How early should you identify a sales opportunity in the federal market? The answer is that an opportunity must be identified before anyone, including the customer, knows that an opportunity exists. Our customers frequently say "We don't want potential opportunities. Instead, we want contact information for potential customers that know they have a problem, have approved money to solve the problem, and are ready to contract out to solve the problem." Although it would be ideal to come across the opportunity described above, everyone in the market knows about such opportunities and it's likely your competitors have already sold the customer.

Companies can research sales opportunities, or the re-bids of existing contracts, in sales databases which are sold as subscription services. Although the opportunities listed are often solid leads, the competition is intense. In the case of re-bids, the incumbent vendors have been selling the customers for the entire duration of their contracts. The critical question is how potential customers can be targeted before your competitors find them. There is no secret formula to developing a federal sales plan - - it is just focused research.

The development of your company's federal sales plan is an art, not a science. Furthermore, companies find that their federal sales plans improve as they gain experience in the federal market. If it's an art, how do we get started?

In a general sense, you need the following:

• Agency information
• Organizational data
• Titles and contact data for end users and official buyers
• Historical data on who is buying what product or service

When doing research on the Internet, you need to focus your efforts. Consider the following tips:

• Geographic focus - Small businesses selling commercial products and commodities and small service companies can focus on the agencies in their geographic delivery or service area.
• Functional - Companies selling training, IT services, recruiting, human resources, etc. can focus first on an agency and then the people who head related departments within an agency. For example, such companies would want to target the training director, the chief information officer, the head of personnel, etc.

Secondly, commercial companies (like Fedmarket) compile and refine the data to save you research time and expense. Even the specialists, such as our company, have to do research because we don't have the ultimate "what they buy" list that you hoped existed somewhere.