How BMO’s innovative social media advocacy and sales enablement structure drives bottom-line impact at scale

How do you build and grow robust advocacy and social sales enablement (social selling) programs in a heavily regulated industry like financial services? How do you utilize employees to expand brand reach and help attract talent? How do you get your sales forces engaged and excited to build relationships and drive revenue on social media channels in a fast-paced, ever-changing digital environment? Just ask Nick Nunes, Director of Enterprise Social Media at BMO.

An award-winning digital strategist and communicator, Nunes leads Enterprise Social Media at BMO, one of the largest banks in North America. When he and his team set out to transform BMO’s enterprise social media strategy back in 2020, the question of how to support, empower, and socially activate all segments of BMO’s workforce was top of mind.

It was a tall order, but Nunes and his team of social experts have delivered. Working with Sprinklr as a definition partner for its Distributed product, they created a best-in-class social media advocacy and enablement framework that has allowed BMO to reduce costs, mitigate brand risk, foster engagement across teams, and drive tens of millions of dollars annually in measurable, bottom-line impact.

Nunes shared the four distinct programs that he, the BMO Social Media team, and partners from across the business have put in place to make it happen:

1. Social Sales Enablement (Social Selling)

BMO’s Social Selling program is designed to empower its regulated employees and sales forces to leverage social media to grow their networks, raise awareness, identify prospective clients, nurture business relationships, and drive measurable, bottom-line impact.

Today, thousands of folks from teams across BMO – including mortgage specialists, business bankers, financial planners, private wealth advisors, and more – have access to BMO’s social selling program, driving tens of millions of dollars in revenue annually.

2. Employee Social Media Advocacy

The Employee Social Media Advocacy program was designed to give all non-regulated employees at BMO the ability to share BMO content in a frictionless way.

Key stakeholders from BMO’s Social Media and Corporate Communications teams worked directly with Sprinklr as a definition partner to design a solution enhancement that allows them to embed Sprinklr’s advocacy technology and capabilities directly into the bank’s SharePoint-based intranet. This was done to significantly reduce social-sharing friction by giving employees the ability to seamlessly share pre-approved, on-brand content in two easy clicks from the intranet’s home page, from within articles, and more. The process they’ve put in place also eliminates the need for employees to manually copy-and-paste links to article or draft their own post copy.

3. Social for Executives Program

Supporting both regulated and non-regulated executives, BMO’s Social for Executives program provides everything executives need to develop a social strategy, grow their networks, and continue to operate in a frictionless way on social networks.

Prior to partnering with Sprinklr, as a definition partner to design the technology environment that supports the program, executive social support had been entirely manual. It lacked scalability due to resource constraints and drove less than $100,000 in earned media value on an annual basis. Today, with a customized executive program in place that utilizes Sprinklr’s innovative Distributed technology, more than 100 BMO executives participate, driving nearly $1M in earned media value in 2022.

4. Branch Social Enablement

BMO’s innovative Branch Social Enablement program was designed to support local bank branches by providing them with the ability to manage their own social accounts in an efficient, and brand-safe way.

Prior to developing this program, bank branches were not permitted to use social media. In 2020, Nunes’ team – in partnership with the P&BB marketing and Branch leadership teams – changed that, making BMO the first financial services company in Canada to launch a new innovative enablement program for branches. Now, nearly 200 branches are supported and encouraged to share helpful content, publish updates relevant to their communities, and more.

A north star for effective social media operations in the financial services space

Since choosing Sprinklr as its social tech partner in 2019, BMO has consolidated seven point solutions. Today, sales forces across the bank’s operating groups engage with customers on their preferred social channels for sales and service, scaling to nearly 8,000 Distributed seats and 25,000 seats for Employee Advocacy.

“When we started our journey with Sprinklr in 2019, our social media tech stack consisted of seven point solutions,” explains Nunes. “As a result, we faced numerous challenges, including extremely manual and repetitive reporting processes, metrics discrepancies between systems, capability limitations due to a lack of integration between systems, and much more. Today, we use one solution for all our social media use cases: Sprinklr. As a result, we’ve saved thousands of hours of manual work effort annually, driven greater data democratization org wide, supported new use cases, and scaled our programs significantly.”

Sprinklr Founder, Advisor to the CEO, and Chairman of the Board Ragy Thomas, is proud to partner with Nunes and BMO, who have driven digital innovation and created programs that serve as a model in the financial services space.

“BMO is a global leader in the financial services industry for the innovation and sophistication of its executive social, social selling, and other secure and scalable social programs,” says Thomas. “BMO is truly a North Star example and a showcase of what can be done by a financial institution across social sales, employee and executive advocacy, branch social enablement, and more.”