The Essential Positions of a Gov Sales Team! (Podcast Transcript)

                        [01:09] Richard C. Howard: Hey, guys. Richard here with government sales momentum. Thanks for listening to this week's podcast. This week we're going to talk a little bit about the type of team that you need to put together to effectively go after government contracts, win those contracts, and then manage them afterwards. So we have a lot of experience both on the government side and on the consulting side, working with companies and seeing how the different teams are made up. But there are some commonalities, whether we're talking about the big defense contractors that have hundreds of people that are working on acquiring government contracts and managing those and the successful startups, whether they're technology developers or service providers, they typically have some of the same individuals or they're contracting it out or they're just doing it themselves. So I thought we'd walk through with a couple of those roles were.

                        Now the first thing, and you've heard me talk about this before, is just making sure that you have a good contract strategy going forward. So who are you selling to? Having two or three agencies that you're focusing on and the acquisition shops within those agencies so you're not spread so thin looking at every Solicitation and RFI source of thought that's coming in. You want to have that focus because relationships are a big part of selling to the government, but once you have that, you can do that on your own. I've done a podcast on how you can do some of that research, some of the sites we use, once you know who you're selling to, how much of the product or service you're buying or you're selling that they're purchasing and how they make those purchases, once you have that understanding and some of the shops you're going to be focused on.

                        Now there are a couple of key jobs that need to be performed now. One of them is I call it the researcher. That's somebody in your company that needs to be able to do some of the fundamental research on opportunities. Just to give you some examples, you need to know about opportunities that you're going to go after, right? So this goes beyond just setting up a bid match with whatever tool you're using to find opportunities. This is once you have an opportunity that might be a good fit, somebody needs to go in there and start looking at things like, hey, is this a new opportunity? Is there an incumbent on there? Is it being recompeted? What are the set aside? How big is it? What offices are behind it? Is there some information on the agency or the acquisition shop that can give you a little bit more insight into what they're really after? How about some of the offices or their contacts that you can try to set up meetings with? Having a good researcher can find a lot of that detail for you that can help you make a go no go decision. And that's going to eliminate a lot of time for you by eliminating those opportunities that you're not going to compete well on. Another thing a researcher can do, and again, this could be someone that is dedicated to research. This could be someone that is just a contractor or this could be the owner of the business owner just spending a couple of hours a week, but someone to find things, like symposiums in industry days. These are ways to build relationships and this kind of blends with business development a little bit, but you can find a lot of the information online. So having a researcher that knows acquisitions can go in there and start finding different appointments for you to go to, different things that you can just sign up for. So you can meet the contracting officers, program managers and other companies that are going to be bidding on things, which can help you with timing. Very important.

                        Another thing a researcher can do is start identifying large government wide acquisitions contracts or multiple award contracts for you to potentially bid on or try to onboard onto. So if you're focused on the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center and you're offering cyber security services and you see CIO, SP Three, SP Four being constantly used, that's going to be a contract that you might want to be on. And that's something a researcher can point out to you, tell you how when the on-boarding opportunities are, when they're going to be recompeted. So you can put that in your two or three year forecast for going on there. So that's your researcher. Now the next position that I want to talk a little bit about is your business developer. Now I separate these, but it could be the same person, right, your business developer. This is someone that you want to make sure that they have a very thorough understanding of federal acquisitions, the Far, how contracts are awarded. And not only that, and probably more importantly, but you want that person to have a network that they can go to. So whether it's the Department of Defense or Homeland Security, the VA, wherever you're selling to, whatever your target agency is, your business developer should have contacts and network in that agency and have people that they can reach out to. This is something you can find. You can look at people's LinkedIn networks and see how many people that they're connected to on there. You can check out the resumes and look at their references. But that network is important, and acquisitions knowledge is important. And a lot of times companies get one or the other, right? And usually it's the other. Usually they're finding a person that well, in some cases they have neither, but in some cases, they find a person that has a network. If it's the VA or the army, maybe it's somebody that worked in that organization, but they weren't involved on the buying side. So they might have people they can reach out to, but they don't understand contract vehicles and the actual process of putting a company on contract. Because keep in mind, if you take a look at the government as a whole, I guarantee you less than 1% of people that are working, no matter what agency it is, actually had at some point the authority to put a company on contract or work in that process. In the Department of Defense, this is acquisition, and most people aren't in acquisitions.

                        In the DOD, most people are driving tanks, flying airplanes, executing the mission in one form or another. The acquisitions community very small. So it's a very small set of people that understand, oh, this is how we develop. This is how we set aside funding and develop requirements and put a company on contracts. So you want to make sure that your BD guy or gal has that background and has a network that they can reach out to, because the benefit of that is that they can reach out and set up meetings with people that can actually make decisions that can actually influence requirements and get your company on contract. Like government sales is a relationship game. There's no two ways about it. The companies and I've talked about this a lot, but the companies that typically don't see success are just waiting for solicitations to come out and putting proposals together on there. And if you're engaging the government when the solicitation comes out, you've missed 90% of the process. That's the tail end. In fact, the government probably already knows who they want to hire at that point. You need to be way before that, finding opportunities way ahead of time, influencing requirements, developing relationships, and this is all something a good business developer can do.

                        So the next thing I want to talk about is the proposal writer, right? So you need somebody that can actually put products together for you. And often this is not the BD person, right? So your business developer, it could be a researcher, it could be a blend of things, but typically your business developer is out shaking hands, creating relationships, working at a higher level. You need someone that can dedicate their time to putting together proposals that can put the responses together for RFI and sources sought. Often this is a team process, right? So you're going to have a lot of input. Your BDI will definitely be inputting on that, your researcher will be inputting on that. But your proposal writer, you want to make sure because government proposals especially are not commercial proposals, this is a different beast altogether. So you want to have somebody that has a track record of performance and winning contracts and has done a lot of them, and the prices on those can vary if you're contracting them out. But you want to make sure that someone understands that because if you miss something in a government proposal, something that is a requirement that's supposed to go into that, they're in a lot of cases just looking for reasons to throw proposals away because they get so many of them. So you want to make sure that not only are you setting your company up in the best position possible to win, but you're not doing anything that's going to eliminate you from winning. It would really be horrible if you did a great job spending months influencing requirements, getting a relationship together with a contract office, and then you write a proposal and you include something or don't include something that's going to get that eliminated that just wasted all of your time, so critically important to have a solid proposal writer to help you with that. And then the next positions are more for companies after that you've won the contract, right? Because contract management is actually extremely important. And I've had some great podcasts with former Colonel Lewis Orndorff on the talks about how you manage your contracts and making sure that you're adhering to the different clauses in there. So a lot of companies focus a lot on, hey, I need to get the contract. But then once they have it, spend less time making sure that they're managing that contract appropriately. And managing it appropriately not only keeps you safe, but this can also help you to maximize your profit on the contract, right.

                        Things like increasing labor rates or increasing cleanse, how to respond to the government when they're asking you for new things, these are all important. So having someone that understands that contract strategy under the Federal Acquisitions Regulation can be important. Now this could be a blend of some of the other services. Your business developer may have a background there that he can help you. This might be something that you can contract out to do a contract assessment, but at some point that will come up when you're trying to manage your contract. And then finally, you don't need to have this person on your team, but you want to have a lawyer that understands the Federal Acquisition Regulations and Federal Acquisitions law. So there will be times when it is going to be good for a lawyer to review something for you to make sure that you do not get into trouble. One thing that just came up recently was ITAR and foreign military sales. So if you're selling to foreign governments, there is a lot of legalese there that you want to make sure that you don't want to be guessing in those circumstances. You don't want to get into trouble when you're selling to foreign government, but you can foreign military sales. I mean, we have huge foreign military sales partners. Companies do it all the time. But just so you know, there are a lot of things you have to iron out with the Department of State as well as our own Defense Department, depending on how you're proceeding with that. And that's probably a good topic for another podcast, which is Foreign Military Sales and Direct Commercial Sales, which I ran the foreign Military sales portfolio for Saudi Arabia. So I'm very familiar with that process. And we'll get into that on another episode. And that's another just federal acquisitions and federal sales. It's so expensive.

                        There are so many different areas you can get involved with it. It's really exciting, and I love talking about it. I love helping companies to execute just based on all of this. A little pitch. The theme for my company, the mission statement, if you will, is providing world class business development services to companies at a rate they can actually afford, right? So everybody's not a 50 million, $100 million a year company. Sometimes there are a lot of smaller businesses with innovative technologies that can't afford to pay a business developer 300 grand a year, or a researcher and proposal writer, and then you add contract management and lawyers and all that other stuff. You could be talking about a lot of money each year to have these guys on staff. What we provide is, in my consortium of experts, I have people that have a past history working usually with the government and with companies after they've gotten out that expertise, which we can provide at a consulting fee each month. So now, instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, we have a low monthly fee where you have access to all of this and providing everything from research opportunity, ID, business development services, proposal writing, contract management, and you have access to the same types of people that the big defense companies, those big companies that are selling to the government have. They might have hundreds of those guys. We don't have hundreds of them, but we have that expertise. So at a fraction of the cost, you could get a former DCMA commander to review your contract, or you could have myself reach out to my network to set up meetings or use some of the tools that we have. And we use the same tools that the big guys use, right? So the ones that are really expensive, that could be prohibitively expensive for your business, you can reach out to us and we can help do research and find opportunities for you, those type of things. So thank you for listening. It was great talking with everybody. Again, don't hesitate to reach out to me personally.

                         [14:05] Richard C. Howard: And if you want to check out our website, you can go to Dodcontract.com We have a lot of free videos. We have all the podcasts on there. We also have a way for you to set up a consultation with us. We offer free consultation, so if you want to discuss any of these services, I would be more than happy to talk to you. Enjoy the episode. Please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. It's very much appreciated. If you're interested in selling products and services to the Department of Defense, I have something for you that you're not going to find anywhere else in the world. The team and I created a program that takes everything you need to win defense contracts and put it into one place. Up until now, only large defense companies and a small amount of people in the know have had access to how products and services are really sold to the Department of Defense. I've taken all of that information and put it in a step-by-step training module that shows you how to consistently sell to the US Military to join our membership. Not only do you get the model, but you also get weekly sessions with former DOD acquisitions officers for training guidance to answer your questions in a community of like-minded business owners that want to partner on different opportunities to bid for subcontracting and teaming or just to discuss general strategy on how to sell to the DOD. You have access to every course I've created. Every coaching session I've ever recorded in every interview with an acquisition professional that I've ever conducted. And we cover topics that range from defense sales planning and competitor analysis to SBIR and STTR or military sales. The list goes on. Go to Dodcontract.com if you are interested and I would love to see you in the membership.

You can also check out our podcast with Kizzy Parks where she shared some really great insight on her specialty in providing services to the government.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us here and we will get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks.