Horizon International Cargo are experts in international transportation and logistics. Established in 1991, they have grown to become the UK’s leading independent multimodal freight forwarder. Horizon now employs over 90 people across the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, the USA, Slovakia and Japan and has an extensive network of overseas partners. Horizon constantly strives to provide innovative solutions for their clients and they are committed to investing in both their people and in their information technology.
Frequently, Horizon have space available to sell on shipping containers on specific routes and they want to take advantage of this by targeting prospects who need to move cargo along those routes. Historically however, knowledge about which prospects and customers use which routes was not recorded so unless a salesperson happened to remember this information, a significant number of sales opportunities were being missed.
Additionally, the management at Horizon had no way of tracking the activities and successes of their salespeople, each of whom worked in a different way, using a combination of Outlook, Excel and paperbased records. In the competitive world of cargo handling, Horizon’s management team recognised that this lack of identifiable and re-usable commercial information was leading to inefficiencies in the business and resolved to find a solution. They began a search of CRM providers and were keen to find one who offered a simple to use interface that was flexible enough to cater for their specific requirements. Horizon’s management looked at but rejected some of the bigger providers, choosing instead to use Workbooks CRM.
"We wanted the right software but we also wanted the right partnership with the vendor, and Workbooks clearly ticked both boxes" said Horizon's Sales Director, Daniel Hart.
Daniel Hart said, "Workbooks impressed us with their friendly and flexible approach. They spent time with us to ensure they understood our aims and subsequently demonstrated a tailored solution that enabled us to record all of our customer information, quickly and easily in one centrally accessible database".
After just a day of training, the sales and support team at Horizon were up and running with Workbooks, using it to capture leads, schedule sales activities and record opportunities for business. The benefits of using Workbooks were immediately apparent and resulted in Horizon doubling the number of licences they own within the first 3 months of using the software.
“We're so impressed with efficiencies and sales improvements brought by using Workbooks that we're planning to roll out usage to colleagues in India and the Far East. We're so confident in the functionality that in future the only software we'll give to new salespeople in Outlook and Workbooks, which will be everything they need to be successful", commented Daniel.