How to use Documents to find buying signals

Find reliable early-stage signs of intent from public-sector buyers

How does Documents help me build pub-sec pipeline?

The most successful public-sector sales teams start engaging with buyers long before an opportunity is open—so that when it is published, they are front of mind with that buyer.

Many of our users use Stotles to track awarded contracts that are coming up for expiry, and that’s a really important signal to follow, but you can also go one step earlier.

Documents allows you to search hundreds of thousands of public-sector publications, from annual reports and budgets to strategy docs, FOI requests and meeting minutes, for those valuable mentions that tell you a buyer is actively interested in a product or service like yours.

Traditionally, this could take hours of searching through different buyers' sites and skimming numerous different documents, often fruitlessly. In Stotles, it's targeted, relevant and takes a few clicks from one single database.

This way, you can easily:

• Identify buyers who are interested in your product or service at a very early stage and start to shape that conversation.
• Build full context so that you can open a conversation with relevant, valuable insights for the buyer that show you understand their needs, pains and priorities—and can help solve for them.

See above for an example of how we found three valuable buying signals in a few clicks.

How do I access Documents?

You can access our full Documents database—known as ‘global documents’—from the navigation bar at the top of Stotles, where you can then filter them down to find those buying signals.

You can also access Documents from a buyer profile page, in which case it will only show you documents relevant to that buyer.

Each works well in different workflows:

• Global documents: Use it to filter by different parameters to discover buyers who are interested in your service/product, or go directly here if you’re spending some time specifically working on multiple different searches in Documents.
• Buyer profile documents: Use it when you’re researching a buyer to build up the fullest picture of their intent and strategy, without interrupting your existing workflow on their profile.

How do I filter Documents?

We have an ever-growing database, so we recommend you use all the filter options available to you to hone in on those valuable, specific buying signals.

You’ll see us do a search in the video above, where we put the following principles in action:

• Use the left-hand search bar to search by a specific document name
• Open your filters to search by keyword
  • We recommend only adding one or two specific keywords to get the best results. For example, ‘case management system’ would return software-relevant results for a case management tool, whereas ‘case management’ alone would also return results related to legal and social care outside of the world of IT.
• Narrow down your results by filtering by date and by buyer parameters
  • Use buyer name to show only a specific buyer, or buyer lists to show a group of your target buyers
  • Use buyer types if you want to discover new buyers who are signalling intent in your sector
  • Use buyer location if you work in a particular geography

What different types of Documents are available?

We are continually expanding our coverage. To date, we have:

• Reports and accounts: This includes performance documents like annual reports, statements of accounts, evaluation reports and historical expenditures
• Strategy: These are goal- and/or planning-oriented documents such as delivery, forward, business and operational plans
• Budget: These include budgetary publications like revenue and capital outturn, financial plans, capital resource allocation, SME action plans and commercial pipelines
• Specific reports: These focus on specific themes such as public health or crime, as opposed to the annual or evaluation reports of the first category

We also cover:

• Meeting minutes
• Guidance and regulation
• Statistics
• News and communications
• Tribunal decisions

FAQs:

I’m getting a lot of results—how can I eliminate noise?

Make sure that your keywords are tight and relevant, and that you’re not searching for large numbers of keywords at once (as you would in a tender feed). You want to be as specific as possible in this case.

A document I’m interested in isn’t yet listed—when will it be added?

We’re continually widening and deepening our coverage, and you can see our latest updates here.

What does it mean if a document doesn’t have a publish date?

On the rare occasions a document doesn’t have a publish date, it means we cannot verify one in our normal systems—but we are manually checking to see if we can discover it from another source.

How do I get access to Documents?

Documents is available on our paid plans. If you're interested in finding out more, be sure to book a demo.