Last Friday, August 5th, 2022, the National Print and Sign Owners Association (NPSOA) organized a conference with partner printers who showed interest in learning more about PlanProphet clients. The session was hosted by David Gardner, owner of Boyds Direct and current customer of PlanProphet, who talked about the platform’s main features and benefits.

NPSOA is dedicated to delivering products and services that enhance the growth and profitability of its members. This is done through the LISTSERV, educational programs, publications, research, and information sharing to advance members in the marketplace and highlight the power of print.

PlanProphet and NPSOA have worked together so more printing businesses can benefit from our platform and improve their growth. The meeting was an ideal moment to talk about the main PlanProphet features, where prospects and clients had the opportunity to ask questions and clarify ideas.

David Gardner’s Overview of PlanProphet

David’s presentation provided an overview of PlanProphet, both for new users unfamiliar with the platform and for experienced and even expert users. He has been a Printer’s Plan user for nearly 10 years and a PlanProphet user for more than 2 years. He is the owner of Boyds Direct, a full-line marketing service company in the Boston area in charge of designing print, direct mail, and large format promotional products. About 2 years ago, they bought another business in charge of real estate signing and grew their organization. “We have expanded our wide format pretty heavily and we have relied on those two programs to help us become more efficient and generate faster growth levels without adding a lot of personnel”, said David.

For him, “PlanProphet is a CRM first and foremost, it sits on top of Salesforce, it has been created in a way that it reads all the data in one of the available integrations, whether is Printer’s Plan or Vision”. He added that the platform does a great job forecasting and providing alerts, that implements great automations, and also creates great reports. “It is a way to stay in touch with your customers on a regular basis, whether it’s through automated email alerts or individual email messaging, proof-level reporting (…) It allows you to stay in touch with your entire team 24/7,” he concluded.

The Main Topics Covered by David

David dedicated part of the session to explain in detail different modules and features of PlanProphet:

Home Page Features and Search Bar: “Everything that’s highlighted in blue is a link, so you can actually go into and look at any of these things in more detail. (…) I will tell you that it’s the fastest way to find a lot of things. (…) Not even with exact text, it does a really, really good job.”

Customer Analysis: For a specific case scenario he said,  “You can use this information if you have a problematic customer from a payment standpoint to say, you know what, we need to be more aggressive at 15 to 20 days and start sending them statements with invoice copies, which is a very simple function within PlanProphet as well.”

Reports: “The Account Reports are absolutely phenomenal. (…) There are many built-in reports, including communications, sales, prospects and clients, and you can create dozens of other reports for management, sales, accounting, production and so many more. For example, you can generate quick reports to review the status of sales for your biggest customers over any time period. The values can be set to anything you need. (…) There are a ton of things you can do with these graphical representations and the ability to actually export this to an Excel sheet, and then you further do the modifications there.”

Marketing Automation: “I think it is one of the things that will make a pretty significant difference. I’m not saying it will double your business, but it will be additive. (…) Just keep your name in front of your customer and keep communicating with them in a way that serves them (…) I would encourage you to not let customers opt-out of business communications. They should know when they get an order receipt, they get a confirmation of the order, and they get to expect a ship date. All those types of things are important for them to get if they want to get an opt-out. You gotta do what they got what they want to do.”

Automatic Email Marketing Communications: Referring to the Feedback Request specifically, David said, “This is a way of building SEO level priority (…) Before I started doing this, I had no reviews on Google. I think right now we’re between 55 and 60, and they’re all five stars, which is kind of what you want.” Also talked about the Customer Welcome Journey and the Inactive Account Check-In, summarizing that every individual contact is treated separately from the rest, and the parameters can be set, so people do not get bombarded on a regular basis.

Proof Management System: “Unless you have a really sophisticated proof management system, I guarantee two things happen: either the proofs don’t get approved, or you don’t get the proof, and you print the wrong job. (…) It gives you a record of the dialogue that occurred between you, your CSR or salesperson with the customer, and you can go to each proof and edit according to the suggestions made to be approved, rejected or delayed.”

Automated Billing: “It is a pretty slick system, and you can do that again either invoice by invoice or by statement level detail, and then they can select which invoice they want to pay”. David uses it for setting statements and accompanying bills.  He mentioned that most of the time when people want statements, as soon as you send the statement, they want to see the backup copy of all the invoices that were on that statement. With PlanProphet, you can break out every aspect of the orders. As well, if you have online payment capability, you can send payment links in those emails.

Session’s Summary

The session concluded with a Q&A with NPSOA members on specific PlanProphet functionalities, and some users commented on the benefits of the system in their organizations.