A MIDDLESBROUGH company is celebrating a five-fold increase in revenue from South Africa thanks to support it received from UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) to expand its operations there.
i-snapshot, which employs 11 people at its Middlesbrough base, is an online sales management system that allows a company to quickly and easily assess its sales performance.
Field sales staff send information about their sales activity to i-snapshot by mobile or smart phone, using text messaging or app. i-snapshot then collates and analyses this data and provides companies with realtime information about their sales performance, helping reduce the amount of time spent on generating reports and enabling them to better understand their sales models.
The company deals with more than 20,000 sales visits a day from field sales staff and has customers in the UK and overseas markets such as Europe, the Middle East, India and South Africa.
Keen to further develop its presence in South Africa, i-snapshot turned to UKTI. As well as providing valuable intelligence on the market potential through the Overseas Market Introduction Service, UKTI also worked with the company to find a distributor, providing ongoing support to ensure the new arrangement got up and running without any problems.
The company also took part in a trade event hosted by the UK embassy in Pretoria, which enabled it to meet with potential customers.
Much of the support was provided by Simon Crosby, one of UKTI’s International Trade Advisers (ITA) in the North-east, who worked closely with i-snapshot to develop the company’s export strategy.
Alan Timothy, i-snapshot’s chief scientist, said: “Getting a distributor on board in South Africa has been absolutely pivotal for us, and we’ve increased our revenue from that market five times over since appointing them.
“It has been hard work but UKTI has helped us all the way, and it was clear right from the outset that their whole approach was about making opportunities work for us, providing the right support and asking the right questions. In particular, the excellent relationship we have with Simon, our ITA, has been so important.
He has spent a lot of time working with us and the advice that we got from him has made a real difference and helped us grow the company substantially.”
i-snapshot now has its sights set on Indonesia, where it hopes to work with some of the country’s banks. With more than 17,000 islands, the geography of Indonesia is complex and as a result, there is little fixed technology infrastructure.
However, Indonesia’s mobile market is very well established, with 150 million users.
Simon Crosby said: “Exporting can be hard work, even for experienced exporters, but i-snapshot has shown that if you take time to research your market and are prepared to put in the effort – including travelling to your target markets – the rewards can be significant..”
He added: “Whether a company already has some overseas customers or is only just considering exporting, there will be a way that we at UKTI can assist them and I hope the success of i-snapshot will inspire other firms across the North-east to contact us to find out how we can help them grow globally.”
