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I'm going to share my screen again today so let me just make sure I got that good to go so today we're going to be talking about business development 101 and an introduction to business development in particular in the federal market right you can do this everywhere it's just sales but fundamentally business development is one-third of the federal sales life cycle the way I describe it right you have business development which uh for this scenario is sales is identifying an opportunity many opportunities right so business development is identifying opportunities capture is really trying to shape those opportunities in a way that your company can win and then proposal management is writing a winning proposal that the government just must choose so they award the contract to you and um so that's what we're going to be talking about today is business development and getting into federal agencies and I'm going to cover three topics in particular the first thing I'm going to cover is the idea that business development is about knowing an agency better than the agency knows themselves and that isn't that hard because most people in a in a company and agency Etc they just know their job if you think about somebody working in HR in the Navy do they really know about what's going on on the ships or you know downrange or over in logistics facility et cetera they know HR because that's their job they're so busy being an expert about that but if your job is to be an expert about the Navy you will know more than any one person theoretically and there certainly as well as anybody in there if you if you commit to knowing that agency better than anybody in there knows it themselves second thing I want to cover is where you can find names numbers and email addresses for the people you want to build relationships with when you go in and do business development it's about knowing an agency better than they know themselves and building relationships and identifying opportunities right so that's why you want to find the people's contact information and that goes into the third point I'm going to cover today is where can you find slam dunk opportunities I'm going to give you 10 ideas of where you can find slam dunk opportunities I'm going to give you 10 ideas on where you can find names numbers and email addresses for the people at the agency you want to contact um I I do try to put in here recently that this training and who this training is for it's primarily for people obviously in the business development side right but it's for small business owners I'm talking to small business owners who have many hats and business development is just one of your hats so how do you do that particular role in your job as a small business owner and then I'm also talking to business developers those of you who are just coming in are thinking about getting in what I talk about today will be very helpful for you even being a junior business developer and it certainly is helpful to the experienced business developers because I teach this a lot to customers that I have who have many business developers how do they do their job even better more effectively right they know how to have the relationships once they're in there but I give them tactics strategies for doing business development better and then the last one is anybody within a company and in my last company I had multiple people who had uh primary responsibilities with secondary responsibilities around Business Development and so if you have people related who have responsibility for identifying opportunities or building relationships these might be the people you're sending to matchmaking events Etc this is good training for them as well so if they're not here let your colleagues know about it if you don't know who I am my name is Neil McDonnell I'm the president of the govcon Chamber of Commerce I want to welcome you to my federal sales training where I provide tips for success in the federal Market I spent 20 years as a small business owner in the federal market and since 2018 I've been teaching people like you the Government Contracting is not a secret it's just a process when you follow a process A to Z you're going to have repeatable predictable results that's what I want for you and that's why I'm here today to provide this training for you okay let's go ahead and dive in uh deeper into today's training the first step of a business developers to to research an agency and get to know them better than they know themselves this is we talk about the seven step to success in the federal Market I teach this seven steps and the first step is research and research is about Gathering that material that helps you understand an agency better than they understand themselves but there's certain reasons why you should do this and I really want you to understand it right people do business with those they know like and Trust right but there's also this other line that says no one cares what you know until they know that you care well how can I communicate to an agency or to a buyer that I care one way that I could communicate to an agency or a buyer that I care is by knowing what their organization does what their agency does um I so in this case what do they do what does the Department of Veterans Affairs do who do they support right do you understand that they support um veterans not active duty not civilians or somebody else they support veterans well what do they support them with well three particular areas right they they support them with benefits as they're coming out of the active duty services and we you know we're vets for life kind of thing and so there's so many benefits that are available to us they support us on health care and they support us um in depth when we die in helping us um maybe get buried in a cemetery so there's the national cemetery uh sign of the VA understanding the VA what they do and who they support really helps communicate that you care about the VA because you took the time to understand it and they will begin to see that you actually care about them um and then when you have an understanding of what an agency does like the VA you begin to figure out where do you fit what whether you do lawn care services or elevators or SharePoint or cyber or data any of these Professional Services or construction and Manufacturing you will know where you fit into that team that agency and that's really important because when you have conversations you want to be able to communicate that to them um the next thing is I want you to understand this concept of Shifting Authority in your favor when you take the time to research an agency and I'll talk in a minute about how do you do that but when you truly take a time take the time to understand an agency and know that agency really really well we call it agency intimacy right when you do then you're Shifting The Authority in your favor and when I talk about shifting Authority in your favor what I mean is when you have a first meeting with somebody a federal buyer in particular right you're coming in like this you're here and you're the unknown risk and you're below them and then as you start talking and communicating what your company does etc you might shift that Authority a little bit so that you're on the same levels now instead of below them you've shifted up and now you're on the same levels with them you're communicating or demonstrating through your uh your discussions your subject matter expertise they can see that you know stuff they begin to respect the fact that you're me a subject matter expert but they still don't really know whether you care but when when you begin to demonstrate that um that you do carry or understand their agency you've read their documents you've taken the time to research them and do your homework then you will have shifted The Authority in your favor it doesn't make you better than them it just makes them look up to you now as I describe it as a trusted advisor so you go from an unknown risk to a subject matter expert they can respect but they don't know if you care to a trusted advisor who they look to for valued advice and that's where you want to be that's a business developer's job is to help your company be seen that way by the buyers and last thing is when you know an agency better than anybody else it helps your capture efforts and it helps your proposal efforts if you talk to proposal managers they will tell you that hey there's all these things we need like if you actually knew what their mission was or their challenges Etc then that would help me when I'm writing a proposal because I could write a proposal much more driven towards or written towards that agency's particular unique values or unique needs except so we'll talk more about that as I go forward um so uh why you should do it I just described what you should learn is a little different right I want you to learn most importantly what I described a minute ago the mission the vision what do they do uh sometimes in DOD it's called the commander's intent right what are they thinking and the commanders will put out this document that describes their intent look this is where I'm trying to drive us over the next year or four years five years or whatever so you want to understand that get an understanding from that perspective but then you also want to know their challenges what are they running into if you get an RFP or a PWS Etc it might touch on a few specific challenges related to some work or something hey we want to address this many users but what challenges are the agency Personnel facing overall what challenges do the agencies face when you understand those challenges you can begin to cross walk them to a requirement you might be trying to go after or products and services that you provide that can address those challenges right and and that's really important you need to understand what you sell and how it can align to the need or the challenges that an agency buyer has the last thing I mentioned that you want to learn when you're doing research like this is the um inside of a strategic plan and some other things I'll talk about it but goals objectives and metrics and so agencies lay out every year hey here's our strategic goals sometimes it goes across multiple years but not just the agency you'll find different major departments like the IT department might do it or the logistics or the HR department the diversity and inclusion departments they'll put out strategic plans that lay out here's our goals here's what we're trying to do and under each goal is an objective of how we'll measure our movement towards that goal and then metrics are based on the um those objectives and the activity it's really measuring the activity but when you understand those the cool thing about it is you can look and go well I can't help on these three goals but these other two I can well now you're talking not to all their goals and hey we can help you do everything but we can really help you here that is community indicating that you care because you just showed them um here's some examples of where you can do research online Etc but you can find strategic plans which I just described as an action plan is where they go to the next level and they're saying well what are we going to do to be able to achieve the objectives and the goals that we have stated in the Strategic plan so it goes a little deeper sometimes I find out like which office branch division et cetera is the lead on particular objectives and so the action plan if you could find those really laid that out in the annual report looks back and says hey in our strategic Plan before we tried to do this in FY 22 and here are the results basically annual reports say here's what we accomplished here's some of the things we did not accomplish in the and the challenges going forward Etc so it's a really good understanding of what they're doing another place you can go is oig or GAO so office of Inspector General or the government Affairs office these two look into a particular agency let's say the Navy they look into the Navy and annually they might do some reports sometimes you can find them as uh called management challenges these are basically just looking at an agency hey our observation is that they're running into these kind of challenges and we recommend they take this action that's fantastic because not only can you see that and see where you can help on those challenges but you can see the agency's response where they say nah that's not really a problem or they go yeah yeah that sucks I don't know what we're gonna do kind of thing right so when you are looking at these challenges you're able to see it and then obviously you can go to websites LinkedIn big conferences so the Air Force for example has a big conference where they're talking to themselves basically and they let industry come in so it's awesome to come in and hear how Air Force leadership is communicating to Air Force personnel and when you hear that you really begin to hear again a different way of here's the challenges that face us this is our mission this is what all of us are going to get done as we move forward and I swear when you're in these conferences you get fired up you start feeling like you want to put on a uniform but most importantly you're getting the information that helps you really understand that that agency so that's pretty important there I want to give you one tip on each of these Pages as I go forward so something you can take there's a lot here but one thing I want you to pay attention to is you can take as you become an expert in the Air Force Navy education whatever um what you learn and share it out you find a strategic plan share it out you find a long-range acquisition forecast share it out if you find hey here's the Navy's top 10 challenges don't keep it to yourself that's old school selfishness first off that's just wrong second off it's uh stupid right it's like it's ineffective if if you share it then you will get visibility among teammates who might want to work with you they go man this person knows the uh that the Air Force for example you get visibility on the Air Force if you grab information keep it to yourself how does it help you or anybody else really beyond that knowledge but if you share it out now you're now you're really building the relationship and you truly are trying to help the Air Force right because you're sharing those challenges out because maybe somebody else can help with some of those challenges so keep that tip in mind as you learn share okay so let's talk about where you can find some of the names numbers and email addresses in the seven step process for federal revenue success that we lay out Step One is research step two is targeting and this really is about finding the right people right you just watch my other training on that I've got almost 300 trainings in the last 12 months and so you can find training on this topic where we go into depth but today I just want to give you 10 ideas of where you can go find names numbers and email addresses as a business developer that's your one of your main jobs is to find the names of people so that you can build relationships business developers learn about an agency and build relationships and find Opportunities and so here let's talk about where you can go look sam.gov great place to go because in there are documents that are forward-looking and passed so past rewards past contracts past rfps et cetera but in those documents you will find a lot of information first on first and foremost usually you have two points of contact in almost every Sam notice and so go in there for your Target agency in the target Direction you're looking for and pull those that information out that's how all these data service providers do it as they go in they grab that stuff and they bring it out and so you can do this on your own fpds same kind of thing you can go in here there's a lot of information but one of the first things I just want to mention on fpds is when you go into a typical item within fpds and by the way I'm not saying what the words are anymore because no one calls it Federal procurement database system that's what it's called but we all call it fpds we all call it Sam those are the terms we should learn that's all you need to know you never really need to know the acronym breakdown um sidebar all right but in fpds when you open up an item that you wish you had won for example because it's only past Awards when you open it up top right hand corner you will see the name of a contract officer or somebody in the acquisition support side of the house their name email address and you can go chase that down for a phone number and it'll take you five minutes to find phone numbers like that right so that's a really good one um LinkedIn company Pages you're not going to find email and phones here but it's a great way to find um names and I use peo digital because I just like that for some reason in the Navy but if I go into LinkedIn I can go to the peo digital page and I'll find um I think there's like 200 300 employees there or something and in there I can see um the different people that I might want to reach out to and now I can gather their names now I'll go off and search for their nums or numbers and emails you know through websites Etc So speaking of websites you can go into the agencies and find contact information within uh the agency website some agencies they don't share a lot and it's not intelligence right sometimes I go into civilian agencies so they don't share a lot and DOD does share a lot but your target agency if you go to their website really scour it you will find certain times like DHS is one of my favorite you go in there and they have a ton of contact information about their small business professionals about their acquisition people a lot about a lot of the program office leaders and sometimes you will find their names phone numbers and email more often than not names and emails but that's a start right there right um so there's a lot to be got on the agency website uh you could do the same for companies especially uh large companies small businesses you go in you might look in the about you'll see the owner or something but large businesses they actually put points of contact in there and I describe this uh my favorite example is Booz Allen but all of them are basically like this if you go into Booz Allen you can find people's names numbers and email addresses and find out what they're responsible for I might go to Booz Allen and type in Navy for example and see what comes up and I just look for um you know things that look interesting when I dig in I'll see at the bottom sometimes somebody's name and number if I look at a contract vehicle and I might want to pursue that one because it's uh you know um Seaport Next Generation I can go into booze Allen's page for contract vehicles and find people's names numbers and emails right this is what I teach the people when I work with them but it's what you can do on your own dsbs is where you find owners of small businesses that's fundamentally it if you go in there you will find a point of contact for every small business in there and you can go into fpds or USA spending or something and find companies that you want to talk to come back to dsbs to find their contact information you can also say hey I want to find a bunch of SharePoint companies in Oklahoma type SharePoint type of Oklahoma and the information will come back with a list of companies there and then you will find names numbers and emails for those business owners so you potentially can team up attendee list and I know I'm going at a fire hose because I got a whole nother slide I want to get to um attending lists are perfect you can get these by attending an event and asking for the attendee list or you can go into Sam and sometimes in Sam just go to Sam's search attendee list um but or industry day or whatever but when you search for that and it comes up it's often an attachment will be there with the attendee list I just did a poll recently like 98 of the people said They wish the government would share the attendee list more but in there you will find points of contact not just for small businesses and large businesses and and more often than not large business capture and Business Development managers not the sbos and then you also will find sometimes they'll slide in who came from the agency which is awesome even if it just has the name it gives you a starting point that you didn't have before the gal this is an example of acronyms that I don't want to spell out right it stands for global address list but that's the last time I want to say it at least today um but the gal is how we call it and basically the gal is the phone book inside of an environment so if you're in an agency like Department of Education and you're an incumbent then you're in there and you have an email account you have access to the gal so you can go in go take the time to go to Google and research gal and learn about this because I guarantee you there are people who know about using it and others who don't and it's really important even in the way you do this ethically right you got to make sure you you feel comfortable with whatever you're doing but one of my favorite things to do is to just teach government people how to use the gal so I will teach a small business professional how to go into the gal find the ciso and then find the people who are direct reports of the ciso if they don't know how to do it but the minute they know how to do it they go oh yeah sure I'll make an introduction so now I'm ethically staying away from any data that maybe you feel concerned about but you're teaching your buyer how to use their own tools that's called the gal global address list oh I violated my rule and told you what it meant government the govcon Chamber of Commerce website and me so these are the last two places where you can find names on our website we've got a directory of over a thousand in fact we're just releasing one for May this week and it has a hundred new small business Professionals in this list so over 100 or over 1100 names numbers and email addresses so that you can get on our govcon website and then go to my um personal profile on LinkedIn follow me hit the bell I only share Government Contracting stuff no no fluff right and no distractions and so um when I put information in there more often than not the documents I'm sharing have contact information or if they don't in order to make my post more valuable to you I'm often trying to research okay who would be the points of contact for this document and I put it into my post I'm not putting in their emails and phone numbers but I'm putting in their link to uh um so they're LinkedIn their own LinkedIn profile so follow that stuff and track on it so my tip for you just as you're moving forward is create a lead list targeting is about having a lead list of 100 200 people et cetera but create a lead list and keep it at a running level of 100 people so that you always have new people to call just take 15 minutes 30 minutes once a week and add a bunch of names numbers and emails to this list at your target agency that you'll eventually reach out to okay so let's talk about where to find slam dunk opportunities and what I mean by slam dunk are that when you look at it you go man this this opportunity was written for our company right all things being equal we're going to win this that's what a slam dunk is too often we go for opportunities that are not um slam dunks I'm going to put a little bullet that says drink water to remind me um so let me give you some places you can look for opportunities obviously you can go to sam.gov and by the way don't dismiss sam.gov because it's a great place to go in you can find rfis inside there they sometimes post their long-range acquisition forecast um they'll they'll do industry days so they'll be putting stuff into sam.gov it's not just about something that's out there but you can also look for past Awards and sam.gov or you can look in fpds and find past Awards the ones that are expiring you want to look out I have customers who are on Stars three and so I look at the stars 2 opportunities that will be expiring they're probably going to go on to Stars three and so I want to identify those and bring them forward when I look at USA spending I'm looking here a little bit differently I'll still look for opportunities that might be expiring for example in USA spending but when I find something I really like I'll look at the company right I can look at fpds and get a whole bunch of expired stuff but USA spending I can just click on the company and I'll go to a new report page that will show me that company and what they're winning and where they're winning it at other agencies et cetera and so I can begin to follow my competitors basically right and anybody's ever seen my training I don't want you to spend a lot of time on your competitors but looking at your competitors to see opportunities is a great way so just click on them in USA spending and you'll see the rest you can do this in fpds as well but it's it's uglier in fps long range forecasts right so most agencies have a long range acquisition forecast basically these are the opportunities coming out in the future and they try to go out out years two three four years out but um these long-range acquisition forecasts you can go get a copy of them for your agency and download it we have a directory on the govconchamber.com website Free Directory email right on the home page and that has I think over a hundred different long-range acquisition forecast links and so we make it easy only gonna have to search for me just oh I'm looking for HHS or I'm looking for this or that you click on it and go straight in um make sure you build strategic relationships when you have strategic relationships with uh teaming Partners you can talk to your teammates as strategic Partners these people you talk to on a regular basis and you will hear about opportunities in fact that's what larges say hey if you want to work with us bring us opportunities right we'll do the same to them say you bring me opportunities too um number six is SBA business opportunity Specialists and procurement Center Representatives both of these people in their role and there's many of them across the country um they work with agencies near them so business opportunity Specialists tend to be a little bit more geographically focused but still dealing with agencies within that region and then pcrs procurement Center Representatives they are they're assigned particular agencies particular military bases and they work with the Contracting officers both of these people will hear about opportunities if you build a relationship with them and maintain that relationship then they will notify you about opportunities when it begins to fit your stuff p-tax and APAC accelerators a similar thing they don't have as tight of a relationship with the federal buyer but they absolutely are contacted by buyers who are looking for small businesses just like yours this next one number eight is veteran a veteran vendor Outreach sessions uh also known as advanced planning brief to Industry I think apbi or matchmaking but you get the point right the vendor Outreach sessions when you go in there you will hear about opportunities you'll hear about it from people all around or you hear about it when you're sitting at a matchmaking event so you want to go to these to be able to hear things agency relationships right if you build relationships these people will tell you about what's going on in there and they'll give you an early heads up about something is going to be coming down and then in meetings last thing I wanted to tell you is in a meeting uh make sure your staff knows how to hear implied needs implied needs are opportunities they're not proposals and awards right but their needs teach your staff how to hear implied needs so you have you know however many people but if you have 100 people working for you billable make those people all listen for opportunities all they have to do is let somebody know and you can follow up with a customer to pursue it so that's a great one as well so the last tip for you here is just know your slam dunk criteria right make sure you understand what is a slam dunk criteria for us I did a whole training on how do you determine that criteria so today as it relates to Business Development 101 it really could be 101 and 301 at the same time but what we talked about is making sure you understand business development is knowing an agency better than they know themselves showing that you care that way um I gave you some tips on where you can find people and where you can find Opportunities within your agency and the one last task or suggestion I want to give you is go read your target agency's annual report I mentioned that it's not that many pages but go find it and read it spend lunch reading it and get a better understanding of your target agency if you get value from these trainings become a sustaining member today and help other small businesses get access to it if you're interested in working with me one-on-one in our BD accelerator Workshop just ping me on LinkedIn this is for companies that are already making money and want to go to the next level and the last thing is just remember Government Contracting it is not a secret it's just a process I'll see you in the next training