The Challenge

Puratos already had a strong CRM foundation. The system was globally deployed, mandatory to use and central to how the business tracks visits, opportunities and commercial activity. The principle was clear: if a visit is not in CRM, it does not exist.

But in practice, CRM adoption was still difficult to sustain in the day-to-day reality of field sales. Artisan sales reps often complete between five and nine customer visits per day. Across the organization, Puratos sees around 90,000 customer visits per month and 32,000 customers visited monthly. Yet fewer than 10% of visits had notes, and less than 30% of sales reps’ time was spent on sales activities.

That created a major loss of frontline knowledge. Valuable insights from in-person conversations, including customer feedback, objections, competitor activity and market signals often remained undocumented. Sales reps struggled to capture insights immediately after bakery visits, while the conversation was still fresh. As a result, important information did not always reach the wider team, leading to weaker follow-up, missed opportunities and limited visibility into customer needs.

The challenge was not whether CRM mattered. At Puratos, CRM data is critical because it feeds Power BI, MLS reporting, leadership decision-making, resource allocation and other business processes. The real challenge was making CRM easier to update at the source, without adding more friction for sales teams whose priority is customer engagement.

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The Solution

Puratos introduced Donna as a proactive AI assistant for field sales, focused on helping reps prepare for customer visits and debrief immediately afterward. Instead of asking sales reps to spend more time manually entering notes, Donna gives them a voice-first way to capture information while they are still close to the customer moment.

The implementation was designed around the daily sales workflow. Before a meeting, Donna helps reps prepare with relevant CRM context, previous meeting information and structured guidance. After the visit, reps can debrief by voice, and Donna turns that conversation into structured CRM updates, visit notes, outcomes, follow-up tasks and emails.

This directly addressed the gap between strong CRM governance and the practical friction sales reps experienced. Today, Puratos expects high-quality CRM execution, but sales teams also need more time with customers. With Donna, Puratos can simplify CRM execution, increase adoption through lower effort, improve data quality at the source and prepare for future sales enablement use cases.

The rollout followed a focused POC approach. Puratos started with two teams of ten people in the US and Belgium, running from early April until the end of May. The wider implementation framework included functional scoping, a deep dive into the CRM environment, mapping of custom objects, fields and workflows, technical setup and testing, followed by group onboarding and training for the first sales reps.

“I've never had such a smooth integration with a project - I was so impressed with the team.” - Christophe Rigaux, Sales Operations & Digital Manager, Puratos

The adoption approach was intentionally wave-based. Puratos and Donna started with early adopters, using their enthusiasm and feedback to shape the experience and build credibility. From there, the plan was to grow with enthusiastic followers and eventually scale to the mainstream majority, moving from a limited-scope “crawl” phase to broader “walk” and “run” phases.

One early user captured the experience clearly after using Donna to prepare for a meeting:

“The experience so far has been great. She types up my verbal thoughts better than I could myself. She tied in the item number and the information that was in my CRM meeting notes already, organized my thoughts professionally and I was able to, with very little tweaks, send the pre-meeting prep email to the Puratos attendees.”

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The Impact

Donna is helping Puratos move from CRM compliance to CRM value. Instead of logging visits later, or leaving insights undocumented, sales reps can capture information immediately after the customer conversation. That means more insights make it into CRM, while they are still fresh, structured and useful.

The early results show clear movement in the right direction. After Donna’s implementation, the percentage of events with a filled outcome field increased by 35%. Meetings containing information doubled, and the average visit report became more than six times richer: from 141 characters to 873 characters.

For Puratos, this matters because every customer interaction contains information that can improve follow-up, pipeline quality and market understanding. With Donna, customer feedback, objections, competitor insights and next steps are less likely to remain trapped in individual conversations. They become part of a shared system of customer context.

“The sales team adopted the tool very easiliy.” - Christophe Rigaux, Sales Operations & Digital Manager, Puratos

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The impact also goes beyond data capture. By reducing admin friction, Donna helps sales reps spend more time on sales and less time on manual tasks. Better visit notes, cleaner outcomes and more consistent follow-up also give leadership stronger visibility into what happens in the field. This supports better coaching, better resource allocation and more reliable decision-making.

“We are evolving into an agentic future. Data will be key. And Donna directly impacts data quality.” - Christophe Rigaux, Sales Operations & Digital Manager, Puratos

Most importantly, Donna gives Puratos a practical path toward AI-powered sales enablement. The first use cases focus on preparation, debriefing and CRM adoption, but the foundation is broader: once high-quality field data is captured consistently, Puratos can build toward richer insights, smarter coaching and more proactive support for sales teams.

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