By Peter Adler Seneca Creek Consulting

Those of us who have worked as professional salespeople in the government IT community occasionally need to remind ourselves that the acquisition process must not subsume our sales skills.

The steps involved in the award of a government contract are, in many ways, process bound. We must not let this inevitable process keep us from exercising our hard-won sales skills. While we may not be able to accelerate the paper process involved in acquisition, we can most definitely compress portions of the sales cycle, reducing the overall time to award.

Early-stage needs analysis can be speeded up if we acquire a thorough understanding of the agency’s problems in the IT sphere before our initial “sit down.” We no longer need long, tedious probing sessions to determine areas of concern to the prospective buyer. Much of the requisite information is readily available in the agency’s Strategic IT Plan and its Mission Statement, both located readily on the Internet. Trade publications are another rich source for information on the agency’s challenges and concerns.

Now when we approach our prospective client, we need to listen primarily to reinforce those problem areas that we have already identified. Should the prospective client desire a presentation on the very first meeting, we can now construct a PowerPoint that is about them, their challenges, and viable solutions offered by our organization.

Intelligently thought-out first meetings and/or presentations have already shortened the discovery cycle significantly by having a gap analysis of the buyer’s needs and proposed solutions in hand when we walk into their office for the very first time.

Wouldn’t anyone choose to do this if the early stage of the cycle could be compressed into a matter of weeks rather than months? If you haven’t done so already, try it. You will be pleasantly surprised.

(Peter can be reached at padler@SenecacreekConsuting.com.)