We all live in a global, online world and the publishing industry is no exception to that. This creates enormous opportunities for businesses, with books and other products being sold internationally, in a variety of formats and through multiple sales channels – potentially great for sales and marketing but how can publishers make sense of the mass of data they get back about those sales?

Sales reports come in from innumerable sources, each with their own way of presenting transactional information and invariably in different digital formats. Bringing all this information together to gain an accurate view of everything from high-level trends to the overall performance of an individual title over time is an enormous, time-consuming challenge. The answer would seem to be a simple-to-use yet comprehensive business analysis solution capable of providing on-demand and user-defined reporting, and meaningful performance statistics – and that’s where knk comes in.

Working with an established independent professional publisher with international presence, the UK team of knk have developed knk Sales Intelligence – a sophisticated tool to bring together and analyse data for all sales channels with custom dimensions allowing users to slice and dice the data at will.

Project Manager, Jo Burges, says:

“From the first in-house meeting with the Publisher’s management team I knew we would be able to deliver exactly what they were looking for. It was clear that providing a solution didn’t simply rely on technological expertise – it was also going to be vital that we understood the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the publishing industry at a detailed level, and that’s something we definitely do.  Our team offers a perfect mix of software experts and ex-publishing professionals and I’m convinced that this combination has been crucial in our ability to fully understand the specific requirements and pain points, and therefore deliver a solution that is already making a difference to the way they make profitability decisions.”

Built on the latest Microsoft technology, with role-based customisable dashboards, it is now easy to interrogate sales by any measure. Extensive filtering and year-on-year/month-on-month comparisons make it simple to analyse performance and to identify trends – all of which can be exported to Excel at the click of a button. And behind the scenes the architecture of the tool means that bespoke customer requirements can easily be accommodated, making it truly flexible and hugely powerful.

If you’d like to find out more about knk Sales Intelligence and how it could help your business drop a line to jo.burges@knk.com