I recently got a sales e-mail from someone in the states looking to buy my software with a tone of surprise that my UK business isn’t registered on SAM.gov and therefore asking for some information.
Has anyone else not in the US registered on the site? Looks easy enough to do, but any experiences would be welcome.
Allan
I registered a few years ago as a US military customer required it for purchasing (others didn’t both before and after though even though this one customer insisted that it was impossible for them to purchase unless registered, go figure). Lots of pages and most q’s not relevant but not too onerous as I remember.
re: “Surprised that you are not on” - unless you target a local/federal govt niche then I am surprised that they would surprised! There are lots of these sorts of registration sites, federal, state, local and much of the premise behind them is not relevant to software (its for commodity services work or commodity supplies so “pick up a $ share of Govt contracts!” == “you get a RFP for each and every IT project from $20 to $2bn regardless of fit”) so IMHO its just not practical, feasible or even worthwhile registering unless you’re in the niche of B-2-Govt.
Interesting - thanks for your thoughts and experiences on this! I don’t intentionally target B-2-Gov. It is developer software tools so B2B is more typical, but government purchases to crop up now and then. I guess they were just used to only dealing with companies that do target the gov. sector.
Allan
I have some experience selling my software to the US government. It can be a real headache if you have to go through any sort of procurement system. One workaround is to try to get the customer to buy through a US-based ‘reseller’, such as shi.com, and get the reseller to do all the paperwork. The downside is that these so-called resellers can sometimes be incredibly incompetent and may lose the sale for you.
Every time I get an e-mail from a reseller saying “a client wants us to buy your software” I inwardly groan. They always ask for a “reseller discount” and then proceed to take up far more time asking all sorts of questions than just going to my site and entering their card details. Very tempted to tell them there is an additional reseller fee.
If anyone else finds this thread from a search on resellers, I found this BoS discussion on the topic to be interesting.
On the other hand, as you say, they do all the leg work in terms of crossing the Ts and dotting the Is…