How I Closed My First Contract In 5 Weeks

At this point you probably know I spent 20 years in the USAF and roughly half of that was as a procurement officer.

What you may not know is that I started a consulting company when I retired and immediately began helping small and non traditional companies sell products and services sell to the various federal agencies.

Most of what I was doing involved coaching, setting up meetings and helping to influence opportunities and build pipelines.

One of my clients asked me to run their contract accounts for 3 federal agencies, which meant I would have a quota and for the first time and be the one selling to the US government instead of buying FOR the government!

Even though I had all this experience putting companies on contract from the government side as well as assisting businesses in their contract wins as a consultant, this was the first time it was on me to bring contracts in and I must admit, I was a little nervous.

So I did what I always do when I'm nervous about something, I went to the gym!

When I got back in the office I regrouped and did for myself what I've been doing for my clients.

I followed the DoD Contract Roadmap process and started working in the pre-RFP phase of acquisitions as I always advise.

I then began setting up meetings with potential customers, current customers and past customers.

I knew from experience that relationships were critical to DoD and government contracting success. I also knew that our quick wins were going to come from current customers!

I approached sales more from a program manager angle than a sales angle. I made sure I understood the problem my clients or potential clients were trying to solve, figure out all the ways my solution could provide value, meet with the customer regularly, and always ask what they needed help with.

After the first few meetings it became clear that a current client had multiple projects coming up that they could use our help on.

This led to the first contract I closed, approximately 5 weeks after starting!

I'll be the first to tell you a 5 week close is extremely fast in DoD/Gov contracting. But if you are currently on contract with a client, often the contract you are on can be modified to add additional capability.

This is one of the best ways to increase your federal contract revenue and it always surprised me as a DoD acquisitions officer that only a few of the companies we had on contract would set up regular meetings and ask us if they could provide additional capability. 

If my acquisitions branch did not have any additional work for a good company that I was meeting with, I would often point them to another branch that had something they could potentially work on. This would also be a warm introduction from myself to another branch chief, and that carried allot of weight.

However, many of the companies I met with never asked for new work and never asked if I knew other offices that could use their solution.

If they didn't ask, I didn't tell them.

Not because I was a jerk and wanted to keep secrets. It was because I was managing hundreds off millions in DoD projects and their's was just one of them. My team and I were really busy and we needed a reminder from the company that they were there, had great solutions and may be able to provide value on another project!

Hopefully this provides a bit of useful insight that you can use in your defense contracting approach.

If you want to learn more about DoD Contract Academy and how we help companies in all industries win defense contracts you can learn more here: DOD Contract Academy

We can’t wait to hear from you!

Ricky

DoDContract.com