13th February 2017, Reading, UK: Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), the UK’s innovation network, has chosen Workbooks CRM to gain visibility into its operations and improve efficiencies and reporting.

KTN’s specialist teams support innovation and drive economic growth by working with entrepreneurs, academics and funders to develop new products, processes and services to create value and benefit society. With over 100 staff contacting companies to understand their needs and innovation capabilities, more than 400 events each year with over 20,000 participants, and contacts in academia, investors and other innovation agencies, KTN has a significant requirement to manage relationships and monitor the outcome of its collaborations.

“It is important for us not just to track the relationship between KTN and the businesses we help,” said Chris Warkup, CEO at KTN. “It is also vital for us to be able to track the development of relationships between the third-party businesses, academics and investors between whom we make introductions – and ultimately to report on the outcomes.”

The bespoke system KTN had developed to track engagements and collaborations was becoming more expensive to update in line with requirements for mobile access, email integration, the promotion and management of events, and tracking and reporting on successful outcome. Staff were not seeing the value add from their use of the existing system, and many were relying on supplementary Excel spreadsheets, which meant that creating a holistic view of engagements was virtually impossible. There was no way to automate and improve processes, and producing outcome reports was a time-consuming, manual exercise.

“Like all businesses, we need to deliver more with less, so it was essential to find a cost-effective way to streamline our processes and reduce operational costs.” said Warkup. “We set up a dedicated team to conduct an in-depth review of 18 potential commercial CRM solutions, and produce a shortlist of six suppliers to assess our requirements and present their solution to us.”
“Our list of requirements was very clear from the outset,” said Iain McGregor, Director at KTN. “Our new CRM solution had to underpin our entire operations: arranging, promoting and managing networking events; relationship tracking and reporting - mostly carried out by remote users using a mobile app and Gmail; automation to help KTN account managers match needs and capabilities; and reporting on the successful outcome of collaborations.

“We were very impressed that Workbooks took the time to gain a thorough understanding of our slightly unusual requirements and not only show us their world-class CRM solution, but also use their previous experience to demonstrate how we could best achieve our key objectives. We were also delighted to see a British company providing a market-leading solution. We particularly appreciated the opportunity to work directly with the vendor to implement our CRM solution, rather than working through an intermediary, such as a reseller or implementation partner.”

“We are very proud to be selected by such a prestigious organisation, especially after such a thorough selection process,” said John Cheney, CEO at Workbooks. “While relationship management is at the core of any good CRM system, Workbooks offers customers the unique ability to define custom relationships between People and Organisations, allowing organisations like KTN to build a network that accurately reflects the complex ecosystem they are working with. We’re also very pleased to see KTN making use of our new Mapping Module that allows staff to view the locations of People and Organisations on a Map to help plan their off-site meetings, and allows the marketing team to quickly identify contacts within a region to invite to an Event.”

About Workbooks

Workbooks delivers cloud-based CRM and business applications to the mid-market, at an affordable price. Workbooks extends beyond sales, marketing and customer support to include order management and fulfilment, invoicing and supplier management, at a price which is typically 50-70% less than solutions such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.

Workbooks joins up the entire organisation around data and processes, promoting teamwork and collaboration. It provides a single 360 view of customers and the information is accessible anytime, anywhere. Productivity is increased, operations are streamlined, insightful decisions are made and the business is better equipped to differentiate against the competition.

For more information, visit www.workbooks.com

PR Contact:
Cheryl Noquet
Senior Marketing Executive
cheryl.noquet@workbooks.com
+44 (0)118 3030113