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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.

Related case studies

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