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Find Teaming Partners
How to Find Teaming Partners to Successfully Pursue Federal Contract or Grant Opportunities
The Partner Finder is a powerful tool for identifying companies that are likely to be the best fit for a given contract or grant opportunity. The tool sorts parent contractors and grant recipients by their level of federal obligations, so you can discover who has the most relevant prior experience and/or other characteristics such as certifications to win an opportunity.
Common use cases for the Partner Finder include:
- 1.Finding potential prime partners
- 2.Finding potential subcontractors
- 3.Identifying likely competitors for an opportunity
- 4.Identifying potential acquisition targets
To access the Partner Finder tool, go to Pursuit Management --> Partner Finder in the sidebar or click here and select either Contracts or Grants. To search for potential partners, add Filters for data relevant to the contract opportunity.
For Contracts, the recommended Experience filters to add include (but are limited to):
- Agency (Awarding)
- NAICS or PSC
- Set Aside (select No Set Aside Used for Full & Open competition)
- Place of Performance
For Grants, the recommended filters to add include (but are not limited to):
- Agency (Awarding)
- Assistance Type
- Place of Performance
- Amount Obligated (suggest setting a very wide range)
In some cases, you may also want to add Registration Info filters (which are listed at the bottom of the filters below the Experience filters). Use these filters if you want to limit your results to companies or organizations that meet certain registration or demographic information such as having a certain certification. For example, while the Experience Set Aside filter allows you to find contractors that have won the most awards with an 8(a) set-asides, the Registration Info Certification filter allows you to limit results to contractors that are active in the 8(a) program regardless of if they have historically won contracts with an 8(a) set-aside.
The resulting search will provide a ranking of every contractor by the total dollar obligations they have received over the set period. You can click on the Explore button next to each row to see the contracts that are relevant to your search for that Awardee.
By default, the results will only return Prime Contracts or Grants for the prior government fiscal year. In many cases, you will want to change the Include and Range dropdowns to include Prime + Sub contracts as well as extend the range measured back to 3 or 5 years.
If you are not finding many results, you can try broadening or removing filters.
You can also filter for potential partners that meet desired criteria by going to Market Intelligence --> Awardees in the sidebar or by clicking here.
Some of the common criteria for filtering for buyers or targets include:
- NAICS: Limit the search to Awardees focused on the most relevant NAICS codes
- Business Type: Limit the search to contractors with the most relevant Business Types
- Contract and Grant PY Obligations: Limit the search to Awardees with at least a certain level of prior year federal obligations
Note that the NAICS and Business Type filters are based on the NAICS codes and Business Types disclosed in the awardee's registration with the federal government, and do not necessarily reflect historical performance. For filtering based on actual historical performance, see the Awardee Ranking Tool above.
Another method of finding relevant prior experience is to search for the Awardees of similar contracts or grants to the one you are looking to find a partner on. The Contract and Grant searches allow you to apply dozens of filters to find contracts or grants that share agency customers, set-asides, size, keywords, and much more.
Looking at potential other bidders for a contract or grant can help you find potential partners to pursue the opportunity with. Most Opportunity pages will show an automatically generated list of potential competing bidders based on the details of the opportunity. To find a contract opportunity enter the title or solicitation ID in the search bar at the top of each page or search for the Contract Opportunity in the Contract Opportunity search here.
If the opportunity you are looking to pursue requires contract vehicle access, you can use the Vehicle search bar at the top of the page or the Vehicle search page (Market Intelligence --> Awards --> Vehicles in the sidebar or click here) to find the vehicle detail page. The Vehicle page provides details on current awardees as well as the current Award Share, which can help determine the likelihood of a particular potential partner winning.
To learn more about analyzing vehicles, see:
HigherGov covers more than 4,000 contract vehicles representing the vast majority of multi-award contract vehicles by dollar awarded. If you are an annual subscriber and need an analysis of a contract vehicle we do not currently cover, please contact us or reach out in the chat.
Once you have identified a potential partner, you can learn more about their prior experience, existing partners, and other details relevant to their competitive positioning and capabilities by reviewing their Awardee page. For more information please see the below guide:
If the Awardee has a GSA Schedule such as a Multiple Award Schedule, the schedule can provide more context about what services and products they provide beyond what you can typically find on their website.
You can find an Awardee's GSA schedule on the Awardee page. Alternatively, you can also search for schedules by going to the Document search page, selecting the Source filter and choosing Federal Schedule, and then typing in the awardee name as a Keyword.