A SOFTWARE company is celebrating a five-fold increase in revenue from South Africa after winning a distributor in the country.

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 export agency 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 potential customers.

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.”