EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.
How EY can help
As one of the world’s largest consumer packaging firms with more than $5 billion in annual revenue, Sonoco regularly grows through acquisitions. Each acquisition results in additional systems, new complexities and new customer data sets that often overlap existing customers. That makes prospecting and account management challenging for sales reps as multiple divisions may be interacting independently with the same customer. Sonoco realized that it needed to have a single, global CRM solution with both a common process and common data model that allowed for a 360-degree view of each account, allowing reps to effectively and efficiently serve their customers.
Sonoco is hardly alone in this. Under the hood of any large corporation is a knot of legacy systems its IT teams are constantly trying to untangle. Acquisitions and divestments only make this problem worse by adding overlapping systems and data that needs to be integrated and that often takes time. At Sonoco, building lasting customer relationships and a high-quality experience for customers is of the utmost importance. As at many companies, the mounting system complexity led its sales teams to spend between a significant amount of time manually gathering and organizing the information needed to support their customers. This not only dragged-out sales operations and slows the sales cycle, but also meant that providing meaningful value to customers required a tremendous amount of manual work and coordination.
“It was important for us to drive organic growth, and we knew we needed better and more robust tools and processes to help us get there,” says Samantha Williams, global IT digital leader at Sonoco. “We had more than 50 different opportunity flows as a starting point across the divisions; we had to get that down to one.”
Sonoco needed more than a technical fix; it needed an advisor with a strategic knowledge of its business and the problems it faced, as well as an understanding of its culture as a people-first company that prizes relationships both within the firm and with outside partners and customers. To that end, the company recruited sales transformation and technology teams to provide insights on solving its larger challenge: driving organic growth and maximizing sales effectiveness.