Outsourcing your capture intelligence and proposal efforts can be wildly beneficial for small and medium businesses. Leveraging experts frees up you and your team’s’ time while also helping you win more with more confidence.

However, not all market intelligence firms are created equally, and it can be hard as a small business to figure out what you need in an outsourcing relationship, making it easy for the experience to go awry.

When a relationship is not as successful as you hoped, it can be paralyzing for a small business. So, we put together a few tips for moving past a bad outsourcing experience that you can reference to move forward.

Assess what went wrong and why. Sit down and have an honest conversation with yourself and the key internal stakeholders who were involved in choosing the failed relationship. Identify what parts of the outsourcing experience were failures and why they failed.

For example, you failed to submit a proposal for consideration on time because you did not receive the finished product from a proposal writer you hired in a timely manner. By reflecting on this you come to the conclusion that there wasn’t clear communication around when you would need the proposal done by in order to finalize and submit it.

Instead of throwing your hands up and resigning to never rely on an outside proposal writer again, you can take this feedback and create a proposal project timeline template with clear deadlines to apply to all external proposal writing moving forward.

Do your research and get back out there. Maybe you were burned by a more ambiguous issue. For example, the market intelligence team you hired actually isn’t that intelligent and you are missing out on bids because the team isn’t doing adequate research.

Counter this issue by doing your own research before hiring outside help. Avoid blindly relying on referrals or picking the first company that pops up when you type “capture intelligence” into Google. Spend some time understanding what you need and don’t need in a partner firm and then find a reliable company that meets those needs.

Re-evaluate throughout a new partnership. The work doesn’t stop once you hire a new company. Set up regular check-ins to evaluate the partnership and ensure that your company’s needs and expectations are still being met by the firm you hired.

If you find that they aren’t, establish processes to correct the course and ultimately cut ties if it is necessary. By evaluating the partnership throughout the relationship, you will easily be able to identify concerning behaviors before they become a major issue, saving you time and money.

Rebuilding after a bad outsourcing experience can be daunting and cumbersome. However, with the right mindset and tools you can easily be back on track and leveraging outside help for proposal writing and capture efforts to grow your business and ultimately win more contracts.