How to get found on G-Cloud

Unfortunately, just being on G-Cloud doesn't guarantee you sales. Here, we break down the best ways to make sure you're easy to find for prospective government Buyers.

The UK Government are committed to ensuring a significant SME spend, giving a fair chance at being awarded IT contracts. But this commitment alone wont guarantee that your organisation will make more G-Cloud sales. The crucial question is: how discoverable are you? Now is the perfect time to optimise your G-Cloud listing to make sure that you can be easily found on the framework.

For your G-Cloud 13 listing, we thought it best to reiterate our advice about the most effective ways to increase discoverability.

 

Service name and Summary

Our most salient advice at team AC is to review your listing from the perspective of the buyer. If you were looking to procure the services that your company offers, what key words or phrases would you put into the search bar?

Basically, the language used in your service summary is crucial in making sure relevant buyers can find you, and that your listing accurately and succinctly displays what you offer. Don’t make this too short; you need to be extremely clear, using key terms that buyers are likely to search for. Depending on what you offer, general examples could include “data analytics”, “unified communications”, “cloud consultancy”, etc. Add some more specific phrases as well, to make sure your unique solution can be found.

However, remember that the reader may well be from a procurement team—not a technical or marketing team—so be weary of using any language that is too sales-orientated or technical. For this reason we recommend having a mixture of people involved in the listing process; from sales, technical and marketing departments. This way, you’ll ensure that your listing is more universally digestible.

 

Filters

Another way of narrowing down the search criteria on G-Cloud involves applying filters. This is where those with fewer “nice to have” attributes are eliminated from the search.

According to a sales analysis carried out by our Strategic Adviser Lindsay Smith, the most significant attributes worth mentioning in your G-Cloud listing to achieve sales success are as follows:

• Email or online and telephone support – Essential
• Service availability 99.9% or greater – Highly significant
• Audited secure software development standard – Significant
• ISO27001 accreditation – Significant
• Formal vulnerability management process – Significant
• Staff security clearance conforms to BS7858 – Significant
• Formal incident management process – Significant

Not all of these attributes may be relevant to the service that you offer but it is certainly worth keeping them in mind. Research shows that if you refer to as many of the “Industry Standard” and “nice to have” elements that you can, your chances of sales success will grow.

 

Test it out

To work out how discoverable your current listing is, you might decide to work backwards. See how easy it is to find your own service within the current G-Cloud 12 listings by using key phrases and filters that sum up what you offer. If you appear with one or two other listings, great job! If you are one of 300, you probably need to rethink your listing. Some key questions to continue asking yourself throughout the process are:

• How can your service summary be more unique?
• How useful are your Features and Benefits to a buyer?
• Are you actually detailing what you offer, or simply using vague terms such as “software services” or “cloud solutions”?