Many GSA Schedule Holders and prospective government contractors believe that selling to the government is a simple task. Hold on there - selling to the US government, the largest buyer in the world, is no easy task. Organizations need to market toward the government through an extensive and developed strategy. This requires organizations to do their homework about Business to Government (B2G) marketing.
Step 1: Chasing and replying to Request for Proposals (RFPs) and Request for Quotes (RFQs) is a waste of time.
Studies have shown that on average only 4% of organizations that blindly bid on RFQs/RFPs actually win a piece of the business. The bad news is that with such a low chance of winning, many organizations are still spending valuable time and boatloads of money on responding blindly to RFPs.Instead of wasting time on responding these blind RFPs, organizations need to seep into the core of their organization and find their most attractive marketing features. Once they have located these valuable attributes, they need to:
Step 2: Identify and target the decision makers.
Decision makers can loosely be defined as "someone who administers business." Decisions makers are the people that need to be contacted and approached because decision makers are the ones that will administer the agency doing business with your organization.
Finding government decision makers can prove to be a daunting task, but don't fear, finding a decision maker begins with a several step process. One of the main components of this process is researching the appropriate agency's history, finding their annual budgets and spending trends. Another key component is finding your competitor's history with the targeted agency. These two features are crucial because understanding the agency’s past decisions will help you narrow the scope of which agencies to target and bring you one step closer to finding the decision maker for that agency.
Step 3: Three simple ideas: Strategy, Training, and Research Support (STARS).
This last step is the most important, organizations can follow numerous steps and processes toward marketing with the government, but understanding that the most successful businesses selling to the government are developing a strategy, properly training their organization for government sales, and researching the best opportunities while being continuously supported.
STARS is a method that many organizations may not have the time or resources to fully implement in house, but there are consulting services and organizations that can provide the support you need, and believe me the investment is worth the outcome, read more about the benefits of STARS in "Growing Government Sales: STARS*"
