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Freshworks & Stotles collaborate; pub-sec team posts 88% growth amidst pandemic.

Olly Phillips
Senior Account Executive at Freshworks

Founded in 2010, Freshworks offers a range of customer and employee engagement software solutions globally. It grew rapidly and by 2018, wanted to build on that momentum by engaging with the UK &I public sector. Freshworks partnered with Stotles to reduce the time being spent on tracking tender portals, enabling the sales team to focus on improving visibility on early stage opportunities and becoming more targeted in their approach to market outreach. Within 12 months, the UK & I PublicSector team increased revenue by 88% YOY.

The Challenge

Scattered approach led to inconsistent results. New to the UK market and with limited resources, the Public Sector team was seeing inconsistent returns – on average <4% of bids submitted to cold tenders were successful. This approach triggered several key obstacles:

  • Unpredictable pipeline: being reactive to the market meant that the sales team had little influence on future pipeline growth.
  • Time-consuming admin: tracking multiple tender portals was inefficient and resulted in a fragmented view on the market which led to missed opportunities.
  • Lack of buyer-specific intelligence: limited insight into prospective clients meant that outbound messaging was generic and so generated low success rates.

The Solution

With Stotles, the team became:

  • More Proactive: Early visibility on market activity enabled the team to shape more relevant opportunities.Instead of ad hoc reactions to new tenders, they used Stotles as a single view of their public sector market toanalyse relevant historic pre-tender, tender and contract award activity and develop future opportunities that had a higher likelihood of success.
  • More Targeted: Insight into historic buyer awards helped the team to prioritise outreach to key stakeholders. Replacing their "Spray & Pray" mentality, the Public Sector team used Stotles to identify prospective client categories (i.e. NHS Trusts, Local Gov, Central Gov), priority organisations within these groups and functional buyers to build relationships with.
  • More Relevant: Hyper-tailored feed of relevant market activity provided content for outreach. Freshworks introduced a more structured 3 / 6 / 9 drip marketing campaign which focused on personalised messaging for their target audience, using insights gained from Stotles - like articles pulled from their tailoredNews Feed or insight into expiring competitor contracts - to engage prospective clients with timely and more relevant content.

Results after 9 months with Stotles

  • 88% year-over-year growth in UK&I public sector
  • #1 performing team in Freshworks' EU operations
  • 53% of qualified leads driven by Stotles sales-enablement platform
  • 32x ROI on their investment in using Stotles

The Take-Aways

Our research shows that teams who get ahead of tenders see significantly higher growth in the public sector market. Freshworks showed further concrete evidence that getting proactive works.

In spite of a pandemic and increased competition from players like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk, the Freshworks UKI approach and using Stotles platform led to record results.

Want to get a clear view of the public sector your way? Get started with Stotles by joining here today.