Three functions, three versions of the same customer.
Sales
You direct the sales forces of every brand in the group and are accountable for its growth, even as the tools they work with keep changing. Your salespeople enter the same customer into three CRMs and your figures show three different customers. On every deal, you commit limited resources before you know whether you will win it.
Your systems should highlight the deals that deserve that commitment but they measure different things from one CRM to the next. Without a consolidated pipeline, you make those calls on Excel exports. You commit to a forecast built on data consolidated by hand.
Customer service
Customer satisfaction is yours to answer for, through the retention and acquisition processes the growth of the portfolio depends on. Retaining a customer means knowing which products they own, how they use them, whether they pay and whether they complain. That information lives in separate systems, none of which traces a customer’s journey end to end.
A qualified deal that never closes should teach you what was missing and send the account back into nurturing. None of that happens. When one of your customers raises the alarm before one of your systems does, you are already late.
Finance
Accountable to your shareholder for the group’s financial performance and for the figures your statutory auditor signs off, you depend in both cases on the coherence of your customer data. Yet nothing tells you whether two records opened in two systems point to the same account, nor what becomes of a customer’s history when a new shareholder takes control.
At every close, every board meeting, your credibility rests on a consolidation of the sales and billing systems that you rebuild yourself. Yet no one ever wrote data stewardship into your mandate.
How many customers do you have?
Three figures, three truths.
You lead the transformation.
Finance, sales and customer service run into the same obstacle.
Every system carries its own definition of the customer and none produces the complete picture. A CRM and an ERP already make two. Under a buy-and-build strategy, every acquisition arrives with its own systems and processes. Your corporate reporting diverges accordingly.
Identifying and sequencing the projects the transformation requires means weighing what each brings against the time it takes. Orchestrating them means balancing strategic alignment, operational impact and technology choices.
What remains is to assemble the people who will own those projects and deliver on their commitments.
One reliable figure to decide
Where to start
Your executive committee wants to launch new offerings this year, integrate an acquisition and deliver the synergies it announced. Your systems and your organisation meet part of that agenda. What they miss becomes the list of projects you could run this year.
Unlock the synergies of your acquisitions in three phases
Merging your CRMs and integrating them into a lead-to-cash initiative towards the ERP is the right rationalisation strategy for a group that grows by acquisition. The trap would be to expect a short-term return, when the build takes time and the benefits compound only after you go live.
Because the billed entity is the reference, the ERP is the least risky starting point for your customer knowledge, since it carries the financial statements your statutory auditor reviews. By building a unified customer data foundation from your ERP and your various CRMs, you gain group-level steering in a matter of weeks, with no heavy reorganisation of people.
Your first agentic initiatives then start from a harmonised context, ahead of consolidating the CRMs and integrating lead-to-cash.
At Intescia, the legacy CRM held data too poor to bill on, so I consolidated the customer base drawn from that system by cross-checking it against the ERP and another company reference, bringing 40,000 legacy accounts down to 10,000 entities actually billed, in 3 weeks. This is how I have started every engagement since.
40,000 → 10,000
legacy accounts brought down to entities actually billed
CRM transformation, a rare skill set.
Architecture · Orchestration · Strategy
A CRM transformation program draws on skills as far apart as application architecture, tool selection, the orchestration of technical projects, data and change management, without forgetting the strategic standing it takes to sell a solution to an executive committee. Finding one person in-house with all those talents can take a long time, holding up your initiative and the benefits that come with it.
I have deep command of CRM, data and lead-to-cash, from solution selection through to go-live, and I guarantee the knowledge handover to my successor when the time comes.
My aim is to help you get past an obstacle and set your initiative in motion, for the time it takes to put the permanent operating model in place.
I put your CRM initiative in motion
References
PROGRAMS DELIVERED IN PRODUCTION, ALONGSIDE TRANSFORMATION LEADERS
INTESCIA GROUP, a European data intelligence publisher, around €100m in revenue, 800 employees, fifteen brands from acquisitions, three CRMs, two ERPs. Vision and roadmap set in two months and defended before the shareholding fund. Lead-to-cash pilot on Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced, offer and quote configuration, billing integrated with the NetSuite ERP through MuleSoft, delivered in production in nine months. Cutover completed over a weekend, teams working in the tool on Monday morning, within the scope committed.
Laura PrimardChief Operating Officer, Intescia Group
MALT REVIEW · TRANSLATED ·
★★★★★
Sébastien came in to lead phase 1 of a strategic Lead to Cash project. He was instrumental in defining the architecture, coordinating with the integrators, negotiating with Salesforce, coaching the internal team and bringing the various stakeholders together. Always precise, reliable and willing, Sébastien fitted perfectly into our organisation. I hope we will work together again!
Air Liquide Santé
Integration architecture and testing, multi-country rollout, two years.
Christian SanchezIntegration Manager, Air Liquide
LEHIBOU REVIEW · TRANSLATED ·
★★★★★
Sébastien brought rigour and commitment that had a major impact on the qualification and validation of the developments tied to our project’s integrations, whether organising the workshops, running the sessions, testing exhaustively or following up on fixes.
Marc JonquetERP Infor M3 technical manager, Air Liquide Healthcare
LEHIBOU REVIEW · TRANSLATED ·
★★★★★
Sébastien was responsible for end-to-end integration testing between the Salesforce CRM and the Infor M3 ERP. He quickly became part of the team and showed a very strong commitment to the project. I noted the high quality of his work, in particular on the test plans he drew up.
Hadrien AbolgassemiERP consultant, Air Liquide
LEHIBOU REVIEW · TRANSLATED ·
★★★★★
I worked with Sébastien at Air Liquide Santé on a complex integration project. The project involved the Infor M3 ERP, which I was responsible for, and Salesforce, managed by Sébastien. […] I greatly appreciated Sébastien’s rigour, attention to detail and ability for technical analysis. I highly recommend calling on Sébastien for your Salesforce projects that require complex integrations.
Yacine ZelmatSalesforce architect, Air Liquide
MALT AND LINKEDIN RECOMMENDATION ·
★★★★★
Competent, engaged, thorough, and systematic, Sébastien has displayed key skills essential for the success of our initiatives. He has shown great mastery over his areas of responsibility and was instrumental in offering insights that significantly boosted the efficiency of our team. I strongly endorse Sébastien and hope that our paths will cross again in the future.
ENGIE
CRM audit run for the Group Investment Office, presented to the executive committee.
Pernod Ricard
CRM transformation, alongside PwC.
Oracle
Oracle BI Applications and Informatica expert, consultant on the Real-Time Decisions engine, then presales, contributing to the product’s success at Canal+, Accor, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, PSA (Stellantis), Sonae and Garanti BBVA.
Saïda IbaraghenFounder of Corevelle, ex-Oracle
SOFTWARE VENDOR YEARS · MALT RECOMMENDATION · TRANSLATED ·
★★★★★
Sébastien was part of my team of consultants at Oracle. He showed great professionalism and a strong commitment to his assignments. His ability to adapt to client environments, his expertise and his sense of customer service make him an excellent consultant. I highly recommend him.
THEY TRUSTED ME
PARTNERS AND INTEGRATORS
PHOENIXBLUE
My services
Clarity – 4 to 6 weeks
In 4 to 6 weeks, I list the candidate projects of your transformation, starting from a questionnaire your business functions fill in and continuing with workshops that surface how you use your CRM and your ERP, along with your reporting maturity. I then hand you a scoping note setting out the priorities and the implementation scenarios worth considering.
Customer Data Hub – 3 to 4 months
From all your CRMs, ERPs, websites and marketing tools, I build the infrastructure that unifies your customer data in 3 to 4 months. I develop your reports on consolidated pipeline, product holdings and churn, so you can steer the group your acquisitions have built. Connected to the applications in place, this data foundation becomes the single customer reference.
Flex – tailored to your needs
Working inside your teams, I help you carry this transformation over the long run, from the audit to the rollout of the target solution, tool selection included. I run the program alongside you and take up my architect’s role when the situation calls for it. On the technical side, I steer the choices towards the options that fit your context and your objectives.
Bringing executives clarity on what a CRM transformation program involves, a pivotal initiative of processes, systems and data whose right alignment takes the business to a new stage of maturity.
Sébastien Vigé
CRM LEAD-TO-CASH PROGRAM DIRECTOR, CERTIFIED SALESFORCE ARCHITECT
A group that grows by acquisition inherits companies turned into business units, each with its own data, its own systems and its own processes. After analysis and consultation, we decide together, system by system, what is kept, integrated or migrated to a single technology, according to the in-house skills available. One ERP for finance. One CRM for sales and marketing. One shared data repository, a data lake or a light MDM, giving everyone the same view of group performance.
01
Solution selection
SOLUTION SELECTION SUPPORT, BUILT FROM THE STRATEGIC VISION, THE PROCESSES AND THE SYSTEMS IN PLACE
Choosing a tool is the easiest step, the one that gives the illusion the project is done. Most organisations that consult me spend too much time assessing technology and the tools market, too little thinking about their processes and their people, when the real challenge only begins at implementation. My work therefore starts with an audit of the organisation, its systems, its interfaces, in the light of the group’s strategic stage. From it come the available options, documented with their strengths and weaknesses, then a recommendation. The specification that follows goes out to integrators, whose proposals establish the real budget.
02
Program sequencing
THE PROGRAM IS BUILT AROUND A TIMELINE OF MEASURABLE BUSINESS OUTCOMES
Success criteria are set at the outset with the executives and their teams, as facts: measurable, beyond argument afterwards. Once the target vision is clear, I list the projects required, their dependencies and their sequence. For mid-sized organisations in buy-and-build, the priority is often to make the synergies envisaged at acquisition real. The first challenge in such a situation is to consolidate customer knowledge within a few weeks, to prepare the CRM rationalisation, then integrate with the ERP into a streamlined lead-to-cash process.
03
Support through to Go-Live
RUNNING THE PROGRAM ALONGSIDE THE CLIENT, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE INTEGRATOR
I support the stakeholders and the executive throughout the program, through to delivery in production, accountable for time and budget. Every risk gets its countermeasure, so the project weighs as little as possible on the group’s day-to-day operations. Whenever we drift from plan, the executive committee hears it from me, with the best options already set out. The handover leaves the teams and my successor able to operate on their own after deployment.
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