Your Stotles signal settings are the heart of your Stotles experience; helping to surface insights across the app, making it easier to drill down to the most relevant details quickly.
You can access the self-serve tool via Settings > Signal Settings.
Optimising your signal settings to help identify future opportunities involves two of the key functions:
Keywords:
Searches the title and description of pre-tender / tender / contract award notices for the keywords / phrases most relevant to your business.
Type in the keyword / phrase you want to monitor the market for and hit enter.
The preview will show all records published in the last 6 months that would be captured by that keyword, to give you a sense of the results you can expect.
Click on ‘Show advanced settings’ to further refine your results by:
Excluding records that contain keywords you don’t want to see
CPV sector codes most relevant to you.
Top tips for picking the right keywords / phrases
Include keywords that describe the products and services your business offers; this sounds really simple, but we often see language in tenders along the lines of "we want to buy X tool" so it is good to make sure you're covered.
It may be worth considering including language used by competitors that are well established in the public sector as well.
Keywords that describe the use-cases or problems solved by your products and services; tenders will often include a "problems to be solved" (or similar) section in which the buyer will outline the trouble they're having, or the process they want to improve, so it is good reflect this in the way we're monitoring the market.
Avoid generic keywords like "consulting", "digital", "transformation" (etc.) which can be used in different contexts thus creating irrelevant noise in your feed.
Make use of the 'Advanced keyword search tips'; these enable you to be more specific in the results you want to see. For example, by default our signal settings keyword search is fuzzy, meaning the system will return results based on the root of a word (for example, development will return developer, developing etc.). Use the quotation marks to capture the exact phrase only.
Use the Tender Search and Award Search tools to test out the language used in historic tenders / pre-tenders to get a sense of keywords to monitor in future.
Competitors:
Searches the title, description and Supplier(s) awarded fields for the competitor name entered.
This is designed to ensure you see all records where your competitor is awarded a contract directly, or where they are referred to in the record - for example, if software that has been resold by distributor.
Type in the competitor name you want to monitor the market for and hit enter.
The preview will show all records published in the last 6 months that would be captured by that competitor signal, to give you a sense of the results you can expect.
Top tips for monitoring competitor activity
Include the company name and / or relevant tech-stacks / alternative brand names associated with that organisation to ensure you capture all relevant results.
If you’re seeing too many or too few results, try searching in the Supplier Search tool (link to app) to find the exact supplier name you should use in your signal settings.
Tip: If your signal settings tool doesn’t look like this you might have access to a feed managed by the Stotles team. If that is the case, get in touch with our Customer Success team via the chat tool and we’d be happy to help.