Pepsi Bottling Ventures was formed through the merger of two successful beverage organizations, bringing together manufacturing, marketing, sales and direct-store-delivery operations across North Carolina and Long Island.

The merger created the opportunity for greater scale, broader reach and stronger market presence. However, this presented risks as well: misalignment, duplicated effort and rising cost if performance wasn’t managed deliberately from day one.

As the new organization took shape, leadership faced several immediate challenges:

• Integrating two sales organizations with different operating models
• Aligning pricing, incentives and accountability across teams
• Establishing consistent cost control in a traditional DSD environment
• Improving speed and effectiveness of new product launches

Each legacy company brought its own systems and processes. Sales and profitability data lived in different environments, making it difficult to create a shared view of performance or enforce discipline consistently.

In a fast-moving beverage market, inconsistency quickly becomes costly.

Pepsi Bottling Ventures partnered with Salient to establish a unified performance foundation that could support both immediate integration needs and long-term growth.

The focus wasn’t just consolidation. It was about creating clarity:

• One view of pricing and profitability
• Clear expectations for sales execution
• Defined processes for how deals are created and evaluated
• Visibility that supports accountability without slowing teams down

Leadership wanted discipline without sacrificing agility.

With a shared performance foundation in place, PBV was able to:

• Separate sales execution from delivery operations
• Enforce consistent pricing practices across markets
• Identify inefficiencies in routing and cost-to-serve
• Shorten feedback loops between planning and execution

The perspective allowed management to introduce a disciplined price-setting approach, grounded in historical performance and real market behavior instead of assumptions.

One of the most visible improvements came in how quickly PBV could execute new product launches.

Prior to partnering with Salient, it could take up to six weeks to ensure products and promotions were fully executed across the customer base. With clearer targets and better visibility into execution, that cycle was reduced to roughly two weeks.

Execution improved not because teams worked harder, but because expectations were clear and progress was visible.

The results were tangible and immediate.

In addition to direct cost reduction, Pepsi Bottling Ventures achieved:

• Faster and more consistent sales execution
• Stronger pricing discipline
• Reduced operational inefficiencies
• A scalable operating model positioned for future acquisitions

For Pepsi Bottling Ventures, success didn’t come from simply combining two organizations. It came from intentionally aligning how decisions were made, measured and reinforced.

When performance expectations are clear, data is shared and accountability is visible, merged teams don’t just integrate, they outperform.