Good morning to those of you out there on the West Coast. Good afternoon to those of you here on the East Coast with me. I'm excited to get started on a little bit of capture training.
And so we'll be talking about understanding and uncovering the federal pain points that are out there. I appreciate you showing up early and on time. So I want to give a quick tip for those of you who do show up early and on time. The tip for you is, as you're looking to sit there and promote your company, really consider video, right? You don't have to do as much video as I do, but look around at my video, right?
There's nothing special about it. I'm in my office, I got my whiteboard, I don't have any fancy plants or anything, right? That's all cool. People can have that, but we can also do just the minimal. As long as what you're saying is authentic and good, then that's what people really want.
They don't overly pay attention to what's behind you. And so on LinkedIn in particular... If you post a video, it could be a 30 or 60 second tip, or it could be a 30 minute webinar like I do.
But if you post it out there and then or record it and then put it up there, that kind of stuff gets traction. And you start doing more of that, you're going to reach those potential buyers and customers and teammates you want to work with because they will discover you. They will begin to know, like and trust you before you even have a conversation with them because they see what you're sharing.
They like you. They like how you're sharing it and they trust what you're saying. They begin to understand that you are a subject matter expert in your world. So make sure you're, so that's my tip for you.
Make sure you're starting to embrace video. You don't have to do anything special. It's like, I don't do anything special. I'm me and I don't worry about, you know, anything but the content I'm delivering.
And I know people want to get access to the content you are. All right. That was just a quick tip for those who showed up early on time. Start posting some video.
Always make the video about your subject matter expertise, your core competency. Don't do other stuff. Don't talk about what I talk about. Don't talk about kitty cats or something.
Talk about your area of expertise. People want to hear that. OK, so we're going to start here just a second.
I am feeling better. Thanks, Hillary. Gave you a shout out yesterday. It's good to see you in here.
Give you a big shout out yesterday. Really supportive of what we do, sharing the capability statements. So thanks for that.
OK. And let me switch over and we'll get rocking and rolling into today's live. Oh, one thing, do me a favor in the chat. Just say if you actually know this, tell me where you're coming in. Obviously, if you're coming in from YouTube or Twitter or Facebook, that's one thing.
But in LinkedIn right now, we're actually displaying the content out there, I think, on our LinkedIn company page and on my page. So I'm just curious on where you're coming in from. I know that, for example, it looks like.
Marvin, you're coming in from the GovCon Chamber website. Just let me know that. Okay, let me find my slides and we're off to the races.
If a customer doesn't have the problems that your products and your services address, then why would they ever buy from you? They won't. We just don't buy for the fun of it.
We buy to meet a need, right? And uncovering pain points, what we're going to be talking about today, uncovering those pain points help you align their problems. to your offerings. And when you align problems to offerings or your solution, right, you increase the likelihood they're going to buy from you. But first, they need to really understand their pains.
And we're going to be talking about that in a minute. But this exercise of you asking and learning about the pain points a company has or a customer has, like a federal agency has, you understanding those pain points, that's all capture. That's what happens in capture.
Business development is... finding opportunities, but CAPTURE is about one opportunity and really shaping it. And part of shaping it is making sure your solution aligns not just to the requirements, but to the pain points that are around that requirement.
And I'll talk more about that in a minute today. The way I'm going to break down today's training on how to uncover federal agency pain points and challenges are in three sections. The first section I want to talk about is what are pain points? When I say this, what do I mean?
Right. And why should you care about uncovering it? I'll give you a spoiler alert.
If you if you uncover the pain and you care enough to align your solution to their pain, you increase the likelihood of winning. That's the why you should care. If you want to increase the likelihood of winning, know what your customers pain points are. And that's what we'll talk about there. I'm going to give you some tips on how to identify pain points, how to do it in meetings and research.
There's two ways I'll talk about today. Learning about pain points through research. So. you know web crawls things like that or web searches and then going in and having meetings with people each person you meet with takes you to a next level of understanding the pain points that are out there and that's what we're going to talk about today if you don't know who i am my name is neil mcdonnell i'm the president of the govcon chamber of commerce co-founder of govcon in a box and i want to welcome you to my federal sales training where i provide tips for success in the federal market i spent 20 years in the federal market as a small business owner And since 2018, I've been teaching people like you that government contracting is not a secret.
It's just a process. When we follow a process A to Z, we're going to have repeatable, predictable results. And that's what I want for you. That's why we do this training.
If you haven't done so already, we have a newsletter, the Government Contracting Success Newsletter. It is the largest GovCon newsletter out there on LinkedIn. And it grows constantly because we provide really good, helpful information for you.
So go subscribe to that. Next training, I should have... I should have put an update here, but don't worry about it. I'll show you completely. But next training is next week, September 9th through the 13th.
And it's all about innovation research dollars. So small business innovation research. So I'll show you that in a minute. I did want to congratulate the companies that are in the 100 Club.
So the 100 Club is something that we put a company into when they come on GovCon in a box and make their company as visible as they can to the federal buyer. We call this federal visibility score. And the federal visibility score, we provide the guidance, but you do the work inside of the government's tools like SAM or DSBS, etc. And so these companies, 58 of them out of 360,000, are fully visible to a federal buyer. That means if the buyer is looking for a company like theirs, they're going to be able to come in and find them.
Like FOMOV Consulting, who came on yesterday, they do data center work. And, uh... You know, so when you look around at some of these other companies that are in here, I want you to come check them out because if you're looking for teammates, they're the right companies. You can go to CupCon in a box, by the way, and check out your visibility score.
Okay, let's get started on today's training with what are pain points and why you should care. First thing I want you to understand is there's a difference in sales, and make no mistake of it, all of us are in sales. There's a difference in sales between implied needs and explicit needs.
So implied needs are needs that we think they have. There's there's some sort of implication that says they have a problem or that need, right? So an implied need is one they're chatting about, but there's no real motivation behind that need to do something to address it. So example is, you know, if I think about my lawn, I might have an implied need to mow it if it's getting long. Yeah, it's getting long, you know, and somebody comes by and says, hey, I can cut it, it's getting long.
I'm like, oh, whatever. And they're like, well, when it's longer and you got deer walking around, the ticks can be in there. Okay, no, I feel bad, but I don't walk in there anyway.
So, you know, that's no big deal. But once they start talking to me, and this is something you can do, once you start having conversations, you can turn that implied need that I need to cut my lawn in front of my house or something, you can turn that to an explicit need. The HOA has sent you a letter saying you must cut it. The HOA says if you don't cut it, we're going to fine you.
The HOA says if you don't cut it, we're kicking you out because we have the right to boot you out of your own house. Well, now. That need has just become a very explicit need.
And for $75, I can have my lawn mowed or something, right? So think about this same thing within the IT world. You might think about an implied need being the servers are slow or sometimes there's some disruption.
That's an implied need. An explicit need is when the boss sees that the servers are stopping them from doing the work. The servers go down, they can't do their job.
Or they're in a board meeting or in an agency like I used to work. One of my customers was the White House. We used to talk about this all the time, that you can have no downtime, zero downtime. When there's downtime, the Secret Service and all the people who are around the world trying to support the president as they travel aren't able to do their job.
And that can impact national security, certainly the presidential security and the success of those missions. Right. And so it was just the server going up and down or something. The implied need, we need to work on it.
Explicit need is when you can tie things to it. Oh. come back and talk more about that.
So certain pains or challenges when you're thinking about them, they can be actual problems. Like I said, the server going up and down, right? That's an actual problem they're having. So that's a pain point.
How big a pain point is how much you... What I like to say in sales is you have that pain and you drive a stick into it and you move it around until they say, ow, right? And it might be a little gruesome, but that stick is questioning.
And we'll talk about that in the next slide. But it also can be unmet needs or goals, right? A pain point that I have might be an unmet need that, you know, I have this particular thing that I know in HR department, I need to hire more people.
And it's an unmet need. I'm not getting those people in there. I'm not able to hire up for my agency or for a teaming partner, right?
They're not able to hire up as fast as they need to. Well, that's the pain point. And we need to get them to realize and even acknowledge that. But sometimes on the flip side, there's a goal that they have.
So it's not an unmet need, like something they absolutely have already tracked on. But maybe it's something on the wall that says, in the future, I want this. Well, that's a pain point as well, because they don't have that thing they want. I want a brand new truck. That's not a real unmet need.
That's a goal. Well, how do I turn that goal into something that they really want? What would you do with that truck?
And again, we'll talk more about how to explore that on the next slide. Another thing about pain points. Pain points can be capabilities or capacities that they lack. If we're inside of, you know, just sticking with IT theme today and servers, for example, well, maybe we've been doing servers in what they call data centers, which are on premise or in the buildings, and we need to go to the cloud.
But I don't have any cloud engineers or people who understand what they're doing in the cloud, or we don't have the capabilities and skill set in-house to be able to take our IT systems from... the building on-prem up into the cloud, right? That's a different skill set.
And so that's a capability that I might want. That's a pain point. If it's an unmet need or capability I lack, that's a challenge and a pain point to me from getting my mission accomplished as efficiently and effectively as I can.
And then I also put capacity and that goes back to capacity on people. Like I don't have enough people. Maybe I don't have enough servers, right? You could think about bandwidth, your own connection right now, right? Do you have a...
A good enough pipe that if you did video like I do video video that you could stream while other people in your office are also streaming or if you work from home, right? These things that are capacity and that can be a pain point, right? A pain point is my team's meeting is always flickering in and out. And the thing to keep in mind about this, when you're thinking about what are pain points, what are challenges, the reason you should care is that people only buy when they feel pain. You know, when you're thinking about it, business environment, I'm not talking about a candy bar when they walk by, because even that's kind of a pain.
My stomach's like, but if I eat a lot before I go into the grocery store, maybe I don't have that pain. But in the business world, we do not buy without a pain that we see. And that's really important thing to pay attention to.
So how do you identify the pain points? I'm going to talk about how you can ask questions in a minute. So spin selling, we'll talk about that in a second.
But one of the ways that you can identify pain points is just listen to the government. They talk about it in their documents that are coming out. I'll give you a whole bunch of examples on the next slide, but research on Google, research in a company's website, an agency's website, and they will tell you their pains.
They will be very explicit about it. This is the pain we need. Not only is this a pain, but sometimes they'll talk about the solution too. This is what we need from industry.
We need your ideas on how AI can help us accomplish our mission or things like that. And so if you just do some research, you'll be able to figure that out. The other...
great way and the best way to really understand the pain points of the people who are aligned with an opportunity you're trying to win. So it's one thing to do research and have a holistic view of pain points. It's another to have meetings with a very customer you're trying to sell to and uncover their pain points, right? You can feed into their pain points by doing research and then inserting that research into your discussions. But you want to get them to talk about implied needs that you can then turn into explicit needs.
So how do you do that? How do you go from implied needs to explicit needs? So you can ask questions. In order to turn implied needs into explicit needs and really lock down on the pain points and challenges your customer has, you just need to ask questions.
And the way I like to ask questions is following a model called spin selling. And spin selling stands for, or the spin part of spin selling stands for... Situational questions, problem questions, implication questions, and needs payoff questions.
It should be a plural needs because there's more than one need they have at the end there. But the ones I really want to talk about in the middle. So situational questions.
Those are factual questions like how much square footage do you have or how how much acreage do I need to do for lawn care? Or how many users do I have if it's an I.T. solution type thing?
Situational questions tend to be factual questions. that can be researched offline. It's okay to ask one or two when you're in a meeting, but generally if you're asking too many situational questions, it's a clear sign you didn't do your research. I like to ask situational questions either one, because I don't know it and I couldn't find it, or two, because I want to tactically get them to start going down a path and I can just guide them. Hey, one quick thing I needed to ask, how many users do you have or something?
So that's situational questions. Need payoff or needs payoff questions. These are questions about the solution.
Right. So if I got you a new car that had great brakes, would you feel like your kids are safer? Like there's a whole example that goes into this.
But needs payoff is when you start aligning your solution to their problem by asking questions. How would it help you if I gave you a solution like this? That's also part of sales and capture, but that's not part of today's training.
Problem questions and implications are where you uncover the pain. Problem questions are ones where, like I use this example. I understand sometimes you guys are having some hiccups on the technology side and you haven't been able to refresh. What's the impact there? Well, our servers go down sometimes.
Actually, it feels like they're going down regularly. Okay, well there, I got them to talk about a problem. Then I'll dig into that problem a little bit more.
Wow, like all your servers or some of your servers? What's the refresh time on buying new servers? So that's digging into that one problem. But then I want to understand what's the implication of that problem? problem if i'm talking to uh you know hhs as an example or nih inside of hhs if i'm talking to them and i'm talking inside the it department they're saying servers are going down well you know it's a pain we got to stop what we're doing come over here and reboot them and make sure people are up but they're talking about how the problem impacts the it department implication questions say well who else is impacted what else is impacted and so you can think about um in a in any particular agency, if the servers are going down, you know, and turning off and not available, how does that impact the HR department?
How does that impact the OR? How are patients coming into the VA or into HHS medical centers, how are people coming in being served if your servers are down? Oh, they're not. And we just hear from the HR department, we hear from the hospitals, whatever it is, like you can see the thread, we hear from these people and they're complaining.
Well, why are they complaining? So if you think about the VA, and the VA has these hospitals that have servers in them or on the cloud, if the servers and the technology goes down, how does that impact patient care? Forget about the servers. That was a tiny, tiny problem compared to this bigger problem of veterans not being served, that implication of this one problem you uncovered.
That literally is jab a stick in there and spinning around the server problem helps you uncover these bigger problems. So anyways, you want to go in when you're having meetings and ask questions, problem questions that kind of uncover it and implication questions. What's the bigger problem?
that comes with this problem. And so research helps you get started thinking about problem questions you can ask and then pulling a thread, meaning when you're talking to somebody, well, tell me more about this, tell me more about this. Pulling that thread on problem discussions that they give you based on the research you did allows you to find problems that are more closely to the person you're talking to. But it begins with that research you do before going into a meeting.
Okay, I want to spend the rest of my time showing you some real world examples of where you can do this research to learn about pain points in federal agencies. So this is kind of prep before you go into meetings. Really quickly, there's documents out there called management challenges, performance and challenges issues.
I can't you'll see what the title is. I forgot it already. But these are the these are annual reports that come out of most agencies that say these are the biggest challenges management faces.
DOD puts out one that's related to cyber challenges. Every year, here's the top 20 plus challenges we're facing in cyber as cyber is part of warfare. There's annual reports.
Every agency puts out an annual report and it says, oh, hey, here's all the great stuff we did. And here's some stuff we hope to get to, but we didn't get to that we're looking at next year. Right. And those annual reports kind of feed in back and forth with their strategic plans.
And the last one I just suggested here is industry day slides. Army contracting command. put out this great industry day event basically and they had like hundreds and hundreds of slides for all these different sections who were all saying hey here are some of the challenges we have and here's what we're looking for from industry and then here's the opportunities we have right and so looking at industry day slides sometimes you can get a good understanding of problems people are facing but you need to know what problems your products and solutions address all right let me go over here really quick you By the way, go cut in a box.
This is where you get your score. Just go get your visibility score number two, and you can find it. So I'm gonna go through really fast because I got 20 minutes and I wanna make sure I show you these eight different tabs. But let's start with this first one, right?
I posted this a while ago. This is NASA's top management challenges, and, or excuse me, top management and performance challenges. That's the proper title, right?
Top management performance challenges. If you search that term for your agency, You should find a document like this. And so if I open it up just really quick, I don't have to go into that particular document, but if I open it up, right, I can, and here, great salespeople learn problems before ever talking about their solutions. But this report lays out these top major challenges that NASA has.
So not only returning humans to the moon, I'm like, all right, that's cool, but I don't see how I help there. But improving management of major programs and projects. Well.
I've done that and I've done stuff that can help on this side. Maybe I don't run the whole program, but I do things that that can improve the efficiency of the overall program project management. Sustaining human presence.
That's not me. But here, maturing information technology management and security. All you cyber firms, zero trust firms, IT modernization or transformation.
That all fits in there. Right. Improving oversight, management of contracts, grants and cooperative agreements.
Bam. Jewel from old, darn it, Gus put Jewel's name in here, our company, so we have it. But Jewel is in our community and she does contracting, right?
So you can understand attracting, retaining a highly skilled and diverse workforce, right? You've got Graham Inc. in here with Nina and team, they do that. Seahill Consulting does that, many others. I don't mean to leave people out, but a lot of companies do that.
So we see that challenge. Well, now you can go into the document, explore the challenge more deeply. Then when you go in to have a conversation with the customer, you're basing it off of, hey, I was looking at challenge number 6, attracting and retaining a highly skilled and diverse workforce.
First off, my language is going to match their challenges. Second, I'm going to have problem questions that are around that. Let's look at another one.
So this is the one I was talking about, and this is a different, oh no, this is not the one I was talking about. This is a different one, and let me just show you really quick. So the Army Sustainment Command, or hold on one second, I can't be expected to know everything by memory.
So the Army Sustainment is a major part of, you know, higher headquarters. That's not, but that's not important right now. What's important is they put out this magazine.
You need to go find it and download it and you come to my site and get it or maybe somebody will drop it into the chat. But inside here, this particular one, they're talking about data-driven sustainment. And if that's your world and you start looking at data modernization for HR professionals, imagine if you're an HR professional or you're data modernization, right? And you're able to come in. They're talking about artificial general intelligence in five not so easy steps.
Well, what is that? How do I get in and talk about it? And same thing up here, data centric sustainment will turn challenges into opportunities. This allows me to go see what their challenges are and how they describe their opportunities.
So that's a so one was a report. This one's a magazine. This one here.
So a couple of more of these are the same kind of thread. Right. Major management performance challenges facing DHS.
Right. So let me come down for a second and come down. Here we go. So if I come here.
I can look at some of their major challenges, right? U.S. borders and approaches. Maybe that's not really me, but I'm an IT or cyber company, secure cyberspace in the critical infrastructure.
I'm like, all right, let me go figure out what that means. They're looking for efficiency and accountability in that activity, right? Let me see if there's any. OK, so right here, remember I was talking about companies that do workforce development or full lifecycle hiring, employee onboarding?
Right here. DHS workforce is strengthening the department. Understanding what challenges they have before we go in is important.
And I can see how it aligns in the appendix towards those strategic plans I mentioned. This one's the same thing, right? It's the Treasury Department.
And so here, they just wrote it right there in a summary, which is awesome. But here is IRS's top management performance challenges. This is really important to understand. I want to go serve IRS and somebody down below.
The IRS is huge and there's many subordinate offices within IRS that I can go talk to. But right here, keeping that theme, human capital is a big challenge for all the agencies. I'm able to look at it.
Information technology modernization that I talk about. I don't know if your business supports other areas in here, but I'm instantly able to see this. any agency you go into, you and your colleagues should all read these challenges and understand at an OPM, right?
What are the major challenges for fiscal year 2024? This was a document in October at the very beginning of the fiscal year 2024 saying, these are the challenges, meaning this is what we need to get done as we go into 2024. Look at right here though, they put theirs into categories. And so I go in and probably look at all their challenges. But the three main categories, if I'm an IT company, I'm focusing on the challenges here.
I don't care about the other ones. I just want to find these and align it to lower level problems. Here's another one. It's a similar thing.
You're seeing this, but I just want to keep letting you see it in different ways. Right here. I think human capital is like the biggest one, right? GPO continues to face challenges with recruitment and retention.
Time to hire efficiencies and succession planning. Succession planning, as far as I understand it, is people who are retiring and leaving out. That's a big deal. We lose that institutional or historical knowledge.
And so it's not just about hiring in human capital, but IT companies who do AI type stuff. You could build an AI solution that shadows a person in their last year in the job. And it's an AI shadowing and learning and documenting the challenges, right? I'm just coming up with that idea now, but I know they used to put... people who would shadow.
Imagine if I had an AI who shadowed me for the last year of my job. Those are big. And so you start seeing it.
There you go. So they're looking at five years out. I said one year out. So these are all these challenges that are in there.
These are worth you getting in. This is DoD where I talked about their challenges. And I'll just go really quick. But this is 2024 command challenge problem set. This is a problem set I have shared for multiple years now.
But if I come down here. sorry, if I come down here, They see that they've been binned into six categories. So if you do cybersecurity, I say this all the time, you don't do everything.
You do some part of it. But maybe you're doing persona and identity or vulnerabilities and exploits, right? You can find out where you're at. And if I go down in here, I can start looking at what they're trying to do.
So Cybercom seeks novel and innovative solutions to the following challenge problems. Rapidly generating defensive capabilities. strengthening the security of SCADA and ICS networks.
I don't know if there's a way to say that phonetically, but you get my point, right? Imagine coming down here and looking at this. Then you can explore that whole need behind it.
This can lead into those questions you have in the meeting. Hey, just really quick before I come off this page, go back to my last slide. Next week, we've got all these events starting at the bottom because that's what I do. Because the most important of the totem pole is at the bottom. But we've got DOD coming in, DARPA, Missile Defense, U.S. Air Force Army.
They're all talking about innovative research dollars. Come in next week to the lives. Those guys are all coming in.
It's super exciting. We've got, I think, almost 300 people already registered for Monday. So it'll be a really good event. All right, let me come back there.
Let me come back to the last slide. And here's what I want you to remember from today's training. First thing is, when you're thinking about the customer and selling, you've got to find the pain.
People don't buy. unless they have a pain they're trying to get rid of, right? They need to have that need.
And so find the pain. It usually comes as an implied need that you turn into an explicit need. So convert that pain into that explicit need that will drive them to action. We need them to drive to action, whether it's to have more conversations with you, whether it's you're so early in the process for them to actually put something out as an RFI, whatever that action is.
It's only going to begin when they start having that explicit need. And then the last thing, and maybe this was kind of the first thing you should start with, is make sure you and your team know what problems do our services or products address. Don't try to solve everything.
Just go, you know, I was SharePoint in my last company. We didn't say we did everything. Even within SharePoint, we said we address business needs.
So the HR department in the hospital was the OR and things like that. So we didn't actually even care about the IT department. We cared about the business units.
So our SharePoint expertise and the problems we solved were around business process improvement. And so you need to know that about yourself. So make sure you go register. You go onto my site and just go into my profile, go to my posts.
And in there, you'll find all the CIVR events for next week. So make sure you register to attend. If you're doing $2 million or more and you're looking for our help to grow your company, we've got a business development accelerator.
You can put workshop in the chat. If that's not you right now, keep coming back to the training. I do the training so that you can understand that government contracting is not a secret. It's just a process. When you learn the process, you're able to do things over and over, over again.
And that's what I want you to do with that skillset and with training. Come back to it over and over and over again. I will see you next week at the Cibber training.