The first of a two part series on selling to the military.
[As part of our Guest Blogger series, Todd Rogers—not the volleyball player—has agreed to contribute. Todd is a recruiter in a fascinating field—science and defense contractors. He shares his observations of how we can all learn from the BIG defense contracts and how they’re sold.]
Bill Caskey has found my comments on his blog to be useful enough that he invited me in to do some guest blogging. I hope I get it right and don’t drive away the loyal web surfers.
I’m a professional recruiter—what many call a headhunter. Presently I recruit business development managers, directors, and VPs for a small cadre of defense and science contractor firms. You’d recognize most of their names. These are companies that make fighter jets, tanks, ships, and provide myriad different types of services to governments including our own.
A Unique Sales Cycle
The sales cycle that takes place when the Department of Defense buys an air defense program is unique. In some ways it’s like selling any other widget, but in most ways it presents a radical departure from the current paradigm which typifies how most B2B sales processes take place.
That’s what I wanted to share with you: How a company such as Lockheed Martin sold the government almost $20,000,000,000 (that’s billion) in fighter jets, repair parts, and the labor to make it happen. 
It’s called the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program and when it’s all finished, Maverick and Goose (RIP) will be left in the dust like two kids who strapped wings to a lawn mower.
The highly sophisticated “opportunity pursuit” process of winning such a contract is a finely tuned work of art—a super-high-stakes game. And there is one part of the process I want to discuss which clearly separates the government purchasing cycle from what regularly happens out in the private sector.
This Sales Process is Not Typical (Although Maybe It Should Be)
Average sales professionals often have a line of goods or services that they attempt to cleverly assemble into what they will then market as “solutions.”
The typical “rep” follows a straight forward process which follows the steps:
He will get a meeting with a prospect;
The two will have a discussion;
The rep will provide a demo or some samples,
And if all goes well, the prospect will become a customer,
(and everyone will play a round of golf.)
Well, maybe it doesn’t always go that way even though we’d like it to. For my purposes, we’ll call this the typical sales process.
A guy with a product finds another guy who needs this product and the two work things out so the other guy gets the product and the sales guy gets some money.
That’s Not The Way It Works Selling Fighter Jets
This may surprise some people, but the designers and prototype-engineers involved in the sale of a fighter program didn’t do a bunch of work-up fighter jet models and then send out some salespeople to find a buyer.
There was no discussion which involved the salesperson asking the prospect to “tell me a little bit about your company.”
Rather, it went a little like this:
- Some analysts at the Pentagon noticed some trends about fighter aircraft. These analysts told their bosses that it might be time to rethink how our armed forces leveraged aeronautical capabilities.
- Their bosses gave it some thought and at some point, through our friends in Congress, asked tax payers for a bunch of money to help keep us safe. (I’m skipping a lot in this story.)
- But while all this analysis and appropriating was taking place on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon, the people at Boeing, Lockheed, and a handful of other firms knew such discussions were in the works, and they got busy “chumming the water” in preparation for what would go on to become the largest defense contract ever awarded.
Now, there was a “meeting” (several actually) where the buyer told the sellers what he wanted.
But he didn’t say he wanted to buy some jets. Instead, he told them about how important it is for our troops on the ground to have the capability to function underneath what is referred to as “air superiority.”
Air superiority, after all, was the thing that the tax payers were actually buying, not a bunch of really sweet fighter jets. Air superiority, by the way, is the notion that in any given scenario, if so ordered, the armed forces can fully control the airspace above a specific part of the planet—think Iraq; if you’re in the air over Iraq, we know about you, and if necessary we can remove you from the air with very little effort.
After a whole bunch of meetings over several weeks, designers, retired generals, smart people who know a lot about physics and also weapons came up with a short list of ideas on how best we could continue to ensure air superiority.
Some of the ideas could have looked nothing like a jet at all. The concept of “jet-ness” or “jet-like” wasn’t the deliverable—at least not exactly. But, given the available technology, it was very likely going to resemble a jet…surprise!
This is the meat of my story. The business development professionals who won this deal went into it looking to provide a solution which solved a problem. Very likely, many people who worked on winning the award had been successful at selling jets in the past.
Now, as luck would also have it, a lot of our fighter jets are getting old. Additionally, battlefields are changing. So, we needed a solution which ensured that for the next few decades we’d have little resistance when it came to taking control of the air.
We also wanted these “vehicles” to be ubiquitous among the other branches of the military. The Marines would get a version which suited their needs. The Air Force had their own needs as did the Navy. Each branch would launch, use, and recover their vehicles in a different way.
But we wanted one jet…er…”solution” which could be modified to meet the different demands of the different branches. Enter the F-35 (A, B, and C).
(Next time, I’ll get into how the sales process works and some tips I can give our readers on how to look at the sales process differently.)
[Todd can be reached on LinkedIn.]
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