Prezi Case Study

Zuora helps high-growth companies such as Prezi launch new products with flexible pricing and packaging that enables them to scale quickly and enter new markets.

Founded in 2009, Prezi is an interactive, cloud-based presentation platform known for its ability to engage an audience and create a conversational experience. With over 75 million users and more than 250 million prezis worldwide, the company is witnessing tremendous growth and disrupting the presentation software industry.

Prezi wanted to enter the B2B market with a new product called “Prezi Business” but their homegrown billing system needed to scale and manage the complexity of B2B enterprise accounts. “The real issue with the home grown system was that it was clearly designed for single users, and we were trying to retrofit it to handle enterprise accounts. It was difficult to create multiple administrators with multiple departments with myriad users underneath that. Now, our business is going to include more choices for our customers and we grow, we have to have vendors who are able to support us. It seems nonsensical to me to try to reduce the scope of our business to suit our systems rather than to invest in systems to embrace the business ” says Doug Ireland, VP of Finance and Controller at Prezi.

Zuora’s subscription management platform helps Prezi easily try new pricing and packaging to accelerate the sales cycle. We also help them collect electronic payments, accept different currencies and simplify revenue recognition. “Replacing the whole pricing and packaging engine with Zuora gives us a lot more flexibility and allows us to test and iterate very rapidly. When you’re releasing a new product, you’re never quite sure what’s going to resonate with the end user. What we’re now able to do is create different bundles with different feature groups at different prices. We’re able to see how users interact and choose the optimum set of packages to increase conversion and yield” says Ireland.

It has also significantly impacted the efficiency of their Sales team. “Before Zuora, our quote to cash system was clunky and wasn’t an efficient way to do sales. With Zuora in place, I can do everything from the Salesforce opportunity. We get alerts when we get paid. We also don’t have to chase down Finance for approval or pricing on different packages. We don’t send out invoices with errors.” says Karen Tang, Head of Customer at Prezi. There was also a very strong business case for Prezi to look outside for reliable vendors to support their growth. “With our legacy system, we had to manage a lot of different integrations and it created a lot of engineering overhead for us. We all have a million things that we can possibly do at any given moment, and it should definitely not be a billing system,” says Charles Taira, Product Manager at Prezi.