Printfection is a swag management platform that aims to simplify the buying, managing, and distribution of swag and branded merchandise, from the company of the same name in Denver. They offer a suite of online swag management tools and APIs alongside custom printing, inventory management, and distribution. The vendor states their customers use the platform to drive more leads, reward customers, and engage employees.
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Sales Engine International
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Sales Engine International is a new company resulting from the merger of Manticore and Sales Engine in 2012.
The product has email marketing and landing page functionality with strong template libraries. The product provides connectors to both Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com.
Primary customers are SMBs.
It is well suited for a one-stop shop that gets everything done in one place (sizing, order, warehousing, shipping, drop-shipping, ability to do one-off orders, support in the process). It is less appropriate if you need something very specific and what they have doesn't work for you or if you like to be very involved in the complete process. It is also less appropriate if price is a major factor.
We used the Manticore Marketing Automation solution for almost/just over 2 years, and initially, it was a great solution. Everything just seemed to work. When Manticore Technology, Inc. and Sales Engine International merged on May 31st of 2012, the overall product quality began to decline. As browsers and other programs (like our CRM environment) went through updates and new releases, Manticore just didn't keep up. Parts of the program became incompatible with certain browsers, forcing us to change where and how we logged into the back-end of the system. It was a silly workaround, but not the end of the world. When we learned that other client-facing portions didn't work with certain browsers, we brought it to their attention, and were told that we needed to find some way to work with it, and that the changes to the system were not possible. We ended up having to change our 200+ landing pages/forms, and could no longer have the State/Province field as a required field for registrations. That is just one example of our experience, and there have been others that are just as troublesome.
List Building for Resends - I like to resend my email campaigns to non-openers and there is no easy way to pull this list within Manticore (If did not open this email is not an option). Typically I pull the report for the campaign, then re-import my list of non-openers to create a new list.
We are currently extremely satisfied with printfection. The quality of swag is very good, but the customer service ranks high above any other swag company. I have been working closely with my Printfection manager (Tyler Rowland) and he has been more than helpful from the start.
I've been incredibly pleased with Manticore/SEI and have selected them at several companies now. It's worked in a variety of different business environments, both big and small, and everyone on both the sales and marketing side have been extremely pleased with the results
The product is really easy to use and manage. We love using Printfection. It's easy to order, ship and manage everything. I did remove one rating point because their set up for "giveaways" is a little cumbersome and I wish their platform notified you when products in your giveaways are running low.
Some of the actions require you to be in a specific section before actions are available to you, like adding a list. You first have to navigate to that section for options to be available to you
Prinfection's availability has been great. There was one time when a product we needed wasn't available, but our Printfection rep made sure to get what we needed.
Email campaigns are deployed instantly when you launch, unlike other Marketing Automation tools I've used in the past that queue emails in batches and can take hours to complete a send
Every step of the way, I have been helped by someone who feels like a friend. They know their stuff and they get back to me in a timely manner. It gets frustrating when you need help but the "experts" don't offer any. Printfection isn't like this at all. They've done a great job making sure I understand everything I need to have a successful campaign for our employees.
Training was done online, but was one-on-one, giving me a lot of time to ask very specific product questions. They also walk you through setting up a test campaign, email, and landing page
Their team is very helpful in getting set up and we felt like they worked with us on price and also getting our previous inventory we had at our offices set up in Printfection. The only down side of shipping in your items to Printfection is the photography of the items (which clients can see) is pretty terrible if you don't have clear product photos prior to sending the items to Printfection warehouse.
**All items purchased through Printfection the product photos look better (so this issue won't be the case with those who aren't shipping existing swag to their warehouse)
It was the easiest integration and implementation that I've ever experienced. I've implemented other CRM integrated services before that provided the same services as Manticore that were extremely technical and expensive to integrate with Salesforce.com or Microsoft CRM Dynamics, or just plain couldn't integrate
There were a couple of reasons we selected Printfection: price and contract/level of commitment (we are on a month-to-month plan). To be honest, there are products that integrate better with Salesforce and have more capabilities but we were looking for something that didn't require us to sign a year contract and was a reasonable price. After purchasing, we are extremely impressed with their team and consider this a huge benefit of going with Printfection.
We migrated to Marketo approximately 6 months ago, and were extremely happy with the change. Besides the higher sticker price and the "everything's a sales pitch" communications from Marketo, we can't find any fault.
Sales Engine International - Manticore (commonly referred to as Manti-beast internally) created many problems for us. And while they did integrate with our Microsoft Dynamics environment, the software quickly ate through our purchased storage and forced us to constantly purchase more. That alone cost us many hundreds of dollars in Microsoft Dynamics CRM storage every year. And, when confronted about it, Manticore support flat out lied about how much storage their activities were taking up in our system. So, while it integrates, it's a very poor integration.
Only a few of our departments will be using Printfection, (like HR and Customer Success), but both departments find Printfection flexible and scalable.
There aren't many professional services besides what is related to their product. What would have been great was to get design services included in our membership since we dont have one in house
Previously we had a "welcome" kit for certain new customers with custom packaging and great messaging. It was very successful in helping kick off a new customer relationship.
If the platform was integrated with our CRM we'd have more metrics to be able to measure ROI.
