Business to Government

Back when selling was just selling, the process looked roughly the same no matter who the customer was. Show the product, negotiate the price, get a signature. A public agency breaks that order completely. There is no single decision-maker to win over, no room to move the price up or down, and the signature goes to whoever scored highest in a proposal review.

A city office once approached Pagedeck first. The whole department wanted the product, but nobody there could decide — it had to go into next year's budget. When Sofia asked when they could start, the answer was ten months at the earliest, and even then the purchase would go out to open tender, so there was no guarantee Pagedeck would be the one selected. Nowhere else is the distance between "we like this" and "we have a contract" that wide.

Business to government (B2G) is the name for that distance. It sits on the same shelf as B2B and B2C, with one difference in character. Those two split customers by who pays — a company or a person — while this one is defined by a selling procedure written into law and regulation.

A public agency can't simply buy the product it wants. Money and procedure have to be in place first, and that usually runs in five steps.

1. Budget planning — an agency sets aside next year's spending in the second half of this year. Anything not written into a budget line cannot be bought that year, however good it is. This is why a contact wants to try the product long before any contract exists. To write the line, they need to know what they are buying and for how much.
2. Public notice — once the budget is confirmed, the agency posts a notice on an open procurement system. The request for proposal (RFP) attached to it lists the required features and conditions, and that document effectively becomes the requirements spec. Nothing in it changes after posting, so one requirement your product can't meet ends the game on the spot.
3. Proposal submission — interested companies submit a proposal and a price in a set format. The window is usually two to four weeks, and a single missing document disqualifies you regardless of what the proposal says.
4. Scoring and selection — reviewers add a technical score to a price score and rank the bids. This is a scoring contest, not a negotiation where a discount buys goodwill, so an unusually low price won't overturn a weak technical score.
5. Contract, delivery, acceptance — you sign, you deliver, and the money moves only after the agency completes its acceptance review. That review checks item by item whether what the proposal promised actually works, so one failed item pushes the payment into the next quarter.

The technical conditions are as demanding as the procedure. Many agencies work only on an internal network cut off from the public internet, which rules out a product people reach through a browser. It has to be rebuilt to run on-premise, installed on the agency's own servers — and once that happens, versions fork per customer and fixes can no longer ship to everyone at once. Notices often add a security certification as a condition for bidding. Earning one takes about six months, so a company that starts preparing when the notice appears is already late.

Inside a company the phrase comes up most often around the revenue table. Public contracts are tied to a fiscal year, so signings and payments cluster in the second half, especially the last quarter. The same $450,000 in annual revenue behaves very differently as $38,000 arriving every month from business customers and as $450,000 landing in December from an agency. Blend the two lines into one and nobody can explain why cash runs short in the first half.

It also comes up in roadmap discussions. Public requirements are rarely a feature or two — they amount to rebuilding the product as an installable package, so agreeing to take the deal hands a full quarter of engineering time to that work.

Organizations staff it separately. Reading notices, writing proposals and sitting through reviews is different work from ordinary selling, so even a company built on sales-led growth hires people who handle nothing but the public sector. With investors, large deal sizes and long renewal cycles put it next to enterprise revenue as the part that holds up the floor.

"This one's B2G, closing in three weeks, and the notice requires an on-premise install. We don't have that version."

Entering at all is out of reach, so drop this bid and prepare for the next one.

"Twenty percent of revenue is B2G and all of it lands in Q4. First-half cash planning has to exclude it."

The annual figure looks steady, but the timing is concentrated, so count that line on its own.

"We're not looking at B2G this year. Writing proposals with the team we have now would stall the product."

The deferral is about the cost of preparing, not about a lack of opportunity.

Pagedeck worked through this decision once. Sofia brought in inquiries from three regional education offices, together worth a quarter of that year's target. Grace wanted to take them; Mia brought the arithmetic. An installable version meant two engineers for a quarter, certification another six months, and ten features pushed back in the meantime.

They decided to skip that year and prepare for the following year's notices instead. Adding a customer type turned out to mean changing the list of things to build, which is why the business-type table keeps this line separate.

The most common belief is that public money is large and agencies never go under, so one win is a stable one. Judging by deal size and institutional permanence, that sounds right. But the contract is with a year's program rather than with the agency, so if the same line doesn't appear in next year's budget it simply ends, however happily people are using the product. Renewals aren't automatic either — the next notice usually means writing a proposal and competing again. Treat that revenue as a given and the following year's plan falls apart.

Assuming the procedure is the whole skill is the same kind of error. Bidding follows published rules, so preparing documents looks like the entire job. The contest is actually decided long before the notice appears, because requirements get written by a contact who has already been looking at several products. A company reading the notice for the first time is competing on someone else's terms, and a team that misses this order writes excellent proposals and finishes second every time.