Empire Distributing’s Sales Reps Can See 3 Years of Account History Before Every Call, Thanks to Commercient’s Sage 100 and Salesforce Connection

Empire Distributing's Sage 100 ERP ran on a local installation, which meant the company's outside sales team, covering accounts up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest, had no way to reach account, order, or inventory data while on the road. Reps had to call back to the office for reports on account history, order status, or stock availability, which slowed down conversations with customers and put deals at risk of stalling.

At the same time, Empire Distributing had never run a CRM system, so account, quote, and order information lived scattered across disconnected external systems with no single source of truth. Sales, marketing, and service teams had limited visibility into each other's activity, making it hard to track territories, coordinate customer communication, or measure progress against annual goals.

Commercient synced Empire Distributing's Sage 100 data, including accounts, item master pricing, inventory, invoices, and sales orders, into Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Pardot, and Salesforce Maps. Brandon Sullivan, the company's IT manager and a full stack developer, led the buildout himself, using the synced data to surface account financial history, open cases, and inventory levels directly on the account record, along with custom dashboards for tracking progress against annual goals.

The integration also runs in reverse: when reps update accounts, quotes, or contacts in Salesforce, those changes route through an internal approval and accounting review process before syncing back to Sage 100, keeping records consistent in both systems without manual double entry.

With Sage 100 data synced into Salesforce, Empire Distributing's outside sales team can pull up three years of financial history on an account before ever running a report, check real-time inventory on the spot when a customer asks about a different product, and log quotes and orders on standard Salesforce objects instead of keying them into two systems. The marketing team uses the same synced account data in Pardot to trigger targeted campaigns, and the service team keeps records current knowing changes flow back to Sage 100 automatically.

Sullivan also credits the synced data with cutting down phone calls into the office and speeding up his own report-building, since Salesforce dashboards update live against real data instead of the static exports he was used to pulling from Sage. Reception from the sales team has been positive, particularly among newer hires who never had to unlearn an old process.