Meeting Quotas With Government Contracts
Aug 26, 2022Trying to meet a quarterly quota with government contracts can be one of the most frustrating things for a business owner or sales professional.
This can be like squeezing a square peg into a round hole, as the government does not care about your quota and certainly does not work on a quarterly timeline.
However, you're not alone. Thousands of sales professionals and businesses deal with this very struggle (including myself)!
One of the ways we teach Academy members to deal with this is the 3-5-8 method.
When I build a public sector pipeline, I ensure I have no more than 3 target customers. That could be a military service branch or even one acquisitions office within a branch of the military such as PEO digital at Hanscom Air Force Base. This ensures that I'm focused on a customer and building relationships with one organization and not spreading myself too thin. I've selected (and vetted) this customer because they historically have proven that they consistently make purchases of what I am selling.
Next, I'll make sure I have 5 opportunities that I am engaging on with each of those customers. This could be at any stage from submitting an RFI, setting up in person pitches or demos to submitting formal proposals. In fact, in order to ensure that my pipeline is solid, it's good to have opportunities at various stages. Once an opportunity falls off or I close a deal, then I add another opportunity to ensure I have five, with each customer.
It's critical to make sure that you're not just adding a good idea as one of the opportunities. At a minimum you have got to engage in someway with each of these prospective efforts. This is how you ensure that there is some degree of likelihood that you will go on contract.
Finally, I need to make sure that I have at least 5 of those opportunities 8 months out. This is to ensure that I'm constantly building my pipeline 2 quarters out so I have consistency in my numbers each quarter.
Every company is different and every sales executive will see different percentages in what they can close versus opportunities lost. Because of this you may want to adjust how many opportunities you look at per customer up or down depending on your results.
Hope you find this email useful and as always if you wanna learn more go to dodcontract.com and check out how we are helping our students consistently close contracts with the Department of Defense.
Best,
Ricky
DoD Contract Academy
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