Standard Life CIS targets three times more intermediary customers with Salesforce CRM

Full Case Study

How do you manage close, lucrative relationships with more than 16,000 financial intermediaries scattered across the U.K.? That was the challenge facing Standard Life, a leading global financial services provider. Salesforce CRM has been deployed to the company’s centralized intermediary sales teams and has proved to be an immediate hit.  Not only is it being used by 100 percent of CIS staff, the system is providing a single, unified profile of U.K. Independent Financial Advisors (IFAs), allowing Standard Life to increase intermediary visibility, sales productivity and effectiveness. Using Salesforce CRM to segment and analyze sales plans, Standard Life was able to identify and target almost three times more IFA customers, thereby de-risking the business and creating a platform to do more business. Moreover, compared with last year, the CIS sales teams increased sales by 15 percent faster than their field sales counterparts.

Independent Financial Advisors (IFAs) are the gateway to Standard Life’s success. There are approximately 16,000 IFAs in the U.K. and these professionals who render investment advice and financial planning services to individuals and businesses form as much as 90 percent of Standard Life’s business. Standard Life Intermediary Sales (UK) has formed a Centralized Intermediary Sales (CIS) division to more effectively exploit this crucial community and share the sales burden with the existing field-based Account Management sales teams. One CIS team provides sales support through in-bound call management; a second team has defined sales targets relating to in-bound and out-bound calls to a universe of up to 8,000 IFAs; and a third team of telephone-based sales Account Managers are targeted to develop long-term, intimate relationships with 200 of the most important IFAs.

The challenge facing CIS was how to effectively target, acquire, and retain business with the 16,000 IFAs. Prior to deploying Salesforce CRM, CIS had an inconsistent contact management strategy, customer data was scattered in different systems, market intelligence was difficult to extract, and the campaign management was clumsy.

For Lawrence Cook, National Sales Manager with Standard Life, the incentive was to introduce a cost-effective, cloud-computing customer relationship management (CRM) system quickly. “We needed it to go live as quickly as possible and didn’t want to be caught up in months of system development, testing, and deployment,” he explains. "Salesforce CRM is proven among thousands of customers both in the financial sector and elsewhere to be quick and easy to roll-out.  The cloud-computing model means our teams can be productive almost immediately. When we first looked at the system, the salesforce.com team showed how the screens could be developed right in front of our eyes. The other great appeal of Salesforce CRM is its ease-of-use: quite frankly, if you can use Google, you can use Salesforce CRM."  

Achieving 100 Percent User Adoption

With the decision made, the next step was to develop an effective roll-out plan which would have the CIS sales teams productive as quickly as possible. Cook explains, “Working with Salesforce.com Consulting, we began by mapping out the best practice sales processes. We identified two expert users at headquarters to mastermind the deployment, and because it was a business-led solution—not an IT initiative—the business could get what it needed almost straightaway. It was also important to win the ‘ hearts and minds’ of the users, because for us nothing less than 100 percent adoption was good enough. And that’s what we’ve subsequently achieved."

Standard Life has implemented Salesforce CRM to 80 staff in CIS. At a basic level, it provides the teams with a shared, unified view of the crucial information associated with each and every IFA, including contact information, call history, and sales pipeline opportunities. But it goes considerably further than this: Salesforce CRM is also being used to develop the overall sales strategy for CIS. Sales managers can view which accounts individual CIS sales executives are devoting most time to, where the IFA opportunities lie, and where the teams are succeeding. Armed with this information, Standard Life CIS is able to target resources where they have the most impact. 

“In one instance, we were able to see that one team was devoting 60 percent of their time to seven percent of the IFAs. They were targeting the right IFAs, but it was draining our resources,” says Cook.  “Elsewhere, Salesforce CRM has directly changed our operational sales processes. For example, the single view of the sales situation showed us that IFA support enquiries were going straight to sales Account Managers and we’ve now diverted these directly to the appropriate support teams. That ensures a more productive use of our resources and a more responsive and rewarding service for our IFA customers.” 

Instantly Segment Groups of Customers According to Multiple Criteria

Improved segmentation has been one of the early successes of this strategic, multitenant program. Standard Life CIS is now able to instantly segment different groups of customers according to multiple criteria, such as their value to the company, geography, size, and sales history. For example, executives now have analytical insight into individual sales people’s performance against segments that the company ‘understands’ (IFAs that Standard Life knows about and which do some business with the company), ‘open’ segments (IFAs that do incrementally more business with the company), and segments it wants to ‘maintain’ (IFAs that are targeted to do more business with Standard Life).

The results so far have exceeded all expectations. Last year, Standard Life had 92 premier IFA accounts, identified and targeted through a fog of different systems and databases. Now, however, using Salesforce CRM to segment and analyze sales plans, the company has 266 premier IFA accounts. "By helping Standard Life to identify and target almost three times more IFA customers, Salesforce CRM is de-risking the business and creating the platform for us to do more business," says Cook.

The CIS team is also giving the field-based sales teams a run for their money! Compared with last year, the CIS has increased sales by 15 percent more than field sales. “There hasn’t really been any major change in the sales processes between the two divisions—the only differentiator has been our deployment of Salesforce CRM, so we see that as the major contributor to his 15 percent increase in sales growth,” he adds.

The system has recently been extended with the introduction of an AppExchange application (SmartFocus email marketing). The app was quickly tested and seamlessly integrated with Salesforce CRM, which provides further proof of Salesforce CRM’s speed of deployment and ease of use. "The productivity of our new hires is picking up. It used to take them nine months to get up to speed with selling in CIS, but with Salesforce CRM we've reduced this to seven months."

Cook concludes, "A Siemens executive famously once said, If Siemens knew what Siemens knows - the implication being that if somebody at Siemens has a question, somebody else in the company is likely to know the answer. The difficulty lies in putting the two together. That’s exactly what Salesforce CRM gives us: it’s the glue that ties together all our information so it can be shared and used for effective business success."