Case Study: Coca-Cola United

Coca-Cola Bottling Company UNITED is the third-largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, operating across a vast and diverse footprint. Over a short period of aggressive growth, UNITED expanded from roughly 50,000 customers to more than 155,000, more than tripling case volume and dramatically increasing the number of people responsible for daily commercial decisions.

Growth of that magnitude creates more than operational complexity. It raises a fundamental performance question: how do you scale decision-making without losing alignment, accountability or local relevance?

The challenge:

Complexity amplified by growth and the cost of centralized decision making

As UNITED expanded through acquisitions, the organization added:

New territories with distinct competitive dynamics
More customers, SKUs and pricing structures
More sales centers, routes and field teams
More people making high-impact decisions every day

Pricing methodologies became more nuanced. Discount structures grew more complex. Local market conditions varied widely, from dense urban centers to rural regions with entirely different buying behavior.

Centralized analysis couldn’t keep pace with the reality on the ground. Decisions needed to be made closer to the customer, but without fragmenting performance or losing control.

The decision:

Enable local decision-making without sacrificing alignment

UNITED partnered with Salient to support a distributed management model — one that empowered people closest to the market to make informed decisions, while maintaining transparency and consistency across the enterprise.

Rather than relying on a centralized analyst group to interpret performance for every region, UNITED focused on equipping leaders, managers and field teams with a shared foundation for understanding value.

“As our business has grown, Salient has become even more critical given the scale and number of people making decisions across the organization.”

Beeland Neilsen, Director of Commercial Leadership, Coca-Cola United Bottling Company

Performance at scale:

Local insight, enterprise visibility

UNITED operates across a footprint that spans coast to coast, serving markets with vastly different customer expectations and competitive pressures.

Local context matters.

“I’m not going to rely on someone sitting in Birmingham to make decisions for New Orleans,” said Beeland Nielsen, Director of Commercial Leadership. “Local teams understand their markets, their consumers and their customers. This approach puts them in a position to make decisions that are right for that marketplace.”

By distributing access to performance insight across roles, from executive leadership to field sales, UNITED reinforced accountability at every level without creating competing versions of the truth.

Performance as the foundation of how work gets done

Performance insight isn’t useful if it lives outside daily workflows. UNITED ensured access extended across roles and environments, supporting both strategic and in-the-moment decisions.

In the field, sales teams could engage customers with clarity and credibility.

“Key account managers use it constantly,” said Bryan Robertson, Commercial Capabilities Manager. “Instead of just selling product, they’re showing customers volume and margin and having real business conversations. That’s how we differentiate.”

Those conversations strengthened relationships and shifted the dynamic from transactional selling to collaborative growth.

A long-term partnership built on industry understanding

“They understood our industry from the beginning,” said leadership at UNITED. “That made it easier to explain how we operate and how performance really works across our delivery models.”

Over time, as UNITED doubled its SKU count, tripled its customer base and expanded its footprint, the performance framework evolved alongside the business.

“We’ve transformed our company, and the system hasn’t skipped a beat,” Nielsen said. “In many ways, it’s improved as the business has grown.”

The outcome:

Performance that scales with the business

For Coca-Cola UNITED, sustained performance isn’t driven by centralized control or static reporting.

It’s built on:

Clear accountability at the local level
Shared measures of value across the organization
Transparency that supports trust and action
A system designed to scale as complexity increases

The result is an organization where growth strengthens performance instead of diluting it.