Ask HN: How do you sell to governments and large organizations?

[hsikka]

I've been seeing repeated mentions of early warning systems for a lot of diseases, but not too much technical development! I think I could hack something together that would be an interesting proof of concept and function as an effective early warning system, using my ML and Public Health background. Of course, I don't know who to directly sell to, its not like most businesses or consumers are interested in reducing disease burden, government folks seem interested though!

[BostonEnginerd]

I sell $1m+ pieces of equipment into large companies, not governments and the key is to network throughout the company and build a coalition of interested people for your product. For example, at one company I've worked with - I've spent loads of time talking to people with similar positions at each site they have and have run loads of demos for each of the groups.

Each of the groups pushes the need up to their local management, and the local management talks to corporate. A key factor in our success has been getting corporate to hear a similar message from multiple sites asking for our equipment.

It takes a really long time to make anything happen - often on the order of 2-3yr.

[rpedela]

How does one network throughout the entire company as an outsider?

[davemel37]

This is precisely what Account-based-Marketing is supposed to be. It's too bad there is so much concept creep in the marketing world, its tough to know whats what.

[cheez]

I upvoted, but also chiming in to say networking is very important.

[skanga]

Any techniques on exactly how you do that?

[GlenTheMachine]

Most US government agencies don't have discretionary money to spend. That means that you can have the greatest idea in the world, and still may not be able to find a buyer.

Selling to the government usually entails one of three things:

1) You can sell a commodity by being a registered vendor, e.g. through the GSA. GSA registered vendors have usually agreed to prices up front, which eliminates some of the red tape. But this doesn't seem to match your situation.

2) You can find an announced opportunity. In other words, the government is telling you that it wants something. You can then write a proposal to sell it that thing. These opportunities are normally advertised in FedBizOps. They are openly competed. The catch here is that you have to be able to provide what the government tells you it wants. You can't tell it what it should buy.

3) You can respond to a SBIR, BAA, or other R&D award announcement, for instance from NASA, the NIH, the CDC, etc. This seems to fit your situation most closely. However, as with #2, these announcements are generally tailored; they are intended to produce a final product or prototype, which performs some function that the agency already wants. If they don't want what you have, you're out of luck. But unlike FedBizOps announcements, they are often more open-ended, and hence more suited to new ideas or technologies.

You can also play the long game: develop some neat tech, and then try to build support for it within government, which then leads to an opportunity like #2 or #3. This entails a lot of behind-the-scenes politicking, which is what (for instance) large defense contractors are good at. It may entail lobbying Congress, or getting your tech in front of generals, admirals, or senior agency management, and then being able to wait a few years until the next appropriation cycle (or two or three) rolls around. For obvious reasons, this is difficult for startups and small businesses to pull off, especially if you don't already have personal connections to the agency you are selling to. Successful small businesses that sell to government are often started by people who have these ties already in place when they start.

[ptrott2017]

In addition to GlenTheMachine's excellent answer:

If you see opportunities on FedBizOps where you only have a partial solution, look to see which Govt contractors/suppliers are already working/bidding in that area. Often you can sell your partial solution to them first, and they package that into a larger solution that is sold in to the government opportunity. This is still a complicated long term sale but it can get you on the board.

Once you have smaller wins at this level, leverage them to drive revenue, product feedback and customer success stories for related conferences/marketing materials. To promote success stories - look at government focused media such as e-republic's various brands. (http://www.erepublic.com/) or specialised media (there are a bundle focused on health/defense etc). Check their editorial calendar and network at their or related industry events.

None of this is quick but it can work.

[tuxidomasx]

Bonus points for landing government contracts if you can fit into one of the underrepresented/minority/disadvantaged group or small business categories.

There's basically a quota that some percentage of contracts must be awarded to those groups.

[walrus01]

Items 1, 2 and 3 pretty neatly cover federal government level stuff. At the more local level (City, County and State), the procurement/purchasing departments of each organization generally have a process for posting RFP/RFQ for specific projects. Basically the same idea as fedbizopps postings but on a smaller more local scale.

If you want to bid on things like this at the mid-sized-city or county scale, it's usually a process of first being set up as a legal business entity in the jurisdiction, then making sure you meet all of the other eligibility requirements, and then contacting their purchasing/contracting departments to register yourselves as a vendor and actually participate in their RFP/RFQs.

But I am not sure how much any of that would apply to a ML/healthcare thing where you want to propose new novel solutions/technologies which are not explicitly called for in an RFP/RFQ. State projects tend to be much more like "we are looking for a general contractor to erect a 150 ft radio tower on this mountaintop as part of the highway patrol/emergency communications radio network upgrade project", or "we are looking for a contractor to build some giant concrete half pipes over top of I-90 and then cover them with dirt+landscaping to create a wildlife overpass". Where they already have a very clear idea of what they want before it gets to the RFQ stage.

[matt_the_bass]

I’ve been PI on a number of SBIR and other us government funded R&D projects. In my experience, the way to win an award is to market the idea to a potential govt sponsor. Sell them on your solution and then try to get them to write a public solicitation the general specs and requirements that exactly match what you have/want to do. It doesn’t guarantee funding, but is way higher chance than just responding to a solicitation you just happened upon.

[hsikka]

This is immensely helpful, thank you!

[santiagogo]

I sell SAAS to banks. Here are some tips for selling to large CO's I've picked up in the process:

1. Get your foot in the door with a small deal. Try and close a small deal, sell them a pilot, a three month trial or sell a small component and then grow your way in. Closing a large deal from the start is close to impossible.

2. When you have an entry point, get several members of the management team on board. As BostonEnginerd mentions, demo and network to everyone you can and try and get them on board. Executives at large established CO's tend to be risk averse even if they have decision making power, so they will try to shield their decisions as part of a team evaluation result.

3. Be prepared for a very long sales cycle. Some of the best deals will take really, really long to close. Work on as many leads as possible so you don't get demoralized if one doesn't come out and keep emailing them even if you haven't heard from them in six months.

4. Be persistent. Even if they desperately need your product, sometimes large CO's are so bogged down in bureaucracy and day to day operations that it will take them a long time to fit you in their agendas.

5. Large CO's suffer from severe FOMO. Use this to your advantage, show them a competitor who is doing something similar. Even if it's a test 8 time zones away, this will definitely shake them up.

As for your product. A successful early warning system for disease should be easy to sell to a large health insurance company which could potentially save millions or billions from preventing insurance claims. It could also be possible to sell it to an established software vendor in the health care industry.

[JoblessWonder]

There are a ton of posts that correctly point out that networking is by far your best bet. Getting someone on the inside to advocate for your product is going to be your best return on time investment.

Outside of that:

You need to be able to quantify what your product can do for the organization. It might be a cool concept, but you need to transfer that into real dollars, lives, or customers to get anyone's attention. Do the research to tell them what they need to hear to consider your product. "Right now you are spending $20 million on disease prevention studies in rural counties in Virginia. With our software, you can get the same actionable data, faster, and more reliable for $2 million."

Also, these organizations are like huge tankers. Don't assume that just because they haven't implemented a system yet doesn't mean someone in the organization hasn't considered it yet. They take forever to change course. They are all probably using some piece of infrastructure that could be upgraded but hasn't because "it just sort of still works." Breaking through that can be impossible.

[jbob2000]

I had a close friend who developed exactly the system you’re talking about, his website is https://sitata.com

Originally, his goal was exactly what yours is - sell to governments. He even had a close contact within the right department in the government!

As you can see, his business has since pivoted to providing this information to people traveling abroad. From what I recall, he pivoted because you can’t sell to the government if they don’t want it. You have to wait until the government wants something and then you can put together a proposal and go down procurement lane.

[boffinism]

> you can’t sell to the government if they don’t want it.

100% my experience. Saying to a government 'here's a solution you never considered to a problem that isn't your immediate priority' gets you nowhere.

[dhruvkar]

An IndieHackers interview went over this exact scenario [0].

Collaborating with progressive, growing, local governments worked well for their product (transit planning). It helped that they were Code For America fellows.

My understanding from this (and life experience), is that working in the same shoes as your intended customer shortens a product's learning curve significantly.

0: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/052-tiffany-and-danny-o...

[jumpman500]

Directly selling to anyone independently is almost impossible if you haven't networked appropriately or have substantially impressive qualifications. Lots of the bigger corporations (in America at least) have a select list of approved consulting groups that they're willing to sign an SOW with. You're not gonna even get in the door if you don't work with one of them. Not as familiar with selling to the government but I'm sure it's similar and probably more hoops to jump(probably get paid a lot less too).

I'd work on formulating your idea more. Early warning systems for a diseases with ML seems like it could mean almost anything. Narrow it down to a specific use cause and a specific methodology. Why is it better than existing methods? What's the value it's going to bring to the government or corporation you sell to? Why should they believe you? How long will it take for you to have a viable product? What are the risks of using your product? (lots of false positives could make your idea more harmful then helpful) What's the performance monitoring plan?

I'd try networking with people that do consulting data integration/analytics in health care industry/medical device industry. Pitch your idea to them, see how they react (people might already be doing what you're thinking). Got to learn the industry, if you're going to be able to sell to them. Good luck!

[nurettin]

Where I live, government opens a bid, some suppliers join the bid, then the government officials select one of their relatives at random.

[jpm_sd]

While GlenTheMachine has done an admirable job answering your "headline question", I think for your particular area of expertise you might also look for support from a public health-oriented non-profit like the Gates Foundation.

[chrisbennet]

As someone mentioned the other day, a lot of these government contracts are written to select for predetermined vendor. The request for proposal is just going through the motions to make it seem like it was open to anyone.

[igrekel]

We sell to large, mostly state owned, corporations. In most cases that means going through answering Request for Proposals (RFP) where you need to show how you will meet a set of requirements for a price. Prior to issuing a RFP, often the organization will try to look for what is possible or what exists out there, this is usually done through a request for information (RFI). We usually try to build a relationship prior to these processes by regularly talking to people in these companies, helping them to solve some of their problems. That way they know about us and notify or invite us to answer when they issue an RFI or RFP. That all takes a long time, sometimes years, and you don’t get revenues for any of this.

Now this probably is not the most appropriate course of action for you. We initially started as a proof of concept for a branch of a large state owned company. If it’s small enough and doesn’t require too much spending or too much involvement, you can probably avoid the RFP process. But you need to know someone in charge inside, ideally more than one. You can try cold calling or meeting them in a conference but it is easier if you can use a network. If someone else in their industry or their company or maybe a well expert or industry researchers can vouch for you.

Also since it’s a potential ML project, if it’s a public organisation, you may be able to access the data though other means either because it is already public or by simply requesting it. In some jurisdictions, you may request data from public institutions. Once you have the data, you can build you proof of concept and pitch it to the organisation or someone you could use to network your way in.

[MarkingTime]

While the Government is a trustworthy client - meaning that they pay their bills, getting in and building the trust necessary to clear the regulatory barriers in place, is a substantial challenge. Selling directly without an established base of paying customers and high-profile success stories is exceedingly difficult, sadly.

Networking, as some HN commenters mentioned, is one step - but procurement networking events are littered with hundreds of bright eyed entrepreneurs seeking to secure a government contract.

Bidding through the RFP process is another route - but often takes a very, very, long time, and could outlast the life of the company.

Another option is to capture the attention of a lawmaker or administration official who is looking to solve the very issue you have a solution for. I.e. they have a lot of constituents who are concerned about early disease warning systems and therefore they want to find a solution that disrupts the status quo.

Depending on how deeply you care about this issue - you could also seek out a fellowship (via tech congress or another non-profit seeking to increase tech’s engagement in government) or look to participate in the digital service (which is a non-partisan group of civic minded technical experts who are just looking to make government work better).

[flarg]

I PM an ML project for pharma for a moderate sized consultancy and we regularly use (or buy!) smaller organisations that have the products or expertise we need. Maybe approach a couple of consultancies with similar offerings in the market and work with them? They usually have the contacts you need.

[brixon]

With lots of regulation, red tape and time.

Try to find the small business guides for the target agencies: https://www.cdc.gov/contracts/cdc-and-small-business/index.h...

[fergie]

Generally, these contracts will be made available through a tender process. If the value of the work is less than a certain amount (in my locale it is $65000) then you can circumvent the tender process and sell directly to the government.

In practice, a large IT provider may have been awarded a contract through tender to provide all technical services, and they will then subcontract to other vendors (such as yourself). This can be a good way to circumvent onerous vendor requirements that may be attached to the customers tender process.

[ageitgey]

This is specific to the field of public health software:

Step 1: Figure out what group might want to pay money for this.

In this case, options might be orgs like the UN in Geneva, CDC in Atlanta, NGOs in Washington DC, people give give money to NGOs on the US West Coast, or specific NGOs supporting the region most affected by the disease in question.

Research, funding and staff organization tends to follow specific diseases. So you need to learn about the world of the disease you are targeting. You need to find out who cares about eradicating that disease and talk to them directly.

2. Figure out if any of those groups actually have money to give you for this work

NGOs are involved in thousands of these kinds of projects, from tiny one-off research projects to larger co-ordinated efforts. You need to meet some of the actual people working in this area, see what the state of the art is, see who is funding research, etc. Some diseases get tons of funding (Polio, HIV, etc) and some get almost none.

3. Convince one of these groups that you have the expertise to solve the problem. Your public health background could help here.

This can be done best by first building contacts and convincing someone let you do a proof-of-concept. But this is going to be hard if you have few contacts or in the field already.

Conferences about the specific disease you want to target can be a good way to network. Talk to the people who pay the research bills. They go to tons of these conferences.

4. Failing that, join or work with a small consulting group that already has existing contracts with NGOs/Government and is looking to expand into a new area

This is a great option and probably your best bet. Many of these consulting companies are really small and work on personal trust. But it still requires finding out who does work in the field and making some contacts.

5. After all this, see if any of these groups are even able to budget for this work

You'll quickly learn some hard truths of public health software:

* Most of the problems are organizational (not technical) and not easy to solve

* People are really busy and change jobs frequently. Turnover (due to unstable funding, etc) is a big problem.

* The world is overflowing with prototype solutions that half work and no one remembers they exist or how to use them.

* Solutions that work great on your computer might fail completely in the field running on a 486 with a radio internet connection.

You might find out that a solution like you imagine already exists and just needs someone to come in and help run it or improve it. Maybe that's a quicker way to help.

[ptrott2017]

In addition to Agietgey's excellent answer.

Look for Non-profits working in this area who do work for the larger NGOs - they tend to be smaller and more accessible and also have specialists who will understand where you are coming from. For example the Gates Foundation is the NGO but they do a lot of disease modeling through the institute for disease modeling (http://www.idmod.org/) - they also fund other R&D in this area.

Similar when you review papers in this area - look to see which institute or org the authors are from. One example of an open science journal in this area is: http://www.keaipublishing.com/en/journals/infectious-disease...

There is a lot of work in this area and the community is in general pretty welcoming and helpful. Reach out. Good luck.

[exikyut]

I'm grabbing at a single point here, but this really jumped out at me:

> Solutions that work great on your computer might fail completely in the field running on a 486 with a radio internet connection.

How common is this sort of thing in the field? I've read the "popular" stories about old C64s and Amigas still being used to do things, but not enough real-world data surfaces to be able to build a realistic/practical/robust mental model of what to expect.

I'd fully expect old equipment in eg an industrial control context, but besides that it might come as a surprise.

By the way, what sort of "radio connection"? APRS?

[hsikka]

This is very insightful, thank you!

[DEADBEEFC0FFEE]

One of the problems will be that the people you need to convince, will likely have a very low tollerance for false positives. Another challenge will be getting access to real data, and the human checked analysis you'll need for training. There are a lot of health coding systems out there, you'll need to pick one.

Network with people on advisory boards, medical professional groups, they will have the ear of others and will help you connect your solution with problems. Health insurance might be a good avenue.

[zachruss92]

It my experience, it's all about networking. I have multiple fortune 500 clients as a consultant and all of those clients came from referrals. I think your best bet is to speak with people in the private and public sector about your idea (i.e. would they be willing to pay $$ if you had a working model) and gauge interest from there. You'd be surprised how many people are willing to talk shop in a more casual setting (meetups, conferences, etc...)

[rhodysurf]

SBIRs are a good entry point if you are talking US

[rorykoehler]

A significant percentage of our business is government. We apply to tenders mainly. We also apply to be on procurement portals as vendors. We also have strong relations with our existing customers which can help inform us of potential opportunities that have just become public knowledge but are maybe not widely advertised.