Live Procurement Relationships Drive Wins
Scott Sanders, Chief Growth Officer at Forterra, on autonomy for every vehicle
This reveals that defense go to market advantage sits inside live procurement relationships, not in generic sector expertise. In practice, the buyer is not one Pentagon wide customer, but a patchwork of program managers, contracting paths, budgets, and mission owners, so the team already working the account usually knows more than any former official or outside consultant. That is why product teams that pair customer intimacy with procurement fluency can outcompete better known advisors.
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Forterra describes the DoD as a set of micro markets, where even adjacent program offices buy differently and use different funding lines. That makes secondhand advice decay fast, because knowledge is tied to a specific office, budget line, and problem set, not to defense in general.
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The practical substitute for expert calls is reading budget documents, RFPs, program signals, and deployment evidence, then matching that against what a company has actually fielded. Sanders frames this as a better way to judge whether a prototype closes for a real need than calling retired generals or former CIOs.
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This also explains why companies like Anduril and Forterra build around product plus capture, not pure tech. Sanders argues that differentiated technology is not enough, because the winner also needs the program manager, contracting path, pricing model, and internal champion that can carry a product from pilot to scaled program.
Going forward, the edge will keep shifting toward teams that can learn with the customer in real time and translate that into repeatable product motions across adjacent programs. As autonomy budgets grow, the winners are likely to be the companies that turn local account knowledge into a broader playbook without pretending defense is one uniform market.