More Intel. Same Win Rate.

Every BD team I work with has more intel than it had five years ago.

More tools. More dashboards. More alerts hitting your phone before you’ve opened your first Dr Pepper of the day.

And most of those teams have about the same win rate they had five years ago.

This post grew out of our October Basecamp Briefings™ session with our partners at Govly, who see what the whole federal market buys in real time. I see the other half... what firms actually do with all that once it hits their inbox.

Short version? More data hasn’t fixed it, because data was never the bottleneck.

The market changed shape. Most BD motions didn’t.

Think about how the government buys right now. Vehicles. OTAs. Phased awards. Task orders with two-week turnarounds, or less.

None of that is new. We’ve all worked in it for years.

What changed is the mix. That stuff used to show up a few times a year and annoy everybody. Now it’s most of the market.

Then look at how your BD team spends its week. Watching for RFP releases. Building a pipeline out of whatever got announced.

Somebody built that motion for a market that tells you when it’s buying... and that market is a slice of this one now.

If your BD calendar runs on release dates, you’re working a shrinking slice of the market.

What’s the difference between market intel and account intel?

There are two kinds of intel. One you buy. One you earn.

Market intel is what’s being bought. Vehicles, awards, forecasts, budgets, prior purchases, recompete dates. It’s real, it’s hard to assemble, and it’s worth paying for.

Account intel is what your customer is deciding... and what’s worrying them while they decide it. Why the last transition went sideways. Which of their people is about to leave. What they can’t say out loud yet.

That second kind is real customer intel (we call it WINtel™), and it’s the one that wins.

Market intel tells you a door exists. WINtel™ tells you how to walk through it.

Guess which one gets the budget.

Here’s the pattern I see more than any other. A firm tells me BD is stuck. So they buy a tool. Then another one. Now they have three subscriptions, a dashboard, and a weekly digest nobody reads past the subject line.

Then I ask one simple question about a top account... what is this customer actually worried about right now?

And nobody in the room can answer it.

You can’t buy your way to that answer.

Most firms buy market data to answer account questions. The tool can’t do that job.

How many opportunities should a BD team actually work?

I asked our friends at Govly to pull real numbers off their platform... what actually happens across their users every month. Three stood out.

• ~500 opportunities a month land in front of a typical active user.
• ~1% make it into an active workspace. That’s about four a month.
• ~5 weeks is the median gap between a Sources Sought notice and the solicitation.

Source: Govly platform data, medians. Opportunity counts: 657 active users, April–September 2026. Timing: 3,319 opportunities where a Sources Sought preceded the solicitation, October 2025–September 2026.

Start with the four.

Four is about right. You should work a tiny fraction of what you see. Nobody wins by chasing 500 things.

The real question is how those four get picked. At most firms it’s whatever caught somebody’s eye that week... and nobody can tell you why those four and not four others.

If you’ve named three key customer accounts, the list picks itself. Same number. Completely different four.

Now the five weeks. That window is real, and five weeks is plenty of time to write a proposal. It’s nowhere near enough time to become somebody your customer trusts.

So treat those five weeks as your deadline. The positioning had to happen before the signal ever showed up.

You’ve heard this in a pipeline review, said with a totally straight face... “It came across my desk.”

Okay. But how it got to you doesn’t count as a strategy. And if that’s how most of your pipeline showed up, your inbox is running your BD.

By the time an opportunity shows up in a database, the positioning window has mostly closed.

What does account intel actually sound like?

“Account intel” sounds like consultant language until you hear it. So here’s what it sounds like:

“Their budget got trimmed and nobody has said it out loud yet.”

“The COR who actually likes you retires in March.”

“They’re still quietly furious about how the last transition went.”

None of that lives in a database. No alert fires for it. No award record shows it.

Every one of those is worth more than a solicitation notice, because every one tells you what to say and when to say it.

Picture an iceberg. About 25% of what drives a buying decision sits above the waterline... the requirements as written, the published schedule, what’s in the database. Good tools have gotten really good at surfacing that part.

The other 75% sits underneath. Decision biases. Pain. Pressure. Politics. Fears. Cost concerns. And the true requirements... which often don’t match what the requirement says.

Hot buttons show you where a decision feels risky to your customer. That tells you more than knowing where the pain is.

Want to know where your firm stands? Ask these three at your next BD meeting and watch the room go quiet:What do we know about this buyer that isn’t in any database? If the answer is nothing, you don’t have an account strategy... and everything downstream of that is a guess.

1. What do we know about this buyer that isn’t in any database? If the answer is nothing, you don’t have an account strategy... and everything downstream of that is a guess.
2. When did someone last talk to them without an RFP on the table? If the last conversation was transactional, you’re a vendor. And customers compare vendors on price.
3. If we lost this account tomorrow, would we know why? Most firms find out in the debrief. That’s 11 months too late to do anything about it.

The bottom 75% only comes from people. No tool gets you there.

Where does account intel come from?

Your best intel source doesn’t have a login.

It’s your project managers and SMEs. The people on site every week. The ones who hear the hallway conversation and know the COR’s schedule before anyone publishes it.

They’re sitting on better account intel than any platform will ever surface... and almost nobody has built a real way to get it out of their heads.

That matters more now, because access to your customers got harder. A lot harder. Fewer industry days. COs carrying more with less. The contracting workforce absorbed the 2025 cuts.

So you get fewer shots, and every one costs more to earn. When you do get in the room, a capability pitch wastes it. Most of the time you won’t be in the room at all... so your story has to travel without you.

Meanwhile, your PM sits inside the customer every single week.

What to ask, with or without access

When you get a meeting, ask about them:

• What’s changed recently?
• Where do teams underestimate the effort?
• What does success really look like?

Notice none of those are about you.

Most of the time you won’t get the meeting. So you read instead of ask:

• What keeps getting delayed?
• What’s getting corrected?
• Where is funding moving?

All of that is public. Budget justifications, strategic plans, protest decisions, mod histories. It won’t tell you what your customer is afraid of... only a person tells you that. But read enough of it and you’ll have something worth saying. That’s how you earn the meeting.

And buyers notice the difference. Research behind The Challenger Sale found customers are 2.3x more likely to engage when the conversation centers on insight instead of your capabilities... and only 38% of buyers say their vendors help them think differently about their problems.

So roughly two-thirds of your competitors run check-in calls with no agenda and call it relationship building. That’s a wide-open door.

Five ways PMs drive BD (without getting salesy)

I’ve watched brilliant engineers duck into a bathroom when they saw me coming down the hall... because they knew I wanted to talk about “BD.” True story. More than once.

So none of these require your PM to sell anything:

1. Stay engaged in the quiet periods. Don’t ghost the customer between deliverables. The quiet period is exactly when they tell you things.
2. Ask one question. “What’s changing on your end?” It opens more doors than any capability pitch ever will.
3. Share insight. A relevant trend, a similar project, something they can use. A schedule update doesn’t count.
4. Make the COR’s job easier. Offer to support their internal briefing. You’ll learn a ton about the pressure they’re under.
5. Loop BD in the week something shifts. If you wait for the RFP, you waited too long.

Zipper the relationship

Most firms run a key account through one thread... one BD person who takes the whole relationship with them when they retire or leave. Ask who owns the customer relationship and you get one name.

Zipper it instead. Your organization and theirs, connected at every level. Executive sponsor to program executive. BD + capture to the contracting officer. Your PM to the COR + technical lead. Your delivery team to the end users.

One relationship is a single point of failure. Four is an account.

And look at your PM. They’re already zipped in, every week, and nobody had to schedule it. That’s the connection almost nobody uses on purpose.

Make it real without making it heavy

This is where firms overbuild it and it dies within a quarter. Three rules:

1. Add one question to a call that already exists. Do not create a BD meeting for your PMs. They’ll stop coming, and you’ll teach them BD means more meetings.
2. Give them somewhere to put it in 30 seconds. A Teams channel, a two-field form, a text to the capture lead. If it takes 10 minutes and 100 clicks in your CRM, you’ll get nothing... and you’ll decide PMs don’t care. They care. Your process was too hard.
3. Close the loop out loud. When something a PM heard changes a pursuit, say so in front of people. Nobody keeps feeding a black hole.

One more thing, since everybody’s pointing AI at their pipeline right now. AI is only as good as the data you hand it. SAM.gov is public, so everyone’s AI already sees it. Vehicle buying data sits behind logins, and SLED opportunities spread across thousands of state + local sites. That’s a data problem, and the right tools solve it.

Your front line is the one source no tool can reach. It’s also the one I’d fix first... because it’s free.

Your PMs already have the access everyone else is fighting for. Give them an easy way to share what they hear.

Should you get on every contract vehicle?

So far this has been about customer accounts. Now let’s talk about where most firms actually spend their money... vehicles.

Order matters here. Pick the account first. The vehicle follows.

Two different sports on one field

If you’ve been through Shipley training, you know the rule. Capture starts 18 months before the RFP. For a major recompete, that holds up. Sometimes 18 months still isn’t enough.

But more of the market moves through vehicles now and lands as task orders with 10-day turns... or less. So you’ve got two sports on one field, and most firms run one playbook for both.

On a major recompete, you plan around the pursuit and build a campaign for it. On fast-turn work there’s no time for that, so you plan around the account. By the time that RFQ drops, the work is done. You’re ready or you’re not.

You’re preparing for that customer, continuously... the RFQ is just the day it shows.

Vehicle FOMO

Is your vehicle strategy basically an Oprah episode? You get a vehicle! You get a vehicle! Everybody gets a vehicle!

I get it. Category management keeps pushing work into fewer vehicles. Agencies have marching orders to buy through them. If you’re not on, you’re not competing.

Then agencies compete, delay, restructure, and sometimes cancel those vehicles after firms spent real money chasing them. (CIO-SP4, anyone?) You can’t tell which one will matter in three years. The fear is rational.

Here’s the catch. Getting on is the cheap part. Nobody prices the carrying cost... proposal hours, compliance, reporting, annual refreshes. And attention. Now your team watches nine portals instead of working three accounts.

If you have an endless B+P budget (ha!), go be on everything. Everyone else has to choose. It takes an afternoon:

1. Which three agencies are we actually serving? Skip the aspirational ones. Where do we have past performance, relationships, and a reason to be believed?
2. How do those three buy? Which vehicles, which portals, which thresholds. That list is your vehicle strategy.
3. What’s left over? Anything with no account behind it is a carrying cost. Keep it if you want... just call it what it is, an option you pay to hold.

The list gets shorter. That’s the point. You picked.

Vehicles follow accounts. Name the customers first, then go see how they buy.

How should a go/no-go decision actually work?

If everything’s a priority, nothing is a priority. Same goes for accounts. Same goes for pursuits.

Tier the work

One process for a $200K task order and a $40M recompete is how you end up doing neither one well. So tier it:

• Light. Small task orders + quick turns. BD leads, proposals produces, 15-minute gate.
• Standard. The regular rhythm. Full team, capture leads strategy, every gate logged.
• Major. Bet-the-year pursuits. Formal capture first, exec sponsor, price-to-win + orals.

Then build in an override. A small pursuit that opens a new account can move up a tier. BD makes that call at the gate... and writes down why. Otherwise it’s whoever has the most pull that week, and we all know how that goes.

Set thresholds on total contract value instead of first-year fee, or IDIQ work lands in the wrong tier by accident.

Spend the meeting on what a database can’t answer

I once reviewed a go/no-go form at a very large, very smart company. It asked a lot of the right questions. Then the last line said: “If your gut says go, add 200 points.”

It’s called go/no-go for a reason. Go-go-go doesn’t count.

Five categories, and every one deserves a devil’s advocate:

• Relationship strength. Who are the decision-makers? How many times have we met them before the RFP?
• Hot buttons. What’s keeping them up at night? What do we know that no one else knows?
• Chance of winning. Do they have a preferred provider? Do we have three real discriminators?
• Resources. Is the turnaround reasonable? Who’s the capture manager? Who’s the proposal manager?
• Long-term alignment. Does this fit the business plan? Must-win, or nice to have?

Half of those have answers before the meeting starts. Who won their last buys. How they buy. What they’ve bought before. When the incumbent’s contract ends. Let your data + AI handle that lookup in five minutes.

Then spend the meeting on the questions only your people can answer. What’s keeping them up at night. What we know that nobody else does. How many times we’ve actually met. Whether this one is a must-win.

And a capture lead who never says no-go isn’t doing the job.

Let the tools do the lookup. Save your people for the judgment.

What to do on Monday

Five things. None of them need budget.

1. Pick 3–5 target accounts. You’ll want to add more. Don’t.
2. Map the buyers + influencers in each one. Use actual names. Who decides, who influences, who takes the heat if it goes wrong.
3. Identify 1–2 positioning themes per account. Build each one around their problem.
4. Align BD + marketing on visibility. Same message, same accounts, same quarter. Too many firms have marketing broadcasting to nobody in particular while BD works a list marketing has never seen.
5. Stay consistent. This is the one that kills people. Thirty days of this beats one spectacular quarter.

Do that for 30 days and the vehicle question answers itself... because you’ll know who you serve, and you can go look at how they buy.

The test

Pull your current pipeline. For each pursuit, ask one question: why this one?

If the answer is a customer you’ve named, a relationship you’ve built, and something you know that nobody else does... you have a strategy.

If the answer is “it came across my desk,” you have an inbox.

You can buy the signal. Somebody has to build the system that turns it into positioning. And the judgment (which accounts, which bids, when to walk) stays yours.

Buy the tool and skip the rhythm, and you’ll have better-organized inaction.

Pick fewer. Know them better. Decide on purpose.