The Account Plan Your Firm isn't Running
There's a version of account management happening at most GovCons right now. Someone owns a spreadsheet. It has client names, last contact dates, and a column for "relationship strength" that gets updated when someone remembers to update it. Maybe there's a CRM with contacts tagged by agency. Maybe a shared drive with capability briefs organized by customer.
And when the RFP drops, the BD lead pulls it up, confirms they have "a relationship" there, and the pursuit begins.
That's not account management… that's a filing system.
The difference matters more than most firms realize — because the firms winning consistently in this market aren't outworking anyone at proposal time. They've already done the work. The question is whether you know what that work actually looks like.
What an account plan is actually for
An account plan isn't a record of your history with a customer. It's a forward-looking document that answers one question: what do we need to do, and by when, to be the obvious choice when this work comes up?
That question has teeth. It forces you to be honest about where you actually stand — not where you hope you stand. Do the right people in that program office know your firm by name? Not just know of you — know you. Have you had substantive conversations with the decision-makers, not just the POC who fields vendor calls? Do you understand what's keeping the program manager up at night, beyond what's in any public document?
Most firms, if they're honest, can't answer those questions for more than two or three of their target accounts. They have coverage. They don't have depth.
The relationship depth problem
There's a word that gets thrown around a lot in GovCon BD: relationship. "We have a strong relationship with that customer." "We're well-positioned because of our relationships there."
What that usually means in practice: someone on the BD team attended the same industry day as someone from the agency, exchanged cards, and connected on LinkedIn. Or there's a past performance on a prior contract and the assumption is that goodwill carries forward.
That's presence… not relationship.
A real relationship in this context means the customer thinks of your firm when they have a problem to solve — before they write a statement of work about it. It means they'll take a call without it going through an official channel. It means when your name shows up on a proposal, the evaluator already has an opinion about you, and that opinion is a positive one.
Getting there requires deliberate, sustained engagement over time. Not a capabilities briefing once a year. Not an email blast when a new contract vehicle launches. Consistent, relevant touchpoints that bring the customer something useful — a question that shows you've done your homework, an observation about their mission area, an offer to share how a peer agency solved a similar problem.
That's the kind of engagement most firms tell themselves they're doing. It's the kind almost no one is doing systematically.
The zipper problem
Here's a diagnostic worth running. Pick your three highest-priority target accounts. For each one, map out every meaningful touchpoint your firm has had with that customer in the last 12 months — not email blasts, not conference booths, not submitted proposals. Actual conversations with people who have influence over the buy.
Now map their acquisition calendar. What's coming up in the next 18 months? What pre-decisional conversations should already be happening?
If those two maps don't line up — if your engagement activity isn't timed to the acquisition cycle, or if you have gaps in the 12 to 18 months before a major procurement — that's the zipper problem. Your relationships aren't tracking to where the decisions are being made.
This is how firms end up surprised by RFPs they should have seen coming. It's not that the intelligence wasn't available. It's that nobody was working the account systematically enough to be in the room where it was forming.
What account planning actually requires
A real account plan for a priority target covers five things, and covers them with actual intelligence — not assumptions:
Who are the decision-makers and influencers, and what is our current relationship depth with each? This isn't a contact list. It's an honest assessment of where we stand with every person who has a role in this buying decision, and a plan for closing any gaps.
What does this customer actually care about right now? Not what the SOW will say. What's the mission pressure, the budget situation, the leadership priority, the thing they got called out on in the last audit? That intelligence requires conversation, not database searches.
What's coming in the next 18 months and what do we need to have done before each milestone? Working backward from an anticipated RFP date tells you exactly when customer engagement needs to happen, when to get your capture lead involved, when to start building the competitive picture.
Who else is working this account and what do they know that we don't? Competitor analysis in account planning isn't about the public record — it's about who's been in front of the customer and what they've been positioning. That requires market intelligence, not just GovWin.
What does our positioning look like right now, and what has to change? If the customer were to choose today, would they choose you? If not, what's the specific gap — relationship, past performance, capability, visibility — and what's the plan to close it before the window closes?
If those five questions have real answers for your top accounts, you have an account plan. If they have vague ones — or if some of them are blank — you have a contact list with good intentions.
The marketing piece nobody connects
Account planning doesn't live in BD alone. One of the highest-leverage things a firm can do for its target accounts is deploy thought leadership aimed directly at the challenges those customers face — articles, LinkedIn content, speaking engagements, webinars — so that when your BD lead finally gets a meeting, that program manager already has some sense of how your firm thinks.
That's not marketing as awareness. That's marketing as capture strategy. It shortens the trust-building timeline. It gives your BD team something relevant to reference in every touchpoint. And it means your proposal isn't the first time the evaluator has encountered your firm's point of view.
When BD and marketing are running separate playbooks, this never happens. When they're working the same account plan toward the same timeline, it's one of the clearest competitive advantages available — and one of the least used.
Build the accounts first. The proposals will follow.
The firms pulling away from their peers in this market aren't doing it because they have better proposal writers. They're doing it because they started earlier, went deeper, and stayed more deliberate about the accounts that actually matter.
That's a system. It runs before the RFP. And it makes every other part of the growth engine easier to run.
Krystn Macomber, CP APMP Fellow, LEED AP
Founder + CEO | Summit Strategy
