What it Takes to Sell your Software Solution to the Government as a Small Business
Table of Contents
Introduction
If you’re a small business and you have software and you’re trying to sell this software to the government, there are a few ways you can get in. First, you need to understand that the government is constantly buying different solutions. Now software, as it happens, is probably half of the solutions, if not more. And the time to act is now. Why?
Identifying the Needs and Challenges in the Public Sector
As it happens, in the last few years, most of the government has been mandated. They have to migrate to the cloud. They have to make sure they’re secure. So, you’ve seen when the pandemic happened, everything had to be changed fast. People went online. People are logging in online. They’re working from home, they’re working from mobile devices, and from public places.
So, a lot of structures have changed. And so yes, the government had a plan to do this over 10 or 20 years, but the pandemic compressed those timelines and you are winning if you’re moving now. So if you’re taking action now, you’re ahead of the curve and you are way more likely to win. Now, how can you get in as a small business? There are multiple tiers of payments that the government has, and let’s see one of them.
Tailoring Your Software Solution
So when selling to the government, you can go directly through a small business set-asides or commercial platforms or contract vehicles. Now, usually, if you start small up to $10,000 payment, most governments have a credit card on file, so they are authorized to buy things up to 10k without any particular loops and hoops that you have to jump through.
Now, from $10,000 to $250,000, those are small business set-asides. And it’s automatically set-aside for small businesses as long as there’s at least two companies that can provide the product or service at a fair or reasonable price. Now, can you represent both sides, both competing offers? I don’t know, but maybe it’s something to look into. Now you have to be certified as a small business, obviously. And if it’s more than $250,000, then you have to go through different contract vehicles and just see it as a proxy that the government cannot buy necessarily directly because of the number, right? If it’s half a million dollars or more, or if it’s $10 million, they need to go through different vehicles because of different reasons I wouldn’t have to dive in right now.
But, what you need to know is you can either be proactive or reactive. So you can come, let’s say, to sam.gov and you register. Then, you can bid on RFP (Request For Proposal). You can bid for a new contract. You can see if you can deliver the service being asked or the product with a better price. And you have to know your numbers, obviously. You make the decision how to do it.
Showcasing Results and Demonstrating Value
Now, some people think that “This is it. Once you bid, you just sit”. Now, what we’ve heard from the government side is a lot of them don’t make the decision if they’re confused, if they don’t know. So, what do I mean by that? A person usually, at the very least when you’re coming in and if it’s a proposal or if it’s a landing page where you represent the whole thing, you have to cover the “Why you?, Why them?, Why this product?, Why now?, and Why at this price?” The price may be something you do on the demo.
It doesn’t have to be public. But for them to make a decision, they need to understand, “Oh, this is made specifically for me. It solves a particular problem. It cost me, let’s say, $100,000, and I’m saving $200,000, right? That’s a business case. So I’m winning already. I’m spending but, what we’re saving is covering the spend, so that’s a win”.
Conclusion
Now if you’re already getting traffic, you have visits, you have bids maybe, and you were looking for other, controllable ways because the bidding is actually not that scalable; you can bid for 100 proposals, but who’s guaranteeing you’re going to get one, right? Nobody.
Now, if you’re looking for that easy button, if you’re looking for a way to get or to acquire that customer predictably, if you have to say, “Okay, next year we need to get 10 of those customers, here’s how we do it, right? It costs us X, it takes us Y. And if we do it 10 times over, we get 10 customers”. So that’s at a very basic level. If you want a more detailed tactical training on how to get those kinds, how to convert more leads, if you’re looking to figure out that flow and that process, if something is not working in your flow, feel free to reach out or watch some more of our training videos to get those nuggets. Thank you.
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