1. Keep your eyes on the market 👀
The catalogue format of G-Cloud offers buyers a pre-approved list of cloud-based products and services and offers suppliers a streamlined route to call-off contracts through direct awards, exclusive mini-competitions, and framework-only call-offs. But, this does not guarantee success.
Leading suppliers remember that G-Cloud is their conduit to access buyers and bypass the red-tape during the procurement itself, but that the most meaningful work is done before this stage.
Successful suppliers aren’t tracking tenders and call offs. They’re tracking contract awards that are due to expire.This means they can identify, qualify and timeline all their upcoming opportunities
In the 6 to 12 months leading up to the expiration of the existing contract, proactive sellers are building relationships, establishing credibility around their expertise and helping buyers find an optimal solution.
When the tender does get published, the requirements then reflect the optimal solution that you and the buyer had discussed. It’s unlikely that you’ll design a solution that you can’t deliver. So now, not only are you technically the best fit to win but you’ve also got the best relationship and understanding of the buyer.
The trouble is, without proper tooling - gaining visibility of all the awards in your market is quite a tricky job. There’s over 1400 portals and over a 1000 frameworks.
The suppliers who do best in the public sector use Stotles to create a personalised feed of open, upcoming and expired opportunities as a single source of truth to inform how they interact with buyers and when.
Build your own custom feed for free using Stotles
2. Target G-Cloud buyers 🎯
G-Cloud’s catalogue structure can limit direct suppliers’ interactions with potential buyers until they are ready to procure but, while this can make it challenging to build relationships through the framework itself, the leading suppliers don’t let this block their success.
Rather than pursue a generic approach, leading public sector suppliers build their sales and marketing campaigns around buyers who procure through G-Cloud, or the frameworks they’re on.
Once you’ve got the intelligence this unlocks the ability to run highly targeted campaigns to nurture buyers towards you. This is a big shift from a more traditional spray and pray approach which delivers far lower ROI on Marketing spend.
Practically, this requires you to build relationships with potential buyers far in advance of a procurement. You should nurture these relationships by understanding buyers’ challenges, responding to their market behaviour, and keeping up-to-date with their latest priorities and strategies so that, when the time comes to procure through G-Cloud, you’re front of mind.
When it comes to marketing to buyers, be specific rather than generic.
Whether this means working with them to add value across events and workshops, publishing reports to support their roles, or running targeted ad campaigns, maintaining a consistent relationship with a presence among your target buyers will support you in becoming the supplier of choice when it is time to procure through G-Cloud.
See which buyers are using G-Cloud using Stotles framework intelligence
3. Partner your way to success 🤝
No supplier is an island, and sometimes, though it may seem counter-intuitive, working with other suppliers can be one of the most fruitful routes to market.
Partnerships using a framework like G-Cloud can take a lot of different shapes depending on the type of supplier you are and the outcome you want.
For SMEs or public sector novices:
Using a value-added reseller (VAR) to sell your services on your company’s behalf means you don’t have to worry about the hefty amount of resource required to acquire and maintain a G-Cloud listing. By reaching a commercial agreement with a VAR, you can still benefit from the direct route to buyers but without the significant overheads associated with G-Cloud.
If you do decide that a G-Cloud listing is the way forward for your business, nurturing relationships on the supplier side of the market can also provide opportunities. Partnering with established and complementary public sector suppliers who can create warm ‘ins’ to buyers on your behalf, which you can turn into your own relationships or an opportunity bid together.
For VARs, enterprise and experienced suppliers:
If you see an opportunity in the market but don’t quite meet all the requirements, try partnering with a business that can fill those gaps to offer the buyer an end-to-end solution provided by multiple suppliers.
Find partners using Stotles...
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4. Know the competition 🥊
Understanding where your competitors are, where they’ve been, and what they might do next is invaluable for getting the most out of G-Cloud.
If your competitors are listed on G-Cloud, then you should be too (and if they’re not, you might want to think about why this might be). Be sure to qualify G-Cloud fully to ensure you don’t miss out on opportunities or waste resource which could be better used elsewhere.
It is also worth considering what other frameworks they use, and what their listings look like to ensure you are considered for the same opportunities as them.
Where your competitor is an incumbent supplier on a G-Cloud call-off, you should be building a relationship with the buyer 3-6 months ahead of the expiry date to understand if they plan to renew, what their challenges might be with the incumbent, and where you could add further value to their organisation.
You can’t rely on a G-Cloud listing alone to provide opportunities, so using relationships to demonstrate where you can add more value than the alternatives in the market is what will give you a competitive edge when the time comes to procure.
See the existing contracts between buyers and your competitors...
5. Look out for early buying signals ⏰
Don’t just wait for opportunities to present themselves to you through G-Cloud, pay attention to signs where net-new opportunities may be about to come to the market (before they get there).
When a new opportunity goes live, most of the time the buyer in question already has a supplier in mind and the decision has already been made. For this reason, you can’t rely on G-Cloud being a ‘catalogue’ as most buyers already know what they’re looking for when the time comes to procure.
GGet ahead by paying attention to signals across the market that might tell you that a buyer is about to procure.
Have they mentioned a specific challenge at an event or in a public forum?
Has there been a story in the media that signposts to a need for a particular solution?
Do any of their strategy documents mention a plan to solve a specific challenge or achieve goal?
These types of early buying signals offer you a perfect opportunity to reach out to buyers to offer your support and be considered before a mini-competition or a direct award.
Look at buyer documents in Stotles...
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Stotles framework intelligence
G-Cloud 14 and other frameworks offer unparalleled routes to market, and diving into the data around them can inform your GTM and the role frameworks like G-Cloud 14 could play within it.
The Stotles frameworks intelligence module hosts contract data for all 365 awards on G-Cloud 13, and 1650 awards on G-Cloud 12 and earlier iterations all in one place.
Seeing an accurate representation of historical G-Cloud activity in one place activity can inform decisions to not only choose a framework, but to inform how that framework fits into your holistic public sector sales strategy.
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