Essential Insights: Conquering Federal Sales

In April, The Pulse and Loudoun Chamber collaborated to host a live edition of our SHRED series. This event united industry peers for an engaging discussion focused on sharing experiences, lessons learned, and valuable recommendations to enhance your company’s position in the Business-to-Government (B2G) sector.

During this discussion, colleagues shared essential insights, strategies, and tips for navigating the complexities of government contracts and achieving success in this market, including:

• Combining Business Development and Marketing
• Accessing and Assessing Opportunities
• Developing Productive Partnerships
• Establishing a Winning Proposal Process

Below are some key points, insights, and conclusions shared during this event.

A federal contractor must establish a robust personnel, procedures, and resources framework to communicate their identity to federal clients while effectively demonstrating expertise.

Best Practices

Incorporate Marketing Into Your Sales Efforts

Create brief explainer videos instead of capability statements to disrupt email cadences.

Be Strategic About Your Technological Investments

Canva, Hootsuite, and Humantic AI are recommended for those lacking resources.

Measure the Effectiveness of Your Strategy with Metrics

• Close rates and win ratios
• Number of referrals and returning clients
• Term sheets generated

Pivot from Thought Leader to Teacher

• Respond to market research thoughtfully and comprehensively.
• Attend industry days and provide clear and appropriate feedback to maximize your impact.
• Generate authentic content that simplistically communicates your organization’s offerings and the quantitative benefits.

“Your expertise is only as good as your reach. If a white paper is released in a forest, and no one opens it, does it make a sound?”

A federal contractor must create an efficient federal sales pipeline system and method to empower their business development and sales team to achieve significant outcomes through streamlined daily tasks.

Best Practices

Encourage Open Exchanges and Sharing of Information

• Provide federal stakeholders with documented information (i.e., FAI case studies, GAO decisions, etc.) to help inform them about the success (or risk thereof) of their strategy.
• Review the agency’s and trusted sources’ news and information to maintain situational awareness.

Provide Visibility for Effective Sales Accountability

• Using CRMs (or Excel!) to track and meet weekly to review and update forecasts for the upcoming 90 days.
• Archive market research responses; no bids or losses.
• Hold leadership accountable for engagement and for providing incentive plans.

Emphasize Acquiring Practical Insights, Not Simply Data.

A well-articulated pipeline can show more than just opportunities; it can also show you your market, customer, and competition trends and effectively plan resources and workforce distribution.

Review, Refine, and Repeat.

• Ensure your pipeline is user-friendly. If an outsider cannot glance at it and articulate its organization – it’s too complex.
• Ensure your pipeline reflects a coherent strategy and gels with company collateral (i.e., marketing materials).
• Determine the intake criteria for the sales “front of funnel” and ensure it is consistently applied.

“Leadership needs to adjust their expectations to the federal sales process if they have never led in this type of industry before.”

A federal contractor must encourage a culture that cultivates camaraderie and mutual respect among internal and external team members, partners, and vendors.

By prioritizing fruitful partnerships, a business development and sales team can effectively navigate shifting market dynamics and competition, potentially spearheading the creation of groundbreaking solutions, services, or processes.

Best Practices

Implement Consistent Mechanisms to Ensure Understanding

• Be honest if you don’t have a partnership opportunity, the right expertise or performance, or the workshare to make it worth the ROI. It doesn’t mean you’ll never partner together.
• Use calendars, trackers, daily check-in calls, Slack, etc., to ensure communication doesn’t lapse.

Separate Your Church and State (Project vs. Contractural Reqs)

Have your contracts department and lawyers handle the legal stuff so you, your Program Management Office (PMO), and your partners can focus on the opportunity and mission requirements.

Establish Your Division of Work Early and Monitor Any Deviations

• Focus on perfecting the teaming agreement and getting everyone on the same page early.
• The teaming partner and subcontractor are responsible for ensuring that their subcontract (SubK) is set up before a significant investment of time and resources.

Communicate a Clear Process Upfront to Develop Trust

• The proposal manager and team must set expectations upfront and communicate deadlines to all partners in advance. This ensures proper resource allocation or identifies timeline issues when responding to an active solicitation.
• Communicate conflicts of interest early on both sides.

“Don’t work with people you don’t like or wouldn’t want to work with again.”

A federal contractor must develop an infrastructure tailored to their business development and sales team, enabling them to craft, respond to, and deliver compliant and compelling federal proposals.

Additionally, contractors must empower their teams to continuously enhance their practical and critical skills for managing federal proposals in today’s dynamic global landscape.

Best Practices

Make Sure Everyone Gets on the Bus and Has a Seat

• Proposals aren’t sports cars – they’re more like school buses. The process isn’t sleek and fast and fits two; proposals are a culmination of people going to the same place.
• Someone has to drive the bus. The primary driver should be the proposal manager, with the compliance manager riding a shotgun.

Find Ways to Make Proposals Fun for Subject Matter Experts

• Do anything but give them blank paper. Try interviews, solution sessions, drawing sessions, or play Mad Libs.
• Financial (commission and guaranteed bonuses) and non-financial incentives (tied to promotions, performance evaluation, extra PTO).

Streamline Your Process with Tools, Templates, and Resources

• The most significant “tool” is a proposal manager dedicated to the role.
• Ensure your team is afforded technology and templates to aid the process and not overburden it. New technology, for seeming innovative, can bog down your staff with more steps than required.
• Remember that bus metaphor? Don’t reinvent the wheel…create templates that are easily updated to increase efficiency.

Examine Your Proposal Alignment with Your Federal Customer

• Proposals are not general applications with information you can copy and paste. All proposals must align entirely with the situation, which means the text needs to conform to the solicitation and be mindful of your federal customer’s needs, wants, and biases.
• Remember the rhetorical exigence when writing a proposal, which means asking yourself, “Why does this matter?”.

“[A proposal] is the first proof that your business is run by capable, intelligent people.”