How To Get the Best Sales From the Local-Government Customer

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2. Be there: You need services support staff readily available to personally get with the local-government customer. Phone calls and e-mails are fine but are hardly substitutes for up-close and personal.

3. Take advantage of the customer's hands-on status: In most cases, the small-town/county customer who buys your products is the same person who's actually going to use them. The layers of bureaucratic personnel in between, commonly found in federal and state government--and even large cities, for that matter--are removed. Find out what works best with your solutions and what could be improved.

4. Let success create success: If you saved one small town agency tens of thousands of dollars on systems integration, you can bet that the six or seven other agencies in that town have heard all about it. Use the immediacy of the town's word-of-mouth to create spillover opportunity.

5. Think creatively when it comes to revenue generators: You may not be able to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for software. But, at least in one reseller's case, it's quite possible to generate service charges to those using the product who are not part of the county government, but still use it, such as building contractors and realtors.

6. Get the word out about your products: Think of resources you normally may not use--nonprofits and trade associations, for example, are groups that local governments often check in with. If you have the trade association/nonprofit contacts who will post your local government IT solution success story on their Web sites, you'll get your name out there to a host of other potential small-town customers.