RCC's CHALLENGE
As a wireless and IT consulting and engineering firm, RCC Consultants has built its business on ensuring the speed, reliability and comprehensive coverage of telecommunications. And those three attributes are also vitally important to the first step in the firm’s revenue-generation process – finding requests for proposals (RFPs) from government agencies that match the company’s products and services.
RCC’s government-contracting work – primarily in the areas of public safety, transportation, and aviation – makes up about 90 percent of its overall business. Because it works with agencies at all levels of government, actionable RFPs could turn up in any of tens of thousands of locations, from the websites of small, rural counties and townships to the official sites of state governments.
“It’s just not feasible for one person to search all those websites manually and expect to accomplish anything else during the day,” says RCC marketing assistant Kelly Hockaday, who’s responsible for researching and acquiring RFPs at the firm’s Glen Allen, Va., office. “I can’t imagine how many sites I’d have to visit to make sure I’m not missing any RFPs.”
THE SOLUTION
RCC became an Onvia client more than eight years ago and continues to rely on Onvia’s lead-generation tools and services to quickly and efficiently identify RFPs that it wants to pursue.
Every morning Kelly receives the Onvia Guide, an emailed PDF document containing the announcements and descriptions of the latest RFPs from among more than 90,000 agencies nationwide. RCC has created saved searches in the Onvia Online Database so that its Guide is customized to list only the projects that make sense for the firm’s services and industry sectors. Still, each daily edition of RCC’s Guide can contain hundreds of project listings, so Kelly uses the Guide’s Summary of Results list to quickly scan the project titles and then click through to the description pages of the projects that seem most promising.
She can also download the RFP documents, including amendments and addenda, directly from links in the Guide whenever available; if the agency hasn’t provided the documents electronically, she can contact the agency’s procurement officer at the phone number or email address provided with the project description.
THE RESULTS
Using the Onvia Guide, Kelly spends only 15-30 minutes each day locating the RFPs that she needs to forward the firm’s regional sales executives, compared to the hours of work that would be required to search the agency websites individually. “It makes no sense for me to spend all that extra time trolling those websites when I’m getting that same information consolidated in the Guide,” she says. “It’s really handy.”
Though RCC also uses other sources besides Onvia to locate RFPs, “Onvia is our main source. The other services don’t troll with as a wide a net. We get more leads from Onvia, and because it allows us to find more opportunities, we can propose for more opportunities.”
