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

(calm music) - Literally, when I wake up in the morning, it's one of the first apps I open on my phone. It's really become a solution, almost at all levels of the organization. - Salient goes, literally, from our senior executive manager all the way down to the guy who's in the store, taking the order. It's all levels of our data, so it's basically who we sell to, what we sell 'em, when did we sell it. One of the things we feel fundamental about in this business is being able to push decision rights as close to the consumer as possible. The only way that you can effectively do that as a company, is that, if each of these local operators has a solution that can help them make those decisions effectively. The salesman has it at his fingertips, at a outlet level, so that they can quickly just pull up numbers on the fly. They don't have to rely on a manager to pull numbers for 'em. They got the outlet level information right here in the store without having to rely on anybody else, down to the package level. - Our goal is to power the end user. We don't just limit it to salespeople. We open it up to all the different groups that want to use it, so, it can be from accounting to warehouse, to all the different people, for even tax people who use it. The mobile app really made a big difference on that, a change in it so that everybody has access to it. Very rarely do a lot of our key account people, even stay in the office, so instead of having them to interact with a computer, they're able to access it now through their tablets, and their smartphones, through the dashboards, and that's really been a game changer for us, because wherever they're at, they're able to see what's going on, and they figure out how to sell something from that data. - For my organization, it cuts both ways. it's the high level dashboarding, but then we take it all the way down and use it for outlet level, product specific performance and validation. So, we're using it to really track volume, revenue, margin. - We were able to show customers our brands, our packages are outselling the competition. Any time you can do that and have data, volume numbers, margin numbers, and then back that up, it was always a win for us, and instead of just, "Hey, I wanna sell Coca-Cola's," I wanna grow your business, and this is how I can do it. - The field users that we see engaging with the solution regularly, consistently out-perform their peers. they know more about their customers and the state of their business overall, and they are far more effective in what they do, and having that fact-based value added dialogue with their customers. - The business review is probably the most impactful day-to-day scope. Green lights and red lights is one snapshot on the screen, that says, "hey, I look and I see it down, and I see open spark or an open still, and then, if the customer wants to see why, we can drill into that, and go deeper. Being able to go in and kinda create a partnership to tell 'em that this is what we wanna, this is what we do for you business, this is why we do it for you business. - Our ability to make better decisions faster has improved with the solution. The biggest thing that stands out for me, with Salient, is its stability, its speed, and its ability to scale is its stability, its speed, and its ability to scale with our business as we have scaled. - We're a three and a half billion dollar company now. The biggest change with Salient grew with us as we grew, right? So we used to have, started out with 18 sales centers in 2014, and now we're at 54 sales centers, and so, it just really grew. We grew three and a half times our size, So our transactions grew that same level. - The support and engagement and interaction has been world-class. Any time we need something, we pick up the phone and call, and they answer. - It's been a long-term relationship, for us. Once we got to know Salient, it, we've had the same people, and the same reps that we've talked to over the years. So it's really a collaboration. - I don't know what life was like before Salient, because it's been a part of our organization as long as I have, but I don't know how they managed their business without it.

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.