“Selling to the government is easy. There is no secret... but there IS a process.” GovCon expert and small business trainer Neil McDonnell is a technology entrepreneur and communications specialist. He is dedicated to helping small businesses succeed in the federal marketplace and brings over 20 years of practical experience ranging from enlisted Army to supporting large government primes and government agencies.

Neil has engaged in business development efforts on multi-billion dollar opportunities with large companies including:

• Radian International

• Dell

• Booz Allen Hamilton

• CRGT

• AOL

• CSRA

In addition to supporting large primes, he's supported large government agencies, including:

• US Air Force

• US Army

• Dept of Defense

• Department of Education

• Executive Office of the President

• IRS

• Department of the Treasury

• Department of Veterans Affairs

• Department of Justice

• Health and Human Services

Neil is currently President of SV Mac Pack, Inc., (a HUBZone-certified and veteran-owned small business), Chairman of the HUBZone Chamber of Commerce and leader of the 'Small Business Success Club'.

The goal of this course is to create a clear, concise, and compelling DSBS profile to help you win more government work.

• Understand how the government uses each part of your DSBS profile

• Look at how your competitors and the government engage

• Strategically complete each part of your profile based on what you learned in the review

Enhance each part

• Basic company information (address, website, contact information)

• NAICS codes

• Keywords – the primary tool for government searches

• Capabilities Narrative to concisely answer 'who you are and what problem you solve'

In this module, we'll

• get familiar with the standard information in your DSBS profile

• make sure your information is accurate and up to date

• fix any problems we find

• review company information pulled from Dun & Bradstreet or Sam.gov

• review company contact information for accuracy

• review the procurement information about how the federal government can buy from you

• review past performance and experience

Throughout this course, I use my new company, SV MacPack as an example, and I take it from a failing grade to an above average grade for DSBS profile.

Download the DSBS checklist if you haven't already done so. The checklist helps you document the current state of your DSBS profile, and take notes of necessary changes.

In this module, we will review the profile for the specific 15 required entries in the Company Information section.

In the previous lesson, we covered company information.

Now, we're going to cover Contact Information to ensure the government buyer can reach you if they want to learn more or if they want to buy from you.

In the previous lesson, we covered Contact Information.

Now, we'll cover Procurement Information, which will tell the government buyer how they can procure your products and services from your company.

In the previous lesson we covered Procurement Information.

Now we're going to cover Past Performance, which will let the government buyer know you have the experience with what you're selling.

This is such a great chance to beat out your competition during Market Research phase of an opportunity; especially as a small business since many people don't even fill this out, as we'll go through and look at.

Congratulations! You've made it through the first main module of the course. Let's review what you learned and what you must do before moving on.

Make sure you're updating your DSBS checklist. This is vital. We will continue to reference it.

We've done a large amount of work in this module and we want to make sure that the time you spent watching the videos and taking a look at your profile isn't wasted. Update that checklist before moving onto the next module.

Module 3 begins with a refresher on NAICS Codes to make sure we're all on the same page.

Next, you'll choose all the NAICS that are going to apply to your company.

Then we'll see what your competitors think the right NAICS are to have.

Finally, we're going to see how the government actually buys your products or services by reviewing the Federal Procurement Database System, or FPDS, and Federal Business Opportunities, or FBO website.

In this lesson, we will review the purpose of NAICS codes to the federal government buyer.

The North American Industry Classification System or NAICS codes allow federal buyers a high level of comparability, which basically means that they can see who's buying what across the federal government similar to what they're buying. You need to know which codes define exactly what you sell.

NAICS management is done in SAM.gov. There is no limit on the number of NAICS you can select so we advise you to choose all the NAICS that are relevant to what you do.

In the previous lesson, we learned about NAICS codes and why they're important. In this lesson, we'll begin picking the right NAICS for your company.

Before we get started picking NAICS, let's make sure we know what we're selling. Sounds pretty basic, but it's also a very necessary step.

The first step is write down some high level keywords related to your company on the DSBS checklist. You're looking for two or three keywords or phrases.

Being selective helps them know you're experts in this particular area.

In the previous lesson, we picked our initial NAICS codes and put them on our DSBS checklist.

In this lesson, we'll begin to refine our NAICS list that you have on your DSBS checklist. What you have listed currently are the NAICS you think the government should use when buying your services or products.

Now we're gonna find out what your competitors think the right NAICS are.

The point of this lesson is to see if you've missed any NAICS that might make sense.

In the previous lesson, we looked at which NAICS our competitors think are the right ones to sell our products and services.

In this lesson, we look at the Federal Procurement Data System, or FPDS, and analyze previous contracts to see which NAICS were used.

If you're updating your DSBS checklist as you go along through each lesson, you have a list of NAICS codes that you and your competitors currently think are the right ones.

Now we're going to see what the government buyer thinks are right.

In the previous lesson, we reviewed NAICS listed on awarded contracts on Federal Procurement Database System or FPDS.

In this lesson, we will investigate the Federal Business Opportunity site (FBO.gov) also known as Fedbizopps.

Congratulations! You made it through the major module of this course dealing with NAICS Codes.

Let's review what you learned and especially what you documented in your DSBS checklist.

In this module, I'll guide you through the process to pick keywords your buyers are searching on.

We'll walk through what you think works, then we'll look at it from the government's perspective.

The module will begin with a refresher on keywords, to make sure you understand their importance.

Then we will choose all the keywords you think apply to your company.

Next, we'll see what your competitors think are the right keywords.

Finally we'll see what keywords the government actually uses when buying your products or services, by reviewing the Federal Procurement Data System, or FPDS, and the Federal Business Opportunities, or FBO website.

In this lesson, we'll review the purpose of keywords in your DSBS profile.

When a government buyer's looking for qualified small businesses to work with, they open up DSBS like you'd open up Google.

DSBS lists approximately 300,000 small business that are eligible to sell to the federal government.

If you didn't add appropriate keywords to your profile, your company will not appear in the government's research, even if you are the very best at that work.

In the previous lesson, we discussed what keywords are and why to use them.

Now we're going to explore how to identify your initial keywords.

After this lesson, we will further refine keywords three more times.

In this lesson, we just need to get our list started with high-level keywords and then build off of those with as many keywords as we can think of for this exercise.

List all the keywords that you can describe about your business. What words would contracting officers search on?

In the previous lesson, we created our initial list of keywords.

In this lesson, we're going to analyze our competitor's keywords in their DSBS profiles to see which ones we forgot.

We will create a long list and then refine it down to the keywords we want to keep.

You might have somewhere between one and 5,000 competitors selling to the federal government. Learning from them improves your own position.

In the previous lesson, we added to our list of keywords by analyzing our competitor's profile.

In this lesson, we're going see which keywords are used by the federal buyer themselves.

As in the NAICS lesson, we will review contracts that have been awarded and are also listed in Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) to see what keywords are in the description.

In the previous lesson, we added to our list of keywords by analyzing awarded contracts and FPDS.

In this lesson, we continue to look at keywords from the buyer's perspective, but from within FedBizOpps.

In FPDS, we're very limited to the content available.

In FBO, we have an entire performance work statement and other documents we can look at to see which keywords might be good for us. We can look at contracts that are awarded and we can look at a current opportunities being put out for proposal or bid.

Finally, we can look at the Sources Sought.

Congratulations, you made it through a major module of the course dealing with keywords, what they are, how they are used and how you can strategically use them to advance your business marketing.

It might have felt tedious, but it is a critically strategic step in the process.

Be sure you have been updating your DSBS checklist with keywords. Stop now to do so before moving on to the next module.

When the federal government buyer needs to identify a qualified small business, they use the Dynamic Small Business Search tool.

They search DSBS for qualified small business based on keywords, effectively reducing the pool of 300,000 small businesses down to five or 10, or maybe even 100.

In this module, we will address your Capabilities Narrative - that portion of your DSBS profile buyers use to further reduce the pool of eligible small businesses.

Buyers are not looking to choose from a large list of small businesses to buy from, they just want a small list of qualified sellers. Once they have that list, they stop looking.

You want to be found and put on short list of possible vendors.

In this module, we will discuss the purpose the Capabilities Narrative and some key points to remember while you write yours.

First and foremost, you need to understand the difference between keywords and a capability narrative.

The Capabilities Narrative answers the question "What do you do?"

Its a simplified, accurate description of what your company does.

In this context, your description must be intriguing enough to attract the buyer's attention, but not so jargon-filled as to overwhelm him.

In the previous lesson, we reviewed the purpose of the Capabilities Narrative in your DSBS profile.

In this lesson, we will walk you through DSBS, looking at other people's Capabilities Narratives as examples.

By reviewing other businesses, you will begin to discover how you can differentiate yourself from your competition.

Remarkably, many businesses neglect to include any descriptive narrative in their DSBS profiles.

Others simply repeat their keywords, missing the chance to tell their story and what their company is capable of!

In the last lesson, we walked through DSBS and reviewed a variety of Capabilities Narrative.

There was a wide range in quality and completion. Hopefully, you really understood how powerful the Capabilities Narrative is for differentiating you from your competition.

In this lesson, we'll start writing your initial Capabilities Narrative.

You can always come back later to refine it, or even pay somebody to create a more compelling narrative.

For now, let's create something that will help you get on the buyer's shortlist.

In the previous lesson, we wrote our first draft of the Capabilities Narrative with high-level keywords, an opening sentence and then paragraphs.

In this lesson, we begin our second draft of our Capabilities Narrative, based on examples from our competitors.

Reference the DSBS checklist Capabilities Narrative section when you start drafting ideas down.

Find high-level keywords your competitor uses, as many as 10 or 15 examples that you say, "Wow, that's exactly what we do."

In the last lesson, we wrote a second draft of our Capabilities Narrative, using our competitor's narrative as examples.

In this lesson, we're going to write our final version of the Capabilities Narrative. This will be the one we add into DSPS and Sam.gov.

It is very important to understand how we go from a blank page to a completed Capabilities Narrative.

This last lesson on writing the Capabilities Narrative will show you how it all comes together. So let's get started.

Congratulations! You completed the Capabilities Narrative module. It was a lot of work and it is the hardest step.

Writing truly compelling and concise narratives is challenging.

That's why so many businesses listed in DSBS leave that section blank.

But documenting a clear narrative about what we do is one of the most effective strategies we can do to market our businesses.

Now, don't move onto the next module until you have added your Capabilities Narrative to your DSBS checklist, so we can update your DSBS and SAM profile.

When this video finishes, if you haven't completed all of the lesson tasks including the NAICS, the keywords, the Capabilities Narrative here, stop and do that before moving on. I'll wait for you.

Welcome to the Dynamic Small Business Search course wrap up.

I'm really happy that you have made it all the way through. I'm excited about what we have achieved and some of the next steps that you're about to go through.

Did you really update your DSBS checklist?

Did you use the DSBS checklist to write down any changes that needed to be made into SAM.gov or your DSBS profile as you went through each one of the module?

We'll use that list for the next step – updating SAM.gov.

We'll also discuss calendar alerts to remind you every four to six months to review and update your DSBS profile and SAM.gov. You want to review any keywords that need to change or added.

Most importantly, you want to update the past performance section. When you update your profile, you reset that date and market researchers see you are committed to keeping it relevant.