Today, let's cover how to find government contracts that are right for your business. And we're going to use a free tool for this at the government website, sam.gov. You can go to SAM right now and search for contracts, but to access all the features I'm going to show you, you'll need to set up a user account and then sign in.
You do this by clicking the sign in button at the top right. To start our search, let's click on search in the top menu bar. And that brings us to this screen.
Now click where it says select domain, and it opens this drop-down menu. And we see a bunch of things we can search for. But today we're looking for contract opportunities, so click on that. Now some people just use the simple search bots at the top, but really that doesn't work so well. So follow along with me and use the method I'm going to show you to get much more precise search results.
Here on the left, we see a variety of things we can filter by. For example, federal organizations. That means the government agency that's issuing the contract. I can click to expand it, and then in the box, I could use that to search for a particular agency.
For example, you might want to do that if you just wanted to search for contracts from the VA. But I'm not going to do that right now, because I want to search for contracts from... any organization.
Now let's click on the spots labeled notice type, and there's a drop-down list of notice types. The most important ones here are sources sought, pre-solicitation, solicitation, and combined synopsis solicitation. And let's go through and select those four things.
And I get a lot of questions about this, so let me explain what the different notice types are. An award notice is a notice that the contract has been awarded to a company. Since we're looking for open contracts, we don't want that right now.
Solicitation and combined synopsis solicitation are actual solicitations issued by the government. The government is asking for a proposal, and the solicitation will include specifications for the product or service they want to buy, and they'll also specify a date. due date for the proposal.
A sources sought notice is something the government sends out in advance of the solicitation, and this is your chance to get in early. Most people just go straight to looking at the solicitations, but I strongly urge you to also look at the sources sought notices, and here's why. Once a solicitation is released, there are rules that limit communications with the agency.
And also, there are probably a dozen other companies who have been following that opportunity and building relationships with that agency for months. Finally, it's unlikely that you can influence the solicitation once it has been released. But during the sources sought phase, you can interact with the agency.
You can meet with them to learn more about their needs. And you also have the opportunity to actually influence the solicitation process. So please look at sources, sought notices, not just solicitations. Now here on the right, we see all the results it found.
We see it found over 28,000 results. We need to filter these down because say you're an IT firm, you don't want to waste your time reviewing construction contracts. You could do a keyword search, but in my experience, that doesn't work so well.
So I'm going to go into the filter list on the left and click on this box where it says product or service information. And it allows us to filter our results by NAITS code or by product and service code. The NAITS code just describes what business, what industry you're in. If you're not sure if you're a NAITS code, watch my video. on how to find your NAITS codes.
For this demo, I'm going to search for NAITS code 561210. That's the NAITS code for Facilities Support Services. Now, most of you will have more than one NAITS code because what you do could be put out for bid under different NAITS codes. So you can enter and do a search for multiple NAITS codes here. I'm going to add a second code.
541-611, which is the code for Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services. And now we see on the right, there are 221 results. Next, I like to filter by place of performance. Place of performance means where the work is done. I like this filter because I always recommend that you start by looking for contracts within driving distance of where you're located.
When we click on Place of Performance, we can filter by zip code, by state, or by country. Maybe you're located in Alabama and you only do work in Alabama. So let's search for those contracts.
And this filter does allow you to enter multiple states here if you do work in more than one state. Now, when we look at the results on the right, we see we've narrowed it down to six contract opportunities. For each one, we see the title, the notice ID, the department and office issuing the contract. and the response date.
That's the date our response is due to the government. To learn more about an opportunity, we click on the title, and it takes us to this page where we can find the information we care about. This one is an opportunity to provide facility support services for the Coast Guard Aviation Training Center in Mobile, Alabama.
In this section titled General Information, we see that this is a source of thought. and that the response date is December 15th at 1 p.m. PST.
So if we're interested in this particular opportunity, we need to submit our response to the agency before then. And then if we scroll down further, we see the description. Here they describe what work they need, and then they give us precise instructions on how to respond. It tells us, Responses are requested by 15 December 2023 at 1 p.m.
PST and may be submitted via email, and then they tell us the email address to send our response to, and then they tell us the information they want us to include in our response. If we scroll down further, we see a section labeled Attachments. This one doesn't have any attachments, but often there will be documents here for you to download. A pro tip here, anyone can search for opportunities in SAM, but you may need to be signed into SAM in order to download the attachments. And below that, it gives us the points of contact for this opportunity.
In this case, it's giving us the name, telephone number, and email address of the person to contact about this opportunity. And that's great, because now you have the... contact information for a person who purchases what you sell. Now, let me show you two more things at the top of this page.
When you find an opportunity that you're interested in, you can click the follow button to help keep track of any changes and easily find the opportunity in the future. And in the left-hand panel, click where it says interested vendors list. Now, not every opportunity has an interested vendors list. So you may not see this button, but if you do see it, this will allow us to add our business to the interested vendors list.
And if the government has made the list public, you will be able to see all the businesses that have added themselves to the list, along with their contact information, so that you can reach out to them. This list includes vendors that are interested in competing for the opportunity, and also vendors that are interested in competing for the opportunity. interested in subcontracting opportunities. Let me show you some other search filters I like to use.
The first thing I always want to know is when my response is due, and we could have added a filter to search by due date. Or if you just want to check what's new, you can search by published date. That isn't one of the standard filters, so let me show you how to add additional filters.
I scroll down to the bottom and click where it says more. filters, and I'm going to add publish date and hit update. And now if I go up and click on dates, we see that I can filter by publish date. Now, once we've gone through all the work of setting up our search, we can keep track of it and stay informed about contract opportunities by saving our search and setting up notifications.
To save the search, we go to the top of the search results page and hit actions and then save. Give the search. a descriptive name because you can set up lots of different saved searches and then hit save.
Now hit the save searches button to see a list of all your saved searches. Now you can come back at any time and click on a search to run it and view the search results. If you want to receive email notifications for your saved search, click actions and then select notify.
Now I'm on the saved searches page and I want to go back. to my search results. I click on the search results button and they're gone.
They disappear pretty easily, which is another good reason to save the search. So I click on the Save Searches button, and then I click the name of the saved search, and it takes me to our search results. And we can also download our search results. We go to the top of our search results page and click where it says Actions, and then click Download.
Now that you've found solicitations and sources sought notices, the next step is to prepare your response. To learn how, watch these videos on how to write a proposal for a contract and how to respond to a source's sought notice. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.