Consumer Products Giant Increases Efficiency and Transparency With Salesforce
BIC Graphic was running a consumer products sales operation without a CRM. Pipeline insight was missing, customer service teams worked from siloed data, and sales, marketing, and service each held their own version of what had happened with a customer. We delivered a Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud implementation built around a Sales Performance System, with a fully integrated connection to the company’s ERP. Average handle time dropped by 7 minutes, and new pipeline opportunities rose by more than 27%.
A Consumer Products Business Running Without a CRM
BIC Graphic sells promotional consumer products at scale, which means high transaction volume, a lot of quoting, and customers who deal with several teams before, during, and after a purchase. Field sales, inside sales, quoting, and customer service all touch the same accounts.
A business that size usually reaches a point where the absence of a CRM stops being an inconvenience and starts costing money. BIC Graphic reached it. Selling activity was hard to plan and harder to measure, service teams spent longer on every call than they needed to, and nobody could say with confidence what the pipeline actually held. Putting a CRM under the operation was the starting point for everything that followed.
The Challenge: Four Teams, No Shared View of the Customer
Four problems defined the project at the start:
• No sales force automation and no pipeline insight, because there was no CRM in place
• High average handle times in the customer service teams, caused by siloed data and communications
• No alignment between sales, marketing, and service on what had happened in a customer interaction
• A customer experience that was cumbersome and disjointed as a result
The fourth bullet is the consequence of the first three. When each team holds part of the record, the customer becomes the connective tissue, repeating themselves at every handoff and waiting while someone finds context that should already be on screen. Fixing that meant giving all four teams one place to work rather than better ways to share four sets of notes.
Our Approach: A Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Implementation Built on a Sales Performance System
We began with how selling actually gets managed. We deployed a Sales Performance System to plan, assign, execute, and measure selling activities, which gave BIC Graphic a repeatable way to decide what the sales teams should be doing and to see afterward whether it worked. Activity became something the company directs rather than something it reviews after the quarter closes.
Our Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation carried that structure into daily work. We designed it to streamline workflows and automate tasks for the field sales, inside sales, and quoting teams so each could operate more efficiently. Quoting was the clearest win. It is repetitive, it is high volume in this business, and every minute of manual handling in a quote is a minute not spent selling.
Sales force automation did the rest of that job. Steps that used to depend on someone remembering them now run on their own, which removed both the delay and the variation between reps. The pipeline insight the company had been missing came out of the same work, because activity captured in the system is activity that can be reported on.
Our Salesforce Service Cloud implementation then created a central repository of interactions and a 360-view of the customer. Every call, case, and conversation lands in one record. An agent picking up a call sees the account history and the open sales activity without opening a second system or asking the customer to explain what happened last week.
The last piece was the ERP. We enhanced the Sales and Service user experience with a fully integrated solution connecting Salesforce to the company’s existing ERP. That Salesforce ERP integration is what kept the 360-view honest. Order and fulfillment data lives in the ERP, and a customer record without it can answer questions about conversations but not about products. Bringing the two together meant sales and service teams could see the commercial reality of an account alongside its history.
The four pieces were built to reinforce each other. The Sales Performance System sets the plan, Sales Cloud executes it, Service Cloud captures what happens afterward, and the ERP connection keeps all of it tied to real orders. That is the version of the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud implementation that made the numbers move.
Tools and Products Used
This build centered on two Salesforce clouds and one integration:
• Salesforce Sales Cloud: designed to streamline workflows and automate tasks for the field sales, inside sales, and quoting teams, and to carry the Sales Performance System
• Salesforce Service Cloud: implemented as a central repository of customer interactions, giving service teams a 360-view of the customer
• ERP integration: a fully integrated connection between Salesforce and BIC Graphic’s existing ERP, enhancing the Sales and Service user experience
Sales Cloud and Service Cloud hold two halves of the same relationship, and the ERP connection supplies what neither of them generates on its own. Together they gave BIC Graphic one account view that sales, marketing, and service all work from.
The Results: 7 Minutes Off Average Handle Time and 27%+ More Pipeline
Average handle time fell by 7 minutes. That reduction came directly from ending the siloed data problem. When the interaction history and the ERP data sit on the same record, an agent stops spending the first part of every call reconstructing context, and the customer stops repeating a story they have already told.
New pipeline opportunities increased by more than 27%. The Sales Performance System is the reason. Once selling activity is planned, assigned, and measured, the teams work the accounts that deserve attention instead of the ones that happen to be top of mind, and the automation in Sales Cloud gives them the hours to do it.
The third change does not have a number attached, and it matters as much. Sales, marketing, and service now work from one record of the customer, so the disjointed experience described in the original brief has a structural fix rather than a process workaround.
| Area | Outcome |
| Customer service | 7 minutes reduction in average handle time |
| Pipeline | 27%+ increase in new pipeline opportunities |
| Sales operations | Sales Performance System to plan, assign, execute, and measure selling activities |
| Customer view | Central repository of interactions and a 360-view of the customer, integrated with the ERP |
Efficiency and Transparency Come From the Same Place
BIC Graphic wanted two things that look unrelated. Efficiency is about time, and transparency is about visibility. Both came out of the same change, which was putting every team on one record of the customer.
That is usually how it goes. Teams are slow because they are searching, and leaders are blind because the searching never produced a record anyone can report on. Fix the record, and both problems move at once.
If your sales and service teams are working from different versions of the same customer, our team can help. Get in touch to talk through what a Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud implementation would look like for your business.
