Years ago I can remember taking a corporate Vice President to downtown DC. He looked at all the buildings and said, your reps should make six or eight calls a day on these accounts.
I looked at him and said, so where would you like to start? He didn't really understand what I meant, and it is almost impossible to comprehend unless you've spent a lot of time getting appointments yourself.
Getting yourself in the door of a building to talk to a customer has never been particularly easy. Talking to government customers has always been more challenging, and since 9/11 it has reached a new level of difficulty.
Many Southwest Virginia businesses have technologies and skills that are greatly needed in the Washington area. Building the relationships to bring some of that business to our area is very challenging and time consuming.
Since I've been working in the government space for a few years, I actually have a number people who can help open doors for me. For those who don't have those contacts, the only way to get them is to join organizations and associations and go to as many meetings as possible.
I recently had a meeting with a very large government organization. The process is very illustrative of the challenges that face those wanting to capture government business.
I already knew a number of people in the agency which has well over 200,000 employees. However, none of the employees that I knew were in the area where I needed to get. Two and one half months ago I sent my first e-mail to one of the high ranking people that I knew. Only four days later I got a response back. Actually in the world of government that's a pretty amazing turn around time. One of the standing jokes is that an e-mail to a government agency needs to age for a couple of weeks before it is ripe enough to reply to the sender.
The response that I got back referred me to another person. Over the course of three or four weeks I sent about one e-mail per week trying to get a response from that person who was someone who didn't really know me. I finally got a response back from someone who reported to this person. They suggested that I try to set up a meeting with another person. After trying a couple of e-mails to this person, I tried a couple of phone calls. I got back an e-mail from another underling who suggested I call another person.
He happened to copy the Chief Technology Officer of his division so I did a reply to all in my return e-mail with some information about the technology I was trying to get in front of them.
A few days later the CTO agreed to meet with me in a couple of weeks. From the time I started trying to get an appointment, it took me approximately two and one half months until I sat down with the CTO.
Even getting to the meeting in the DC area can be a huge challenge. On the day of the meeting I started out from my daughter's house in Reston which is only a mile or two from the Dulles Toll road.
Unfortunately the normal way to the toll road was blocked by construction so I took a back way to Reston Town Center where a power failure had taken out all the stop lights. So the normal five minute trip to Dulles Toll Road took twenty five minutes. I then drove to Tyson's Corner where I caught a cab to downtown DC. Now some would question this, but those people didn't spend thirty five minutes looking for a parking spot last week in Arlington. I ended up parked on a curb in a garage. The attendants assured me I wouldn't be towed.
My trip to Washington was longer and about $5 more expensive than the normal $33 because the Cobbie had his special way of getting downtown. I usually don't complain if I'm headed in the right direction and not getting really stiffed. The ride downtown was about thirty five minutes but it could have easily taken an hour or more. My total travel time ended up being eighty minutes which is a little longer than the hour that I usually budget, but I had allowed lots of extra time for security so I was fine. This trip I was lucky, security was minimal and I only had to show my driver's license twice and to sign in twice before I got a visitor's badge.
I arrived about fifteen minutes before the appointment, and talked with the CTO for about twenty minutes while we waited for the other participants to show up. We had a good meeting where I did a PowerPoint presentation and then left them with some literature. The meeting lasted about an hour, and I managed to get into a cab by three pm and head back to Tyson's. Traffic was a lot slower leaving DC than it was coming into town but there were no delays getting off the Dulles Toll Road so I was back at home base in about forty five minutes. Counting travel and waiting the one hour meeting took about four hours of time. If you add the morning prep time for the appointment, I spent about six hours on the one meeting that day.
Sending the participants thank you notes is a task for the next day as is providing answers to a question that I was unable to answer. I'll then start trying once again to contact some of the other people that I have been trying to schedule in the same organization and try to hook up with some new people who were suggested as appropriate contacts by the people with whom I met.
If we're lucky in another month or so, after two or three more successful appointments, the organization will be interested enough to come off their turf and come to our organization and hear a more detailed explanation of our technology and meet some of the key people in our organization.
If that goes well, in a few months, they might end up recommending our technology to people in their organizations that have a need for it. Then it will have to get budgeted and through procurement. If we are lucky and some miracles happen, that will be about nine months from the first e-mail, more likely it will be about twelve to eighteen months since the first e-mail.
The idea that you can get five or six of these appointments back to back in one day with government customers is just a pipe dream from someone who is very inexperienced in sales. Govermment schedules are too busy and the scheduling almost never works unless you have dedicated resources scheduling appointments. Very few small or even large corporations have that.
I used to work with a government consultant, and we would sometimes put together three or four appointments in one day for one of our Vice Presidents. It would basically take the two of us and many of my managers and reps working for a couple of weeks or longer to make three good appointments happen in one day. Even then we've had someone in government cancel an appointment as the VP's plane was landing.
Against that backdrop, our small businesses in Southwest Virginia have a huge challenge in front of them. They need to understand that the results will not come easily, and that lots of travel will be required. It's hard to do all of this if you're a small business, but if you're going to grow and thrive, there is no easy way.
You can go to meetings where you meet a number of potential customers or partners, but that only gives you a foot in the door which you'll often find is the wrong door or requires that you go through several other ones in order to be successful.
So plan your strategy well, and carefully pick where you want to start because there are a lot of buildings out there, and there isn't enough time in the day to just have appointments for the sake of appointments. You need to understand what you want to accomplish and the organizations that are most likely to be good customers or partners.
So where do you want to start?
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