If you're going to take up a public entity's time, you should make that interaction pay for itself, and aim to be as immediately valuable as possible.
I have a rule that any interaction I have with a decision maker should be used as an opportunity to provide value. You're taking up their time for what is, at the end of the day, a pretty self-centered reason (selling your stuff), and people are a lot more likely to listen if you show up to their door with flowers.
Take my friend Charles (Chip) Royce and his LinkedIn posts. Chip runs a pretty exceptional GTM consulting firm, where naturally every "sale" he brings in is built on trust — trust that he actually knows what he's doing. And that kind of trust takes time and repeated exposure.
Now yes, he could follow the standard playbook to get your attention (run ads, push free consultations), but instead he's opted to do something different and build his LinkedIn around consistently giving out free value: insights, advice, breakdowns, every few days for anyone who wants it. He understands you don't owe him your time, so he "pays" for your attention by giving you something useful upfront. No strings attached, just value in exchange for the time you spend to receive it.
Could he charge for it? Of course. But by not doing so, he's reimbursing you for your attention and building trust without pressure. He's making the trust-building process worth your time, and he's making himself the pitch.
The same idea in GovTech
Your job as a vendor is to provide value, and you should be looking for creative ways to prove that value in your own way, especially early. Make that first interaction worth something. Figure out what your specific decision maker cares about, what's valuable to them, and see if you can use your product to give them a portion of that value upfront. Not as a pitch, but as proof. Something tangible.
One example I've personally used is attaching free pothole censuses to my email outreach. I'll use our camera coverage to map out potholes in a small section of a city I'm targeting, then process that into the top 5 potholes with the highest likelihood of causing vehicle damage. That data gets attached as a free "gift" in my outreach email as payment for opening my message, with an offer to walk them through how it was collected and how we determined those were in fact the 5 worst over a call.
From their perspective, they just got free insight into the 5 most dangerous road issues in their jurisdiction, and they can take action immediately. That's real value, proven upfront, in exchange for hearing me out.
Does it guarantee a sale? No. But it does guarantee that anyone I've met with under this model walks away knowing for certain that the product works, and is infinitely more willing to take a second meeting than if I just dumped 20 slides and an ROI model in front of them.