Why Your Federal Strategy Probably Isnt Working and What To Do About It

If you make a medical product and you’ve been trying to sell it into the VA or DoD, there’s a decent chance you’ve already discovered that the federal market doesn’t behave like the commercial one. Different buyers. Different timelines. Different language. Different rules. You can have the best product in the country and still spend two years getting nowhere.

I see this pattern over and over. A manufacturer hires a “federal sales rep,” lists the product on a website, attends a couple of trade shows, and waits. Twelve months later, revenue is flat, the rep is frustrated, and leadership starts asking whether the federal market is even worth pursuing.

It’s worth pursuing. The VA alone is the largest integrated health system in the United States; 1,200+ facilities, 9 million enrolled veterans, billions of dollars flowing through the procurement pipeline every year. The DoD adds another massive layer. Add the IHS, the Bureau of Prisons, and other federal health systems, and the addressable market is one of the largest in domestic healthcare.

The problem isn’t the market. The problem is the access strategy.

The four mistakes I see most often

1. No federal contract vehicle, or the wrong one. The VA can’t simply buy from any vendor that asks. To do business at scale, your product generally needs to be on an FSS schedule, under a DAPA, on the GSA schedule, or available through a prime contract vehicle. Each one has a different application process, different pricing logic, and different rules about who can sell what to whom. Manufacturers regularly tell me they “have an FSS,” and then I find out they have a DAPA, or vice versa, or that what they have isn’t actually configured for the products they’re selling. The contract vehicle is the foundation of federal sales. If yours isn’t right, nothing else matters.

2. Treating the VA like one customer. The VA is structured around 18 Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISNs), each with its own leadership, formularies, contracting officers, and clinical priorities. A win at one VAMC doesn’t propagate automatically. Selling to the VA is selling to 18 organizations stitched together, plus the National Acquisition Center on top. Manufacturers who treat it as one buyer end up with one or two accounts and no path to scale.

3. Hiring a “federal rep” who is really a commercial rep with a federal title. Federal account work is its own discipline. The buyers, the workflows, the value analysis processes, the role of pharmacy and prosthetics & sensory aids, the way contracting officers and clinical chiefs interact — none of that maps cleanly onto a commercial hospital sale. A rep who has spent 20 years selling to IDNs is excellent at IDN selling. Drop them into a VAMC, and they often spend the first year just figuring out who they’re supposed to be talking to.

4. Underestimating the timeline. Federal sales cycles are longer than commercial — but they’re also more durable. A VAMC that adopts your product and builds it into a standing order tends to keep buying for years. The mistake is calibrating quarterly expectations against a market that doesn’t move quarterly, then giving up six months before the deals would have closed.

What actually works

The manufacturers I see succeed in the federal channel typically do three things differently.

They get the contract vehicle right before they hire a single rep. FSS, DAPA, GSA — they know exactly what they have, what it covers, and what it doesn’t. They’ve thought about pricing strategy across all those vehicles, not just one.

They treat federal as a *channel*, not a side of the desk. That doesn’t necessarily mean a giant in-house team — in fact, for most manufacturers, it shouldn’t. It means having someone who lives in this market full-time, knows the VISN leadership, knows the procurement officers, understands the formulary processes, and is built to operate on a federal calendar rather than a commercial one.

They focus their energy on a few VISNs and go deep, rather than chasing 18 of them shallow. A handful of VAMCs converted into reliable, recurring buyers is worth more than a hundred warm conversations across the country.

Where The DaVinci Company fits

This is exactly the work TDC does. We are a federal channel partner for medical and health manufacturers who want to access VA, DoD, and adjacent federal markets without having to build the infrastructure themselves. We bring the contract vehicle expertise, the VAMC relationships, the VISN-level account strategy, and the day-to-day field execution. Our manufacturer partners stay focused on what they do best, building great products, while we run the federal channel.

If you’re a manufacturer with a product that should be in front of veterans and you’re not sure why your current federal effort isn’t producing, that’s the conversation I’d like to have. The market is open. The mechanics are knowable. And in most cases, the gap between “stuck” and “scaling” is smaller than it looks from the outside.