The more information you have about your company’s ability to win contracts the more success you’re going to have in the government contracting marketplace. One way to gather crucial information about how your company stands up to the competition is to request a post-award debriefing whether you win or lose.

You probably understand why it’s important to request a debriefing if you lose. It is important to understand what mistakes or missteps you made in the proposal that could – next time you’re submitting one – hamper your ability to win. But why go through the trouble of requesting and attending a debriefing if you won?

It might seem counter intuitive to request a debriefing if you won, after all, whatever efforts you took must have been successful so what is there to evaluate? The answer is: everything. Even though you won, there could be aspects of your proposal that weren’t as strong as you thought. The truth is, without a debriefing you can’t know why you won, and if you don’t know why you won it is more difficult to win again.

Our clients tell us all the time that post-award debriefings always provide them with a surprise. We’ve had clients who were the incumbents on contracts and figured they were shoe-ins so long as they proposed the right price, but lost because they didn’t show enough loyalty to their team. Even the winners come back with new and exciting information and ways they can improve for next time.

It is impossible to submit a perfect proposal, we’re humans and we make mistakes. And the only way companies can grow is by improving their ability to win business. Being more successful at winning business within the government contracting marketplace is achieved by understanding what you did wrong, what you did right, and putting it all together for the next big proposal.

Clients of our FAST™ Process will likely recognize all of this information, because we go into post-award debriefings in great detail throughout the process. It is a crucial aspect to any successful government contracting effort.

If you have any questions about post-award debriefings or the TargetGov FAST™ Process, please contact us. Take a look at our upcoming webinar about the post-award debriefing process, “Win or Lose: Take Advantage of the Proposal Debriefing” on October 16, 2014.