Peter Auto, founded in 1982, organizes automotive events including the Tour Auto (a road race dating back to 1899), the Le Mans Classic (which has followed the same route as the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans since its inception), and championships for specific categories of vehicles (such as the Fifties’ Legends and Sixties’ Endurance events). The company also operates a public relations and communication business.
40 employees
Events
Paris
The project at a glance
In 2018, Peter Auto decided to completely overhaul its business information system with a view to enhancing the client experience, automating some processes, and avoiding data re-entries. In 2020, after reviewing a number of different solutions, the company opted for Salesforce on account of its functional completeness, modular design, and scalability. It commissioned Carrenet (now part of Cloudity) to develop and integrate the application.
“The people at Cloudity possess the right expertise to help us deploy the various Salesforce components we need. We were very pleased with the support they provided in terms of designing our new information system.”
— Josselin Peter, consultant and application product owner
Application deployed
Salesforce components |
Integrations |
Roll-out |
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
Context and objectives
Peter Auto organizes around a dozen events each year, drawing high numbers of participants and spectators (up to 200,000 for the Le Mans Classic) and involving numerous business interactions with competitors, exhibitors, classic car collectors, and automotive clubs. With its software and tools—comprising a client database, accounting software, Excel spreadsheets, and more—no longer meeting its requirements, the company decided in 2018 to completely overhaul its information system.
As part of an internal consultation process, the firm’s various front-line units—especially its sales team—identified three areas for improvement:
- Enhancing the client experience: in order to register an event on the website, competitors or participants had to fill out several questionnaires, which implied inputting much of the same information over and over again.
- Automate some processes and avoid manual re-entries: some of the information submitted online by clients had to be re-entered by the front-line team, and then again into the accounting system.
- Sync business and accounting data to automate exchanges between the two systems.
Application
After reviewing various applications, Peter Auto opted for Salesforce on account of its feature-rich, modular, scalable design. It turned to Carrenet (now part of Cloudity) to handle the integration side, in part because of its Salesforce multi-cloud capabilities.
The project was launched in 2020. Following an initial scoping phase, three components were implemented: Sales Cloud (for front-line client relations), Experience Cloud (for creating a members’ area), and Numm (accounting software natively developed in Salesforce). The Salesforce components were linked to Peter Auto’s website and e-store, as well as with the Stripe online payment platform.
“We now have a single platform for managing commercial and accounting tasks” said Josselin Peter, consultant and application product owner. The company is so happy with the solution that it plans to use Salesforce for other purposes, including managing email marketing campaigns, handling event-related logistics (especially accommodation), developing a knowledge base to make it easier for employees and clients to find vehicle details and specs (700 makes and 10,000 models), and managing client relations during events (interaction between teams, results, complaints, etc.).
“By linking member vehicle details and specs with our knowledge base, we could run new competitions in the future,” added Josselin Peter.
Benefits
- User-friendly, immersive client experience with a new members’ area fully integrated into the website
- Reliable database updated by clients from their members’ area
- Numerous processes standardized and automated
- Front-line and accounting teams no longer have to re-enter information, saving time
- Fully automated billing with business and accounting data now synced
