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Everyone reaches for the free federal databases. Almost nobody reads them correctly, and the wrong read sends a whole pursuit in the wrong direction.
In this week's episode of GovCon Unscripted, Chelsea Roberts sat with Eileen Kent, the Federal Sales Guide and President of Custom Keynotes, LLC, who has pulled the SAM ad hoc report thousands of times over twenty years.
She walks through the free public data that most contractors misread: why “place of performance” often shows the vendor’s address or the manufacturer’s plant instead of where the work lands, why “dollars obligated” is the only money figure worth trusting, why a string of negatives is usually an adjustment rather than a vendor being pushed out, and how to hunt for patterns of who buys what you sell from whom.
She makes the case that AI and paid aggregators can accelerate a bad decision because they cannot interpret dirty data, and that the deal is still closed in the field, through relationships. She closes on the discipline she cares about most: a real bid/no-bid process, and the strength to walk away when there is no relationship.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro · 01:00 The Three-Step Program
02:30 Early tools (FPDS, USASpending, FedBizOpps, CCR)
06:30 Free vs paid · 07:30 The place-of-performance problem
12:00 Inside the SAM ad hoc report
15:00 Reading patterns (DHA, VA VISNs, CMOPs)
20:00 The 2025 shift of commodities to GSA
23:00 Why outreach bots fail
28:30 Dollars obligated and negative adjustments
33:00 Bid/no-bid discipline.
Resources:
Other Resource:
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