If you’re starting out 2025 with a new Multiple Award (MA) Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract (like OASIS+ or SeaPort NxG) – congratulations! But now it is time to get to work. Whether it’s building a pipeline to prepare for future opportunities, responding to multiple task orders (TOs) at once, or managing TO after TO while also balancing your existing client work – having a process in place to review, track, and respond to task orders will be critical for your IDIQ contract success.

IDIQs are great for flexibility and building a more robust experience portfolio, but they require some care and feeding to be leveraged effectively. Trident has decades of experience supporting TO responses, so we want to share our Top Five Best Practices to succeed on IDIQs.

Top Five Best Practices for Success on your IDIQ

1) You must understand the contract’s administrative and participation requirements

Each IDIQ has specific terms and conditions outlined in the contract, which may include minimum participation requirements, reporting requirements, billing/invoicing requirements, compliance measures, attendance at designated conferences and events, and even website/marketing commitments.

You should have someone (perhaps even a small team) who understands these requirements and who will be responsive to the contract program offices. This can’t (or shouldn’t) automatically be the company's president, as they likely won't have enough bandwidth. Dedicate and designate an individual to be the Subject Matter Expert(s) (SMEs) for the contract requirements.

• The SME should keep your SAM.gov profile up to date and let the contract program office know if any of your certifications or clearances change (i.e., you get a higher facility clearance, you earn your ISO certification, you lose ISO certification, etc.).
• Additionally, your SME should schedule regular internal reviews of personnel and facility clearances, ISO certifications, and SAM.gov certification to ensure ongoing compliance. If a TO is on the street and you’re scrambling to update a certification, you may miss out on the bid altogether.

2) You must deliberately market yourself to existing and/or desired customers

Reach out to your clients (or desired clients) to let them know about your contract win (if it’s OASIS+, get specific about the IDIQ and domains you were awarded). Also, if you are a Small Business (SB), let your Large Business (LB) teammates know about your award.

Clients and LB teammates frequently ask for a capability statement, so dust off your company capability state that describes services you can offer under the IDIQ contract (Trident can help with this).

Consider various marketing forums (email, social media, industry forums, direct outreach, etc.) to post about your award (Trident can also help with your marketing campaign). While posting to your company website and social media accounts is important, reaching out directly to the client(s) is still necessary. Clients or LB partners will not search for awardees – you must bring the good tidings to them.

Pro Tip: If you were awarded OASIS+, keep the OASIS + Ordering Guide handy so you can walk potential customers through the process of becoming a Designated Procurement Authority.

3) You must have an effective way to consistently monitor opportunity platforms

Along with an SME to track the contract requirements, you should also allocate resources to regularly review and assess incoming opportunities on the respective government IDIQ portals. This can be the same person who is the contract requirements SME, or you assign another POC. However, be sure the “designated monitor” has access to the required databases, has alerts and notifications set for the respective portals, and has a backup individual identified (with the required access) when they are out of the office.

The following databases are for OASIS+ and Seaport NxG:

• OASIS+ TOs will come out on eBuy (and will only be visible to the IDIQ holders).
• SeaPort TOs will come out via the SeaPort portal – so relying on Sam.gov updates or subscription database platforms increases the risk of missing something.

Note: Even with third-party subscription services like GovWin and C2P (which are great examples of databases that you can add your IDIQ for better visibility), you MUST log in to the respective government portal(s) frequently (we recommend, at a minimum every Monday and Friday, but daily is better!) to review opportunities (and submit your bids). As a best practice, we recommend monitoring contract activity via multiple methods to ensure you don’t miss something. There are several third-party databases to help track opportunities, like one of Trident’s strategic partners, Capture to Proposal (C2P). C2P helps track opportunities and deadlines, reviews the opportunities for relevance, and even offers a place for your proposal team to collaborate in one place.

We also recommend establishing a centralized process to track opportunities, deadlines, and action items.

4) You must have an efficient Bid Decision Process

You can’t bid on everything, so start by developing a clear set of criteria for deciding whether to pursue a bid (we have a blog all about ways you can tell you shouldn’t bid on an opportunity – 4 Ways to Tell a Bid Isn’t for You. We also have a complimentary download on our website to walk you through How to Validate an Opportunity. Click here to download). Define your criteria that would make something an automatic “no” (think location/place of performance, facility requirements, types of services, size of the opportunity, clearance requirements, task order type, etc.).

We also recommend the following steps for establishing your process:

• Create a streamlined process for distributing opportunities for review/consideration among your team. We can’t expect everyone to log on to the portal daily, right? Your "designated monitor” can do quick shreds of the opportunity and send it out to the decision makers (Trident can help with this).
• Keep track of why you’re not bidding – is there a critical certification you’re missing? Are you short on technical capabilities or experience (that maybe a strategic teaming partner could help with?) Or are your current services not totally aligned to the domain you’re in? Whatever the reason, it’s helpful to track the factors keeping you from bidding so you can identify gaps in your capabilities or certifications and find ways to mitigate them for future responses.

5) You must have an efficient proposal response process

Monitoring and identifying opportunities are the first steps to successfully preparing for IDIQ bids. Developing an efficient proposal response process is the other critical piece to your success.

Response times for TOs may vary from 2 weeks to 2 months – regardless of the timeline, you’ll want to move quickly and be efficient with your resources.

• Consider building a library of templates and or standardized responses to frequently addressed sections (think past performance quals, recruiting/hiring/retaining verbiage, quality control measures, etc.) This doesn’t relieve you of the burden of tailoring the outline and content to each RFP’s specific requirements, but at least the starting material will be readily accessible when needed. (Bonus: Trident can help you develop standard templates so your entire team starts with a prepared document. Contact us to learn more.)

Conclusion

You won’t succeed without a plan! To recap:

1. Develop your internal monitoring, bid-decision, and proposal processes now,
2. Assign the SMEs and monitors so you don’t miss opportunities, and
3. Let your clients know you are available for work.

If you need help establishing or refining your internal response process, call Trident.  We have staff standing by to be your dedicated Contract and Task Order Management Support (CTMS) to help manage your IDIQ responses.

***If you mention this blog - we’ll even give you a FastProp book for free. Our FastProp book provides a step-by-step process for responding to proposals.***

If you’re interested in hearing more about some of the Contract Vehicles we support (Alliant, OASIS+, MAPS, NASA SEWP VI, etc.) or want to keep up with the latest content from Trident Proposal Management, subscribe to our monthly newsletter and Trident Blog, and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.  

Written by Rebecca Wayland and Kristi Bickel

Rebecca is our Chief of Staff. While Rebecca may primarily wear the HR hat, she offers comprehensive proposal management, capture support, market research and training. She is also our GWAC and MA-IDIQ lead, so if you’re exploring SeaPort NxG, SEWP VI, OASIS+, or Alliant 3, she is definitely your SME. As a U.S. Navy veteran and military spouse based in Hawai’i, she supports clients around the world as part of our globally dispersed team.

Kristi is a capture and proposal manager and our Client Advocate. Her skills go beyond technical editing and compliance checks; she’s also well-versed in post-proposal reviews. As a U.S. Navy veteran and military spouse based on the East Coast, she supports clients around the world as part of our globally dispersed team.