Working with clients is the core of Marsh’s business. As the world’s leading insurance broker and risk advisor, Marsh’s 45,000 employees provide clients in communities worldwide with insights, advice, and support to make their businesses better.
As Senior Vice President Finance for Global Operations, Kristen Jaffee ensures that Marsh’s finance operations support the company’s focus on client service. “We are overhauling the way our teams are organized, the technology that we’re using, and the way that we support our clients,” she explains. Part of that transformation involves sales compensation, incentive management, and planning processes.
Data at their fingertips
With the legacy systems used by Marsh, sales teams were frustrated by slow data delivery. “Our sales colleagues had to wait roughly 30 days to receive data,” explains Steven Guerrera, Vice President, U.S. Sales Compensation. Stagnant data on new opportunities, deals in process, and progress toward goals made it challenging for salespeople to prioritize the clients and activities that would deliver the greatest positive impact. Data issues also limited Marsh leadership’s ability to make informed decisions quickly and to adjust sales compensation plans to meet changing strategic initiatives.
The Marsh team selected Anaplan to address these challenges and help them extract value from existing data sources. They integrated Anaplan directly with Salesforce, enabling sales colleagues to model the value of their current pipeline in Anaplan and prioritize their work. A mobile Anaplan application solved the problem of stale data and enabled salespeople to view their current compensation status anywhere, at any time. “They don’t have to wait 30 days to see it,” Guerrera says. “They can see it today.”
Feeling the benefits
Marsh has cut the time salespeople need to reconcile transactions by about 50% with the Anaplan solution and can pay them more frequently now. “Our colleagues using the system can feel that benefit,” Jaffee says. “Our sales teams have become more motivated because they can see how lucrative any deal will be to them at any given point in time.”
Because sales teams and client advisors can navigate the sales process more efficiently, they can focus their attention on the important work that supports Marsh’s advisory mission. “Anaplan has enabled more time to be spent with clients,” Jaffee says, “which is how it should be.”
