Sales and Marketing Group Recovers $6 Million in Pipeline Revenue with Visio 2010
Overview
Country or region: United States
Industry: Information Technology
Customer Profile
Based in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft is a worldwide leader in software, services, and Internet technologies for personal and business computing.
Business Situation
Microsoft’s U.S. Small and Mid-market Solutions & Partners (SMS&P) group was unable to develop a comprehensive view of their marketing and sales lead pipeline, resulting in dropped leads and lost revenue.
Solution
The group developed a “subway” view of its marketing and sales pipeline using Microsoft Visio Professional 2010, which visually depicted the sales and marketing lead management process and dynamically integrated key performance data.
Benefits
n 20,000 recovered leads in the past 10 months
n $6 million in recovered pipeline revenue
n Ability to effectively track every lead in the pipeline, eliminating the lead “black hole” / “In the 10 months since implementing the Visio 2010 solution, we’ve been able to recover 20,000 lost leads, which our sales teams have been able to convert into approximately $6 million dollars in pipeline revenue.”
Heather Whitman, U.S. SMS&P’s Marketing Tools and Program Manager,
Microsoft Corporation
Overview
Microsoft’s United States Small and Mid-market Solutions & Partners (SMS&P) group is a sales, marketing and partner management organization which helps Microsoft, its customers, and industry partners realize the significant opportunity for growth in the small and midmarket business segments. SMS&P’s Sales and Marketing Operations Team needed a better way to track, manage, and report its potential leads across sales and marketing processes. Using Microsoft® Visio® Professional 2010, the group developed a “subway” view of its marketing and sales pipeline using Visio 2010, which visually depicted the lead management process and dynamically integrated key performance data. With the solution in place, the group was able to recover 20,000 leads and approximately $6 million in pipeline revenue over 10 months, and ensure that every lead in the pipeline could be tracked from opportunity to sale.
Situation
Microsoft’s Small and Mid-market Solutions & Partners (SMS&P) group is a sales, marketing and partner management organization within Microsoft North America (MSNA) which helps Microsoft, its customers, and industry partners realize the significant opportunity for growth in the small and midmarket business segments. Within SMS&P, Sales and Marketing operations focus on managing the marketing and sales execution through process, systems, and tools.
As Heather Whitman, U.S. SMS&P’s Marketing Tools and Program Manager, describes it, “My group’s priority is focusing on the customer experience and really making that experience everything it should be. We look at the scalability of our processes and tools, the ability to train our individuals, our business intelligence, and our partners’ solutions to better know our customers and what their needs are.”
A critical component of the Sales and Marketing Operations Team’s responsibilities is lead management–the supervision of the group’s marketing and sales opportunities, from marketing and initial identification through the sales process to eventual sale or close. This information is used by both sales and marketing stakeholders to plan campaigns, pursue opportunities, and evaluate performance. To manage its sales and marketing pipeline, U.S. SMS&P uses a complex system of databases, CRM solutions, and lead routing tools to monitor a lead from beginning to end.
One challenge U.S. SMS&P faced involved the tracking and management of its lead data across multiple databases and business processes. With complex marketing and sales processes, numerous databases with parent-child relationships, and a variety of manual processing steps, generating a holistic view of the sales and marketing pipeline became quite a challenge. The group’s lead management required multiple handoffs between systems and organizations, including telesales operations, field marketing and sales, Microsoft partners, and product segments. This created an overly-complex environment for managing data and processes.
Developing a comprehensive picture of its lead pipeline was no small task. “If you could imagine a dozen databases and another dozen manual processes that are required to convert a marketing lead to a customer sales engagement,” you begin to understand the scope of the challenge, says Kevin Nohl, Business Manager, U.S SMS&P. Lead management data was scattered across a number of disparate reports, each managed by different groups.
In addition to more formal reports, there were several Microsoft® Office Excel®-based Pivot Tables to manipulate to fully understand the lead pipeline. “We were doing 10-20 one-off calls per month to explain the current lead management process and train users on how to generate and use the lead data,” explained Whitman. The process was so complex that it took approximately 12 hours per week across 6 people to simply maintain the lead management data.
To improve upon its lead management and reporting processes, U.S. SMS&P sought to identify a simpler, more intuitive way to report and convey marketing and sales pipeline data to stakeholders: Microsoft Visio 2010.
Solution
U.S. SMS&P’s Sales and Marketing Operations wanted a solution to help institutionalize lead management and simplify monitoring and reporting of the sales and marketing pipeline. The group envisioned what they termed a “subway” view of the pipeline, which would visually represent all of the “stops” that a lead must travel to reach a customer sale, and the associated metrics that are needed to manage the complex process. This would allow the team to track every lead in the pipeline, drive operational excellence, and overall return on investment (ROI).
To begin, the team documented the current-state lead management process within the group at a very detailed level using Visio 2010. Once they had the detailed current-state process diagram developed in Visio, the team was able to overlay existing lead pipeline data and associated Microsoft Office Excel Pivot Tables with the process steps. This would allow users to review key performance metrics associated with each process step, including things like process step cycle time, conversion percentage from step to step in the pipeline, and volume of opportunities at any given point in the pipeline. With the Excel Pivot Table data layer integrated within Visio, the group published the Visio diagram to SharePoint® 2010.
To develop the solution, the group relied on key functionality within Visio 2010, including integrated enterprise functionality, Visio Services, SQL Services Linkages, click-through drill-down process-mapping-capabilities with integrated metrics, and integration with SharePoint 2010 and Visio Services. In all, the team dedicated between 40 and 60 hours to planning, development, and testing.
With the Visio 2010 solution in place, the group could now effectively run business intelligence analytics across the sales and marketing pipeline. For the first time, the group could easily answer questions such as “What is the cycle time of your process?” “How many leads went through the process last month?” “What was the attrition rate last year?” “Which
campaigns were successful this quarter?”
In the past, many leads would disappear into “black holes” in the sales and marketing pipeline, where no one would know what happened to them because they were very difficult to effectively track across so many disparate data sources. With their newly developed holistic pipeline view, U.S. SMS&P can now allow managers at all levels of the organization to have a full understanding of the lead management process and provide them with a better way to manage their business. “So now not only do we have a map of our process, but we can measure how that process is performing from the actual data within our databases,” said Nohl.
“We chose to use Visio 2010 because it allows us to pull in data from multiple databases, multiple tools, and multiple sources into one graphical view,” explains Whitman. “That allows our business leaders to make effective decisions and improve the experience our customers and partners have when they work with Microsoft.”
Benefits
According to Heather Whitman, “in the 10 months since implementing the Visio 2010 solution, we’ve been able to recover 20,000 leads that we wouldn’t have been able to recognize before. In addition to recovering those leads, our sales teams have been able to convert approximately $6 million dollars in pipeline revenue from those leads that we were able to recover.”
With its Visio 2010 solution in place, U.S. SMS&P now has an actionable system level view of Sales and Marketing pipeline, and the ability to quickly track every marketing lead through its lifecycle. Rather than dig through countless pivot reports to find leads, the Visio 2010 dashboard gives instant status on health of the business and daily operations. Furthermore, the Sales and Marketing Operations Team is able to significantly reduce the time and effort associated with managing one-off support calls with users, reducing the number of calls from 10-20 per month to almost zero.
“Visio 2010 gives us the ability to demonstrate the process in a visual way, and it allows our business leaders to drill into that data to make decisions around marketing, sales capacity, scaling our partner resources, and further provides marketing with better ‘closed-loop’ data so we can continue to improve that experience for our customers,” says Whitman.
With the “subway” diagram published with SharePoint 2010, users can access the diagram and its data directly from SharePoint. Users can filter the diagram to tailor the view as desired. “An individual marketing manager can now easily monitor and evaluate his or her own campaign’s performance,” said Nohl.
Microsoft Visio 2010
The advanced diagramming tools of Microsoft® Visio® 2010 help you simplify complexity with dynamic, data-driven visuals and new ways to share on the Web in real-time. Start by building your diagram with a diverse set of professional-looking templates and modern, pre-drawn shapes. Then, easily link your diagram to popular data sources (such as Microsoft® Office Excel®). You’ll see data automatically refresh right within your diagram, reflected in vibrant visuals such as icons, symbols, colors and bar graphs. Finally, with just a few clicks, publish your data-linked diagram to Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010, and provide access to others on the Web, even if they don’t have Visio. Together, simplicity, data-driven shapes, and Web sharing make Visio one of the most powerful ways to see and understand important information.
For more information about Microsoft Visio 2010, go to:
www.visio.com