Cédric Gibiat leads Digital, Customer Marketing and Sales Performance for the brands of Saint-Gobain Distribution Bâtiment France (SGDBF). He explains to Soft Atlas why the company chose the Imagino CDP, how it relies on Snowflake and what this architecture changes in marketing and sales activation.
Before deploying its CDP, SGDBF had about twenty applications in its marketing and sales environment, and customer data was spread across many systems.
To bring coherence back to this whole, the company chose the Customer Data Platform from the French vendor 
Imagino.
About two years passed between the definition of the need and the actual deployment. In early 2026, the two main brands, Point.P and CEDEO, were in production; three other brands are being rolled out.
Beyond the choice of a tool, the project reflects an architecture philosophy: rather than multiplying point-to-point connections between business applications, SGDBF deployed Imagino in “no-copy” mode on Snowflake, the group's data platform. The CDP works directly on the data stored in 
Snowflake, without duplicating it, which avoids maintaining two separate customer reference databases.
Tools in this section
Why a CDP?
The starting point was the fragmentation of customer data. In addition to its ERP (SAP, called ATLAS internally), SGDBF relied on many SaaS solutions, internal applications and custom developments specific to certain brands.
The CDP also had to meet four other needs:
- bringing customer data up to quality standards and maintaining it,
- enriching customer knowledge,
- omnichannel activation,
- and managing consent and communication preferences.
Why Imagino rather than Salesforce Data Cloud?
SGDBF mainly compared Imagino with several solutions from American vendors, including 
Salesforce Data Cloud. “From my point of view, Salesforce's solution was not yet fully mature at the time,” says Cédric Gibiat. “It was probably broader in terms of features, but also more complex for our internal users to get to grips with.”
User experience weighed heavily in the decision.
Imagino was considered simpler for building audiences, targeting and creating campaigns. The goal was for the marketing teams of the brands, headquarters and regions to use the CDP on their own, without depending on the data teams.
Several criteria rounded out the evaluation:
- Proximity of the vendor: a French company that states its willingness to involve its customers in its roadmap,
- Robustness and adaptability: a vendor of sufficient size and a solution able to adjust to needs,
- Scalability: nearly 800 customer data fields, hundreds of thousands of customers and tens of millions of records.
Why bring in Converteo from the moment the need is defined?
SGDBF brought in Converteo for support even before writing the requirements document.
For Cédric Gibiat, this is one of the main lessons of the project: support should not start once the software has been chosen, nor be limited to integration. Keeping the same partner from the definition of the need through to deployment contributed, in his view, to the project's success.
How do Imagino and Snowflake work together?
The rule is simple: any new customer data need goes through Snowflake first before being used by Imagino. Integrating a source directly into the CDP, without going through the data lake, remains exceptional or temporary.
This rule has gradually changed the teams' reflexes.
“Our first reflex is to bring customer data into Snowflake. In fact, for the Marketing and Sales domains, both topics are managed in the same steering body.”
The benefit shows up above all in tracking campaigns and sales operations. If a piece of data used by Imagino is missing from Snowflake, it has to be retrieved and then reconciled to link a campaign's intermediate metrics (email deliveries and opens, for example) to sales. Centralized upstream, it is immediately available for dashboards and KPI tracking.
On the output side, Imagino feeds several systems: Dartagnan for email templates, SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) for the sales force, and Nextpulse, the “best-of-breed” e-commerce platform built in-house.
Linking online behavior and action at the branch
One of Imagino's most concrete contributions concerns omnichannel journeys. SGDBF already knew how to link digital and its physical network, but at the cost of more “plumbing” and asynchronous data exchanges between systems.
Now, online behavior can directly trigger an alert to a salesperson. A page visit, an email open or a click on a call-to-action are all signals. Once qualified as a hot lead, this signal is passed to the sales force in C4C to trigger a visit or another sales action.
Actito decommissioned by the end of 2026
The project also reduces overlap in the stack. SGDBF historically used 
Actito to send its email campaigns. The tool is being decommissioned, with a shutdown planned for the end of 2026, and Imagino is taking over this function. Dartagnan (acquired by 
Justrelate) is still used to design templates.
The CDP is therefore not simply added to the existing stack: it consolidates functions that until now were spread across several tools.
Next step: better connecting Imagino and AB Tasty
SGDBF uses 
AB Tasty for A/B testing and, increasingly, for personalization. The challenge now is to use Imagino's data and audiences in AB Tasty to further personalize the online experience.
This project extends the logic followed from the start: evaluating software on its features, but above all on its ability to integrate with the rest of the architecture.
Tools in this section
Summary of the software this article mentions in Saint-Gobain's stack
| Status | Workflow | Tool | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| In use | CDP / Marketing automation | imagino | Centralization of customer knowledge, segmentation, omnichannel activation and emailing. Deployed in no-copy mode on Snowflake. |
| In use | Data platform | Snowflake | Central foundation for storing and using customer data, with no duplication in Imagino. |
| In use | ERPCRM / Sales |  SAP | Internal ERP, notably a source of customer and transactional data.Passing hot leads and behavioral signals to the sales force. |
| In use | Email design | Dartagnan | Design of the email templates used in campaigns. |
| In use | A/B testing / Personalization | AB Tasty | Experimentation and personalization of digital journeys. Integration with Imagino audiences still to be built. |
| In use | E-commerce | Nextpulse | E-commerce platform built in-house, fed by Imagino. |
| In use | Data consulting / Integration |  Converteo | Support from the definition of the need through to the deployment of the CDP. |
| Replaced by Imagino. | Marketing automation / Emailing | ActitoReplaced by Imagino. | Legacy emailing solution, scheduled to be shut down at the end of 2026 in favor of Imagino. |
| Dropped | CDP | Salesforce Data 360Dropped | Solution compared with Imagino, considered at the time more complex and less mature in some respects. |
