PwC’s digital transformation
In 2016, PwC set out to establish a new working environment that supported new ways of working across our entire organization—an investment that’s realized powerful, quantifiable business value.
All front office transformations have the potential to transform the business. However, a jarring 70% of them fail to do so. So as a tool for those of you just starting out on your journey, we wanted to share the method that allowed us to achieve real results.
The business case
Succeeding on our journey began with understanding our destination. What were we trying to do, and how? In other words, what was the business case? Well, we had one overarching goal: to grow the company, by employing tools and skill sets that would drive new ways of working.
To that end, we developed five methods:
Understand the business
Have a one-stop shop for opportunity, activity and competitor tracking to increase business visibility throughout the firm.
Leverage relationships
Understand who knows whom and when roles change, to serve the right client at the right time.
Enhance collaboration
Bring the best of the firm together to get our clients the right resources.
Drive insight
Increase in-app reporting capabilities and provide actionable insight.
Automate the mundane
Streamline repetitive, low-value or mission-critical tasks to increase team productivity.
As the world’s number-one CRM, Salesforce was strongly positioned to drive consistency across our complex, global network of firms, while providing the flexibility needed in certain regions. So selecting our platform was the easy part. Of course, we knew what the hard part would be—the numbers show most front office transformations fail due to lack of adoption and behavioral change.
Engaging our people
Yes, it’s people that make or break the initiative. So we knew we had to create a movement to get our teams to change the way they worked and embrace the vision.
With that in mind, we set five guidelines to support adoption:
We identified what we called our “Trailblazers,” and created a matrix of metrics through which to track them.
The proof is in performance
So how would we know if our investment had paid off? We collaborated with Salesforce’s Business Value Services team and formulated a strategy to get the answer. We identified what we called our “Trailblazers,” and created a matrix of metrics through which to track them. Who were our Trailblazers? They were the teams most faithfully employing the new Salesforce tools as intended.
When compared to average PwC teams, Trailblazers logged 163% more
opportunities, created 92% more contacts, collaborated on chatter 376%
more, accessed Einstein Analytics 9% more and leveraged automated client onboarding capabilities 130% more. The result? When it came to revenue growth, these teams of power users produced a whopping 14% growth compared to 4% posted by average teams.
...these teams of power users produced a whopping 14% growth compared to 4% posted by average teams.
Now, this data can be read in a couple of ways: either teams leveraging Salesforce’s full potential performed better, or high-performing teams craved powerful new tools to do their jobs more effectively. But either way, the impact on our business was extraordinary.
The wrap-up
We hope this overview was useful. And of course, if you’re looking for support as you set out on your journey, contact us today. After all, our expertise with digital transformation isn’t about theory, it’s about practice. It’s about the hard earned, hands-on experience that comes with navigating the largest single instance Salesforce implementation in the world—and doing so with success backed by stats.
In other words: We did it for ourselves, and we can help do it for you.
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