How Beam’s three-person bid team achieved a 66% win rate with Stotles

Summary

Beam supports people into jobs and homes, and sells AI software to the councils it works with. Its bid team of three uses Stotles as the single place to find, qualify and track opportunities across both sides of the business. Last year the team scoped around 280 opportunities in detail, submitted 29 bids and won 19 of them, a 66% win rate. All but two of those bids were for buyers Beam had no prior relationship with.

Key results

• 66% win rate: 19 of 29 bids won in a year
• All but two of those bids were cold
• About 280 opportunities scoped in detail by a team of three
• First software contract won from a tender the sales team didn't know about

The company

Beam started in 2017, delivering frontline services that help people find work and secure homes, mostly through contracts with local authorities. Its caseworkers have always used AI tools Beam built in-house. Over the last few years, councils have started buying those tools too, including Magic Notes, Beam's AI transcription and reporting tool. Beam now sells both services and software to the public sector.

Beam has worked with Stotles since its early days in public sector bidding. Its first win through the platform was a £100,000 contract to re-house more than 100 Afghan families in London (read that story here). The business has grown a lot since then, and its bid process has grown with it.

Eleanor Hay, Senior Bids and Procurement Manager, runs the bid function across the whole company. That covers local and central government tenders, grants and innovation funding. Dani Ismailov-Law, Chief of Staff, has worked with the bid team since Beam first started using Stotles.

The challenge

In the early days, finding opportunities meant manually checking council portals, frameworks and spreadsheets.

"There were heaps of spreadsheets. There were loads of people poring over all these documents, creating logins. A huge proportion of the time in the team actually just went to staying on top of these portals, frameworks, all these different places that we had to monitor." Dani Ismailov-Law, Chief of Staff, Beam

The problem grew once Beam started selling software. The team now had two distinct markets to cover with the same three people, and every tender it missed was a lost chance to win work it was well placed to deliver.

"It's a real shame if we actually miss an opportunity that's perfectly Beam-shaped, but based on not having the visibility, we've just let it go by." Dani Ismailov-Law

The solution

Beam now finds bids only through Stotles. The team has set up separate signals for housing and employment services and for software. Each morning, Stotles pulls in the matching opportunities and scores them on how well they fit.

When something looks promising, the team sends it to HubSpot, which feeds a Slack channel where go/no-go conversations happen in the open. Documents are only downloaded once a bid looks likely to be a go. At that point the team runs the tender documents through Magic Notes to check for risks before committing.

"If I was scoping without Stotles it would take me hours to click in and out of different portals and tabs. Stotles just brings it all up in one view." Eleanor Hay, Senior Bids and Procurement Manager, Beam

As the business grew, Eleanor's team tightened its services signals around clear go/no-go criteria, so it only sees work it's good at delivering. The software signals stay broader on purpose, so the team can track what councils want to buy and feed that into product development. They also use the Buyers and Competitors tabs to spot contract expiries and plan ahead.

Beam uses the same approach for early market engagement, responding to about two engagement documents a week. Stotles surfaces planning and market engagement notices, which gives the team time to introduce itself to commissioners and find partners for large contracts it wouldn't lead on alone.

"Having Stotles surface market engagement and planning notices for big pieces of work that we wouldn't want to prime enables us to partner with other companies who excite us and who align to us, and approach those partnership opportunities ahead of time." Eleanor Hay