Creating Agility and Unlocking First-Party Data Insights

BIC, a French manufacturing corporation, is best known for making disposable consumer products such as lighters, razors and (of course) pens. For more than 75 years, BIC grew from their humble beginnings to the iconic brand they are today. The BIC team is passionate about bringing simplicity and joy to people all over the world.

BIC reimagines everyday essentials and designs products that are part of every heart and home. But BIC's digital platform and integration was slowing them down. Their team needed a single source of information for their commerce needs. 

The BIC platform needed updating across four programs: Sales Routine, Sales Orders, Business Development Funds and Trade Discount. While each program existed for a slightly different reason and, therefore, required different functionality, the four offerings weren't properly integrated. The sales portals and solutions didn’t communicate, which led to problems during the ordering and fulfillment process.

By migrating to Salesforce, BIC seized the opportunity to keep the functionality of each of their offerings while creating a more unified and integrated digital stack that could handle all the different orders and BIC’s global customer base.

With the Salesforce platform, BIC's sales teams are more productive and more agile. Sales Cloud consolidates all information to provide teams with a complete view of the customer, helping to align complex deals with customer needs. The single source created by Sales Cloud is crucial for smoothing out the orderings, logistics and fulfillment process.

The new Sales Cloud module uses native and custom objects, customized pages, custom settings, workflows and process builder, with robust approval processes. Sales executives can focus more on their relationships with customers, creating a system in which they can more accurately and more quickly respond to customer needs.

With the Salesforce implementation, BIC achieved a 90% increase in order entry speed. The time between a seller registering the order in the system and it being invoiced, dropped from 24 working hours to just two. The number of additional sales grew by more than 10% and the cost of freight dropped due to better planning and use of logistical resources, which generated savings of 25%. Visits to customers' stores grew by 100%, ensuring that they always have products on the shelves, favoring the final consumer's purchase.

The Salesforce platform creates centralized customer data through dashboards, providing BIC with data intelligence that is crucial for future new marketing efforts and sales initiatives. BIC has unlocked the importance of first-party data.