How To Use Sam.Gov To Make $435K

Hey guys, Ricky here. Today, we're going to talk about how to use SAM.gov. Are you really going to use it to win contracts with the government? Now, just a little bit of warning. You're going to hear some things here that are the exact opposite of what most of the social media channels out there are pumping out. I'm a former government procurement officer. I managed over $82 billion in contracts for the federal government, and then started a coaching consulting business where I help companies. sell to the government. Okay. So I've been on both sides of it now, and I'm going to tell you the truth, what is really going on in sam.gov, a very specific opportunity that you need to be looking for and the work required to actually close a contract. So let's get into it. All right, guys. So this is sam.gov. Now this is a government website, so not the smoothest, not the most user-friendly. Now you don't even have to be logged in here to look for opportunities. So what we're going to do is the first thing I do, just go to search. All right. Now, here is the big difference between what I'm going to teach you and what the gurus are telling you. You do not want to look for solicitations, meaning you don't want to look for a request for quote or request for proposal. But that's an official solicitation, meaning if you respond to a RFP or RFQ, you could be awarded a contract. You're going to write a proposal, which is a lot of work. or solicitation, and then the government is going to critique that proposal, grade it, and then eventually somebody is going to be awarded on most of those solicitations. Now, here's why you're not hearing. By the time those solicitations come out, a tremendous amount of work has gone into this contracting process on the government side and on the company side. At the end of the day, relationships win contracts with the government. You don't have to have relationships from a childhood friend that's in the government. You develop these relationships specific to the opportunity. So there's very few people that can put you on contract. So we're going to develop a relationship with someone in the government that can put you on contract. This is how we do it. We look for sources sought. So I'm going to go down here to sources sought, and it pulls up a bunch. Look, there's 3,700 of these. Look. There's 3,700 sources sought. These are not all going to be things you can engage on because some of them are going to be past the due date. Now, it's March 28th today, 2024. So March 28th or after is what I want. I go into dates. So let's say the next three months. Okay. All right, great. Now I have 1,100 opportunities. And another good point about this is there are a lot of systems that will charge you a lot of money for helping you find bids, automating things. Some of them are worth the money, but those typically charge a lot, thousands of dollars. But you can do a lot with SAM.gov. You can do a lot for free. And by the way, even though I have access to all those tools, I still, SAM.gov is... the source documentation for most of the solicitations out there. So this is still, you have to learn how to use SAM.gov, no matter what system you're using. You're going to have to go back here, double check the facts. If you really want to be successful, you have to know how to use this. All right. So I know that there's 1,180 sources sought out there. Let's talk about what this source of sought is. This source of sought is the government. This means that there is a government office that has the authority to put you on contract and has funding to put you on contract. they are going to put somebody on contract to solve a problem. The source of SOT has multiple benefits for you and for the government. One, and this is the one most people associate with source of SOT, it does let the government know if there's a small business or a business with a set-aside like 8A, woman-owned small business, service-disabled, that can perform the service, provide the technology, provide the solution that they're looking for. So that's one thing. So it can help the government set something aside for a small business or let them know, hey, we can't set this aside because there aren't enough companies out there that can do this. We're going to make a full-blown open competition. Large and small can go for it. That is one reason for the source to saw it. The other reason for the source to saw it, and keep in mind, I was the guy in the government doing this, right? The program manager and the contracting officer and the government are not the expert at what you do. You're the expert at what you do. So if it's a, what's the first thing up here? Cable assembly spec. Tell you right now, I was not an expert. Cable assembly specs. Now I might have an engineering team that have some idea about what that is, but. I need companies that are experts at this to tell me the government, what's the latest and greatest technology? If there are services associated with it, what kind of certification should they have? What kind of past performance? What you're doing when you respond to a source of thought, you're not just helping them set something aside. You're helping them write the solicitation that's going to come out. Remember that thing I said not to look for, the RFP or RFQ? The government still has to write that. That's a lot of work. So they are taking these responses and they are incorporating a lot of this into the solicitation. You're starting your relationship with that office. They now know your name. You've now helped them. And so you're going to request a meeting or a demo of whatever you've got. You respond to the sources side. So you're helping them write the solicitation. You're helping them understand maybe a business like yours is the business that should go on contract. In their mind, you're starting to become a front runner. And by the way, now you requested a meeting with the office, right? You want to get on the phone with them and you get in a meeting with them. You show them your past performance, whether even if it's just commercial past performance. This is the work we've done. You're talking with them. And what you're learning when you communicate with them, by the way, is all of the use cases the government has for this cable assembly spec. I haven't even opened the sources, but I could tell you right now, all of the use cases for this are not in there. You're going to learn about these use cases during your meetings with the government and your competitors aren't going to know about them because they're not all going to end up in the solicitation. So when you write your proposal, it's going to be so much better and so much more targeted toward what the government actually needs. Let's go back to Sam. Okay. So we brought up a bunch of these sources. So I'm just going to open the first one here. This one's due in a couple of days. It's with a defense logistic agency. Now you can see there's a couple of things here. It says this is not a solicitation, right? So this isn't going to result in a contract. A lot of companies avoid this whole thing because of that, right? But what you're doing by focusing on solicitations is focusing on an area where you think you're going to get a quick win. This isn't a quick win. This is not a quick win game. This is a marathon. It takes much longer to sell to the government than it does commercially. Like you need to know that going into this 12 to 18 months, that's where you have to plan on. Based on sources sought market research, this requirement may be set aside for small business. We talked about that. So you're going to recommend small business set aside if you're a small business. You're going to recommend that they don't set it aside for small business if you're not a small business and everything in between. They want the cage code manufacturing location. So this is to manufacture something, right? But it really doesn't matter what this is for. My guidance is going to be to send whether it's for a service or something like this. Now, look. You've got the email address of the actual contact that's going to be working this project. So this is the first interaction with them. You're building a relationship with them. When you find the source of SOT, there are a lot of steps that go from finding this to closing a contract with the government. And it's critical that you have a way of managing this. So the next thing that you're going to do is you want to track it, right? You're going to put in a lot of work between finding this source of SOT. and closing a contract, one of the things you have to do is eventually you will have to do a proposal, probably on an RFP or an RFQ, but those are going to be ones that you are specifically looking for because you've engaged on the sources sought that was associated with it. Okay. So you need a way of tracking that. So I'm going to show you quickly how I manage that. Just make sure that you have a way to do it as well. Okay. The next thing we need to do is go to our system. You need a system for selling to the government, selling anything really. I like a CRM that's combined with a pipeline, combined with a place where you can host your website, do all of your email tasks, people that are working for you, if you have people that are working for you. So this is what I use, GovClose. And I want to add that opportunity to the appropriate pipeline. So I, in all of these pipelines, are specifically designed for selling to the government. So we're going to go... Now our sources saw it pipeline. Okay. Now create an opportunity. I'm going to plug and play the name in there. We want to take, this is pretty important. Okay. You want to make sure that you have contact, add the contacts email. I'm going to assign this to one of my salespeople. I'm going to give it to Stephanie. This is with defense logistics agency. And I also want to save the link to this. I can plug the link right in here. and the sam.gov link. Okay. The rest of this will fill in as you go through the opportunity. So there's a lot that's going to go into that. I'm going to create this opportunity. I'm also going to assign a task to Stephanie. Now, once you talk to the office, you're going to have a good idea of when the solicitation is actually going to come out. Let's just say we talked to them and they said by mid-June, this is going to come out. So probably around, let's say, 7 June. I want to make sure that we're looking for that's going to add a task. And so Stephanie is going to have that in there assigned to her. And every time we go into the pipeline, it's going to be looking at her. Hey, we're monitoring for this solicitation release. And you move it through the pipeline as you. So if you. What would actually happen here is we would read all of the attachments and we make a go, no-go decision. So you can see there's a process to this. This is the long game. Selling to the government is not a get-rich-quick scheme. You've got to plan on 12 to 18 months normally to win a government contract. You're going to write a response. You're going to submit it. You want to confirm receipt, request follow-up meeting. So after all of this is done, you can see all of the steps we're going through. We have submitted. Even writing the sources sought, which I cover in other episodes, is a lot. We make sure that they received it because the government is notorious for blocking emails. So if you don't get a confirmation of receipt, no matter what you're sending them, you need to make sure that it didn't get blocked by the government email system. Call them, send an email with no attachments, do whatever you have to. You're trying to get a meeting, like meetings win contracts. But after they've confirmed everything, you are. monitoring for the solicitation. And that's the column we have right here. Now, at this point, you should also know how much this opportunity is worth. So this opportunity, this could be worth after you talk to them, whether if you're manufacturing it, maybe it's a 400, I'm just going to make something up here. We find out it's a $435,000 opportunity. Okay. Is that worth spending six to 12 months trying to close that contract? It probably is for your company, right? And you can see there are a lot of steps here. Now, I... I want to, all right, so just something I want to talk about real quick. All right. Think about the difference between what I just described to you and what a lot of your competitors are going to be doing, or a lot of people that are misled are going to be doing. Let's just take a look at this pipeline one more time. Okay. Cause I want to show you something. Okay. When you see companies or you're seeing advice saying, hey, let's look for a RFP or an RFQ and write a proposal and win a contract, which I use in air quotes because you're not going to win that way. It happens so infrequently that it's worth me making a polarizing comment like that. What they're saying to do is start here. The solicitation is released. So. That's what all your competitors that don't know the process, they're starting here. Solicitation's released. I'm going to write a proposal. Ton of work, by the way. Then they're probably not even confirming the government receives it. They should be monitoring for an award. This is what they're telling you. Some people are telling you, find a solicitation, write a proposal, monitor for award. You win the award. Yay, right? Really, it's lost the award because you just put a lot of work in for nothing. But these are all the steps that people that are really winning contracts are taking. They find... the RFI or the source of thought. By the way, there's other ways to find early opportunities. This is a good way to do it. Then they make a go, no-go decision. And if they go, they decide, do I have to team up with somebody to do this? Maybe they do this before or after. So you can change the steps in here a little bit. Call the government point of contact. You're going to get so much information out of that. Then we write a source of thought response, a very solid response that is influencing the government. not only on how to put something on contract, what is going to be on contract, but also influencing them to think that your company is best suited to do this. And you're eliminating competition. All of that is going into this response. Then you submit. Then you confirm receipt. Then you request a meeting. Maybe you give a demo or a brief to the government office, either in person's best, but in person or virtually. Now you're also confirming the solicitation dates. You're monitoring that. You got it very important. We need to make sure we or the sales team is waiting and looking, have a way of identifying the solicitation when it comes out. And by the way, the government office you're working with is probably going to send you a heads up. Hey, this is coming up. You have to do the work before that solicitation comes out or you're not going to win. Now the solicitation comes out. Who's going to win? The companies that are doing all of this work up to this point or the yahoos that are... Oh, hey, solicitation. I'm writing a proposal. I'm going to win. Very few and far between are going to do it this way. All right. That is our Sam.gov instruction for the day. Very important stuff here. Hopefully you took something away from that. You can find us at dodcontract.com. You can find the system I use to win government contracts for my clients at govclose.com. Have a good one. Cheers.

I'm a former government procurement officer. I managed over $82 billion in contracts for the federal government, and then started a coaching consulting business where I help companies. sell to the government.

Okay. So I've been on both sides of it now, and I'm going to tell you the truth, what is really going on in sam.gov, a very specific opportunity that you need to be looking for and the work required to actually close a contract. So let's get into it. All right, guys. So this is sam.gov.

Now this is a government website, so not the smoothest, not the most user-friendly. Now you don't even have to be logged in here to look for opportunities. So what we're going to do is the first thing I do, just go to search. All right.

Now, here is the big difference between what I'm going to teach you and what the gurus are telling you. You do not want to look for solicitations, meaning you don't want to look for a request for quote or request for proposal. But that's an official solicitation, meaning if you respond to a RFP or RFQ, you could be awarded a contract.

You're going to write a proposal, which is a lot of work. or solicitation, and then the government is going to critique that proposal, grade it, and then eventually somebody is going to be awarded on most of those solicitations. Now, here's why you're not hearing. By the time those solicitations come out, a tremendous amount of work has gone into this contracting process on the government side and on the company side. At the end of the day, relationships win contracts with the government.

You don't have to have relationships from a childhood friend that's in the government. You develop these relationships specific to the opportunity. So there's very few people that can put you on contract.

So we're going to develop a relationship with someone in the government that can put you on contract. This is how we do it. We look for sources sought.

So I'm going to go down here to sources sought, and it pulls up a bunch. Look, there's 3,700 of these. Look.

There's 3,700 sources sought. These are not all going to be things you can engage on because some of them are going to be past the due date. Now, it's March 28th today, 2024. So March 28th or after is what I want.

I go into dates. So let's say the next three months. Okay.

All right, great. Now I have 1,100 opportunities. And another good point about this is there are a lot of systems that will charge you a lot of money for helping you find bids, automating things.

Some of them are worth the money, but those typically charge a lot, thousands of dollars. But you can do a lot with SAM.gov. You can do a lot for free. And by the way, even though I have access to all those tools, I still, SAM.gov is... the source documentation for most of the solicitations out there.

So this is still, you have to learn how to use SAM.gov, no matter what system you're using. You're going to have to go back here, double check the facts. If you really want to be successful, you have to know how to use this. All right.

So I know that there's 1,180 sources sought out there. Let's talk about what this source of sought is. This source of sought is the government. This means that there is a government office that has the authority to put you on contract and has funding to put you on contract. they are going to put somebody on contract to solve a problem.

The source of SOT has multiple benefits for you and for the government. One, and this is the one most people associate with source of SOT, it does let the government know if there's a small business or a business with a set-aside like 8A, woman-owned small business, service-disabled, that can perform the service, provide the technology, provide the solution that they're looking for. So that's one thing. So it can help the government set something aside for a small business or let them know, hey, we can't set this aside because there aren't enough companies out there that can do this.

We're going to make a full-blown open competition. Large and small can go for it. That is one reason for the source to saw it.

The other reason for the source to saw it, and keep in mind, I was the guy in the government doing this, right? The program manager and the contracting officer and the government are not the expert at what you do. You're the expert at what you do.

So if it's a, what's the first thing up here? Cable assembly spec. Tell you right now, I was not an expert. Cable assembly specs. Now I might have an engineering team that have some idea about what that is, but.

I need companies that are experts at this to tell me the government, what's the latest and greatest technology? If there are services associated with it, what kind of certification should they have? What kind of past performance? What you're doing when you respond to a source of thought, you're not just helping them set something aside. You're helping them write the solicitation that's going to come out.

Remember that thing I said not to look for, the RFP or RFQ? The government still has to write that. That's a lot of work. So they are taking these responses and they are incorporating a lot of this into the solicitation.

You're starting your relationship with that office. They now know your name. You've now helped them. And so you're going to request a meeting or a demo of whatever you've got. You respond to the sources side.

So you're helping them write the solicitation. You're helping them understand maybe a business like yours is the business that should go on contract. In their mind, you're starting to become a front runner. And by the way, now you requested a meeting with the office, right? You want to get on the phone with them and you get in a meeting with them.

You show them your past performance, whether even if it's just commercial past performance. This is the work we've done. You're talking with them.

And what you're learning when you communicate with them, by the way, is all of the use cases the government has for this cable assembly spec. I haven't even opened the sources, but I could tell you right now, all of the use cases for this are not in there. You're going to learn about these use cases during your meetings with the government and your competitors aren't going to know about them because they're not all going to end up in the solicitation.

So when you write your proposal, it's going to be so much better and so much more targeted toward what the government actually needs. Let's go back to Sam. Okay. So we brought up a bunch of these sources.

So I'm just going to open the first one here. This one's due in a couple of days. It's with a defense logistic agency. Now you can see there's a couple of things here.

It says this is not a solicitation, right? So this isn't going to result in a contract. A lot of companies avoid this whole thing because of that, right?

But what you're doing by focusing on solicitations is focusing on an area where you think you're going to get a quick win. This isn't a quick win. This is not a quick win game.

This is a marathon. It takes much longer to sell to the government than it does commercially. Like you need to know that going into this 12 to 18 months, that's where you have to plan on.

Based on sources sought market research, this requirement may be set aside for small business. We talked about that. So you're going to recommend small business set aside if you're a small business. You're going to recommend that they don't set it aside for small business if you're not a small business and everything in between.

They want the cage code manufacturing location. So this is to manufacture something, right? But it really doesn't matter what this is for. My guidance is going to be to send whether it's for a service or something like this.

Now, look. You've got the email address of the actual contact that's going to be working this project. So this is the first interaction with them. You're building a relationship with them.

When you find the source of SOT, there are a lot of steps that go from finding this to closing a contract with the government. And it's critical that you have a way of managing this. So the next thing that you're going to do is you want to track it, right? You're going to put in a lot of work between finding this source of SOT. and closing a contract, one of the things you have to do is eventually you will have to do a proposal, probably on an RFP or an RFQ, but those are going to be ones that you are specifically looking for because you've engaged on the sources sought that was associated with it.

Okay. So you need a way of tracking that. So I'm going to show you quickly how I manage that. Just make sure that you have a way to do it as well.

Okay. The next thing we need to do is go to our system. You need a system for selling to the government, selling anything really. I like a CRM that's combined with a pipeline, combined with a place where you can host your website, do all of your email tasks, people that are working for you, if you have people that are working for you.

So this is what I use, GovClose. And I want to add that opportunity to the appropriate pipeline. So I, in all of these pipelines, are specifically designed for selling to the government. So we're going to go... Now our sources saw it pipeline.

Okay. Now create an opportunity. I'm going to plug and play the name in there.

We want to take, this is pretty important. Okay. You want to make sure that you have contact, add the contacts email. I'm going to assign this to one of my salespeople.

I'm going to give it to Stephanie. This is with defense logistics agency. And I also want to save the link to this.

I can plug the link right in here. and the sam.gov link. Okay. The rest of this will fill in as you go through the opportunity.

So there's a lot that's going to go into that. I'm going to create this opportunity. I'm also going to assign a task to Stephanie.

Now, once you talk to the office, you're going to have a good idea of when the solicitation is actually going to come out. Let's just say we talked to them and they said by mid-June, this is going to come out. So probably around, let's say, 7 June. I want to make sure that we're looking for that's going to add a task. And so Stephanie is going to have that in there assigned to her.

And every time we go into the pipeline, it's going to be looking at her. Hey, we're monitoring for this solicitation release. And you move it through the pipeline as you. So if you. What would actually happen here is we would read all of the attachments and we make a go, no-go decision.

So you can see there's a process to this. This is the long game. Selling to the government is not a get-rich-quick scheme. You've got to plan on 12 to 18 months normally to win a government contract. You're going to write a response.

You're going to submit it. You want to confirm receipt, request follow-up meeting. So after all of this is done, you can see all of the steps we're going through. We have submitted. Even writing the sources sought, which I cover in other episodes, is a lot.

We make sure that they received it because the government is notorious for blocking emails. So if you don't get a confirmation of receipt, no matter what you're sending them, you need to make sure that it didn't get blocked by the government email system. Call them, send an email with no attachments, do whatever you have to.

You're trying to get a meeting, like meetings win contracts. But after they've confirmed everything, you are. monitoring for the solicitation. And that's the column we have right here.

Now, at this point, you should also know how much this opportunity is worth. So this opportunity, this could be worth after you talk to them, whether if you're manufacturing it, maybe it's a 400, I'm just going to make something up here. We find out it's a $435,000 opportunity.

Okay. Is that worth spending six to 12 months trying to close that contract? It probably is for your company, right? And you can see there are a lot of steps here. Now, I... I want to, all right, so just something I want to talk about real quick.

All right. Think about the difference between what I just described to you and what a lot of your competitors are going to be doing, or a lot of people that are misled are going to be doing. Let's just take a look at this pipeline one more time. Okay. Cause I want to show you something.

Okay. When you see companies or you're seeing advice saying, hey, let's look for a RFP or an RFQ and write a proposal and win a contract, which I use in air quotes because you're not going to win that way. It happens so infrequently that it's worth me making a polarizing comment like that. What they're saying to do is start here. The solicitation is released.

So. That's what all your competitors that don't know the process, they're starting here. Solicitation's released. I'm going to write a proposal. Ton of work, by the way.

Then they're probably not even confirming the government receives it. They should be monitoring for an award. This is what they're telling you.

Some people are telling you, find a solicitation, write a proposal, monitor for award. You win the award. Yay, right? Really, it's lost the award because you just put a lot of work in for nothing.

But these are all the steps that people that are really winning contracts are taking. They find... the RFI or the source of thought. By the way, there's other ways to find early opportunities.

This is a good way to do it. Then they make a go, no-go decision. And if they go, they decide, do I have to team up with somebody to do this? Maybe they do this before or after.

So you can change the steps in here a little bit. Call the government point of contact. You're going to get so much information out of that. Then we write a source of thought response, a very solid response that is influencing the government. not only on how to put something on contract, what is going to be on contract, but also influencing them to think that your company is best suited to do this.

And you're eliminating competition. All of that is going into this response. Then you submit. Then you confirm receipt. Then you request a meeting.

Maybe you give a demo or a brief to the government office, either in person's best, but in person or virtually. Now you're also confirming the solicitation dates. You're monitoring that. You got it very important.

We need to make sure we or the sales team is waiting and looking, have a way of identifying the solicitation when it comes out. And by the way, the government office you're working with is probably going to send you a heads up. Hey, this is coming up. You have to do the work before that solicitation comes out or you're not going to win.

Now the solicitation comes out. Who's going to win? The companies that are doing all of this work up to this point or the yahoos that are...

Oh, hey, solicitation. I'm writing a proposal. I'm going to win.

Very few and far between are going to do it this way. All right. That is our Sam.gov instruction for the day.

Very important stuff here. Hopefully you took something away from that. You can find us at dodcontract.com. You can find the system I use to win government contracts for my clients at govclose.com.

Have a good one. Cheers.

Transcript for:How To Use Sam.Gov To Make $435K

Transcript for:
How To Use Sam.Gov To Make $435K