A global insurance broker brings 40+ business units onto one Salesforce platform

More than 40 business units, across LATAM, Asia, the US, EMEA and Specialty, are still to come onto the platform, and their sales and marketing tooling reflects that. Some run on spreadsheets and manual processes. Others sit on mature, heavily integrated CRM systems the business depends on every day. Company-wide, there are more than 30 different CRMs in use.

The hardest part isn't the platform, it's the integrations. No business wants to feel it's going backwards by moving onto a shared system, and the ones with mature setups have the most to lose. So onboarding can't be a mandate. It needs careful planning and a lot of honest conversation with each business about what it gains and what it gives up.

The group is also acquiring at pace, which means the assessment and onboarding process has to be as streamlined and repeatable as possible. My role is to lead the global assessment, make the trade-offs explicit, and give leadership a funded, sequenced plan to bring everyone onto one platform for pipeline, CRM and marketing, without stalling the businesses that already run well.

The programme runs in clear stages so every business is looked at the same way. It starts with leadership engagement: getting the sponsors in each region and business aligned on why the change matters and what good looks like. From there we run a full assessment of every sales and marketing activity, mapping how each unit works today, how mature its processes are, and how far it sits from the target model on Sales Cloud, Financial Services Cloud and Marketing Cloud Engagement.

Next comes the onboarding approach. For each business we evaluate the options, from a light migration to a full rebuild, weigh the integration work involved, and agree a route that doesn't force a mature team backwards. This is where most of the stakeholder discussion happens, and where a repeatable method earns its keep, because the group keeps acquiring and onboarding as it grows.

With the assessment and onboarding plan in hand, we move to funding allocation: sizing each onboarding, sequencing it against the rest of the programme, and giving leadership a clear line from spend to outcome so they can commit budget with confidence.

Funded businesses move into implementation, which follows a familiar cycle: detailed requirements, build, test, data migration, business change and training, then go live. It doesn't stop there. Each business then moves into adoption management, so the platform is genuinely used and the benefits, global data sharing, cross-sell and standardised CRM processes, start to land.

The immediate programme is around 20 people, and ramps up significantly as businesses clear assessment and move into build. Today roughly 3,000 users are live on the platform. The plan takes that past 13,000 as the 40-plus businesses come across.