Federal Sales and Government Contracting (Neil McDonnell)
7 Proven Steps to Success Federal Government Contracts
Government contracting is not a secret, it's just a process. But the process doesn't have to be complicated. Join today's training to learn my 7-Step Process for Revenue Success and learn how to earn predictable revenue.
✅ In this training, GovCon Chamber president Neil McDonnell explains
- Why it is important to seek first to understand the buyer, then to be understood
- To be proactive in finding and building relationships
- How to find, shape, and respond to 'slam dunk' opportunities
7-STEP PROCESS FOR REVENUE SUCCESS
1. Research.
2. Targeting
3. Outreach
4. Relationships
5. Opportunities
6. Proposals
7. Sales Process for Winning Federal Government Contracts
✅ Join us on LinkedIn to build your network and engaging other in the largest Government Contracting community online.
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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:
- 19 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
Everything is complex until you know the process, right? When I learn the right process to cook a steak, I'll be able to succeed. When you learn the right process for federal contracting, you'll be able to succeed. In 2018, I helped over 4,000 small business government contractors pick up $3 billion more in contract awards than they did the year before. In my contribution to their success, was to teach them the process of federal government contracting. Before I came along and taught them, they were confused by it. In fact, if you've heard me do other trainings, I talked about this, but the only reason I was as successful as I was in government contracting was because I actually was very good at sales. But I didn't understand the intricacies of the acquisition, life cycle, and the government and how they buy, right? I didn't understand the process of government contracting. Until about seven years ago when I came out, I started teaching people, I'm like, "Oh, wow. You don't know the process. Let me go back to the basics and I'll teach you the process." I spent seven years teaching a simple process for federal revenue success, and it's perfect for small business government contractors, especially when we have a much smaller team. We don't have red teams and blue teams and green teams, and all pink teams, all these different teams. It's all still just me, and maybe two or three of us in the company, but it's all us every single time. We can keep calling ourselves a different thing, but it's still us. That's what we're going to cover down on in today's training, my seven-step process for federal sales success or federal revenue success. In today's training, I'm going to go over three main sections of it. The first thing is I just want to give you a high-level overview of the seven-step process for federal revenue success. Then I'm going to go through each one of the seven steps and give you the purpose and what do you do in order to execute on that process step? Then the last thing is I want to give you an action item going away from today's training. When you hear me talk about the seven-step process, even if you're very experienced, even if you're in a firm that's doing 20, 30, 40 million dollars a year, you can still pause for a second and take this action item that I do, that I give you, and basically you're going to look at the process and go, "Where's my bottleneck?" If that's what you're here for the training for today, put process rocks into the chat. Let me know you're on board with what I'm going to teach. If you don't know me, my name is Neil McDonald. I'm the president of the GovCon Chamber of Commerce, and I want to welcome you to my federal sales training, where I provide tips for success in the federal market. I spent 20 years in the federal market as a small business owner, and since 2018, I've been teaching people like you that government contracting is not a secret, it's just a process. When we follow a process A to Z, we're going to have repeatable, predictable results. That's what I want for you. That's why I'm here every day doing the training. If you haven't done so already, subscribe to our newsletter. You can see it right here, the government contracting success newsletter. It's the largest newsletter on LinkedIn related to government contracting by far, and it's because we constantly put out information that you would value. No fluff, just pure tactical tips. The last thing I want to say is thank you to the people registered for training. I think we had almost 100 people registered for today's training. When you registered for training, it's a quick thank you to us, the GovCon Chamber team, but also LinkedIn puts the word out to more people that, hey, this is a good training going on, you might be interested in it. So we grow our overall community, my community, your community. This is our network. And the last thing is when you register for training, you're able to see all the other people who registered for training and easily connect with them so that you can increase your network. And when it makes sense, you go off and have intro meetings, etc. All right, let's head on down. Oh, one quick thing, because I didn't want to put this in the middle, just let me know about some exciting news that we're releasing soon a web-based solution to address the top challenges small business government contractors face. And so if you're interested in hearing about that, join our wait list. It's GovCon in a box.com. You can find that right here on the slide. The three main challenges we're going to be addressing that small businesses face and that we've been training for years on is getting in the door to meet federal buyers, finding teammates who want to work with you, and then identifying, pursuing, and responding to opportunities you can win. If that's something you're interested in, just go to GovCon in a box and join the wait list. Okay, let's get rocking and rolling and talking about the seven-step process. I want to give you a high-level intro first, and then we'll walk through each step. So the first step in the seven-step process is research. There's a guy out there. He's gone now, but Stephen Covey wrote a book called The Seven Habits for Highly Effective People. And habit number five was seek first to understand, then to be understood. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. And this idea of research is you're trying to understand the agency, the customer you want to sell to. You're trying to understand them first before you go in and talk about solutions and what you sell, etc. There's another great line that goes with this is that people don't care what you know until they know that you care. People don't care what you know until they know that you care. And when you research, you're showing them that you care. I've looked at your documents, I looked at your website, I've gone to your events. Whatever it is, you've taken the time to understand them and understand where you can fit and begin to have a lot more informed questions when you do eventually talk to them. Step one, research. Step two is targeting. And targeting is this phase where you're putting together a list of the right people to call. So during research, you're starting to identify some of those people because you will see how the organization is laid out, you'll see leaders. But then in targeting step two, you're putting together really what I like to say is 200 people on a spreadsheet and your CRM, wherever it is, I don't care. As long as you got a name, number, and an email, now you're building and targeting a list of people that you can reach out to. And remember, if you got here early enough, you heard me say some people will take a meeting, some won't, you know, some, so what, well, you need 200 people in order to get a good 25 to 40 people who are going to meet with you and talk with you, etc. The third step is outreach. And in outreach, you could think about this as cold calls. This is where you're reaching out and trying to get a first meeting. And then make that first impression so that you can have a second and third meeting. Outreach can be those first few meetings as you're working to develop the relationship. You're having a meeting with a buyer to see if there's, you know, some people that like synergy, right? But somebody can give me a different word. But this idea of, hey, is there, is there a professional chemistry, you know, a desire to work together that we can benefit each other? That's what we're looking for when we do outreach. And these three first steps, research targeting outreach, they're your path to building strategic relationships. Strategic relationships are different than a normal relationship. And I'll talk about it later or a networking relationship. These are powerful relationships that allow you to learn so much more about an agency. And you can transfer any of this, by the way, from an agency to a company and learn about a company. But when you have strategic relationships, you're able to learn about that agency much more. You're able to get introductions. And when you have those introductions, more information and strategic relationships, you're going to hear about opportunities. And so relationships lead to the opportunities. It allows you to hear about opportunities that you might not have heard of. Sometimes there's opportunities in SAM and you didn't hear about it because you're busy. But when you have relationships and people know what you do, etc., they bring it to your attention. Sometimes when you're in an agency and you've got strategic relationships, you get somebody say, "Hey, keep your eyes open and RFI is going to be coming out that I think you guys might be interested in." They're not giving you inside information. They're giving you basically incumbent information. If you were an incumbent in inside of an agency having coffee every day with your customer, etc., you're going to hear about more things. And so when you're on the outside the wire, when you're outside that agency and you build strategic relationships, it allows you to hear about the opportunities that you can win. And we'll talk more about the opportunities, but they need to be opportunities that you can win, not just a whole bunch of junk, but really slam dunk opportunities lead to you being able to write what I call winning proposals. It's not enough to write proposals. You need to be writing a proposal that is a winning proposal, something that when the contracting officer looks at it, they're going to go, "Oh, I wish I could have awarded it to them, but there's three winning proposals and I'm picking this one." But all three of these proposals are winning proposals compared to not winning proposals, which it's like, "Yeah, I'm not awarding it. Here's three winners," or not compliant proposals. You don't even get a chance. Winning proposals is what you need to write, not just proposals. Don't just vomit proposals out of the company and into the government. And then when you write these winning proposals, it leads to sales. You're winning the sales that will lead to your future year revenues and allow you to have the revenue that you're forecasting or setting a goal for them. And when you land that sale, when you win a contract, you're on what I call the wheel of success. You've done this path to strategic relationships that have led to sales, and now that you're on the wheel, you're not coming off. You're able to do good work on that contract you have, which strengthens the relationships you already have, enables you to build new relationships and hearing about more opportunities and get an early heads up and a start on pursuing those opportunities, enabling you to write more proposals within that same agency, see what I mean by a circle of success, or a wheel of success, you're never going to get off of it. So that's the seven-step process. Research, targeting, outreach, lead to relationships, opportunities, proposals, and sales. So let's walk through each one of these as we go forward of the seven-step process. And I'm going to track my time. I got about 15 minutes left, and I want to give you a few tips on each one. So the first step is research. And the purpose of the research is to understand the agency. What I like to say is you want to understand the agency better than they understand it themselves. If you look at the entire Navy as an example, and I didn't check yet, but David Waltz usually comes into our training, and he is a small business professional at one warfare center within the Navy. That means he knows the warfare center he's responsible for. He might even know all of the 10 warfare centers. He might even know more about NAV-C, which is the command. But does he really know about what's going on in NAV-FAC or NAV-War and NAV-AIR, right? As you begin going, it's that same way. You can pick an admiral in the Navy, and they don't know everything about it. But because you're holistically looking at your customer, and you're understanding that agency, sometimes you have the ability to know them better than they know themselves, right? You're not going to know David's job, but you are going to be able to say, "Hey, David, I was looking at this document over here," or something, and come back. So a couple of tips on what does research look like when you do it. First thing is you want to look at the organizational structure. I just dropped some things off there, right? And I know I dropped a lot of acronyms. Don't worry about it. But I was talking about the Navy, right? And the Navy is organized under 10 like buying commands or system commands. And so you can look at those. NAV-AIR, NAV-War, NAV-FAC, NAV-SUP. These are supply and facility, information, C-command, whatever that is, C-systems command. That's boats and underwater stuff. But you can look at the organization and see how they're organized. You begin to understand where you might fit and your company might fit. Then you're also able to look at their challenges, goals and objectives, the activities that they have to drive those objectives. And these come out of looking at strategic documents. I just shared one today. I think I actually just shared keeping with my example a Navy artificial intelligence strategic plan. So I just shared that out today. Well, in there, I can look and see their lines of effort and what they're trying to do within each one of those lines of effort as it relates to integrating artificial intelligence into the Navy. And I'm sorry, I'm looking away for a second because I think it actually is a cyber plan that just came out this past month. But by looking in there, I can understand these organizations. And then I can, through my research, and you can watch training I did yesterday specifically on this, but I can see which offices within the Navy buy what I sell. When I'm doing my research, if you look at David Waltz's chat, if he's in here today, you'll see he always starts with, this is what we buy. You can look at it, oh, that's not what I sell. Let me move on. Or let me talk with David and see if he knows somebody who does buy what I sell. So this is research. Know the agency better than they know themselves. The second one is targeting. Know who to call. It's not sufficient to just, for example, if you go to a conference, you don't want to go to a conference and not know who's going to be there, who you want to meet. Because then you're just basically doing a lottery. You're scratching off relationship building lottery tickets at an event because you're there. And you're like, well, I'll just see who's here. And if you do that same thing, you're not really driving towards any goal. But if you sit there and say, I want to meet people in the Navy who do cyber, anything related to cyber, then you're going to build a targeted list around that. The people that you call, I put them into three categories. Three categories in three groups. So the first thing is, whenever you're trying to get into sticking with the Navy, you want to find federal government employees, so whether it's military or civilian, who were government employees in the Navy, then you want to find small businesses that are winning in there, and you want to find large businesses that are winning in there. This gives you a full 360 approach into the Navy. And in each one of these groups, you want to find focus as a receptivity, focus as a dissatisfaction, and focus as a power. Inside of every customer group that you go into, you will find a focus receptivity who's this person willing to help you learn about their organization, maybe make some introductions, but they don't have a problem and they don't have money. They're just willing to help you. That's why we call them focus or receptivity. Focus and dissatisfaction does have the problem. They have the goal that they want to achieve or the problem they're trying to overcome. They're typically called program offices within the federal buyer world or federal agencies, right? And the focus of power are the people who can sign a contract with you in the government. This is the contracting officer. So when you're looking into the Navy, you want to find focus as a receptivity, focus as a dissatisfaction, and focus as a power within the federal buying group, and you can find similar type people in large and small prime contractors who are winning in the Navy. All right. And so a couple of quick tips on how you can find these people into targeting. You can look on their websites. I find a ton of information constantly out there. I just shared a document I talked about today, a strategic plan that was on their website. I'm looking at the PDF and in the PDF, it has multiple people listed who were in charge of different offices. Now I'm adding them to my list. If I don't see a phone or an email, I'll go to Google and chase it down more. Or I can put it in. And when I'm talking to Sally, I can say Sally, I'm trying to find John here. And I know he's in this office, but I don't have a phone number, an email, anything can be helped me. Can you make an intro? Can you give me a number? And you've got them down. LinkedIn is a fantastic place. You go into LinkedIn. We're all pretty much here. By the way, if you're not in LinkedIn, come join me in LinkedIn. Connect with me, connect with my network. I just passed 31,000 connections or followers. So these are people who are in my network. And almost every single one of them are open to connecting with you as well. But in LinkedIn, I can go into the Navy like I was talking about a warfare center. I can go to the Naval, I think it's Naval, Dave is going to correct me, but Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane. I just can't tell whether they're above or below the water, but Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane, I can go find them on LinkedIn. And then I can see the people who are working for that that installation, and there's thousands of them. And then I can filter down and say, well, I'm really looking for those cybersecurity related type people. So I can find those people, and then I chase down their number in the email. And the last one is Sam and FPDS. So Sam, hopefully everybody knows, and FPDS is the Federal Procurement Data System, FPDS.gov. And in there, you can find the names of contract officers, contract specialists, sometimes corps, sometimes small business professionals. So you can find their information in there. I did training, I think yesterday, where I was talking about how you could find small business, small and large businesses who are interested in supporting an agency by going into Sam, finding an industry day deck, and our industry day information. And the government sometimes shares interested vendors who are interested in working within the Navy, they'll share it out. So then we're easily able to meet with people who have a similar goal as us supporting the Navy, just in that example. Okay, step three outreach. So we've done our research and targeting, we're ready to start trying to get meetings. And so the purpose of outreach is to establish that relationship, right, to get on the wheel. The activity behind this, things like cold calls, you're trying to get in there and just schedule an intro call. I've done a lot of training on this where I talk about when you reach out to somebody, you don't even want to talk to them, let alone sell to them. What you want to do is say, hey, David, hey, can I get on your calendar, whatever nice way you want to say it, but can I get on your calendar in the next week or two, and take 30 minutes of your time for an intro call? The reason I say this is because you want to be able to prepare, but you don't want to prepare for a call with David until he gives you that meeting. So get on the schedule. I teach this and I've been teaching this for years and it's the best way to get in, but allow you to research before the meeting so you can wow in the meeting as well. So outreach is also part of, it doesn't include that meeting, that first meeting where you go in and you're talking and I always say make it virtual, never in person, right? If you want to meet people in person, that's great, but do it after you've established a relationship. Whether it's government or industry, don't make your first meeting in person, don't make your first two or three, get some traction, make sure it's worthwhile, then go connect and say, hey, let's take it to the next level if it makes sense, but you can have that first meeting for sure virtually and make sure it is no more than 30 minutes. You don't want, you want them to see you as not taking up too much of their time and if you can impress them in 15 minutes, which you should be able to do with a five-minute capability briefing, you should be able to impress the people who it makes sense for you to talk to again, they'll schedule another meeting. That's how it works. And then the last thing I wanted to say about outreach as it relates to what is you want to have successful meetings. So when I talk about getting in with a customer, it's not enough to have a great meeting. Everybody loves everybody, you know, they loved our deck. They really talked and pulled into certain spots. That's cool, but that's not sales. Sales is a successful meeting. A successful meeting is when the sale moved forward. We scheduled another meeting. We agreed to get an NDA sign. Damon agreed to get me the strategic plan and send it back or to introduce me to this person. That is a successful step forward. It does not have to be a big step, but it has to be forward momentum. Otherwise, you just had a great meeting, which is cool, but it's not helpful for you winning contracts. So you always need to be moving that relationship and the sale forward. And it doesn't need to be greedy. It just needs to for you and the other person. You both want to move forward, not be stagnant. So I put down suggested activity here. This is in particular really important activity when you don't have any relationships. You need to be doing this full war until you get them. So I say do 25 calls per day. That could be 25 basic intros emails. Don't spam. Do not spam. You will instantly get on a do not talk to these people ever again list, right? Just reach out to them and say I'm looking to connect with you and personalize every email you ever do. If you do 25 calls a day, you should be able to do an hour. And if you don't have strategic relationships already, then I got a feeling you got an hour of time that you could block to this. Stop watching Netflix. Stop sleeping as much. Whatever it is, do an extra hour of work and you can do 25 calls. It'll lead to the outreach results that you want. And then I talk about your goal should be four meetings a week. Okay. So we've done the outreach and we've established relationships, but I want you to establish strategic relationships and strategic relationships are ones where there is a neutral commitment to growth. I'm committed to your success. You're committed to mine. This can happen with the federal government as well. They want information to learn what's going on in industry, right? And even in the commercial sector or whatever. And so you can share back and forth. You want that strategic, not friendly relationships, strategic relationships are what's valuable to the other person and your company. And they can be friendly, right? But if all you have is everybody loves everybody, well, that's not helping anybody. That's called friends or a network, but it is not strategic relationships that will lead to the opportunities. And I'm just watching my time. I'm going to pick up the speed a little bit. You want to meet regularly every two weeks is what I say to discuss the pipeline. Look at a spreadsheet, say these four opportunities. Let's talk about it. When you're talking about a teaming partner, that's the way you know it's a strategic relationship. But the government might be once a month. And it's less committed to a recurring thing. But yeah, let's touch base again next month. And there's something that comes out of it every single time. Down here, I'm going to skip the goals at the moment because I'll cover that in another time with more training. But you want 24 strategic relationships. That's what you should be thinking. Eight with the government, eight with smalls and eight with largest. Slam dunk opportunities is step seven. These are opportunities you can win. When everybody in your company looks at it, they're oh my god, this was written for us. That's a slam dunk opportunity. And so that's the purpose of step five is you want to be able to identify those slam dunks. Those are what you put in your pipeline. You don't put junk into your pipeline. You put slam dunks and some of those slam dunks will result in a proposal going out the door. And some will not. But you should not spend a single bit of energy on things that are not slam dunk or at the early stages you think they're slam dunk. So this is what you're best at. The notes I had down here is that the opportunity step in the seven step process is capture. This is where you're pursuing an opportunity. You're shaping the requirements of the acquisition approach. It's a chance for you to push that towards your company's increase what we call the P win or what I like to call the winning proposal score. But in step seven, you're trying to shape that opportunity so you can win it. Step six is writing those winning proposals that I mentioned. A winning proposal is a proposal that buyers love. That's all there is to it. The buyer looks at it go, man, I wish I could award to this person or this company, right? Even if they don't, that's fine. They've got another proposal they're doing to or something. But a winning proposal is one that the buyer says, this one I can award to. Oops, there's another one I can award to, right? Now you got heavy competition. But that's fine. At least you've written a winning proposal compared to a losing proposal, right? In order to write a winning proposal, I teach that it needs to be clear, compliant, compelling, and convincing. Clear means no heavy jargon make it easy for anybody to understand. Remember, it's not always just the technical people reviewing and providing feedback on a proposal. It needs to be compliant with all those shell statements. It needs to be compelling like, wow, we're going to Maui. Imagine that's what you're saying. It's like, I can get you to Maui. Everybody's excited. The government's like, wow, we're going to go to Maui in Hawaii, right? Well, that's exciting. It's compelling. We really want to go to Maui. That's exactly it. Now it needs to be convincing. Commencing is, hey, we have a plane that has fuels, got enough fuel and can last across the entire Pacific. We've got past performance where we've flown people there and back from Maui successfully, hundreds and hundreds of people. Well, now it's convincing that you can get them to Maui. And so whatever you're telling them that you can do, back it up. Not just with past performances, but with stories that talk about it. I can dive more into this later, but you should be writing 48 winning proposals a year, even if you just started your business 30 days ago. And here's what I mean. If you just started at 30 days ago, start building strategic relationships, be good at one simple thing. Imagine if we're all in construction, you should be good at framing the wall. Somebody else does, sheet rocks, somebody else paints, but you're like the best framer. That way you can go around and find all these other construction companies and say, I want a team with you. I'd love to be able to work with you. Some will, some won't, so what, right? Find the ones that are open to you joining them and you can take their framing work. And so if they've got this big project and you come in and do framing, especially in construction, that's kind of normal, right? But you want to do the same thing in IT or anywhere else. Well, if you have a very tight niche core competency, then you can write 48 proposals by having those 24 strategic relationships or 16 with industry, and you can do that as a sub. As you get farther and more experienced, you should be able to write prime contracts, but it doesn't all have to be primes, but you got to make sure you're writing winning proposals and enough of them to enable you to win. The last point is, the last step is increase your revenue. Here, you just want to learn from the lessons. If you win, if you lose, you still want to learn. But the whole point is you want to build strategic relationships that come out of those wins. If you get a sale, you're going to keep going on that wheel. You're going to deliver well, and you're going to sit there and build those relationships stronger. I like that in time, so I'm going to blow through this really fast, but here's what I want you to do for today. Reverse entry to the other process. If you're not getting the revenue today that you want, then just ask yourself, are we doing enough sales? Are we winning enough? No? Are we writing enough winning proposals? Or is the government telling us that you didn't win because of this reason? Do we have enough slam dunks in our pipeline, etc? Reverse engineer the process starting with sales. Very quickly, you can stay on, somebody will throw this in chat, but I have a newsletter article where you can get that handout of the seven-step process, and my, again, recommendation for you today is reverse engineer the process, and go back to step one often when you're trying to drive further into the relationship. If you're trying to learn reverse engineer the process, if you're trying to push into an agency, start at step one research and go through. The more you practice this, the quicker it'll be for you to be able to get into an agency and start developing those relationships. Okay, I'm out of time. If you value what I just taught you, put process rocks in there on your way out. Thanks for the team, and I will see you in the next training.