How Hexagon improved sales efficiency, customer experience, and ABM with Complete Hierarchies

Highlights

• Established a trusted data foundation with Dun & Bradstreet and visualized multi-level account hierarchies in Salesforce with Complete Hierarchies
• Reduced duplicate account creation by giving sellers instant visibility into complex corporate structures and account context
• Improved collaboration by mapping full account teams across roles, enabling smoother handoffs and stronger land-and-expand motions
• Unified Sales and Marketing with account-based marketing visibility directly in Salesforce, aligning go-to-market efforts on priority accounts

Overview

Hexagon is the global leader in digital reality solutions, bringing together sensor, software, and autonomous technologies. Its Asset Lifecycle Intelligence division helps the world’s largest industrial organizations design, build, and operate facilities that are safer, more efficient, and more sustainable.

By unlocking data and accelerating digital maturity, Hexagon enables customers to modernize projects, boost productivity, and advance their sustainability goals.

The Challenge

Hexagon’s Sales Operations and Enablement team carried the responsibility of equipping sellers with the right tools, processes, and methodologies to break into new markets. But their efforts were undercut by poor master data management in Salesforce.

The team struggled to create, maintain, and enforce accurate, consistent, and complete account data, which made scaling into new territories far more difficult than it needed to be.

Bad data drove operational inefficiency

Hexagon sells to some of the world’s largest enterprises, including mega-corporations like Shell, with hundreds of subsidiaries and sites beneath them.

However, due to the lack of master data management, Hexagon had thousands of duplicate accounts in its Salesforce environment and no way to determine which ones were right or wrong.

In many cases, subsidiaries had different names from the global parent company, making fuzzy matching near impossible.

When our sellers were looking for an account to associate an opportunity to, they would either spend time Googling or just create a duplicate — and that was our big problem.

We had folks creating duplicate accounts, thousands of them a month, around the world.

Eric Chapman, VP of Sales Operations and Enablement at Hexagon

Inconsistent hierarchies negatively affected customer experiences

The lack of master data management also hurt customer relationships. Hexagon’s Marketing and Sales teams couldn’t easily identify net-new accounts within a hierarchy or confirm whether parts of a corporate family tree had already been penetrated.

At the same time, Hexagon’s acquisitions added more specialized sales teams, each bringing its own selling approaches.

We had many disparate selling approaches.

There were different types of negotiations happening in the same account structure and we were setting up multiple contracts instead of applying one MSA to all the subsidiaries.

Eric Chapman, VP of Sales Operations and Enablement at Hexagon

As a result, different teams negotiated separately with the same customer, often setting up multiple contracts instead of consolidating them under a single master services agreement.

Customers went unrecognized, leading to confusion, inconsistent experiences, and even difficulties with support cases and invoice collections.

Solution

For starters, Hexagon turned to Dun & Bradstreet to establish a trusted data foundation. This gave the team reliable DUNS numbers to anchor its master data strategy.

But they still needed a way to make that data usable inside Salesforce — one that sellers could easily understand and act on. That’s where Complete Hierarchies stepped in to help.

Before, I was frustrated with the fact that we couldn’t see the account hierarchy in Salesforce.

Complete Hierarchies is great in terms of being able to take DUNS numbers on a page and turn it into something that the business can understand and use.

Eric Chapman, VP of Sales Operations and Enablement at Hexagon

Gained 360° visibility into complex accounts

With Complete Hierarchies, Hexagon could finally visualize multi-level account hierarchies directly in Salesforce. Hexagon’s reps no longer had to search across the system or waste time piecing structures together.

Instead, they could see an entire corporate family tree on one page. This visibility dramatically reduced duplicate creation and Hexagon’s gave sales team instant context when working with large accounts.

We’ve slowed duplicate creation down considerably by using Complete Hierarchies.

Eric Chapman, VP of Sales Operations and Enablement at Hexagon

Strengthened collaboration across account teams

Hexagon also used Complete Hierarchies to bring stability and clarity to account ownership.

Teams could now add every role tied to an account — from primary sellers and presales to solution architects, ADRs, CSMs, and renewal specialists.

Even as acquisitions brought in new sales teams, accounts remained consistent and visible. Everyone associated with an account or opportunity could see who else was involved, which improved collaboration and reduced overlap.

With enriched account information, sales teams could identify whitespace, pursue land-and-expand opportunities, and validate whether colleagues were already working with a target account. Renewal specialists also gained the visibility needed to support sales reps and find the next best point of entry.

Now that [reps] have all this enriched information about the account, the account team, and a full view of the account and its subsidiaries, they can go do whitespace-hunting and start to land and expand.

Eric Chapman, VP of Sales Operations and Enablement at Hexagon

Aligned sales and marketing on ABM strategy

Complete Hierarchies also allows users to see which accounts are tagged for account-based marketing, giving different teams awareness of which accounts sales and marketing leaders are trying to penetrate.

Now, both sales and marketing leaders could align on the same set of priorities.

Instead of passing around PowerPoints or offline files, teams shared one clear view of which accounts to target, where to penetrate, and what parts of the portfolio to lead with.

In the past, [ABM] was all just done through PowerPoints and offline files. Now they can see all that ABM information together in Salesforce, which is well beyond what we originally intended Traction Complete and D&B to solve. It’s an added benefit.

Eric Chapman, VP of Sales Operations and Enablement at Hexagon

The Final Word

Complete Hierarchies allowed Hexagon to take their master data and turn it into visual, actionable account hierarchies in Salesforce. It could finally understand where different subsidiaries belonged and what kind of land and expansion opportunities existed in its accounts.