Swinton

“Salesforce will be fundamental to shaping our future sales strategy and driving growth in the commercial insurance market.”

- Richard Beaven, Distribution Director, Swinton Business

Swinton Business boosts conversion rates and customer engagement

Swinton Group is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year and recently began working with Salesforce. The partnership has helped Swinton Business, manage new leads, and further its knowledge of prospects.

The company’s core business has predominantly been in the household and private motor insurance market. It has built up a reputation within the commercial arena over a number of years, and continues to increase its commercial insurance proposition. “We want to maximise the opportunities with SMEs and sole traders,” said Tony Monnington, Head of Commercial at Swinton. “We need to understand our customers’ challenges and develop insurance solutions that offer added value.”

Understanding the customer and their journey

Swinton Business prides itself on providing a professional, localised service by offering face-to-face interactions along with the ability to transact business over the telephone to accommodate all customers’ preferences. “The routes to market are changing,” explained Monnington. “Supporting multi-channel customer engagement is becoming increasingly important in our industry.”

With more people and more channels contributing to the sales cycle, Swinton needed visibility of both individual prospects and the overall pipeline. With multiple systems being used to capture information, Swinton needed to better understand its route to market and future opportunities. “We didn’t have the ability to manage our new business pipelines effectively, ” said Alex Bush, National Development Manager at Swinton. “We needed greater clarity and consistency around our sales processes, and better forecasting and reporting capabilities.”

Seamless implementation and adoption

It took the leaders at Swinton just 60 days to turn this situation around. “Following a robust tender process, Salesforce was identified as the provider with the best proposition,” said Bush. “The implementation was a great experience – we configured and embedded the new solution and trained the users in record time.”

Swinton created a group of user champions to ensure Sales Cloud, which went live in January 2017, met the needs of more than 40 customer relationship managers. “The feedback has been really positive,” said Bush. “We can now have more focused conversations about the commercial pipeline and any gaps.”

Unlocking new intelligence with central sales data

Every lead – whether it’s from an event, a customer meeting, or a cross-selling opportunity – is now logged in Sales Cloud. “We can see how many leads and prospects we have at every stage,” said Monnington. “In the past, our pipeline and forecasting information was logged in different spreadsheets. We had the intelligence but couldn’t access it quickly or easily.”

With Salesforce, Swinton has not only unlocked this intelligence but also entered the world of analytics. “We can evaluate which sectors to focus on and identify the market opportunities. We can also provide insurers with feedback on their products,” said Monnington.

Boosting personal development

Customer relationship managers can also run their own reports to check progress against sales quotas and demonstrate individual accountably. “Everyone wants to see their graph going up,” said Monnington. “With the Lightning dashboards, people can cut their sales data in lots of different ways.”

This data also feeds into staff development. With visibility of performance at an individual and national level, Swinton’s leaders can now see at what stage in the sales cycle they are losing prospects, and offer extra training to support customer relationship managers. “With Sales Cloud, we can achieve better outcomes at every stage of the customer journey,” said Bush. “As a business we have a responsibility to equip our people with all of the necessary tools to ensure their success.”

More quotes and more conversions drive growth

Swinton’s customer relationship managers have already clocked up a number of successes. As well as boosting quote volumes and conversion rates, they are spending more time with customers providing the all-important personal service that differentiates Swinton from other commercial insurers.

“Salesforce helps us focus on new business viability and broaden our knowledge of our current position, making sales managers more organised and the sales process more transparent,” said Bush.

For Bush and Monnington, however, this is just the beginning. They are now looking at integrating Sales Cloud with other internal systems to bring even greater efficiency and agility to the business. “Salesforce will be fundamental to shaping our future sales strategy and driving growth in the commercial insurance market. It puts us ahead of the game,” said Richard Beaven, Distribution Director.