Europe's VNU Media Shifts from ERP to Zuora Accelerating Product Launches by 4X

Leading Dutch job site uses Zuora to dramatically expand its recruiting services to more market segments, accelerate launch times, and help employers tap more career candidates

London, UK and Amsterdam, Netherlands — November 16, 2011

News

  • Zuora, the subscription commerce and billing leader, today announced that VNU Media, a market leader in the online and print recruitment classifieds market in the Netherlands, is using Zuora’s subscription commerce platform to price, package and bill the services it provides to recruiters and job seekers.
  • VNU Media is the top online job board in the Netherlands with more 10,000 customers such as recruiting firms, government agencies and private sector employers. VNU Media’s goal is to help its customers find highly qualified talent for open positions and to expand its market leadership position over Monster.com and LinkedIn.

A Goal to Launch New Tailored Service Offerings to New Markets

  • VNU Media operates in a highly dynamic market, with growing head-to-head competition with Monster.com and services some of the biggest employers in Europe. To maintain its market leadership position, VNU Media knew it had to price, package, and bill its services in a highly flexible manner to meet the varying needs of its broad customer base.
  • VNU Media had to vision to optimize how it moves rapidly into new markets with new service packages. VNU Media’s existing ERP system was effective for traditional print media, but was not designed for subscriptions or to keep up with VNU Media’s fast-changing business requirements. To support subscriptions, time-consuming, expensive manual labor was required to address the wide range of pricing and packaging requirements.
  • As a result, VNU Media looked to implement an integrated system that would keep its legacy ERP system synchronized with Salesforce CRM while adding highly flexible subscription billing capabilities. VNU Media’s goal: Create a seamless flow from the pricing and quotes generated by its sales team, to service booking and fulfillment, to subscription billing and invoicing, and have a single view of the customer’s bookings, billings and cash without discrepancy in the data.

VNU Media Achieves 4X Acceleration in Product Launches and 40% Improvement in Billing Efficiency with Combination of Zuora and Salesforce CRM

  • VNU Media selected the combination of Zuora and Salesforce CRM to be tightly integrated with VNU Media’s existing ERP system. Now that the systems are live, VNU Media now can launch new products and packages 4x faster than in the past, helping the company stay at the forefront of its market, as:
    • Pricing is now centralized in a single product catalog through Zuora,
    • Changes to pricing and new packages can be rolled out instantly, and,
    • Zuora automatically updates Salesforce CRM with pricing information so that quotes and orders can be initiated in real-time.
  • Zuora’s native Salesforce solution, Z-Force, gives VNU Media a seamless quote-to-cash system with no errors enabling VNU Media to manage its entire customer lifecycle from sales order to subscription activation to invoicing, providing VNU Media with visibility of everything from pipeline, quotes, orders, subscriptions, bookings, billings and cash.
  • With this solution, VNU Media has also improved the overall efficiency in the work process of billing by more than 40% in speed, transparency, and accuracy.
    • Pricing and Quoting: Accurate customer pricing applied across eight discount levels and seamless quoting flow through authorization, fulfillment and billing.
    • Customer Service: Reduction in follow-up calls between sales and accounting due to complete visibility of customer data from subscriptions to invoice history.
    • Billing: Automated and instant bill runs on a daily basis, including the ability to initiate bill runs from a mobile device such as iPad anywhere.

Commentary

  • “To stay at the top of our market, we need to be able to meet the needs of our customers quickly and accurately while making every part of our operations as agile and efficient as possible,” said Hans Platschorre, CFO of VNU Media. “Zuora’s productized solution with Salesforce CRM gives us an incredible level of transparency into our customer relationships and transactions to understand where our business stands day by day, as well as the accuracy and efficiency to maintain our competitive edge and perform at our peak.”
  • “Subscription Economy companies must have the flexibility to tailor services to individual needs and new markets and deliver these services rapidly to meet the changing needs of customers and businesses,” said Shawn Price, President of Zuora. “Zuora is excited to work with VNU Media as part of our European expansion as VNU Media represents the level of transformation required to drive success today.”

About VNU Media

VNU Media is a market leader in the online and print recruitment classifieds market in the Netherlands. The company has a strong portfolio of online recruitment brands including NationaleVacaturebank.nl, Intermediair.nl, Computable.nl and InIct.nl, which are supported by the print titles Intermediair, Computable and IntermediairPW. VNU Media also owns Tweakers.net, which attracts more than 3 million unique visitors per month, making it the largest IT website in the Benelux.

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora is the global leader in subscription commerce and billing, helping companies in every industry transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud platform to launch, scale, and monetize their subscription services. Zuora’s applications work where traditional ERP applications fail: Subscription pricing, quoting, orders, billing, payments, and renewals. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry veterans from salesforce.com, PayPal, and Netsuite, Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box.net, Ning, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. To learn more about Zuora, please visit zuorainternprd.wpengine.com.

October 10, 2014