Adobe announces new innovations to drive B2B experience-led growth
At Adobe Summit 2023, we announced a range of technology innovations designed to help B2B businesses and marketing teams drive stronger and more efficient growth through superior customer experiences.
From new business to retention, and from upsell to cross-sell, great experiences for your customers large and small form the foundation of profitable growth. Today, that means a digital-first approach to support top accounts with high-touch engagement and digitally informed sales and service reps, as well as to grow the long tail of customer accounts through automated conversations and personalized self-service. We call this experience-led growth. Through our continuing innovation, Adobe is uniquely able to help B2B organizations differentiate themselves through customer experience to thrive and win.
The race against rising expectations
As customers expect more self-directed, responsive, and personalized experiences, what it means to be customer-centric continues to evolve. Digital-native millennials and zoomers now make up 65% of B2B buyer group members and so the bar for what defines an acceptable experience continues to be raised. And now, 55% of B2B executives say their buying cycle time has increased over the previous year — anything that creates delays, confusion, or uncertainty in the already complex B2B buying journey simply adds cost and risk to deals.
It’s no surprise that 93% of B2B marketers have said that keeping pace with new tools and techniques is highly important. Unfortunately, classic tech stacks can’t support the personalized and connected experiences buyers expect, struggle to support the cross-team collaboration needed to achieve them, and don’t adequately give go-to-market teams the scale they need to operate quickly and efficiently.
Adobe’s vision for experience-led growth
It’s time for a new blueprint for how to scale B2B businesses. One that transforms the customer and partner experience, along with the marketing, sales, and service relationship. And one that transforms the productivity of roles across go-to-market teams to deliver the experience — together with the insights to propel the business forward. This is experience-led growth for B2B, and it requires these three things to be effective:
- Customer data at the center. A deep understanding of the customer account and buyer groups you can use for real-time engagement and measuring the ROI of experience-led growth efforts.
- Interactive, self-serve experiences. Experiences across marketing and sales that give customers flexibility, choice, and convenience in how they engage with your brand and buy your offerings.
- Intelligent automation and workflows. Aligning teams around the customer and bringing together the content and data to power personalized experiences at global scale.
Today, we’re announcing a range of targeted innovations that directly address these three needs and span Adobe Experience Cloud, including Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Marketo Engage, Adobe Marketo Measure (formerly known as Bizible), Adobe Commerce, and more.
Customer data at the center
Adobe Real-Time CDP – account list segmentation and activation
Adobe Real-Time CDP provides a single view of B2B customers — accounts, people, and opportunities — for marketing activation across channels. Predictive lead and account scoring help you understand where to focus. Still, if you don’t know all the people in the buyer group, you can’t engage them. Now, Real-Time CDP can activate your target accounts in Marketo Engage and on LinkedIn and other channels, so you can focus your marketing on the specific buyer roles that are missing in your target accounts. That means acquiring new customers and cross-selling existing ones more efficiently.
Adobe Marketo Measure – advanced AI modeling
According to Forrester Research, B2B marketing attribution can lift revenue 15%–18%, but measuring the pipeline and revenue impact of each channel, campaign, and content asset has always been a challenge. And the level of complexity is higher in B2B with its often large buyer groups and long buying cycles. When done right, it can make all the difference in optimizing marketing spend, and that requires a B2B data model of accounts, opportunities, and people, as well as a complete picture of buyer touchpoints as the foundation.
In the last year, we announced and delivered a new edition of our industry-leading B2B attribution solution, Marketo Measure, which uses the power of Adobe Experience Platform to work with nearly any data source, including multiple CRMs, multiple marketing automation platforms, and Adobe Real-Time CDP.
With a more complete picture of touchpoints and their association with progression, the next challenge is to uncover the relationships and patterns in that immense pool of data to derive accurate attribution insights. Now, we’re raising the bar again with advanced AI modeling. This new capability will enhance Marketo Measure by enabling:
- Fully algorithmic attribution that sheds the need for assumptions and rule-setting
- The ability to better isolate the performance of tracked marketing and sales tactics by removing baseline effects on revenue
- The ability to create separate-trained AI models for different conversion points or segments (e.g., new business vs. renewals)
This higher precision insight fuels marketing strategy and investment decisions.
Self-serve experiences
Adobe Marketo Engage – Dynamic Chat with generative AI features powered by Adobe Sensei GenAI, Live Chat, Live Streams, and Advanced Lead Routing
The demand for more interactive, self-serve experiences is causing business leaders to reimagine how marketing and sales teams can move and act as one, and where customers prefer, provide a completely digital buying experience. Indeed, a sales rep is 100 times less likely to reach a lead who wants to be engaged just 30 minutes after the lead comes in — yet the average response time is 42 hours. And if the connection is made, it takes 4.3 days on average before the first meeting happens.
Last year, we announced Dynamic Chat, an essential set of capabilities to automate customer conversations at scale and book sales meetings. Nearly every Marketo Engage customer has access to this base offering today, significantly expanding the number of B2B marketing teams with access to B2B conversation automation technology.
Now, Adobe is further redefining interactive, self-serve experiences by combining the power of generative AI and market-leading automation to create a unique and powerful B2B conversational marketing offering. Together with Marketo Engage, this new premium offering of Dynamic Chat gives B2B teams an end-to-end ability to automate conversations and facilitate Live Chat discussions with customers across the buying journey. Deep personalization and cross-channel consistency comes from having B2B chat natively within marketing automation, and furthermore as part of Adobe Experience Cloud.
Let’s take a look at a few of the new capabilities.
Generative AI features. Powered by Adobe Sensei GenAI, Generated Responses assemble question and answer pairs in minutes from across company-owned knowledge bases and resource centers to use in automated conversations or to assist sales during Live Chat conversations. It also significantly increases time to value and reduces setup overhead. Plus, features focused on content curation and customer data privacy ensure that brands build a trusted experience. Teams can prepare for sales phone calls or other follow-up engagement with Conversation Summaries generated from previous automated and Live Chat conversations. And last but not least, brands can reduce time fine-tuning Generated Responses with Tone and Style Effects that create content designed for your audience.
Live Chat. Seamlessly connect automated conversations to live agents who now have a workspace to receive and manage conversations. The insights are made available across relevant sales team members through the sales insight module in Marketo Engage, available within the CRM.
Live Streams. Turn any Marketo Engage lead form or landing page into a conversation starter or offer up a sales meeting. This cornerstone of lead capture is now interactive.
Advanced Lead Routing. Tap into the power of Marketo Engage to precisely route leads across diverse sales organizations instantly.
Adobe Marketo Engage – interactive webinars
Webinars are a core channel for B2B marketing teams, often with a wealth of behavioral signals from the time an audience is engaged during the webinar that remain locked in the tool. Now, a completely revamped and modernized Adobe Connect powers end-to-end webinar creation and management in Marketo Engage to give customers a streamlined process for marketing and delivering these events. In addition to registration and attendance data, marketing teams get immediate access to engagement insights from polls, surveys, hand-raising, Q&As, and other interactive webinar features in their lead scoring, sales alerting, nurturing and other marketing automation workflows. This creates more responsive and personalized customer experiences. Nearly all Marketo Engage customers will get access to interactive webinars as part of a phased roll out.
Adobe Commerce – advanced B2B ecommerce capabilities
To further scale sales and create net new revenue streams, B2B companies are extending self-serve, personalized buying experiences with online commerce. Adobe Commerce has best-in-class B2B capabilities that allow business buyers to manage their own accounts, purchases, and fulfillment choices. Now, personalized content and offers in Commerce can be powered by precise audiences created in Real-Time CDP from all your essential customer data across and beyond Adobe Experience Cloud. Plus, with greater support for complex customer accounts that span multiple divisions, and advanced capabilities for quoting, such as line-item discounting and seller quoting tools, Commerce takes highly efficient, customer-friendly transactions further up market.
Intelligent automation and workflows
Adobe Marketo Engage and Adobe Workfront – integrated workflows
There’s no customer experience without content, which is why personalization puts new demands on marketing teams that may not be growing as fast as their programs need to be. Marketing at scale takes intelligent automation and workflows to maximize the productivity of every team. Marketo Engage gives teams the ability to scale their marketing automation and campaigns across brands and regions, while Workfront is the command-and-control center of the content supply chain. Now, integrated workflows between them streamline the campaign planning and development lifecycle, including intake and creation, proofing and approvals, reporting and auditing, and more. This speeds time –to market, increasing marketer productivity and providing visibility for stakeholders of all levels.
Adobe Marketo Engage – Journeys
To power responsive customer journeys, modern demand marketers create vast webs of interconnected campaigns, but seeing how these campaigns come together to create a customer experience can be challenging. Journeys in Marketo Engage visualizes these connected campaigns to more easily reveal ways to improve the customer experience and encourage journey progression. Plus, the visualized relationships make it easier to share and explain these journeys to engage stakeholders in the process. And the more visual approach to creating a single campaign simplifies this essential activity for new team members, encourages a broader sphere of campaign creators and reduces the training time for new Marketo Engage customers. Natively built on Marketo Engage, Journeys will be available to every Marketo Engage customer later this year.
In closing
Our passion is our customers and their passion for their customers. As fuel for our creativity, our innovation agenda aims to return the favor by providing the foundation for every Adobe customer to drive experience-led growth in their organizations, through the next year, the next decade, and beyond. To our customers and partners, thank you for your collaboration and inspiration. It is your partnership that continues to propel B2B forward.
Learn more about what Adobe Marketo Engage and Adobe Marketo Measure — and their new AI-powered features — can do for your business.