Forget cold emails and traditional sales tactics. When selling to government agencies, relationships trump everything else. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Vibrant Planet CEO Allison Wolff revealed how building deep trust enabled them to secure contracts with major government agencies and scale to 18 million acres in just 18 months.
The Trust Gap
“This is a very relationship, trust driven space… It’s the most relationship driven business I’ve ever experienced,” Allison explains. Coming from Silicon Valley, she discovered that government sales required completely different muscles than traditional B2B sales.
Even with her impressive tech background, she couldn’t shortcut the trust-building process: “I earned that respect coming in as the newbie from Silicon Valley. You know, took several years of many conversations to also build that kind of rapport with folks.”
Leveraging Internal Champions
Rather than starting from scratch, Vibrant Planet tapped into existing networks. “All of our early customers were deep relationships that might either some of my team who are foresters, or long time people in government from like EPA and bureau, land management and US forest Service, where they had deep respect,” Allison shares.
Co-Creation as Trust Building
Instead of the traditional approach of building a product and then selling it, Vibrant Planet made their early customers true partners. “We really co-designed the system with them as they were going through a risk management workflow. We built it side by side with them, and then they became our earliest and biggest paying customers once they saw the potential of the system.”
This collaborative approach served multiple purposes:
- Building trust through shared ownership
- Ensuring perfect product-market fit
- Creating internal champions
- Generating reference customers
Embracing Technical Complexity
Unlike many startups that try to simplify their pitch, Vibrant Planet leaned into the complexity of their solution. “What we do is really complicated. We’re basically doing our best to mimic the complexity of nature,” Allison notes. This technical depth earned them credibility with sophisticated government buyers.
“The forest service, for example, has to manage for carbon, water, biodiversity, recreation values and protecting communities that are in and around their forests.” By demonstrating deep understanding of these complexities, they built trust with technical stakeholders.
The Multi-Level Trust Strategy
Vibrant Planet’s approach works at multiple government levels simultaneously. They support “all scales of government so that we can support the deployment… at the top level of the government, where billions of dollars are moving from the Inflation Reduction act and still from the infrastructure bill.”
But they also work “at the hyper local scale where permits happen… where you’ve got a local watershed and multiple collaborators working across land ownership jurisdictions.” This multi-level approach creates a network of trust relationships that reinforce each other.
From Trust to Scale
Their patient approach to relationship building laid the groundwork for rapid scaling. Today, they work with “the US Forest Service, Department of Agriculture, we work with utilities like PG and E, we work with fire districts, counties, states. We actually are starting to work with Cal fire in California.”
Key Lessons for Founders
Vibrant Planet’s experience offers crucial insights for founders targeting government customers:
- Accept that trust-building takes time
- Leverage existing relationships and networks
- Make early customers true partners
- demonstrate deep technical understanding
- Build trust at multiple organizational levels
Their journey shows that while relationship-based selling requires more upfront investment, it can lead to faster scaling once trust is established. The key is seeing relationship building not as a sales tactic, but as the foundation of your entire go-to-market strategy.
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