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Marketing Overview

Marketing your GSA Schedule (Overview)

Your GSA Schedule Contract provides you with a FAR (Federal Acquisitions Regulations) compliant way of selling to the federal government. There are several different ways to generate federal sales and depending upon your product or service will likely alter your approach. We have experienced analysts that provide our government marketing services to our clients with GSA in hand market themselves to the federal government.

Marketing Overview
GSA Advantage (Simplest) - Online Product Sales

If you are marketing a product to the federal government than your listings on GSA Advantage will be extremely important to your federal sales effort. GSA Advantage serves as the “Amazon” for the federal government. GSA Advantage is a place where federal buyers can quickly do market research, product comparisons, and make purchases with their government issue credit cards.

Your products should therefore have detailed descriptions as well as pictures. Selling on GSA Advantage is similar to selling on other online websites. Additionally, once your products are uploaded you should conduct sample searches and look for your product. The search engine that drives GSA Advantage can be tweaked so that your products appear as one of the first few results for your key search terms.

GSA elibrary (Moderate Complexity) – Wage Catalogs / Complex Product Offerings

Federal buyers use GSA elibrary to find your firm’s wage categories or for more complex product offerings, an example would be a more expensive product that has many options. It is important to have your offerings the way a federal buyer is expecting to see them as offerings that are confusing and could cause the federal buyer to move on. Generally, there will at least a phone call or a request for proposal before a sale takes place.

GSA e-buy (Most Complex) – When Federal Buyers are in need of a Tailored Solution

Federal buyers use the e-buy system to ask for solutions to problems they have but want to limit proposals to only GSA Schedule Contract Holders (each proposal requires a through analysis). Generally, they will send out about seven requests to receive three proposals. Firms that did not obtain a request from the GSA are welcome to bid and win with high frequency. Therefore, if e-buy is the place federal buyers are likely to use to procure your products or services a good federal marketing strategy is to check e-buy for RFQs frequently.

Federal Marketing

We recommend that client’s market to two-three federal agencies to start with and then narrow their focus down to a single agency. This is key to getting your first federal contract and from their mastering selling to this agency. Once you have obtained strong past performance it will then be time to leverage this work to move into marketing to other federal agencies.

GSA Intersection with Federal Marketing

A GSA Schedule greatly aids your sales efforts in several means.

  1. Federal buyers know you have been vetted by the GSA, making your firm a much safer choice.
  2. Your firm by virtue of being on a GSA Schedule is set up to take federal credit cards as well as other forms of government payment.
  3. Federal buyers know that purchases made by your firm will be FAR complaint.
  4. GSA Schedule plus past performance makes obtaining IDIQ and GWAC contracts easier which gives you the ability to leap-frog your federal marketing into new agencies.
Action Plan

Give us a call or schedule a time and we can go over a Federal Marketing Action Plan. One of our skilled analysts will go over your product or service offering, target client, as well as what specific items need to be carried out in order for you to gain federal sales in the shortest amount of time possible. As a government marketing agency, we often have examples of similar clients we can share with you on how a successful GSA Marketing Strategy was put into place.

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