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How Do Federal Buyers and Sellers Compare?

A Survey of Federal Agency Program Managers and Federal Salespeople at Tech and Professional Services Contractors

by  Leadership Connect Data Science Team, Salma Ismaiel, and Michael Crosby
April 2022

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KEY FINDINGS

  1. With public sector sales turnover averaging 19 months, and on-boarding taking 6 months, Contractors have just one year of productive contributions from sales hires.
  2. With some federal buying processes exceeding 2 years, this means institutionalizing continuity is paramount.
  3. Federal Program Managers come from very different backgrounds than federal salespeople.  They have much more technical backgrounds, are more highly educated, and come from all over the country.

RECOMMENDATIONS

  1. Reduce Onboarding time: Contractors need to reduce onboarding time given high turnover to maximize productive time in-role. Reducing onboarding by just 2 months would result in 20% more productivity.
  2. Improve Continuity: Contractors need to improve continuity processes between outgoing and incoming sales positions. Maintaining detailed notes on current contact and influencers as opposed to leaving stale-data in a CRM is a simple technique that most contractors are not using.
  3. Increase Retention: Extending employee tenure by 6 months will have a significant impact on revenue performance and culture.
  4. Open-ended Questions: Contractors need to up their game with understanding challenges faced by agencies and adopting how they communicate their value to meet these challenges. Program Managers don’t want to hear “feature dumps”.  Contractors should increase the use of mission-focused questioning.
  5. Improve Sales Culture: Contractors need to adapt their workflows to ensure high turnover doesn’t destroy its ability to successfully close deals that take more than 18 months. This means constantly building relationships before you need them, seeking to widen the influencers you interact with, and capturing this data in a system.

 

Contracting clients of Leadership Connect have had success addressing each one of our five recommendations. Contact us to learn how we are uniquely helping our clients improve their sales, retention, and continuity.

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