30 Most Influential Companies of the Year 2020
CIO Bulletin
There are a lot of companies in the market to help you with CRM solutions and help you establish B2B businesses. But having software that already understands how to sell to the government can give you a huge lead against your competition! We did our research into software for Government Contractors and found a solution that manages every aspect of selling to the Government including the overall health of your company and the health of your Pipeline. We talked to the founders, Skip Blackburn and Drew Blackburn, and here is the detailed discussion we had.
What is the history of BIT solutions?
We are a software company with extensive experience in managing complex Government sales and developing software to automate manual processes. And, in addition, we offer consulting support for the government contractor space. Our customers are government contractors who do business with Government Agencies and Commands. Our CaptureExec™ Software is a Cloud based, enterprise-wide solution to automate and integrate every aspect of the capture process selling to the government. If a customer is looking at Salesforce, Dynamics, or any other software to manage their sales process, they need to make certain they talk to BIT Solutions first – twice the features at half the price!
What is CaptureExec™ and what is the process?
Our software is designed from the standpoint of the executive; owners of companies, division executives, department managers that run sales teams who sell to the government. We optimize, automate, and organize a repeatable process for the individual contributors to manage every aspect of a capture process, from inception to win. Therefore, anything they have to do, the system guides them, tells them what questions to ask the Government, and when to ask it in the cycle. It shows them during the process of what information they need to gather. It helps them understand how to shape a deal in that capture process. From the executive standpoint, it helps the executives understand, at all times, what the health of their business and pipeline look like and what they need to do to improve different aspects of their business. All the manual processes have been automated and integrated to solve the real business needs of the Sales Enterprise.
We have created our CaptureExec software to allow each company to define their own best practice in winning deals, and the software allows them to create the questions of what to ask and when to ask in our system and have their sales team follow their prescribed best practice for each different company that uses our software.
What are your offerings? How are they unique?
Currently, we are split 50/50 for our CaptureExec software and our Consulting Services. In consulting, we do everything from Pre-B&P (Strategic, Account management, and Capture Management) - to B&P (Proposal management, Graphics, Color reviewers, Writers, Editors, PTW, Blackhat leaders, and Strategic experts). We cover the gambit from both sides of the need for consulting to support Government Contracting companies. We have experts that manage across the board of what customers need during surge times for support as well as customers that are just getting started in the Federal marketspace. We can help them find and win contracts to grow their business.
What have you learned from your clients? What areas have you made changes in based on what users have pointed out?
That is a great question! We get a lot of new feature and function requests from our customers as they use the system and say, “This is a great dashboard with excellent information on it that helps me run my business.” They will say, “One thing that I have done in spreadsheets or Word docs or PowerPoint in the past, is keeping track of this information so that I can work with the CEO and brief them on a weekly basis. Can you create a matrix display process on the dashboard that we can utilize and see that information and be able to slice and dice it?” The answer is always YES! We take those ideas and we work with those customers to draw up all the interactions throughout the enterprise and we add those features in new upgrades. Every quarter we release a new version of the software with functions, features, and improvements that we have gotten back from our customers or in interactions with other people in the industry, where we have learned about new features that would benefit our customer base. Therefore, we are constantly evolving our CaptureExec software to make it more user friendly and more functional for every level of user that utilizes our system.
Meet the founders
Skip Blackburn is a Founding Partner and the CEO of BIT Solutions, LLC. He has led BIT Solutions through the startup phase, the design & development process, and the sales & marketing efforts. The company has grown consistently since 2012. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Mathematics from Towson University and attended the MBA program at Loyola College of Baltimore.
Skip was a partner in a software firm in the late 1970s for 20 years before selling the company, which designed and developed Enterprise Software to manage every aspect of the Non-Profit Association market. He then gained significant Executive & Capture experience from companies including Sarcom, Accenture, IBM & SAIC where he led companies, divisions, and teams on large, complex captures for many years. With this knowledge, he designed the capture management software, CaptureExec™, and formed BIT Solutions, LLC.
Drew Blackburn is a Founding Partner and the CTO of BIT Solutions, LLC. Since the company’s start in 2012, he has led the BIT Solutions development team for every aspect of the capture management software and database integration process.
Drew has been developing and managing web-based systems for the past 15 years and has been instrumental in implementing, maintaining, and upgrading the CaptureExec software system. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering (Valedictorian), from Georgia Tech and a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech.
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