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Case Study

Bongards Modernizes Quoting with Agentic AI and Salesforce Optimization

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Who We Are

Eide Bailly is a nationally ranked accounting and advisory firm bringing financial, operational, and technical solutions to middle market and high-growth organizations.

Bongards
Bongards Premium Cheese| Chanhassen, Minnesota

Bongards Premium Cheese — a farmer‑owned cooperative and cheese manufacturer with 100+ years of expertise — partnered with Eide Bailly to modernize its complex, spreadsheet‑heavy quoting and bidding process. With a lean sales team handling hundreds of quotes each year, manual entry had become an organizational bottleneck.


“A big focus for us was, how do we make it easier for the team to use?” said Evan Carlson, Vice President of Marketing. “How do we improve the effectiveness and adoption of the tool by aligning it even more closely to the realities of how it's being used?”


Using Salesforce Agentforce, Data Cloud, and intelligent automation, Bongards streamlined its workflows, reduced manual effort, and laid the groundwork for future AI innovation.

Key Results
  • Automated key workflows
  • Eliminated time-consuming manual processes
  • Increased capacity for higher-value work
  • Leveraged Data Cloud insights to enhance agentic AI guidance
  • Reduced risk of manual errors
  • Improved Salesforce adoption and user satisfaction
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Challenge

Manual Work, Confusion, and Bottlenecks

After nearly a decade on Salesforce, Bongards’ system had evolved into a “one‑size‑fits‑all” model that no longer reflected the realities of its quoting process.

Sales reps were toggling between Salesforce and external spreadsheets, entering pricing line by line — sometimes modifying every field on a quote just to update a single bid price. The issue was particularly painful for K-12 bid submissions, which often involved more than two dozen product codes. The K-12 team tracked bids outside Salesforce in a separate Google Doc, duplicating the same work across two systems.

The team size intensified the challenge. With only eight to ten core salespeople — and many only handling full-scale opportunities a few times a year — users frequently found themselves confused about which steps were required.

The launch of Salesforce’s new AI capabilities created an opportunity to rethink the entire system. Bongards aimed to simplify the user experience, improve efficiency, and better align Salesforce with how the team actually worked.

Strategy

A Streamlined, AI-Supported Salesforce Experience.

Eide Bailly has been Bongards’ accounting firm for years and supported the cooperative with a large-scale Salesforce optimization project in 2018. So when the time came to take their Salesforce implementation to the next level, Bongards knew exactly where to turn.

“We were very pleased with Eide Bailly’s approach to that project. So since that point, we've continued to use Eide Bailly as our primary or only technology partner when it comes to implementing Salesforce.”

Together, the teams rebuilt the quoting ecosystem from the ground up, introducing:

  • Custom opportunity types tailored to Bongards’ real‑world processes
  • Automated workflows to remove repetitive steps
  • Tier‑based pricing automation that eliminated the need for manual recalculation
  • Bulk product addition, replacing manual spreadsheet imports
  • AI‑powered support via Salesforce Agentforce, offering step‑by‑step guidance

One of the most transformative changes was importing pricing spreadsheets directly into Salesforce Data Cloud, allowing the AI agent to deliver real‑time pricing recommendations.

“It took a time‑consuming process — and a second time‑consuming process on top of it to review it — and essentially eliminated 95% of that effort,” Carlson noted.

With Agentforce embedded into quoting workflows, reps gained an intelligent assistant that evaluates completeness, identifies missing steps, and surfaces the most relevant product and pricing information.

“It’s like having a Salesforce specialist sitting over your shoulder,” Carlson said.


female employee talking to coworker

"We were very pleased with Eide Bailly’s approach to that project. So since that point, we've continued to use Eide Bailly as our primary or only technology partner when it comes to implementing Salesforce.”
 

— Evan Carlson, Director of Marketing | Bongards Premium Cheese

Impact

Time Savings, Improved Alignment, and a Foundation for the Future

The transformation has had immediate effects on efficiency and morale, especially in the bidding process. Bongards now saves an estimated 5-10 minutes per bid. With 450-500 bids processed annually, this adds up to roughly 40 hours of work saved during the four-month bid season.

Beyond the numbers, the team has felt qualitative improvements, including:

  • The K-12 team now tracks 100% of its work inside Salesforce, eliminating duplicated effort.
  • Cluttered screens were replaced with simplified, intuitive views.
  • AI guidance helps users feel confident about what they’ve completed and what still needs to be done.

For Bongards Premium Cheese, this initiative was far more than a system update — it was a strategic modernization effort. The organization now operates with a smarter, more intuitive quoting process that reduces friction, improves accuracy, and supports a growing customer base.

The project also opened the door for future AI initiatives. Bongards is already exploring how agentic AI could streamline other systems, including complaint management and reporting.

“It gave us an idea of what’s possible with AI,” Carlson said.

With a lean team and increasing demand, Bongards is better equipped than ever to focus on what matters most: serving customers, capturing new opportunities, and continuing to build for the future.

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