At a glance
| Industry | Software / Digital Signage |
|---|---|
| Location | Eden Prairie, MN |
| Employees | 40 • ~$10M revenue |
| Products | Salesforce Sales Cloud Service Cloud Operations |
| Integrations | Ingram Micro BlueStar BigCommerce (in progress) |
Executive summary
Wand Digital had been on NetSuite for over a decade — paying approximately $100,000 per year for a platform designed for $100M+ companies, requiring external specialists for every workflow change, and running in parallel with a Salesforce sales environment the team had already been using for five years. The business was growing rapidly, but the infrastructure was actively working against it.
SMBHD helped Wand Digital consolidate entirely onto Salesforce using an in-person discovery visit to identify the highest-impact vendor automations, and aligned the implementation roadmap to the company’s quarterly EOS/Traction operating cadence. Two years in, Wand Digital has nearly doubled its customer base, tripled its managed endpoints, and added only a handful of staff — with a continuous improvement engine generating 3–4 new automations every two weeks.
Key outcomes
The business problem
Wand Digital is a 41-year-old software company based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, providing scheduling, content management, and digital signage solutions to quick service restaurants, corporate dining facilities, universities, and hospitals — serving recognizable brands like Dairy Queen, Cinnabon, Caribou Coffee, and Auntie Anne’s, while managing digital signage across roughly 300 universities in the US and Canada.
As the company scaled under COO Dave Kemp’s leadership, a decade-long dependency on NetSuite was creating a three-way drag: a platform costing $100K/year designed for businesses ten times Wand’s size; a tech stack split between NetSuite and Salesforce requiring constant synchronization; and a system so technically demanding that any automation improvement required external specialists. A difficult contract renegotiation, in which Wand Digital felt dismissed as too small to matter, removed any appetite for a hybrid integration approach.
The challenge
- $100K annual cost for diminishing returns: NetSuite’s enterprise pricing was designed for $100M–$1B companies — delivering a fraction of that value to a $10M business
- Automation required external specialists: any workflow improvement required a third-party NetSuite partner, making the platform expensive and slow to evolve
- Fragmented tech stack: sales on Salesforce for 5 years, operations on NetSuite — constant synchronization burden with no single source of truth
- Manual vendor integration overhead: logging into Ingram Micro and BlueStar portals and manually importing data consumed 30–60 minutes per employee per week
- System speed as daily friction: NetSuite’s response lag on every click and dropdown was perceptible and cumulative across every user, every day
- Damaged vendor relationship: contract renegotiations left the team feeling like a burden, removing any interest in a hybrid integration approach
The solution
SMBHD implemented Salesforce as a unified platform for sales, operations, support, and accounting — consolidating the previously split NetSuite/Salesforce environment into a single system the team could operate and extend without specialist dependency.
- Salesforce as unified platform: sales, operations, support, and accounting consolidated; five years of existing Salesforce account data preserved and extended
- Ingram Micro and BlueStar integrations: automated PO processing, serial number tracking, and shipping notifications — eliminating 30–60 min/employee/week of manual portal work
- Internal improvement submission process: staff submit automation ideas via Salesforce form; operations manager implements 3–4 per week within two weeks
- Support case management: scaled from 50 → 100 tickets/week with only one additional Level 1 hire in 5 years
- Automated customer communications: delinquent account messaging, payment reminders, and operational notifications built and managed internally
- BigCommerce integration (in progress): automating inbound e-commerce orders directly into Salesforce
The results
The speed improvement alone was transformative. NetSuite’s response lag disappeared. Dave described it as roughly ten times faster, and the impact on case ticket creation, installation checklists, and sales order processing was felt immediately, before a single automation was deployed.
The vendor integrations recovered 30–60 minutes per employee per week. The company maintains a 92% answer rate within 90 seconds on its support line. The internal improvement submission process — five requests per week, three to four implemented within two weeks — has created a continuous improvement engine that runs without external dependency.
“We take little tiny bites out of every process and say, is there a way to improve this? Nobody cares about 10 seconds until that 10 seconds becomes a minute and becomes an hour. Pretty soon you’ve basically created an additional person’s worth of time.”
AI readiness
- AI Assist for support calls: real-time panel surfaces answers and next steps during calls; targeting 10% reduction in 9.5-min average handle time, recovering 300+ minutes/week across the support team
- AI-driven menu generation (in testing): customer website, brand assets, and images fed into AI to generate starting-point menu designs — eliminating the blank canvas problem
- Agentforce for customer support (evaluating): clean, unified Salesforce data architecture makes Wand Digital an ideal candidate for AI-layer adoption without data remediation
- Mandate from leadership: if a business discussion doesn’t start with AI, it shouldn’t start at all — one of the most aggressive AI postures in SMBHD’s portfolio
How we worked
- Business case clarity before platform decision: SMBHD helped build a clear-eyed total cost comparison — implementation costs, sunk costs, and the true three-year ROI horizon Dave’s CFO needed to justify the investment.
- In-person workflow discovery: SMBHD’s team visited Wand Digital’s office to understand vendor operations firsthand. The Ingram Micro and BlueStar automations came directly from that on-site visit, not from a requirements doc.
- Discipline over scope: SMBHD reinforced Dave’s ‘little tiny bites’ philosophy — two or three things per quarter, executed well. Core functionality first, vendor integrations second.
- Aligned to EOS/Traction: the integration roadmap was aligned to Wand Digital’s quarterly ‘rocks’ process — each automation evaluated against a clear ROI threshold before commitment.
- Internal capability building: a key outcome was enabling Wand’s operations manager to build and deploy workflow improvements independently, without SMBHD or external specialists for every change.
