How to Find Government Contractors to Sell To

Federal contractors are one of the best-documented markets you can sell to. Every company that wants a federal contract registers in SAM.gov, and awards show up on USAspending.gov with the winner's name, the agency, the amount and the industry code. So the quickest way to find government contractors is to search the awards first, since a company that just won work needs help delivering it. Then check each winner's SAM.gov registration before you write.

That works whether you're a small business looking for a prime to team with, or you sell consulting or software to the contractors themselves. Small firms ask how to find primes in r/GovernmentContracting and r/smallbusiness.

Where government contractor data lives

SAM.gov tells you a company is set up to win federal work. USAspending tells you it's actually winning it. For a sales list, the second matters more.

How to find government contractors, step by step

1. Pick your NAICS codes. Both sites sort contractors by North American Industry Classification System code. Use the codes of the companies you serve, not your own, unless you're looking for teaming partners in your own line of work.

2. Search awards on USAspending. Filter by those codes, the agencies you know and the last fiscal year or two, then download the results. Filter on place of performance as well as recipient location if you only cover one region, because a company headquartered in Virginia may deliver the work in Texas.

3. Group by recipient. A company with several recent awards in your codes is a better target than a one-off winner. Sort by count of awards, not only by dollar value.

4. Check SAM.gov. Confirm the registration is active and note the business types listed: small business, 8(a), women-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned and so on. Those designations decide which set-asides a company can bid on, which shapes what it buys.

5. Find the person. SAM.gov gives you a contact name at best. The company's website usually names the leadership team, and our guide to finding someone's work email covers the rest.

From award data to the person who decides.

Primes that have to subcontract

If you're a small business looking for subcontract work, aim at primes that are required to subcontract. Under FAR 19.702, a large business winning a contract expected to exceed $900,000 ($2 million for construction) generally has to submit a small business subcontracting plan when subcontracting possibilities exist. Those thresholds took effect on 1 October 2025, and set-asides are among the exceptions, so check the rule before assuming a contract qualifies.

Those primes usually name a small business liaison officer, and many run a supplier registration portal on their own website. Register there first, then email the liaison about the specific contract you could help deliver. USAspending's subaward data shows which small businesses a prime already uses, which tells you whether your category is crowded or open.

For construction work, the commercial side runs on the same relationships, and our guide to finding general contractors covers it.

Who to contact

At a company with a dozen staff, the owner is often the capture manager too. At a large prime, your first email should go to the liaison or the program manager on the contract you found, never to a generic sales inbox.

What to say

Lead with the award. It's public, and it's the reason you're writing.

Hi [Name], congratulations on [Company]'s [agency] award for [short description of the work]. We help contractors with [what you do], mainly [the problem in their words, for example staffing up in the first months of a new contract]. [A proof point you can back up, such as a past performance reference.] Would a short call before kickoff be useful?

For teaming, swap the middle for what you bring: the certifications you actually hold and the agencies where you've delivered work. Contracting officers and primes both care about past performance, so name a contract you can point to.

Doing it with ManyPI

Disclosure: ManyPI is our product.

Download your filtered USAspending results, keep the recipient names, and import the file into ManyPI. The agent finds each company's website and the email of the person you want, usually the capture manager or the owner, and notes where each one came from. Or describe the list in a sentence, for example "small IT services companies in Virginia that won Department of Veterans Affairs contracts this year, with the capture manager's email", and the agent searches the live web plus a database of 600M+ contacts. Every email is checked against the receiving mail server before a campaign can use it, and sequences go out from your own Gmail or Outlook inboxes and stop when someone replies. The lead generation page covers the setup.

A USAspending export brought into ManyPI, with websites and capture manager emails found and checked.

One trap: a SAM.gov registration has to be renewed every year. If a company on your award list has let its registration lapse, it may not be chasing new federal work, so move it to the bottom of the list.