Stanbic Business Finance

The Challenge

Stanbic Business Finance operated across 12 regional offices in West Africa, each running its own spreadsheet-based tracking system for business lending pipelines. Deals were falling through the cracks between handoffs, forecast accuracy was near-zero, and the regional MD had no live view of the consolidated pipeline at any point in the month. The sales team were spending 3–4 hours per week manually collating status updates for weekly reporting.

Our Approach

We designed and implemented a Salesforce Sales Cloud environment tailored to Stanbic's business lending workflow — with custom pipeline stages matching their credit approval process, automated handoff tasks between relationship managers and credit analysts, and a live executive dashboard that aggregated deal status across all 12 offices in real time. Data migration from 12 separate Excel environments was handled with a purpose-built ETL process to ensure no historical pipeline data was lost.

The Results

Within 90 days of go-live, the average deal cycle had shortened by 62% — primarily through eliminating manual status-chasing between teams. The regional MD gained a consolidated pipeline dashboard that updated in real time. Forecast accuracy improved from ad-hoc estimates to data-driven weekly projections within the first quarter. The sales team recovered an average of 3.5 hours per week previously spent on manual reporting.