Ultima Media choose the ultimate media and publishing CRM from Workbooks

As Ultima Media’s product portfolio and customer databases expanded, the organization found itself managing data across 15 different sources. This fragmentation made it difficult to maintain data quality, build marketing campaigns efficiently, and extract useful business insights.

“We had no visibility of our data. This meant we couldn’t clean or organize it, campaign building was time‑consuming, reporting was difficult, and we couldn’t make data‑driven decisions.” Justyna Wanczyk, Head of Data

Knowing they needed a CRM platform but uncertain where to start, Ultima’s team sought recommendations from other media companies and conducted online research. This led to a shortlist of two solutions: Workbooks and Salesforce. After several months of evaluation, Workbooks emerged as the clear winner.

The team needed a CRM that offered strong return on investment, flexibility for customization, and guidance throughout implementation. Workbooks met all these needs, offering ready‑made templates along with the adaptability required to build a system tailored to their workflows.

“We were looking for a strong return on investment, a system we could tailor to our needs, and a vendor who could guide us through adopting CRM for the first time. Workbooks stood out in all three areas.” George Williams, Lead Data Analyst

The process began with a shared success workshop involving key stakeholders. Workbooks started backend configuration, followed by a rapid data‑migration phase completed within a month. Marketing was the first department to adopt the system, taking a gradual approach to integrating emails into Spotler to reduce bounce backs.

“Taking small steps and showing everyone the system was working was crucial to getting everyone engaged.”

“Workbooks provided a ready-made solution with templates that allowed us to get started quickly, while offering the flexibility to customize the platform to suit our business. The inclusion of professional services enabled us to run implementation workshops and continue developing custom integrations and enhancements.”  

Although the sales team was initially hesitant, visible successes in marketing and ongoing training helped drive adoption. Today, all sales activities—including opportunity management, orders, and contact tracking—are fully managed within Workbooks.

With Workbooks, Ultima Media now has full visibility across all brands and departments. Teams can see every client interaction, improving coordination between editorial and sales.

Web‑insight data highlights who is viewing specific online content, enabling smarter prospecting and more targeted outreach.

Enabling sales teams to win 5x more business

“One salesperson gained at least ten new accounts using web insights—five times more than before—because he could focus on high‑intent prospects rather than only existing clients.”

Improving segmentation to drive more sales 

“Beyond sales, Workbooks has enabled the marketing team to improve segmentation and targeting, halving email send volumes while still selling out products. The platform has supported more refined personas and behaviour-based segmentation across multiple customer touchpoints.”

Communication is key

“Throughout the process, communication from the Workbooks team has been excellent. They’ve stayed in touch, offered guidance, and shared ideas that helped us get the most from the system. CRM is a journey, and we’re excited to see what more we can do.”

The team at Ultima used DQ (Data Quality) to clean up their data and make more accurate business decisions. 

“The biggest challenge wasn’t simply cleaning up the data. It was making sure we had a way to measure and maintain its quality going forward. By introducing a data health scorecard and automating much of the deduplication process, we’ve moved away from constantly fixing problems and towards a much more structured and sustainable approach to data governance.” Justyna Wanczyk, Head of Data

“For a commercial team, confidence in your CRM data is everything. Before this project, we knew valuable insight was being hidden behind duplicate and inconsistent records. Working with DQ Global allowed us to clean and structure our data quickly, but more importantly it put the processes in place to keep it healthy. Today our teams can trust what they see in the CRM, which means better targeting, clearer account ownership and faster commercial decisions.” Mark Buller, Commercial Director 

 

The team at Ultima Media plans to continue to expand Workbooks as they grow, with a plan to use AI features to drive even better results.

“More recently, attending a Workbooks event in London highlighted the future potential of AI within CRM. Features such as AI Scribe and improved sales hygiene tools show clear potential to accelerate order processing, improve data quality, and reduce internal support queries. We look forward to implementing these capabilities as part of our continued partnership with Workbooks.”