From Unknown to Known: Opening the Federal Market for a Global Plastics Leader
Greg Giddens and Tom Sharpe — Protection & Compliance
The Moment
Our client is no stranger to winning. As a large, long-standing leader in the plastics industry, they've built a commercial sales engine that's the envy of the market — deep relationships, a proven playbook, and decades of trust with private-sector buyers.
But the federal government market told a different story. Despite sitting on products and capabilities the government actually needed, the client had never built a real presence there. They weren't losing federal deals — they simply weren't in the room. Opportunity was passing them by, quietly, deal after deal, and leadership knew it. They needed more than encouragement to "go federal." They needed a partner who knew the terrain.
That's where GRIP came in.
The Diagnosis
GRIP's domain experts guided client in sizing the federal market opportunities available to them and baselined its current reactive federal sales process to better proactive and focused practice.
Working closely with the client, we seized the real opportunity available to them in the federal market and took an honest look at how the client was currently showing up: reactive, ad hoc, and largely invisible to the agencies that could be buying from them today.
That gap — between a company built to win and a market it hadn't yet entered — became the call to action. Not "should we pursue federal," but "here's exactly what it will take."
The Work
With the diagnosis in hand, grIP and the client got to work building a real federal sales practice from the ground up:
Sized the opportunity
quantifying the addressable federal market so the client could see, in real numbers, what was at stake
Mapped the competitive landscape
identifying who else was already winning this business, and why
Built the story
developing marketing collateral with differentiators and use cases tailored specifically for federal buyers, not repurposed from commercial materials
Made the internal case
securing a dedicated project support resource, turning federal growth from a side initiative into a resourced priority
Targeted the field
identifying the federal agencies most likely to buy, so outreach had a bullseye instead of a shotgun
Stood up channels
establishing resellers as an initial go-to-market path into select target-rich agencies
Built internal muscle
training the client's team on federal bidding platforms and launching focused, direct bidding efforts
The Outcomes
The results are already speaking for themselves — and the work is still accelerating.
- The client now has a clear, expert-built roadmap they're actively executing to move from unknown to known in the federal space
- Resellers are live, generating a performance baseline that's already being tracked and improved
- In just the first few weeks of direct bidding, the client won a sale valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars— proof that the strategy works, not just in theory
- The client is now preparing to propose on a government-wide, multi-year framework contract — a shot at the kind of durable, large-scale federal presence that was out of reach before working with us.
A company that built its name in commercial markets is now writing a new chapter — one built with the same discipline and expertise, this time in federal contracts.