Keeping tabs on the millions of annual transactions is no small task—just ask Shashi Lanka Venkata and Mark Anderson, two company employees who are leading a bid to automate what historically has been a painstakingly manual revenue transaction process.

“We support close to 50 million platform actions per day,” says Venkata, a principal group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “For a quarter-end or a month-end, it can double. At June-end, we’re getting well more than 100 million transactions per day.”

That’s a lot, especially when there cannot be any mistakes and every transaction must be processed in 24 hours.

To wrangle that high-stakes volume, Venkata and Anderson, a director on Microsoft’s Business Operations team, teamed up to expand the capabilities of Customer Obsessed Solution Management and Incident Care (COSMIC), a Dynamics 365 application built to help automate Microsoft’s revenue transactions.

[Learn more about COSMIC including where to find the code here: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI automate complex business processes and transactions.]

First tested in 2017 on a small line of business, the solution expanded quickly and was handling the full $100 billion-plus workload within one year.

That said, the team didn’t try to automate everything at once—it has been automating the many steps it takes to process a financial transaction one by one.

“We’re now about 75 percent automated,” Anderson says. “Now we’re much faster, and the quality of our data has gone way up.”

COSMIC is saving Microsoft $25 million to $30 million over the next two to three years in revenue processing cost. It also automates the rote copy-and-paste kind of work that the company’s team of 3,800 revenue processing agents used to get bogged down on, freeing them up to do higher value work.

The transformation that Anderson, Venkata, and team have been driving is part of a larger digital transformation that spans all Microsoft Digital. Its success has led to a kudos from CEO Satya Nadella, a well-received presentation to the entire Microsoft Digital organization, and lots of interest from Microsoft customers.

“It’s been a fantastic journey,” Anderson says. “It’s quite amazing how cutting edge this work is.”

Unpacking how COSMIC works

Partners transact, purchase, and engage with Microsoft in over 13 different lines of businesses, each with its own set of requirements and rules for processing revenue transactions (many of which change from country to country).

To cope with all that complexity, case management and work have historically been handled separately to make it easier for human agents to stay on top of things.

That had to change if COSMIC was going to be effective. “When we started, we knew we needed to bring them together into one experience,” Venkata says.

Doing so would make transactions more accurate and faster, but there was more to it.

“The biggest reason we wanted to bring them together is so we could get better telemetry,” he says. “Connecting all the underlying data gives us better insights, and we can use that to get the AI and machine learning we need to automate more and more of the operation.”

Giving automation its due

The first thing the team decided to automate was email submissions, one of the most common ways transactions get submitted to the company.

“We are using machine learning to read the email and to automatically put it in the right queue,” Venkata says. “The machine learning pulls the relevant information out of the email and enters it into the right places in COSMIC.”

The team also has automated sentiment analysis and language translation.

What’s next?

Using a bot to start mimicking the work an agent does, like automatic data entry or answering basic questions. “This is something that is currently being tested and will soon be rolled out to all our partners using COSMIC,” he says.

How does it work?

When a partner submits a transactional package to Microsoft, an Optical Character Recognition bot scans it, opens it, checks to see if everything looks correct, and makes sure business roles are applied correctly. “If all looks good, it automatically gets routed to the next step in the process,” Venkata says.

The Dynamics workflow engine also is taking on some of the check-and-balance steps that agents used to own, like testing to see if forms have been filled out correctly and if information extracted out of those forms is correct.

“Azure services handle whatever has to be done in triage or validation,” he says. “It can check to see if a submission has the right version of the document, or if a document is the correct one for a particular country. It validates various rules at each step.”

All of this is possible, Venkata says, because the data was automatically abstracted. “If, at any point the automation doesn’t work, the transaction gets kicked back for manual routing,” he says.

As for the agents? They are getting to shift to more valuable, strategic work.

“The system is telling them what the right next action is going to be,” Venkata says. “Before this, the agent had to remember what to do next for each step. Now the system is guiding them to the next best action—each time a step is completed, the automation kicks in and walks the agent through the next action they should take.”

Eventually the entire end-to-end process will be automated, and the agents will spend their time doing quality control checks and looking for ways to improve the experience. “We want to get to the point where we only need them to do higher level work,” he says.

Choosing Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure

There was lots of technology to choose from, but after a deep assessment of the options, the team chose Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure.

“We know many people thought Dynamics couldn’t scale to an enterprise the size of Microsoft, but that’s not the case anymore,” Venkata says. “It has worked very well for us. Based on our experience, we can definitively say it can cover Microsoft’s needs.”

The team also used Azure to build COSMIC—Azure Blob Storage for attachments, Azure Cosmos DB for data archival and retention, SQL Azure for reporting on data bases, and Microsoft Power BI for data reporting.

Anderson says it’s a major leap forward to be using COSMIC’s automation to seamlessly route customers to the right place, handing them off from experience to experience without disrupting them.

Another major improvement is how the team has gained an end-to-end view of customers (which means the company no longer must ask customers what else they’re buying from Microsoft).

“It’s been a journey,” Anderson says. “It isn’t something we’ve done overnight. At times it’s been frustrating, and at times it’s been amazing. It’s almost hard to imagine how far we’ve come.”

• Learn more about COSMIC including where to find the code here: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI automate complex business processes and transactions.

The post How automation is transforming revenue processing at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Emeric and launch leadership had to do exactly that when they set out to transform the way Microsoft launches products, something that would require acceptance from product groups that build drastically different products and services.

“Initially, there was resistance to change because people were familiar with the processes in their own silos,” Emeric says. “We encouraged employees to have a growth mindset and recognize the value for the entire company.”

Teams across Microsoft used 600 different launch types, each with their own vision, roadmap, and revenue forecast. Emeric and Brandon Ruby, a director of operations in MBO responsible for launch process, infrastructure, and analytics, knew that transforming the launch process would require a change in the people, process, and technology. But the most crucial part was adding value to the work of launch managers.

“We saw a gap in experience and productivity, and we wanted to make sure that the launch managers felt like they were a part of the process,” Ruby says.

This transformation aligned with MBO’s vision to run state-of-the-art operations.

“Our culture of innovation in Operations empowers employees to lead improvement for our customers and partners through end-to-end business process improvement and tool optimization,” says Mary Ellen Smith, the corporate vice president of MBO. “Modernizing our launch processes enables us to compliantly launch products, services, and capabilities with agility at scale.”

[Learn how Microsoft is optimizing launch management to deliver innovation to market with speed and compliance. Check out how citizen developers at Microsoft used Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.]

The previously siloed launch process didn’t align with Microsoft’s integrated selling model that bundles products, devices, and cloud services.

“We knew putting together end-to-end solutions would be challenging if we didn’t change the way we sell,” Emeric says. “Bundled solutions are especially important for commercial and industrial scenarios where you have a range of devices, cloud services, and AI on top of what you’re trying to build.”

Additionally, compliance was also done manually in silos using spreadsheets, Microsoft PowerPoint decks, and Microsoft Word documents. Each launch manager would be responsible for knowing the latest launch rules or working with experts who could flag finance and anti-corruption risks.

This led Microsoft to create a single launch delivery process that runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform to deliver innovation with speed and compliance.  This ensures that over 200 launch managers at Microsoft have a consistent way to conduct compliance assessments of their product, service, and program launches at scale.

“Before, there was a perception that our launch process was slowing people down,” Emeric says. “In reality, offering a standardized launch process enables Microsoft to do highly complex launches and assess risks with minimal risk to the company.”

The new launch process requires a dynamic digital compliance assessment, which asks a list of questions that change as risk domain owners continuously evaluate risk categories. This is critical to consistently assess risk across the launch ecosystem. The launch team’s responses are used to determine the risk of the launch, and launch managers consult relevant risk domain owners on key risks involving finance, trade, and anti-corruption. Launch managers are then responsible for mitigating or closing risks before launching their product or service.

“Through a centralized risk management process and consultation with risk domain owners, we are much more confident that 100 percent of critical launches are managed, maintained, and meet compliance requirements before they go out the door,” Ruby says.

Built by the launch community, for the launch community

Initially, Ruby’s team focused on the process, data fields, and controls of the transformed launch process. Halfway through their journey, it was evident that the team was putting the process and digital requirements ahead of experience and productivity. Launch managers needed to be more involved in shaping the launch process that was a part of their day-to-day work.

“We found that communities, citizen development, and incubation are a great combination for creating experiences that empower the productivity of launch managers,” Ruby says.

In the summer of 2019, a team of people from MBO and Microsoft Digital participated in the Microsoft Hackathon with the goal of transforming the company’s launch process.

“This led to the creation of a citizen development program where we create rapid prototypes of value with the community,” Ruby says. “We continue to have conversations where we identify top priorities before making major investments on the platform.”

Ruby is referring to the Launch Management Excellence team, a forum among launch managers and citizen developers across the company who bring perspective from their launch portfolios. They share pain points that they’ve heard from their teammates, advise on best practices for the launch process, and provide information about upcoming trainings and events. Based on these conversations, Emeric and Ruby can return to their leadership team and share what the launch community is passionate about addressing.

“Our launch managers drive the conversation,” Emeric says. “We prioritize the needs we get in this feedback loop and address the top pain points first.”

Leading with a vision and intentional investment in your employees

Transforming the launch process with compliance by design is already paying off. It’s been exciting for Emeric to see the vision come to life.

“When it comes to transforming your launch process, it’s vital to have a clear vision about what you want your transformation to look like and have buy-in from leadership,” she says.

As this vision has come to fruition, Emeric has found that teams see MBO as a leader in launch.

“Business groups come to us for launch resources or oversight so they can ensure that they’re compliant,” Emeric says. “They’re also using our launch platform for portfolio, launch, and external risk management.”

Transforming the launch process requires intentional investment in the experience and productivity of employees. At Microsoft, the launch community and citizen development community have been central in deciding what features to add to the new process.

“You have to invest in people just as much as the process and technology,” Emeric says. “Our leadership team understood that they could have the biggest impact by empowering people with the tools they need to be productive.”

Ruby and Emeric also emphasized the importance of prioritizing progress over perfection. The team is always iterating on the launch process, and they’re willing to repivot if necessary.

“It’s a journey, and you have to start somewhere,” Ruby says. “If you anchor it in making an investment and having a shared vision, you’ll see progress.”

Emeric and Ruby recognize that the launch platform and community have grown significantly since this journey began two and a half years ago, and they hope to empower customers and partners to transform their launch processes too.

“The goal for Microsoft is to be the industry leader in how enterprises launch products and services,” Emeric says. “Our launch process is designed to uphold our commitment to trust and compliance, all while ensuring that our customers and partners have a great experience.”

• Learn how Microsoft is optimizing launch management to deliver innovation to market with speed and compliance.
• Check out how citizen developers at Microsoft used Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.

The post Rethinking how Microsoft launches its products and services appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“Specialists are solution sellers,” says Schlegel, a data and AI specialist for Microsoft Digital Sales. “We help customers solve problems with an eye toward helping them move down the path of digital transformation. To do this, we also must develop high-quality relationships with them.”

Schlegel introduces customers to Microsoft technologies that can help them efficiently address their business needs. He says that he and other solution seller specialists can identify opportunities for sales based on customer purchase history, Microsoft Azure consumption levels, and workload usage.

However, it can be challenging for Microsoft sellers to holistically understand their customers because of the company’s scale and the broad set of rich products it offers to customers.

“I could do this manually, but it would consume most of my time,” Schlegel says. “If a tool gives me recommendations, I could spend more time with the customer.”

Enter Daily Recommender, an internal AI solution that uses Microsoft Dynamics 365, Azure, and an AI interface to provide data-driven recommendations to sellers based on over 1,000 data points per customer, including past purchases, marketing engagement, and digital and local event attendance.

“A lot of companies invest in AI solutions,” says Praveen Kumar, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital. “The primary differentiator is that Daily Recommender presents specialists and account executives with meaningful data, insights, and artifacts so they can make the right decisions.”

[Learn more about how Microsoft Digital developed Daily Recommender. Learn how Microsoft Digital modernized the toolset Microsoft sellers use.]

Scoping customer conversations based on past engagements

Daily Recommender uses internal and external data points such as current consumption levels, licenses, customer interactions with marketing material, and machine learning techniques such as collaborative filtering and natural language processing to identify the next logical product recommendation for the customer.

“We help customers achieve the solutions they intend to build in the most efficient way using Microsoft technologies,” says Siddharth Kumar, a principal machine learning scientist manager who works on the team that provides machine learning solutions to Daily Recommender. “With these curated recommendations, sellers can spend less time creating sales pitches and focus on having meaningful and useful discussions with customers.”

These recommendations and insights are presented in a curated dashboard, which is available to the entire Digital Sales team.

“Let’s say a Microsoft account team is responsible for over 100 customers,” says Salman Mukhtar, the director of business programs for the Digital Sales team. “Daily Recommender gives you access to product recommendations for the accounts across your solution areas. The app also provides a rationale for the recommendation, what material you can use, and a suggested action date. It takes the AI to the last mile.”

Using Daily Recommender, account executives and specialists work together to understand what may be top of mind for the customer, review product recommendations, identify the right customer contacts, and provide customer-centric recommendations based on the customer’s needs and interests.

For example, say a customer downloaded a piece of Microsoft content showcasing how to move legacy SQL servers to the cloud. Daily Recommender could prompt a specialist to provide that customer with resources for cloud migration and suggest that they unlock the advanced capabilities of the cloud by investing in a business intelligence tool like Microsoft Power BI.

“Within minutes, I have a clear picture of what’s currently driving the customer and how I can structure my conversations based on their current consumption and interest in Microsoft products,” says Alexander Mildner, an account executive for Microsoft Digital Sales. “If I had this two and a half years ago, my life would have been easier.”

Equipped with this data, sellers and account executives can collaborate and connect customers with Microsoft resources, products, and specialists to achieve their projects’ goals. Specialists can work with customers to create execution plans or discuss the technical details of implementation, often within their area of expertise.

“Collaboration is an essential part of an account team,” Mildner says. “The more insights you can use as a specialist or account executive, the better.”

Committing to continuous improvement over time

With Daily Recommender, one out of every three recommendations qualifies as a sales opportunity. This is almost four times higher than the industry average of 6 to 10 percent. The app becomes more intelligent over time as it continues to learn from seller actions and sales outcomes. The team also takes a hands-on approach to improving Daily Recommender by analyzing clickthrough and seller action data and soliciting feedback through in-person roadshows, emails, and community calls.

“I think we will look back in a year or two, and we won’t be able to imagine a time before this tool,” Mildner says. “I’ve already seen the progress that the tool has made in the past two years, which tells you how strong its AI is.”

Daily Recommender was built for the Microsoft Sales team by Microsoft Digital as part of an ongoing effort to transform the tools and processes that the company provides for its sales force.

“For a sales model that requires sellers to do active prospecting at scale, we needed a robust and AI enabled solution that would help sellers quickly identify and actively engage with the customers to make faster buying decisions,” says Hyma Davuluri, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital. “This led to the development of Daily Recommender, which enabled sellers to identify and act on sales opportunities.”

The journey to create and improve Daily Recommender has been educational for Mukhtar and the team. They have learned that the best way to improve the experience is to create synergy across business groups, sellers, and AI experts.

The result?

The Digital Sales team was able to transform the sales process with AI.

Mukhtar says that supporting this collaboration took time, but it started with bringing people together to invest in changing the way the Microsoft sales teams organized and approached their customers for prospecting new business.

“Changing people’s behavior isn’t easy,” Mukhtar says. “We focused on bringing together different stakeholders to invest in changing our processes. We found that value is really unlocked by how well you bring together AI and the sales process, seller behavior, and customer needs and integrate into a modern app.”

• Learn more about how we developed Daily Recommender.
• Learn how we modernized our seller’s toolset.

The post Transforming sales at Microsoft with AI-infused recommendations and customer insights appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Just ask the 25,000 people who pitch the complex array of products and services that the company sells to customers across the globe.

Those sellers used to wade through more than 30 homegrown applications to get their jobs done, often spending more time filling out forms and cross referencing tools than talking to customers.

“We needed to modernize our toolset,” says Kim Kunes, who leads the Microsoft Digital team that provides the tools and experiences that the sales and marketing organizations use to sell the company’s wares. “We needed to turn what had been our sellers’ biggest headache into an asset that would help them flourish in a connected, cloud world.”

A complete overhaul of the company’s tools and processes is fully underway, says Kunes, but it’s not complete.

“We’ve winnowed a disconnected, heavily seamed group of tools down to a core group of critical experiences connected in ways that make sense for our sellers and marketers, but there is still work to do,” she says. “We’re in year two of a multiyear journey to revamp our sellers’ toolset.”

Kunes says her team, like all of Microsoft Digital, is shifting its focus from working for internal partners in a traditional IT manner to building experiences in partnership with the business that make sense for users. In this case, those users are the heart and soul of the company’s revenue-generating selling community.

“Now, just like any other product team at Microsoft, we operate with a baseline budget that funds a group of FTE (full-time employee) engineers and a continuous prioritization and planning process to deliver functionality most critical to our users and businesses,” she says. “Now we’re thinking, ‘What should the seller experience be from start to finish? Are we doing everything we can to make their experience as seamless as possible?’”

This transformation has Microsoft Digital’s Commercial Sales and Marketing Engineering Team working in new ways. It’s centralizing and standardizing the many channels of feedback and data to derive a picture of users’ unmet, unarticulated needs. The shift is built around a new focus on how Microsoft Digital approaches customer research. It’s adopting a fluent, modern look and feel that’s consistent with how the rest of the Microsoft is approaching design. It’s using DevOps and other agile engineering principles that truly keep the team focused on the user’s end-to-end experience as it moves, fast and flexibly.

“All of our sellers’ regular tasks need to be in one place and arranged so that it’s efficient and virtually seamless to flow through them,” Kunes says. “Everything has to be intuitive. There should be no big learning curves. They shouldn’t have to figure out how to use a new application every time they want to get something done.”

This laser focus on the customer experience has required the team to think and work differently.

“I’ve seen our team’s culture shift,” Kunes says. “In the past we were focused on incremental improvements to make the process and tools better. Now we’re thinking bigger. For example, we’re beginning to use AI and machine learning to curate the gold mine of valuable data we have to surface critical next best action insights to our sellers and marketers.”

This transformation is driving results that are paying dividends, says Siew Hoon Goh, the Microsoft director of sales excellence in charge of making sure the tools and experience that Microsoft Digital is building meet the needs of the company’s digital sales force.

“Our sellers do recognize that there has been lots of progress,” Goh says. “Technology is one of the best enablers for us to scale to bigger and better things and increased revenue for the company.”

Microsoft’s umbrella tool for sales is Microsoft Sales Experience. Known as MSX, it’s an integrated solution built on Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure products, Office 365 productivity and collaboration services, and Power BI. In July, MSX was upgraded to the new modern Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales user experience. It includes a simplified user experience and integration into LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams, and several internal tools.

“Our MSX instance is one of the largest implementations of Dynamics 365 in the company,” says Ismail Mohammed, a principal program manager on the Microsoft Digital team working to make life better for the company’s sales field. “Ultimately, we want to make our tools more intuitive and help our sellers get their time back so they can focus more of their time on selling.”

MSX is the gateway to several important seller experiences that you’ll read about here:

• Portal, a second generation of MSX meant to be a true single pane of glass for sellers to work from
• Account Based Marketing, a transformed approach to sifting through marketing sales leads to find the ones that are worth pursuing
• Daily Recommender, a machine learning-based discovery engine that advises sellers on the specific leads they should pursue next
• Account 360, an aggregated view of customer content that helps sellers find the right customer information before they reach out to leads

Charting the evolution of MSX

When MSX launched in 2015, it replaced eight on-premises instances of Dynamics CRM 2011, each of which was highly customized and complex. Built on Azure Cloud Services, MSX brought all those experiences into one cloud-based platform.

Though it was a big improvement, it was still just a beginning.

“For perspective, MSX started out as a collection of links,” Kunes says. “It was nice to have a place where you could get to everything, but it really wasn’t the seamless, single-pane-of-glass experience that we are working toward.”

The team has continued to refine MSX, pushing hard to evolve it into an experience in which sellers feel more productive. They felt less so when they pieced their sales story together with their own offline Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, and secret contact lists (the latter of which are no longer allowed anyway, because of GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation).

The original MSX solution is gradually making way for MSX Portal, a new, transformative experience that is being rolled out to the company’s sellers role by role, says Steffie Hofmann, Microsoft Digital’s lead MSX Portal program manager. MSX Portal debuted in February, when the experience was provided to the company’s customer-success managers, a specialized sales role at Microsoft.

MSX Portal helps sellers figure out what the next best action they can take. They get suggestions on their homepage and in context-driven ways within their workflow.

“Each time we ship MSX Portal to a new group of sellers, the experience improves dramatically,” Hofmann says. “They no longer have to leave the tool to get their work done.”

The goal has long been to have MSX provide sellers everything they need as they reach out to customers to sell the company on a daily basis , says Steve Thomas, Microsoft Digital’s lead software engineering manager for MSX Portal.

“We built MSX Portal with the idea of making it a great place for our sellers to start their day, to get their work done,” Thomas says. “We wanted to get past the notion that it was something they had to work around.”

The rollout of MSX Portal is expected to be complete by the end of the 2019 calendar year.

Sifting through the noise

Sales leads pour into a company the size of Microsoft from all directions, at massive scale. After their interest gets piqued by the company’s wide-ranging marketing efforts, leaders at other businesses watch webinars and make decisions:

• Should CIOs invest in Microsoft’s stack?
• Should CEOs ask Microsoft to see how the company can help them digitally transform?
• Should IT pros ask for Microsoft’s help via product websites and customer-service lines and at conferences?

[Read this case study on how Microsoft uses a bot to improve basic lead qualification to see how millions of potential sales leads received each year are qualified down to thousands. Read about how we use AI to serve up the next best lead to sellers.]

All those many thousands of leads get funneled into the Microsoft Global Demand Center.

“Before we move a lead to one of our sellers, we nurture them in the Global Demand Center,” says Prabhu Jayaraman, a group engineering manager who helps lead Microsoft Digital’s marketing effort. “They don’t go to our sellers right away—first we need to make sure our leads are high quality and have a high propensity to result in wins before we transfer them.”

It used to be that all those marketing-driven leads would get dumped on sellers, tossed over the fence with little vetting or insight.

“Sellers would look at these queues, they’d see 25 pages of leads, and randomly say, ‘This looks interesting, let me go talk to them,’” Jayaraman says. “The problem was the lead they picked out of the 10,000 options might not be the next best lead to pick.”

To help sellers get to the right lead, Microsoft adopted a new approach to how it markets to larger customers by infusing AI into its Account Based Marketing (ABM) program.

“ABM is not a tool, it’s a concept,” Jayaraman says. “It’s about stitching these opportunities together in ways that make sense—when one company contacts us in five different ways, we will connect those together into one opportunity.”

To Vinh Nguyen, ABM is about bringing marketing and sales closer together—something it does by weaving relevant contacts and insights together in ways that help sellers be more effective.

“It may sound simple, but it hasn’t been,” says Nguyen, the senior program manager leading Microsoft Digital’s efforts around Account Based Marketing. “We’re trying to use machine learning and automation to optimize when sellers should engage with a customer on products that their employees have shown interest in.”

The team has been working for more than a year on getting it right.

“We’re using Marketo marketing software to listen to our customer interaction signals,” Nguyen says. “When signals come into the Global Demand Center, we feed them into our machine-learning models.”

Those ML model-fueled recommendations are fed into the Daily Recommender, where sellers use them to decide which leads to pursue on a daily basis.

Finding the best leads with Daily Recommender

Until recently, Microsoft’s most successful sellers were those best at finding gold nuggets of customer information hidden in the company’s many sales tools. That was when star sellers were known for maintaining their own offline databases and sales pitches more than they were for building close relationships with customers.

“Why should our most successful sellers be the ones who are the best at navigating complex systems?” Kunes says. “Why shouldn’t success be about having intelligent, human connections with customers?”

This culture was fed by the fact that the company’s sales strategy was built around educated guesswork—each quarter, SWAT team-like groups of sellers would gather, discuss the indicators that each of them were seeing, talk it out, and use that war-room discussion to set sales targets for the upcoming quarter.

All of this made selling more art than science.

The team looked to change that when it developed Daily Recommender, a machine-learning tool that makes individualized recommendations for each seller, says Hyma Davuluri, principal program manager in Microsoft Digital.

“With Daily Recommender, we’re pushing the envelope on using AI to influence large-scale selling at Microsoft,” Davuluri says. “It’s also helping us accelerate our digital transformation journey across the company’s sales organization.”

Launched three years ago, Daily Recommender has been rolled out to about 1,000 sellers and, as it has learned and matured, is starting to show very promising results. So says Salman Mukhtar, the director of business programs who leads the selling community’s use of Daily Recommender.

“It’s Microsoft using Microsoft,” Mukhtar says. “We’re using SQL Server, Azure Fabric, Azure Machine Learning—we’re using a lot of our own technology together and connecting it on top of Dynamics.”

Microsoft started small with the intent to prove the value of an AI-enabled discovery engine that would improve targeting of new business while reducing the preparation efforts by sellers. So far, the results have been promising—one in four recommendations pursued by sellers result in a customer opportunity or engagement.

“Machine-to-human AI requires a mindset change,” Mukhtar says. “It requires legacy processes to be enhanced and new habits to be formed across the sales force.”

For example, sellers must give up their personalized Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks. “The sponsors and developers of our legacy toolkits and processes need to be bold and decommission where necessary,” he says.

The needed changes are happening but are not complete yet.

“Digital transformation is a journey—for us it involves data, tools, processes, and people all enabled by AI,” Mukhtar says. “We are scaling up our enablement efforts to transform Daily Recommender into the primary discovery engine for the business.”

Account 360 stitches the customer story together

Historically, it has been a challenge for sellers, as they reach out, to understand what relationship a customer has with Microsoft.

“The key challenge for sellers was to gather consistent insights in order to have a productive conversation,” says Alioscha Leon, Microsoft Digital’s program manager for Account 360, a new MSX sales tool that seeks to stamp out that legacy of opaqueness. “They would have to go to several tools with different interfaces and search functionality in order to get the information required to have a productive conversation, and there still was no guarantee that they were getting the full picture.”

To change that, Microsoft Digital rolled out Account 360 in May 2019.

It was introduced in beta form to an initial wave of sellers from Microsoft Inside Sales. Built into MSX Portal, it aggregates multiple tools into one, with a consistent user interface, giving sellers a comprehensive view of their customers. More than 1,300 sellers volunteered to try out the tool, exceeding the goal of 800.

“We allow sellers to very quickly prepare for an interaction with a customer,” Leon says. “We’re making it easy for them to have relevant conversations without having to do huge amounts of research, increasing the seller productivity and interaction quality.”

Account 360 allows sellers to see Microsoft’s agreements across modern and legacy systems, revenue across products, marketing interactions, partner association, and account profiles. It also shows what opportunities and leads are already being pursued, and what products and services the customer is already consuming. The insights are available and delivered in a fast and consistent manner, using an interface tailor made for sellers.

The goal is for the sellers to get all the info they need to enable a productive customer interaction in the Account 360 interface. But if they need to go deeper, a linking strategy allows them to navigate to additional resources.

A first version of Account 360 went live in July for all seller audiences. “We continue to have exponential growth in both monthly and weekly unique users, with 3,000 unique monthly users and a run rate of 1,300 weekly unique users in August,” Leon says.

Dynamics 365 is the backbone of selling at Microsoft

MSX’s heavy use of the Dynamics 365 platform is very helpful, says Linda Simovic, principal group program manager for the Dynamics 365 product group.

“I think the way we’re drinking our own champagne inside the company is amazing,” Simovic says. “With 25,000 sellers or more in the company, it gives us a lot of great ways to test out our products and services.”

Showcasing the way Microsoft uses Dynamics 365 products also helps other companies understand what they can do with the platform, she says.

Simovic says the Dynamics team continuously talks with the Microsoft selling community and Microsoft Digital, weaving their steady stream of feedback into Dynamics 365 as fully and quickly as possible.

“We actually say to the MSX team, ‘We’re thinking about building this—what do you think?’” she says. “We want them to use it and to let us know if it works. It’s a litmus test to see if what we’re thinking is a good idea or not.”

The recent decision to upgrade MSX to the latest version of Dynamics 365 helps with this—now the Microsoft Digital team can try out new features as soon as they’re ready for testing.

“We want to be able to cover their needs out of the box as much as possible,” Simovic says. “The better we can support the company’s complex sales motion, the better we can support our external customers.”

Mohammed agrees, calling out how the two teams have worked together to bring new enterprise-level capabilities into Dynamics 365.

In fact, he says, the teams are working so closely together that in some cases the Microsoft Digital Commercial Sales and Marketing Engineering Team is co-developing directly with the Dynamics team to add features that the sales teams need.

“That’s a big change from our historical approach of building in-house bridge software,” Mohammed says. “This is a pretty major leap forward for us—we’re working hand-in-hand with the product group to build new capabilities for customers.”

For Kunes and her Microsoft Digital team, the successful partnership with Dynamics is just one more signal that their new, transformed approach to supporting the company’s complex sales motion is working.

“We’ve laid the groundwork for us to finally get this right for our sellers,” Kunes says. “Now we just need to go finish what we started. It’s an exciting time to be working on this team.”

• Read this case study on how Microsoft uses a bot to improve basic lead qualification to see how millions of potential sales leads received each year are qualified down to thousands.
• Read about how we use AI to serve up the next best lead to sellers.

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