At a glance
Lascaux had a Salesforce implementation that had stalled mid-rollout. We rescued the Sales Cloud foundation, added Marketing Cloud on top, and left behind a platform their own team maintains without depending on us.
- Sector
- Software & Digital Services
- Location
- Tuscany, Italy
- Timeframe
- Just over 1 month, training included
What we implemented
What we integrated
What we learned
- Rescue projects need thorough discovery before committing to timelines.
- Preserve what is working while fixing what is not, big-bang rewrites rarely land well.
- Documentation is written as you go, not after the fact.
- Training is not optional. It is what turns a delivered platform into an adopted one.
Who they are
Lascaux is a software engineering company: over a hundred people across Arezzo, Florence and remote, building products and turnkey projects for finance, public administration and industry. A company that ships software for a living, which makes what follows more relatable, not less.
What wasn't working
More than a year before we met them, Lascaux had bought Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement and commissioned an implementation. It never went live. The marketing team, unable to launch anything from the platform they were paying for, was running its campaigns on Mailchimp instead, while the Marketing Cloud licences quietly renewed in the background. Software you pay for and don't use is the most expensive software there is.
They'd waited far too long, and it showed. The marketing department was effectively stuck: no working segments, no way to run campaigns efficiently, a workaround tool on one side and an expensive empty platform on the other. When Salesforce looked at the stalled implementation, it recommended Hoshi and made the introduction.
How we thought about it
A client in Lascaux's position has already paid once for this exact outcome and received nothing. The rational starting position is doubt, and we knew it. So we did the audit and the roadmap before any agreement was signed: here's the state of your system, here's what we'd fix, in this order, on these timelines, at a fixed cost, with training shaped around your team's needs.
That one decision did most of the relationship's work. It killed the fear of landing in the hands of another debatable partner, spared Lascaux a paid discovery phase, and meant that by the time we signed, both sides knew exactly what a month of work would deliver.
What it was like to work with us
The audit told us the system couldn't send an email. Literally: the email authentication records (DKIM and related settings) that let a platform send on your domain had never been configured, so campaigns simply could not be launched. No templates had been developed, and nobody had been shown how to build one. Flows sat neither completed nor explained. Not a single segment had been created in over a year of ownership. None of these is an exotic problem. Each one is the kind of thing a competent implementation closes in its first weeks, which is what made the situation so frustrating for the client and so fixable for us.
What we put in place
We fixed it in order. Email authentication configured, so the platform could actually send. Permissions set up properly. Flows completed, switched on, and explained to the people who'd own them. Segments built. Templates developed in Marketing Cloud Engagement, with training on how to create and adapt them, plus written material the team could keep. The whole engagement, training included, took just over a month.
Where it got them
Lascaux now runs its marketing where the licences always said it should: newsletters, nurture campaigns segmented by geography and product relevance, lead-gen campaigns and product launches, all from Marketing Cloud. No further issues have been reported since go-live, and the engagement closed with a five-out-of-five customer satisfaction score through Salesforce.
For us, this project is a clean example of what deep platform knowledge plus agentic execution is for. Our agents accelerated the audit and the repetitive configuration work; our consultants made the judgement calls and ran the training. That combination is why a problem that had lingered for over a year gave way in about five weeks.
What's next
If you're paying for a Salesforce product that has never quite gone live, the way out starts with an honest audit, not another build. We'll do it before you sign anything, like we did here. Our Percival audit is the productised version of that first step.
In their words
“Hoshi turned our Salesforce investment from a source of frustration into a genuine competitive advantage. The technical work was excellent, and the patience they showed while training our team was the part that actually made it stick.”
Services and Clouds used
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