Established in 2007 by five students from the EPITECH IT school, PrestaShop is an e-commerce platform based on open-source software, i.e. software that is free to download. It is on a mission to produce solutions for creating e-commerce websites. As Europe’s leading content management system (CMS), PrestaShop allows anyone to create their own online shop and tailor it to their personal requirements and aims. Add-ons in the form of themes and modules allow PrestaShop’s users to increase their shop’s potential, both in terms of its look and the features provided to vendors and their customers. PrestaShop has helped create more than 300,000 online shops all over the world.
Boosting productivity by centralizing data
Changing consumer habits, particularly since the coronavirus crisis, are leading more and more companies to turn to e-commerce. This is reflected both in the number of new online shops being set up and the growth of existing ones. Repeated lockdowns and restrictions prompted many business owners to invest more in their online sales, bringing PrestaShop many new clients in 2020.
Having used the HubSpot CRM since 2018, the PrestaShop platform has been able to adapt quickly to this influx of new business. At the start, only the sales team that worked with partner agencies was able to draw on HubSpot’s expertise. To meet the growing needs of the sales, marketing, and support teams, the HubSpot tools were gradually rolled out across the company during 2019. The aim, therefore, was to centralize all its income streams as well as the services involved in generating them.
However, PrestaShop faced a problem in the form of an organizational structure that was not joined up, making data processing data more time-consuming and laborious. The decision to opt for the HubSpot CRM means that all the teams now work hand-in-hand, pursuing a common aim of growth.
HubSpot was a natural choice for the PrestaShop team, not only because their initial experience of the tool had been positive, but because it allows coinciding objectives to be pursued with precision. For PrestaShop, some agencies are both clients and partners. To avoid confusion and take into account all information relevant to one company, the tool used had to allow for the dual entry of this information.
Improving the inbound marketing strategy
PrestaShop’s main aim in using HubSpot’s services was to give it the means it needed to develop. Put another way, the company wanted to make it possible for lead generation to be tracked accurately from the time a form is created right through to when a partnership agreement is signed. It also wanted to make everyone able to view and use client data in-house.
In other words, PrestaShop is using HubSpot to help improve its existing inbound marketing strategy. For example, the CRM has to allow product managers to identify a shop that uses one of their solutions so they can suggest that it trials new features.
Rolling out the CRM across the board has led to an increase in the number of qualified leads at PrestaShop to its current level of 800,000 marketable contacts. Pipelines have been filled and developed further to make sales studies easier to undertake, while several tasks have been automated to make work flow more smoothly.
More and more members of the teams are using the Sales Hub and Marketing Hub software on a regular basis to track their activities and the impact that these are having.
Sustaining the pace of development
Since PrestaShop picked HubSpot to improve its sales processes and progress its lead generation strategy, its growth has been clearly apparent on several levels: more clients, revenue up an average of 35% between 2019 and 2020, best month in the history of the marketplace in November 2020, and 88 new hires between January 1 and July 1, 2021.
PrestaShop’s client development work and the new talent that it has attracted have enabled it to launch new product lines and boost the expertise of its teams. Over the next few months, therefore, it wants to continue on this path of growth by becoming a global point of reference, particularly through its new services: PrestaShop Facebook, PrestaShop Metrics, PrestaShop Checkout, and PrestaShop Google.
On a personal level, PrestaShop’s CRM Manager Clément Gontier is keen to make sure that staff retain their enthusiasm for HubSpot. Most of them are already using it every week, either for reporting or for sales work. He also calls the platform “very easy to use” and would have no hesitation in recommending it to his clients and service providers.
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