It’s 8:07 a.m. and it’s a pipeline review. Coffee’s cold, the pipeline is thin, and the CEO just said, “We’re the incumbent, we’ve got glowing CPARS, the program manager is tracking this… we should be fine.” You know better. Vehicles decide the battlefield, capture starts a year earlier than anyone wants to admit and win rates don’t care about wishful thinking. You are watching the Federal market and expect org charts and procurements to move under your feet.
You know that to survive and thrive in the current government contracting environment, your company must build ~5× pipeline coverage, qualify faster, capture better, and increase bid throughput without sacrificing quality.
The only way to do all of it? Level up the team’s skills and let AI take the grind so humans can focus on relationships.
Multiple industry snapshots show incumbents are winning only about half of recompetes today. It’s far from the once-assumed 80%+ that was prevalent in the early 2000s. The world has long changed but some BD executives’ thinking is stuck in the past. In 2017, Grant Thornton GovCon survey reported that “just over half” of incumbents won, while experienced Contracting Officers (CO) peg it at “not much north of 50%.”
In FY24, agencies obligated about $755B in total contracts, with $74.8B (≈9.5%) flowing through GWACs and IDIQs such as NASA SEWP V, Alliant 2, and SeaPort-NxG—channels that favor prepared teams with access and past performance. The March 2025 Executive Order fundamentally restructures federal procurement by consolidating domestic acquisition of common goods and services under GSA management. The shift towards centralization is continuing.