Today, Cobrief has a solid foothold in the everyday lives of over 20 people in the consultancy. Processes that previously could take days and weeks, now are done in minutes.
"I was sold in 10 minutes. Or really before. After all, it was we who first contacted Cobrief", laughs Christian Martinsen.
He is commercial director at Knowit Norway. One of his many responsibilities is to be the product owner of the digital tools used in the sales apparatus of the Nordic consultancy.
Martinsen says that Knowit likes to be early and is no stranger to testing out new, digital tools — even from startups.
“I love that they are a startup that has really hit the mark. We are testing a lot of new tools in Knowit, but Cobrief is one of the few that has really gained a foothold,” he says.
With Cobrief, Knowit gained a tool that, according to Martinsen, “speaks our language and understands how we work”.
Today, there are around 20 people in Knowit who use Cobrief daily. Although Cobrief offers both follow-up, customer support and training, Knowit chose to do it all on its own. Without there being so much to do.
Martinsen says Knowit has spent “zero time implementing Cobrief.”
“Ease of use is the key to the success of any product. Cobrief scores 100 out of 100 on usability. We see it by how quickly our salespeople adopted it,” says Martinsen.
Knowit is a leading Nordic consulting company with offices in six countries and around 4,000 employees. The company is organized as a networked group, consisting of more than 86 autonomous limited companies divided into four business areas: Solutions, Experience, Insight and Connectivity. These 4 business areas provide consultants and consulting in the areas of technology, user experiences, management and organizational development and embedded technology.
In Norway, the company has about 1000 employees. For Knowit, government procurement is an important part of the business. Martinsen cannot say exactly how large a proportion this amounts to, but confirms that it is significant.
Public Norway buys goods and services for around NOK 800 billion a year. An average of 80 new tenders are launched every day. Many of these are related to IT.
See available tenders for IT consultants.
“Public procurement is something we work on every single day. It is a central part of our business, as far as I can say,” says Martinsen.
As Commercial Director, Martinsen is a liaison between the sales apparatus across Knowit's many companies. His job is to coordinate sales processes and make sure the various entities “don't step on each other's toes.” In addition, he is the system owner for all tools used in sales support—including portals and software related to government procurement.
He says Cobrief was “served on a barn” by a Knowit salesman one winter night in November 2024. The seller thought this was something they should look into. Martinsen quickly realized that there was something here.
“We have been working on public procurement for many years and have achieved it. On the other hand, the processes are often heavy, demanding to manage, difficult in terms of access and complicated when the applications were to be set up. The user experience has been anything but good.
“It takes a lot of time, simply,” says Martinsen.
Cobrief serves as a sales support tool for government procurement. It makes it easier to find relevant calls, filter out irrelevant competitions and get a full overview of deadlines and requirements.
It has radically improved the search functionality for Knowit. Martinsen says that processes that previously could take days and weeks are now done in minutes.
The company quickly gets up relevant information, can see who has won in the past, and quickly decide whether to go for a competition or not.
Cobrief's score function, which assesses the relevance of each call based on predefined keywords and criteria, has also proven to be very useful.
The precision of the searches is much better. Now we save a lot of time on screening and qualification, and can spend more time making good deals,” says Martinsen.
Christian Martinsen believes Cobrief is suitable for all companies that are in some way engaged in public procurement or want to invest in that market.
Martinsen adds that Cobrief is suitable for companies of all sizes that want to compete for government contracts -- whether it's large companies like Knowit, or smaller businesses and startups.
“You can say a lot about it, but the fact is that Norway has a large public sector. There are tender processes every single day and there is a significant market.
With Cobrief, you get a super user-friendly tool for anyone who wants to compete for government contracts. Martinsen believes the implementation was super simple.
'It's intuitive, requires almost no training, and works “right out of the box,"” he says.
For businesses that want to save time creating new revenue.
Jonas Klafstad
Co-founder and CEO at Cobrief, Jonas Klafstad, says Cobrief has a simple vision: to become the tool that gives suppliers the freedom to focus on what they do best — creating amazing goods and services for their customers.
By aggregating all the tenders in one place so that they can be easily shared with people across the companies, Knowit provides good control and saves them a lot of time.
In addition, he highlights the AI screening of the tenders with integration to Flowcase, which makes it both quicker and easier to assess which cases are worth moving forward with.
“Knowit has also highlighted how easy it was to implement the system, since in practice they did not need any training. It will also make it much easier to get it firmly established in the organization.