Setting a Successful Government Sales Strategy with Pauline Yau

Pauline has spent 25 years working in technology sales and has specialised in selling to the public sector market. Pauline built the public sector sales presence at UK tech start-up Huddle and then went on to run the central government sales organisation for Microsoft UK.

Ahead of her highly anticipated webinar, we asked Pauline to give a few helpful tips on how to best approach selling to the public sector!

In what ways is it different selling to the Public sector than the Private sector?

It’s important to bear in mind that there are an increasing number of people being hired in to public sector from the private sector and they bring with them their private sector experiences. So, whilst there are not many differences in how you sell now as there were several years back, it’s important to remember that public sector have procurement processes that need to be understood. In my experience, it’s critical to build a strong network within public sector as the IT community is quite small and people can move around to other departments or agencies. There are also many cross public sector groups where your service or product can be talked about and recommended as there is much more collaborative working and knowledge sharing in public sector than with commercial organisations who are competing with each other.

How important is it to design your product or service specifically with government in mind?

It’s really important to understand and adhere to the government cloud security principlesbecause these are an important selection criteria for public sector organisations procuring any cloud service. Government departments and agencies in particular have levels of bureaucracy which isn’t as common in private sector companies and they also have rules around retention of information for archives and freedom of information. It’s good to understand how government works so you can articulate the business value of your service but not critical to design a service specifically for government.

How do you feel G-Cloud has changed the way in which digital services are procured?

G-Cloud has done a great job of allowing SME cloud providers to sell to public sector which has driven greater innovation by vendors and public sector organisations alike. For those vendors on G-Cloud who understand how to increase awareness of their service, they have seen strong public sector sales results that they would have struggled to achieve if G-Cloud didn’t exist.

With thanks to Pauline for her time and you can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Get in touch with one of the team if you would like to find out more about this webinar or how to sign up or upgrade to our enterprise package!