{{item.videoDuration}}
{{item.title}}
{{item.text}}
{{item.videoDuration}}
{{item.title}}
{{item.text}}
Can Marketing & Sales become the co-owner of customer relationship? Cmm 360 magazine discusses this topic with Dr. Michael Flaschka, Head of Growth & Innovation and Strategic Projects at PwC Switzerland and Director, PwC Europe Markets.
Your stated vision is to be ‘the most client-centric Big 4 firm’ worldwide. Why does PwC ascribe so much importance to client focus?
Continuous change and transformation are here to stay. We have to keep pace with that change. Companies across the board need to become more agile and respond dynamically to shifts in the market and new client requirements. This means you have to have an in-depth knowledge of your clients across the entire organisation, but especially on the market cultivation side.
Marketing must understand at all times where each client stands within the marketing and sales funnel and precisely how they think, feel and act. That then forms the basis for delivering a differentiated, client-centric 360-degree experience. It is only when we actively feel passionate about the challenges facing our clients – and indeed our clients’ clients – that we are able to truly understand their problems and offer them long-term solutions and results. This ultimately creates a differentiated client experience with PwC.
Click the image to zoom in
How do you put a vision like this into practice?
The starting point for our own transformation was a wide-ranging survey carried out among our clients. What we learned was that while they saw PwC as their preferred professional services provider with the best reputation on the market, they also found it increasingly hard to differentiate PwC’s services from those of its competitors. It also emerged that our clients’ business models were likewise transforming, and that we needed to expand our offering accordingly. We saw this as a clear call to action.
We embarked on our own transformation and set ourselves the ambition of becoming the best marketing and sales organisation on the planet. We also wanted to offer each and every client a unique, individual experience and rally our employees and clients together around our purpose – and boost our marketing and sales-driven revenues in the process. We brought this ambition to life with the help of three crucial levers: our strategy, our technology as well as our processes and people.
Off the back of this transformation, you have launched another one specifically for the entire Marketing & Sales organisation with the ‘Data-Driven Marketing, Lead Scoring and Performance Measurement’ project. What exactly can we expect from this?
Adopting a clear strategic focus, we have ensured that all activities within Marketing & Sales are geared around the design and implementation of a unique 360-degree client experience. We have moved all our activities in these units from ‘one-shot’ measures that were not clearly linked to success over to fully integrated end-to-end campaigns that cultivate clients along the entire length of the marketing and sales funnel, from awareness and image through to consideration and ultimately purchase and loyalty. We have also clearly defined the content of marketing and sales activities to focus on the major themes that will determine PwC’s own future success and that of our clients. These themes are based on megatrends and support our clients in their own transformation processes.
We have supported this new direction with the requisite technology, building a fully integrated ecosystem that covers all the relevant client contact points and enables Marketing & Sales to co-own the client relationship. By combining Salesforce’s Sales and Marketing Clouds, we know when and where our clients get held up and which channels we can use, at what time and in what way to best address them and take our relationship to the next level. Alongside the technology, we have invested heavily in new processes and mindset change throughout the entire organisation. We have built connections within the company, ensuring that the seamless external experiences enjoyed by our clients mirror the internal reality within our organisation – bringing all the relevant units together and eliminating any barriers that existed. We have undertaken extensive training and development to ensure that our employees are digitally enabled and have full transparency over all sales and marketing activities at all times via Salesforce. This means that any PwC employee can access the relevant insights and key information for all existing and potential clients, e.g. following in-person contact – all in real time.
You talk about creating transparency throughout the global Marketing and Sales organisation and across all processes. How do you achieve transparency, and why is it so important?
You don’t achieve transparency through a new strategy, revised processes or new technology alone. It takes a client-centric mindset. Every employee in an organisation needs to understand that they can make a vital contribution to a perfect client experience. This understanding of a company’s entire value chain makes it possible to deliver a unique experience for clients and, in combination with a suitable platform, produces transparency regarding the marketing function across the entire business. We decided on Salesforce for this platform. Salesforce Sales Cloud, the CRM system, is fully integrated with the Marketing Cloud and with all relevant applications and studios. The analytical tools in the Salesforce ecosystem play a central role, enabling us to draw findings and action recommendations for our employees out of the growing volume of data. Client and solution-specific dashboards that give a 360-degree view of our clients are central to the acceptance of this digital solution and to the transformation process as a whole.
You can only create transparency with a customer-centric mindset. Everyone in the organization needs to understand that they can make an important contribution to the perfect customer experience.
Which KPIs do you measure today, and why? What promise do they hold, or in other words what do you want to read in these dashboards?
The most important KPI is courage. The courage to try new things, to make mistakes – and to learn from these and so keep getting better. For every end-to-end campaign, we strive to see this mindset reflected in the marketing and sales-driven revenues. That is the truest and toughest test of marketing: the direct impact at client level. We also use all relevant marketing and sales KPIs for each individual dimension of the funnel. As a general principle, what matters is not the absolute level of the KPIs, but the comparisons with the previous quarter – have we learned from our mistakes and properly implemented the lessons – as well as the comparisons across measures. In this way, we ensure that we are always competing internally to achieve the best implementation and that our own internal improvement process doesn’t grind to a halt.
Have you rethought any KPIs following the transformation? Any redefinitions?
We have reviewed all our KPIs and adapted our entire market cultivation logic to the marketing and sales funnel in a way that is easy for everyone to understand. We have also made use of the opportunities posed by the technology. The integration of web and social platforms now enables the effectiveness of each individual measure – even one focused on something like awareness or image – to be defined in concrete terms and linked to the marketing and sales-driven revenues calculated by the system. For the first time in its history, this makes marketing a controllable discipline with clear input and output factors. Client-specific KPIs such as customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty also play a central role. We are currently working on making the client experience even more success-linked and measurable throughout the marketing and sales funnel via suitable KPIs, and from a system point of view linking Qualtrics, our global CX solution, with our Salesforce platform.
Are you able to say today that you know about points of contact with potential as well as existing clients? Are you able to share your first measurable results with us?
We know when existing and potential clients get held up at the different contact points and what they do or don’t do, enabling us to build an increasingly detailed profile. At the risk of exaggerating, it takes just a few interactions and the addition of artificial intelligence to be able to say for almost any client what their habits are, when they get up in the morning, and at what time on what day of the week they would be most receptive to a marketing measure. In all, the transformation of our market cultivation activities enabled us to grow our marketing and sales-driven revenues by more than 20%. And for the first time, we were able to achieve transparency with all relevant stakeholders about the effectiveness of each individual campaign and the impact of our market cultivation activities as a whole. That is a quantum leap forward for the way in which we are perceived internally: from a cost centre to an investment case. The question for the management is no longer where can we cut costs, but rather where does it make sense to invest more?
The question in management is no longer: Where can we reduce costs, but: Where does it make sense to invest more?
How did you bring your employees along with you on your transformation journey and build the mindset?
Changing the mindset is the biggest, most important challenge on the road to living by client-centricity. This is a never-ending road. At PwC we have developed an incentive system with an optimum mix of carrot and stick. We must always start with the carrot. The first step in the transformation must always be easy and spark joy. Employees must inspire and reinforce one another. Bureaucratic hurdles need to be broken down and should not adversely affect behaviour. Once critical mass had been reached, we then gradually introduced more painful elements. We have had particularly good experiences at PwC with the gamification route. PwC employees love to compare themselves against one another and strive hard, for example, not to be in the lowest third of the rankings for the use of Salesforce, number of contacts or leads generated. Small challenges and games are enormously helpful as a source of fun and recognition for employees, but they can also act as a kind of stick for those who don’t take part and end up at the foot of the rankings. Gamification also allows behaviour to be steered in the right direction and made transparent by awarding points for certain activities.
Where does client retention and loyalty fit in at PwC? Are the KPIs measured and followed up beyond Sales?
The hope is that client retention and loyalty are deeply embedded into every employee’s thinking. We measure this annually at PwC by means of a global survey of employee satisfaction, in which we ask not only about our purpose but about whether our strategy is understood and put into practice. This shows that client-centricity is not just a matter for the business generation side but for the entire company, making it also a responsibility of the whole senior management and leadership team. Regular client surveys and conversations regarding the value added and the client experience are held at individual client and project level. These are documented so that this information is widely available and becomes part of the organisational knowledge base. In reporting to management too, the client always comes first. All relevant KPIs across the marketing and sales funnel are shared on a continual basis, ranging from relevant media KPIs in connection with awareness to the corresponding earnings data and the results of the client satisfaction data that we obtain from our existing clients on an ongoing basis. This enables us to cover the entire experience and to consider all levels of the marketing and sales funnel, differentiating, for example, by company sales or industry or by criteria such as client role or seniority.
Looking to the future, what is next on this journey for PwC? Do you have any more projects lined up to help understand and serve our clients even better?
The journey is never over, and we seek to move forward with courage and to improve our ecosystem even further. We currently see tremendous potential in the application of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics. We want to keep making the client experience more and more personalised, and to appeal to a ‘segment of one’ in everything we do. That might mean, for example, addressing the client personally via our website or individualising their chatbot interaction. We also want to look to the future on our clients’ behalf: we can use predictive analytics to think ahead for them. This allows us to identify our clients’ specific future needs today before they even become aware of them, and to offer them suitable PwC solutions at an early stage.
For more information on the topic of customer transformation, please visit our website and get in touch with our expert Dr. Michael Flaschka.
Customer Transformation
Put customers at the center of your business. Then see what happens.
#social#
{{filterContent.facetedTitle}}
{{contentList.loadingText}}
{{contentList.loadingText}}
Contact us
Dr. Michael Flaschka
Director, Leader Growth & Innovation, PwC Switzerland and Markets Director PwC Europe, PwC Switzerland
Tel: +41 58 792 22 48
