Loading...The first semester of 2014 brought an all-time record of new clients in Pentalog’s history. What’s even better is that the contract signing pace has not slowed down at all during the summer. And we intend to keep exceeding our objectives by combining this frenetic pace with a good bunch of brand new offers!
Sales in the first half of 2014
The first semester was extremely successful in terms of requests, exceeding all our forecasts. We have managed to acquire 29 new clients, despite a relative slowdown in April and May. This is almost the same as in 2013 but for the whole year (30 clients overall). Most importantly, we increased our conversion rate to 77%, which is truly exceptional! The ascending trend continued in July and August since we have acquired 7 clients during this period.
This efficiency rate is mainly due to Pentalog Institute’s contribution in terms of consulting, functional analysis, POC creation and support offered to its clients in the digitization process. This high-level commitment at the onset of the relationship allows it to win the new clients’ confidence and ensure seamless project start.
Moreover, Pentalog Institute’s sales figure has constantly increased according to the Group’s objectives. This growth was mainly fueled by the valuable research and innovation works.
Evolution of Pentalog’s sales figure structure
In 2012, our largest client made up for 20% of our sales figure. In 2013, the same client represented only 14%, while this year is ranked the 5th with only 5% of our sales figure, whereas the first place is occupied by the ex-challenger with 8%.
In 2012, 70% of our sales figure was represented by 25 clients, in 2013 by 33 and in 2014 by 34 clients. The examples could go on and on, but the conclusion remains the same: our sales figure is better distributed, which means that the dependency risk is constantly decreasing.
Who are our clients?
Our client portfolio is mainly composed of software publishers (40%) and e-merchants (around 20%). The remaining percentage (between 1 and 7%) is held by a small group of fifteen business domains: Industry, Banking/Finance, Telecommunication, etc.
43% of our clients are SMBs, 23% are mid-cap companies and 23% are big-cap companies. The remaining percentage is composed of micro-companies or companies under creation. More importantly, among all our clients, almost half of them define themselves as startups! This makes Pentalog the reference partner of European and American startups in terms of consulting and outsourcing.
We are quite proud of this positioning generated by high potential R&D projects in cutting-edge business expertise areas.
International expansion: North America
The American adventure started a year ago, with a limited but agile device: ¼ of Fred’s time and ¼ of an on-site consultant’s time with a very clearly defined objective – signing contracts with 2 clients before the end of 2013. As the objective was easily achieved, we allowed ourselves to continue our operations there (see our press release: Pentalog enjoying booming overseas business).
In 2014, another 4 American clients decided to team up with us. From a team of 10 developers at the beginning of 2014, we quickly grew to 30 people in early summer this year, with a forecast of 50 people for the end of 2014. Considering the existing US clients and those acquired as a result of these efforts, we will soon reach 70 people working for the North-American economy. This is more than enough proof that very few resources combined with strong motivation can lead to very good results on a receptive market.
This fall we will invest more in the commercial segment and project management in order to continue our efforts, stimulated by a 100% recommendation rate from our American clients, who are extremely satisfied with the quality delivered by our East European teams. Our development perspectives will continue focusing on international markets and, why not, on conquering new lands in 2014!
News for 2014
Following the observations my team and I made on market trends since the beginning of the year, we reoriented some of our historical offers and envisioned new services to better meet our clients’ and prospects’ expectations:
- We reorganized our mobility offer to integrate the new technological and business trends
- At HR level, we regrouped our activities related to recruitment, skills management, payroll outsourcing, training and provision of talents in an HR cloud dedicated to the IT world.
- Pentalog Institute has also added a new dimension to its R&D and innovation funding and management offer by opening its R&D laboratory to its clients and prospects. I will get into more details about the launching of these offers very soon.
Choose the right weapons for this new digitization war: contact me today!
