Grant Thornton looks to the AI-powered capabilities of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights to close new opportunities faster and win more deals

Nichole Jordan is National Managing Partner, Markets, Clients and Industry at the US member firm of Grant Thornton International, one of the world’s leading providers of independent audit, tax, and advisory services. As a member of the firm’s Senior Leadership Team and Chair of its Growth Committee, Jordan owns the vision behind Grant Thornton’s growth strategy, working to determine how the firm can provide the most value to clients through the use of technology.

In our interview with Jordan, she discusses how she got started in the industry, how it has changed since that time, and the steps Grant Thornton is taking to remain a leader—including how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and AI-powered capabilities from Dynamics 365 Sales Insights help the firm “connect the macro with the micro” to drive continued growth and performance. 

What attracted you to the industry, and how did you get started in it?

I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with an accounting degree and started my career as an auditor at Arthur Andersen. Ultimately, I made my way to Grant Thornton where I started as a senior manager in the audit practice. I am a CPA and have always taken a data-driven approach to things. I think it ties back to my dad being a math teacher and having math as a big part of our conversations as I was growing up.

What was the business like back then? Do you remember your first audit?

When I worked on my first audit, we were using pencil and paper—working on huge, 14-column worksheets. We would write out all the numbers and add up the columns, and that’s what the partners reviewed. If we missed a number, we had to erase everything and start over. It happened all the time.

How has the industry changed since that time?

Technology has really transformed the profession. While a lot of market dynamics have evolved and advanced, when it comes to the profession itself, it’s technology that enables us to accomplish far more today than we ever could before. We can consume, assess, and analyze large volumes of data, whereas in the past, we had to rely on sampling techniques and then apply the results to the entire population. The advances in technology have greatly improved the speed and accuracy of business decisions. 

So it’s all about data and analytics?

That’s half of it. Through modern analytics, we can take thousands or millions of data points and analyze every one of them, as needed, to understand the key drivers, trends, and outliers, which ultimately enables us to narrow our focus on the real risk areas. What is the data telling us? What are the key takeaways that can inform a client’s management decisions? Today, we spend our time on the insights, both within a client’s business and at a macro-level view of what’s happening across that client’s sector or industry.

If analytics is half of the recipe for success, what’s the other half?

The other element is being able to study and understand our clients on an individual and personal level. For example, knowing someone’s formal role in an organization, perhaps a buyer of financial services in the manufacturing industry, is just one small part of the picture. We also need to understand that person’s buying patterns, personal interests, professional network, and passions, along with the business interests and problems they’re trying to address—and then overlay the macro-level needs of the client’s unique industry and situation with the priorities of each buyer. It’s all about having the right conversation with a particular executive, which starts with identifying a 360-degree view of that person. 

What role does Dynamics 365 play in all this?

With Dynamics 365, we have tools that deliver insights on each individual buyer, so we can build lasting, trusted relationships that better serve their needs. Over time, this helps us bring more value to the partnership and increase our win rates.

We use Dynamics 365 as a hub for bringing together the macro and micro, making sense of it all, and determining the best next steps. We can do this because Dynamics 365 has all our customer relationship data, client satisfaction data, client loyalty data, and all the research that comes in every single day. And because it’s all in one place, we’re able to give our partners and other sellers easy, intuitive access to that critical information. We’ve been on Dynamics 365 for about five years and currently have about 3,000 employees using it day in and day out. 

What does LinkedIn Sales Navigator bring to the table?

Our partners use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for the background they need in order to take a more informed and personalized approach right when they walk in the client’s door. Before engaging in person, a partner can quickly discern a client’s needs and interests, what they’re posting about, the conferences they’re attending, the articles they’re reading, their professional network, and other aspects of their digital footprint and persona. Today, you can’t just go meet with someone for the first time and get to know them off-the-cuff. 

When we empowered people with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we saw an important correlation—our teams with the highest number of LinkedIn connections were also winning larger deals more frequently. It’s all a virtuous cycle: the more connections you have within a client organization, the more deeply you know that client. And the more that a client trusts we know and understand them, the more confidence they have that we can help them and the greater our ability to win.

What’s next on your roadmap, and what role do you expect Dynamics 365 to play?

We’re starting to look at how we can use AI-powered capabilities from Dynamics 365 Sales Insights to take things to the next level—by continuously analyzing the vast volumes of data we already have. It can help us further connect the macro to the micro, understand the health of our relationships and where new opportunities may lie, take actions based on those insights, and close new opportunities faster. We’ve already announced internally how we plan to use AI to help us build stronger relationships and identify and focus on those opportunities that we have the highest likelihood of winning.

Can you provide an example of how this might work?

I think Sales Insights will come into play in a lot of ways. For example, in New York, the banking industry had a particular regulatory issue on sales practices. If one team helps a bank in that region with that issue, by using Sales Insights features like the assistant, we can immediately get that information out across our other US regions to everybody who serves banks of a similar size. They then know that we just sold this kind of project and the specific outcomes that we can help them achieve. Through the power of AI, we can continuously examine the existing data in our systems and proactively share important information with partners across the country in real time. 

And then, using relationship analytics in Sales Insights, we can understand where we have highly satisfied clients who we may be able to leverage for referrals—and get that information out to our partners quickly as well. Could this bank in the Northeast help us get into a bank on the West Coast because our client was highly satisfied with the work that we’re doing? And when we identify opportunities at these other banks, how can we use the predictive opportunity scoring to measure our odds of winning or assess the risk characteristics with that particular opportunity? These all represent ways of bringing more value to customers. But we need to get to them more quickly with ideas they’re likely to embrace, leverage existing loyal relationships for warm introductions, and do it all with speed and accuracy.

There are other ways we can use Sales Insights to empower our sales force. For example, partners can receive alerts from the assistant about deadlines related to opportunities and about a health check—when the sentiment of a client conversation might indicate some risk factors. With AI, we can monitor emails within our enterprise for potential triggers, identifying things like the mentioning of a competitor or a change in tone when interacting with a client or even changes in the time to respond to messages we send. We want to use Sales Insights to get actionable information to the frontline partner who has the relationship with the client, so that partner can be faster and more accurate and maybe understand a more personal side of the buyer because AI has surfaced it.

One of the things that’s really unique—and really compelling—about Sales Insights is how it pulls data from both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Exchange. Like most business professionals, our sellers spend a lot of time in Microsoft Outlook throughout the day, sending and receiving hundreds of emails, scheduling appointments, flagging items for follow-up, and so on. There’s a lot of valuable data hidden within those unstructured activities and, with Sales Insights, we can harness that information and put it to best use. 

At the end of the day, it’s all about being smarter about where—and how—we spend our time. With the assistant, relationship analytics, predictive lead and opportunity scoring, and other AI-powered tools, we can focus on those opportunities where we have the highest likelihood of winning and strike while the iron is hot. That’s what Sales Insights brings to the table: connecting together all the data points to get a full 360-degree view and then looking for hidden insights.

You mentioned that you’ve already announced such capabilities. What’s been the reaction so far—and what’s next?

The partners who’re using these features find them very valuable, which indicates that everything is going according to plan. Our ultimate measure of success is convincing a partner who’s been doing this work for 30 years that using this technology will help make them even more successful. When folks like that say, “Hey… this is great,” it’s a huge win. So that’s where we are today—demonstrating the capabilities available to all these different folks and getting the early adopters onboard.

As far as vision and where we’re headed, we believe in—and have experienced firsthand—the value of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft offerings as a whole. We’ve put Dynamics 365 at the heart of Grant Thornton’s digital enterprise, so when Microsoft brings powerful tools like Sales Insights to the table, we need to fully explore all the ways we can put those tools to use. Everything we’re doing is to stay ahead by providing the greatest value we can to our clients. As we do that, over time it will help us be invited to participate in more opportunities to serve them and drive up our win rate.

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