Making sure you’re selling on G-Cloud

With the 12th iteration well under way, we wanted to give some top tips on how to make sure you're selling on G-Cloud.

At the tail end of 2020 G-Cloud 12 went Live and opened for business. A great route to market for those selling cloud software, support or hosting to the public sector – and an easy and compliant way for buyers to purchase them – it’s one of our favourite frameworks.

With over 38500 listings currently on G-Cloud, from more than 5000 individual suppliers, it’s highly competitive. So, how can suppliers get selling on G-Cloud? How can they stand out from the rest? We’ve got you covered.

A good service name and summary

The main part of a suppliers G-Cloud listing is its name (unsurprisingly) and the summary given within it. These elements are completely searchable by the public sector buyers looking for their solutions.

So, if your name is way too specific, like the product name of your software or full of abbreviations, it might not feature in a lot of results. The same goes for the summary. This is where you should describe what you do, in searchable broader terms but also include specific terms, that would be enough to make you be one of only a few results – or the only result!

The key is to test your keywords. The Digital Marketplace is free to access for anyone, so you can search G-Cloud terms and find the appropriate terms you should use.

Get your support documents up to scratch!

There’s more to your G-Cloud listing than what’s seen on the front end. On top of your service name and summary, in order to get selling on G-Cloud suppliers should make sure their additional documents are exceptional.

The big one is the Service Definition. Now mandatory from G-Cloud 12 onwards (it used to be optional), it’s where you go into finer details about how your service, software or solution works. The trick here is to not make it full of marketing speak. G-Cloud isn’t a shop window like that. The Service Definition should delve into the straight-forward practicalities of your service. After all, the buyer will be after an easy to read, understandable document that lets them know how your service works.

Which also brings up another point. Don’t overdo it with the technical language! There’s no guarantee the person who reads your Service Definition knows the ins and outs of the technology, so make it as digestible as possible.

You’ve got to be buyable to be selling on G-Cloud

We always say it, but it’s an important thing to repeat: getting listed on G-Cloud doesn’t mean you’re going to win the business. There’s a lot more to it. Making sure your listing is as buyable as it possibly can be enables this to happen though.

Suppliers need to make sure their pricing is buyable, their listing is compliant with the terms of G-Cloud and, as we said, searchable. After all of this is done, then we always recommend making sure you’ve got the framework firmly placed into your public sector marketing and sales strategy. Only then will suppliers be selling on G-Cloud.