The demands on growth leaders in the GovCon industry, on time, resources, and the ability to respond, are a constant. When we come across a tool that saves time, integrates with existing products, and is specifically built for the government contracting space, we take notice. This interview with Rye Jones, Co-founder & CEO at NextStage and Joshua Chua, its Co-Founder & CTO, discusses a never before available opportunity.
Beginnings
Just three years out of the gate, the NextStage team applies Silicon Valley technical experience to challenges unique to government contractors, namely the B2G sales cycle. Formed after hearing countless stories of hours spent daily seeking opportunities, manually entering those into spreadsheets, and the challenge that most available options were not purpose build for long, competitive RFPs, NextStage has focused on a very specific target audience.
The team has introduced a ground-breaking product to the government contracting industry to address the shortcomings of traditional CRMs for GovCon. NextStage distinguishes itself by providing a balanced focus on both market intelligence and the application of best practices to the full lifecycle of opportunity and pipeline management. To date, NextStage has helped over 100 government contractors streamline their BD and capture process.
Who can Benefit
Designed for the small to mid-sized professional services government contractors, the tool helps companies address growth challenges in scaling GovCon.
“Small businesses on the cusp of significant growth often find themselves overwhelmed. Before NextStage, they’re juggling spreadsheets and generic CRMs, leading to a chaotic and unstructured approach to managing potential deals. NextStage revolutionizes that process. It’s designed for these businesses to bring order and clarity, transforming their pipeline management into a streamlined and understandable journey through every phase and evaluation. The result is not just control but a clear understanding of their opportunities, making it easier to track progress and make informed decisions.”
The other target market is businesses about to graduate from their small business designation who will be seeing huge expansions across their teams and for whom systems and tooling will be critical.
“Another niche is companies who have reached that critical mass of contract vehicles that requires too much overhead finding the right opportunities. They will find this a chance to bring that all together, to streamline overhead, and create a more efficient process with everything under one view.”
Simplicity Represented
Bringing together data from all major federal contracting data sources, teams fully implement NextStage in just one to two weeks, it comes with unlimited onboarding support and requires no outside consultants or technical expert to customize.
“A lot of companies start out using a combination or market intelligence tools and a CRM to find and win opportunities. The problem is keeping these tools in sync requires a tremendous amount of manual monitoring and data entry. Our tool takes a one-stop shop approach, aggregating data from private and public sources and using that data to continuously maintain opportunities with updates.”
Uniquely Designed for GovCon
Focused on the GovCon space, the templates, workflows and other components that go into qualification, capture and the proposal lifecycle have been specifically designed. “We heard from a lot of people that long-term adoption of some tools can be a challenge and when you delve into the issues it comes down to them being built for commercial sales, and not government contracting.
The team says the convenience of having all of the relevant data feed into the system is something users will feel on day one. Having the data synched and live will help teams coordinate proposal resources, forecast revenue, and report on pipeline health.
Evolving
Focused on continuing to meet the changing demands and workstyles of government contractors, the NextStage product continues to evolve, taking customer feedback and iterating as and when it can. “Our goal is to make life easier so people can focus on the fun, PWin enhancing activities.”
Expect future iterations to continue to expand data integrations with contract vehicle sources and potentially, future support for proposal management. “We’ll continue to see ways we can bring our unique data sets and our perspective on the common pain points in GovCon to help support these contractors as they grow their business.”
About NextStage
NextStage is the one-stop shop for market intelligence, task order management, capture, and proposal workflows.
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