Utilize State and Local Government Cooperative Purchasing Groups

State and Local Government Procurement is a difficult beast, even during the best of times. With well over 90,000 SLED agencies nationwide, and some estimates showing about 80% of procurements taking place without a formal bid, it is imperative that vendors understand how agencies procure services when they don’t put out a formal RFP.

In a crisis like we are currently experiencing in early 2020, agencies will often buy things they need directly from approved vendors on various contract vehicles like the GSA Schedule, the E-Rate Program, City and State Contracts, and Government Cooperative Purchasing groups.

While everyone is locked in place with no tradeshows or travel, it might be a great time to get yourself on some, or on some more, of these contract vehicles in order to take advantage of these current and future opportunities that come along and never see the light of a formal bid.

Many of us know about NASPO ValuePoint (formerly WSCA), or PEPPM or MiCTA. We’ve tried to get you to that next level. Selling can be much easier when agencies reach out to you to procure services.

We’ll address city and state contracts in another post but for those looking to get on the GSA schedule or some of the many coops out there we’ve compiled a list that can help. Many of these Coops have goods and services that agencies need immediately listed on their homepages during this COVID-19 crisis.

We’ve done quite a few searches and can’t seem to find a more comprehensive list than the one we’ve created, so we hope that this information is helpful to our SLED Technology Vendor community.

And, there are a lot out there, so if we’ve missed any, please let us know so we can add them to our list.

To request our cooperative purchasing list click here