acquisition field have been cut or suspended this year. So some of your best guess for what might happen can relate to looking at in the contract award data field, the field estimated ultimate completion date. Not every single contract that's in place is going to be renewed, but based on your research into administration priorities, that at least is a clue. So you're gonna have to make more best guesses for forecasts than you used to. And looking at the past contract award data is another piece of that. So does that help a little bit? Absolutely. Judy, I'm I'm curious just because I I think most people don't usually get into this level of detail, when it comes to, this topic around data. When it comes to the the created by, approved by, last modified, data points there, like, tactically, how how are you actually using those, in your day to day? What a great question. The created by, approved by, modified by. What's actually gonna be in there is mostly something that looks like an email address, and a lot of the time, it's not a usable email address. About 5% of the time, it'll say f p d s q, two nine seven two q dot gov or something. So that's completely useless. But most of the time, you might get first initial, last name, and some other data at agency dot gov dot mil. Sometimes you'll get last name, last name initial first name or first name dot last name dot number at g s a dot gov. So this that is not that difficult once you figure out what's the syntax in that agency, what's the pattern that they're using to decode. Sometimes you can remove a couple of extraneous characters, and you're gonna probably gonna have a fully usable email address. Other times this is one of the reasons why an AI can be helpful. Once they figure out the pattern, you can take a list and say, please go research according to best sources what who this person might be, their possible first name and last name. Many agencies again, I'm I'm talking about techniques you can use if you're just using free day free public sources and an AI. You can then also you might have access to a federal agency directory. State department, for example, does publish theirs in a PDF. HHS and GSA have had different levels of data that changes from one week to the next about the names and contact information for their employees. Veterans affairs, not so much. LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn. 2,400,000 current federal employees have more or less, current profiles on LinkedIn, and that can start to be super helpful once you've got a discernible first name, last name, and an agency. So this is where detective work comes in. Come back to my maximum. You're gonna spend time, and you're gonna spend money. All you get to choose is mix. This may be part of the reason why somebody pays whatever the price is for b gov or GovDash. I'm sorry. Go gov or gov win or gov tribe. Some of these services have more or less extensive or partial federal employee directories that that's part of what you're paying for. Others do not. And so you're gonna choose the mix of time and money that you wanna spend. But you need to pull out of that data who's the human. So instead of asking yourself, what can I bid? Everything changes when you flip the lens through which you're viewing the data and say, who is my buyer, and how are they behaving? Until now, look back was reasonably helpful because the shift in which agency is spending which money didn't change that quickly over time. And so looking back two years could give you a reasonable short term idea of what the spend is likely to be. This year, a lot of things changed really quickly, and so you have to rely a lot more on executive orders, current events, news reports, extrapolation, feet on the street, relationships you have in the agencies. And if people have stopped returning your calls, you've got to keep researching and keep following up, keep leaving messages, keep enlisting the network you have as if your business depended on it to find the people who are in the program offices you need because your business does depend on it. That's a real long answer as you can tell. I get very excited about this. Did I answer your question? No. I love it. I I am curious. So you you mentioned, clearly that, like, the created by for by last modified data is really useful for for finding some of these, key points of contact. That's who's in the contracting shop. So the the approved by, that's gonna be somebody who had signature authority. They created by or modified by might be a contracting specialist or someone else, a contracting shop. And they their customer is the end user. And that's all everybody from the program manager all the way down to the frontline tier one help support help desk support person. Yeah. And so that's my question. Once we once we're, kinda following the the breadcrumbs here and we identify those individuals, how do you actually think about prioritizing who you should be reaching out to and maybe what the sequencing is there? I love that question. Too many people make the mistake of thinking, well, I've got to go and get in front of the contracting officer, and they get really frustrated when contracting officers don't return their calls. While the contracting officer has the signature authority, they're not the ones who are stuck with the day to day consequences of choosing you as the vendor. They're not the ones who are defining the requirement, who are struggling with some other vendor who's offering poor service at for too much money and not helping them do the job. Those are the folks at the end user layer. And the more relationships you can build with people who are on the ground doing the work And the more in advance of a solicitation hitting the street that you can have those conversations, the more they're likely to tell you, the more helpful you can be, the more you're likely to be the top of mind person who's starting to help them shape their ideas for what could come next. How could they be defining requirement that can help them perform better, and how can you be part of that? So contracting layer is critical, but they are what I call, essential, but not the whole picture. End users also. They note might not have signing authority to award, but they have everything to do with refining the requirement. Third layer then, industry. That's you as a vendor, but it's also incumbent contractors. It's also your competitors. You might need to team with them. You might need to nibble some small task orders off their back porch when they're not looking. You might have to go head to head with them, and it's usually a mix of all three. Of the five layers that I talk about, contracting is not your first one. End user or industry, depending on who you already know. Talk to people you already know and enlist their help in getting the introductions to the people that you don't know, but your research shows you need to know. Of the five layers, those three, end users and industry, once they you've got a requirement. You've got somebody who's hungry for a problem you can help them solve. Industries your partners are more likely to talk to you when you say, I've already been to the federal law enforcement training center in Glencoe, Georgia, and they say they're gonna die if they don't have our approach, wanna talk. Your industry partner is gonna start to return your call. K? So bringing business, come bringing relationships. When you've got a partner and or an end user, then the contracting shop is much more likely to be willing, especially if the a current prime and an end user's state of contracting, you need to talk to these guys. Then you've got that, really powerful trinity on your side. Two other layers that can be helpful, but decreasingly so, the small business specialists, the folks that I've talked to, many folks who say right now, half of them are concerned that their jobs whether or not their jobs are gonna be around next month, next year. The more specific your question can be, the more helpful a small business specialist is gonna be. These days, saying, hi. Do you know where there's gonna be some work for my company? That's not a useful question. To go to a small business specialist, say, I've been trying to get in touch with these five people. I've tried these calls and these phone numbers and these email addresses. Can you tell me whether or not these people are still here? And if not, who should I be talking to in this shop about this thing? Small business specialists do wanna be helpful, but the more specific your question, the more helpful they are likely to be. Okay? The fifth layer, because we talked about contracting, end user industry, small business specialists. The last layer is what I call the stakeholder. And that, I mean, CIO, assistant secretary, deputy secretary, agency secretary, for almost everyone. Those stakeholders are not in the room when the contract decision is made to choose you. They're not. So you need to know who they are. You need to know what they are publishing about, what the whether the agency is gonna be around next week or their mission is to shut it down and what the program priorities are. You don't need on on those cases, you don't need the relationship with that person, but you need to know who they are and what they're saying. So there's your five layers. Researching who they are, first of all, making sure you've got at least one, if not in the case of the end users, particularly multiple contacts there. You've got their basic data, and then you've gotta learn you gotta really start to dig in and learn what's it gonna what's important to those individuals and what's it gonna take to build relationships. Mhmm. Yeah. So I wanna jump into, like, how you actually operationalize that once you build out this map. I do think it'd be really helpful, for myself and the audience though, just to get your thoughts on before we jump over to how to operationalize this, when we are building out the map, do you have a list of just, like, common mistakes that you frequently see derailing this process and, maybe kind of like a greatest hits list of things that that people should be avoiding? Absolutely. The single biggest thing that derails account mapping is trying to be in too many places at once. K. If you've done your research, then stick with that confident decision you've made based on the hard data and your best understanding of the administration's priorities. Stick to your plan. Second thing that derails the attempt at account mapping is lack of research into the actual specific people. Oh, nobody's answering my calls. Oh, I can't find any end users. That's not good enough. There's public data. It's out there. It's one of the reason why people love doing government business instead of corporate. There's a ton of public data available about who's working in those agencies, where they are, and what they are doing. So lack of commitment to I research and identify the individual humans at multiple layers. Understanding you need a whole passel of people who all have to love you in different kinds of roles. That's the second thing that can derail. The third thing is lack once you found these people, lack of commitment. And sometimes it's just lack of creativity or lack of time or just plain fear of rejection at building relationships. You can't just send out email send out your email, the newsletter, and post on social and hope somebody's gonna care. But because that's easy. My goodness. Leaving a voice mail and they don't return your call. Oh, dear. Now there's a technique I call double tap that I teach my clients, and AI has made it easier to write the content for this. Even for myself this year, I found that if you you wanna be able to, find draft a content that is very specific and bind knits together what's important to the individual human with what you do well and why it is you represent the low risk choice and be able to have a creative, interesting combination of voice mail, email, voice mail, email, voice mail, email. And by the time you go through about five of those within two, three weeks, they know that they've got to return Sean's call because Sean is not giving up. And at the very least, you need to tell Sean who else Sean needs to be talking to. And so if somebody's in the chair, if they're answering the email, if they if they are still in the agency, it doesn't take all that much of just consistent doing what you say you're gonna do and showing up and calling back as long as you've put your messaging together well and it's about them to get. So insistence on too many agencies, lack of research into the identities of people, lack of of commitment to build during relationships, and the last thing, lack of lead time ahead of the solicitation dropping to build those relationships, establish trust and credibility. Those are the big four mistakes that can derail or just undermine the credibility of sense. Let's account map. Oh, that didn't work. Well, if if you've made these mistakes, that's why it didn't work. Go back to the drawing board. You can do this because it's essential and it works. Thank you. Yeah. And, I'm sure some of, Judy, I'm sure some of our, GovDash customers on the call, can attest to the fact that I I do indeed follow-up a lot, definitely definitely during the sales process. But I think you get at an important ground truth there. The reality and and this is my my take is this is true in all spaces. Right? And especially in in the the federal contracting market, is you just have to pick up the phone, and you have to follow-up and you have to be consistent about it. And and really the the teams that are willing to put in that work will yield better results. So, I I definitely all of that resonates, very deeply with me. I do wanna jump over, like I mentioned before just into okay. We've we've laid out, we've we've followed all your advice here. We built out an incredible account map. We know who to target, like, how are we actually gonna use that to win more business? I love the analogy of of a map because you've got so many different kinds of of maps. So once you've got the the wireframe, if you like, when you've laid out your agency, you've laid out your players at all your layers, Then you get to lay in topography. You get to lay in roads. You get to color the map. And and so you light up your account map with the paths you're gonna use to navigate that territory. So in so pick your top priority agency and then layout. Let's say you've got players at those four layers. You've got start with one. You can only take one trip at a time. You're gonna be talking to one end user, one person at the contracting shop, one person at small business layer, one lead contractor contact you're gonna try to contact in industry. Make a pass through one of each, and then when you start to get a feel for it, then add another one. But for each at the structural level, understand what are their goals, the top of the appraisal top of the, annual performance appraisal type of goal. For industry, you're a CEO of a company. What's one of your top goals in industry as a CEO, Sean? I I have a few. The number one the number one goal for the company is is growth, I think, as Okay. Perfect. I love it. Great. So, if now, let's say, put yourself in the role of number one goal of a contracting officer. What might a number one goal of the contracting officer be? Top of the performance appraisal, end of the year, what's that contracting officer gonna be measured on? The effectiveness of of what they procured? Maybe. It can be. And and that so I don't mean to put you in the hot seat. Alright? So did I spend all did I spend all the money by September 30? Did I have no protests? Right? Got it. Did I spend all the money? No protests. Alright? An example for the end user, it gets a little bit more like that. Did I deliver the mission? You know, on time, on budget, deliver the mission. That's a typical top of the for program managers, top of the performance appraisal goal for them. Stakeholders, again, did I represent the administration well? Did I deliver the mission? Industry, again, did I grow? Small business specialist, did I meet our agency's small business goals? K. That's the top of the performance appraisal. Then you get to the next layer, milestones. What are the kinds of, mid, milestones, markers in the road, the quarterly nut they're trying to meet? For the contracting officer, it might be, did I get the right number of solicitations to the street, for example. For the small business specialist, it might be, did I did I meet my outreach goals? Did I get lots of people at my outreach event? Did I get enough contracts set aside for small business? Okay. Mhmm. For industry, it might be, hey. How many bids do we put on the street? Or did we have teaming partnerships? For example, so you can see the the milestones are gonna be different for each. Right? You wanna be able to lay those out. Understand how the roles are different, things people care about are different. Then we get to the part that takes some real thinking and creativity from micro engagement. A micro engagement is something that either you or your opposite number, your contact can initiate that takes both of you toward goals that matter to you. So for contracting, an example of a micro engagement might be that the contracting layer gave you feedback on your capability statement, for example. A, micro engagement for with a small business specialist might be that they gave you feedback on your capability briefing or they made an introduction in an agency to you, for example. And so the, laying out at a structural level, what might those small moves be? Gives you something to talk about because, hey. Do you need me? Hey. Do you need me? Hey. Do you need me? That gets old in a hurry. Who wants to take that call? Getting creative can feel frustrating. One of the things that we are that we are offering out into the world are examples of micro engagement. I've got a free infographic, and the QR code that you see on the screen can take you right to a place where you can download a free three page guide with 10 different ideas that contracting officers and federal buyers I've checked with and said, nobody ever does that. Wow. We wish people would do that. That would be great. And so these aren't things where you're directly pitching, but you're offering information. You're offering support. You're cheering for their team. You're giving them a takeaway that they could share in their agency. You might have an invitation to a free online event that they their agency might let them attend. All kinds of things that are helping them shine, helping them be useful. Here's a generous thing. You might have a referral to a competitor who does something that you know they're actually better at that thing than you do that thing. Or that you might have a list of four other small businesses in a category similar to yours that you'd be happy to go toe to toe with and compete because what the contracting officer really needs is to show that they did maximum practicable competition so they can run a set aside, have not 8,000 bids, and still be on the fast track to choosing the vendor that they want. And that shows that you are smart. You care about what's important to them. It's not all just about you. So your ability to stay useful and engaged, bring value consistently over time is what helps you bubble up and position yourself as the go to vendor who really gets them. How does that sound? How does that jive with your experience in talking to your clients and community, Sean? Yeah. I I think that's exactly right. Also, I'm I'm glad you, really broke down, like, what these different personas care about. You can you can see the the thirty seven years of experience there, because you the messaging that like, the the way you craft your messaging for each one of those personas will end up being quite different as you had mentioned before. Judy, just because, kind of timing, I wanna make sure that we're able to answer some of the the questions from the audience. Yeah. If you don't mind, Yeah. I think we have a couple. So our first question here is from, Ian, who's actually a, an account manager at GovDash. And he asked, do you not recommend using FPDS? Oh, I love FPDS. If I want a really quick and dirty answer. Okay? And FPDS prevents me from going down a rabbit hole and coming up two days later. FPDS, will give you if you first of all, you can just look at something, sort stuff by date, get a real quick gut feel. If you export the results of your search, you will get 26 data fields, just 26. You can take those, export them. You can pivot table those, and you can see, which years and which agencies somebody, a a vendor has been successful in, for example. Awesome. For me, that's a great starting point. If I'm talking to somebody and I wanna get a sense for are they growing their prime awards over time? Are they shrinking? Have they suddenly, two years ago, nobody at USDA is paying the money anymore? You get a sense of what might be happening, and you can start asking yourself questions and lining up what might I'm where might I have a conversation with somebody. So these are some of the reasons why I love FPDS. I never second guess a full blown data analysis. But if somebody's saying, hey. Should I even be in the federal arena? Or does anybody use GSA schedules in this agency to buy this thing? You can get a little bit of a glimmer and say, I'm not gonna second guess the data, but this might or might not be warm or cool, and this would be a reason why getting a detailed confident answer would be valuable. And is and I hope that's helpful. Let us know if that kinda gives you a sense. Alright. Looks like looks like that was helpful. Okay. I have another question here. So, I think this is, quite a good one as well. If my team is small, how should we think about dividing up account mapping and, and then also outreach work, effectively? One of my clients had to make that decision and making it well was part of how they grew. JCTM, which is a a group of former marines in providing professional services to the intelligence community, when they implemented players and layers approach, they engage multiple personnel, at different layers. And so they integrated their whole team and realized that not just the contracting officer, but they had subject matter experts who were then talking to more people at the end user layer. Senior leadership in the company was talking to contracting, and they were able to really start to solve the individual pain points and problems with the players at different layers. So they took a full team. The people at Shenaga technical, Shenaga Technical Information did the same thing. They realized that their business came from relationships, and so they retooled to engage their whole team in the relationship building. And so even if you have a small team, your CEO can do some things. Your subject matter experts, even the ones who say, I don't wanna sell, you know, breathe. K. First, sales is not slimy. Second, if you don't believe me, fine. But let's say you are a subject matter expert who cares deeply about your ability to care for your customer. Listening to them, feeding what you learn about pain points, feeding that up the chain, the people, your CEO or in a small company, the peep the one or two people who are doing BD. Take the handoff, but share that information. Does that help a little? Yeah. I I think it does. I I, have a a big question for you here. This is selfishly. I also am, like, really interested about this from a product perspective at at GovDash as well. But for for for businesses out there, what do you think the most important shift is for for federal contractors, that they should be ready for in in 02/1926? And how do you think that they should prepare for that? Most important shift in 2026. I would say commit to verifying your relationship map. There's we are not finished with the changes and reductions in force and changes in personnel. Commit to so go in with super empathy and really understand who your people are, how they're feeling even if they're not buying stuff right now. Renew your understanding of who's in what role, who might be leaving, what's going on. K? Your people are going to be more important than ever. And second, stay up to date on not just what the administration is saying. This administration does what it says it's gonna do. So stay up to date on the executive orders. Watch the far changes. The federal acquisition regulations are being rewritten literally as we speak. Stay on top of that. And in particular, stay on top of the changes in thresholds for micropurchase and simplified acquisition. There are proposals that are gonna raise those and watch for the spending authorities to come back on 75% of the purchase cards that normally are very active in this time in fourth quarter. Those purchase card authorities are $1 right now. So we're not gonna we're probably not gonna see the same surge that traditionally we've seen in federal fourth quarter. Our long game got longer. Stay in the game. Even if people who normally would buy from you in fourth quarter, we can't help. We're not returning calls. We're embarrassed. No. We can't we don't have the signing authority. Stay it's a stay with them. Stay engaged. It's okay. We're with you. How can I help you? What can we do to make things a little easier for you right now? Stay engaged. Because people who don't do that, they go, oh, there's no money, no calls, no nothing. You may find it way too hard to ever catch up. So stay engaged even if the spend that you want is not happening. Your long game got longer. GovDash, you're gonna have to keep investing time and sweat equity and staff time and money to stay in the game. It will open up. It will look different. And that's presuming that the age that you're not doing business with the Department of Education or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or USAID, in which it it's your game is very, very different, and I offer you my condolences. There may be other places that you can play, but it's gonna be very tough. I know that, a lot of companies, that we work with as well, have been hit by those challenges. You you sort of alluded to it there, but I'm curious, like, how how do you think that those teams should reassess their positioning and then figure out where to go from here? There are some folks who, of course, they had to retool they scrubbed all their collateral for any references to DEI, not least because their federal contracts provide anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion were canceled. They view what they are doing through a different lens. It might be I'm not saying dress it and call it something different. Alright? We can't be disingenuous. We have to make it clear to the administration that we hear what they are saying. On the other hand, skills that you were using to deliver things related to DEI also relate to interpersonal communication, personnel management, team building. Those are all things that you can be doing if the administration does not think that you've been tired with the brush of DEI and they don't trust you. You may need to build relationships differently. Your point of contact may have left, but there's still people who are in the HR section. They still need to build teams and talk to each other. You coming back to the office is still a thing. It's hard. People aren't enjoying it. People are still getting used to peopling again. If you are, in some instances, if you're doing things related to education, state and local may turn out to be a place that you've gotta pay more attention to. Apex accelerators, if you're not working with them, do remember that their help is free and that their mission includes helping you win not just federal, but also state, local, county, and regional government contracts. So if you haven't tapped your Apex team for a little bit of intelligence and direction on, hey. Where could I go in my neighborhood? That may also be an option. In some cases, I was talking to somebody two days ago who's lost her job because she was working as a support contractor at USAID. There may be nonprofits who are carrying on some of that work as well. So, and work your network. It's one of the reasons one of the things we do at GovCon Rockstars, which is an in person networking event I run in person indoor rock climbing event that we run on Tuesdays in Gaithersburg and four Thursdays in Alexandria. And it's a professional network with a climbing habit. And so we get people together in person, and we routinely talk about who needs a job, needs a connection. We help people find jobs there. So work your network as well. Judy, Jonathan Lewis had a great question here. I wanna make sure I ask it. So, Jonathan's question was, is there a way to find micro purchase data, or just to get an idea of what vendor agency spends, what what a vendor or agency spends on micropurchases. There is a little bit of data, and it's you've gotta view it with a grain of salt. One of the data fields in contract award data was whether purchase card was used. But you also have to remember that a purchase card gets used to do a payment transaction. So perch just because a purchase card gets used doesn't mean that the acquisition was a micropurchase. But analysis of that data is, in past contract award information. And one of my other favorite humans, William Randolph, who had launched a fabulous service called micromarket.co. Micromarket.c0 is one of my favorite experts on being able to pick apart that data. The every agency, this past anomaly of fiscal twenty twenty five notwithstanding, every agency does micropurchases. And so it's not, gee, where are the micropurchases published? These are relationship sales. So, being able to talk to the people in the end user shop and think about what problem can you solve for less than 10,000. Now that threshold is gonna move up. Watch that space. And just talk to them about that. This is not gonna be a great season to try to get your call returned from the contracting officer and say how much do you do micropurchases. You can see the transaction data of stuff that's worth less than $10,000. You can see whether or not they used a contract vehicle. If there's no contract vehicle used and a purchase card was used, that gets to be a start. This is why people enlist help, whether that's free help from an Apex accelerator or from another expert in the market. This is analysis I do. My friend Eileen Kent does. Others do to pull that out of the data. But rather than looking at what can I bid, build the relationships, and start to talk to your people in the account about how they use micropurchases? Eileen is great, by the way. Judith, I think we have time for one last question. So how far back in award data do you typically go when you're doing a competitor review? I do two full years of fiscal year data and then year to date. So between two and three, that usually gives enough to get a sense of what the patterns are. And I know that somebody had a question about how to best educate, train, and give incentives to GovDash. I'm curious about what that that question is because, team members who are not comfortable with information gathering tactics, you know, get some hands on experience. Your, Apex Accelerator may have some programs. Hands on experience, it's what we do. I am when I'm not doing GovDash, I'm not only a professional indoor rock climbing instructor. I am also a scuba diver. I'm also an instrument rated private pilot, but I'm not an adrenaline junkie. What these three things have in common is you find the best instructor money can buy, who sits by your elbow and keeps your tuchus alive and answers your personal questions. If that's the kind of learning that you like that's customized to you and where you wanna go, I'm your girl. I'm a slut for personal attention, and my favorite clients are ones who say, help me, hold me, take me where I need to go. And so you give people some wins. You give them hands on experience. Let them get into it. Let them get success. And when you start to get momentum and people return your calls, that's that keeps people going. If they're just sitting in-depth by PowerPoint and nobody's returning their call and they're not getting encouragement, try this one. Try this one. Try this one. Let's do another one, and you get encouragement. Of course, you never move forward. So being able to create an environment where people get experience, get good coaching, and experience success and can build on that is the whole ballgame. And that Mhmm. Is what I live to do with my clients. Awesome. Well, John, great question. And, Gina, I'm glad you you caught that. So just quickly to to recap, first of all, I wanna say thank you to everyone for, for attending. And, Judy, this was incredibly helpful. So so thank you again. I think my personal takeaways from this are, you wanna figure out how to use the data, right, to your advantage and and and especially these these free publicly available sources to build out these maps. You need to do the hard work of calling and not only calling and and and sending emails, but also knowing how to position your messaging, differently for different personas, within the map, and also just being flexible and able to pivot. Right? Some teams have been hit harder than others. Some teams have had many of their contacts leave, the agencies, that they work with and finding new contacts, finding new areas for business. It is possible. It's going to be hard as you said. But if you follow these tips, you can get there. So with that, Julia, I wanna turn back to you. If you have any parting advice for, for for the group here, I'd really appreciate it. Absolutely. I think the remember that this is a relationship game. On my website under, under the about, if you wanna book a federal business breakthrough, I'll spend thirty minutes with you, and we'll try to run the ground your attempts to get through to one agency. And my promise is you'll come away with at least three ideas you can use right away, and I won't try to sell you anything. I wanna give you something you can steal from me. I wanna give you the micro engagement experience and get give you the sense of what it feels like for somebody who's on your side who's just genuinely giving to you. And notice people will forget what you did. People will forget what you said. People will never forget how you made them feel. Come, have that experience and understand what it feels like so you can turn around and give that experience to someone else. And I'm happy to do that with you. Awesome. Well, Judy, thank you so much. That was super fun. And, I learned a ton. I I hope everyone else did as well. We're gonna be doing a lot more of these. I hope to have, and I think we actually have another one coming up in a few months. But We do. October 8. October 8, we're gonna do hot we're gonna do hot wash. If you're going, I don't have money for more BD. You've got if you haven't done a hot wash and taken a look at what could we do differently, what are we gonna stop doing, what are our lessons learned, and you're leaving money on the table and you didn't get your full ROI out of the money you spent last year. If you're going, I'd like more money for BD, start by looking back. Look at what you can retool. And we're gonna talk about easy ways to do that on October 8. And because you're here, I've got to ask you, is it gonna make sure you get invited? So watch for that. Yes. We'd love to hear Alicia, thank you. I am so glad you enjoyed this. Please stay in touch. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Let's keep the conversation going. Molly, thanks so much. You folks are awesome. Sean, keep doing the good work and making a difference for people in their lives and in government. Thank you, Judy. And there you have it. That's the next event. I hope to see you all there. Thanks. Okay. Thanks. Bye bye.