Our friends at GovFresh.com brought to our attention the availability of a series of video that the Department of Justice has produced that explains what FOIA is and how to make FOIA requests.

Which of the GSA Schedules is best for your firm?

GSA has about 33 different GSA Schedules that have over 30million products and services. Usually the choice is pretty simple.  If you sell engineering services, you would pursue the Schedule 00CORP - the Professional Services Schedule (which absorbed many services schedules including the old Engineering Service Schedule (871)).  If you are a hardware store, you would choose the Hardware Superstore schedule  (Schedule 51 V).

Update on the New SBA WOSB Contracting Program

SBA will be holding a web chat session on March 31, 2011 at 1:00 pm (ET).  This session provides small businesses with an opportunity to discuss the new Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) federal contract program.  This program is designed to attract more woman owned small businesses into federal contracting.

For years government contractors have been using traditional marketing techniques to gain the attention of Federal clients.  Email blasts, direct mail, conferences and exhibitions, brochures, advertising have all been used to varying degrees of effectiveness.  But about ten years ago, the effectiveness of these traditional methods began to decline.  And in the past few years, their effectiveness has declined precipitously. But what has caused this decline?

ABC - Always be closing… it’s a famous sales mantra.  But in order to close more government sales and obtain Federal contracts, you must first generate significant number of qualified leads.  And you cannot develop a significant amount of Federal sales leads before you first attract agencies to your firm.  This process of acquiring prospects, converting them into leads, and making them your Federal clients is known as the sales funnel and all deals begin with filling the top of the funnel.

The United States Office of Government Ethics (OGE) is an executive branch agency responsible for establishing policies to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, conflicts of interest between the federal government and its employees.  The OGE establishes regulations, standards of conduct, and training programs on the many forms of criminal ethics violations.  As you might imagine, the potential for conflicts of interest is high in government contracting.

Traditional methods for generating Federal leads include trade shows, seminars, direct (junk) mail, email blasts (spam) to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and print and media advertising.  These outbound methods are where firms push out the message to the four corners of the country hoping that it resonate with that needle in a haystack. Those techniques are very expensive…and are far less effective than they used to be, especially in Federal marketing, for a number of reasons.  First, Federal employees, like all of us, are inundated with marketing interruptions an estimated 2000 times per day.  In order to cope, Federal buyers have constructed creative means to block those messages:

Do any of these thoughts ever cross your mind?

The U.S. Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program helps small and disadvantaged businesses compete in the marketplace.  The Program provides mentoring, procurement assistance, business counseling, training, financial assistance, surety bonding, and other management and technical assistance to qualifying firms.  The program targets firms that are owned and controlled at least 51% by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals and aims to help these entrepreneurs gain access to the economic mainstream of American Society. 

Each year, the President proposes an annual budget for how the government’s resources should be allocated among its many departments, agencies, and programs.  Congress then appropriates funds through legislation.  Departments and agencies then award much of these appropriations to private businesses that provide the products and services they need in the form of contracts, grants, loans, etc.  While this process is simple enough to teach in middle school civics classrooms around the country, keeping track of, and understanding where and by whom the government’s vast resources are ultimately spent can be a complex task.