Selling to the public sector doesn't start when a tender is published

This was one of the central ideas of the public market training I recently delivered at Málaga City Council's Polo Digital de Contenidos. During the session we worked with companies and projects that wanted to understand what it really means to have government as a client and, above all, what has to happen before reaching a procurement.

Because a company can have a good solution and still be very far from being able to sell it to the public sector.

Before talking about procurement, other questions need answers: what public problem does the product really solve? Which administration has that problem? Who identifies it inside the organisation? Who will use the solution? Is there budget for it? How should the offer be built? What barriers could prevent its adoption?

The public market forces you to look at the business from a broader perspective.

Knowing sales techniques isn't enough. You need to understand how public organisations work, how certain decisions are made, what budget constraints exist and how regulation and procurement shape the design of a solution.

That's why, during the training, we worked through the full path between having a product and getting an administration able to buy it:

public need → solution → institutional fit → budget → value proposition → sales strategy → procurement route → first sale → repeatability.

One of the most interesting parts was grounding this path in concrete cases.

When you analyse a product this way, questions appear that usually aren't asked while designing it: maybe the public client we imagined isn't the right segment; maybe the price makes procurement enormously difficult; maybe the commercial contact isn't who we thought; or maybe there's a much simpler way to win a first reference.

That analysis is exactly what Public Market Fit is about.

It isn't only about learning to sell to government. It's about designing products, services and strategies with a real chance of finding a market within the public sector.

Public procurement is part of that process, but it's just one piece.

Before it comes understanding the problem, choosing the market, building the value proposition, identifying the relevant players, designing the right offer architecture and finding an entry strategy that secures the first references.

And afterwards comes another equally important challenge: making that first sale not an exception, but the beginning of a repeatable, scalable B2G model.

Because bidding for a tender may be the end of a process. Building a market starts well before.

Training with Public Market Fit

I deliver sessions and workshops for startups, companies, incubators, accelerators and entrepreneurship programmes that want to work hands-on on how to access the public market.

Trainings can be adapted to the projects' maturity and combine public market, B2G product design, sales strategy, pricing, segmentation, access to government and procurement.

They can be delivered in person or online, either as an introductory session or as a workshop working directly on participants' projects.

If you're running an entrepreneurship, acceleration or innovation programme and want to include specific training on designing and selling solutions to the public sector:

Request a training →