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Microsoft Sales, Marketing, and Services Group

The Client

Microsoft Corporation relies on its Sales, Marketing, and Services Group (SMSG) to educate its global sales force and customers about new products. The SMSG team plays a critical role in the Microsoft sales cycle. Not only does it drive customer interest in new products, it also empowers the sales force to find new ways of solving customer problems by informing them about the latest technologies. Microsoft's annual revenue for 2004 was in excess of $36.8 billion.

The Challenge

Microsoft recognizes that its over 20,000 sales employees in seven global regions often know best about what training they need. The company wanted to collect detailed training information including business needs and priorities from their sales force to determine which courses to build and offer. This would lead to the creation of a better yearly curriculum roadmap. Microsoft wanted a low-cost solution that could be deployed on a global scale, could accurately collect data, and could store information in an existing database. The system had to be maintainable by a single employee.

The Solution

Realizing the customer's unique demands for reliable data collection and storage, Qdabra built an easy-to-use Microsoft InfoPath form to collect information from the global sales force. This template was distributed via a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Server, which provided the document repository for the submitted data. After the data was gathered the SMSG team used a custom application to successfully upload the data into its existing database.

Screenshots

Figure 1. The InfoPath SMSG readiness request form allows a worldwide sales force to quickly submit training request needs to corporate planners.

Figure 2. Sales people enter multiple business needs in a flexible form that expands as more data is entered. The top of the form displays the summary list of needs and the area below provides space for entering detailed information.

Figure 3. The aggregated deliverables screen allows quickly sorting by priority and adding detailed requirements. In this way training planners can quickly analyze the requests and start to develop curriculum.

Figure 4. The details for each requirement can be viewed and edited.