Government Business
Finding Agencies and End Users
By Richard White
May 19, 2005, 11:23

Finding agencies and end-users that buy what you sell is one of the most difficult aspects of government sales. And yet it is one of the most important since it is the key to focusing your sales efforts. Throughout this primer series you will be advised over and over again to focus your sales efforts. Finding the people who buy your product or service is the critical first step in a focused sales program.

Each government program purchases goods and services to carry out its particular mission. As an example, the federal Department of Defense buys nearly every product ever made and service ever provided. Guns, clothing, vehicles, consumer goods for the PXs, military base maintenance and operational services, paper clips, computers, and funeral and Chaplin services, just to name a few.

Within the Army, thousands of program managers, program professionals, operating supervisors, engineers, and scientists participate in deciding what to purchase and from whom.

Finding your potential customer is an art, not a science, and how you approach the process depends on the type of products or services you offer.

UNDERSTAND AGENCY MISSIONS

Common sense and intuition can direct you to starting points for further research concerning who buys what.

Unique or Specific Products and Services

The more specific a product/service is, the easier it is to pinpoint potential customers. Firefighter hoses, for example, are specific. Thousands of firefighting agencies nationwide buy firefighting equipment, and it doesn't take long to figure out which agencies in your area are involved in firefighting.

Another example: suppose that you sell a device to reduce the time needed to fill a sand bag. The Federal Emergency Management Service (FEMA), the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Army Corp of Engineers would be places to start. Further research, usually on the Internet, will point you to other agencies that fill sand bags.

At the state and local levels, you'd look for towns, cities, and counties near rivers that have experienced flooding. You'd dig into FEMA records by making telephone calls and if necessary written requests under the Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to find where the emergency funds flow.

Commodities and General Services

In contrast, almost every government agency purchases office supplies, so you would need to focus on geographic areas that you can reach economically, both from sales costs and shipping costs viewpoints. Office equipment and supplies, office furniture, reproduction equipment and supplies, and office leasing would all fall into this category. Again, the Internet can be helpful in finding agencies within your geographic area of business. Look at your state website and, for federal information, try FirstGov. In the case of office supplies, you'll have more potential customers, but the downside is that for each one of them the competition will be keener.

The Department of Defense Internet site, Selling to the Military, provides information on military buying by purchasing office. Go to Part 2: Products and Services Bought By Major Military Purchasing Offices.

Our CD-Rom of Government Internet Sites is helpful in locating agencies within your state. More information about this new product can be found at Fedmarket.

INTERNET SEARCHING

The Internet has become a panacea for conducting market research. Market research using the Internet is such a broad topic that it is best illustrated with an example. Let's consider FEMA again. In your research you might do the following:

Go to FirstGov, and find the FEMA homepage using the keywords, "Federal Emergency Management Agency." The first listing in the search results is Fema.gov.

For state and local government, use the search engine at Google.com. For more efficient searching, try Bidengine, or, again, our CD-Rom of Government Internet Sites, at Fedmarket.

At the FEMA site, start your research at the "Doing Business with FEMA" web page. Most of the information here is helpful, especially two sections:

1. The "Listing of Active Contracts" section shows what FEMA has bought in the past through large contracts and the end dates for these contracts. The contract listings are not tied to end-users, but are, nonetheless, excellent starting points for determining if FEMA buys what you sell. (Not all federal sites list active contract data but many state sites do.)

2. The "Doing Business Guide" section lists program offices and what they buy.

Let's assume that you've now identified a program office that buys what you sell. Now is when the market research gets a bit more challenging. You must find who is in each program office and what their responsibilities are. Then you must determine how to get a hold of them. For example, the training program head within a program office would be the obvious person purchasing training-related products and services. This would probably be the first person you'd call if you worked for a training company.

Each agency's web site will be different in how it presents personnel and organizational information. In the case of FEMA, the web site shows key personnel and their contact information, although you have to go several places to tie it all together. The site contains the names of program managers and staff. Email addresses have a common format, allowing you to formulate a person's email address from their name.

Frequently, you'll have to go beyond the Internet to find relevant end-users. If you can't find end-users at the site, call the agency's public affairs office and/or small business office and ask for staff directories, organization charts, and written information about the agency's programs. Don't be shy! It's all public information, and it's their job to assist you.

If you visit an agency, make a personal call on the public affairs office and the small business office. They may not be much help in finding you specific business opportunities, but they can be useful in providing you with end-user contact information.

Official buyers also are an excellent source for information on end-users. They know who buys what in their agency and it's their job to assist you in finding the end-users who buy what you sell. Buyer contact information often can be found at an agency's purchasing web site.

Just to sum up how we might be helpful to you in this area, the following Fedmarket.com products are designed to assist you in finding end-users and buyers.

• CD-Roms of Federal Credit Card Holders,
• CD-Roms of Government Internet Sites, from new product tour,
• CD-Rom of Official Buyers,
• Bidengine.com provides a convenient way to find buyer contact data at the federal, state and local levels. Bidengine searches about 1,000 Internet pages containing buyer contact data key word. If you sell office supplies, Bidengine can tell you what agencies have purchased your product using the keywords "office supplies."

1. The Federal Procurement Data Center (FPDC) publishes contract award data for all procurements exceeding $25,000.
   
   
2. The Defense Logistics Agency publishes source and pricing data for products assigned a National Stock Number (NSN). The source and pricing data is published for procurements of any size.
   
   
3. For buys under $25,000, purchasing offices maintain paper records of awards, and these are available upon request.
   
   
4. Browse or search notices of award at FedBizOpps. (Go to http://www.fedbizopps.gov and click on the "Vendors" icon in the lower left part of the page. Search using keywords at http://vsearch1.eps.gov/servlet/SearchServlet. Be sure check the "awards" radio button.)
   
   
5. Search for awards at Navy Electronic Commerce Online (NECO). Specifically, go to http://www.neco.navy.mil/synopsis/synopsis.cfm and use the Advanced Search option.