Spearheading Cross-sell Designs in Azure
Built design led product growth from the ground up generating $125M additional revenue for Azure Networking
🏆 Nominated for FY23 Cloud Marketing award addressed by Takeshi Numoto, EVP/CMO of Microsoft
My role
Crafted the first cross-sell design proposal that generated $360K ACR within 4 weeks, then became the design lead for Azure cross-sell v-team, collaborated with business planners, data scientist, content designers and researchers, established the first Azure cross-sell design principals, created 6 design patterns, and shipped 3 more experiments each generating $0.36M ~ $1.1M ACR.
Opportunity
Azure offers a vast ecosystem of services, but users often struggle to discover complementary solutions that could enhance their workflows, which also lead to missed opportunities for customers to optimize their cloud usage and lost revenue for Microsoft.
As the cloud market matured, if most of the largest companies in the addressable market have found their cloud, what is the next frontier of growth for Azure?
How we defined cross-sell
Cross-sell is a powerful strategy that drives adoption by surfacing relevant, complementary products at the right moment.
Leveraged product association data built by metrics from Azure business planning and monetization team on monthly customer transactions and every possible product combination.
Design strategy and impact
#1 Establishing design principals with intentions that focus on usability yet drives business outcomes
Be intentional
Include a cross sell feature and service in relevant experiences, at the most appropriate time and place, to customers who can decide to adopt or not to adopt.
Be honest
Make it clear to customers that they are in a cross-sell moment and be honest about the potential consequences of adding a cross-sell feature or service which may include additional costs and the technical impact of a deployment, like workload downtime.
Be helpful
Help customers make the decision to adopt or not to adopt a cross sell feature or service by providing all the relevant information needed to decide. Including a clear value proposition highlighting the reasons to adopt + better together benefits, and the consequences of adoption.
Be friendly
Be friendly by being transparent about why you’re presenting a cross-sell moment to a customer, making the experience delightful by avoiding pushy language, speaking negatively or in an alarming way about the current features and services in use.
Design strategy and impact
#2 Demonstrate measurable design impact through lightweight experimentation and quantifiable results
#Case study: Cross-selling DDoS protection
Understand user and business motivations
Preventing DDoS attacks is a high priority for US Government and strategic gaming customers. Our data has shown that most people who have Azure Firewall, also has DDoS protection enabled in their infrastructure.
How might we make it easier for users to deploy two things they need often together?
Designing end to end cross-selling moments
Option 1. Allow quick “add-on” configuration during deployment process
Just like a combo at McDonald’s, you will likely want that small fries to go with your meal. Making it accessible to enable DDoS protection while deploying a Firewall allows users to deploy 2 things they need in one go.
Option 2. Help users mitigate risk right where they found it
By surfacing DDoS protection status on customers’ virtual network, we not only help customer understand their security posture, but also allow them to quickly mitigate risk by enabling DDoS protection quickly.
The team kicked off a 4 weeks experimentation with design option 2, which only needed 4 hours of dev time, and has proved to drove new customer acquisition for DDoS protection plans while also increasing usage among existing customers—potentially reducing churn.
+2.6-4.3%
Increased adoption in 4 weeks
+10x
Increase in sidepane loads
+$360K
Projected annual revenue gain
Design strategy and impact
#3 Craft easy to follow cross-sell guide and contribute to others’ success
Continue to design and innovate the way users adopt Azure services
We didn’t stop at one experiment, instead, we continue to craft design patterns and invite even more designers, content designers and researchers to join the v-team.
Created a step by step cross-sell guide with check list and helpful links
By lowering the difficulty, we made sure teams could quickly add cross-sell strategies without any problems or guesswork.
Reflect and learn through research backed insights
Ensuring teams design their cross sell moments to be genuinely valuable rather than intrusive or purely engagement-driven