Marketing to public sector agencies differs in many ways from marketing to private sector entities, most particularly in the variety of procurement process and what you can do to develop/maintain client relationships. Federal professional services procurement is governed by the Brooks Act; most state-level professional services procurement is governed by state laws (“mini-Brooks Act”), ordinance or administrative rules/orders. Many cities have processes required by their various states’ enabling legislation, ordinances, administrative rules/orders.

Government agencies have their own multi-page forms, often with exacting requirements for team composition and content, and the process often has detailed evaluation criteria which may vary from one RFQ/RFP to the next. Contrast this with the private sector, where a client can give you a new project simply because you did a good job on the last one!

This session will address the legal frameworks for public sector procurement, including some of the politics of selection; talk about “best value” as a way to give objective scores to subjective evaluation criteria; and look at a variety of forms and real-world RFPs as jump-off points for discussion.

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