Nick Romano
Cofounder, President and CEO
Prinova

Prinova’s Nick Romano specializes in business process reengineering for enterprises migrating to new document delivery solutions. His primary focus is on implementing messaging and personalization strategies, workflows and ROI tracking. OutputLinks recently spoke with Romano --- who was presented the 2009 President's Award by Xplor International during the 2009 Xplor Global Conference and Exhibition, held at St. Petersburg Beach, Fla., March 4 - 6 ---  about transpromo, his company and best advice for high volume transaction output (HVTO) professionals.

Question:
A few years back, OutputLinks did an executive interview with you. At that point in time, Prinova was focused primarily on document engineering and design. Recently, Prinova changed its positioning from being service-focused to a software developer of technology. Tell us about that.

Answer:
This isn't a switch from services to software, but really an evolution, with the primary focus of our software addressing one of the fundamental gaps that Prinova identified as part of our end-to-end service offering. Over the past 10 years, we’ve done a lot of professional services work enabling Transpromo for our customers, often on an almost monthly basis, helping them update and refresh their message content, and what we've done is develop a solution to automate this process.

Through what we learned in the trenches working on transpromo manually, we've architected a software solution to really automate the entire process and enable the business users to do it themselves. Therefore, the services side of our business is now a division, with the software part of our business really zeroing in on part of the transpromo challenge and addressing and plugging that hole in the enterprise.

Question:
How has the transpromo movement influenced Prinova’s business decisions and technology?

Answer:
Transpromo was an influencer, and transpromo is something we're focused on solving, but we're going well beyond that and really looking at the problem space holistically from a multi-channel marketer-type perspective, so it's not just documents.

With our software, messagepoint, the business users, the marketers for example, are creating their campaigns and content, and can deliver them through their documents and their printed touchpoints, like statements and bills, but they can also deliver that content to an e-mail campaign, website, or call center. We wanted a solution that sold transpromo but also appealed to the reality of multi-channel marketers.

Question:
Is messagepoint, your new software, a part of that change and new positioning for Prinova? And what is messagepoint? What are the benefits?

Answer:
Our go-to-market strategy is about getting very, very deep in solving a lot of the issues surrounding transpromo.  We're not just providing an online tool to enable you to put a message on a document.  We really analyzed the transpromo issues, the different users, the workflows, the problems, the targeting, and are really getting deep into solving the transpromo issue and ensuring that transpromo enablement is easy to implement and can be done by virtually any organization.

One of the key problems with transpromo is that the collaboration of business stakeholders is all done manually. Our software, messagepoint, provides the Web interface to let them collaborate through a customizable workflow allowing them to create their campaigns and content, share it amongst one another, assign tasks to other people so that they can get their contents done once and done quickly.

An additional challenge with transpromo is targeting. How do you personalize this message to go to this particular group of customers? Virtually every other solution requires programming, so you need to have a programmer that can take the business rules and programmatically make both happen. With messagepoint, we have our natural language targeting process that allows non-technical people, with no programming experience whatsoever, to actually create very complex targeting rules for their messages.

I think it is important to add that there really are two primary types of messagepoint deployments. There's the deployment that goes right to the customer where they manage their campaign and the content in their environment. There is also the version that gets installed at the service provider or service bureau. This allows service providers to easily offer messagepoint to one or more of their clients as a service.

Question:
What’s the future of TransPromo?

Answer:

As far as I'm concerned, transpromo is still very much in its infancy, so the evolution is really about adoption. The next real step is primetime adoption by organizations to really leverage this. 

Education is still needed for marketers in organizations to understand the power of the channel, the power of the touchpoint, and the flexibility around the return on investment of campaigns delivered through this channel.  I think we still have a lot of work to do to educate the marketers. There are still some perceptions out there about the quality or that these touchpoints are compliance documents, not marketing documents.

Question:
With the economy requiring companies to be slimmer and trimmer in both operations and marketing, tell us how mission-critical documents can be efficient and effective enough to ease the burden in both departments, not to mention making statements more cost-effective.

Answer:
If you can get your head around the fact that if you can turn off even 20 or 30 percent of your DM mailings, you’ll eliminate the processes to create them and the cost associated with managing those campaigns and integrate them, changing your perspective from a static list based direct mail campaign to a dynamic customer-focused transpromo campaign. You're going to save the organization a tremendous amount of dollars, but you're also going to get significantly higher returns because you are delivering highly targeted content to customers within a touchpoint that has a significantly higher probability of being relevant.

Question:
You founded Prinova in 1998 and you often speak internationally on the conference circuit. As an industry expert, what trends do you see taking shape in 2009 and what will the industry be focusing on?

Answer:
Organizations are focused on costs right now, and aggressive organizations are going to take advantage of the fact that others are taking a defensive position. I think transpromo offers a tremendous opportunity for organizations to drive cost savings because of the economic condition and migrate to more cost-effective marketing solutions in order to drive more business into their organization. So, save money on the operations side and generate more revenue through highly targeted communications. I think that's a key trend.

I also believe that organizations are taking another look at how they've outsourced in the past, what components of their solution they've outsourced, and what service providers can do to help drive savings and efficiencies inside of their organization.

Question:
What’s your best advice for high volume transaction output  professionals?

Answer:
Absolutely innovate, look for new solutions, look for ways to save money, look at the professionals that can provide value to your organization and keep moving forward.

Question:
Thanks for your time. Any last-minute words of wisdom?

Answer:
A word of wisdom is these days, it’s really important to establish the right partnerships so that you have access to the right people to get the job done as quickly and efficiently, as economically as possible. Trying to do everything yourself, in our experience, generally doesn't save the organization money.