Why your team should know about public sector procurement

Sharing knowledge throughout your teams is the best way to make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to public sector procurement. Here's why...

If your team are used to selling to the private sector, then selling to the public sector can be a new adventure for you and your team. If you’ve been selling to the public sector for a while now, this same advice applies to you too. To ensure success, here’s some questions to ask yourself  to ensure that your whole team know about public sector procurement.

This includes more than your marketing and sales teams! It is essential that your wider company has a firm understanding of how the public sector market works and of your overall public sector strategy so they too can have effective conversations with buyers, produce relevant material and support the overall team goals.

What do my teams need to know

Ensuring that your wider team understand the public sector, you need to ensure that they have a solid foundation of knowledge. Ask yourselves the following questions:

Does your wider team have experience of working with the public sector? It’s worth highlighting those in your company that have experience in these areas. They can share their knowledge. Bringing this experience to the forefront can make a buyer less nervous to do business with you.

Do they understand your overall public sector strategy? Sometimes it can be a bit confusing to members of the team where your focuses are. A good, solid public sector strategy is important to have success in this market – we’ve given tips on this before – but if your teams don’t buy into it or understand it, it’s almost worthless.

Does your team understand framework best practices? Make sure your sales team know how the frameworks (or Dynamic Purchasing Systems) that you’re on work. They’re the ones pointing buyers to these ways to procure your services. If they don’t know that G-Cloud has the possibility to direct award, for example, you could be missing out big time.

Does your marketing team understand how to best frame your messaging for the public sector? There’s a lot a marketing team can do to help boost your public sector market presence. However, some of the basics include making a website page dedicated to the public sector, including case studies. Buyers like to see experience and know that you can do what you say you do.

Does your sales team understand how to best approach the public sector? Do they know how to get in front of buyers? Do they know who’s using which frameworks?

How do I help my team understand public sector procurement?

The best way to ensure that your whole team understands public sector procurement, is through training and sharing knowledge. We understand that it can be very difficult to dedicate time to training in these testing times, but there are plenty of online training courses available. We have our own courses here.

Attend events and get chatting to other suppliers and (more importantly) the buyers. You’ll get to know buyers’ preferred ways to procure and how they’re using them. On top of this, Crown Commercial Service run webinars throughout the year covering their key frameworks and DPSs, attend them! There’s always good info shared and you can get the jist of what other suppliers are asking.