“The key to success in a digital transformation is to make it fun. It's to make it so that people want to be part of that transformation.”

Change is hard. But change is particularly hard when you’re in charge of an ambitious global digital transformation journey. Christine Robertson, the sales, communications and marketing leader at PwC Canada, understands this all too well, having found herself at the helm of PwC’s efforts to become a digitally enabled network of firms

PwC dates back to the 1800s, but they’ve gradually expanded their business offerings to include technology consulting, as well as advisory, audit, and tax. As PwC increased its global footprint, each new region created processes and systems that were uniquely tailored to its local culture. This ultimately resulted in siloed regional offices, disparate technology systems, and complex multi-layered structures. These disconnects hindered the firm’s ability to globally collaborate, which presented real challenges for other leaders like Reggie Walker, Chief Commercial Officer at PwC US.

“For us to serve our clients better into the future and meet their expectations, we needed to bring our network together,” Walker said.

PwC established a global strategy to help the network become a digitally enabled organization better able to thrive in the digital revolution. This shared vision would enable PwC to harness its internal consulting expertise and transform its sales and marketing operations to ultimately better serve its clients.

PwC chose to go with a single, globally shared deployment of Salesforce. “We know Salesforce is the leading platform,” Robertson said. “But digital transformation isn’t only about technology. The people part is the hard part.”

She was referring to the almost-universal challenge that cripples most digital transformation projects: getting people to adopt new technology and new ways of working. According to Forrester, a majority of digital transformations fail to generate positive returns. Of those failed transformations, 70% are due to a lack of user adoption and behavioral change.

As a relationship-driven company, PwC knew it needed to focus on getting its people to adopt this new system. That meant building a gold-medal team of specialists with a breadth of expertise to drive the transformation and securing full leadership buy-in, all to help foster a culture that readily embraces using Salesforce to better respond to the needs of their clients. If Salesforce technology was a car, PwC needed to create a workforce that was excited and interested in learning to drive.

At the start of the journey, PwC partnered with the Success Cloud Expeditions team to co-create a vision for adoption, including developing engagement models and determining KPIs to measure success. Through this process, they discovered some universal threads across the breadth of learning styles within PwC’s workforce.

“People get bored. If you look at adult learning, no one wants to sit in a classroom or join a webinar,” Robertson said. “We needed people to learn new behaviors without using traditional learning models. We had to make it fun.”

Through human-centered design techniques and applied behavioral science, PwC’s team of specialists channelled their consulting expertise to create a variety of highly personalized and fun learning tools. This included everything from interactive escape-room sessions, to white glove, one-on-one coaching, and guided in-app learning.

“The escape-room sessions had amazing feedback in Canada. So then we thought, how do we scale this to Brazil or Sweden or Africa?” Robertson said. “We couldn’t do one-size-fits all, so we focused on testing and iterating to get models that worked.”

While PwC continues to roll out its sales and go-to-market transformation globally, member firms have seen astounding success already with 14 deployments in 87 countries. Currently, more than 65,000 users are live on Salesforce.

PwC’s focus on prioritizing user adoption paid off: over 90% of key internal stakeholders logged in within the first week of the UK’s go-live. There was a 151% increase in the value of recorded opportunities during the first month. In the US, sales pipeline grew 300% in 2017 due to Salesforce adoption. PwC has noticed that client teams with the strongest adoption are winning 8-10% more business.

Now, more than 80% of the network’s revenue is captured in Salesforce, enabling network-wide visibility into the global sales process. The member firms saw a 25% increase in won opportunities in the first year of transformation.

The people-first approach has successfully helped leaders like Reggie Walker drive adoption and equipped them to better service their clients’ own digital transformation projects. “We are reimagining our client experience, and viewing our customers differently than before,” Walker said.

Learn more about PwC's people-centric approach to digital transformation

Download the whitepaper

PwC’s partnership with Success Cloud was instrumental to its transformation journey. The Success Cloud Expeditions team provided invaluable expertise in the Salesforce platform and astute business knowledge in the sales ecosystem.

“We’ve only begun to unlock the power of the PwC network, and we could not have achieved this without Salesforce,” said Robertson.