Scaling GovTech Solutions

Ty Cooper is a Senior Account Executive at EcoMap, with over a decade of experience in GovTech sales. Before joining EcoMap, he spent seven years at GovSpend, where he became the #1 all-time sales performer and revenue generator, selling over $30 million in SaaS solutions to government agencies. As Sales Director, he led teams of Account Executives while consistently achieving 125% to 200% of his sales quota and maintaining a 72% net revenue retention rate. At EcoMap, he applies this expertise to help ecosystems adopt digital infrastructure that strengthens how they support entrepreneurs, small businesses, and economic development.

You’ve built a career in GovTech sales, consistently delivering results in a space that’s known for longer, complex cycles. What drew you to this field, and what keeps you motivated in it?

I was drawn to GovTech because it sits at the intersection of technology and community impact. The sales cycles often are longer, but the outcomes are often more meaningful. When a platform gets adopted, it can shape how entire regions support businesses, students, entrepreneurs or citizens. What motivates me is knowing the work goes beyond revenue. I’m enabling governments and civic organizations to be more effective, transparent, and impactful for everyone.

Public-sector sales often require a different playbook than commercial sales. What are some lessons you’ve learned about building trust and navigating government decision-making?

Patience and trust are everything. Decisions go beyond ROI, in my opinion. They’re about reducing risk and achieving stakeholder alignment. I’ve learned to focus on clarity, transparency, and repeatable proof points.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that public sector decision-making sometimes is less about a single buyer and more about navigating a web of stakeholders. Each has different priorities, so building trust means understanding those perspectives and connecting your solution to their specific lens of value. I’ve also learned the importance of transparency. Public-sector leaders operate under constant scrutiny, so they value partners who are upfront about timelines, costs, and limitations.

Many people hear “sales” and think only of quotas, but your work is about helping customers adopt transformative technology. How do you balance selling with guiding customers through change?

For me, sales is about helping leaders adopt solutions they’ll feel proud to champion. That means acknowledging change management challenges like small staffs, siloed data, and multiple stakeholders, then positioning EcoMap as a partner that simplifies their work and takes the burden off their shoulders. I focus on what the outcomes will be: more time for impact, less time managing spreadsheets and updating out-of-date data.

Adopting new technology goes beyond making a purchase. Staff might have to change long-standing processes, often with limited capacity. So I focus on being a guide, not just a seller. I ask a lot of “how will this land with your team?” questions, and then help them picture the end state. Less manual reporting, clearer visibility, and more time for impact.

I’ve also learned to pace things, breaking adoption into achievable milestones. When things can become overwhelming, I like to “start small and grow smart,” securing early champions and celebrating quick wins with just one of our suite of products to start, so momentum builds naturally. When leaders see me invested in making the transition smooth, trust grows. That’s when selling shifts into partnership, and the technology becomes something they’re excited to own rather than something they feel was pushed onto them.

You’re experienced in breaking down long sales cycles into clear steps. How do you keep momentum going when adoption requires buy-in across multiple stakeholders?

Long sales cycles can stall if you treat them like one big decision, so I’ve learned to break them into a series of clear, achievable steps that build momentum. 

The first thing I do is map the stakeholder landscape, not just who signs the contract, but who influences adoption to build out that “cast of characters.” Each of them needs to see a version of the value that speaks directly to their priorities, while they all buy into the long-term vision.

I try to pace communication so there’s always a next step, even if it’s a quick check-in to review metrics, share a peer case study, or catch up on what’s been going on in each of our worlds recently. In public-sector sales, silence can easily turn into drift, so keeping energy in the process is about being proactive without being pushy.

Finally, I lean on champions inside the organization. If one leader sees how EcoMap will reduce manual reporting or improve transparency, I empower them with the right language and proof points to advocate internally. That way, momentum isn’t just me pushing from the outside. It’s carried forward by someone they already trust. Ideally, I want everyone to feel like this isn’t a leap into something new, but the natural next step in a process they’ve already been working to achieve.

Ecosystem intelligence is still a new category for many people. How do you help decision-makers connect the dots between their challenges and the solutions EcoMap offers?

It’s a newer category, so I start by tying it to familiar pain points, like “Your team spends hours maintaining resource lists that are outdated by the time they’re published.” It’s difficult to build an ecosystem, but it might be even more difficult to maintain it since it’s ever-changing.

At EcoMap, we automate the updating, add visibility and analytics, so you can track who’s being served, where gaps exist, what’s working, and what in the ecosystem is most valuable to people. It’s a huge burden off the client’s shoulders not having to focus on constant updating, and we help identify where gaps in the ecosystem may exist, as well as what people are looking for that doesn’t currently exist. This is where EcoMap steps in to manage all of that.

Government agencies and ecosystem leaders often juggle competing priorities. How do you position EcoMap’s tools so they align with their goals and reduce friction rather than adding to it?

One thing I’ve recognized is that most government and ecosystem leaders aren’t short on tools. They are usually short on capacity. They juggle things like workforce, small business support, reporting requirements, and community engagement, often with lean teams. So my job is to show that EcoMap isn’t another system to manage. It’s something that reduces the burden.

I think the best way to do that is by grounding the conversation in their priorities. For example, if they’re focused on accountability to funders, I show how our dashboard analytics automate the reporting on ecosystem activity in different ways, which they are usually struggling to compile. If it’s ecosystem visibility and building, I point to how our Discover tool embeds the ecosystem and keeps data accurate without endless staff hours.

EcoMap isn’t prescriptive. It wraps around what they’re already doing. Instead of asking them to change workflows, we integrate with their existing ecosystem, enhance what they already have, maintain it, and give them a single, centralized view they never have to worry about. The shift from “one more platform” to “the platform that saves you time and helps grow the community” is what reduces friction.

Ultimately, I want to be a partner in helping them deliver on their mission and goals. When leaders can see that the platform lightens their load and directly supports their success metrics, the lightbulb comes on.

Sales leadership isn’t just about closing deals, it’s about developing strong customer relationships. What qualities do you think make for an enduring partnership in GovTech?

Public-sector leaders often operate in high-stakes environments, and they need to be accountable to funders, boards, and the public. So the first quality I focus on is transparency. Being upfront about what’s possible, what’s not, what might take longer, and even where we’re still learning creates credibility that lasts beyond the sales process.

Second, I think empathy is huge. Listening to their problems and tailoring the conversation to how we can help solve them, rather than just focusing on product features. 

Third is consistency. It’s easy to show up during the sales cycle, but enduring partnerships come from being present after the contract is signed, both from the sales side and the customer support side. I make sure their onboarding is going well, celebrating successes with them, and being their partner post-sale, always there for them.

You’ve seen what works in scaling SaaS adoption. What excites you about the opportunity to do that here at EcoMap as ecosystems embrace digital infrastructure?

We are at a huge inflection point. For years, public sector groups have talked about building an ecosystem, or even tried themselves and learned how difficult it is to do and keep up-to-date. The adoption in government and civic spaces often lag behind the private sector, sometimes because tools feel too complex or don’t align with how lean public-sector teams actually work.

EcoMap is different. It’s purpose-built for these environments, so scaling adoption here feels less like forcing change and more like meeting an overdue need. I’ve learned that successful SaaS adoption comes when platforms are intuitive, reduce manual effort, and prove impact quickly, and we check all those boxes. Whether it’s Discover with embeds on their current website to build and keep innovation data accurate without staff hours, or our ERM tool showing exactly who’s being served and where gaps exist, the value is both immediate and easy to communicate.

What excites me is the chance to help ecosystems make that leap. We’re not just selling software, we’re laying the foundation for how cities, states, and networks understand and grow their economies. To play a role in scaling that impact is what’s most important and exciting to me.

GovTech is evolving quickly, especially with AI and data-driven tools. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in the next few years, and how is EcoMap positioned for them?

The biggest opportunity in GovTech is moving from raw data collection in a bunch of different areas to a centralized place with actionable insights, and AI is the driver of that shift. 

Agencies need tools that tell them what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next. I like to say a clear picture and clear decision rather than feeling like you’re in a washing machine spin cycle.

EcoMap is already positioned with Discover automating ecosystem visibility, ERM tracking relationships and impact, and our Nonprofit Intelligence Dashboard standardizing financial health data. 

Another opportunity is collaboration. Governments can’t afford siloed systems anymore, so the platforms that provide a shared source of truth will unlock the most value. That’s where EcoMap stands apart, serving as the digital backbone that reduces duplication and aligns stakeholders.

What excites me is that this innovation goes beyond efficiency to helping communities make smarter decisions and grow.

When you think about EcoMap’s trajectory, what kind of impact do you hope your work will have on the ecosystems and communities we serve?

By implementing EcoMap in different agency systems, I want to see more jobs created, entrepreneurs finding what they are looking for quicker, communities growing, and everyone feeling more connected. I hope to see real outcomes, like a small business in a rural town finding funding as easily as one in a major city, or an economic development agency being able to prove its value to funders because they finally have clean, real-time data at their fingertips.

At the core, my goal is to help leaders spend less energy wrestling with information and more energy driving the change they care about, whether that’s job creation, innovation, or community growth. If we can give ecosystems that clarity and confidence, the ripple effects on communities will be huge.