Making the full customer relationship visible.

The challenge: a connected business with separate systems

Sysco’s broadline business serves restaurants, hotels, and other food-service customers. Alongside it, specialty businesses such as FreshPoint and Buckhead Meat offer more differentiated products. Acquired companies brought their own systems and ways of working, often built for a smaller regional operation.

I joined as Senior Product Owner for Specialties and International, responsible for bringing sales and service onto Salesforce as part of a wider enterprise-systems transition. The opportunity was to connect those businesses around the customer while giving teams capabilities they could use in everyday work.

See the relationship, protect the information

A customer might buy from broadline, FreshPoint, and a specialty meat or seafood business. We built and deployed components that showed those relationships on the customer record, including the responsible sales representatives and managers. Teams could see who else served the customer and coordinate across business lines.

That visibility needed carefully controlled access. I worked with business leaders to understand where sharing would help teams serve customers and where commercial information needed protection. We translated those decisions into access rules that stayed in sync as territories, representative assignments, and customer relationships changed. A developer implemented the automation in Apex.

Partner with leaders, learn through delivery

I partnered with sales executives to understand the reasons behind their organizational structures and territories, refine them where needed, and connect those decisions with implementation. Feedback early and often helped keep the design grounded in how teams worked. Alongside that partnership, I coordinated with the ERP team on customer and transaction data and supported user readiness and onboarding.

We also extended broadline capabilities to specialty businesses. A prospect account could be submitted for approval and converted into a customer account, preserving its Salesforce information as the record type changed and ERP integration took over. Customer status then opened access to additional capabilities.

Salesforce screen flows let representatives initiate requests on a customer’s behalf, track their progress, and route them to the groups responsible for review, approval, and action. This connected the front-line interaction with the internal work required to fulfill it.

The value of a shared foundation

I led a global team of 12 supporting more than 500 sales and service users. The work gave teams a clearer view of shared customers and a more consistent way to initiate and track requests. Connecting leadership decisions with delivery and user feedback helped make collaboration more practical and reduce friction in serving customers.