For professionals in the infrastructure industry, discovering an opportunity too late is one of the most frustrating situations to face. The window for strategic positioning narrows, and responding in time becomes nearly impossible. This reactive approach is often tied to a business development strategy centered around responding to Requests for Proposals (RFPs). Unfortunately, by the time an RFP hits the market, it’s usually too late to build meaningful relationships or differentiate from competitors.
Leading business development teams are shifting their focus to proactive strategies. These teams equip themselves with the right tools and intelligence to pursue their best-fit opportunities early in the process—well before an RFP is even defined.
Citylitics offers early-stage sales intelligence, allowing companies to position themselves strategically long before formal projects materialize.
What Proactive Business Development Looks Like
Building a proactive business development strategy means:
- Getting ahead of the competition: Identifying opportunities at the earliest stages ensures your team is always one step ahead.
- Educating & aligning prospects: You can shape your prospect’s understanding of their own needs while showcasing how your solution aligns with their long-term goals.
- Strengthening relationships and market position: Developing relationships early and nurturing them over time helps create a trusted partnership by the time the RFP is released.
Companies that adopt these proactive methods, leveraging early-stage intelligence from platforms like Citylitics, can influence the infrastructure industry rather than being influenced by it.
Key Components of a Proactive Approach
Let’s explore what a proactive versus reactive approach looks like in different areas of business development.
1. Relationship Building
- Proactive: Strong relationships are built with best-fit prospects long before an RFP hits the market. Citylitics tracks over 40,000 entities generating public data on future infrastructure needs, helping businesses form meaningful connections early on.
- Reactive: While a company may have many industry connections, they struggle with winning contracts because relationships weren’t nurtured in the pre-RFP stages.
2. Opportunity Identification
- Proactive: Proactively identify future opportunities during the discussion, planning, or even feasibility assessment stages. Citylitics’ intelligence covers key stages of infrastructure development, including planning, feasibility, pre-design, and financing.
- Reactive: Opportunities are often only found once an RFP is publicly available, or worse, after the project is already awarded. At this stage, competition is fierce, and options to influence the process are minimal.
3. Prospecting
- Proactive: At its core, a proactive strategy focuses time on building and maintaining relationships. Citylitics extracts key sales intelligence from billions of public documents—such as meeting minutes, budgets, and capital improvement plans—giving business developers the ability to focus on relationship-building, not research.
- Reactive: When prospecting is reactive, significant time is lost sifting through data for opportunities that may already be in advanced stages.
4. Competitor Differentiation
- Proactive: Companies can evaluate competitors and position themselves based on true differentiators early in the project lifecycle. With insights from Citylitics, you gain valuable foresight, helping you tailor solutions before competitors even know about the opportunity.
- Reactive: Businesses only learn about their competitors after speaking to prospects or clients, missing out on the chance to effectively differentiate their offerings.
5. Messaging
- Proactive: By gaining insight into a prospect’s needs early, proactive teams can tailor messaging and sales pitches to directly address those needs. Citylitics helps businesses align their messaging by providing early indicators of infrastructure needs from various public data sources.
- Reactive: Messaging is often generic, leading to low engagement as prospects don’t feel the company truly understands their unique challenges.
6. Outreach
- Proactive: A proactive team knows the right contact at the right time. With Citylitics’ early-stage intelligence, your outreach is more precise, helping you connect with key decision-makers well before your competitors.
- Reactive: Many months are spent navigating through organizations just to find the right contact, putting you behind others who already have their foot in the door.
How Citylitics Powers Proactive Strategies
Citylitics offers unique value by providing early-stage sales intelligence—often as early as 1 to 5 years before an RFP is released. By tapping into billions of public documents from municipalities, counties, utilities, and other government entities, Citylitics delivers actionable insights that help business developers get ahead.
The platform tracks key stages of infrastructure project development, from initial discussions and feasibility assessments to pre-design and financing. Armed with this intelligence, business development teams can influence the conversation, educate prospects, and ultimately increase their chances of winning contracts.
Key Takeaways
In an industry as competitive as infrastructure, waiting for an RFP to be released can mean missing the boat entirely. By adopting a proactive business development strategy and leveraging early-stage intelligence from Citylitics, companies can gain a significant advantage. Whether it’s identifying opportunities years ahead of the competition or building meaningful relationships with decision-makers, proactive strategies not only increase win rates but also position businesses to shape the industry itself.