[Music] [Michael Smith] Good morning, afternoon, or evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this fireside chat on a topic that is absolutely critical for driving success in today's B2B environment. Cracking The Code: How to Build and Scale B2B Buying Groups. I'm Mike Smith, Principal Solutions Consultant, Adobe, and I'll be your host today for our conversation. And alongside me is the brilliant guest, or my brilliant guest, Jessica Criscione.
In this session, we will cover Adobe's proven framework for aligning teams, processes, and data around buying groups. We'll gain insights from IBM's Jessica's on buying group evolution and preparing for and operationalizing buying groups in the B2B marketing, and then discuss actionable steps to get started and drive alignment with your revenue teams, even before implementing tools like Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition.
So let's get started.
So Forrester's Revenue Marketing Buying Group Manifesto opens with the assertion, "The B2B buyer is a buying group," marking a significant evolution in how businesses approach B2B marketing today. Marketers need a more modern approach given our traditional lead-based marketing is a bit too narrow. This person is interested, but what about the account? Whereas our account-based marketing, which came in effect around 2015, 2016, is a bit too broad, these contacts are interested, but for which products and who are the stakeholders? That's where Forrester is leaning towards this idea and concept of buying groups, which is just right. It focuses on the people that matter the most, the key decision makers that are part of the account, and really giving you an understanding if you are targeting the correct buying group and buying group members, but also the understanding of the completeness of that buying group and what it looks like across your entire company's product go-to-market motion.
Adobe and our customers agree, as well as IBM and Jessica and team with Forrester's answer to modernizing and reorienting B2B marketing towards buying groups.
If we look, it's an evolutionary process. B2B marketing is evolving to include these buying committees, enhancing current lead and account targeting strategies. Buying group engagement is the missing link needed to modernize and reorient existing lead and account management needed to stay relevant and effective for today's modern day B2B buyer. The reality of it is actually we need all three. It's an evolution. We continue to build on and enhance what we've built over time. It really comes down to having the ability to work with not only your leads, accounts, but also buying groups and I'd even add in a fourth, which is opportunity data. And if you were just getting started with becoming account-based focused, no better time to do so now while we're in this process of enhancing off of the ABM and lead marketing traditional playbook that we've utilized for years. We at Adobe believe this will unlock even more value from our automation and ABM programs by identifying the true demand units that sales focuses on, increasing sales trust in marketing sourced opportunities, and improving marketing co-selling during the sales cycle. Having a buying group centric approach to drive alignment with sales and generate demand is in a more precise way has been impossible until now. Now, Jessica, all that said, I'd be interested, you've worked or have had a lot of experience working with businesses that need to engage these complex groups. In your view, why has the shift from individual decision makers to group decision makers become so important for businesses to grasp? [Jessica Criscione] I don't know that I would say it's a net new thing as far as behavioral patterns of our clients. I think it is a new thing for businesses to look at. We now have the data where we can say we see that it takes, at least for IBM, about 4 to 14 people for any given product to actually make a decision and invest in it. I think part of the mental shift for businesses is that especially when you're doing large investments like you generally are doing with IBM, you want to make sure that you have all the right parties on board. So in our world, we've historically tried to separate a lot of the people that would normally be considered like "influencers" in the Forrester model. And we would talk to the developers in a completely separate channel from what we would generally consider decision makers, aka the C-suite. And I think a lot of the data that we've started to gather over the years has really helped us see how the developers are, in fact, informing the more senior members of the company, what is the right product, right? So that shift has been major for us in trying to provide a unified journey and how we tie it all together and speak to our individual clients as a holistic company and tie it together as One IBM.
I like that notion of One IBM. And also just the process by which you've gone through in identifying those, I'd even say maybe siloed groups and work towards seeing them more as a buying group.
And we'll talk about it in a little bit. And you and I have talked about it over this process of building this presentation, this buying group community. So obviously, with IBM, you have a huge community of developers. So it's interesting and insightful how you guys at IBM are approaching it. Now we're the same at Adobe. We are facing some of the same challenges that you guys are facing and a lot of our B2B customers are facing. And it is that idea of making the shift toward buying groups. We, just as we've been talking about, we started off in a lead-based manner. So lead volume and linear pipeline and bookings to support solution selling models. And for those that are attending other sessions as well, there is another session that I'll get to at the end of our presentation that goes into further detail about the Adobe on Adobe story. So most certainly check that one out. This is just a high level overview of that. But again, we started off in a lead-based format. And Jessica, like what you had said, this is an evolution. It's not necessarily something new. I've always thought this process, going even from lead-based to account-based marketing or a double funnel where you're doing both, is more an evolution, as well as an evergreen process. It's always going to be changing. We're always going to be tweaking it. We're always going to be enhancing it. And I think that's where Forrester is going with the idea of buying groups. It's almost complementary to what we've been doing in lead-based and ABM and account-based marketing. So giving you that ability to self-directed research, which structured account development to increase buyer group quality and alignment to solutions. But again, being able to, in a single solution, work with your people or your leads, if you will, accounts and buying groups. Now again, this is a little bit of a high level overview of what we're doing at Adobe. This really gives us the ability to...
build out our journeys based on buying groups. And I think you had talked about it earlier, and I'd be curious, Jessica, on your perspective of your journey at IBM and doing the same thing, more so centered around the other challenge we had was gaining that view or that single view of the customer journey and moving towards that single view of a buying group. And you had shared this current state and future state architecture. If you could just go through the thinking and where you guys are and a description of IBM's journey, I think that would be helpful for the audience. Certainly. One of the challenges that we've had historically is that marketing and sales have operated in very siloed fashion. You touched on this earlier.
And we're really trying to shift from the model that you see at the top, which is very much a marketing is pushing to sales, right? In that model, we're operating under independent views of what we're trying to do in market. And with buying groups in this broader collaboration, we're really trying to shift to where marketing and sales are going after the same identified groups and then doing it in a unified fashion. So part of what we're doing in the bottom half of this diagram is with adding AEP. That gives us the holistic view. What are all the different touch points with both the individuals and the account? And then AJO is coordinating that entire journey, right? And you'll see that we have some other tools in here. Some of them are on the sales side. We also have some media tools. But what we're really trying to get to is having a holistic engagement that's truly omnichannel about how we try to move these people through the funnel, right? As we have the different roles, they're going to all be at different points. We're going to engage with them in different ways...
But all the parties on our side. So I'm talking marketing, offering, take care of product teams, sales and support need to see all of this so that they can help move people appropriately through the funnel. So you'll see we've evolved from at the top, a one-to-many spray and pray model on the marketing side to getting more and more targeted, where we're narrowing down on that buying group and the activities that we want them to pay attention to and hopefully sending them fewer messages that are more targeted towards the pipeline.
That's very insightful, interesting as well in reference to some of the key points that you and I have discussed and it's almost as if unifying across the board and unifying the team, unifying the data, unifying around the customer and the community in reference to buying groups so that you have that again, that single view of the customer journey to then affect communication, the personalization within those groups. So very insightful in reference to what you guys are doing today, and exciting to see your story evolve. We also talked about this idea of a North Star that you're working towards. Again, this I think is an interesting thing that Forrester has published in reference to continuing to evolve what we've been doing over the years and striving towards something new that will really revolutionize what we're doing today in B2B marketing.
Now for those on the call today, one thing that Jessica and I did as we went through this process of just sharing what we've learned about buying groups over the last year in reference to not only what Adobe is doing, what IBM is doing, what I'm hearing in the field, what she's doing in reference to speaking with influencers and just speaking with other B2B marketers out there is we want to combine some insight and give the group on the call some key best practices. So we came up with five key best practices for operationalizing buying groups. Again, before you even get to the point of implementing a product such as Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition. So the first step that I think we both agreed upon, and it was interesting to see, we're both huge fans of steering committees and centers of excellence, so COEs. Prior to coming here six years ago to Adobe as a B2B marketer for 20 plus years, a lot of the programs that I built were centered around having a center of excellence, which it's interesting now that we've moved to this buying group mentality or focus in a B2B world, your COE could essentially be your own internal buying group or portions of it could be your own entire internal buying group in reference to B2B. So the point here that Jessica and I talked about was the idea of, again, we're not necessarily reinventing the wheel. This is not a huge revolutionary step in B2B. It's an evolution. It's a reorientation. So step one for both of us, I think, was re-leveraging existing committees or maybe, and I think in one instance, I was talking to a colleague of mine, it's almost resurrecting. So if you deployed your ABM strategy two, three, four years ago, and that COE is dissolved, well, maybe this is a great opportunity for you to pull that steering committee back in to start focusing on buying groups, but leveraging everything that you've done the last two or three years in reference to your key target accounts, how you might be segmenting them or tiering them out, either that be by industry, geography, whatever it might be, enterprise, mid-market, small business, whatever it might be. But it's where we have to start having those hard conversations that we may have had when we talked about ABM, which is a manual process and, Jessica, you talked about it, of unifying with the sales organization of really understanding, okay, have we been targeting the right accounts? And now that lens of, okay, if we can really peel back the layers of understanding what truly are our target accounts, well, what do we feel our true buying group is? Who are the members? What are the roles? How do they act? Really uncovering what makes them tick, what incentivize them, what they're looking for in product, in messaging, and a personalized experience? So leveraging that, I think, is the first component. And then I think that dovetails into the second component. And what I was doing was working off of my implementation of ABM as if I was moving to a buying group. And I think it also gives us an opportunity to audit what we've done from an account prioritization and segmentation perspective if you have deployed an ABM strategy. I've worked with customers over the last couple of years where when I start asking questions around, what is your segmentation, or your tiering, or your structure of your accounts and how you're targeting them? And I get responses of I have a list of 6,000. I have a list of 10,000. If we go back to some of the original best practices around account-based marketing, it was this idea of starting small, not biting off more than you could chew. And possibly, I think the range I always work within is maybe targeting 200 accounts. And maybe you're spreading that across two or three key industries. On the enterprise side, I've heard targeting 1,000 accounts is maybe where you start. So for me, I think it's a great practice as we go through this evolution and this reorientation to really look under the lens again, what has been working and what have we been doing from an account perspective. And then again, have those conversations, and look into the data that you might have in reference to are we targeting the right people? What kind of engagement have we historically received from targeting these accounts in this particular way? And you could pull that from your marketing automation tool like Marketo and get that information as you, again, make your way towards this new buying group-centric world. Now, Jessica, that was a lot in reference to structuring that traditional foundation or structuring a foundation, I guess, towards buying groups. I'd be curious what you and IBM might be doing from a structuring perspective of team as you get ready to evolve towards buying groups.
Yeah, you had mentioned COEs earlier, which very much excites me because we have an omnichannel COE. And in that particular COE, we're doing a combination of automation specialist, demand strategists, representatives from all of the disciplines, as well as the technologists and some of our taxonomy folks.
And that is really trying to set some governance models about how do we want to engage with people? How do we want to plan journeys into end? And then we're within each of the campaigns, creating the equivalent of a tiger team that is taking that broader governance and then focusing in on the right buying group roles, making sure we have a shared definition of what that role is. What do we want them to do? What content are they consuming at what point in the funnel? And then really doubling down on that individual campaign journey.
And in a few cases, like if we have to daisy chain campaigns, what does that start to look like? So it's really a combination of higher level governance within teams that are very focused in on trying to sell a certain set of products in a certain way.
That, again, COEs couldn't agree more. I think that it's a great way of approaching, and it sounds like you've had some quite success in that route as well. I think your point about governance that is a key ingredient, our best practice, most certainly in reference to how you're going to govern this evolution towards buying groups. And then I think that idea of a tiger group. So having a bit more of an agile group that you could rely on in making this transition, I think, would be key as well. So again, that steer co, COE, governance, and tiger group mentality as a two key pillars as you move towards buying groups, I think is something crucial for a lot of our customers to consider. And now, in reference to the other three best practices that we talked about, it's more of a, now that you have this foundational components or these two foundational components to building out buying groups are evolving towards buying groups. I think the other component is more about, okay, now that we have that foundation, that team structure and processes, we need to move into building out the buying group foundation, launching the journeys and ultimately expanding alignment across sales and marketing. And it's not something that you're going to do on day one. And it's not something that's going to be an all-encompassing process. I think it's more just as the buying group centric mentality is in moving from ABM or moving from lead-based marketing is it's an evolution. It's a reorientation. I think that's that key first step. And I think you talked about it as well, Jessica, when we talked about unifying the data and getting that single view of the customer, being able to reorient your lead and accounts into buying groups, I think is the key number one piece for me and even have an opportunity to discuss what that reorientation is based on your historical data and engagement from either a lead or account perspective. Then moving to that unified account identities across systems and teams, then modeling and leveraging engagement to identify opportunity and propensity, and then setting those buying group rules to begin composing buying groups in target accounts. Now, obviously, AJO B2B will help with that and it will help scale. But I think in our discussions today alone, really pinpoints this idea of having these and I think a lot of our customers I know I did when we deployed account-based marketing was there needed to be a lot of upfront internal conversations around manually whiteboarding out, what are our buying groups? What type of modeling, engagement, and leveraging, and scoring do we have today? What does our unification of account identities look like internally and have those hard conversations with marketing, sales, and IT? It's funny, I think my first implementation of Marketo way back in 2006, they were doing a campaign where you had a sign. This was during implementation, you have to sign a manifesto that you would basically get along with your sales and IT counterparts for the better good of building best practices and lead marketing. And I think the same thing is true for account-based marketing. And the same thing is true for buying groups now is having that internal agreement and unification outside of just moving into utilizing the product is key. So use cases, create buying groups and identify missing contacts, establish outcomes, start to identify buying group role, communities, I'll call them communities. There's a big trend in B2B. And I think you talked about it earlier, Jessica, about acting almost like a B2C company. I think we've somewhat over digitized ourselves so much over the years that we focus on this idea of we have to target this group, we have to target this lead, how do we digitize this. And I think through even this exercise, as I'm talking, we have to get a better understanding of who our communities are and make sure that our brand is communicating and keeping them in consideration, that our brand becomes an extension or part of that community. And I use the word community because that community are these sub buying groups. And I think you had said it as well, Jessica, around your buying group of developers. That's a different mindset, a different communication, a different community than maybe someone purchasing a different community of engineers, maybe that you're targeting. So I think that's a piece to really nail down up front and understand their personas and how you target them across different products and solutions. And I'll pause there, just to get your input, Jessica, on that because it did sound like that's some of the things that you're working towards in reference to, excuse me, reorienting, unifying accounts and really understanding those buying group communities. Absolutely. One of the key things for us, and I will very much say, we're in the walk phase, is that we're trying to get all of the data. And because over the years, across all of our products, we have very many products, right, we have a lot of different personas. And what could be a programmer persona in one product is going to be very different in how they behave from, say, a mainframe operator or things along those lines, right, just like how they engage in what they are looking for from us as a company to help inform their decisions is generally going to be different. And if you look at, we target a lot of C-suite as final decision makers, they're looking for very different information. So now that we have some of the foundation and are manually identifying what our buying groups are, and making some guesses at that, we're hoping as we get into more run phases, that we'll have the data to validate whether those assumptions are correct. Are we giving them the right information at the right point in the funnel? Are they getting stuck or deterred because we should have done something different? We're really looking to get that feedback loop so that we can try to make our nurtures more impactful and frankly, just help our clients find what they need to help make a decision. I could not agree more. And I appreciate you also, and I know I didn't call it out at the beginning of this slide of this step one in this best practice is this idea of a crawl, walk, run, kind of processey going from having those conversations internally in and pseudo manually coming to a consensus of what your unification of data and unification and understanding of buying groups is. And then to your point, led me right to our next point is what does the walk phase look like? So launching buying group journeys.
One thing you'll hear in the Adobe on Adobe story that we talk about is creating these micro journeys. And I think you were just discussing that there's a-- And you could almost even say a micro journey in a micro community in reference to your developers and your programmers and your C-suite. And they're not just someone who's going to be a receiver of some communication you're sending out. There should be a sense of community and a community around where they fit in the buying group journey and the decision-making process. So creating those micro journey campaigns that content is focused on buying group community and member acquisition, buying group evaluation to progress. The buying group is a key driver. I think you were just mentioning that feedback loop. So once you have an understanding of what you believe you are buying group personas are across different segmentations and products and solutions better understanding through the product of say AJO B2B if that's the right target. If that's the right messaging I'd even go to the point where, and I've seen a lot of B2B influencers. Obviously, there's the digital input and insights you'll get in analytics as a feedback loop, but I'd also say some community-based events or even voice of the customer. And I'm curious, Jessica, does IBM do a voice of the customer type feedback loops, as well as obviously the digital one? Very much so. We've done it for years. Actually, we've evolved from NPS to direct feedback. We actually have a fair amount of community outreach where we either do standalone communities around certain products or certain personas.
We look at all of it together and try to figure out what that looks like and how we can better engage to service everyone's needs. We've been doing some variation of that feedback loop very specifically around voice of the customer, for I want to say at least 10 years or so. And trying to use that not only to improve our products, but also improve our messaging to individual groups. I think that's very important. And it's good to hear that you've been doing it for so long and so successfully, and it's a foundational element.
And just to work off of what we have here again as use cases, so developing that buying group community content, acquiring missing buying groups, activate account data to create cross-sell journeys. But I think again, that idea of that feedback loop of getting a better understanding of if that buying group community content is resonating or if it needs to evolve and change by again, hearing from your own buying group communities. So goal here, again, orchestrate buying group journeys for prioritized counts. Sales Ops validate buying groups and marketing creates content and nurture campaigns as a stepping stone in the walk phase. And then you expand on that into the run phase, which is expanding impact and alignment. So sales and marketing leaders roll up to say a CRO or you advance use case activation that spans outside of the ones that you used as a fine foundational element to get your buying group centric strategy off the ground. Use cases around qualifying opportunities by sending sales alerts for qualified buying groups, understanding and optimizing ROI of journeys and communities. I think as we're talking about our micro journeys that we're talking about, the idea here again is to expand buying group orchestration adoption to additional use cases that span sales and marketing teams. And I think one thing that we've been talking about is this is important because it becomes almost like a natural state within the organization that you have these buying group communities and it's an extension of your brand and extension of your campaigns, and you have that feedback loop, obviously, that we talked about that just continues to expand this in a line over time. And again, I'll pause there, Jessica, just to get your final thoughts, on these five key best practices, but also this crawl, walk, run approach, given it's something that you're doing right now.
Yeah, I will say I'm very excited about the evolution, both for us as a company and just the industry as a whole. Like, part of where we're trying to get to is not just sales pipeline. That is obviously a direct benefit and part of what everyone is trying to achieve. But ultimately, it's really about delivering a better experience for our clients or potential clients so that they want to be engaged with us, right? So we're looking at it from a, this is a lifetime value kind of situation, right? You had mentioned infinite loop and doing that larger model.
To me, it's really, are we giving you what you need to make a decision? Are we talking to you holistically? How can we move the needle in servicing all of our individual clients? Could not agree more. I think that was a great way of summarizing our talk today.
Just a couple of additional resources. Thank you very much for all that are on the call today. There are most certainly, Jessica and I had talked about it, looking at the Adobe Summit session agenda. There are a ton of other B2B sessions to attend, to take advantage of that are very insightful.
Again, thank you very much. Just want to outline some next steps and resources. Two particular Summit sessions I think that would be worthwhile to check out. One is ABM and Buying Group Orchestration with Journey Optimizer B2B Edition with AWS on March 19. And then B2B Transformation Series. So that's what I was referring to, the Adobe on Adobe Digital Marketing Story, which is on March 20. And that goes into a lot more detail than what I went into on the Adobe on Adobe story today.
Again, another resource, be sure to check out the Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition online resources on adobe.com And then, most certainly, open to scheduling or having you reach out to either your account manager or going through the process of introduction to AJO B2B or discovery call. At the end of the day, we are happy to support you and your B2B ever evolving journey as we discussed today. And thank you very much, Jessica, for coming along for the ride in this presentation and developing out. I most certainly learned a lot in reference to what we uncovered here around buying groups.
Any other last words before we close it out on our Summit presentation? No, just thank you for having me, and I wish everyone the best of luck on their journey. Yes, thank you. [Music]
