Microsoft annually runs thousands of marketing campaigns to create leads for a dizzying number of different lead “catchers” ranging from Microsoft 3^rd party partners to in-house sales teams in various geographies around the world. While marketing knew how many raw leads were created they could not see what actual end result was generated (ie: like revenue). Ultimately the ability optimize and improve marketing’s performance was hampered by the lack of insight into:

·         What leads were generated by marketing - sales creates leads too

·         Where did marketing’s leads get routed to?

·         How much revenue was generated?

·         What was wrong with the 90+% of leads that don’t generate revenue?

Curtis led a multi-year project to gain a detailed understanding of the lead pipeline ecosystem and leveraged interviews w/ sales reps and external partners to investigate whether leads did actually get followed up on (there was no way to connect specific revenue to marketing campaigns). From this, Curtis documented the hundreds of ways a lead can “fall out” of Microsoft’s lead pipeline process from campaign launch to billed revenue. Reasons ranged from system errors like “customer not interested” or “lead data not uploaded correctly” to cases where the sales team didn’t follow up as they didn’t need the type of leads marketing generated (connected sales/marketing issues).

To address these challenges Curtis hired, built, and managed a multi-functional team to:

·         Launch a robust new platform tracking each of the millions of marketing generated leads

·         Create an intuitive visual reporting capability (the Lead Impact Map) to show where leads went and more importantly how many of those leads actually generated results

·         Create a dedicated resource to monitor the lead pipeline and “rescue lost leads” (like leads assigned to sales people who have left the company).

·         Work with marketers worldwide to educate and “diagnose” campaign performance issues

·         Work in partnership with corp marketing teams to educate the field to solve sales & marketing coordination issues.

Deploying first to the United States the program was successfully rolled out to the rest of the world mid-2011. The immediate benefit was massive as thousands of  valuable leads were discovered that were not being followed up on because of system or routing issues. In the first several months alone the project recovered tens of thousands of leads worth over $6M. The project was so successful that the US pilot was even published as a case study by the Visio team (Visio was one of the technologies used). When interviewed by Curtis months later during the global rollout the Visio sales team reported using the case study in virtually all customer sales calls.