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CASE STUDY
MICROSOFT CORPORATION
Serving high volumes of customers
worldwide every day: faster, better &
more easily & inexpensively than ever
MICROSOFT AZURE DEMAND CENTER
A best of breed marketing automation and
CRM solution for a changing industry
THE DEMAND CENTER STORY
The Demand Center story begins in Washington,
USA, where Microsoft’s C&E Azure Marketing
team is responsible for driving Azure
subscriptions revenue through demand creation.
Microsoft is an industry unto themselves, and
have been a major name in software for over 40
years. Known globally for their outstanding
software, they believe in empowering their
customers to achieve more from the world,
whether at home or in business.
Azure is an open, flexible, enterprise-grade cloud
computing platform and infrastructure designed
and created by Microsoft; a collection of integrated
cloud-based services, incorporating analytics,
database management, computing, networking
and more. It is used for building, deploying and
managing business services and applications,and
serves as a reliable data transporter vehicle for
integration of these different applications and
platforms. The motto is move faster, do more, and
save money; words the team lives by.
THE BUSINESS CASE FOR
TECHNOLOGY CHANGE
Today, the Azure platform is used by many
customers worldwide. Microsoft’s Marketing
& Sales team is itself a unified organization,
engaging in joint planning processes around
leading flow marketing needs. To keep up
with their success, and to drive more,
effective marketing tools to support their
staff are essential.
In the modern market, sales and marketing
automation is a growing industry. While
Microsoft’s standard model was to sell
on-premises software through one- to three-year
cycles in established markets, the shift to
pay-as-you-go subscriptions like Azure meant
that marketing would play a much larger role in
demand creation, leading to costly endeavors,
like cold calling or direct sales.
Enabling such systems to effectively run
themselves saves work hours, streamlines the
customer experience, and allows valuable
personnel to get on with other projects. Also,
with such high volumes of customers in this
industry a more reliable customer management
system is a must. Microsoft needed a robust,
intelligent and finely-tuned system to handle this.
THE ENGAGEMENT
To adapt to this industry shift, Intergen’s Seattle
team was tasked with building a system to
automate Azure’s marketing strategy, and allow
them to keep track of their customer base by
creating an infrastructure which would enable
“The next generation
systems and
infrastructure that
Intergen helped us build
has become a model for
how we do businessto-business modern
marketing and sales at
Microsoft. Their expertise,
consultative approach,
and delivery were key to
our success. We could
not have done this
without them.”
CHARLES EICHENBAUM
DIRECTOR OF MARKETING TECHNOLOGY
& OPERATIONS, MICROSOFT CORPORATION
buyer journeys. This would make Azure
marketing easier, quicker, and more effective;
a winning formula.
The primary goal of the project would be to keep
track of Azure subscriptions, and allow for easier
marketing to both new and existing clients.
Nurturing these clients was considered equally
important, and qualifying leads using scoring
with automation would accelerate revenue
growth. Reporting would also be key. The
platform had to be extendable, to allow for
onboarding of future products with the expansion
of the project’s scope and cloud-based interfaces
would be ideal for the eventual global rollout.
Effective marketing automation and customer
relationship management were the cornerstones
of Microsoft’s requirements. Over the course of a
two-and-a-half-year engagement, the Demand
Center initiative was born and developed, and
remains in a continuous process of improvement
and refinement.
THE SOLUTION
The Demand Center solution combined
countless internal data sources to come up with
the types of customers Microsoft could use for
targeted promotions and channel engagement.
It ultimately consists of:
»» Marketo: This cloud-based marketing
automation tool is used to manage lead
scoring, email automation, webinars and
much more. Its business analytics block is
used for leads scoring, after all leads are
synced with Contacts in the Microsoft
Dynamics CRM aspect of the solution.
All Marketo Leads are scored based on
demographic and behavioral data so, once
the score hits a predetermined threshold,
a trigger in Marketo sends a message to
CRM to generate a new phone call.
»» Microsoft Dynamics CRM: This acts as a
central repository for all customer and
business-related data: accounts, contacts,
subscriptions, and so on. Dynamics CRM
serves as central functional hub for all
integrated process objects, creating reports,
sending emails, and automating data
processing. It also acts as an accessible
user interface for qualifiers and nurturers
to enter all pertinent call information.
AUCKLAND
CHRISTCHURCH
DUNEDIN
»» Inside Sales (Power Dialer): This cloud
based solution allows for dialing
automation, saving time and money in the
most straightforward of ways.
These tools combined allowed for a platform
from which to launch not only Azure, but all
sorts of other Microsoft products, including its
new range of cloud delivered products
including, but not limited to, BI, Visual Studio
Online, Enterprise Mobility Suite, Internet of
Things, and more.
THE GAIN
Demand Center allows for more engaging
content to be shared with both existing and
potential customers across multiple channels.
The system reaches a high volume of
customers every day, and the platform
handles this with ease. It’s also an extremely
accessible and intuitive solution, and has been
translated into 15 languages.
Demand Center acts as an intelligent solution,
combining countless internal data sources to
come up with the types of customers
Microsoft use for targeted promotions and
channel engagement. It’s a benchmark for
how the best customers use products, and
encourages them to buy more for different
aspects of the business. The topic-specific
nurture programs have open rates of roughly
38%, and click-through rates of 25%; that’s
not just basic market penetration, but often
several multiples of the industry average.
Time saving has also been a huge plus. The
power dialing technology has reduced the
cost-per-call by 75%, and reduced webinar
launch times from six weeks to less than a
day. Demand Center is in a constant process
of fine-tuning and experimentation, meaning
that it stays on top of industry trends and
customer habits, leading to the best possible
marketing programs available.
THE BUSINESS CASE
A need to adapt to new pay-as-you-go
licensing model and a shift within the industry
towards modern marketing and automation
platforms catalyzed the need for Microsoft to
look to implement a new CRM and marketing
automation solution for its Azure business,
creating an infrastructure to enable buyer
journeys and provide better services.
With high customer volumes, saving work
hours was also a major need, leading to the
idea of auto-dialing software in conjunction
with the existing automation.
THE BUSINESS VALUE
»» More engaging marketing and improved
lead qualification leads to better sales
outcomes
»» CRM shows exactly who to nurture
»» An expandable, flexible system in place
should the scope of the project grow in
the future; no building from scratch
»» Ability to use the Demand Center solution
to manage sales, marketing and lead
qualification for other Microsoft products
»» An information architecture and data
strategy that ensures greater accuracy and
understanding of customer information
»» Reduced costs from dialing and increased
sales show a huge increase in marketing
efficiency
THE ENGINE ROOM
»» Microsoft SQL Server
»» Windows Azure
»» Microsoft Azure Web Service
»» Marketo
»» Microsoft Dynamics CRM
»» Inside Sales PowerDialer
With Intergen staff working
across organisations of all sizes
and types, our offerings include
portals, content and collaboration
solutions, Microsoft Dynamics
financial and relationship
management, custom software
development, management
consulting and hosting services.
MELBOURNE
PERTH
SEATTLE
SINGAPORE
SYDNEY
WELLINGTON
USA www.teamintergen.com NEW ZEAL AND www.intergen.co.nz AUSTRALIA www.empired.com.au