The Complicated Path to Teaming

As government agencies increasingly use IDIQ vehicles to manage acquisitions, teaming has become a primary challenge for small businesses. In order to compete, small businesses often must form partnerships in the form of joint ventures or through prime/sub-contractor relationships to increase overall capabilities. It is becoming harder and harder for a small business to become a prime without sub-contractors because the requirements are complex and varied.

The traditional method of doing business development and capture management is effective, and it can produce great teams that will win contracts. One-on-one meetings with potential teaming partners, networking events, lunches, dinners, hours on the golf course and sporting events...they all work together to boost relationships, facilitate information sharing, and generate creative ideas. The problem is that these can be very time consuming and expensive, especially for small businesses. Not only are they time consuming, but they might not be possible at all for your opportunities that come out on an IDIQ vehicle, which may be the opportunities for which you have the highest PWin.

At InfoSquirrel, we believe the world is changing, and the following trends will eventually impact you and your team. We believe:

• The government will increasingly use IDIQ vehicles to save cost and time,
• Requirements, especially in technical industries, will become more complicated and teaming will become more important,
• More solicitations will require proposals that are scoring-based as opposed to lengthy technical write-ups, especially as the use of AI becomes more prevalent,
• Fewer companies will be able to invest the time and resources they used to when forming teams as technology is making it easier and more affordable to make intelligent teaming decisions.

These are some of the reasons we designed InfoSquirrel. The software enables you to quickly identify teaming partners with a high potential of being able to meet your specific needs based on the information they included in their company profiles. Once a match is identified, the partner can choose to request to join your team, and while submitting the request they will fill out a capability matrix to help you quickly determine whether they are a good fit. As proposals increasingly become partially or completely scoring based, you will now have the ability through InfoSquirrel to have multiple teaming partner options and use the software to identify the highest scoring combination. InfoSquirrel reduces the inherent complexity of teaming while greatly reducing, but not entirely eliminating, the need for meetings and email.

Now you do not have to leave teaming to chance and hope that you rub shoulders with the right partner at a lunch or networking event. Use InfoSquirrel today to find the partner you need without wasting time on endless meetings and failed information sharing attempts.

To learn more about the InfoSquirrel approach and to receive a demo of the software, visit www.infosquirrel.com.