In theory, lead management is simple: find the right people, engage them meaningfully, and pass them to sales when they’re ready.

In practice, enterprise B2B buying is anything but simple. Every deal is a committee decision involving stakeholders from procurement, IT, finance, legal, and business — each with different priorities and levels of influence. Add in long buying cycles, privacy expectations, and disconnected data, and suddenly, the “qualified lead” your sales team receives is anything but qualified.

The traditional funnel — with its neat handoff from marketing to sales — wasn’t designed for this level of complexity. It assumes a single buyer, a linear journey, and a predictable timeline. That’s why it breaks.

Adobe Marketo Engage was built for a different reality. It helps marketing and sales teams orchestrate engagement across every role, region, product, and channel — at an enterprise scale. And with Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition, you can go a step further: shifting from lead management to buying group orchestration.

Here’s how modern lead management works — and how Adobe’s B2B go-to-market orchestration engine turns fragmented signals into real pipeline impact.

Why lead management is broken — and what replaces it.

The reason so many B2B organizations struggle with lead management isn’t a lack of leads. It’s a lack of visibility into who’s involved in the buying process.

Most marketing teams still optimize for individuals — scoring based on job title, email clicks, or webinar attendance. Sales, on the other hand, sells to buying groups. The result is a mismatch: leads that look good on paper but go nowhere because the full committee isn’t engaged.

This disconnect shows up as stalled deals, missed quotas, and marketing attribution that no one trusts.

To fix this, companies don’t need more automation. They need systems that reflect how enterprise buying happens — across groups, journeys, and touchpoints. That starts with Marketo Engage.

Orchestrating every touchpoint, not just capturing interest.

Marketo Engage acts as a centralized engine for capturing, scoring, and nurturing leads — but it doesn’t stop there. It connects inbound, outbound, and paid media into a cohesive demand generation system, with the intelligence to adapt based on how people engage.

It ingests behavioral and firmographic data from web visits, emails, webinars, and events — and combines that with CRM and Adobe Real-Time CDP data to build unified profiles. This allows marketers to create dynamic segments and trigger personalized nurture tracks based on who someone is, what they care about, and where they are in the journey.

Cloning, tokenization, and intelligent workflows enable marketing teams to move fast without reinventing the wheel each time. And with native CRM integrations, sales always knows which leads are engaged, what they’ve done, and what’s next — with alerts, prioritization, and attribution built in.

It’s not just lead management. It’s lead velocity, with visibility.

From individuals to influence: Introducing buying groups.

While Marketo Engage helps marketing and sales act on real-time signals, Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition takes this further by enabling buying group orchestration.

Enterprise deals aren’t won by convincing one person. They require consensus from a group of decision-makers, influencers, and technical evaluators. Journey Optimizer B2B identifies these groups in real time — and monitors whether all critical roles are engaged.

By combining data from Marketo Engage and Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer B2B uses GenAI to assign contacts to buying group roles based on behavior, title, and past patterns. It calculates completeness and engagement scores — and when the right people are sufficiently active, it converts them into a marketing qualified buying group (MQBG).

From there, Journey Optimizer B2B alerts sales with AI-generated summaries that highlight who’s in the group, what they’ve done, and what to do next. No guesswork. No cold outreach. Just actionable momentum.

Role-aware journeys that scale with the deal.

Journey Optimizer B2B also makes personalization scalable across the buying committee.

Each member of the group gets a journey that’s tailored to their role, stage, and level of engagement. If the CMO downloads a product brief, the IT lead might get a security checklist next. Activity from one stakeholder can trigger intelligent follow-ups to others — keeping the group aligned and the opportunity moving.

All of this is tracked and synchronized across Marketo Engage and Customer Journey Analytics, giving marketing and sales a shared view of what’s working — and what needs more attention.

The result is fewer stalled deals, higher conversion rates, and a faster path from interest to revenue.

Lead management KPIs that matter.

Too often, marketing teams focus on surface-level metrics — clicks, downloads, or individual form fills — without connecting them to meaningful business outcomes. But at scale, lead management success hinges on your ability to move the right people through the funnel and prove impact across functions.

With Marketo Engage, performance can be measured using:

• Conversion rates across MQLs, SQLs, and opportunities
• Time-to-lead assignment and time-to-first touch
• Campaign velocity (how quickly programs can be launched and iterated)
• Engagement scores across channels and segments
• ROI from multitouch attribution at the program and channel level

For teams using Journey Optimizer B2B, two metrics redefine qualification: completeness and engagement. Completeness indicates whether all key buying group roles are represented. Engagement reflects both individual and collective activity. When both thresholds are met, a marketing qualified buying group (MQBG) is triggered — giving sales a reliable signal of readiness.

Before and after — what changes when lead management works.

Before Marketo Engage and Journey Optimizer B2B

Sales receives a list of “hot” leads — but has no context on what product they’re interested in, or who else is part of the decision. Marketers run dozens of siloed programs across channels, with no clear way to measure influence. Sales cycles drag out because decision-makers are either disengaged or never identified. No one trusts the handoff.

After implementation

Journey Optimizer B2B automatically maps contacts to buying group roles and flags gaps to be filled with targeted outreach. Once the group is complete and engaged, Marketo Engage alerts sales with a GenAI-generated summary of who’s involved and what to do next. Campaigns adapt based on role and interest — if the CIO clicks a security whitepaper, legal might receive a compliance resource. Sales focuses only on deals with verified product interest and committee-level engagement — and moves faster with confidence.

Real business impact, not just automation.

Companies using Marketo Engage and Journey Optimizer B2B aren’t just modernizing workflows — they’re accelerating performance across the board.

One global marketing team launched 36x more campaigns per month after switching to Marketo, thanks to campaign cloning and token-based automation. A leading enterprise reported a 16:1 booking return on marketing program spend and a 25% increase in sales-qualified leads by unifying engagement and scoring across systems. With buying group orchestration, customers saw a 15% lift in MQBG volume and faster sales cycles across key accounts.

These gains reflect a different way of thinking about lead management — not as a static handoff, but as a coordinated motion across marketing, sales, and the full buyer journey.

Lead management is a growth lever. Treat it like one.

Enterprise CMOs and CIOs can’t afford to rely on yesterday’s lead models. If you’re still measuring Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs) without understanding the full buying context, you’re leaving a pipeline on the table — and putting pressure on sales to close deals without support.

With Marketo Engage, you gain the engine to manage and accelerate leads intelligently. With Journey Optimizer B2B, you orchestrate engagement across the full buying group. And with the rest of Adobe’s B2B GTM stack — Real-Time CDP, Customer Journey Analytics, and Experience Manager Assets — you can execute personalized, AI-powered strategies at scale.

The path to revenue starts with how you manage leads. But it ends with how well you engage people — together.

Let us show you the full power of Adobe Market Engage: Book a demo.

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