The Salient Story
Salient began with a mission to gain control of the sales process at Elmira Pepsi Bottling Company. The President, Guy Amisano, Sr., who later founded Salient, understood that gaining control of this process was fundamental to addressing the issue of gaining revenue and volume but realizing no additional profit.
He set out to use the data available on invoices to:
- Provide a measure of value created or lost directly to each member of the sales force,
- Make sales accountable for the outcome of the process, as measured by gains in margin, and
- Allow the sales force to explore the underlying factors affecting the measure to understand the root cause.
He explored the technology available at the time and found that all available potential solutions lacked one or more of the capacities he was seeking: speed, simplicity, and specificity. It was at this point that he determined that he would hire programmers and develop a solution himself.
Once developed, the original solution (later named “Margin Minder”) was implemented at Elmira Pepsi Bottling. As part of the implementation, Guy informed his sales force that they would no longer be accountable for their activity, but only for producing the desired result – increased margin, as measured by the new system. In addition, he offered a generous incentive for improving this measure. As a result, Elmira Pepsi Bottling saw massive year-over-year increases in profitability, as the actions of the sales force became aligned with the desires of leadership.
Guy then sought to market the solution he had developed to companies in a similar situation in which he had originally found himself. Salient was founded in 1986, and soon afterward Margin Minder was introduced to the original Salient market: companies involved in direct-to-store distribution (DSD) of beverages. Initially, the company grew slowly, as the product was met with some skepticism by the market. Was it possible that a Pepsi bottler from the Southern Tier of New York had managed to create capability beyond that of the major tech players?
However, once Salient had implemented Margin Minder solution for early adopters, interest and sales started to explode, eventually capturing majority market share. By the late 1990s, Salient found itself as a highly profitable company, but it had achieved near saturation of the target market for the Margin Minder product.
A decision had to be made: retract and maximize the profits of this success, or pursue growth in new markets?
Guy realized that the fundamental characteristics of the Margin Minder solution, and the management methodology they were designed to support, were not specific to beverage distribution. In fact, these characteristics, once abstracted, were nearly ubiquitous across industries and processes. However, Margin Minder itself was coded from the ground up to be specific to one business segment.
The decision was made to develop a platform – one that embodied the characteristics that made Margin Minder so impactful, but that could be applied across industries and processes.
This development effort resulted in the introduction of the first instance of Salient’s current platform – Salient Universal Exchange and Transfer (UXT). It was designed to preserve and expand upon the learnings from Salient’s past about maximizing speed and flexibility while preserving detail in the end-user experience. It was also designed to capture the abstracted components of all transactional business processes – cost, revenue, margin, frequency, volume, and conditional factors.
Once the Salient UXT platform was developed, Salient was positioned to expand across a huge number of potential markets… and expand it did. The early 2000s saw Salient develop solutions for ancillary segments of the DSD market, as well as segments of retail, manufacturing, wholesale, county government, public health insurance, healthcare providers, educational institutions, and others.
In order to design and implement solutions for these markets efficiently and effectively, Salient developed a consulting process for driving the development of new applications, referred to as the “alignment process”. This process was meant to re-create the focus of the Margin Minder product identifying leadership’s definition of “value” within core processes and mapping the components of those processes to Salient’s management methodology. The intent of the alignment was that the information collected would drive the downstream design and development of new solutions.