How Plate prevents churn and increases sales by 10%

The Plate Group of Companies is a medium-sized family company in the office supplies sector, which has developed into a full-service provider of office and industrial equipment since its creation over 150 years ago. From classic office supplies to catering items to complete office equipment - Plate delivers everything from a single source.

Marco Bender heads internal sales and, as part of the sales development team, works on how customers can be even better supported — both in office and in the field.

Customers disappear unnoticed

For Marco, the biggest challenge was identifying customers at the right time:

• Which customer needs a call now because they're about to cancel?
• Who would have to order copy paper again right now?

One reason for this was simply digitization - customers order more online:

Fewer direct conversations, less direct contact with customers, less insight into where something is wrong right now.

“When deciding which customers we should prioritize, we looked at self-made Excel lists helped. Not only were they cumbersome, they were often out of date as soon as we started using them. In addition, we are often Only stumbled upon the insights when sales have already plummeted.”
— Marco Bender

While Power BI was already more accessible than Excel lists with their thousands of positions, the core challenge remained unchanged:

Identify the right customers at the right time to target them.

Complex system implementation? Bad news.

“When I saw Acto for the first time, it was immediately clear to me: That's exactly what we've been missing so far — it's pretty much exactly what we've been trying to build ourselves for years. ”

But: “We were just in the middle of the ERP transition and were thinking about introducing Salesforce at the same time. There was no room for another system — actually,” Marco remembers.

“However, Acto was such a lean solution; and the implementation was so completely uncomplicated that the hurdles were surprisingly low:

The Acto team has informed us which data they need. We delivered them. That's it.”

Clearly prioritized customers, clear agenda

Instead of laboriously collecting data, sales employees now receive specific priorities on a daily basis:

• Which customers ordered less recently?
• Who should I talk to — and about what?

And not only on the Acto platform, but also conveniently in Outlook.

This saves sales the daily research and preparation of meetings — and has more time for the most relevant customers.

And the results?