Customer Campaigns

Customer Campaigns, the structure around which Microsoft began building its marketing and sales efforts starting in the second half of 2006, mark one of the company’s most ambitious efforts to leverage its research on how businesses function.

Building a Map of Business

This structure began with an effort to map all common business functions, relationships, and activities in modern businesses. Although an interesting exercise, particularly for a company often criticized for its lack of knowledge about businesses other than software, the mapping exercise does not easily translate into concrete sales.

One technique that Microsoft has found useful is to convert abstract or general business roles into specific personas, fictional people who embody the knowledge, concerns, and aspirations that people in their position in the business world commonly express. Thus, a manufacturing business likely has people like Phyllis in the finance department, Kevin the sales manager, and Ichiro the IT professional, all of whom are among the more than 100 personas that Microsoft has developed to guide product developers, marketers, sales staff, and partners to sell software in manufacturing industries.