Three Tips to Set Up Your Public Sector Sales Team for Success

Three Tips for Improving Your Sales to the Public Sector

The global public sector will spend over $7 trillion this year and, with the right preparation, your team can be in a prime position to maximize profits from this exciting market. Check out these tips to set your sales team up to win more.

Align quotas to fiscal year purchasing seasonality.

Since a major portion of state, local, and education organizations adhere to a June 30 fiscal year-end and federal agencies largely align to the September 30 fiscal year-end, it is vital to ensure quotas account for the resulting seasonality in purchasing. When quarterly quotas follow the tradition of being evenly distributed throughout the year by well-meaning sales and finance leaders, public sector salespeople look (and feel) like heroes during major purchasing seasons and failures during purchasing droughts. Correct quota alignment for seasonality will not only improve morale but will also position sales efforts to run in parallel with public sector planning and budgeting cycles.

Encourage specialization for public sector segments.

Where possible, fight the urge to require salespeople to focus on multiple segments within the public sector at once. In addition to differences in fiscal year-ends, federal, state, local, higher education, and K-12 differ in length and complexity of sales cycles, required contract vehicles, buyer profiles, IT security policies, and a number of other key areas. At a minimum, facilitate specialization for federal, state and local, and education segments to allow sales teams to profit from coordinated messaging and buying habits.

Train salespeople to master procurement and contracting details early.

It is vital to learn as much information early on about possible hazards stemming from security requirements, procurement thresholds, legal provisions, decision processes, or contract terms. Salespeople who ascertain this detail early in the sales process through savvy qualification and discovery will accelerate outcomes for the opportunities that matter most.

Learn how intelligent qualification for bids and proposals wins more business, reduces team tension, and increases efficiency.

Strong qualification processes are the backbone of the most effective sales processes. The same is true for the best-performing proposals functions. 

Yet too often, bid and proposals opportunities are treated differently than sales opportunities, resulting in too many greenlit proposal responses to low-probability opportunities.

Just like operating an effective sales organization, correctly identifying the right proposal opportunities to pursue is essential to running not only an efficient proposals function but to keeping the entire company focused on the work that matters most.

This eBook serves as a framework for how to think about the qualification of bids and proposals to win more business, reduce team tension, and optimize company efficiency.

Download The Executive’s Guide to Qualification to learn the following: 

• How to think about bids and proposals
• How to incorporate data into proposal qualification
• The key metrics to track for proposal success
• The benefits of intelligent qualification 
• The best tools to optimize proposal opportunity identification and qualification

Download the eBook