How Freshworks grew UK&I public sector revenue 88% with Stotles' market data

Summary

Freshworks grew its UK&I public sector revenue by 88% year on year after nine months with Stotles. By getting ahead of tenders instead of reacting to them, the team became the #1 performing team in Freshworks' EU operations. Stotles drove 53% of its qualified leads and delivered a 32x return on investment.

The company

Founded in 2010, Freshworks offers customer and employee engagement software to organisations around the world. After growing fast, the company set out in 2018 to build on that momentum by working with the UK and Ireland public sector.

The challenge: a scattered approach led to inconsistent results

Freshworks was new to the UK public sector and had limited resources. The team was bidding on cold tenders, and on average fewer than 4% of those bids succeeded. That approach created three problems:

• An unpredictable pipeline: Reacting to the market meant the sales team had little influence over future pipeline growth.
• Time-consuming admin: Tracking multiple tender portals was inefficient. It gave the team a fragmented view of the market, which led to missed opportunities.
• Little insight into buyers: Without much insight into prospective clients, outbound messaging was generic and success rates were low.

The solution: getting ahead of tenders with one view of the market

Freshworks partnered with Stotles to cut the time spent tracking tender portals. That freed the sales team to focus on spotting opportunities early and becoming more targeted in its outreach. With Stotles, the team became:

• More proactive: Instead of reacting to new tenders as they appeared, the team used Stotles as a single view of its public sector market. It analysed past pre-tender, tender and contract award activity to shape opportunities with a higher chance of success.
• More targeted: Insight into past buyer awards helped the team prioritise outreach to key stakeholders. Replacing a spray and pray approach, it used Stotles to identify the types of organisation to target (such as NHS trusts, local government and central government), the priority organisations within each group, and the right buyers to build relationships with.
• More relevant: A tailored feed of market activity gave the team content for outreach. Freshworks introduced a structured 3 / 6 / 9 drip marketing campaign with personalised messaging for its target audience. It used insights from Stotles, like articles from its tailored News Feed and expiring competitor contracts, to engage prospective clients with timely, relevant content.