Delivering Added Value to Government Agencies

Today sophisticated contractors are seeking to add greater value by becoming “strategic counselors” to their key government customers. No longer can a contractor’s offerings provide a partial solution to major government customers such as the Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Education or Energy. Instead, many companies are transforming their approach by offering “total solutions” to agency problems. To accomplish this transformation, contractors are expanding their capabilities in mission-critical areas and teaming with partners who can bring complementary expertise. These changes are making it possible for contractors rapidly to deploy customized solutions and technologies that benefit their government customers.

In addition to these value-added actions, smart contractors increasingly are offering a new service—a marketing skill called “strategic counseling.” Reaching beyond their core competencies, smart contractors are offering their major government customers value-added consulting in new areas outside their traditional services. This new consulting service brings to government agencies capabilities that they are unable to adequately perform on their own. This service inevitably links a contractor more securely to its target agency, providing a comparative advantage over competitors. It is, in effect, a new marketing tool. Because cutting-edge contractors who service government agencies understand the importance of a customer-focused strategy, they increasingly partner with consultants who bring an expertise in government advocacy to their team. Working together, they can provide “total solutions” to their customers.

A consultant-advocate can help a contractor identify the services within its expertise that are of the greatest need to an agency. This puts the consultant-advocate in the unique role as “coach” for a contractor who is evolving into a “strategic counselor” for the customer – the agency. The consultant-advocate marries the contractor’s interests with that of the agency.

The consultant’s first order of business in creating a “strategic counselor” is to help the contractor more fully understand the political parameters of his customer’s true mission. Working with the contractor’s team as a coach, he helps identify what political problems the government agency needs to have solved. Aware of both the target agency’s needs and the contractor’s core competencies, he first helps the contractor maximize the support services he can offer immediately. Next, the consultant-advocate looks forward and analyzes the political and business milieu in the near-term, identifying the strategies, players, and political processes that may influence the agency’s mission in the future. Armed with this information, the consultant-advocate helps the contractor become a strategic counselor, advising the agency in light of existing political and competitive forces. This transition of a contractor to a counselor involves a four- step process:

The first step requires the consultant and contractor to better understand the customer’s stated mission, goals, and resources. The contractor must accurately identify whether or not the agency’s plans are politically doable -- whether the funds appropriated are sufficient for success. The customer’s mission typically is a concise, internally focused statement of the reason for the agency’s existence, its basic purpose, and its values that guide its activities. The mission also describes what the customer expects to deliver to stakeholders. An effective consultant-advocate can show how the agency’s needs are exactly what the contractor is poised to provide. And the consultant-advocate enables this to occur by helping contractors shape their customer’s mission statement long before the contractor is responding to a request for proposal. For a strategic counselor, shaping the statement of his customer’s mission begins long before a contract is signed, and the contractor plays an important role in the evolution of the mission statement – a key to retaining the customer program.

Failure of a contractor to perceive accurately the customer’s reality results from a number of factors [1]: too much filtering of information; hearing only what a contractor wants to hear; thinking that is fanciful; fearing bad results; failing to take serious things seriously; emotional over investing; unrealistic expectations. Both the contractor and the agency must have a view of facts as they are, not as they both want them to appear. A consultant-advocate, because he is external to the contractor-agency relationship, can ensure that the contractor has a realistic view of the situation. Working with the contractor, the consultant helps to remove or minimize these barriers to success.

Based on a realistic assessment of the customer, the consultant-advocate coaches the new strategic counselor by helping to craft the customer’s definition of success. For the customer, this phase produces a precise picture of their destination, where the agency wants to be in the next few years. It also provides both coach and contractor an opportunity to manage expectations. At this stage, the coach helps the contractor to:

In the third phase, the coach and contractor team help customers communicate their vision that provides a clear picture of future performance that is dramatically better than the present.[2] A communications team creates awareness and tests whether understanding of, and loyalty to the strategy has penetrated throughout agency. When successful, effective communication of the agency’s strategies will: educate the entire agency about the strategy; provide useful feedback about the effectiveness of the new strategy; make clear to the employees in the agency why change is needed; create a climate in which employees are motivated and empowered to strive toward the agency vision; and make everyone aware of, and accountable for, the strategy and its success.

The fourth step in transitioning from a contractor into a strategic counselor requires helping the customer execute key strategies. A strategy cannot be executed if it cannot be understood and it cannot be understood if it cannot be described. However, describing the cleverest strategy will do little good unless the customer agency also executes it well.. At the execution step, the consultant-advocate supports the contractor by helping everyone in the customer agency not only to clearly understand the underlying hypotheses of the strategy, but also to align resources with the hypotheses; test the hypotheses continually, and adapt them as required.

By listening well to the customer’s needs, carefully studying political and business trends, and analyzing critical issues and testimony that could affect the mission of customer agencies, consultant-advocates successfully support contractors in their new role as strategic counselors. The consultant-contractor team, in turn, helps customer agencies to adapt to the vagaries of the present and peer with more precision into the future. These activities are improving the ability of government agencies to accomplish their mission and goals. By being coached into a new role as a strategic counselor to key customer agencies, contractors are providing agencies with real-time awareness of political and competitive forces and “total solutions” to their needs. This new marketing approach by contractors will soon emerge as a key strategy for successful customer retention.

 

Michael J. Kerrigan
Kerrigan & Associates, Inc.
Consultant-Advocate
December 31, 2004

 

References Cited

1. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Confronting Reality, (Four Steps: Realism, Vision, Communication and Execution)

2. Vision, communication and execution ideas are largely from Strategy Focused Organizations, The Balanced Scorecard and Strategy Maps by Kaplan and Norton.