B2B marketers are rethinking event strategies & budgets. 🤔 Fuel ROI with webinars in 2025. Read the Forrester report

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Microsoft azure drives revenue | Customer Case Study | ON24

B2B marketers are rethinking event strategies & budgets. 🤔 Fuel ROI with webinars in 2025. Read the Forrester report

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How Microsoft Azure equips its sales team with better insights via ON24

  • 7.2%

    Of webinar attendees converted to paying customers

  • 246%

    Scaled webinars per month

  • 1,500

    Annual increase of global webinar run rate

Capabilities

Industry

Use Cases

Number of Employees

  • 10,000+

About

Microsoft develops, manufactures, supports, sells, licenses and otherwise creates the element going into today’s technology puzzle. Founded in 1975, Microsoft is one of the world’s largest multinational technology companies today. Its brand and technology are ubiquitous, establishing decades-long standards for programs, operating systems and more. The company continues to evolve to this day and is a leading innovator in edge computing and cloud technologies.

Introduction

New products and new technologies need a lot of support. They need product teams for operations. They need marketers for establishing a presence. They need sales teams for showing value to potential customers and closing deals. New products and new technologies need all of these elements running in tandem to grow.

The need for collaboration is a requirement for virtual and cloud computing products. Communications for this class of technology relies largely on marketing abstractions, constant sales nurturing and a lot of tracking. For sales, in particular, this demands a well-run lead generation program. Prospective clients must be pinned to the stage in the sales funnel and progress must be tracked from the first touch to close. What’s more, sales needs to know which messages resonate with their target audience to continue conversations and make a close.

Problem

For Microsoft, this meant bringing expert teams together over new products, Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform. To gain a foothold in the cloud computing space, a relatively new field, Microsoft needed to refine its global lead generation program, scale its demand generation programs and gather actionable data for its sales team to work with. It also needed a solution capable of integrating itself with the company’s backend systems, making for fast and easy data transfers on the latest prospective information.

At the time, Azure’s lead generation program consisted of loosely coupled funnels backed by different CRM systems and only tracked top-of-funnel activity for each channel. Sales couldn’t see where a prospect was in their sales cycle, what content they’ve seen and what questions they had about their platform. The lack of data sharing through integrations and the inability to measure its buyer’s journey restricted Microsoft’s ability to drive pipeline and revenue.

"The ON24 platform, it’s so easy, it has allowed us to go and train hundreds of marketers worldwide, get them up to speed very, very quickly, and then they just go and execute.”

Charles Eichenbaum, Director of Marketing

Solution

Microsoft’s established marketing channels lacked the actionable data sales needed to inform and educate potential Azure customers. A major program and process overhaul was needed. After assessing their options, Microsoft added the ON24® platform to its list of tools.

With a data-rich, integrated solution in place, Microsoft could pull audiences in with informative and interactive webinars and drive genuine engagement. Absent data on interactions, downloads and funnel position was now visible. Sales could see which attendee looked at what and when with a few simple clicks. Pinning prospects to a buying cycle stage—and measuring how engaged they are with Azure’s content—became easy with engagement scores and attendance history. The team could now continue conversations and close deals.

With a better engagement platform in place, Microsoft enjoyed:

Instant actionable data: With ON24’s Marketo integration in place, Microsoft ensured its account data was unified, consistent and followed the account through the entire buying cycle—no more chasing down data from different CRMs.

Boosted pipeline and revenue with webinars: Microsoft used ON24 to produce more than 130 webinars a month and convert seven percent of webinar attendees into paying customers.

Scaled webinar impact: With easy-to-use and produce events, Microsoft’s field marketers and sales teams easily created and published webinars for prospects and regions.

Results

With the tightly connected ON24 Marketo integration in place, Microsoft gained valuable insight into its webinar program performance. This type of end-to-end reporting helped determine where to continue investing webinar efforts. With ON24, Microsoft:

Made measurable conversions.

With the right solution in place, Microsoft could track webinar attendees from first touch to paying customers, with a 7.2 percent conversion rate.

Grew its webinar program.

With an easy-to-understand and programmatic solution, Microsoft grew its webinar program to more than 130 events per month.

Put Azure’s message in every corner of the globe.

Cloud computing means global computing. To get Azure’s message where it needs to go, Microsoft increased its global webinar run rate to 1,500 annually.

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