Willis Towers Watson centralizes sales data, improves governance and predictability with Dynamics 365

Unified platform, unified company

Willis Towers Watson (WTW) brought together two renowned companies when it formed by merger in 2016. The company is a combination of Willis, a United Kingdom–based insurance broker, and Towers Watson, a United States–based risk management and human resource consulting firm. Now, WTW has 45,000 employees working in 140 countries.

WTW set up the Corporate Risk and Broking (CRB) unit, which accounts for about half the company’s operations, to blend its consulting business with its broker business. In the first years after the merger, the company focused on serving its existing clients. As time went on, WTW wanted to build more structure around how it managed clients and needed more consistency with its tools. The company used multiple customer relationship management (CRM) systems and a lot of spreadsheets to manage its sales processes. WTW liked the idea of using a unified global platform to gain a 360-degree view of clients, better collaborate across account managers and sellers, and nurture current clients while attracting new ones.

“We have aspirations to become even more connected as a company and to accelerate growth through standardized processes,” says Luis Maurette, CRB Global Head of Sales and Client Management at Willis Towers Watson. “We wanted a single process and single platform that would help us facilitate the interaction between business segments and regions.”

Large, fast CRM deployment

WTW already used many Microsoft technologies and decided to move its CRM tool to the cloud to access data easily from anywhere. The company is using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Relationship Sales (LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise) to support its digital sales processes and to help identify clients.

CRB began with a 24 percent adoption rate, but within a month of moving to the cloud with Dynamics 365 Sales, adoption increased to 67 percent by possible users. And by January 2021, it rose to 89 percent. More than 8,000 employees now use Dynamics 365 Sales, and the company wants its client-facing teams in all 140 countries where WTW operates to adopt it by mid-2021.

“In my 18 years at WTW, I don’t think we ever expected staff to adopt anything at above 80 percent, let alone a sales platform. It’s just outstanding,” says Jim Blaney, Head of Sales and Client Management for Corporate Risk and Broking in North America at Willis Towers Watson. “Our employees adopted Dynamics 365 Sales at a high rate because of its great usability and functionality. They continue to use it because they see the value of the tool.”

Data insights, targeted actions

The company also adopted Power BI for analytics and data visualization and connected its sales data to the finance team. Blending robust financial analytics with its sales activity gives WTW sellers, managers, executives, and others more visibility into the company’s sales pipeline.

“We’ve developed extremely sophisticated dashboards in Power BI, which we now use to manage the sales pipeline and actually forecast revenue,” says Maurette. “In January, we ran our numbers based on prior performance and predicted almost to the penny what the number would be for new business going forward. Probably very few companies have been able to do something like that.”

By tapping into the true value of Dynamics 365 Sales, WTW makes more data-driven decisions with consistency across the company rather than decisions based on guesswork. And the company has a deeper understanding of its clients and can better create targeted campaigns and deliver relevant, personalized services. For example, in conversations with any given prospect or existing client, the CRB sales staff knows what information to share about which core services based on a now highly accurate understanding of that prospect’s industry, geography, and size.

“Our clients buy from us for many reasons—most importantly, because we understand them,” says Blaney. “We can now target unique audiences because of data in Dynamics 365, and we’ve accelerated the sales process because clients recognize right out of the gate that we understand their needs.”

Increased leads

Having streamlined its end-to-end processes and established shared access to richer data, WTW now generates better leads and a lot more of them. Staff used to track client information in spreadsheets, then later transfer that data to a CRM tool. “We’ve started putting data in Dynamics 365 right from the beginning, and we identify more opportunities sooner with the highly effective, automated triggers in the sales process that come with the platform,” says Marcelo Fama, Head of Latin America CRB Ops at Willis Towers Watson.

Adds Amanda Duffield, Director, Corporate Risk and Broking, Great Britain, Willis Towers Watson, “I have 10,000 leads already going, and that’s just in Great Britain. We now have our whole sales lifecycle in one place, including the communications, leads, opportunities, and when an opportunity converts to a win. We have the whole ROI journey in Dynamics 365, which we’ve never had before.”

Continued innovation

WTW will continue to add more capabilities and new features to its sales process. For example, the company plans to adopt the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app (in preview). It also wants to tie its Microsoft Teams channels in closely with Dynamics 365 so that staff can store individual records in Dynamics 365 but have the option to edit them in Teams. WTW would like to put the powerful combination of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales in the hands of the whole company so that anyone from sellers to service agents can share and collaborate from within Teams or Dynamics 365 Sales without switching apps.

“We tested this Teams functionality with some operational leaders recently, and it went really well,” says Duffield. “It’s early, but staff understands the bigger-picture possibilities with collaboration from anywhere and how easy it is to connect another Microsoft product and maintain that continuity.”

Willis Towers Watson has spearheaded a lot of change, and this innovation will help the company maintain stability in the future. Concludes Maurette, “Willis Towers Watson is becoming more predictable in an industry that’s extremely unpredictable. We’re accelerating growth by running a reliable company and using Dynamics 365 and Power BI to make the right decisions to properly manage our business.”

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