Founded in 2022 by Frederik Linderberg, Frederik Vetter Samberg, and Anton Herborg, ZRM is a Copenhagen-based digital consultancy specializing in Zoho solutions and integrating these with other platforms, including Plecto. ZRM offers tailored end-to-end digital systems to businesses and organizations across different industries across Denmark. It’s what’s called a partnership—a firm that implements Plecto for a third party.
The Presidents Institute is a ZRM client. Based in Copenhagen with branches in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, the Institute is a networking group for industry professionals in Northern Europe. Founded in 2005 in cooperation with Oxford Business School, its mission is to help business leaders tackle professional challenges while facilitating their growth and development. It currently boasts over 1000 members across the Nordic region.
The year was 2019. An organization whose business model relies on outreach and membership fees, the Presidents Institute’s sales team was facing a major obstacle in data tracking and distribution.
“Before adopting Plecto, the Presidents Institute didn't have a system for real-time performance tracking, and they relied on a weekly sales report, which was manually compiled and distributed every Monday,” says Magnus Knaack Pedersen, Business Analyst at ZRM.
“The problem with this method was it lacked the immediacy and transparency that you need for effective decision-making, especially in sales.”
Jonas Kibrick, Group Chief Executive Officer at the Presidents Institute, was all too happy to explore Plecto to help solve these key challenges.
“We needed a single tool to visualize our sales input metrics and support our strategic objective of increasing key input metrics per sales consultant,” Jonas says.
“We chose Plecto because of its modularity, easily customizable interfaces, and ‘no-code’/’no-dev’ plug-and-play integration with various data sources.”
The Solution
At the time the Presidents Institute sought to adopt Plecto, Frederik Samberg was working there, right before he went on to found ZRM. With his background in tech and entrepreneurship, Samberg implemented Plecto for the Institute’s sales team—and it was an instant success, as the team’s performance tracking was enhanced with Plecto’s immediate, up-to-date data visualizations.
“Plecto was able to get quick data synchronization, and the drag-and-drop interface made it simple to customize dashboards without requiring deep technical expertise, allowing the team to start visualizing these metrics in just a few days. It was quite fast and easy to set up,” Magnus says.
"Plecto was able to get quick data synchronization, and the drag-and-drop interface made it simple to customize dashboards without requiring deep technical expertise, allowing the team to start visualizing these metrics in just a few days. It was quite fast and easy to set up."
Magnus Knaack Pedersen
Business Analyst, ZRM
The Plecto installation for the Presidents Institute was also the start of a fruitful partnership between Plecto and ZRM.
“After seeing the impact it had on performance transparency and employee motivations, we started to offer Plecto as part of broader ZRM solutions and partnerships to our clients,” Magnus says.
“So if our clients, for example, want a dashboard that has similar capabilities to Plecto, we will, of course, recommend Plecto.”
Since that time, ZRM has continued to support the Presidents Institute in their ongoing CRM and performance tracking needs, Magnus says.
Jonas agrees. “Plecto has been an integral part of Presidents Institute’s business operations for the past five years, particularly within our sales and marketing functions,” he says.
Plecto use in the office
Plecto dashboards are located on five TV screens across the Presidents Institute’s office, and their display runs the whole gamut of Plecto’s capabilities:
Sales targets
Call performance
Customer engagement metrics
Integration metrics
Individual- and team-focused notifications
Leaderboards and achievements
Jonas also highlights several specific niches where Plecto has provided support to the Presidents Institute's teams:
Member Success Team
“Plecto is used tocapture, track, and visualizeour communication efforts with members, our success in resolving tickets, and the value created by these efforts. The team finds ithighly motivatingto see the dollar value of their contributions to member support each day.
Marketing
“Our marketing team relies on Plecto as acentral dashboardthat consolidates data from various sources. This allows us tomonitor performance, track KPIs, and make data-driven decisions.With Plecto’s seamless API integrations, we caneffortlessly connectplatforms such as LinkedIn Ads and Company Pages to a single dashboard, manipulate data, analyze trends over time, and develop concrete action plans.
Sales Team
“For our sales consultants, Plecto providesreal-time insightsinto their daily efforts versus targets, the correlation between input and output, progress towards monthly goals, and overall pacing throughout the month.
“It also serves as a tool tovisualizeinternal sales competitions,fostering motivation.ThetransparencyPlecto provides allows consultants to see thedirect impactof their efforts on the company’s success. Additionally, involving them in designing their own dashboards has been anengaging and empoweringprocess.
Sales Leadership
“Our sales leadership team utilizes Plecto to align withstrategic prioritiesby analyzing performance, tracking changes over time, and improving forecasting accuracy.”
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Magnus stresses two Plecto components that have proven especially beneficial to the Institute’s teams: integrations with Zoho and Aircall, and gamification features that have improved employee morale.
“Zoho is an open API, so it really allows you to customize Plecto quite seamlessly into your Zoho system. And it works together really well because you can connect it to the smallest detail, so everything runs seamlessly through your workflows,” he says.
Gamification—and celebration! 🎉
Magnus also emphasizes that Plecto’s gamification capabilities have enabled the management team to more easily make data-driven decisions while creating a more competitive work environment.
“When you get these notifications from Plecto, it really motivates the workers to be more motivated to make more sales. And the real-time data trading of Plecto really solved the issues they had,” he says.
Fun and interactive dashboards that allow achievements and milestones to be celebrated by the whole office is a “key aspect” of what makes Plecto perfect for the Presidents Institute, Magnus says.
“It really fosters immediate recognition and boosts morale. And it makes employees very motivated when they can see their performances—either by being very good or maybe not so good,” Magnus says.
The biggest key to the Presidents Institute’s success with Plecto? The culture of celebration that Plecto has facilitated within the Institute’s sales team.
Magnus mentions how Plecto usage facilitates office culture through celebratory activities— “taking it further than just the dashboard,” as he puts it.
“It’s actually quite a fun story—when the Presidents Institute sets up these custom milestones, they have celebrations outside of the system. So for example, if they hit a specific milestone on the Plecto dashboard, it triggers some kind of activity that the office has to do together,” he says.
These activities included going out in Copenhagen—for example, taking a boat ride on one of the city’s many canals, or having an after-work gathering at a café—and celebrating with parties.
The final word
Plecto’s customizability and scalability are among the platform’s most prominent features Magnus highlights, especially as the Presidents Institute is a multi-location organization based on networking.
“I think especially when you have implemented Plecto, it becomes such a vital part of the culture that it's not really replaceable,” Magnus says. “As the Institute grows, Plecto's ability to also scale and customize that dashboard ensures that they can track and evolve the KPIs efficiently and with the company.
“So Plecto really allows them to maintain a data-driven approach no matter how big they get.”
Coming from an agency that regularly works with and installs Plecto for others, Magnus encourages a gradual adaptation of Plecto so you and your organization have time to fully learn and unlock its capabilities—and see the changes that result.
"I think especially when you have implemented Plecto, it becomes such a vital part of the culture that it's not really replaceable. As the Institute grows, Plecto's ability to also scale and customize that dashboard ensures that they can track and evolve the KPIs efficiently and with the company."
Magnus Knaack Pedersen
Business Analyst, ZRM
“It’s important to start the customization with your most important metrics and make sure everyone is aligned: ‘These are what the metrics mean and here’s when we celebrate.’ And really use the gamification features and the leaderboards, but keep it simple at first and then evolve as the employees get used to it.
For those other third-party Plecto installers, Magnus has some words of wisdom.
“Just make sure that Plecto is the right fit for the company you're servicing. Just explain Plecto to them, really because I think it could contribute to a lot of companies.
“It’s a good booster for you as well, if you come up with these ideas on the forefront and are not only reacting to the client's problems, but also trying to explain them and enhance their performance in advance.”
Ultimately, Jonas says he can “highly recommend” Plecto to those data-driven organizations looking to enhance their data visualization, performance tracking, and decision-making processes.
“Today, Plecto plays a crucial role across our entire business,” he says. “Plecto’s ability to facilitate data manipulation, create leaderboards to drive desired behaviors, track progress over time, and analyze past performance makes it an invaluable tool for any organization striving for growth and efficiency!”
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*Disclaimer: We are committed to data privacy. All dashboard images in this blog post have been provided by our customer, ZRM. Names, identification photos, and some data have been altered for security. Plecto does not access customer dashboards without written consent.
Jonas Kibrick
Group CEO, Presidents Institute
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