Now we should focus and choose the entities of the government that buys your product or service often. This is because if they buy your product or service fairly often, they are highly likely to buy it again versus a part of the government who has only bought it once five years ago or two years ago. If they have only ever bought it once, they are less likely to buy it again. Now how do you define “often” depends on your product or service? If it is something that they have to buy once a month, twice a year, once a year, once every other year, once every four years then it can also be termed as, “often.”

There may be tens of thousands of buyers in the government, so you really need to get somewhat focused. So instead of having to reach out to 10, 20, 30, or 40 thousand entities, just start with a few hundred then you can learn a lot more from it.

As the information about Government contracts is public, you can learn some things about it but how the government buys what you sell is extremely critical. This is the linchpin on doing business with the government and I am going to give you a real-life example of it. This happened when I first started doing this in consulting and actually took out a company to meet with a government customer. We started explaining to them what that company can do and the government customer was really impressed.

They said, “yeah it definitely sounds like you understand our problem, you could solve it.” So, it basically checked all the boxes”, then she started to ask us questions such as, “Are you on this contract.” So, our answer was, “no.” The second question was, “Do you have this certification?” and our answer to that was also in negation. Finally, we got the response, “well you know what, I can’t even buy it from you and you just wasted my time.”