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in today's training I want to talk about the federal sales life cycle and how you can succeed in there one of the best ways to succeed selling is to understand how buying is done and I really want to um point out that the federal government in particular the federal buyers right they follow a real clear process I love this about the federal government because as they go forward um I know their their acquisition life cycle their process from initial requirement until contract Award right and what I want you to keep in mind is that your sales activities your sales efforts should overlay on top of the government's acquisition life cycle or acquisition process you want to align your activities to their activities and when you do that then you're able to start um seeing like an opportunity trying to chase you can see where they're at where that opportunity is in the journey and make sure that you're doing enough on the sales side as well thanks for those sound checks out there let me go ahead and share my slides and we'll just get rocking and rolling talking deeper about um the federal sales life cycle and what you should be thinking about the big thing I want you to remember about sales just in general across the board sales is a um proactive approach to winning it is not a reactive approach it's really important that we keep that in mind because when we say it's a proactive approach it means we're doing something to make something happen and we're not just waiting for it to happen the opposite of that is a reactive approach right and so in a reactive approach in federal sales is an example is to see an RFP when it drops and then responding to it you might see it in sam.gov or you might actually have a contract vehicle like cport NextGen or or GSA or whatever and you see it in that contract vehicle and then you're responding well even though the competition is reduced from 300,000 businesses down to let's say a TH or 2,000 on cport NextGen you're still in this reactive mode I don't want to sit there and say that you shouldn't do that I'm totally okay with you going after an opportunity if you see it at the last minute but that's a a reactive way of doing business and so that's not a really ideal way of doing business that can be 10% the other 90% should be proactive we should really be driving um in the direction we want one of the downsides of a reactive approach to business is that uh if the RFP drops and that's when you see it you're behind the curve right you're hearing about the opportunity at the last possible minute um you're behind anybody who did capture me and people who are like me who are putting opportunities six 24 months out and and chasing them and trying to win them right you're behind any of us who have been able to get into the government and have conversations and um and you're kind of stuck in this position where you're the only one who uh excuse me the only information you have is what you're seeing right there in that document and that document is a sanitized document that RF P it's a San sanitized document compared to the opposite right if I hear about an opportunity at the very earliest stage which I'll talk about about that I have a chance to get in and talk to the government the Contracting officer the the program officers Etc and I can hear stuff that won't be in the paperwork right they're not giving me secrets but you're able to just pull a thread you're say well what about this what about that the minute an opportunity gets uh to the RFP stage even a little bit before the conversation's locked down and so when you get in there early and have a proactive approach you can have a lot more conversation with the buyer if you don't know who I am my name is Neil mcdonell I want to welcome you to the uh my federal sales training where I provide tips for succcess in the federal Market I spent 20 years in the federal Market as small business owner and since 2018 I've been teaching people like you that Government Contracting is not a secret it's just a process when we follow the process a toz we're going to have repeatable predictable results and that's what I want for you I know that's what you want for yourself right is a pipeline that leads to predictable revenue and when you follow a process you're going to sit there and have that predictable Revenue um I don't know if you've already subscribed to my newsletter but but please do that Government Contracting success newsletter uh this newsletter is where we share even more information about Government Contracting there's just so much information that we put out that I think would be helpful in your sales activity right I don't just put it out for the sake of putting it out I just put something out today and it literally was guiding you down this path of how to get into the Army on the sustainment supply chain Logistics side right well if you miss that then I'm summarizing those in a newsletter and then other times in the newsletter I put sales and that you know Business Development capture tips and and road maps Etc so make sure you subscribe to that newsletter if you're feeling extra generous if you get a newsletter and you like it send it to two or three friends and we'd appreciate that but I'm sure they'd appreciate it as well on the right hand side you see a little red box it says register for training if you're here today and one of the 100 people who registered thank you very much I really appreciate that if you're not I'm about to um put out five more trainings for next week and so uh you'll have the opportunity to register for those and I ask that you do when you register to attend first off you it's an easy way to say thank you to me right because I'd love this LinkedIn lets other people know that we're doing this training we can help more and more people the other reason it's helpful is because LinkedIn will remind you of the training let you know that it's coming up and the last thing is don't come to the training alone H if you like today's training invite a friend next time okay so let's get rocking and rolling on Le hand side you can see that I'm going to cover down on a high Lev set of overview of the federal sales process this this is not a deep dive into any one of these by the way because I have multiple trainings for each one of the bullets you see on the left hand side business development capture proposal um and actually I was going to put a guide there but I didn't do that so I might send that after the fact if you put guide let me ask you really quick before I go forward uh in the chat just tell me if you had to say which one was the toughest for you is it business development capture management or proposal writing uh proposal management Etc put one of of those words BD capture or proposal into the chat to let me know which one's the you know the most challenging for your company okay so I wanted to begin with this chart uh I I thought it'd be an ideal place to begin because um I said if you want to be good at sales then make sure you understand the buying process your sales life cycle should align to how your customer buys and so this diagram is from USDA I did a whole kind of training on earlier in the week that I really love because it lays out how does the government buy and this is not just USDA right this colorful one is theirs but this is fundamentally how the government buys um I'm not going to to go too far into it but the idea is they have a requirement they start exploring that requirement they start doing some Market uh survey to see if industry's got input onto the technical requirements and if they might be able to find people um to bid on it and then they go through and shape the whole acquisition you can see all that going forward the reason this is important is when you have a Target agency you want want to make sure you understand their buying process you want to this is one of the questions I would ask when I'm doing business development in particular um and and I can do it in capture if I'm that late but I want to know my target Agency for example da I'm in there with a particular customer what is your buying process what's your life cycle and I don't want you to ramble ramble it off they have diagrams like this and that's um business development is about trying to find this document so let me um talk about federal sales life cycle uh from a couple different diagrams that I have and I just thought these be helpful uh to look at because the idea is I want to align my sales life cycle to the government buying process and this is where I begin to do this um if you look at the RFP phase right here above the word formal in the center of the screen this is where I said it was too late if you're at this stage it's reactive and so what you want to do is be participating earlier on so if I go one step ahead or to the left it's market research and this is still formal part of the formal acquisition process and so you could think rfis source of sought Etc and what I want to point out here is that's the time to influence the government the most and when I say influence I don't mean you're going to twist their arm I mean you're G to have discussions with them if you have a conversation with a Contracting officer they're going to hear you go that makes sense maybe I'll consider that right and I'll talk more about how to do that or or what to do that on specifically but in this stage when you're in the market research this is RFI and sources sought resp uh responding this is where small businesses hurt themselves small businesses sometimes sit there and say I never win anything off of responding to sources sought or rfis so I'm not going to do it it's a waste of time it's a waste of money this is the part in 2024 that I would highly recommend you recommit to and you go you know what forget about whatever my past experience is I'm coming here if you only respond to your target agency if you only respond to your core competency what I call your slam dunk opportunity and if you respond over and over again I guarantee you're going to win right if you're in an agency like the Army and you're responding and you're uh writing about cyber security in a particular risk management framework you're going to get known because it's not just the small business specialist seeing you it's not just the Contracting officer seeing you but it's also the um program office seeing you so you want to participate if you're not winning and you're not being brought back in then I would uh my first thing that I look for is are you writing to Stu that's outside of your core competency outside of your slam dunk opportunity if you can come in and write to your um write to RFI responses and and I mean write RFI responses and source of sought responses in your area of expertise you will impress the uh Contracting officer and other people in the government enough so that you can get in get in and start having conversations which allows you to shift left a little bit more to this whole informal stage and and I have a whole separate training so I'm not going to dive into it here but this is the idea where you get in before it's even uh the Contracting officer is really even getting involved I just talked with a company this morning who does artificial intelligence like truly does artificial intelligence not just chat GPT and using it right and so they can come in and help the government do certain things and what I was telling them is you want to get in and have conversations and give people aha moments that idea you don't want to respond to the government's idea you want to be in there early enough and this is business development right being in there early enough to be able to give them the very ideas they should be thinking about right I know you've been using lenium for a hundred years but I recommend you use bamboo flooring for example and I don't know anything about flooring but I recommend you use bamboo flooring because it reduces the cost uh by 10% but more importantly Studies have shown that people's feet feel so much better or something whatever right and and that's discussions with the program office that is this informal area and this is this area where business and development and cap come together let me show it to you another way and hopefully this diagram is very familiar to you this is the seven-step process that I teach for success in Government Contracting and there's two sections right there's this path to relationships and then when you hit relationships on this wheel you are now on a wheel of success and I say once you're on it it's pretty impossible to get off it and then it's only going to lead to continued success of course I'm simplifying it but that's the whole point right you you have um what you need to succeed you just got to follow a process and get better and better at the process to lead to success and so this seven step process uh Business Development be this is all business development basically the first time I'm showing you right research getting in there and understanding the buyer and then trying to identify people you want to talk to and then reaching out to them that cold call you're trying to break into a um in industry and I've done previous training on this that you can go look at our past training but when you uh do Outreach you're identifying the right people to build strategic relationships with you don't want to know everybody you want to know about 8 to 16 people when you know that many people you're able to really understand an agency and begin to get in there the one thing I want to talk about as I move forward these processes that I teach or designed to work with one person company or 100% company or more the whole point of it is is to not burden ourselves with too much work if you're not making enough money that you could be full-time Business Development salesperson then you need to be subcontracting under small businesses it'll reduce the workload on you but allow you to focus on your subject matter expertise and so as we go forward and we talk about some of this stuff just keep this in mind um this same process by the way that I'm showing it can be modified a little bit for the path for relationship if I identify an opportunity then I'm going to research the agency around one single opportunity not the whole agency I'm going to identify targeting I want to build a list of 15 20 people related to that opport opportunity and then I'm going to start calling those people related to that opportunity so I can develop relationships with potential uh selection board folks or potential teammates or potential competitors I can develop that and the opportunities um in this point it goes into more solutioning or something but it's the same process basically you need to understand develop relationships and get on that wheel of success okay so let's talk about business development the way I teach it and I only got 15 minutes left right so I go through at a very fast pace um each one of these things I'm talking about I have an additional separate training that's broken out where I dive deep into certain things but I just wanted to start from a high level um and talk about business development right business development is the first stage of the federal sales life cycle and I'm sorry I didn't put a graphic in here but the federal sales life cycle the way I teach it right is it begins with business development it moves on to capure and it goes to proposal it really is that straightforward um and we'll talk more about that so Business Development for me uh covers down on three things right business development if I have a brand new uh person I'm teaching in business development I'm saying here's what you need to do I need you to get in there and understand an agency I need you to build relationships and I need you to identify opportunities it literally is that straightforward that's what I want from a business developer your job is to get in there and and move that around that's a different skill set than a capture person which we'll talk about in a minute but a business developer is almost that uh social butterfly that likes moving around everywhere capture is a lot more tactical than a business developer and so when I say um understanding an agency I Want to Break these uh these points down and today I'm going to use the Army as an example and additive manufacturing because I got a customer actually I'm sorry I should put da not Army I got a customer doing additive manufacturing and we're talking about going into da to pursue that right and so when I look at an agency and I'm trying to understand them I always say you want to understand the agency better than they understand themselves that's totally possible I had an intern several years back who was under me and I was mentoring them and within their second uh 30 days they had information that the people they were calling at an agency didn't have and those people were like hey can you share that information Imagine The Authority shifting right where it's not who's in charge but it's just like hey I'm I'm willing to listen to you now because you got information we didn't have um and that comes from doing research right step one in a seven-step process to under understand the agency so here I want to understand what's the purpose of D how does Da interact with the military services that are out there right it's it's one thing to go they buy a lot of stuff there's dibs and blah blah blah but there's another to truly understand what are they doing to truly understand that DOD sees the supply chain as a national security issue we need to make sure that supply chain is strong and impenetrable right however you say that word fully and so that's understanding the mission and the purpose and then goals and objectives what is that agency trying TR to do not just this program office but when I do business development I'm looking at the agency if I want to sell the da of course I want to go after these particular opportunities but I want to understand the agency Mission I want to understand the subordinate commands within da and how they fit together so that they just have awareness I care about that customer I want millions and millions and millions of dollars from them at some point in the Years forward well I should commit to understanding what they're doing so I don't become a vendor to Da I become a strategic partner to da so goals and objectives this is where um sometimes when you look at an opportunity they have their own goals and objectives but you want to look at the top uh agency priorities their strategic goals inside of every goal they have objectives and activity that's leading to those objectives being achieved you want to understand what they are the reason I say this is because you want to take your company and align it to the goals that you can support you can't support every one of DA's goals for example but when you look in you're like oh I see I can support this now now when you have meetings in the future you're talking their language you're talking to their priorities you're not talking to your product and this going with those goals and objectives you want to understand the agency challenges often one of my most favorite documents is an oig report of management uh challenges faced by an agency go watch the training I've done or just go to your a go to your agency and type into their search bar management challenges and you'd be amazed at what comes back like the the Frank discussion the agency is having with itself with where it has challenges and to me that's where industry can help and then building relationships right and here I'm going to go a little faster but um the second purpose of Business Development is I want you to start building relationships first you understand them so then when you start reaching out and having trying to have those first meetings you're trying to build relationships in particular with the government and I put F FR ffp what that stands for is focus of receptivity these are friendly people who will just talk to you about the agency but they really have no power or um need the second group is focus is dissatisfaction these are the program office people usually right they're the ones that have the need and focuses of power in the government is Contracting officers these are the ones that can sign the contract and award it to you when I'm trying to go into da sticking with that example I want to find complimentary businesses that are winning in da that are small businesses and large businesses so if I look at additive manufacturing I want to go well what businesses that are in there that are doing something that might be related maybe they're selling parts and added to manufacturing and 3D printing might be able to print those parts right maybe we can come together and jointly go after more work together Etc and so building relationships I want to build relationships from many angles and um through those relationships I will be able to identify opportunities when I'm talking to the small business specialist when I'm talking with a Contracting officer I'm going to hear about short-term opportunities even 12 months shortterm and when I'm talking to the program office I'm going to hear them talk about maybe even even their uh fiveyear 10year view I used to work with a customer um in DOD and on the back wall of my my customer boss's uh office was a 10-year plan of all these things they were trying to do and I swear it was like picking candy off it right that's the that's the value of being an incumbent but if you're doing business development the next best thing is to try to get in there and have conversations about what are you trying to do over the next year that we can help you with and then what are you doing next year and the year after um okay let's talk about capture management and I and I see I'm probably going to have more slides that I can cover down on but if business development is about understanding an agency building relationships and identifying opportunities right big picture around an agency then capture management or capture is the way I describe it is increasing the likelihood of winning a single opportunity so the idea here is if business development is helping me identify uh slam dunk opportunities that are good to go into our pipeline then from a capture standpoint and most times with small businesses by the way it's the same person doing BD and capture I get that it literally should not be the same person writing a proposal it better to Outsource that or something if you can but the idea of Business Development capture being that same person that totally makes sense in a small business under even 20 million right but the idea is when you have opportunities in your pipeline you take the most important one and you say hey let me start shaping that in a way that increases our likelihood of winning that's the whole reason and opportunities in the pipeline is so that we can increase the likelihood of winning there's a lot of other ways to describe it but fundamentally that's it and so we want to fully understand the customer goals and challenges around this opportunity we'll see some of that in the statement of work or some of the documentation but capture is about exploring that with the customer right I noticed it said this what are you thinking about this especially if you get in early you're talking about six 12 months before an opportunity's RFP drops you can have these conversations I noticed in the oig report they said this how's that impacting your office you're beginning to understand these things um there's a a a proposal lead out there um you know expert Juliet Fletcher somebody put her Link in if you're feeling generous she wrote a great post this morning that I love she says hey uh I'm paraphrasing but basically in order to write great proposals we need this this this this and I loved it because I'm like well in order to write great proposals capture needs to do this this this this and and if you listen to a proposal writer and go how do I help you write a a stronger more winning proposal they'll tell you and all you have to do is go do that I want to understand the challenges and pains of the customers in order to put that in the proposal okay let me go have meetings and ask them that um and and by the way experience is what it you'll develop as you keep asking the questions over and over again um to understand those challenges and pains but in the very beginning you could literally ask them hey I just wanted to ask you about your goals and your challenges and let it go from there right when you're more experienced you get a little bit better pulling threads okay so you um in capture you're trying to play up your strengths in everybody's mind on the government side and so you're and you're also trying to mitigate or reduce the chances of your weaknesses basically being in the RFP I you know if if I do um additive manufacturing but I don't do it in um with this particular technology well I want to stress in conversations that hey this technology is even better you guys should really consider that or maybe I'm throwing in suggestions about the the certifications or something around it so minimizing this weakness that we have that we didn't we couldn't afford this particular tool or something right you're whatever your weaknesses are if you know them you're trying to reduce them out of the RFP or eliminate them out of the RFP um competition right capture is about eliminating the competition I want to reduce the competition by trying to get the opportunity set aside a woman own small business uh takes it from 3 300,000 businesses down to like 10,000 and I want to discourage the competition I want to get something like you must be a Microsoft gold certified provider uh in there if I get that put in there a lot of businesses are gonna go Ah that's wired I'm out of here even if they're gold certified sometimes they just I'm out of here whoever got that in there somebody's ahead of it and you don't have to do a lot of work to be justifying it but these are through conversations again when I say influence the government I don't mean in a bad way you have to justify why m gold certified is necessary um okay and the last one I put here is that you want to maximize your winning proposal score I don't like the idea of pwin that that whole term just was um it just seemed vague whenever I last 20 years I've been in the government space doing this and it just seemed vague I'd see too many people make up the number but a winning proposal score is literally based on the activity you do and capture and every time you do something like gamification you're getting score you're increasing the winning proposal score and the whole idea is you want to get a winning proposal score of 80% or higher you don't want to guess at it you want to know it's because of these certain things that are in place um and so just when you do capture that's what you want to do you can go check out trainy I have and just type in winning proposal score and it's a whole separate 30- minute training just on that score um here's some examples of shaping tasks and I'm running out of time so I just want to cruise forward really fast but this idea is you can shape a lot in an opportunity and the government look at you and go yeah that ain't happening right but sales people capture people our job is to get in there and try to shape as many things as we want and so this is just a sample list of what I put here but you want to have in your company and it can start with one thing to begin with but slowly but surely you want to say hey we want to shape our opportunities always to try to get this you know if we don't get it no big deal but if we get even one or two We're Off to the Races of uh eliminating competition so an example one of my favorite ones is oral evaluations number five I want to get them to say You must come in and talk to us because there's a lot of people who use writers who aren't going to go in and do the work compared to if you're the expert you can go in and wow them they're like I want you and your team it's like okay another one that I'll just leave here is uh and I'm happy to share these slides today I don't share slides but because there's so much I'm okay doing it um today so this one number eight is my favorite one uh with page count what I would recommend you try to do is like get them reduce the page count you know you really can um get a good response in 15 to 20 Pages that's hard for people it's very hard if the page count is 50 pages anybody can fill 50 pages but it's incredibly hard to fill 20 pages with 50 pages of of value right uh so let me just oh this one other thing this a pipeline I'll show it to you later but if you're newer to sales pipeline the idea is you're moving opportunities through the pipeline even if it's just you it doesn't have to be that hard right you're just moving it saying does it look like a fit is it guaranteed a fit okay let me start shaping that opportunity let me start beginning to write the proposal let me write the proposal and send it out um it you know I have a whole separate training on this one but it was just a different way of looking at the pipeline I just want to kind of come down here to the proposal so if the three stages of the federal sales life cycle are business development capture and proposal writing what I say proposal is about right and I'm not trying toh speak from a proposal manager's way of speaking but from a salesperson the whole point of proposal writing is to deliver a winning proposal to the customer that's it as a boss as a company owner that's all I want if you're pushing out proposals I don't need volume I need winning proposals going to the customer if you're doing that then our chances of winning one out of three or one out of four at most opportunities are great and it allows me to predict the revenue so um as you write proposals just a quick tip for you is that remember that proposals need to be clear compliant compelling and convincing and if you're not on a video clear is no heavy jargon compliant is all the Sha statements compelling is help them see the transformation the vacation to Maui Hawaii right and convincing is help them believe what you're saying the transformation is that you are the ones to take them there um so here's what I want you to remember just so I end on time first thing is make sure you understand your customer's buying process right when you understand that then follow your proven sales process and align it to the buying process the last thing is get away from the rfps dropping and being reactive be proactive by shifting left in the process and speaking of a process just remember Government Contracting it's not a secret it's just a process I'll see you in the next training