If we could just get a small piece of that Federal IT budget….
Planning to grab a piece of the proposed FY22’ $92B budget that the United States Federal Government will spend on information technology offerings? Incredible revenue opportunities lay ahead along with the reality that you are also signing up to support what may be your most demanding & complex customer.
For information technology providers, large and small, the US Federal Market is a critical segment of any total addressable market analysis and one that can expose uniquely large & repeatable revenue opportunities for companies. With that revenue upside is growing set of compliance obligations that MUST be understood to ensure your capability to deliver them, with perfection, is 100% mapped out before accepting a PO from an agency through a direct procurement vehicle, from a prime contractor, or through a channel partner.
Figuring out how to succeed over a long time frame in this market begins with a seemingly obvious fact …there is no single buying entity called the US Government. The market is structured such there are 10’s of agencies that set & operate IT functions as independent groups & literally 100’s of individual buying groups that wear either US Government or Prime Contractor badges. An outstanding example of this point is the Fedscoop report on September 12th that the UDSA has 22 CIO's! Peeling that back a bit to give you something to consider when you are done reading…..not only do you have to find the right people who have a need for your solution multiple times but you have to face the fact that they way they buy your offering & the terms under which they will do so are largely independent of one another.
Increasingly, companies without the scale and resources to carve out a dedicated Federal subsidiary are finding that selling into the US Federal IT Market has moved from traditional selling motion managed by Sales & Services organizations to one that is truly a “C Level” decision & ongoing responsibility given the required investment of time and capital from critical business organizations like Product Groups, Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing, IT, Service Delivery, Finance and Legal.
Organizing delivery of "slightly" different products & services to different customers, establishing new levels of rigor within contract management processes, carving global support staff out of your service delivery teams, segregating Federal data within internal IT systems and having the on-demand agility to address emerging requirements are now the new table stakes and thus, you need to approach this market as a team sport.
So….while that $92B market size is ever-so appealing, ensuring that your selling efforts to the US Federal Market are a profitable proposition starts with a fundamental decision…do you have the time and resources to make a LONG TERM COMMITMENT for a market that is rapidly changing, one that is under constant and public threat from the toughest adversaries on the planet and one that is required to hold it's suppliers to the highest delivery standards in order to meet national security interests?
Today begins the start of our blog series where we will begin to break down & expose the challenges / opportunities / behaviors / realities to help you make or reaffirm your decision, along with sharing the experiences of a former Fortune 150 IT supplier's dedicated National Security executive who now wakes up every day with the mission to help technology providers to the US Federal Government accelerate their compliance with emerging cyber-security and national security requirements.