Engaging U.S. DoD End Users: How to Find, Meet, and Win with This Critical Group

Great to be here. Welcome, everyone. Here’s what we’re going to cover today. This is not a checklist of tactics. It’s a way to understand where end users in DoD influence buying when engagement matters most.
And why restraint and focus are strengths, not limitations. We’ll talk about how needs form before requirements are published, where end users actually influence decisions, and why timing, not activity, is often the difference.
We’ll also look at common engagement mistakes that quietly cost credibility and how to think in terms of roles, friction, and small contributions instead. And finally, we’ll connect this thinking to something very practical. What all of this changes about your capability statement?
Everything you’ll hear today is about building trust before the formal acquisition process begins. Be present. Take notes. Some of you have AI’s. That’s OK to have them logged in for this session. Respond to questions or polls. Make use of the chat or Q&A.
A box, Georgia will convey to me anything that seems like I can really answer it right in the moment and we’ll have some time for Q&A at the end. So do ask questions and you can also contact me via LinkedIn or contact information at the end. I love your questions.
Are you in? If this works for you, give me a heads U or say ye or we in the chat.
Yeah, let’s love those thumbs up. Gotta love it. All right. Like popcorn. All right. This webinar is not a replace for understanding people who are working in the contracting layer. It sits before it and beside it.
In our contracting webinar, which is the next one we’re doing in a few weeks, we’ll focus on how buying decisions are executed. This session is about how buying decisions start. You can’t engage the contracting folks if you don’t understand where requirements come from.
And you can’t influence requirements if you haven’t built credibility with the people who are living with the problems every day. One other note, the discovery process you’re going to see today and participate in for researching and developing connections and ideas for individual end users is the same one you’ll use to support building relationships with folks in the.
Contracting shop and the steps for making contact, which we’ll cover in the next webinar, are ones you’ll also use as you start to put these ideas to work to connect with players at any layer. That’s why this webinar and the next one, engaging DoD contracting, are designed as a pair.
This session is about how buying decisions start.
Now I want you to think about your own DoD buying experience right now. So which of these environments have you worked in, whether you’ve sold to government at Canada or anywhere else in the world, sold to DNDUS corporate clients?
U.S. federal, state or local government or USDOD, you’re in the right place. We’ve got something for you. Before we talk about tactics, outreach or engagement, we need to reset the frame because a lot of frustration in.
Federal and DoD sales comes from misunderstanding how buying actually works inside DoD. This first section is about correcting a few assumptions that quietly sabotage otherwise great efforts. Once these are clear, everything later we do makes more sense and feels less random and much more deliberate.
This matters now because DoD buying is more complex and more risk sensitive than it used to be. Access still matters, but influence matters and happens much earlier. End users shape problems long before requirements are finalized and.
Published.
They influence success criteria, tolerance for change, and how risk is defined.
If you’re invisible to end users, you’re not neutral. You’re reactive by design, and reacting late is why so many firms always feel like they’re chasing published opportunities instead of chasing them instead of shaping them.
Some of you may be used to looking for leads, people to call on through pre-solicitation notices on sam.gov, requests for information, sources sought. Those signals matter, but they’re more useful as that signals data points that help you decide where to focus.
Points of contact listed in notices like that are almost always people who are in the contracting layer of the federal acquisition system. They’re not the people living with the problem. This session is about why you need to be active.
And what’s most effective before any kind of notices show up on Sam.gov when needs are still forming, when requirements haven’t been finalized, when risk is or feels the most.
Personal and most threatening. We’ll talk about the contracting layer in the next webinar.
I need to be explicit about an assumption we’re making. Everything in this session presumes you’ve already done the focus work, things we talked about in the last webinars that are also posted on CCC’s website. You’ve chosen a small set of agencies.
Programs or offices because you know how what you do fits their mission and their responsibilities. This is not a session about cruising LinkedIn or Google for names. It’s not about blasting your capability statement and hoping someone responds if you try to do this work without focus.
It becomes overwhelming very quickly. Focus isn’t a marketing preference, it’s what makes judgment possible.
This slide shows where end users sit in the broad DoD buying ecosystem. At the top of the left column are end users, subject matter experts, and program or mission leads. These are the people closest to the work, the ones living with the problem day-to-day.
Below them are program managers, project managers and contracting officers, representatives, CORS or CORS. Their role is translating operational needs into something the acquisition system can execute. Today, we’re only focused on these two layers.
The people closest to the mission and the people who translate the mission into requirements. We are not focusing today on contracting officers or contract specialists, nor on players in industry, small business offices or stakeholders.
That’s intentional. Those roles matter enormously, and we’ll spend time on the contracting layer in the next webinar. This session is about how buying decisions start, not how they’re executed. If you understand where friction lives up here in these two boxes, you’ll be far more effective when you engage the contracting layer later on.
Acquisition activity happens all year long. It can be distorted by shutdowns, continuing resolutions, and when Congress releases funds. But relationship building follows a very different rhythm. In DoD, especially October through March is a critical window.
That’s when many requirements are being shaped, refined, talked around, socialized, even if they won’t be published until later. That’s why this kind of work, the kind of work that we’re doing today, matters before anything shows up on sam.gov.
We’re also talking about micro engagements for a reason, because early trust doesn’t turn into $1,000,000 contract. It turns into willingness to spend just a little bit of money. A micro purchase or a simplified acquisition is not primarily about revenue, although that’s real nice.
It’s about trust. Someone choosing to spend 10 to $15,000 with you is a massive signal. It means you’re safe. You reduce my risk. I’d work with you again. Everything we talk about today, restraint, timing, small contributions is designed to earn that.
Moment.
We’ll share a link after this session to our earlier webinar on micro purchases. The mechanics are different, the principles are exactly the same, and while the threshold just went up from 10,000 to $15,000 US, the trust logic did not.
Before we go any further, we need to be clear about language. When I say end users, I don’t mean everyone involved in buying. I mean the people closest to the work, the people who live with the outcome, the people who feel friction first, the people who notice something isn’t working long before that becomes.
A red flag, a flashing blue light, a major catastrophe that can include program staff, technical leads, operators and practitioners, mission owners, internal subject matter experts.
The group I don’t mean here are contracting officers, and I don’t mean evaluators. These roles matter, but they sit in a different part of the system. Today we’re only focused on the people who are closest to the work. So real quick interaction. Keep it real simple in the chat drop.
One job title, a role that somebody you already interact with or expect to interact with when you’re doing the kind of work you want to do for DoD. Not something you hope for, not a future guest, just a typical end user who.
Needs relies on what you do. Might be a facility manager, help desk supervisor, maintenance engineer. Good technology architect, systems engineer, war fighter. Good. Thank you, Frederick. Let’s see those. Let’s see more of those titles.
Different missions. Fire chief. Cool. Intelligence analyst. Yes. Different missions. Different titles. What they have in common is this. They’re close enough to the work. Cybersecurity engineer. Yeah. Scientist. Logistics coordinator. Thank you, Matthew. What they have in common is this. They’re close enough to the work to feel friction.
You don’t need to explain your answer, just notice whether the rule you chose actually lives with the problem you solve. That’s the lens we’re going to use for the rest of the session.
These three statements show U everywhere, sometimes from contractors, sometimes from buyers. Each one is partially true, and each one hides where influence actually forms.
Up till now, we’ve been clarifying where end users sit in the DoD buying ecosystem. Now we’re going to talk about how they actually influence what gets bought and what doesn’t. Not through authority, not through contracts, but through how needs form, surface and get translated.
Most influence happens long before anything looks like a requirement. Art 2 is about recognizing those moments and understanding why they matter. O Let’s start with how needs actually become requirements.
End users don’t award contracts, but they do shape the conditions under which contracts are written, competed and judged.
Problem framing. What gets defined as the real issue? Operational constraints. What will or won’t work in practice? Success criteria. What good and done and mission accomplished actually look like? Risk tolerance. How much change feels acceptable?
By the time something shows U on Sam.gov, most of this articulation has already happened.
And user influence is strongest before anything is formally published. Not because it’s secret, but because that’s when problems are still fluid. Before requirements, needs are still being clarified. Problem definition, the decisions about what’s in.
And what’s out? Early market research? What seems feasible and who can help do the work? Acquisition shaping guardrails are set.
By the time something is fully documented, the end user influence has done its work. There’s one end user role we need to slow down and name, because this role doesn’t just use what gets bought, it translates mission pain into acquisition reality.
Contracting officers, representatives sit across the boundaries most contractors never see. They’re the industrial translator. If you’ve ever had a buyer or somebody, the end user layer, somebody you’re talking to say I’m going to throw this over the wall to contracting the person who’s.
Heaving the ball. That’s the contracting officer’s representative. They’re not senior executives. They’re not contracting officers, but they connect more dots than almost anyone else. Once you see where the core sits, a lot of end user behavior starts to make sense.
This isn’t about authority. It’s about pressure. The cores carry risk, particularly personally. Here’s why. A failed vendor doesn’t just hurt the mission. It can follow the core’s career our.
Failure as vendors can put a permanent black mark in their file that damages their promotion prospects for years. Missed promotions affect not only them and their families in real time. It also dents their best three-year average salary.
Which is the basis for the calculation of retirement benefits and pension.
That reality explains a lot of cautious behavior and even horrors, silence that contractors misread as resistance. Be with that for a minute. Defining how they’ll choose a vendor isn’t just a professional choice.
It’s personal in ways that you might never have thought about.
Here’s where contractors get tricked U. Very few people have core in their title. So when they say we don’t have access to cores, what they really mean is we don’t recognize them. We can’t see them.
Take a moment and add 1 core type title to the end user list you already started. You don’t have to share this, just write it down in front of you. This is just more about seeing clearly. I want you to think about that kind of list of job titles of people you’re working with every day and think about which one of those might be carrying.
Core responsibility.
Now let’s talk about why this matters to you, not just to them.
Cores don’t just observe the process, they move it. They shape how requirements get written. They initiate actions, they monitor performance, they sign off on what good looks like, and they also sign off on whether you get paid.
Think of the core as the translator between end users and the contracting layer. If that translation goes wrong, no amount of proposal excellence fixes it later.
And once you understand that role and that pressure, it changes everything about how winning contractors show U, which brings us to what really needs to change.
These are understandable misreads. They come from taking what you hear and see at face value.
OK.
Rules don’t add up to reality.
Being compliant doesn’t necessarily mean you’re forming decisions. Process isn’t the same as influence. Taking steps isn’t the same as shaving acquisition.
Access isn’t the same as trust.
Not every meeting is useful. We confuse what’s visible with what’s decisive. Once you see the misery, the next question is how end-user relationships actually form.
End user relationships don’t form through activity. They form through repeated signals.
Consistency. Showing up the same way over time. Usefulness. Helping someone think, not doing what we all too often think of as selling. Judgment.
Knowing when not to engage restraint, respecting risk, time and boundaries. End users trust patterns, not itches.
Most failed follow-ups don’t miss the mark because they’re offensive, they’re just irrelevant.
Or worse, we don’t realize that the things we’re saying and doing, despite our best intentions, make things harder, not easier, for the people we so keenly want to serve.
Noise adds volume, not clarity.
Pressure shifts risk onto the end user self-interest.
Sanders on the contractor, not the mission.
From an end user’s seat, most follow-ups, the typical follow-ups they get from industry increase cognitive load. Hi, do you need me? Do you need me? Do you need me? Do you need me? That gets old in a hurry. So what does it take to show up in a way that’s genuinely helpful and meaningful? The idea that you can help.
Someone think.
When people absorb what we just talked about, there’s a very predictable reaction. They want to do something immediately. They push for meetings. They ask for introductions. They try to educate.
They chase responses.
None of these things are wrong because they’re unethical. They’re wrong because they increase friction, and friction is exactly what cores and end users are trying to avoid. So if you’re waiting for tactics, that’s not where we’re going.
Instead, what works is almost the opposite, and this is the hardest part for most contractors. Everything we’ve been taught says if something isn’t working, do more.
But with end users, and especially with cores.
More effort, and especially the wrong effort on your part, often feels like more risk on their part.
More effort doesn’t equal more trust. Speed doesn’t equal progress.
And silence doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
In fact, silence is often where judgment is forming. Be with that for a minute.
Imagine.
What if all those gaps, those nonreturned calls somebody was just thinking?
What works instead is not more activity, it’s lower friction, and users respond to signals that make it easier to think, not harder to decide.
Context. Why? What they might need to do matters now and not eventually. Clarity. What’s different or useful without forcing a response? Continuity. Building on what already exists from previous conversations. Not starting over. Gee, did you hear me? Let’s start. Let’s do all this again.
Some of you have heard me talk about micro engagements before. What we’re describing here is the why behind that idea, not the tactics. This isn’t about tricks or templates, it’s about reducing friction over time. The goal is to make it easier for end users to think.
Not forcing them to respond.
You rarely get a thank you or a declaration of trust. What you get instead, and sometimes you can overlook, are quieter signals.
Earlier questions. They involve you before things are settled or published. Pressure testing. They check ideas with you, not against you.
Shared language. They reuse the language in how you express problems and that can show U in a solicitation or desirable qualifications.
Risk flags. They warn you about the bumpers before constraints become public, or even tell you about constraints that aren’t going to show up in the solicitation, but you know they’re going to be the third rail if you propose that thing. These are signals of trust forming, not guarantees of work.
But this is also where many contractors make their next mistake.
When you change how you communicate with end users, you transform access into relevance. You gain their attention because you’re genuinely useful in the moment. You transform activity into judgment by learning about when to engage.
And when to take a beat and step back, you transform chasing into continuity by staying quietly present without forcing motion. When you change that posture, you change your outcomes quietly and overtime. This isn’t about doing more.
It’s about making fewer mistakes, especially expensive ones. If you remember nothing else, write this down. When you ask a DoD buyer, how can I help you? You’re not helping, you’re giving them homework.
They already have enough to do. Your question just puts you to the bottom of the pile. Everything changes when you flip the order of two words in that phrase, and instead of saying how can I help you, you start off how I can help you.
When you understand end users and cores and risk the way we’ve described today, you stop chasing motion. You start making better judgments about when to engage, who to engage, and what not to push. That steadiness is what end users actually trust.
End users typically don’t show up at networking venues. In fact, many of them actually avoid those places. Unless management directs them to attend, which does happen occasionally, they’re usually not there.
You find end users at coordination venues, events, laces and channels where people doing the work solve problems together. Some of these are exclusive to government layers.
Others are in a reputation as trusted spaces where government and industry collaborate productively, like the Society of the American Military Engineers, AF Works, ACT IAC. Think about places like engineering, maintenance and sustainment shops.
Centers of excellence, regional association chatters, end users are in their workplaces every day and they show up where they can solve problems with peers, not where vendors itch.
Many of these conversations start with people you’re already in touch with.
Take a moment and mentally circle one place from this list.
One lace where end users actually show up in your world. You don’t need to put this in the chat. This is just an exercise in narrowing your focus just a little.
We just covered where end users actually are. Now let’s explore how you enter their world once you’re there. Many contractors get this wrong because they show U dressed like vendors. End users don’t experience their day as a buying process.
It experiences coordination, risk, problem solving.
When you enter as a peer, someone who understands the work, conversations open. When you enter with curiosity instead of an agenda, trust builds. When you focus on the work instead of on the contract, relevance shows up naturally.
End users don’t grant access because you asked well.
They grant access because you made their thinking easier.
This next section is about how end users and organizations resent their work publicly, not about contacting anyone.
In Canada, you’ve got GEDS, a centralized, searchable federal employee directory. If you’ve never seen this or used it when you’re marketing to government in Canada, you better believe your competitors have. So when you file your taxes this year, take a moment and be grateful for how helpful this can be.
Because there is nothing comparable in US DoD, DoD employee directories exist, but they’re rarely visible, not least for reasons of operational security. The good news is that most commands and program offices have a landing page, and many have comprehensive high level information about their missions, organizational structure.
And senior commanders, the level I talk about as stakeholders. The bad news is that those sites rarely include full current contact information for the actual humans with whom you need to build relationships, military and civilians doing actual everyday work who live with the everyday consequences of choosing you.
At this point, your research options can get pretty sprawly. Again, good news and bad news. Good news. USDOD employees publish all kinds of stuff, including a ton of classified, unclassified, unclassified technical papers and presentations. They’re available online, filled with org charts and.
and emails and phone numbers, but there is no one place you can find all of it. On to some good news. Today, over 2.8 million current federal employees, including ones who work at DoD, have profiles on LinkedIn.
They’re not there because they’re looking for jobs, but because it’s a professional platform where people describe how they work and connect with each other.
LinkedIn is the big place where government and industry see each other. Right now, I don’t want you to think about LinkedIn as an outreach tool.
Start by thinking of it today as a visibility tool. We’re using it to see, not to message, and as a starting point for research. You’re not sending connection requests. You’re not sending notes. You’re not writing scripts.
What we’re looking for today are people, roles and patterns. Who shows up consistently, who they’re connected with, how work is described, what problems cluster around certain titles or teams. This is about understanding the terrain.
Not entering it. Let me show you what I mean. Remember I asked you to write down a common job title of end users you work with. Often people who get what you do. You genuinely help them solve problems that matter when they hire you and they love what you do. Come back to that job title.
And if you really have a very serious ADHD brain, you can open a LinkedIn window in another screen right now and try this as we go along. Go ahead if you want to do that, but I’m not suggesting that that’s where your attention should be about job titles. Titles tell you where someone sits relative to the work, but not what they’re allowed to buy.
So things can look opaque until you realize where visibility actually lives. The example I’m going to work through is to give you one way. You can start with free public data and start to sketch out the full constellation of people whose responsibilities touch problems you can solve.
So what you’ll experience here is 1 method or path to find many people who touch the work you do, end users, embedded subject matter experts, and the core, if there is one. So let’s say I started out looking for naval engineers currently employed by the United States Navy, located in the northeastern United.
States.
There are filters you can use to do exactly that kind of narrowing right on LinkedIn. I zoom in on this profile to start my thinking about the problems this person deals with every day, because I think he has problems that I know how to help with.
I want you to notice what we’re doing here. We’re not evaluating this person. We’re not deciding if they’re a fit, and we are definitely not contacting them. We’re simply reading how their work shows U in public, starting with the headline and the rule.
Not as a title, but as a clue to function. What kind of work does this role? Director of Public Works and Program Manager sit closest to operations engineering.
Sustainment integration. Now look at the language they use to describe their work.
What shows U repeatedly? Problems. Constraints. Responsibilities. This isn’t marketing language. This is how people describe work when they’re talking to their peers.
Now, when you’re reading one of these profiles, also notice what’s absent, what isn’t emphasized, how what you’re reading does or doesn’t bum into your assumptions about somebody in that job.
Those gaps often tell you as much as what’s actually there.
O Let’s say I want to know more, and so the next move isn’t outreach. The next move is out zoom or zooming out to understand who this person works with and how the work actually flows around them.
This is still observation. We’re not taking action yet.
Broadening searches to the command and program office level gives us a fuller picture of who’s doing the work. It also gives us clues to where to find the official language and structure of the organization where the work happens. But that’s not the point of this slide.
The point is that you don’t need special access or insider permission to see how work is organized. Now we’ve got 92 people who are showing up with this particular search and not you’re not going to scrape this list and spam everybody on the list. For one thing, you don’t solve the problems that everybody on this list has.
The next question is what they pay attention to. That’s where we’re going next.
So here’s what I did. I started with Ian because he’s a person who does the work. But then I zoomed out to the language of the organization he said he works for. Ian doesn’t use the formal Navy abbreviations in organizational language in his profile.
That’s normal. People rarely describe their work the way organizations do, but the environment he works in does. When I see Public Works and Naval Station Newport, that immediately places him inside NAV FAC, Naval Facilities Engineering Command, specifically in naval language NAV.
A or name stay Newport. Now I dig in.
Now something important happens. I still don’t get people. Remember I said the commands publish high level stuff about their mission and what they do. Bingo. Here it is. Now there’s a directory here. When I dig in there, I still don’t get names.
And I don’t get contact lists. What I do get is structure. I get a full list of functions, facilities, utilities, maintenance, environmental, transportation, energy, in other words.
The work. This guy’s director of all that stuff. And this tells me exactly what problems the director of public works is accountable for. What kinds of issues are likely to land on his desk? That’s the signal. Still no outreach.
Still no messaging, still no action. Kee your powder dry. Now we’re going to talk about what end users actually trust and why most vendors never earn that trust. When end users decide what to pay attention to, they’re not asking, is this impressive?
They’re asking, is this safe? Is this useful? Is this grounded in reality?
Walk the words lightly. Small because big asks feel risky. Is it specific because vague signals feel like marketing? Is it low risk because failure sticks to them, not to you? Is it? Is there proof because credibility travels through evidence, not through big claims?
Trust isn’t built by volume or Polish. It’s built by reducing uncertainty. This isn’t a checklist, it’s a pattern, and once you see it, you’ll recognize why some outreach works and others get ignored.
Just as important as what end users trust is what they quickly tune out. Not because they’re cynical, but because they’re busy and exposed to risk. Big promises because they increase perceived risk. Generic claims because they don’t map to real work. Marketing language because it signals distance from the mission.
AI noise because it often sounds confident without having any grounding. End users aren’t anti technology or anti innovation, they’re anti uncertainty and boy are they risk averse. This is why Polish and volume alone don’t earn trust. You can be polished.
But focused, there’s a difference. Clarity and usefulness win the day. These trust signals don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re shaped by context, mission pressure, timing, and personal risk. End users and cores aren’t evaluating you once. They’re accumulating impressions over time.
Context matters because the same message lands differently depending on what’s happening around them. Risk accumulates because every interaction either reduces uncertainty or adds to it. Attention is scarce because thinking time is limited. Trust isn’t a decision, it’s a pattern that forms.
And that brings us to micro engagement, not as a tactic, but deeply grounded in how trust actually forms and how research shows that it does. Everything we’ve covered so far explains why most outreach fails and why trust forms the way it does.
This next section is where we translate that understanding into practice. Once you understand that trust forms through small, low risk signals overtime, you can see why certain approaches work quietly and why others fail loudly.
This is not about scripts, templates, or volume. It’s about designing small, low risk moves that make it easier for end users to engage with you and safer. Micro engagement isn’t a tactic, it’s a discipline grounded in how trust actually forms.
Everywhere, not just in DoD, one small interaction at a time. Right now we’re going to build 1 micro engagement together deliberately so you can see the thinking behind it.
If you’re familiar with Brene Brown’s work, you’ll remember her research into the anatomy of trust. Those seven elements all add up to this. Trust everywhere, not just in DoD, is built one small interaction at a time, a micro engagement.
Is deliberately small, not because you don’t have more to say, but because size signals risk. Small doesn’t demand time or permission. Useful, so it earns attention without asking for it. Low risk, so engaging doesn’t feel dangerous.
Dangerous personal because it’s grounded in their reality, not your offer. A micro-engagement is not a pitch and it’s not a sale. It’s a contribution. This is the discipline. Not many people, not many problems, not many ideas.
Let’s start with some examples of moves that meet that definition without turning this into a checklist. These are not steps, they’re categories of contribution. Each one does the same job. It reduces uncertainty without creating obligation.
Creates clarity. Helps them think more clearly about a problem they already have, or even to see a problem they may have overlooked. Compare. Reduce choice overload without steering right to your solution. Sketch. Make something abstract.
Easier to see or concrete, but lightly.
Check. Pressure test an assumption before it becomes expensive. Test. Pilot. Create a safe way to learn without committing. If it feels like a pitch, it’s too big. If it feels like homework, it’s too risky. So let’s build one of these so you can see how it might work in the real world.
These are examples, again, not templates. I want to be very clear about this. They’re different in form, but they all do the same job. They reduce workload, they reduce uncertainty, and more importantly, they reduce risk. So let me demystify a couple of the terms on the slide, because two of these words can sound more complicated than they need to be.
Rough order of magnitude is not a quote, it’s not a proposal and it’s definitely not a commitment on either side. It’s a common term in DoD acquisition, contracting and financial management, referring to a quick early stage and non binding cost estimate used for budgeting and project feasibility.
Acquisition professionals use it during the early high level phases of project planning, often with a variance of.
-25% to plus 75% contracting professionals uses as a part of financial management for program funding estimates. A rough order of magnitude helps someone answer the very basic questions early. Is this problem small, medium, or large?
Is it going to take weeks or months to fix? Is it fixing it going to be manageable or disruptive? Rough orders of magnitude reduce uncertainty without locking anybody in. A subject matter fit expert check is not a DoD term of art, but it’s a term you need to know. It’s a short reality check with the right technical person.
It answers one question. Is this person’s problem a good technical fit for how you actually operate? It’s not a design solution, it’s not an architecture review, and it’s not a sales call. Fit checks protect them as much as they protect you. Whether it’s a sketch, a short diagnostic, a ROM, or a fit check, the pattern is the same. You’re helping.
Someone think safely before committing. If it feels like free consulting, it’s probably too big. If it feels genuinely helpful but incomplete, you’re in the right zone. Now we’re going to go and design one of these for ourselves.
Not to create the perfect micro engagement, but see the thinking behind it. We’re going to pick one person, dig into one specific pain, and offer one small contribution, and you’re going to help me do this. No selling, no next steps, no ask. The goal isn’t momentum. The goal is credibility without pressure. So I’ll narrate the thinking as we go.
And you’re going to bring some judgment to it. This is the point where I want to be very explicit about scope. We’re not doing a full workshop today. We’re going to walk through one micro engagement slowly and on purpose, because the value here isn’t volume, it’s judgment. Trying to do ten of these live would rush the thinking, and rush thinking is exactly what gets people into trouble.
So we’re going to do one. Well, we’re not thinking about contacting this person. We’re not modeling outreach. We’re using this profile to understand how work is organized. We’re not asking, can this person buy or should I contact them? But what functions are closest to their work relative to the problem?
You solve.
This only works if you’ve done the discipline about being clear about what problem you actually solve, because otherwise everything feels like the problem.
So I’m going to pick that one person we’ve been talking about. Not the perfect role, just a real one. And we’re not contacting them. We’re practicing how to think. So Ian here, Director of Public Works at Newport Naval Station. The phone directory puts them at the top of every single one of these functions.
Anything could go wrong in any of these functions ends up on his desk. Now I have a client who deals with everything related to cranes. The name of the company is Crane Works. They specialize in engineering, inspections, repairs, and upgrades for new crane procurement for secure government research and repair facilities.
They’re experts in the application of NAVFAC P307 and NAVCRANCEN 111450.2 A. Founded in 1999, they’ve grown to be the largest private provider for Navy crane services. They annually inspect 1000 cranes and deliver 15 new hoists and cranes every year.
Choose them because they realize they require highly qualified crane technicians, assistance with purchasing fully compliant requirement, or assistance managing a high compliance crane program. Now let’s think about one point of friction that could be keeping the sky up. A record-breaking ice storm literally swept from southwest to the northeastern United.
States. Another one is forecast for the week ahead. Ian just might be losing sleep, among other things, over how ice accumulation and high winds can affect everything on his list. But where Crane Works can help relates prime to permanently fixed onshore cranes, typically including portal cranes.
Pedestal cranes and gantry cranes used for maintenance and logistics. They support ship repairs and material handling that has to go on no matter what the weather is. O if your specialty is cranes, here’s one place where effort, coordination and risk shows.
UO name one small contribution. What’s one thing that would reduce effort, risk, or uncertainty for his person who has lead responsibility for cranes? Your crane works. What are some ideas for something that might help this guy sleep at night?
This is not a pitch, not a solution, not a capability brief, something that would make life easier for them. I’m going to wait a full 60 seconds. I want your ideas in the chat. 60 seconds. What’s one thing?
If you were crane works that you could bring to Ian Underwood to help his crane people with an ice storm coming in, what’s one thing?
Incident response? Yeah, if something goes wrong, we can help you.
Predictive maintenance. Yeah. Hey, what should you? How should you be battening down the hatches with this new thing coming in? What else? Thank you, Francis.
Making introduction with a company who specializes in conditions like this regularly, such as a Canadian company. Yeah, operations, continuity, free inspection by local team and checklist. Yeah, Said. I like that particularly. Manpower coverage. I’m liking all of these things. You’ve got this.
Risk assessment? Yes. Remote measurement of crane status. Awesome. Everybody gets big stars. I am so proud of you. You totally get this.
What we just did wasn’t outreach. It wasn’t prospecting. It definitely wasn’t a solution. It’s a way to practice judgment safely. Bravo.
This works because it matches how responsibility is actually carried inside DoD. People aren’t just busy, they’re accountable. They live with the downstream consequences of decisions, delays, and mistakes. A micro engagement respects not just someone’s workload, but responsibility they carry for outcomes.
That’s why this builds trust quietly. Now, this is usually the moment where people think, uh oh, cause it just hits you if this is what it takes to reach just one person, the rough order of magnitude of what it would take to reach everybody who needs you.
Just blew your mind.
That discomfort is not failure. That’s what happens right before you get clarity. The moment of clarity is this. The investment it takes to build trust means we can only build deep, trusted relationships in a limited number of places at a time.
Especially when our companies are small and there are only one or two people making those calls. In short, focus is your.
We talked about restraint. We talked about respecting workload and responsibility. Now I need you to understand timing.
Micro engagement doesn’t start when you are ready to sell. It starts when you understand the work well enough not to waste someone’s time. This is how you earn the right to be useful. If you can’t do these four things yet, you’re not late.
You’re just not ready yet, and that’s OK. Timing isn’t about patience, it’s about sequence. Most contractors wait until contracting is involved to get serious, but by then the timing window is already closing. Micro engagement happens before the ask.
Before there’s a solution on the table, before contracting needs to protect the process, before money moves. This is where trust is cheapest to build and where mistakes are easiest to survive. Good timing reduces risk for them, not urgency for you.
This work is iterative. You learn things from how someone responds to the first one or two micro-engagement ideas that change how you’d write up the next one. If you rush to write 10, you lock in assumptions before you’ve tested them. That’s especially risky if you’re using AI support to generate these ideas without developing judgment about what does and
Doesn’t work. In all my work with AI over the past year and watching how these tools are unfolding for government contractors, here’s my number one take away. AI is very good at helping you make more bad choices faster.
Judgment has to come first. Speed only helps once the thinking is sound. In the companion webinar to this one on engaging USDOD contracting professionals, I’ll take you through the proven mechanics of how to use the ideas you develop for polite, persistent outreach that work for both end users and folks at the contracting layer.
Everything we’ve just done points to 1 unavoidable question. If someone asked you what problem today, what problem do you solve and for whom? Could you answer that clearly and in their language? That’s the job for the capability statement.
Not to list everything you do. Not to impress, but to make your judgment visible. A good capability statement shows you understand where friction lives, who feels it first, and how your involvement reduces risk. It’s the written anchor of.
What judgment is O? Let’s look what a mission focused capability statement needs to do, and why many miss the mark. This next session is about translation, not selling, not expanding scope, but making your value obvious to the people who feel the problem.
A mission focus capability statement still includes the formal requirements, NAICS, product, service codes, unique entity identifier, cage codes, vehicles. Those don’t go away, but they don’t do the heavy lifting. What actually creates traction is how clearly you express why those capabilities matter to this mission, to that reader, to the person in their role.
The mistake isn’t about including codes. The mistake is about letting those codes do the talking. A buyer should never have to guess why your past performance matters or how your experience reduces their risk. Most capability statements fall flat for a simple reason.
They force the buyer to do the work. The buyer has to figure out, is this relevant to me? Does this apply to my situation? Is it safe? They have to translate it. They’ve already increased risk. So there’s only one thing that matters at this stage, not are they qualified, not are they certified.
Those get answered later. Right now, the buyer’s acting. Do these people actually understand what makes my day harder? This is where most firms default to marketing language. What belongs here is a short set of best values. These come from what you’ve actually done.
And what you know matters when things get hard. They explain why your qualities matter to mission success. They’re objective, they’re verifiable, ideally quantifiable, and they’re specific to your company and make it easy to choose you when they get to the final four behind closed doors.
Think of this as layered. Your codes say you can play. Your best values explain why you’re the safe choice, and the problem framing shows you understand their world. Customization of your capability statement doesn’t mean you start from a blank sheet every time. It means you know which parts.
Bring forward and which to let recede. That’s not. That’s judgment, not formatting.
A strong capability statement makes micro engagement easier because you’re not inventing relevance from scratch. This is decision support for people who carry real responsibility.
So before we wrap, I want to leave you with one small piece of follow up. Pick one installation. Choose two or three roles you’re now thinking about in a completely different way. Sketch two or three micro engagement ideas for each. You’re not sending them, you’re not polishing language, you’re just looking at them to test your judgment.
If the third one you develop looks different from the first one, that’s the point.
I want to thank you for thinking with me today. We covered a lot, but none of it was about tricks or tactics. What I want you to take away is this. The end user engagement works long before a requirement shows U. It works when you understand who does the work.
Work where decisions actually form and how trust is earned inside their environment. When vendors struggle with end users, it’s rarely because they lack capability. It’s because they move too fast, talk in the wrong language, or try to sell before they understand how the work really flows.
If you’ve slowed down just enough to observe first roles, friction and responsibilities and signals, a lot of the right moves become obvious.