Pricing Strategies that Win Government Contracts with John Peacock

John Peacock is a Senior Vice President at ASRC Federal. In this episode, John shares how building up great relationships ultimately paves the way to your success rate in a government setting as in any other. It’s also a matter of triangulating these three essentials of pricing, price to win, and competitive intelligence, and all other data points to reach your pricing point.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: Learn how to do competitive intelligence and price to win   Find out how to show value in a government setting and have a good win rate  Learn how to shape opportunity so that government RFPs comes out more in your favor            “You’ve got to have really good relationships across all the different functional and organizational teams within your company. At the end of the day, my ability to get to the right price and help the company get to the right price is all driven off of the teams of people that you work with to get there.”   – John Peacock         Topics Covered: 01:16 – How one thing led to another and finally into pricing  02:23 – What got him to stick with pricing all these years  04:06 – Working through the pricing ranks  04:57 – What is ASRC, what does it do, is it government-focused primarily  07:09 – Pricing for value in a government setting  09:01 – A multi-step process in government bidding  10:38 – Talking about sole source contract award  12:03 – What’s a good win rate  16:58 – Taking a look at win rates early and late in the process  19:06 – Increasing win rate at the time the RFP comes out  21:46 – Factoring in competitive intelligence in the price to win  23:56 – The key to do competitive intelligence and price to win  28:21 – Margin requirements for bidding  30:31 – John’s best pricing advice to help create a great impact on one’s business        Key Takeaways:  “A big piece of government pricing is compliance; it’s responding specifically to what they ask for.” – John Peacock  “It’s much harder to win something where you’re not ahead of the curve in government pricing. It’s not as if there’s a commercial price list that you just go grab a number off of; we’re not buying a Dell laptop that you can just get anyone can go and get the same price for.  It’s much more specific than that. And so, you’ve got to be ahead of the curve if you want to have a good win rate.” – John Peacock  “Just like everything in life, everything comes down to relationships, and whether it’s your BD people, your program people, the people that are truly successful are the ones that make good relationships; they bridge that gap. And that allows you to have those conversations, and explain why there’s value add. If you have the greatest product in the world, but no one will talk to you. It’s not going to ever go anywhere.” – John Peacock  “The level of information and expertise comes into play. Putting the numbers together, honestly, isn’t the hard part. It’s pulling all the pieces together, so you know what the numbers should be?” – John Peacock  “The key to how we do competitive intelligence and price to win is, I see federal really falls within the expertise of the team that does this, and how they’re able to present the data.” – John Peacock  “I always tell my team, how you present information, how it looks even, is critically important. You might have the best answer in the world. And if you do it in cram, on a PC, your kids drawing paper, you’re not going to win the award; it’s got to look good, smell good, taste good. It’s got to be 100%.” – John Peacock         People/Resources Mentioned:  Tech Systems: https://www.techsystemsinc.com/ Dell: http://www1.ap.dell.com          Connect with John Peacock: Email: [email protected]  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-d-peacock          Connect with Mark Stiving:    Email: [email protected]  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/