Nice piece, but selling to enterprise customers and selling to the government only tangentially overlap. While most of the advice is transportable, the number o

Nice piece, but selling to enterprise customers and selling to the government only tangentially overlap. While most of the advice is transportable, the number one rule of selling to any government -- federal, state, or local -- is get on the approved vendor list. Getting on GSA is fundamental; getting on as many state-level purchasing schedules as possible is the next step. Unfortunately, this almost certainly means you'll end up giving a chunk of revenue to companies whose sole business model is "we're a GSA-certified vendor" and who will handle the regulatory runarounds for you. But the rewards are significant -- schedule vendors are often exempt from RFP requirements, so you can skip the usual pain point of writing RFQ responses and bidding for business, and get right to the selling.