A prospecting CRM and phone app for Pasta King's Business Managers that replaced spreadsheets, reads the orders every day and keeps the email-marketing lists up to date on its own.
£26,000
estimated saving a year
570 hours
of staff time a year
47 hours
a month of admin and reporting removed
18 months
to pay for itself
The problem
Pasta King supplies about 840 schools, colleges, hospitals and caterers across the UK through its Business Managers, with around 4,000 more sites to win. The information existed, but it was spread across spreadsheets and inboxes, and nobody could see it in one place.
Each Business Manager worked from their own spreadsheets, so there was no shared record of who had been called, what was said, or when to call back.
Finding customers who had stopped ordering meant someone going through the order data by hand every month. A lapsed account was often spotted late.
The weekly Business Manager report was built by hand, and every week's Active Customers report had to be worked through by hand to update order dates and close accounts that had ceased.
Mailing lists for email campaigns were exported, cleaned and split by Business Manager and sector by hand, every week.
How it worked before
Prospects and customers lived in spreadsheets. Orders arrived as a weekly drop-off report and a daily orders email, and everything else (lapsed customers, the weekly reports, the mailing lists) was worked out from those by hand. There was no map, no call history in one place, and nothing on a Business Manager's phone.
Before the CRM: prospects and customers were managed in spreadsheets, with follow-ups and reporting handled by hand.
What we did
Started with the Business Managers' working day (January to March 2026). Every school and site with its contacts, trust and council, a call log and notes, recontact dates, a map, a sales pipeline, and an installable phone app that alerts a Business Manager when a visit is booked. More than 14,000 calls are on record, with up to 1,000 a month logged in term time.
Tied it to the orders. The weekly drop-off report is imported, and since July 2026 the daily orders email is read straight from the orders mailbox. Every customer has a last-order date, anyone who stops ordering is flagged at 4, 8 and 12 weeks, and the office is alerted if the order data stops arriving.
Moved it onto Pasta King's own footing (June 2026), with every record and call log copied across and checked.
Connected email marketing (July 2026). A daily sync puts every mailable contact in the right list with their sector, account type and Business Manager's sign-off. Lapsed customers get an automatic email at 4, 8 and 12 weeks, opens and clicks come back into the CRM as a Hot Leads call list, and unsubscribes and bounces stop further mailing the same day.
Automated the weekly reporting (September 2026). The Business Manager report is emailed every Friday at 4pm, and the weekly Active Customers report refreshes every customer's order dates and closes ceased accounts with a note.
Kept building as Pasta King asked: a Sales Team view, national accounts and buying groups, Business Managers covering several regions, an NHS hospital tracker, sample tracking, sending files to customers, Ask VAL (an assistant that answers questions from the CRM's own data) and, in October 2026, a sector for every school, trust and council checked against the government school registers.
Worked alongside the people using it. We build with Pasta King week by week, without a requirements document, so changes come from what the Business Managers and the office tell us. Steve Wickham, CEO, backed the build. Linda Hoyland, Business Manager, shaped it around how the team actually sells.
The results
Total estimated saving: about £26,000 a year. That's about 570 hours of staff time, worth roughly £17,100, plus about £9,200 of software Pasta King did not have to buy.
Saving
Per year
How it was worked out
Business Manager admin
370 hours
Two hours a week for each of four field Business Managers, over 46 working weeks: finding who to call, logging calls and notes, looking up a school and planning visits. Pasta King's own estimate (one to three hours).
Weekly reports
90 hours
About 7.5 hours a month building the Business Manager report and updating customers from the weekly Active Customers report. Both now happen automatically. Pasta King's estimate (five to ten hours).
Lapsed-customer checks
40 hours
About 3.5 hours a month going through order data by hand. The CRM now flags 4, 8 and 12 weeks without an order automatically. Pasta King's estimate (two to five hours).
Mailing lists
70 hours
About 1.5 hours a week keeping campaign lists up to date, over 46 weeks. The daily sync now does it. Pasta King's estimate (one to two hours).
CRM licences avoided
£9,240
Ten seats of an off-the-shelf CRM, at about £77 a seat a month on annual billing, ex VAT, for the eight to ten people using the system every week.
Total
£26,000
Estimated, per year
One-off data work (not in the total)
About 100 hours
2,731 schools, trusts and councils given a sector checked against the government registers, 165 NHS hospitals and 80 group accounts imported, 255 closed trusts cleared out. About two minutes a record by hand (roughly £3,000), plus about £1,310 of CRM onboarding avoided.
Other improvements
23 accounts have become customers since the CRM started recording win dates on 7 September 2026, each followed from first call to Active Account.
Customers who stop ordering get an email at 4, 8 and 12 weeks without anyone remembering to send it, and the people who open or click show up on a Business Manager's call list the same week.
The customer list is honest. Ceased accounts are closed off with a note, so the 842 customers on the system are the ones actually buying.
Every school, trust and council has a sector, with the government register entry kept as proof, so a campaign to primary schools or hospitals reaches exactly those.
Unsubscribes and bounced addresses come back into the CRM the same day, so nobody is mailed after they have asked not to be.
The orders feed saves time and makes the order figures reliable. They are there every morning, and the office is told if they are not.
The dashboard, customer and prospect map, and appointments available to Business Managers between visits.
What Pasta King say
"
Before Pasta Prospector every Business Manager had their own spreadsheet, and we often found out a school had stopped ordering when it was too late to do much about it. Now the whole team works from one record, the system tells us who has gone quiet, and the follow-up email goes out on its own. We spend our time talking to schools instead of keeping lists.
Steve Wickham, CEO, Pasta King
"
I used to spend a couple of hours a week working out who to ring and digging through notes and emails before a call. Now it's all on my phone: the school, the trust, what was said last time and when to call back. And I can see who has gone quiet before they've told us.
Verona AI
