One Sales Cloud for a consultancy that sells everywhere

LSC (Lifesciences Consultants) helps medical device, diagnostics and biopharma companies get new products to market: commercial strategy, market access, the work that decides whether a good product actually reaches patients. It's a global business run from offices including Milan, selling sophisticated engagements across the US, Europe and emerging markets.

Selling that way creates a particular problem. Around twenty salespeople pursuing deals in several countries and several currencies, and all of it tracked in spreadsheets. Each person could see their own slice. Nobody could see the whole.

The spreadsheets had reached their limit. Data lived in different versions in different hands, so the numbers rarely agreed with each other, and leadership had no reliable way to give the sales team strategic oversight: where effort was going, what it was producing, which markets deserved more of it. LSC wanted one centralised system for all sales operations, international from day one, with dashboards that showed both the effort going in and the results coming out.

The hardest part wasn't the software. It was the word "lead".

At LSC, "lead" meant anything that wasn't signed yet. A ten-year client discussing a new engagement was a lead. A company was a lead. And because of how that had been set up, each company could only be one lead at a time, so the mapping between leads and actual accounts was never clear. There was no concept of an opportunity at all.

There was also a subtlety in how the team is managed: salespeople at LSC are targeted on the number and type of interactions they generate, not only on closed revenue. Whatever we designed had to measure effort in those terms, not just outcomes.

So we proposed a different vocabulary: leads that convert, accounts that persist, opportunities, quotes and orders. That meant retraining people who had worked the old way for years, and in the first weeks it generated real confusion. It also became a new habit faster than anyone expected, and it's the change the client felt most: with the concepts separated, transparency, clarity and control over the sales data improved dramatically. The two months of training and adoption support we contracted alongside the build were for exactly this, and they were not the optional extra they might look like on a quote.

This was a from-scratch Sales Cloud implementation, and starting clean was an advantage: no legacy configuration to work around, and a chance to fix the sales process before automating any of it.

The org runs multi-currency and multi-language, because a pipeline that spans countries is only trustworthy when a deal in dollars and a deal in euros roll up into one honest number. Where standard configuration wasn't enough we wrote custom automation in Apex, particularly around lead assignment and lead-to-opportunity conversion, so that promising conversations become properly tracked deals in a couple of clicks rather than a chore people postpone.

We also wired Salesforce into the tools the team actually prospects with. Salespeople build lists in LinkedIn Sales Navigator and import them into Salesforce to work them. When someone wants a targeted person assigned to them, they request authorisation in Salesforce and an administrator approves it: a lightweight control that keeps twenty hunters from treading on each other's ground. Outlook integration logs the email trail against the right records as they go.

Sales operations now live in one system instead of a folder of competing spreadsheets. Leads arrive, get assigned through the approval flow, and either convert or close with a reason attached. Managers read the pipeline across countries and currencies without assembling it first, and the dashboards answer both questions LSC's targets are built on: is the effort happening, and is it turning into work?

Implementation took one month. Training and adoption support ran for two more under a separate but related contract, and the engagement closed with a five-out-of-five customer satisfaction score through Salesforce.

If your firm sells knowledge-work internationally and the pipeline lives in personal spreadsheets, where "lead" means everything and therefore nothing, this is roughly what fixing it looks like.