How New Offerors Can Outperform Incumbents and Win

Think about the last contract you lost to an incumbent. At what point did you know you were behind? The honest answer is usually before the customer releases the RFP. Incumbents do not win on proposal quality alone—they win because challengers let them control the customer relationship, the requirements, and the competitive narrative.

Survey Says…

To learn how incumbents can unseat challengers, we surveyed business development, capture, and proposal professionals across LinkedIn and asked: What is the most important factor in displacing an incumbent? The responses broke across four strategies, with no single factor dominating.

• Influence requirements early: 42%
• Strong customer ties: 22%
• Strengths tied to all evaluation criteria: 20%
• Strong competitive intelligence: 16%

Read the list as a ranking, and you might conclude that influencing requirements early is all that matters. But that interpretation misses the point entirely. Each of these factors enables and amplifies the others. Treated in isolation, none of them is enough to unseat an incumbent with strong past performance and entrenched customer relationships.

Four Factors, One Integrated Strategy

Incumbents hold real advantages. They know the customer, they understand the work, and they have years of performance data to point to in their proposals. A challenger who focuses on only one displacement strategy hands the incumbent an easy win; the contractors who unseat incumbents consistently are the ones who work all four levers simultaneously. Here, we explore how the four factors connect and reinforce each other.

• Influence Requirements Early

Early influence is the foundation on which everything else is built; engaging with the customer before market research closes is how challengers level the playing field. Shaping requirements means your differentiators become evaluation criteria, and your competitors are responding to a solicitation that was partly written around your strengths.

However, early influence only works if you show up with something valuable to offer. That means knowing the customer’s mission priorities, pain points, and dissatisfaction with the current contractor, which brings you directly to the second factor.

• Build Deep Customer Ties

Strong customer relationships are not a soft advantage—they are a competitive intelligence asset. Regular contact with the customer brings to the surface the information that makes early influence possible: what is working, what is not, where the incumbent is falling short, and what the customer wishes they could change. Without that intelligence, your pre-RFP outreach is generic and forgettable.

Customer ties also inform your proposal at a granular level. When you understand what the evaluation team values, you can build and position your strengths to match. That direct connection is what links the second factor to the third.

• Tie Every Strength to Evaluation Criteria

Evaluators score what is in front of them; a proposal that describes capabilities without explicitly linking them to evaluation factors gives evaluators no reason to award full credit. Strength-Based Winning^® means that every claim in your proposal is anchored to a specific criterion, backed by evidence, and written so the evaluator can score it without effort.

This level of precision requires a deep understanding of the evaluation weighting and scoring methodology, as well as what excellence looks like in each area. This comes from the customer relationships and competitive intelligence you built long before the RFP dropped.

• Drive with Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence is the connective tissue that sharpens the other three factors. Knowing the incumbent’s performance gaps tells you where to focus your pre-RFP conversations, understanding a competitor’s pricing patterns shapes your cost strategy, and identifying where the incumbent is overextended or understaffed tells you which strengths to lead with in your proposal.

16% of respondents citing competitive intelligence as their top displacement factor may seem low compared to early influence, but competitive intelligence is not a standalone lever—it informs every stage of the capture and proposal development process. Contractors who skip it are flying blind, even if they have strong customer relationships and a well-structured proposal.

The Displacement Formula

Displacing an incumbent is not a problem of proposal; it is a capture problem that the proposal reflects. By the time the RFP drops, the contractors who invested in all four factors are already ahead. They shaped requirements that favor their approach, they know exactly what the customer needs; they’ve built a proposal strategy around real evaluation intelligence; and they’ve used competitive analysis to close every gap the incumbent would try to exploit.

Contractors who focus on only one or two factors may still win, but they are betting on partial information. In contrast, contractors who execute all four are running a full-spectrum capture strategy, which is what it takes to consistently take business away from entrenched incumbents in the GovCon market.

Is Your Team Ready to Seize the Recompete?

Lohfeld Consulting Group helps contractors build the capture strategies, customer engagement plans, competitive intelligence practices, and proposal processes needed to displace incumbents. Our consultants have helped teams win against entrenched competitors across a wide range of agencies and contract vehicles.

If your team has a recompete or a high-priority displacement opportunity on the horizon, contact Lohfeld Consulting to develop the integrated strategy that gives you the best chance to win.

Relevant Information

• The State of Capture in 2026: What’s Changed Now? Capture Management is changing, and contractors who don’t evolve—those who are capturing too late in the acquisition lifecycle or are not set up to respond quickly—are going to see declines in win rates. Learn what we should do differently.

• How to Capture a Bid with Discipline and Authority: Capturing a bid requires discipline and authority long before the RFP is released. Organizations that win consistently do not report pipeline activity; they control outcomes through structured capture execution.

• How to Win Challenged-Based Procurements Now: The popularity of challenged-based procurements and multi-step down selects indicate that customers are no longer satisfied with written proposal descriptions. Learn how you can successfully navigate challenge-based proposals.

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By Brenda Crist, Vice President at Lohfeld Consulting Group, MPA, CPP APMP Fellow

Lohfeld Consulting Group has proven results specializing in helping companies create winning captures and proposals. As the premier capture and proposal services consulting firm focused exclusively on government markets, we provide expert assistance to government contractors in Capture Planning and Strategy, Proposal Management and Writing, Capture and Proposal Process and Infrastructure, and Training. In the last 3 years, we’ve supported over 550 proposals winning more than $170B for our clients—including the Top 10 government contractors. Lohfeld Consulting Group is your “go-to” capture and proposal source! Start winning by contacting us at www.lohfeldconsulting.com and join us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube^(TM).