TMCVocabulary
How to Sell Whole Product in Government Markets
By Bob Rutherford
Strategy
Winning in this environment requires shaping requirements through interaction with the customer. To the extent that the government has not solidified the details of a given requirement, and typically they haven’t in the early stages of requirements definition, the approach is to encourage the expansion of the boundaries that define the required product zone in the direction of your VOD. The goal is to generate the requirement for a capability that you can best provide, or in the perfect case, that only you can provide. Ideally, through the shaping process the customer would come to believe that the capability resident in your VOD is actually a hard requirement and publish it as such. In effect you are helping the government redraw the diagram to adopt your unique capabilities as the generic, expected, or augmented product, or change the level of importance in the direction of your VOD. However, because the government likes competition in its acquisition processes, it will frequently stop short of generating a requirement that effectively locks out a major competition to any less than two bidders. This is not to say that it will not march right up to that line however, and the “best value” zone is a convenient working space that they use to ensure competition with implied but perhaps not explicitly stated requirements that might otherwise prevent competition. Accordingly, the successful adoption of implied requirements is often a more realistic goal.
