I’ve read a lot about marketing and none of it has really done me much good. I’ve also tried a lot of marketing techniques over the years. I spent years on inbound but my industry (government consulting/contracting) seems impervious to it or at least the version I of govcon we’re in. Ditto with cold email. We had a company that did cold emailing successfully for dozens of types of businesses and it yielded us zero. I’ve dabbled in Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads. I made funny videos on YouTube, blogged a bunch, and, heck, I’d even try walking up and down the streets of DC wearing a sandwich board advertisement if anyone were in the office.
John Wanamaker, from my home town of Philadelphia, is famous for saying, “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” I think John was doing a bit better than I. I feel like I’ve wasted 100% of mine over the years.
So what is a poor, lost business owner like me supposed to do? My answer: keep trying. Eventually something will work.
What is Marketing?: My definition has three parts. Marketing is:
Identifying a potential customer
Defining the product or service for that potential customer
Qualifying the customer and delivering them to sales
The strategy part is defining the customer and the product or service. The tactical part is qualifying them. Qualify is a pretty loose word. It’s essentially getting them ready for sales. In some cases that simply involves finding out who that customer is and how to contact s/he. In other cases it might mean exposing them to information about your product or service before passing them to sales.
Weird Stuff about My Industry: My industry is data rich but flexibility poor. The government releases lots of information about its intentions to contract and keeps historical records of contracts it has executed, who is performing on them, how much they were for, and when they expire. You can also read legislation or countless policy papers and reports to know what new funding will become available. The industry involves lots of complexity in procurement that involves multiple players many of which have no responsibility to each other. The barriers and bureaucracy are immense.
Over the years we’ve learned that sifting the available data and having an intuitive knowledge of the agency where you work were the keys to understanding what services to target and where. Because of the structure of contracting, teaming with other companies large and small is essential. Buying cycles are long so you need to be planning to target opportunities a year or more out. At times it’s essential to get in front of the potential client but most of the time its important to team with a company that already works with or adjacent to the client. Sometimes you win because you are the only company in the mix that has performed a contract of x size even if that was at a totally different agency or have a contract vehicle that no other player has. Other times you win because you hired the right person who knows the office and client. Sometimes it’s price. It’s a big bespoke mess and it is different at every agency.
Lots of companies do thought leadership and develop proprietary methodologies or other IP for the government market. That’s all great but exactly zero of the companies I’ve seen really grow in my space have used that approach. Some of them don’t even have nice websites. They sift the data better, figure out how to the get the check marks they need in the proposal, and have large groups of people churning out those proposals. I would never say you can’t grow in a more focused and thought-leadership oriented way, it’s just that I haven’t seen it. I’ve also tried aspects of it and it’s really, really hard. Teaching the government why they need your version of business process reengineering is a lot harder than just getting good at the one they are buying.
What I Recommend: My purpose in the article is not tell you how to do govcon marketing. It’s to demonstrate that all industries are different when it comes to marketing. Advertising, cold calling/emailing, and many other techniques that are successful in other industries are a waste of time in mine. I believe it is really important to benchmark successful competitors in your industry to understand what you should be doing. I do agree that it can be productive to import techniques used successfully in other industries to yours but you have to do it in an experimental way and not neglect the basic blocking and tackling.
Marketing is not a generic function that can be applied from industry to industry. Finance and even sales are far more adaptable in my mind. Don’t hire your director of marketing from consumer products if you are in B2B.
Marketing is also an area where you should experiment and measure before investing heavily. Additionally, it’s important to find the right helpers. Hiring a generic marketing firm is going to waste you a lot of money but finding one that helps grow your kind of company can be worth its weight in gold. It’s a dark art and only continuous effort and lots of failed experiments gets you to the right answer.
That’s it for this week,
Alan