By Amber Hickman |
Founded in 1970, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) is a nonprofit with the mission of advancing the understanding, practice and development of leadership for the benefit of society.
Headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, the organisation employs over 500 employees across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions.
CCL offers in-person and on-demand training, assessments and coaching alongside a deep library of leadership resources and research on topics such as hybrid work, women in leadership and psychological safety. With such a global reach and diverse client base, CCL understands the importance of speed and responsiveness in its operations.
After going live on Microsoft Dynamics 365, CCL partnered with Sunrise to provide ongoing support and strategic guidance on how to maximise the value of its investment. Sunrise first worked closely with the operational side of the business to strengthen and optimise its use of Dynamics. Over time, as the partnership deepened, CCL’s sales and marketing leaders began working with Sunrise also, seeking ways to use the same tools to improve customer engagement and streamline their day-to-day work.
One area that CCL’s marketing team identified as an opportunity for improvement was in manual lead reviews. The organisation’s global presence meant that leads were flowing into Dynamics 365 at all hours of the day. A marketing team member was manually reviewing over 1,000 inbound customer leads each month, a process that consumed more than 10 hours a week. Furthermore, each lead required verification before it could be routed to the appropriate team for follow-up. Not only did this cause delays but it also slowed down sales team’s response times.
Sunrise worked with CCL to design and implement a solution that could filter out potential spam leads, eliminating the need for manual reviewing, as well as automated workflows that would route inbound leads to the correct sales teams based on enquiry, location and more. Dubbed the ‘speed to lead’ initiative, the goal was to reduce the amount of time it took to get leads into the hands of the sales team.
The solution used Microsoft Power Automate to orchestrate the flow of information, combined with a custom-trained AI model tuned with CCL’s own historical data. The solution only took 20 hours to implement thanks to CCL’s existing ChatGPT endpoint and Sunrise’s familiarity with its systems.
By learning the patterns that distinguished legitimate prospects from junk submissions, the model could automatically flag and remove spam before it ever reached a human reviewer. Leads that passed this validation step were then routed to the correct sales team based on region and business rules defined by CCL. Because the process was built inside Dynamics, updates to assignment logic could easily be managed as the organisation’s needs evolved.
The new tool automatically filters spam, validates legitimate leads and routes them to the appropriate sales team all seamlessly within the Dynamics 365 environment.
“Now it just runs,” says Jennifer Bradley, senior manager of global marketing systems, integrations and operations at CCL. “Leads come in, get validated and are assigned automatically. That means our sales team is following up within the hour, while the prospect still remembers submitting the form. It’s been a huge win for us.”
Since the transformation, CCL has cut manual review time by over 90 per cent, down to just one hour per week by filtering out over 300 spam leads each month. This allows the team to respond to leads faster, more accurately and with greater confidence, helping to free up valuable staff capacity for higher-impact work.
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