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