Stotles launches sales enablement platform for public sector

Stotles is today launching a new sales enablement platform in the UK and Ireland to help sales, marketing and bid teams go-to-market in the public sector.

“A third of all public sector spending comes through public procurement,” said John Witt, the start-up’s co-founder & CEO. “Particularly in the digital sphere, the public sector is accelerating digital transformation faster than ever, creating massive opportunities for technology vendors to grow their business by serving the government.”

Witt said the newplatform can help suppliers tap into this activity, using data to help them find better opportunities “in half the time.”

As a result, he said, “they can create stronger go-to-market strategies, build stronger partner networks, get a leg up on competitors, and find earlier opportunities among all the noise.”

“Nightmare experiences” of public sector

Witt and fellow Stotles founders Carsten Schaltz and Taj Kamranpour said they “all had shared nightmare experiences” working with public sector in their previous careers.

Witt noted several challenges associated with selling into the public sector. Fragmented data can make it time consuming to find relevant opportunities and market signals. Also, sifting data to find relevant items is often a labour intensive manual process.

He added that often, published opportunities have already been “shaped” by other suppliers, making it difficult to know which opportunities are real or not.

“Getting ahead and shaping opportunities is the way to find real success, but it’s expensive to create shaping opportunities. Usually, it’s something only the big companies have the resource to do,” he said.

As such, in early 2020 Stotle raised private funding from investors for the platform, which includes like Uber, Dropbox, Revolut and UiPath. For the past 18 months the firm has been in private beta, working with hundreds of companies in its Early Access Programme.

Centralising fragmented data

Stotles aims to centralise fragmented data to allow people to see the entire public sector in one place.

It allows people to build customised feeds of this data to automatically sift for the market signals or opportunities that are relevant. Secondly, Stotles informs teams about which opportunities to pursue, and which ones to ignore. It also flags early buying signals in the public sector, showing teams where they can ‘shape’.

The company gets its name from Aristotle, who said “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Stotles said it has adopted the quote as its mantra, “to take all of these messy, fragmented parts around the world, and build a whole that helps business and government work better together.”

Stotles said Freshworks used the platform to grow year-on-year revenues by more than 88 percent in the public sector.