You are a small to medium sized business located outside the Washington, DC area and you have decided that you want to enter the federal market. What should you do?

1. Develop a List of Potential Federal Buyers

More than 700,000 federal employees purchase products and services worldwide. The key to finding them is focus and the easiest way to find them is through the Internet. Like completing red tape, finding procurement decision makers is not difficult - - it just requires tenacity and research skills. A recent college graduate with Internet research experience can do it and this will save you from using expensive sale people who should be focused on making sales calls.

Use the Internet and painstakingly compile a list of end users who you think may buy your product or service. Consider monitoring Fedbizopps.gov (the federal public bid site) to see what contracting officers are buying. You can go to agency procurement forecast web pages and monitor the Washington, DC press. Your staff can attend government-sponsored procurement conferences or you can ask your Congressman who is buying what. Or you can buy Fedmarket's end user lists, save confusion and untold research dollars, and focus immediately on making the required sales calls.

2. Begin Making Sales Calls and Hire and Train a Full Time Federal Sales Person

You should begin making federal sales calls immediately and also hire and train a full-time federal sales person if you don't have one. You ask "How can we start direct federal sales immediately if we do not have an experienced federal sales person?" Have an owner, a principal, or your commercial sales manager start making federal sales calls. This may dirty their hands a bit but someone has to do it. They will soon learn that the same rejection occurs when making cold sales calls to federal customers as it does when calling upon commercial customers. In fact, the sales process is identical in both markets. The federal market is just bigger and requires more intense focus. On a positive note, the federal customer will be a bit nicer when throwing up the roadblocks to meeting with you.

The ideal situation would be for your company to find a person with federal sales experience. If you cannot find such a person, you will need to train him or her. First, have them read all of the free content at Fedmarket. Then have the sales person sign up to attend one of Fedmarket's federal training seminars. Our experienced federal sales trainer will immerse your sales person in the reality of federal sales and show him or her how to operate on the federal sales firing line