"Finding Official Buyers

In Finding Agencies and End Users, we discussed how to find end-users, the people in government who'll actually USE your product or service. This time we're going to talk about the official buyers, those folks who are responsible for making formal purchases.

As I've explained before, these two groups often work together. As a vendor, you generally focus on the end-users if you sell technical or complex products -- i.e., products where the user has a real vested interest in performance.

If you sell lab filtering flasks, for example, and the Director of Lab Services for your state's Department of Agriculture and Food prefers filtering flasks made by Indigo Instruments, well,
then that's something you need to know if you're going to have
any success in selling to that agency. You'll have to sell
Indigo's product or convince the lab head yours is better.

But it's important to know official buyers, too, for reasons
that include the following:

• They have a broad understanding of what the agency buys.
• They make the buying decisions for commodities, non-technical
  products, and routine services.
• They can tell you who the end-users are for complex product
  and services.
• Though they may not USE them, they can certainly influence the
  decision on which technical or complex products to buy.
• They are the source for awards data, including who has provided
  what product/service in the past, the pricing and other contract
  details.
• They have knowledge of the agency's planned future procurements.

Generally, buyers are accustomed to sharing information with
vendors. Sometimes they'll provide it for the asking; other times
you'll have to make formal information requests (Freedom of
Information Act requests at the federal level).

Finding buyers is considerably easier than finding end-users for
the following reasons.

• They are concentrated in the purchasing organization, as opposed
  to end-users who can be located anywhere in an agency.
• Often a buyer directory is published at an agency's web site.
  If you're lucky, a buyer directory will show the types of products
  or services that each buyer is responsible for purchasing.
• The employee breakdown of the purchasing organization is usually
  shown in published, paper directories available from the public
  information office.
• At a minimum, the public information office will provide you with
  contact information for the head of the purchasing organization.

These days, the Internet is the place to start to find buyers. The
research can be laborious if you're interested in many agencies, but
manageable if you're focusing on only a few.

To find the main agency site, try using the following search engines
and the keywords representing the agency's name.

Federal: FirstGov, http://www.firstgov.gov
State and Local: Google, http://www.google.com

Once at the main agency page, generally it is easy to find the
purchasing organization page and then the buyer directory within the
purchasing page. Call the purchasing director and ask for a buyer
directory if it's not posted at the site.

Using the State of California as an example, you'd find the buyer
directory as follows:

Entering "state California" into Google.com produces a link to the
state site, http://www.ca.gov/state/portal/myca_homepage.jsp.

At the home page, click through the following link hierarchy:

Business
Doing Business with the State
Selling to the State
Procurement Division Directory

The Procurement Division Directory in California tells you buyer
names and telephone numbers by product/service category, but does
not show email addresses. Some government agencies show email
addresses in their directories and others don't.

The California home page provides links to directories of
California counties and cities with web sites. Directories like
these are valuable tools for finding local government buyers.

The California example is a fairly typical outline of the path
you'd follow for large and medium sized states. The purchasing
organization's directory is reasonably easy to find by following
an intuitive path starting on the state home page and clicking on
a link called "Business", "Doing Business with", "Business
Opportunities" or "Vendor Information."

In smaller states, counties, and cities, you may find only contact
information for the head of the purchasing organization, rather
than a directory of individual buyers.

The following Fedmarket.com products are available to reduce the
Internet research effort required to find buyers:

- CD-Roms of Government Internet Sites,
http://www.fedmarket.com/vtools/cd_urls.html. This product will
show you all of the government agency and purchasing sites
nationally or by state. It is particularly helpful in that it
shows federal, state, and local agency Internet addresses within a
state. All of the links can be found on the Internet with extensive
research, but the product saves you time.

- CD-Rom of Official Buyers,
http://www.fedmarket.com/vtools/official_buyer_cd.html#official.
This product offers you access to contact information on over
18,000 official government buyers.

- Bidengine.com, http://www.bidengine.com, provides a convenient
way to find buyer contact data at the federal, state and local
levels. Bidengine searches about 1,000 Internet pages containing
buyer contact data. For example, using the keywords "office
supplies", Bidengine can tell you the agencies and buyers that
have purchased these products.

An example of a buyer directory found from Bidengine.com using the
keywords "office supplies" is at this URL:
http://www.co.catawba.nc.us/depts/purchase/staff.htm. That
particular site (Catawba County, North Carolina) lists the names of
the buyers, their telephone and fax numbers, their email addresses
and what types of products and services they buy.