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Streamlined Sales Process Now on Track at Aon

Pat Speer April 1, 2008

AON takes its name seriously. Gaelic for ‘oneness,’ the insurance brokerage and risk management consulting firm recently completed a global initiative that consolidates sales and marketing efforts onto one platform.

With a multi-country footprint and a multi-lingual, multi-currency culture peppered with acquisitions, Chicago-based Aon Corp. knew its executive team needed to study the benefits associated with consolidating 30 disparate sales systems.

“There was no common sales process,” recalls Joe Demmler, Aon’s U.S. VP of marketing operations and its European director. “Each country had its own system. None were connected, and the systems had nothing in common. We wanted a common sales and marketing process to drive activity.”

Making sense of the sales process’ labyrinth of disparate systems resulted in the firm taking deliberate action to create a singular model. And time was of the essence.

“When Greg Case joined Aon [as CEO] in Spring 2005, Aon made other changes in executive management, bringing a new COO and a new CIO on board and, coincidentally, the technology organization within Aon became very busy driving costs out of the business.”

Reducing costs meant choosing a model that, for insurers, has grown in popularity in recent years, especially among U.S. companies: software as a service (SaaS). Not the ASP flash-in-the-pan of the past, SaaS is heating up, and is being hailed by some industry experts as having the potential to change the software landscape.

In fact, the worldwide the SaaS market is expected to grow $19.3 billion by year-end 2011, according to research consultancy Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn. The insurance SaaS market in Europe is 13 million euros this year and will grow at a solid rate over the next five years to reach 53 million euros, according to Celent LLC, a Boston-based research firm recently acquired by Oliver Wyman.

SLOW BUT ACCELERATING

“The uptake of SaaS by insurers has been slow but is accelerating,” notes Celent senior analyst Catherine Stagg-Macey from the firm’s London office. “There are a number of reasons why SaaS can make commercial sense to the buyer, including lower costs and reduced downtime.”

Demmler admits that both those issues were deal-breakers for the brokerage as it evaluated vendors in the CRM space that could provide a system that would run on this global platform. “We needed a sales tool that could be customized, and we needed rapid deployment.”

Aon ultimately chose Salesforce.com, San Francisco, as its partner. With 38,100 customers worldwide across all vertical markets, Salesforce recently celebrated its millionth subscriber using its on-demand model.

“At the foundation of our offering is the concept of multi-tenancy,” points out Bruce Francis, Salesforce’s VP of corporate strategy. The analogy Francis offers is the typical office building, where the lights, elevator and heat are shared by various companies, yet where their employees have secure, discreet offices in which to execute their business plans.

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