NIKA Keeps Pace with 2x Growth by Replacing Salesforce with NextStage

Background

Founded in 1998 in Rockville, Maryland, NIKA began as an engineering and architecture firm. Today it works exclusively for the federal government, providing mission support services such as base operations and facilities maintenance and management for every branch of the military. For its largest customer, the Defense Health Agency, NIKA delivers engineering and program management, a relationship that has grown from a single contract two decades ago to more than 15 today. It also runs base operations for the U.S. Coast Guard in Alaska, supporting the Department of Homeland Security. As a result, the company has doubled in size over the past three years.

That growth reshaped how the company operates their business development lifecycle. NIKA now runs approximately 50 large proposals a year and bids contracts up to $400 million. To understand how the company scaled its operation and kept pace with that growth, we spoke with Rosanna Cruz, NIKA's EVP of Business Development. She owns marketing for the company along with the full business development lifecycle, from building the pipeline and running capture to every proposal NIKA submits.

The Challenge

For years, NIKA ran their business development, capture, and proposal operation on tools that were not purpose-built for government contracting workflows. Three problems compounded as the company scaled.

1. A manual pipeline that went stale. The pipeline lived in Excel, PowerPoint, and Salesforce. Nothing got updated unless someone did it manually, so opportunities sat untouched and out of date. As Cruz put it, "It was just an administrative task. You put in an opportunity, but then it just sat there and went stale."

2. A CRM built for the wrong business. Salesforce was built for commercial sales teams, not federal contractors. "The features didn’t feel centered around the government contracting community," Cruz said. Adoption was nearly zero so when the renewal came up, they decided it was not a good use of their resources.

3. Limited visibility and no strategy. Preparing for the monthly leadership review took one to two full days of manually updating a deck that was, in the end, just a list of captures in progress. There was no dashboard and no live view because information was stored in multiple disconnected tools. "It turned into a robotic process instead of a proactive one," Cruz said. "When there's no strategy, your win rate goes down."

The Search for a Better Solution

By late 2024, NIKA's leadership recognized that the company had outgrown its manual, retrofitted stack and needed more strategy behind its bidding. Cruz spent several months evaluating different platforms, seven in total, bringing NIKA's requirements into focus.

Above all, the company needed a platform that would:

• Fit the way federal contractors work, instead of forcing GovCon into a commercial offering

• Update automatically by connecting to the contract vehicles NIKA already ran on, rather than depending on manual data entry

• Give leadership a live, shared view of the pipeline instead of a static list

• Support separate partner-driven pipelines, since NIKA bids about a third of its work through joint ventures and teaming

• Be simple enough for a growing team to adopt quickly

The Solution

When NIKA demoed NextStage, the fit was immediately apparent. "After the call, my boss and I just looked at each other and said, ‘Wow, that was really cool. That has everything we want.’" NextStage was built specifically for GovCon and the way federal contractors work, and it showed up everywhere NIKA needed it.

• Built for GovCon. The platform matches how NIKA runs business development, capture, and proposals, so there was no customization tax to make it fit.

• Automated portal integrations. NextStage connects directly to GovWin, eBuy, and other contract vehicles so the pipeline updates itself instead of waiting on someone to do it manually.

• Real-time pipeline dashboards. NextStage gives NIKA a dashboard that stays current as the pipeline moves, so the whole team can review opportunities and run go/no-gos from one real-time view. "I put the dashboard up and we talk through opportunities. We do go/no-gos live."

• Manage teaming in one place. With so much of NIKA's work bid alongside teaming partners, managing those partnerships and shared pursuits in one platform gives NIKA an advantage over its competition. Cruz shows up to joint pipeline meetings with a current, shared view of every pursuit, which keeps the team organized and prepared.

• Quick to adopt. As Cruz adds new people to the team, she's able to onboard each of them quickly. And not only does the BD, Capture, and Proposal team use NextStage, but the leadership team has also adopted it. "It's not complicated. It's very easy to teach."

Results & Impact

Adopting NextStage positively changed how NIKA's team spends its time and improved how the company makes decisions.

• Meeting prep decreased from days to 20 minutes. With a real-time pipeline in NextStage, prep for leadership meetings is now a quick scan instead of days of manual report-building. "I can walk in at 10:45 for an 11:00 meeting and be fine. It makes me look like a superstar."

• Go/No-Go analysis in 15 minutes, opportunities added in seconds. Analyzing fit and adding details to the pipeline once meant someone had to comb through sources opportunity by opportunity and manually enter everything. Now NextStage pulls that data from the connected contract vehicles automatically and simultaneously alerts the team of updates, such as date changes. This alone eliminates hours of manual data entry.

• Decision-making grounded in data. Cruz can now pull up a dashboard on the spot to show what their pipeline is worth and how much the company has won, lost, and bid over different time periods.

• Go/No-Go became a strategy discussion. The leadership team now weighs the incumbent, potential partners, and competing priorities together, and makes bid decisions on new opportunities as they drop rather than letting them wait for the next meeting.

"NextStage makes me look better in my meetings. And it makes NIKA look more mature overall as a business."

Conclusion

NextStage gave NIKA back the time it once lost to manual prep, put live pipeline numbers in front of leadership, and turned business development from administrative work into strategy. A commercial CRM like Salesforce can be customized to tolerate government contracting, but it will always be a workaround. A platform built for the way GovCon teams work is what lets a lean team scale with a pipeline that keeps growing.

"This was one of the best decisions our company has made in recent years. I'm a huge cheerleader for NextStage. Every partner I talk to, I tell them, you need to just do the demo."