As part of your overall plan to sell to the US government I would imagine that most of you are (or should be) also reviewing your system integrator (SI) partnership strategy.

As most of you with experience in partnering with the SIs know, close to 80 percent of all government IT spending goes through the system integrators/solution providers.

In reevaluating your strategy, or in planning your strategy for the first time, you need to consider the following:

Value Proposition

• Communicate clearly your value to the SI community (why should the SIs work with you?)
• Map your products and services to solving specific business problems (vs. speeds and feeds)
• Map your value to key business drivers that the SIs care about (i.e. healthcare, security, identity management, virtualization, homeland security, and energy efficiencies)

Developing or Updating Your SI Target List

• Do the research to identify SIs that have or are building solutions in areas and agencies that you best support (consider outsourcing research to someone who understands the data and the SIs)
• Look at all SIs as a possible partners, not just the household names (midsize to small SIs are more likely to develop true partnerships).

Marketing

• Develop marketing strategies to communicate to Government AND the SI community
• Map your percentage of marketing and communications spending to the percentages of how sales will take place (i.e. if 40 percent of sales are expected to go through the SIs, then a similar percentage of your marketing spending and activities should go toward the SI community)
• Develop specific sales and web tools that speak to the SI community
• Develop and maintain a database of key SI contacts and use it for marketing

Events/Networking

• Research the events, activities and organizations in which the SIs are most likely to attend and participate
• You must assign ownership of these events and organizations (attend, sponsor and network)

Compensation Plans

• Develop compensation plans that reward your agency field reps and your SI BD reps for working together (good sales reps will work their comp plans to their advantage)