Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition — setting the new standard for B2B marketing with qualified buying groups and AI

There’s a fundamental truth about B2B growth — more alignment between sales and marketing teams drives more growth for B2B business. However, achieving this alignment has been a persistent challenge for many organizations. B2B purchases are rarely made by individuals acting alone, but rather by buying groups made up of teams of stakeholders within an account – all with diverse roles and needs. By upgrading strategies to engage these buying groups and their members more precisely, marketers can directly address and improve one critical area of sales and marketing misalignment.

Focusing on buying group journeys offers a shared framework that anchors sales and marketing efforts around the collective decision-making process while complementing existing strategies. Building upon traditional lead-based strategies, it improves account-based tactics by grouping and identifying known and missing stakeholders to more accurately represent how B2B buying decisions are made across business units. This shared perspective can enable both marketing and sales to work as one coordinated revenue team, using unified insights, metrics, and strategies to foster collaboration and break down longstanding silos.

To guide your teams in this new approach, we created Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition to help B2B marketers intelligently engage relevant buying groups within target accounts using personalized, AI-powered content that drives demand for specific product or service offerings. It also unlocks more precise personalization and engagement for enhanced B2B buying experiences.

Read on to learn how your marketing team can work seamlessly with your sales team, and how Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition can help you drive high-quality pipeline and maximize your revenue growth potential.

Why today’s B2B marketing strategies fall short in sales alignment

Today’s B2B buyers are disillusioned by disconnected sales and marketing tactics. These tactics lack the increased level of precision, personalization, and connectivity desired by today’s buyers, making lead- and account-based marketing strategies on their own increasingly ineffective.

For example, while lead-based marketing strategies are a good fit for qualifying an individual’s product interests by using personalized content to attract and engage buyers, they often fall short in viewing these individuals within the context of their role in an account. This can lead to missing vital information for sales, such as an individual’s relationship to the larger buying committee and whether key stakeholders have been overlooked. The result is often a collection of individual marketing qualified leads that have been engaged in a silo.

Account-based marketing (ABM) strategies typically drive more personalized demand and larger deal sizes for the right accounts while aligning closer with the sales team’s needs. However, ABM alone lacks the crucial ability to identify key stakeholders for specific product offerings, especially in accounts with multiple buying committees or when individual stakeholders participate in several committees. Although ABM marketers can group contacts by account, they often struggle to further refine these groups into smaller, more precise groups of stakeholders based on product interest and their company’s selling strategies. This leads to a marketing qualified account with too many contacts for sales to manage and no visibility into key stakeholders or their relationships across different business units.

Focusing exclusively on leads is too narrow, while focusing only on accounts is too broad. Both leave out key information regarding stakeholders, requiring sales representatives to spend time and resources identifying who does and does not play a part in the purchasing process. Focusing on buying groups combines the strengths of both marketing approaches by providing the crucial information marketing needs to enhance customer experiences and the insights sales needs to speed up opportunity creation.

Go beyond leads and accounts to marketing qualified buying groups using generative AI

It’s time to add a buying group focus to your B2B marketing strategy. This shift includes identifying key stakeholders, understanding their individual challenges in the context of their roles and accounts, and crafting and delivering content that addresses individual member’s specific needs and concerns.

5 steps for aligning go-to-market strategy to a buying group focus:

1. Define your business objectives.
   • Example: Increase revenue with existing customers.
2. Confirm your relevant selling motions and target accounts.
   • Example: Cross-sell Solution A to accounts X, Y, and Z.
3. Determine key roles involved in making a purchase decision.
   • Example: Decision Maker, influencer, practitioner
4. Agree on the criteria for each buying group role with sales.
   • Example: Decision maker – Title: CMO or VP of Marketing
5. Agree on threshold for marketing qualified buying groups with sales.
   • Example: Alert account owners when buying group engagement score is 90 or higher.

Creating buying groups shouldn’t be a manual process, though. If it were, it could easily end up requiring too many resources and would not be scalable for larger businesses.

That’s where the generative AI in Journey Optimizer B2B Edition will soon be able to help. It will drastically speed up the buying group creation process by using previous customer engagements and opportunity data on closed deals. Generative AI also plays a role in scaling content creation to speak to individual member’s needs based on their role, product interests, and even previous interactions with marketing and sales teams.

But creating and engaging buying groups is only half the battle. The other half is qualification. Evolving your B2B marketing approach from leads and accounts to buying groups will naturally change your success metrics. As buying groups interact with your brand, Journey Optimizer B2B Edition scores engagement and summarizes behaviors to generate AI-assisted marketing qualified buying groups. These groups act as pre-qualified sales opportunities and include:

• All the roles of key stakeholders
• Engagement activity and scores
• Known and missing members
• Product interest
• Account information
• AI-generated insights and summaries

As a result, these buying groups align directly with your company’s go-to-market plans, unlocking improved coordination between marketing and sales teams to drive demand in a more effective and cost-efficient way.

Enhance existing marketing strategies with Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition

Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is a customer journey orchestration application that unites marketing and sales into a coordinated revenue team, enabling intelligent engagement with buying groups inside targeted accounts. Uniquely designed to leverage generative AI and industry-leading automation to enhance the data and campaigns in existing lead and account-based marketing systems, it makes it possible to identify and engage all key stakeholders in a buying committee — both individually and as a collective group — on every channel and across every stage of the buying journey.

Journey Optimizer B2B Edition does this by giving marketing teams visibility into all buying groups for each product offering within target accounts, aligning with their company’s sales strategies and go-to-market plans. Sales teams also gain more purchase-ready sales opportunities, the ability to accurately prioritize accounts, and better resource allocation.

Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is built as a native application on Adobe Experience Platform, allowing businesses to easily integrate Adobe Marketo Engage, Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform, and other Adobe tools from across their tech stack into a powerful revenue marketing solution.

Learn more about Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition.

Mitch Folks is a group manager of product marketing at Adobe and is responsible for developing and executing go-to-market strategy for Adobe’s B2B product portfolio.

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