You’ve made your product or you’ve got your idea. Maybe you’re feeling ready to sell! Maybe you’re priming an MVP for the first launch. Perhaps you’re in the early stages of customer discovery. You’ve determined your model and characterized your customer archetypes.  You’ve compiled a list and you’re ready to launch off on industry best practices! 

Launching a business is never easy. There are nuances and challenges to direct marketing and business to business sales alike. People are complex by nature.  Still, one of the most common stumbling blocks for companies entering the government market lies in the challenge of defining and interfacing with a customer.  

A quick look under the hood at the processes by which the government can “make a deal” makes it clear why.  Not only is your government “customer” complex - often they aren’t ONE archetype or persona.  They aren’t ONE person. 

For those seasoned in business to business development practices, this doesn’t sound terribly daunting. There’s often an approval process for major deals and purchases. There's due diligence, maybe a board, and you’ve got to be prepared to “wow” multiple personalities in the room.  

So why does the government “customer” STILL trip people up? 

Not only is the customer broken out into multiple people, but they span across multiple organizations, are tied to different (sometimes conflicting) value propositions, and support overlapping, but independent processes. Often, in fact, they do not know each other by name, or even organization, and are unfamiliar with each other's processes.  This turns the role of the business development lead into that of a program manager, responsible for engaging and establishing an integrated team, functioning as a foreign entity without authority beyond the credibility of their product offering. 

If you’re a small business, programs like SBIR/STTR and other outreach opportunities can serve to give you the initial “in”.  But winning a SBIR award should be viewed as the starting point for your journey.  There are instances where your government partner happens to be a connector that knows the system and sets up the calls, but more often than not, YOU have to guide your government contact to their counterparts, help them build the argument, and ensure they connect the dots. 

If you’re asking yourself, “how do I even begin?!” then read on! 

Customer Breakdown: 

The actual complexity of your customer breakdown will depend on what you're selling and at what scale.  Something very inexpensive that can be purchased on a government credit card may have a smaller and more interconnected chain than a product that needs to arrive at a program office for integration.  

In general, however, your customer will be comprised of 4 people or organizations: 

• The User
• The Funder 
• The Buyer 
• The Requirer

The User

This is the person who’s actually going to USE your “thing”. If you’re having a user-centered design discussion, they’re most often the ones you want to be talking to. This group is the one to whom your core value proposition should resonate best! 

The Funder

This is the person or organization with money that can be spent on your thing. They may be affiliated to your user or buyer organization, but then again, they might not!  SBIR, for example, is often centralized, so if you’re using SBIR funding, it may come out of the SBIR funding office, while your users may be more tactical and executing in affiliated organizations. 

Sometimes your funder is an external agency with incentive funding for a technology area such as energy. On some occasions, your funder is someone completely unassociated with your work. It’s simply an organization that has surplus funding they want to spend before organizational deadlines. 

You can help unlock a funder by researching available funding and learning THEIR organizational mission. Know that this may be different from your user's mission, and be prepared to communicate either based on who you’re talking to.

The Buyer

Your buyer is someone who is authorized to make a deal. This may be a warranted contracting officer, or it may be a resource advisor with delegated authority to buy things on a purchase card under a certain dollar threshold. 

Your buyer might be very invested in what you’re selling. They also may not. Often, our government buyers aren’t brought in until it’s time for them to do their part, and have limited details on the project or program. Their focus is on making sure that both the intent and letter of the law are being followed in the formation and execution of the relationship, and they are PERSONALLY on the line for doing so. 

A truly effective program or project lead will include their buyer from the beginning - if you’re lucky enough to be tied to such a person, then you should find yourself sliding into the contracting or purchase phase of your effort to be smooth! For those that feel like things were going great and you hit some bumps, this is often why!  Slow down and put yourself in their shoes if you can - this is often a case where “slow down to speed up” pays off.

The Requirer 

This is the person that can trigger the authorization of funding for your thing. For most inside of the government, this will flag the notion of what we formally call a requirement. This is a need that has been reviewed and codified, and that funding is specifically tied to within the president's budget.  If you are a major program, or will be integrating into a major program, this may be the context in which your “requirer” is defined. While requirements generation can be influenced, you won’t have any direct control here.  (We’ll talk more about how to drive and influence these actions in a later post!)

For many, the requirer may be more vague. It may be a commander whose intent will drive how a subset of funding is spent based on their interpretation of larger goals and formal requirements. It could simply be the person who sets the goals for a discretionary budget or program line – the loser we get with this term, the more likely the requirer is to merge with your customer or funder.  In this case, you’re rolling back to “simple” sales! 

So how do I know who I should be working with? Sometimes they’re different, sometimes they’re the same, sometimes they talk, sometimes they don’t. Clear as mud, right? In the coming weeks, we’ll start breaking down these personas with some tips and best practices on what matters most to each, and how to identify, characterize, and engage with YOUR specific government “customer”.  

Any specific questions on this topic, or any other topics you’d like us to cover? Please share in the comments! 

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