Federal Sales and Government Contracting (Neil McDonnell)
3 Foolproof Strategies to Find Federal Agencies
How do you find Federal Agencies who buy what you sell?
✅ In this training, GovCon Chamber president Neil McDonnell explains
- How to Use Your Top 3 NAICS Codes & PSC to focus your research
- Which agencies buy what you sell using
- SAM.gov, FPDS.gov, USASpending.gov, Long-Range Acquisition Forecasts (LRAF), Industry Days & APBIs and GSA eBuy
- Let Your Competitors Teach You
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HOST | Neil McDonnell
president GovCon Chamber of Commerce and co-founder of GovCon in a Box
https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-mcdonnell/
Small business owners trust Neil to show them HOW to earn federal government contracts and subcontracts. A passionate 'evangelist' for business development in the federal marketplace, Neil has helped 1000s of small business contractors collectively win over $3B (federal contract value).
A small business contractor in the tech space for 25+ years, Neil successfully won contracts worth hundreds of millions for the Department of Defense and civilian agencies, including
- US Army • US Navy • US Air Force • HHS • VA • White House • Departments of Education, Transportation, Interior and Energy and numerous large prime contractors
✅ SPONSORED BY GOVCON IN A BOX | www.GOVCONinaBox.com
GovCon in a Box is a FREE AI Community Resource for small business government contractors (launched July 2024)
- Maximize your visibility to federal buyers by getting a '100 Visibliity Score'
- Find teammates who want to work with you
- Gettting daily updates of RFIs in your sweet spot
- Respond to opportunities that you can win
- See consolidated data from USA Spending, FDPS, and DSBS
- www.GOVCONinaBox.com
- Broadcast on:
- 23 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
I'm going to dive into today's training where we talk about tips for finding federal agencies that buy what you sell. There are literally hundreds of thousands of federal buyers in the federal market, right? So DoD alone has 187,000 last time I checked, 187,000 acquisition personnel. These are people with acquisition-related jobs. So think, contract the officer. And then they have, you know, four to five times bigger than that of federal buyers, all the people who have the needs. So the program office that's out there, the people handling the budgeting or executing on the contract, all of those people are buyers along with the KO. So there's hundreds of thousands of federal buyers out there, and there's many, many agencies, but they don't all need what you sell. They're not all buying it. They're not all buying it at a frequency or a volume that you need. And so it's important that you focus your effort down on the agencies that are buying what you sell that do have this need. I use an example of information technology. If you're selling IT in one way or another, whatever that is, and you're selling it to the Navy, the Navy has what's called buying commands. If you took that over to DHS, they would be called components. If you took it to HHS, it's called agencies. But these buying commands are these huge buying powers within the Navy, and there's 10 of them. One of them's called NAVC. They use IT, but they tend to buy boats. There's another one called NAV war, Naval Information Warfare Command. That one doesn't buy boats. They tend to buy IT services on behalf of the Navy. So understanding that, understanding who's buying what you sell, and who's bought that in the near past, that's really going to help you achieve success. So that's what we're going to dive into today. Let me get started sharing some of my slides. Today's training, I'm going to break these tips for finding federal agencies, buying what you sell, down into three components. Two smaller ones. Just one is I want to help you have some understanding of what you can do before you get started even searching for those folks, just being prepared before you. If you went into a sales meeting or a project meeting, you'd be prepared on what you want to talk about. We'll do the same thing when you're researching. Make sure you know what you want to research, where you're trying to research. And then the second thing I want to show you is just I just want to talk about the tools that are out to that the government has. There's a lot of places you can look for where federal agencies are buying what you sell. But I'm just going to talk about some of the top ones. And if you stick to these ones, they will get you a ton of information. Of course, you could go to subscription services and other places, but let's just stick with the basics and get really good at the basics. By the way, if you don't know this, there's tools like GovWin, which is the big subscription service that's out there for finding opportunities, et cetera. But these companies, they're all just pulling their data from federal resources that are free. And so learn to use the resources yourself. Take advantage of a subscription service like GovWin, when you're ready and it has extra functionality and features, but the data is free. Get good at the data because that's your tool and that's a skill set you should have. And then I'm going to dive into a live demo and this is where I hope to spend the bulk of our time is how I actually do the research. If you don't know who I am, my name is Neil McDonald. I am the president of the GovCon Chamber of Commerce and I am the co-founder of GovCon in a box. Super excited about that. It's an AI powered SaaS platform for small businesses succeeding in the federal market. I want to welcome you to my federal sales training. Not only do I provide training, but I provide you an opportunity to network with others in the federal market. So engage in the chat, let us know who you are. I spent 20 years myself as a small business owner in the federal market and since 2018, I've been teaching people like you. Government contracting is not a secret, it's just a process. When we follow a process A to Z, we're going to repeatable, predictable results and that's what I want for you. Make sure you subscribe to our newsletter, Government Contracting Success newsletter. We put out constantly, we're putting out good content several times a week, then help you understand agencies and learn sales techniques for the federal market. Last thing on this slide, just make sure you register for tomorrow's training. We had almost 150 people registered for today's training. We already have over 100 people registered for tomorrow's training and tomorrow I'm going to be talking about how can you use org charts in a organizational charts within an agency to find buyers to begin to navigate an agency. So I'm going to talk about how I use those and how I teach my customers to use those org charts to understand an agency and then get to that buying, well, the federal buyer. Last thing before we dive in, I just want to congratulate all the 100 Club members. We have 52 companies that have a perfect score of 100 in GovCon in a box. This is our SaaS platform where we help you understand federal visibility and we give you a federal visibility score between zero and 100. 100 means you've done all the things you should do on their tools, the government's tools, to be visible to the buyer when they're looking for you. There's 360,000 small businesses in the federal market. Only 52 are in the 100 Club. As we continue to move forward, when I have special events, these are the ones I'm going to bring forward because these are the people and the companies that are making it easy for the federal buyer. So make sure you get in and increase your score. Just go to GovCon in a box.com. If you have a question, you need a little help moving forward. I provide a lot of guidance, but if you have a question, the bottom of the screen of GovCon in a box, you'll see a question mark. Hit it, send us a question that will help you that day, maybe the next day, but usually that day. All right, so let's talk about what you do before you start searching for agencies that buy what you sell, right? And one of the first things you need to do is just understand what your clear-focused offer is and really know what you want to find. What are you looking for? Are you looking for, you know, like staffing services is where I'm going to go today or you're looking for IT or construction, really know what you want to find. And then are you trying to find opportunities or are you trying to find agencies that buy what you do or contracting shops, which are different? I'll talk about that in one second, or are you trying to find the names numbers of people? Today's training, it's about finding the agency. I'll slide in and show you people, but my purpose is to show you who's buying. One thing to keep in mind is there's a difference sometimes between the contracting shop, the people who sign the contract for you and the funding shop or the people with the needs. So you want to understand those two different types of people, and I'll show you that a little bit today. The next thing you want to make sure you're doing as you prep is have your top five keywords. So if you do search, like I searched in preparation of today's training, I searched on a keyword and I was like, "Oh, this is perfect keyword." And I got like zero results or limited results. I'm like, "Yeah, well, I just moved on to my next keyword and I got really good results." And that's what I want you to do. Start by top keywords for what you sell, then you'll be able to search and you can switch back and forth until you start getting that traction. Similarly, you need to know your top three NAICS codes and PSC codes. That's a little redundant, I get it. But when you know those, sometimes you can search on those codes, and I'll show that to you as well. And the last thing is pick a target agency or eliminate agencies. An example is I have a customer that is trying to place people and they don't really have the ability to do clearances at the moment. They're going to work with clearancejobs.com, I hope, but they don't have clearances, right? And so they're trying to avoid DOD at the moment and go to the civilian agencies and support their needs that don't require that clearance. You might want to sit there and say, "Well, I'm not interested in these agencies, but I'm interested in this one." Just understand what you're trying to search when you search. Don't go in blindly. If you go in with an objective, you'll hit that and come out with the results you're looking for. So here are some places, and I'm going to show you all of these. But this is where I go look, some of the places I go look for agencies that buy what I sell. I'm at a stage where I have subscription services, so sometimes I use those, but nothing, nothing to me is better than, and I should have put them first, but FPDS and USA Spending. So FPDS is the repository of almost every single thing the government has bought basically over a certain level and not in the intelligence community. But basically, everything the government has bought, USA Spending is just a nicer way of seeing that raw data that lives in FPDS. I'm going to show you both because FPDS contains some field, some information that is really helpful to you. So usually, I'll start in USA Spending, go to FPDS, and then I can go to others. Sam.gov is a great place to go. It's a second tier place for me to go, but I do go in there because I can find this similar type thing, maybe not on awards, contract awards, but in this case, I might look for future opportunities, and I can see what agencies are buying right now, what I sell. And again, it's not to try to chase that particular opportunity, but it's to find the agencies, the people who are buying what I sell. A couple of other ones at the bottom, Long Range Acquisition Forecast, every agency tries to put out a forecast of what they're going to be buying in the next 12 to 36 months. And so you want to find your target agency, Long Range Acquisition Forecast, you can find a whole list of all the agencies we can find in a single list on my newsletter. If you go in there and search LRAF, Long Range Acquisition Forecast, you'll find that list. You can go in and look at it. Great examples are like DHS has one of the best Long Range Acquisition Forecasts. And so you can look in there and see which offices within their department are buying what you sell. Instead of just at the agency level, even going lower. Industry Day and APBIs, Advanced Planning Briefs to Industry, these are just decks that you can find. So you want to find these. You want to ask a small business professional at the agency you're trying to target, get that information, and they'll share, again, at this level, it's which offices are buying what you sell. And then GSA eBuy, so there's hundreds of contract vehicles out there. I think there's 434 I got confused, but there's so many contract vehicles out there on GSA that especially if you're on there, if you work with people, you can find the agencies that are using those vehicles. And there's a lot of different ways around finding that, but you can go check it out. Okay, so let me get into the live demo. I just want to set the stage. So today's demo, I'm just going to use a staffing recruiting company that's trying to sell into the federal government. I picked five keywords, recruiting, staffing, workforce, hiring, and talent acquisition. Depending on the time, I'll try to get through some of those. I put down just starter NAICS code in PSC. So here, 541612, you'll see that in a minute, but it's basically HR. Same thing with R431, so these are my starting criteria for what I'm searching on. The last thing I want to say to you, and I'll show you this, is let your competitors teach you who's buying. I can do searches to try to go in, but the minute I find a winner, I can just chase down every contract that company has won and see the agencies that are in there. It's public data. It's one of the best things about the federal market. And remember, people are competitive. It's one thing I'm competing, one day I'm teaming. All right, let me switch over to here. By the way, I did say, let me go in here really quick, I did say find small business specialists. We announced this in any formal way, but on Capcom in a box, we put out, we used to do this in a PDF format, but now we have the small business specialist directory right here. So you can search for them, you can find there's 1,384. We have, I've got about 50 more army ones I just learned about last week that I'm going to add in, or the team's going to add in. And so if you're looking for a small business specialist who can help you navigate an agency, just go to Capcom in a box and it's right up there on top, it's free. It's a free tool for us. Or for you. It's not free for us, it costs us money. Okay, so let's get started. I'm going into USA spending. This is a rapid training, right? I'm just trying to wet your whistle on what you can do to find who's buying what you sell. So if I'm coming in here, I'm looking for, first of all, I just want to see the past couple of years. So I'm going to choose the last fiscal year, the last three fiscal years. And then I'm going to close that. I'm going to open up this and say, look, I'm looking for keywords. In this case, I'm just going to say recruiting because I know the results that I want to get to the results for you. So I just typed in a keyword and I have that period of performance, as you can see. So right away in the last, let me zoom in a teen of it here, in the last two and a half years, three years, fiscal years, right? 979 contracts, 96 contract vehicles, like BPA's and other stuff. One thing here, I noticed I got grants and other things. I didn't do this, but what I should have done, right here, you see a war type, change that to contracts and contract vehicles. So that way, that's all you're seeing. I don't know why it didn't refresh, come on, there it goes. So now I'm looking at all contracts and all contract vehicles. And now I'm just looking at the data I want to see. Okay, so I search for recruiting. Remember, you can put cybersecurity or janitorial services, it doesn't matter. You're doing the searches on those keywords. First things first, it just came up and I'm like, okay, this looks good. And who doesn't like money, so I'm just going to sort it by the amount of money they're kind of spending. Actually, let me do it by obligation, the size of the contract. So I've got it and it looks like it might have already been doing that, but I'm going to come across here, come on, it's got the ability to scroll, please hold technical difficulties here, there we go. So I wanted to be able to scroll, I was having a hard time. Okay, so here, what I'm looking for is the description. So the first thing I start seeing, remember, I'm looking for recruiting and it looks like I had five keywords, but I'm having a winner with this one here. But right here is recruiting, let me back this up a teeny bit, that's $7 million recruiting. I don't know what that is, but if I click on it, let's just take it. It's a BPA, so these are delivery orders or BPA's, generally they're on a vehicle and we'll talk about that in a second, but I'm going to click on that one and I'm going to click on one more just right here, I think, is one that I would like to look at and this might be similar, well, it's a BPA call, so I want to avoid BPA for one second, let me come down and see if I can find something else, Air Force recruiting, here you go, staffing and recruiting support services, delivery orders, now I got two, so we'll take a look at this one first, I'm coming in, the first thing I want to do is to go down and just see what the services were, right? And so if I come down here to the description, well, they didn't get any fancier, but it's just human resource staffing and recruiting support, this looks like what I want, right? I would need to go look at some other documents, maybe in SAM to see if I can find a PWS, but now I've got something in here, I'm like, hey, this looks good, let me come back up to the top and just walk you through for a second, I can see that this thing came out on this contract vehicle and I can look at that a little bit, but if I come down, I can see this is a $3 million, the minute I see it's a $3 million, $3.5 million, I'm like, I wonder if that's an 8a set aside, so we'll get to that in one second, but remember, I'm saying you also want to sit there and understand NAICS codes, right, here's the same NAICS code I showed you a minute ago, and PSCs, right? And so when you have PSCs or NAICS, you're able to use that as a way to search as well as keywords, which is my old time favorite, okay, so let's keep coming down here, right here I can see it's USDA, I think I passed that up a little fast, let me come back, so here I can see it's USDA, but if I get lower I'll be able to see an office, so here if I come down and I want to see who's doing it, I can see that the sub-agency is ARS, Agriculture Research Services, so basically an agency within USDA, so I got it, that's the awarding office, and so that's good, if I'm looking to pursue this further, which I'm going to in a second, I can see the contract award, I can see the activity, over here I can see how it was competed, so I thought it was 8a, and apparently let's see if it has, well there's no set of sides, so this one, I instantly feel weird about this one, but maybe it's because it's a task order, not the vehicle, so let me take this guy, where can I go? I want to show you this really quick, if I take this, and this is a hit or miss, this is live, I'm in FPDS, I'm just coming over to search, I'm killing me, sometimes this stuff just doesn't, it doesn't work because the numbers are not lined up the way I need them to, but anyways let me stay on track here, so I'm able to look at this and I'm able to see who these people are, if I come back to, this guy I should be able to use though, control A, control D, there you go, so this one here I'm using it, I'm able to come in and look that this was, where's my agency, so I'm able to see this is ARS, USDA, so if I come in here, let me just sort it by the size of the contract, this was April 2023, I'm zooming in, I went from USA spending where I found something looked interesting, then I came over to FPDS, and so here all I'm doing is expanding the amount of information I have, if I click on this view and scroll over for a second, first thing I have now is I have the agency, the subordinate agency, right, the sub-agency, I have two points of contact, this is probably like a small business specialist, and then Lori Leedy is the contracting officer, nowadays the contractor officer has to be the one approving this stuff, and then as I come through I can find, remember I was talking about the reference ID, there it is, let me try this one more time, let me try it one more time here, there you go, so now I'm seeing, now I can see more of the opportunities that are on here, and if I actually searched, hold on, just ascending, date signed, if I search this, then if I do this right, I can see where it's coming from, so it was a GSA schedule that it came out on, I would do more research on it, I'm not interested in doing that today because it's too crowded, but if I come back here, right, I'm able to come down and I can see the contracting office and the funding office are the same, sometimes like Department of Commerce, you might have one subordinate bureau is the funding agency, and a different one like NIST or Census is the contracting office, same thing in the military, army has an entire army contracting command that might be buying on behalf of so many other army commands, so you want to be able to understand that, and so these are the names over here, these things called, I think these are the DODACs, right, where you can go in, it's an ID, I never pretend like I'm an expert at all the data, I'm an expert at finding names and information and getting in the door, right, that's my true expertise, the other thing I really want you to pay attention to is this award looked interesting, it's not a small business set aside, so this is a type of thing I would pursue to try to get in the door, okay, let me come back here really quick and close that guy, close this one, and I'll show you one more here, this is the second one we brought up, and this one here it was a BPA, so I could follow the BPA through, but I can see, it was $8 million contract, I'm trying to see what the services were for, so this one, okay, this one already expired, this is a little less interesting to me, but I can come in here and it's really, it's hard to see what this is, it's recruiting, it's media buy, so it might be outside my world, right, so just by looking at that I might not be interested, but here's the thing, I'm just trying to find the agencies in the offices that buy what I sell, well if these people are buying advertising services for recruiting related activity, well maybe I get in there and talk to them and here I can look in and say, okay, it's the FBI who's doing it, I don't know on exactly who Division 1200 is or whatever, but now if I talk to a small business specialist at FBI, I can say, hey I was tracking this opportunity, I'd like to meet this office and learn more about it, I want to show you one more thing just before I run totally out of time, is how do you chase your competitors down, and let me see if I can move this over, okay, I've already done some of this review and looked at it, and I want to show you this one activity of this company, this recruiting company, I liked it, and by the way, let me just jump over to Sam really quick, you can do something similar in Sam, it's a little harder to find what they've been spending, but I'm able to come in here and find out who's buying what we need, when I do something like recruiting and show me award notices, I can come in and see something like this that I found earlier, a LinkedIn recruiting service, this is them just paying LinkedIn for a subscription service so that they can find candidates, the government has their own staffing people, well down here though I can follow the thread and I can find this person, this happens to be at the Senate not at an executive agency, but I can go over there and I can find Courtney and begin to reach out and talk to them and say, hey I know you have that, can we shore up what you're doing, can we get in their talk, I'm not here to teach you how to sell to them at the moment, but now I have a potential buyer, somebody who's definitely in the staffing recruiting world and a primary point of contact which is generally his contract specialist, a contract officer, okay, so this one here, let me show you following the money, the way I like to do this, so if I come in here, I'm looking at this company and I can see, I mean their name is so beautiful, if there was another name I did, but these guys are doing $43 million in the last 12 months, right, if I bounce this back further and you'll see it, they've done a significant amount, but the first thing I want to know or I noticed is that they're not a small business, so I'm gonna try to take every piece of work they have and I say that softly, nicely, right, they can come team with me, but you know, I'm chasing the money, these guys happen to have the money, one day they have it, one day I have it and then they'll get it back or something, so here I'm finding the recruiting company, down here I can see their traction and these guys have been doing really well, kind of coming up, right, and so they really popped up high last year, this is big, I might try to team with them because they too have a small business component to it, I might try to team with them, but I'm sure interested in looking where are they winning, so I can come in here and see, okay, they're winning at commerce, one of the customers I was thinking about when I did this training is in commerce, right, and they want to be in these agencies, they're in Department of Justice, but that spends too small for me, when I look at this, I'm like, wow, there's a lot of potential right there in commerce alone, and then the last thing on this particular section I want to talk about is I can remind myself or make sure I'm covering down on the right NAICS codes and the right PSCs, so let me come up, the next thing I do, right, as I look at that company, I'm evaluating them, but now I want to see what have you been winning, right, what do your contracts look like, and so when I come in here, I'm able to see these are all from this particular company, let's just say the last 18 months, right, if I just search that and I wait patiently for it to come up, okay, so like 65 or something like that, I don't know what that is, but if I start coming through and I scroll over recruiting and hiring services, these are the things I want, staffing and recruiting support services, these are ideal, right, so if I come over, I can start looking at where they're winning and which agency, and I can look at this as a whole, I can come down, I'm like, okay, I can track on these things, and here, the last thing I'm looking for is this period of performance, right, if I sort it correctly, one second, I can, well actually it didn't sort for me, which is, come on, there it goes, so I can look out and I can see what contracts are going to be expiring next year, so let's look at all of the ones you can see at the moment, they're all expiring next year, and if I come over, let me keep coming, sorry, come on, scroll with me, if I come all the way over for a small business, these are all fantastic opportunities to be looking at, right, I got to explore a little bit more and see what's in there, but these are all opportunities, a small business could potentially push from large business to small business, I haven't even looked at a second company yet, imagine if I did this with 10 companies, the ability to actually track on all those opportunities that are out there, so here's what I want you to remember from today's training, first off just when you do research like this and you're trying to find opportunities that can fit in your pipeline around what you sell, know your top keywords, NAICS, and PSCs, the second thing is use the tools the way I showed you, you can use SAM and some other tools definitely lean heavily in the USA spending and FPDS, same data set, just a different way of looking at it, and they complement each other, they do not, they're not independent, you want to go back and forth from one to the other, and the last thing, just like I showed you, let your competitors teach you, this is what I do with our customers in our BB Accelerated Workshop, is I teach this to you, but I help them do it, when I help them, I go in and I try to find where are people winning, and that is the most likely agency that's going to sell to us are the ones that are selling to our competitors, and so let your competitors teach you who the buyers are, it's a fast way to do them, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter register for tomorrow's training, I'd love to have you in there, and if you haven't already done so put your core competency and your company name into the chat so I can follow up and just understand it, have it sink into my memory, if you do it over two million and you're looking to accelerate your business in the federal market, reach out to us, let us know and we'll talk to you about our BB Accelerated Workshop, or you could just put workshop in the chat and I'll follow up, just remember as you go into your day, government contracting, it's not a secret, it's just a process, I'll see you in the next training.