Case Study

Reinventing the client journey

Using a digital, analytics-driven platform to enhance our client relationships and grow our business

Call for change

"In the past, our customer relationship journey relied on systems that were disconnected and inconsistently used. Today, by integrating our leading practices into Manage mySales, our teams are better able to share data and use it effectively."

— SARA PORTER, Managing Director – Sales & Pricing Performance, Accenture

When tech meets human ingenuity

Here are some of the milestones in developing and launching Manage mySales:

Implement the foundation

Manage mySales is based on the Salesforce platform using standard capabilities with customized enhancements. Implementation of the “base” Manage mySales solution involved bringing together sales data across numerous applications to streamline, simplify and integrate the sales management processes. Using a new cloud-based infrastructure, the solution has full mobility and can be used anywhere, anytime.

Actively encourage adoption

The initial introduction of Manage mySales affected around 30,000 account team users. To help this large number of users to become familiar with the new solution quickly, we developed extensive training using job aids and videos and social media tools to offer learning tips—giving account teams the right level of support and information they needed, when they needed it.

Enable insights

Laying an application foundation and building comprehensive integration and automation created new opportunities to transform business processes and make previously unattainable insights available to account teams—all of which is now leading to new, post-digital value. We built a new business management application that provides a comprehensive view of an opportunity and enables online, real-time approval decisions. We implemented enriched core analytics to make opportunity comparisons against key metrics to see what’s happened, what’s changed and what’s projected in the future.

Drive intelligent decision making

Initially, we launched analytic sales capabilities to drive operational efficiencies. Now, we are equipping our teams with predictive analytics to help us make better business decisions. We aim to empower account teams to move from insights to actions more quickly and intelligently. For example, Einstein Analytics, a product of Salesforce, enabled us to develop indicators, such as our Win Probability Predictor, to help to predict the potential for deal success, and enable sales teams to take strategic actions to increase win probabilities. The model accurately predicts the ability to win an opportunity with 97% accuracy—in less than three seconds.

A single source of truth

Manage mySales has taken the standard features of Salesforce beyond a customer relationship management solution to provide data that is a single source of truth across our core business functions. And these capabilities are easily expanded.

In addition to our sales account teams, areas of the business taking advantage of Manage mySales include:

Marketing

In 2011, the Marketing organization consolidated more than 50 different databases into one using Salesforce.com for all its contact and campaign management.

In 2015, Marketing began sharing contact data from its instance with Manage mySales and fully migrated in 2017, enabling us to see the entire client experience—from prospective client to loyal customer. This 360-degree visibility enables client account teams to be predictive and agile in their response to clients’ changing needs. We have also introduced a data quality initiative, to make sure that contact information is complete and accurate, built an index to measure key fields and created a central team to support data management. Around 71% of all new contacts are created as Good or Pass as a result of the data quality initiative and 78% of contacts are rated as Good or Pass in the Contact Data Quality Index.

Marketing continues to expand Manage mySales’ capabilities through integrations: Oracle Eloqua, offering marketing automation; Cvent, an enterprise event management platform; internally developed Integrated Planning & Campaign Tool to automate the creation of marketing campaigns in Manage mySales; Smart Rooms which provides secure rooms for clients or for use by larger communities, as well as custom objects developed to meet specific Marketing and Communications business requirements, such as a Client Nomination functionality for events.

This robust data set feeds standard reporting and dashboards as well as Tableau CRM Analytics Studio dashboards.

Quality/Client Satisfaction

As with the other areas of our business, historically our client satisfaction activities were undertaken in a standalone application. Prior to Manage mySales, extensive housekeeping was required to keep account and client information current across multiple applications.

The quality and sales team understood the synergies of using a common contact repository where account and client contact changes are maintained centrally and available in real time.

Additional synergies included storing the outcomes at the account and client contact level in Manage mySales and making them easily accessible to sales, quality and account team members—bringing the voice of the customer into view.

While keeping data entry at a minimum, Accenture is able to share data and outcomes more easily and efficiently and gain deeper and more robust insights.

Ecosystems

Another area that has benefited from the client lifecycle data available from Manage mySales is our ecosystem team. Responsible for all partnerships outside of Accenture (from our longstanding relationships with SAP and Microsoft, to cloud partners and providers), the ecosystems team works with these partners to build and bring to market tailored solutions for clients. For example, take our living workplace solution that brings together technology (software and hardware) with human ingenuity around the employee experience to make sure that the workforce has the right solutions to deliver the right outcomes—from hire to retire.

By drawing on the data collected by Manage mySales—input from areas such as Sales, Quality/Customer Satisfaction and Account Planning—the ecosystem team is able to generate predictive analytic insights that help to inform where we target our next ecosystem solutions to clients. Having one enterprise store enables better applied intelligence and improves the success of our campaigns—resulting in more tailored solutions, improved client targeting and higher conversion rates. This data analytic approach has contributed to 38% growth rate in ecosystem-related business.

Accenture’s mission is to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity. And we match the technology innovations of our ecosystem partners with smart Accenture people to help clients reinvent their business.

We do this at scale, since we have hundreds of partners who specialize in all manner of solutions that meet the needs of a changing future. So much of our sales opportunities are about timing and suitability.

With a common data store in the cloud, we can see what’s happening and not only make better decisions for our own organization, but also improve outcomes for clients.