4ways is a leading UK and European private telediagnostics company that provides remote radiology reporting services to more than 80 NHS trusts and numerous private organisations across the UK.
Since 2005, its leading technology platform has been used to relieve the pressure on busy radiology teams by running and reporting over one million scans per year. Trusts can simply send the scans to 4ways who will triage and distribute them to a panel of more than 300 UK-based consultant radiologists.
The sales and fulfilment process is very data-heavy as a result, encompassing lots of information from the NHS and public domain. As a rapidly growing company, it was increasingly difficult for 4ways to bring all of this data together without a way in which to join up the various business processes.
Improving collaboration and streamlining processes
At the time, 4ways held information on spreadsheets, but this was making it difficult to understand and manage the sales pipeline, and extract insights like time to sale. In addition, the company has a large pool of reporting radiologists, so it was also challenging to communicate and engage with those on hand to analyse the reports.
Ultimately, two overarching pain points emerged: a CRM was required to both increase visibility into the sales pipeline, and improve engagement with the radiologist reporting base. The team looked at various solutions – including industry giants such as Microsoft, and plugins to their broader system – before opting to partner with Workbooks.
4ways chose Workbooks CRM for a number of reasons, including its adaptability and seamless integration with existing systems. The Workbooks CRM platform is easy and simple to use, and straightforward to implement. However, equally important to 4ways was having an expert team on hand to offer support and advice.
“One of the best things about implementing the Workbooks solution is that in-house expertise and know-how aren’t requirements for us to use the platform. This meant the software was up and running in no time,” comments Annie Meharg, Chief Commercial Officer at 4ways. “If we need some kind of new functionality, Workbooks offers us the ability to do a lot of this in-house – but with support from their team readily available whenever we require it.”
Clear outcomes breed success
In order to ensure CRM roll-out meets the needs of each company, Workbooks leads a ‘Shared Success’ strategy, which includes a co-funded workshop before they invest in the software. Within the workshop, potential clients can define what their CRM journey should be based on their unique business needs and objectives, together with the milestones they need to hit along the way to meet their goals.
“As a new management team with varying objectives, whether it be from operations within radiologist engagement or from sales and finance, the Shared Success workshop helped us to all come together and agree on clear outcomes for phase one of our implementation. And the process itself was very quick,” adds Annie.
“Our first step was to actually map out what it was we wanted to build. We have quite a complex structure and having Workbooks to help navigate through that taxonomy was really important. The NHS is a dynamic, rapidly changing organisation, so for us, getting that data structure right was fundamental. Once we did that, it was very simple to upload and cleanse the data, and make sure that we had the right starting point.”
Using Workbooks CRM, teams can now access a single 360-degree view of the business, helping them to streamline existing processes and enabling more time to be placed elsewhere, resulting in cost savings.
“We’ve also integrated with NHS datasets, and that process was very heavily supported by the Workbooks team too. This has had a positive impact on the sales team and created a sales focus across the whole company. Another thing the Workbooks CRM does very well is allow the marketing team to excel at their jobs: creating great content and getting it out there quickly,” says Annie.
Since partnering with Workbooks, 4ways has grown 10% more than its competitors in the market. It has significantly reduced its reliance on spreadsheets, and slashed the amount of time spent by the finance department giving the sales and accounts teams data.
“I would thoroughly recommend Workbooks,” Annie concludes. “I’ve been in charge of a number of global CRM implementations and one thing that has truly impressed me about Workbooks is how easy it is for us to self-manage.”
John Cheney, CEO of Workbooks, comments: “During our Shared Success workshop, we were able to clearly outline 4ways’ unique business objectives and ensure alignment in terms of challenges and how to solve them. The team at 4ways has embraced the Workbooks solution and the company is already seeing positive results, even outside of the original proposal.”
