How Cogentia improved its organisational memory and saved time
Founded in 2010, Cogentia is a healthcare consulting company based in Cambridge. They specialise in market access and health economics for the pharmaceutical, biotech and device industries. Life after spreadsheets and with RealtimeCRM has been a lot better.
| Company | Cogentia Healthcare Consulting |
| Industry | Healthcare |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, UK |
| Employees | 10 |
| RealtimeCRM users | 4 |
Founded in 2010, Cogentia is a healthcare consulting company based in Cambridge. They specialise in market access and health economics for the pharmaceutical, biotech and device industries.
To provide the service their clients require it means managing multiple stakeholders on projects, and bringing the right expertise and opinion leader insights to bear. In practise this means keeping track of relationships between a wide range of individuals over the long term. For Director, David Alderson implementing an efficient and sustainable way of doing this was critical.
Cogentia also needed a system that could help with business development, targeting and also tracking past history, both their successes and failures. It had to enable quick extraction of company experience and past case studies. They wanted a process and system that did not depend on one person’s memory or action or availability. Instead a system where insights would be shared across the organisation efficiently.
Life before RealtimeCRM: Managing and finding the right people became a huge pain
Before RealtimeCRM, the team at Cogentia were using spreadsheets to store a lot of their contacts for use in projects. This proved to be an unwieldy system that made it difficult to manage their sub-contractors, experts and advisors, and to effectively engage with their client base.
The problem they faced was that they wanted to find the relevant contact for a past project and then extract what they needed. In order to find out the history of interactions with a contact or what needed doing next they had to go beyond the spreadsheet, adding extra steps and more time. It was not efficient and it was clear that it would be difficult to sustain going forwards as the number of projects and clients grew. The challenge was to find a system that could do the above without adding undue complexity or time in order to achieve it.
“We are very pleased RealtimeCRM, as it enables us to be able to manage a wide range of client relationships efficiently, it enables us to have a good corporate memory and supports a methodical approach to business development and case studies.”
Life after RealtimeCRM: Tags and Custom Fields help keep track of the right people
When first getting to grips with RealtimeCRM they loved how quick and easy it was to get their large list of contacts into the system. But the real game changer was the ability to add Custom Fields. They could now record and search for specialists in certain areas of work and use Tags to link them to previous projects. This was extremely useful to research analysts on the team for example. The Tags could be created on the fly and were not time consuming to set up but proved to be incredibly powerful in organising contacts.
From a business development perspective they can now create and keep track of tasks and activities, and being able to apportion actions and follow up. They can see a quick overview of projects they have open and what opportunities are potentially coming down the pipeline. Exporting this information out of RealtimeCRM and updating a deck each month for board meetings is no longer an arduous chore.
Another feature they loved was linking email correspondence to Contact records by just bcc’ing RealtimeCRM. It’s intuitive, quick and really useful.
With RealtimeCRM they can store all their contacts in one place but do so much more. They can keep track of what’s been done and what needs to be done as well as find information as soon as they need it. Life after spreadsheets and with RealtimeCRM has been a lot better.
