How Printavo overcame the #1 challenge faced by small businesses

Small and medium-sized businesses, regardless of industry, face the same challenge: Learning how to scale while keeping overhead low. Printavo, a software platform for screen printing businesses, is one example of a company facing this age-old challenge.

Printavo’s founder, Bruce Ackerman, describes his company as bootstrapped. As a result, he continually looks for ways to scale and grow their business while remaining conscious of their bottom line.

Discover the cost-effective solution Ackerman most recently came up with, and the impact it had on Printavo.

Determining how to scale

Raise your hand if your small business still relies on Excel spreadsheets for lead and customer management.

Excel is a powerful — and affordable — tool for small businesses, but its capabilities won’t get you far when it comes to scaling.

Excel isn’t great for organizing leads, which means it’s hard to nurture prospects, and losing sales is practically inevitable. Additionally, Excel doesn’t integrate well with other sources of data or provide robust collaboration functionality. This makes it difficult to provide excellent customer service to existing clients or make accurate sales projections to measure your business’s health.

To be blunt, small businesses that continue to rely on Excel for lead generation and management are stifling their own growth and hurting their bottom line.

Printavo recognized Excel’s limitations. “Keeping track of everything with Excel wasn’t going to scale well,” says Ackerman, “As we started to grow, we had to be smarter about how we were keeping track of everything.”

Finding the best match for growth

In an ideal world, Printavo would have endless resources to aid their scaling journey. However, as most small businesses can relate, keeping costs low during a growth phase is critical. The balance between investment and opportunity was top of mind for Ackerman as he started to research CRM options.

A lot of CRMs were too expensive for us to get going quickly as a small business. Close was different.

Bruce Ackerman
Founder of Printavo

To find the best match, Ackerman narrowed down his wish list to the most essential components of a CRM, which for Printavo was:

• Easy to use and manage
• Customizable to their business needs
• Quick to deploy

A CRM that accelerates success

Ackerman saw Close’s blog and scanned the resources. He felt an immediate connection to the platform.

Close’s technology is geared toward small and medium-sized businesses, and the entire premise of the technology is to:

• Accelerate sales and revenue
• Provide a service that’s fast to market
• Create simplicity with an easy-to-use interface
• Increase deal volume with actionable reporting

After Ackerman moved forward with Close, he saw an instant impact on the Printavo sales team. By using strategic lead generation and lead flow techniques, Printavo has improved its lead qualifying and closing process.

Once Printavo’s lead data is entered through the Close API:

• The leads are automatically added to a Smart View in Close
• The Printavo sales team then reaches out to the leads to schedule a demo
• Once a lead signs up for a demo, they become an opportunity
• Printavo’s team follows up with leads via call, email, and text — directly via Close

From there, the Printavo sales team assigns a confidence level to all leads within Close for more accurate sales forecasting.

A scaling process that works

Close has been really great to help us scale to this point. It’s been very easy to use. We can easily manage our sales process.

The CRM has been so effective that Ackerman rolled out the technology for his customer success team as well. “Close allows us to keep track of our customers in a much easier way, it helps us foster a personal relationship with the customer, and to always deliver the best customer experience possible.”

Each year Printavo has been in business, they’ve doubled their revenue. And, thanks to Ackerman’s business acumen and constant focus on implementing tools to help his team, Printavo will continue to thrive.