How Plate catches churn early and grows revenue by 10%

The Plate Group is a mid-sized, family-owned company in the office supplies industry. Over more than 150 years, it has grown into a one-stop supplier of office and workplace equipment. From classic office supplies and catering items to complete office furniture, Plate delivers everything from a single source.

Marco Bender heads inside sales and, as part of the sales development team, works on how to support customers even better, both from the office and in the field.

Customers disappear unnoticed

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

• Which customer needs a call now because they're about to drop off?
• Who should be reordering copy paper right now?

Part of the reason was simply digitization: customers order more online.

Fewer direct conversations, less direct contact with customers, less insight into where things are going wrong.

“To decide which customers to prioritize, we relied on homemade Excel lists. They were cumbersome, and often outdated by the time we used them. And we often only found the insights after revenue had already dropped.”
— Marco Bender

Power BI was easier to work with than Excel lists with thousands of line items, but the core challenge stayed the same:

Finding the right customers at the right time and reaching out to them.

Complex implementation? Not here.

“The first time I saw Acto, I knew right away: this is exactly what we'd been missing. It's pretty much what we'd been trying to build ourselves for years.”

But: “We were in the middle of an ERP migration and were also considering Salesforce. There really wasn't room for another system,” Marco recalls.

“But Acto was such a lean solution, and implementation was so straightforward, that the hurdles turned out to be surprisingly low:

The Acto team told us which data they needed. We delivered it. That was it.”

Clearly prioritized customers, clear agenda

Instead of painstakingly pulling data together, the sales team now gets concrete priorities every day:

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

Not just on the Acto platform, but right in Outlook too.

That saves the team daily research and meeting prep, and frees up more time for the most important customers.

And the results?