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um so we're getting started talking about how to guarantee sales in the federal Market on as a small business but today we're going to be talking about um making sales happen right and how can you actually guarantee sales are happening if you haven't heard me talk about seven step process before sales happens when you do the right things and we'll talk about this today but basically it's writing winning proposals having slam dunk opportunities in your pipeline strategic relationships with other companies and then doing a lot of the right activity before you even build a relationship when you do these you're going to have sales success you're going to have repeatable predictable results you'll hear me say this over and over again that that's what I want you to have and so um for today we're going to be talking about understanding the numbers I'm really going to dive into how do you line up your numbers so that you can be aiming for a particular activity um and then identifying bottlenecks I really want to talk about if you're not getting the the if you're not getting the outcome that you want how do you look back in the process and go well what am I not doing quite right that could fit this and then the last thing I'm going to end up with in today's training is give you activity that you should be doing on a regular basis um so let's go ahead and get started on that if you don't know who I am my name is Neil McDonnell president of the Govern Chamber of Commerce and I want to welcome you to my federal sales training um I spent 20 years 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 and when we follow a process A to Z we have repeatable predictable results um if you haven't done this already go ahead and put your company name and your core competency into the chat so we know who you are let others know if you're open to connecting on um LinkedIn and I had one quick question for you for those who feel comfortable putting stuff in the chat I'm really curious on whether you wrote down your 2023 sales goals and in a minute you'll see that those sales goals should not be about 2023 they're about your 2024 and Beyond Revenue goals right and so I'm curious have you written down um what's in there so by the way if you're if you're tracking on this you can definitely switch over to uh our LinkedIn company page so just look at my profile and click on that or you can go to YouTube out out there and then I'll just let the team talk about that okay so let's get rock and rolling um starting with the numbers right I want you to understand the numbers around the goal that you're trying to achieve and so the first thing I want to start with is just some terms that I use there's all sorts of ways people talk about things but I like bringing it down at a very clear terms that are easy for me to understand and which I hope are also easy for you to understand and so the first goal or first um term that I use is revenue right and and this is literally meaning money in my hands money in the bank if I don't have it then it's just all sorts of other variations of it um and so revenue is just money in hand and we'll talk more deeply about that that's your goal for next year for example you're gonna have a 2024 goal your goal is for Revenue how much money do we want our company to make I take Revenue then and I break it into what I call a run rate right and run rate just to me means am I at a 1.2 million dollar run rate level or company am I bringing in enough money that any 12 months I'm going to be bringing in 1.2 million or 50 million or whatever I want to know what my run rate is so that I don't wait till the end of the year to find out if I'm gonna hit my annual goals or my annual revenue goals I'm going to see that on a monthly basis even weekly basis if you want for me monthly is more than enough so then sales um sales is about the contract Awards I'm getting so just keep that in mind when I say what's your sales goal it really is how many how much contract um when value do you want that's your sales goal how much do you need it's to determined based on your Revenue which you'll see in a second and then um going down from that right I'm just kind of reverse engineering through the pipeline the next thing is proposals right how many proposals am I looking to get out the door and in this particular sense I need to have a goal around that and this means a proposal I wrote and sent to the Contracting officer on time that's what I mean by proposal sent and these terms are important to understand how do you hit your sales goals in a minute in your Revenue goals so the last term that I'm going to use when I'm talking about understanding your number is pipeline your pipeline value and what I put here is at the capture stage of bid if you're familiar with the capture or sales pipeline there's different stages for example lead or qualified and then it goes to pursue then it goes to bid depending on what your company has but basically I look at you know qualified pursue bid and proposal and and at each stage As you move it forward it has more value to your company because you've done more research and so in this particular case the only pipeline value I really care about for today are the the opportunities in your sales pipeline that have advanced through capture far enough that they're in the bid stage now for some of you that's just a Time exercise but for most of us it should be a capture exercise and so that is um that's a little quick summary on the terms now let's dive into actually understanding your numbers uh in particular your Revenue goal and for those of you who are you know who are off camera for whatever reason my screen's not sharing Etc um the uh I'll just walk through what I have here so I'm setting a revenue goal for 2024 of 1.2 million I'm saying that my fictional company I want to have brought in my account my bank account 1.2 million it's not enough for it to be coming in in January 2025. that is not 2024 Revenue right so 2024 revenue is money that came into my bank account it's it's that simple to me as a business owner and so I set my goal for 1.2 million you can set your goal higher you could set it for 12 million you could set it for 120 million it doesn't matter these numbers are basically the same you're just reverse engineering the more money your company has the more people who get in and try to add complexity to the whole idea of numbers um but the reality is you know when you think about numbers it's just coming down to how much do you want to bring in so I set it at 1.2 million um at a run rate when I said I want to have a run rate in my head so 2024 monthly run rate mean means I need to be bringing in a hundred thousand dollars per month that means if I'm pure federal government the government needs to be uh sending me a check or electronically right but sending me a check for a hundred thousand dollars every single month I need to be getting a hundred thousand dollars a month into my account every single month in 2024 in order to bring in 1.2 million in Revenue it's really important to kind of keep that in mind the reason you want to look at the months is because you can begin to predict whether you're going to hit your annual goal and whether you're okay with missing it or whether you really step up the activities to um to achieve that annual goal so let's talk about like if you're looking at um a hundred thousand dollars a month that's if you start receiving Revenue in January 2024 you need to get a hundred thousand dollars a month starting in January in order to get 1.2 million at the end of the year of 2024. if you don't start making any money like no money is coming into the bank until let's say March well then you need to sit there and be bringing in a hundred and twenty thousand to still try to hit that 1.2 million dollar 2024 Revenue goal hopefully that makes sense there right and that same number can keep going forward this is why you need to know like have your run rate your monthly run rate so right away your team can see man we got to be bringing this in uh sooner otherwise the lift is going to be tougher at the end it doesn't mean it's the end of the world right you could still bring you know uh not bring in Revenue in the first three months of 2024 and still hit that 1.2 million dollar goal or the 12 million dollar goal you'll just have to be doing more uh billing right in the later months hopefully that makes sense but that's the revenue and I and so the reason I have that in mind is that's driving all the next numbers I'm going to be thinking about so keep in mind as we move forward that 1.2 million dollar goal is our scenario that's a hundred thousand dollars a month Revenue okay so now when you move forward and the next thing I want you to think about is how do you get that Revenue before I even get to my sales I want to think about how does that Revenue even come into my uh company how am I making money and so in this particular case the 2024 Revenue goal is 1.2 million I'm saying I want to make 1.2 million well how many people do I need to be Billing at client sites in order to be bringing in 1.2 million in Revenue the next exercise I have here are five bullets and for those of you who can see the screen you can see what I have here but I'll describe it for you the first thing I want you to do the first number you have to put in your mind is what's the average hourly rate for all of your billable employees I don't need you to say depends depends means you're afraid to answer the question right you want to say well our average hourly rate is this it's okay if you sit there and say well I got a 50 an hour person I got a 40 an hour person I got a 200 an hour person that's cool just write them down really quick add them up divide them and you got your average hourly rate right you can figure that out you can look and go well I got a lot more 40 an hour than 200 an hour okay then adjust the numbers but it shouldn't take you more than five ten minutes to come up with your average hourly rate for your company the reason this is important is because you just need to put a stake in the ground to drive all the other activity if you say depends then you just are waiting you're you're interfering with your ability to do all the other planning so for my come companies um pretty much all of my Government Contracting time my average hourly rate was 125 an hour um and so I like that number because when I think about the average annual revenue I can get from an employee a full-time equivalent employee um who who works through that year is 250 000 the easy math right I love easy math the easy math is to double the hourly rate and you have the annual revenue if you double the hourly rate of a hundred and twenty five dollars an hour that gives you a number of 250 000 a year in expected Revenue right at a normal 1880 hour type billable thing so um when I think about that I go okay if my average hourly rate is 125 dollars an hour then I know that I'm going to be able to expect one FTE one full-time equivalent one person to bring in 250 000 a year and going back sticking with that monthly run rate that I have right um I want to know how much is that person bringing in per month and for me 250 000 divided by 12 is basically like 28 000 but for easy math I rounded down and I said okay that employee is going to bring in twenty five thousand dollars a month I know that my company monthly Revenue goal that run rate is a hundred thousand dollars a month is Where I Wanna Be at and so if every average employee is bringing in 25 000 and I want a hundred thousand per month then I need four people billing for ftes full-time equivalent so in a simple exercise with math I put in my head that I just need four people next year billing out at 125 an hour and I will bring in 100 or 1.2 million in Revenue if I wanted uh 12 million in Revenue I just throw zero on right a zero onto the to the revenue and a zero on to the FTE so I would need 40 ftes next year to bring in 12 million well okay so then you just um begin to think about your efforts so hopefully that made sense there let me move on to the um next slide here where we talk about your sales goals so I talked about revenue and I talked about thinking about the fdes the people who were responsible for this activity so now let's think about um uh how are you going to make that happen through your sales activities just as a refresher our 2024 Revenue goal how much money we want to bring in is 1.2 million for 2024 right for next year so that means our sales goal is 2020 for 2023 this year our sales goal should be 6 million we still have five months left in the year right if I want 1.2 million next year then I need to bring in six million dollars this year what does that mean why do I need to bring in 6 million if I'm if I want 1.2 next year Well the reason is because for most contracts you have a five-year pop anything can change and that's fine but five-year period of performance is a really conservative way of looking at your numbers so instead of saying that I just need 1.2 million in sales or 2.4 million I'm going to the extreme and saying generally if I win a contract that's going to be a five-year contract then that's six million so my sales goal for 2023 is 6 million I need to win six million dollars in contract value contract Awards in uh in 2023 in order to be pretty clear pretty confident that I'm going to bring in 1.2 million dollars in 2024 to meet my Revenue goal because 1.2 million times five is six million hopefully that makes sense so I have a revenue goal of 1.2 a sales goal of 6 million but a sales goal is just what I want awarded to me I need to back it up now in the process remember you have a sale in the seven step process you have sales and you have proposals and opportunities so I just said the sales goal is six million so my proposals uh sent to the government to the buyer that goal is 24 million and let me pause for a second on all my math from this point forward I just use a 25 win rate I just say across the board I expect that I have a 25 win rate you have to decide yourself um you know what number is the right number for your uh your company right whether it's a little higher percentage or maybe you only win 10 percent do your numbers you can adjust it based on it but just know that I'm using a 25 win rate what I mean is every four times I do something one time it'll win every four million one million will win right that kind of thing so my goal for 2023 sales is six million four times six million is 24 million that means my proposals that have to go out the door need to be valued at 24 million in order for me to expect to win six million dollars in contract value at a 25 win rate you can come back and watch the replay right but a couple of guidelines in here the proposals you send can be no bigger than 6 million this is kind of rules that I put in place if I was managing your pipeline et cetera your if your goal is six million dollars in sales that's the upper limit of any opportunity value to um to your projection so so let me try to say it this way it does us no good to send one proposal and have it be a 24 million dollar proposal because we want we only win one out of four proposals so if all I do is send one proposal at the full goal value then I'm not giving myself a chance to win so I want to give myself a 25 chance of win I need to send at least four proposals valued at six million dollars each in order to expect to win six million dollars in contract value you can definitely go up you can write 24 proposals and send them at one million dollars a piece in all sorts of variations but I'm just saying no matter how big your uh proposal value is going out only count six million of it in our scenario today when your goal is a six million dollar sale and a 1.2 million in Revenue so that would be 4 million in Revenue so or uh proposals the last part that I have here is if you think about you have a revenue goal of 1.2 million a 2023 sales goal of 6 million a proposal goal sent out of 24 million then you go back into your pipeline and I'll talk about this from a different angle in a second but if you go back into your pipeline then you should expect the value of your pipeline to be at least 96 million you need to have 96 million dollars worth of value in your pipeline in the bid stage that furthest along opportunity um again it follows the same rule of saying no opportunity in your pipeline can count for more than six million you can certainly participate on an opportunity that is 60 million for all I care it doesn't matter but in our in our forecasting of our efforts we only count that up to 6 million if you win it you're you're Off to the Races that's exciting right you hit you hit all your goals but um in the opportunity in the pipeline you want to make sure each opportunity you're only counting it up to six million and when you do that and you know that you're trying to achieve 96 million in value in your pipeline you'll know that you can only have 19 opportunities I mean excuse me you need to have at least 19 opportunities in the pipeline um hopefully that made sense I know it's a lot of numbers so you can come back and watch the replay this is a very uh fast training and small training it's something that takes like a whole day and and really months of Consulting to teach you but if you come back and look at these numbers and put your own numbers in where I have stuff you will all of a sudden start having goals um by the way if you have questions from the training this is our website I'm showing at the moment but we haven't asked me anything button on there it's open 24 7. so just click on it and ask us anything we'll get back to you as soon as we can but I want to make sure you know that the govcon chamber is there to answer your Government Contracting questions okay so let's talk about um so we set the numbers right but what if we're looking at our activity and and we're saying we're not hitting um any of the goals we're trying to do or uh we're not achieving the outcome that we expect to achieve well how can you look at your process how can your company look internally and say well what are we doing wrong or what could we do better in order to make sure that we're achieving the the outcome and the goals that we set for ourselves and so here I brought back the seven step process and it really is literally asking yourself some questions right um the first one is it you know if I'm not making enough either if I'm not making sales at all or I'm not making enough sales and remember sales means contract wins if I'm not winning enough contracts then I would submit you're not writing enough winning proposals but if you think you're writing winning proposals you can start going back right if you're not writing or if you don't have enough winning proposals going out do you have slam dunk opportunities or are the opportunities in your pipeline kind of all over the place I hear about people they write a lot of proposals so they have a lot of opportunities in the pipeline but are they all narrowed down to cyber security are they all narrow down to elevator or SharePoint Services Etc do you know your slam dunk opportunity I have a whole separate training on how do you define that for your company but if you have enough slam dunk opportunities in the pipeline then you're going to be able to write winning proposals and when you write enough winning proposals you will be able to start winning more um going with this thread right number four uh excuse me number three if you don't have enough slam dunk opportunities in your pipeline you're looking in there you go I just don't have enough then uh you have to ask yourself do we have enough strategic relationships and you probably don't so you need to build more strategic relationships strategic relationships are ones you have with agency and Industry Partners where you are able to hear about opportunities they know what you do they know what you're great at and they'll let you know about opportunities they'll invite you in for discussions Etc um number four right if you don't have enough of these strategic relationships and and I'll Define in a second how you can kind of measure them but and I have a whole separate training on strategic relationships if you don't have enough strategic relationships then the problem in your bottleneck maybe is that you're not calling enough people and so you need to call more people but if you're not calling enough people right if you're if you're not calling enough people to lead to strategic relationships what's causing that well it could be that you don't have a Target list right we talk about building a Target list that leads to um that has you know one 200 people in it that you can call at your target agency if you haven't built that list then how can you reach out and call people and if you don't know how to build that list if you kind of run out of steam you're like I don't know who else to call then you need to do more research and really what I did was just walk back through the seven step process if you're having a problem look to the step before it and go am I doing enough of that if you are writing if your proposals are all winning but you're not putting out enough winning proposals then it leads you back to the opportunity and so on and so on okay so the last thing I want to try to wrap up here with is I want to give you three things that you should be doing um and and I just did daily weekly and uh monthly in here but these are the three things that can be the right things that you can do that will lead to success at the beginning when I talked about the training the training is um the training is how to have guaranteed sales guaranteed sales doesn't come from the government guaranteed sales comes from our activity and so I want to talk about some of the right things that you can be doing that will lead you down that path towards you hitting all your goals your Revenue goals your sales goals Etc giving you that guaranteed success guaranteed success is just about doing the right things the right way and enough of the right things right when you do those you're gonna hit the mark every time so the first thing I want you to do is call five people every day five people right it takes 15 minutes to call five people at most most people don't even answer the phone right so it could take five minutes to call five people but you call them you leave a voicemail it's brand these are brand new people these are not existing relationships you call five new people every single day and when you call them you're calling leaving a voicemail saying hey I'd like to schedule an introduction meeting right there's a whole training on how to do all that but you're calling to do that and then you follow up a little later with an email that entire activity takes 15 minutes even if you called people in the morning and came back and sent an email in the afternoon it's a 15-minute task when you do that um calling 15 people every day and you do it for two weeks and I'll come I'll come back to to the reason I like two weeks is because it fits with the next bullet but two weeks that's only a two and a half hour commitment out of an 80 hour work day if you spend two and a half hours you're going to reach out to 15 new people every two weeks we do this with our customers and and they're setting up meetings every single week kind of thing right you can do this yourself just by picking up the phone calling 50 new people if you do that every week through the year for 50 weeks right take two weeks on vacation if you do that then you're gonna call 1250 new people every single year imagine calling that many buyers that many large primes that many small primes and teaming Partners across both Industries right um when you call those people the right people are gonna uh be appreciating that you call them and they're going to connect with you and say hey we've got opportunities hey I want a long-term relationship hey let's write a proposal together right so call five people every day there cannot be any excuse for um missing this right that should be something you do every single day 15 minutes start of your day second thing I want you to do is every two weeks have this these bi-weekly meetings with strategic partners and again watch my training on it but when you um schedule meetings with eight strategic Partners these are people companies that are all where already winning contracts right so uh I don't mean three million and Below small businesses those are great people keep meeting with them but they're not strategic in the way I describe strategic strategic uh teaming Partners or ones that can help you reach your goal all by themselves so if your goal is 1.2 million whatever small business you're working with make sure they're at a threshold that um they're winning already they're going after more proposals they've got to process and get in there certainly keep the other activity you have but I'm just talking about um every two weeks have a regularly scheduled meeting with large Prime and small Prime strategic Partners these meetings are 30 minutes you're talking about a pipeline at most they're 30 minutes right you're talking about a pipeline you're talking about things you want to do together going into an agency um when you do this with a partner at 30 minutes it's for our commitment right every two weeks it's four hours so now we've got six and a half hours where you're meeting with strategic partners and you're calling new people this is huge these are the right activities As you move forward and the last thing is write four proposals each month and I and I did a whole training on this as well on many uh uh times about how to write proposals not not from a proposal management manager's perspective but from sales but right for proposals each month only write them in your sweet spot your core competency right and the key is you can make them all uh where you're a subcontractor so just find your strategic Partners get on teams get on enough teams where they're the total um are sending out four proposals every month you could do that as a sub and your lift is tiny tiny they'll ask you to write a couple of pages around your subject matter expertise but these are the goals you should be trying for five uh every day um meeting with eight strategic Partners every two weeks and then run write four proposal each month okay so what I want you to remember from today's training and I know it's really fast and I'm probably actually going to come back and do it again because of the technical hiccup but remember these things right in order to have success in government contract you need to understand your goals your numbers um look at your process and identify the bottlenecks that are preventing you from having success farther down the line and then the last thing number three is just do the right things do the right things the right way and enough of the right things that activity and it will lead to success as you go forward I just want to remind everybody that tomorrow we're going to do another training as um and this one is how to grow your government contracting business from zero to one million from one million to 100 million really I'm talking about tomorrow the process of going through that stage as you go forward it's really a strategic looking type training as well so join me in that one and for everybody remember Government Contracting it is not a secret it's just a process I will see you in the next training