How to build proactive, early pipeline with expiring contracts in Stotles

Learn how to identify expiring contracts that will likely renew - and engage with the buyer ahead of your competitors.

Contents:

1. How do expiring contracts help to generate pipeline?

2. How can I find relevant expiring contracts in Stotles?

3. What can I do with an expiring contract once I've saved it?

4. How can I effectively run early engagement with buyers?

How do expiring contracts help to generate early pipeline in public sector sales?

The most successful public sector sales teams operate around one key principle: 

Reacting to tenders once they are published is often too late as the buyer already has a supplier in mind. Instead, you need to engage and build relationships with buyers before they go to market.

The government encourages early engagement as a way for buyers to discover what is possible from the market and learn about solutions, requirements and restrictions that they might not otherwise have been aware of.

But how do you find who and when to engage early with?

This is the power of expiring contracts. Expiring contracts are contracts that have been awarded to a supplier and are coming to an end. In many cases, there will likely be a renewal of this contract - and an opportunity for you to take over.

Here's a quick overview of how building pipeline with expiring contracts works, before we go into detail below:

1. Use Stotles to find contract relevant to your keywords that are expiring within a set timeframe, such as six months.
2. Qualify these opportunities further with full visibility into the previous award and buyer spend.
3. Start building a relationship with the buyer as they begin their internal renewal conversations - and before the market is aware.
4. Once the tender is published, you are front of mind with the buyer.

How can I find relevant expiring contracts in Stotles?

It's easy to find expiring contracts via a dedicated view in Stotles.

1. Navigate to your main notices page in the Stotles app.
2. Click on Upcoming Expiries in the saved views (saved searches) ribbon.
   
3. Your feed is automatically sorted by expiry date
   1. To see notices expiring within a certain time period (e.g. 6 months or 12 months from now), simply click Filters -> Contract Dates -> Set an expiry date
4. Click on the title of an expiring contract to view the full details
5. If the contract is relevant, click Pre-engage to save it to your My Notices pipeline page, where you can track its progress through the procurement stages.
   
6. Click the >> icon to return back to your feed and find your next relevant expiring contract. 

What can I do with an expiring contract once I've saved it? 

Track progress and bottlenecks in your My Notices feed

Make sure that you mark all relevant notices as 'Pre-engage', as above.

Once you have done this, you'll always be able to find it in your My Notices page, where you can track its progress, see if potential revenue is stuck at a particular stage, and assign to different team members.

To move a notice into the next procurement stage, simply:

1. Click into the notice
2. Under the heading Workflow, click on Pre-engage: To do
3. Select the new pipeline stage you want to move the notice to

How can I effectively run early engagement with buyers?

From the relevant expiring contract, you can find all the crucial context you need about the buyer's previous behaviour - their spend, the awarded supplier, the specifics that they were looking for, time frames and more.

This gives you a valuable starting point for beginning your engagement with the buyer from the point of view of their previous activity and priorities.

Early or pre-market engagement is encouraged by the government as a way for buyers to discover what is possible from the market - solutions they may not have heard of or what resources would be needed to fulfil, for example - as long as it doesn't distort the competition.

This gives you a strong opening to positioning yourself as a valuable resource to the buyer and gain an early understanding of their needs and pains in the process. 

On Stotles' Growth and Expert plans, in addition to the context you can access through the buyers' expiring contracts, you can go deeper with meeting minutes, annual reports, budgets and more to fully understand any internal decisions made.

Plus, add on decision maker contacts to go one step better than the publicly available procurement contacts and go straight to the people who hold the purse strings.