How a Savvy GovTech Marketer Turns Council and Board Meeting Signals Into Pipeline with NationGraph

Key takeaways from a conversation with Israel Bautista, Marketing Manager at SmartFusion, a Harris solution
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If you’re a marketer selling enterprise solutions to government agencies, your job is two-fold: 1) darken the skies with brand messaging, and 2) find and target the highest-potential opportunities.
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The truth is, most marketers focus primarily on first mandate. They take a tops-down approach with broad messages focusing on large accounts across all territories. They do this because they don't have the time or tools to get account-level intelligence for targeting. But that's needed to win because the biggest accounts aren't always in a buying motion, and buyer needs can be quite different across prospective accounts.
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Israel Bautista, Marketing Manager for SmartFusion (a Harris solution), has built a playbook that allows him to take a bottoms-up approach to solving for the question of where to focus.

He starts with using AI to listen for buying Signals across hundreds of city council and county board meetings. Rather than go broad to “darken the skies” across all the states and agency types, he helps the sales team sharpen their focus on the accounts that are highest-potential opportunities and provides them with the tools for highly tailored outbound campaigns.
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Mine for Pain Points

Most sales teams use intent data the obvious way: find who's buying (usually based on RFP alerts), then reach out. Israel flips the script. He looks for the reasons why a city, county, or special district would be looking for new solution. Then he works with the sales team to turn those reasons into custom marketing campaigns.
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"I'm not looking at whether a town is searching for a new ERP. I'm looking at the pain points coming up in council and board meetings. When I find three towns or counties dealing with a similar issue, that gives me ideas for what I can create for social posts, email campaigns, and blog content."

One example: a council discussion about a $300,000 discrepancy found buried across mismatched spreadsheets. Israel doesn't name the town. Israel turns that pain point into a blog or social post that asks other municipalities, could this be happening to you? It's content rooted in a real problem.

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Build Smarter Signals

Israel also takes a different approach when building Signals. He doesn't populate his signal keywords by brainstorming. He starts with Google Search Console data and competitor keyword analysis, then feeds those terms into NationGraph. His keyword lists include phrases like "feasibility studies," "end-of-life software," "financial reporting gaps," and "audit preparation pressures". These are the key words that people actually use when discussing the problems that SmartFusion solves for.
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"I pull up a competitor's website, have an AI tool review it and find the keywords for me. Those are the ones I use for my search terms on signals — instead of just a bunch of random keywords and hoping."

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Competitive Intel Through FOIA

When a signal shows that a municipality signed with a competitor, most reps move on. Israel leans in. He uses the signal to identify the vendor, then files a public records request for the contract through NationGraph.
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"We can look at that contract to see why they won. So when we come up against them again, we know. Maybe it wasn't price, maybe it was functionality – this is important to know in our market, and it helps me build tools for the sales team for objections handling."

Even a "lost" signal has value. If a municipality just signed a five-year deal, Israel tells the rep to pin it and circle back when the contract is up. This can be done with NationGraph native CRM integrations that populate accounts with details about current solutions and contract end date. Teams can set up alerts in their CRM to get back in touch before the contract is up for renewal. 

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Stop Throwing Money at Paid Ads

Israel is blunt about paid social for niche GovTech: it isn’t always cost effective. He pulled back LinkedIn spend after seeing irrelevant impressions and low returns, redirecting budget toward GovTech-specific publications and events like the GFOA conferences and state municipal leagues.
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"We're so niche. LinkedIn's not where I want to spend my money. I'd rather put it into a publication that caters to local government than throw money at LinkedIn and Facebook hoping it sticks."

For events, he coaches reps to limit attendance to two or three high-value trade shows per year – which is the explicit strategy from leadership. A single event can consume two to three weeks if done well (booking booth meetings in advance, travel, setup, follow-up).

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Let Reps Own the Outreach

Israel sends marketing emails — but he's the first to admit they're not the highest-impact channel even though Harris Computer is a well established brand.

One-to-one outreach from reps consistently outperforms marketing blasts. The Harris team uses HubSpot's AI-powered prospecting agents as a virtual SDR team. Israel builds the custom instructions and templates; reps clone and tweak them for their territories. When a rep's agent produces an awkward email, Israel reworks the prompt — not the email.
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"The one-on-ones are a lot more responsive than marketing emails. I've told them that from the beginning. I'll send marketing emails all day long, but those personal touches from the rep are what book meetings."

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Population-Based Targeting

Here's a tactic worth stealing: when Israel spots a pain point in a town of 2,000 people, he doesn't just flag that one town. He builds a prospecting campaign targeting other municipalities in the same population range, because small towns tend to share the same operational challenges, like disjointed systems and manual or spreadsheet-based processes.

He uses NationGraph's smart columns to map job titles across these small governments, knowing that in a 2,000-person municipality, the city clerk might also handle utility billing and the secretary might double as HR. A handful of well-chosen persona keywords covers the buying committee.

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The Takeaway

Israel's approach isn't complicated, but it is disciplined. He treats every Signal as a piece of intelligence. Pain points become content. Competitor wins become FOIA requests. Population patterns become campaign segments. And the AI tools (both NationGraph's email writer and HubSpot's prospecting agents) get custom instructions so every output sounds like a human wrote it, not a machine.

For GovTech marketers: working a broad territory with limited budget can be scalable if you adopt approaches like Israel’s. The data is already there in the public record, and in NationGraph. The key is what you do with it