Pan-European B2B Salesforce Transformation

Situation

Disneyland Paris was launching a B2B digital transformation on Salesforce, replacing fragmented manual processes across European markets with a unified platform. The B2B operation — corporate group sales, travel agency partnerships, tour operator relationships — spanned more than 20 European markets, each with its own sales workflows, partner management processes, and operational practices that had evolved over decades of operation.

The engagement was architecture-first. Rather than selecting a vendor and letting implementation decisions drive the design, Disneyland Paris needed the architecture to precede the vendor — producing a specification precise enough that the selected implementation partner would build to the design, not around it.

Challenge

European B2B operations resist standardization. Each market has developed working practices that reflect local business culture, partner relationship history, and regulatory context. A corporate group booking process that works efficiently in France doesn’t map directly onto the equivalent process in Germany, Spain, or the UK. Forcing a single template across all markets would produce a platform that technically functioned but that local teams would work around. Allowing each market to customize independently would produce the same fragmented state the transformation was supposed to replace.

The architectural challenge was finding the right abstraction layer: the standard framework that could accommodate genuine market-level operational differences without creating structural fragmentation. This required understanding what was genuinely different across markets (legitimate divergence that the architecture had to accommodate) versus what only appeared different because of inconsistent terminology and undocumented local variation (convergence that standardization could achieve).

The vendor handoff risk compounded this. Implementation programs where the architecture is designed by one party and built by another consistently produce divergence — vendors interpret requirements through the lens of their existing delivery patterns, which rarely match the architecture intent precisely. The only protection against this is architectural documentation that eliminates ambiguity: not a high-level design that the vendor completes, but a specification that the vendor executes.

Action

Pan-European Technical Audit

The audit phase was ground-up, not top-down. Rather than designing from headquarters strategy outward, the process started with direct engagement with market-level sales operations: how corporate accounts were structured, how travel agency relationships were managed, how bookings flowed from enquiry to confirmation, what reporting markets were accountable for upstream. Twenty-plus markets were assessed, capturing the operational nuances that requirements-gathering processes consistently miss.

The audit produced a structured differentiation between genuine market requirements (which the architecture had to accommodate), operational inconsistencies (which standardization could resolve), and local workarounds (which were symptoms of prior technology failures that a well-designed platform would eliminate).

Solution Architecture Design

The Salesforce solution architecture was designed to the audit findings: a standard core that covered the B2B workflow common across all European markets — account hierarchy for corporate and agency partners, opportunity management for group sales, contract management, and partner portal for self-service — with defined configuration points for market-level customization.

The customization model was explicit. Each market could configure within defined parameters; configurations outside those parameters required architectural review. This gave local teams legitimate flexibility while preventing the accumulation of structural divergence that had fragmented the prior state.

RFP and Vendor Scoping

The RFP was written as a technical specification, not a capabilities questionnaire. Vendor responses were evaluated against the architecture — not against their platform expertise or reference clients — because the architecture had already established what needed to be built. Vendors who proposed approaches that diverged from the architectural design had to justify the divergence against the requirements that drove it, not simply propose alternatives.

The selected vendor received not just a requirements document but a complete architectural design: data model, object structure, integration architecture, customization boundaries, and deployment sequence. The implementation was scoped to the architecture, not the other way around.

Result

The pan-European B2B audit was completed across all markets, delivering a requirements and divergence analysis that captured operational reality rather than idealized workflows. The Salesforce solution architecture unified the diverse European working models into a coherent technical framework with defined flexibility for legitimate local variation.

The RFP process produced a vendor selection where the chosen partner was scoped to the architectural specification — the implementation mandate was to build what was designed, not to discover what to build during delivery. Architecture documentation was precise enough that the handoff created no ambiguity about what constituted successful delivery.

The methodology developed for this engagement reflects the same discipline applied in Org Health assessments: start with what actually exists before designing what should exist. The audit approach — structured market-by-market analysis, differentiation between genuine requirements and operational inconsistency, documentation that survives handoff — is the same methodology that makes technical due diligence and architecture assessments actionable rather than theoretical. It is also the same methodology that Agentforce deployment preparation requires: before deploying AI agents across a multi-market B2B operation, you need to know what the operation actually does, not what the process documentation says it does.

Technologies used: Salesforce Sales Cloud, Experience Cloud (partner portal), Sales Cloud for B2B workflow, solution architecture design methodology, RFP process management, pan-European requirements analysis