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Case study

The challenge

Saint-Gobain Abrasives is the world's leading manufacturer of abrasives for shaping and surface-finishing a wide range of materials. The company has a proven history of product, R&D and engineering quality, and its leadership wanted its customer-facing EMEA teams to have equally high-quality tools to support business development and sales growth.

Growth through acquisition had left Saint-Gobain Abrasives without a standard CRM system in EMEA. Its North American operation had standardized Salesforce with great success—a result that its EMEA leadership was keen to replicate. The project would require a custom Salesforce implementation for 25 countries, involving new sales processes as well as new software. Saint-Gobain Abrasives needed an experienced Salesforce partner to manage this major change program.

Our approach

The project had a tight 12-month timeframe to get Salesforce live in 25 countries, across multiple languages and cultures. Working closely with Saint-Gobain Abrasives’ EMEA CRM Manager and IT/IS Director, Cognizant implemented a three-phase program of change management and technical solution delivery, involving IT, sales, customer service and marketing teams from across EMEA.

Meeting the ambitious deadline, Cognizant completed a very complex business and IT change project, successfully delivering a customized implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud to 650 trained users (from sales, customer service and marketing) across 25 EMEA countries, including several dozen external agents.

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Single CRM platform accelerates deal velocity and revenue growth

Following a successful go-live, Saint-Gobain Abrasives has, for the first time, a standardized CRM system and standardized processes to track and manage new business opportunities. The new Salesforce platform has turned the organization’s sales culture into a data-driven lead culture, enabling it to capitalize more fully on net-new revenue opportunities across EMEA. 

25

EMEA countries live on Salesforce Sales Cloud

12 months

ambitious go-live deadline met, despite significant project complexity

650

users trained and onboarded, including several dozen external agents