[Music] [Bob Conklin] Great. Well, welcome, everyone, to our session. I'm Bob Conklin with Adobe Product Marketing, and I'm joined by Nina Grossberg from Vanguard. Very happy to have Nina here. Yes. The Vanguard fans are in the house.
And so, yeah, we've put together a session for you. We spent a lot of time on it including Sunday, I think, right? - [Nina Grossberg] Maybe. - We won't admit to that.
But anyway, I think there's some really good lessons to be learned here and we hope you enjoy it here late on Wednesday. So without further ado, let's dig in. So the agenda, I'm going to start off with just some context setting, the evolution of B2B go-to-market and how CDPs play into that, and Adobe innovation, just a quick recap of some of the announcements we've made here over the last two days, which have been quite a few. And then Nina's going to pick it up and tell the story of Vanguard and their journey of their business needs, their marketing strategy, how their customer data management has evolved and then the outcomes they've seen from using the CDP, how they go about measuring the value of the CDP and other MarTech investments to be able to communicate that internally which is a good thing to know how to do. And then lastly, tips and tricks, pitfalls to avoid around not just the implementation of a CDP but the ongoing getting value part of the CDP. And then we'll hopefully have some time left at the end for questions, and there you go. Since I have one slide that talks about announcements, I have to put my roadmap disclaimer slide in here, which says things could change.
But before I get to that, I wanted to pause and just recognize the pace of change that's happening right now.
Last year at Adobe Summit, we had at least five companies here. A lot of them were long time Marketo users. I worked at Marketo, came into Adobe with Marketo, and they had gotten to the point where they wanted to put a CDP into their MarTech stack and make it the source of the data and the audiences and they'd cross that boundary. So we had a lot of stories around implementations of CDPs and best practices around implementations. This year, it's very interesting. The sessions are more about value acceleration of a CDP or expanding use cases of the CDP, which is a lot of what Nina is going to be talking about. Although you'll get some implementation, tips and tricks in there as well.
So things have changed quite a bit, not to mention the advent of buying groups and software that can actually handle them. Last year we were talking about GenAI and now it's all AI agents, right? There's a lot. Every conversation I've had with people here at this event is like wow. There's so much coming at us, and there is. It's just I've never really seen it. I can't remember anything like this, actually. There's quite a bit being thrown at us, but it's all things that help us in our marketing, and I've been in B2B marketing for longer than I would like to admit. So let's just talk about-- We'll start with Experience is Everything, and I put this slide in just to say-- When you might see this slide, you might think consumer marketing, I guess it's a pretty slide. But experience is everything matters even more in B2B because the decisions being made are high stakes decisions, they're complicated decisions solved by complicated solutions.
And so it is true what I find is that our B2C marketing colleagues-- I think of B2C marketing as they're fast and they're at scale, they have giant audiences, and they're just-- It's a more trans-- Every B2C business and B2B business is different, but typically high transaction rate, giant audiences. B2B, we have the extra complexities of our relationship with sales, long sales cycles that we're tracking through all these stages. We put a bunch of money into an opportunity and we lose it. That's very expensive, right? Stakes are high for us. They're high for our customers. There are a lot of reasons that B2C sometimes from a technology perspective goes a little bit ahead of us in B2B. But the good news is we can learn from them and watch them make their mistakes and not make the same mistakes they make.
And like I said, it's a good thing that sometimes we go second. We don't always go second, but sometimes it's a good thing because the stakes are higher with us. So what we're seeing now and hopefully you're able to see some of our earlier sessions. We have three roadmap sessions on B2B applications. Yesterday, we had a strategy keynote, today where we got into this talking about the evolution of B2B. There are just a lot of things coming together at the same time.
If you think back, we started with CRMs and we're codifying the Rolodex that sales used to have and then we move on to marketing automation and account-based marketing which largely ended up solving top of funnel use cases. But we ended up with two funnels then and that seems confusing. So now we found our self at this, what we're calling B2B 3.0, which is a convergence of account based, lead based, full life cycle instead of just acquisition and AI, which is, as I said, just advancing very, very quickly to help us scale and do all the things that we need to do.
And so what does that look like? Well, it's got to start with a nucleus of a customer profile because everything you're doing from a go-to-market perspective is going to have something to do with who the customer is and what they're doing. And from a B2B perspective, we want to be able to see that from people basis and account basis and a buying group basis.
Last year at Summit, we announced Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B edition that helps do orchestration based on buying groups. This is something, from the Marketo team, we've been wanting to do this for years. We were very happy to be able to launch that. Now that's out in the world. So first, you have to have this common profile of the customer. And then you have to go through this process of listening. What's their behavior? So that's first party, second party, third party data.
That's data that's your own. It's data that we bring into something like the CDP from our partners. We just built a few new sources from some very popular account based intent data providers.
From that to the next thing which is building the experiences. There's a term I love and I'm sorry I can't remember which analyst firm to attribute this to, but it's called buyer engagement, right? And it's the idea that as a B2B company, you're out talking to your buyers, you're helping to-- You enable them. I meant to say buyer enablement. Enable them to solve their problems, to make their decisions, and you're trying to give them content and conversations that help them figure out sometimes the problem that they're trying to solve and which solutions fit with solving that problem and getting them through the decision-making process in a giant buying group.
That goes on to the actual engagement itself, which now with AI, we can do a much greater scale. We had a speaker in the B2B keynote from NVIDIA, and she was talking about hyper personalization. And then of course, sales is a really important part of the mix and they need to be completely involved with what marketing is doing and so there are a bunch of things we're doing there to make sure sales is seeing what we're doing. We're doing more pre work for sales, so for instance, maybe we're handing them a buying group instead of a lead. We're doing more work upfront that matches more how sales thinks about going after opportunities and accounts. And then lastly, optimization.
There's a lot going on. We talked about a lot of things at this event. We announced CJA B2B Edition. We announced an experimentation agent. There's just a lot of things that go into optimization and new capabilities for it now. Things like experimentation are a lot of work, right? AB testing at scale across channels. It's a ton of work. But AI, it's another good example of where AI can help us scale.
And so there are three things that it takes really to do this, right? And this one in the center is in the center for a reason, which is data. You have to have the data to figure out what content to create and what channels to use and how to string that all together and who to target and everything. So the data is at the center and it's about solving, you have to have both an inside-out and an outside-in perspective. I think when we came in from Marketo to Adobe, we felt like we were really strong and revenue processes and stages and how marketing and sales work together to get things through a process. Maybe that's a little inside out, but we knew Adobe was very good at customer engagement and putting the right content in front of people. And so you have to be have both of those pieces and be good at both of those pieces because customer experience is always important, but it's got to match up with your go-to-market and your resources. So now I'm just going to double-click and we'll start heading in the direction a couple slides on the CDP before I hand it to Nina. And so the CDP, not that long ago like 2013, one of the first definitions was basically bring all your data, pull it into this thing and we even called it a database then, and it was a pretty IT centric approach.
As we developed, we said, you know what, actually, don't bring all your data into the CDP. Just bring the data you need to build better audiences, to do better targeting of your marketing, to do better personalization of your marketing. And all this has happened in the last 12 years or so, and now it became a little bit more operational. Like, okay, this is a key to operating a marketing department, operating a customer experience function is to have the center of gravity to figure out audiences for different campaigns, et cetera. And now today and going forward, it's about having the center of gravity to drive engagement, drive activation. In many ways data is just a means to an end, right? You have to actually take what it teaches you and then go out and engage with customers through different channels, et cetera. And so that's what we're seeing now and just greater adoption with B2B CDPs is that there are more applications connected to them to do engagement and drive activation off of the data. And with that, the value prop is fulfilled and we see more and more adoption. And of course, AI, again, helps with the scale.
So the things you'll hear Nina talking about in here, for sure, profiles, right? Profiles are at the center. This is your understanding of the customer in real-time CDP. We have account profiles, and we have person profiles, and we're doing identity resolution and we're trying to best understand these people and these accounts as best we can to drive audience creation and personalization off of those. Those profiles are informed by data sources. I said first party, second party, third party. We have new methods with CDPs now where you don't have to have the data in the CDP. If you have some really important business information that's in a data warehouse that's locked down and nobody will let you take anything out of it, we have federation processes now where you can access and use data that's external to the CDP. And then lastly, I mentioned activation channels, right? We have activation channels for own channels, for advertising, new CDP collaboration capabilities that have to do with third-party cookies went away. What do we do now? And this is more about a second-party relationship between brands and publishers. And Jamie Dimon actually alluded to this this morning in his keynote.
And so these are the components that it takes to do this well. Adobe is one of the leading market share products in this area. Like I said, we're seeing good growth and we're not done yet. There have been a lot of announcements at Summit around the core CDP and data management, but then importantly, like I said, data is a means to an end. Also the things around the CDP that take advantage of what the CDP is able to do.
So a lot around AI, the audience agent is a really important one which comes on top of AI Assistant which is already a capability we have today that can help with audience creation. So we just keep adding more automation, more AI to streamline that process. And I'll just hit on a couple ones. I mentioned CJA B2B Edition on the optimization analytics front.
And it's not just the CDP. It's not just AJO B2B edition. We're investing in Marketo. In the core of Marketo, we just announced, we redid the reporting in Marketo, something we called advanced report builder. It's been completely redone. We've got a new email editor in there with GenAI capability. So again, you have the data from the CDP. You have this really intelligently produced audience, and now you actually have to go do the engagement. And then lastly, sales. We've announced a few things here around engaging with customers, either sales or something like a BDR or maybe even just something more automated than that that just is like a sales conversation and an agent around account qualification. So the innovation keeps coming. Like I said, I know that the conversations I've had with people been like wow.
We're so far behind. No, you're not. You're not that far behind. It's just these things all seem to happen at once. We had buying groups. We have CDPs coming into maturity and filling some of the things that there were gaps before. And we have AI just really evolving really quickly. So with that, I'd just say, don't feel like you're behind because we're all trying to drink from the fire hose that is the rate of innovation right now. But in a couple of the keynotes, I think Marriott this morning and then I mentioned the NVIDIA presentation, they all gave similar advice to how do you deal with the fire hose of innovation and it's start small, right? Pick some use cases that you know matter to your business, solve for those, show that works, prove the investment, and then expand from there, which is very much what Nina and Vanguard story is about. And so I don't think we have pumping music or lasers or smoke here. So let's just give Nina a round of applause. Very kind. Very kind.
Yeah. That was a really good tee up. I hope I live up to Bob's expectations that he set. And I want to thank everyone for coming. I know it's close to party time for people, maybe, or at least the end of a long day. And I appreciate, Bob, you connecting what we've already heard today. But I think what you're going to hear about Vanguard is getting those basics right, the small things, testing into them. But before I dive into all of it, I want to give a brief overview of our business. I don't want to speak jargon to you. I want you guys to understand the context for our B2B CDP journey because I think it's all the devils and all the details, right? So hearing what our B2B orgs, how they're structured, how they operate, and why the CDP was so crucial for them.
So here's our agenda again. FYI, if you see other Vanguard people, congratulate them. We have our 50th anniversary coming up in a few weeks. So big to do, awesome new brand logo to celebrate. And I want to just give you context for why we do what we do every day at Vanguard. So we're very mission driven, and you can see at the top our motto, what we live by, and that's to help everybody that comes to Vanguard to invest, achieve that retirement success. And I'm not telling you that as a feel good story. I'm telling you that because it really filters down to all the decisions we make even within marketing, even within IT, MarTech, all those partners. And it's about being really responsible for the investment we're given to make these experiences happen because, ultimately, every dollar we save, every efficiency we drive, we can give back to investors so they can retire and do what they want to do with their retirement because we lower the fees. So you might have seen in the news recently, we just lowered a lot of our fees, and that's why we do what we do, right, is to help everybody achieve that success. Lots of numbers up there. Fifty years, right? But let's get to the stuff I know that you all care about.
I want to give you an example of what our B2B is like, and so I think I'll use Bob's image he had up there about, what, someone skiing, right? As our very first image there. So if you think about Vanguard more like a ski boot manufacturer, a specialty ski manufacturer, we have people who can come and buy these ski boots on our website, right? That's our whole B2C business. But we have separately this B2B business that's like when the ski boot manufacturer calls up Sports Authority and they're trying to sell to them. "Hey, we want you to carry our products, right? We want you to provide it to the end consumer, in our case, the end investor." And that's what our B2B organizations are like. It's selling to the specialty retailer, the adviser in our case, and selling to big companies who want to provide a great retirement experience for their employees. So some of you in the room might use a (401)k from your employer that's through Vanguard. Some of you might work with an advisor that helps you invest in Vanguard products. That's our B2B space, right? So it's a little unique. It's a little bit different and offers a high level of complexity, which is why we're going to talk about how CDP makes the difference for Vanguard.
So let's jump to that.
Why was CDP so crucial? So those businesses, with that intermediary, means there's a lot of rules and those rules are very, very hard to manage manually. CDP offered a way for Vanguard to take all that data and those rules and put it in an easy to use data set for marketers. So you'll hear this a lot as I talk about the Vanguard experience, but our marketing teams, some of which are in the house today, I'll embarrass them so you can ask them questions later. They are very big at Vanguard on self provisioning. And what does that mean? That means putting the power in the hands of the marketers to deliver these incredible experiences so it doesn't take forever. So they're not reliant on "Listen, I'm IT," but they're not reliant on IT delivery teams. And those IT folks want to build cool stuff. They don't want to help you with your website or make you lists, right? They want to be doing cool stuff, and this lets the marketers who know their audiences the best puts the power in their hands. So that was our end goal for both of the businesses for many different reasons. Our B2B businesses are also using Marketo, so I don't know how many of you are using Marketo, right? How many of you are using a CDP today? Are any of you still thinking about it? Okay. So cool. There's a great mix. Are any of you really super IT people who want to see the architecture diagram? Oh, okay. All right. I might need help from the audience then. It is in here, but that marketer enablement that I spoke to you is super, super important, and it's also where we find a lot of efficiency. So again, bottom line, we want to give money back to our investors. If we can do that by enabling our marketers to do that and not relying on hundreds of IT teams to deliver this stuff, that's our goal. And then we have these B2B teams. They're small, not as small as Leanne, who's in the room, who just spoke about the Australia business and how lean their team is, but they're small. They're nothing like the size of our marketing teams for B2C. So they need to punch above their weight, and the CDP lets them do that, right? They don't have a budget. They can't bring on more people to deliver all these experiences to segment all these audiences. The CDP is the unlock is allowing them to do that with the same number of people.
Okay. For those of you who raised your hand on a little bit of an architecture diagram, it's an architecture diagram light. So if you're interested in talking to someone from Vanguard afterwards about the technical, Alexis is in the audience, she made me this awesome slide. I have to give her credit. But I think what it touches on is what Bob touched on, which is that we have a CDP. We have all this data flowing into the CDP and into AEP from lots of different places. Our two lines of business, you can see represented. But the segmentation is one piece, and at Vanguard, we wanted the separate piece of orchestration, which is why our B2B businesses have Marketo, right? So they're using them in tandem. And so if any of you were thinking about that or already doing that, you may identify with this. We also have all these activation channels and more coming every day because our B2B teams are really awesome and mindful about crafting great use cases for how to leverage this technology, and use cases is going to come up a lot too as we talk about what the B2B team did.
Was that enough for the techies in the house? So let's go double-click into those two B2B businesses now that you understand how we're structured at Vanguard. Also I want to share with you that my perspective here is not as an FAS marketer or two divisions. I'm actually on the Enterprise MarTech team, and I feel very privileged to sit in a spot where we do enablement on my team. So we sit embedded in the marketing teams and help them drive value out of these tools, help them and advise them internally on how to deliver the experiences they want with what we have in the stack, or if we don't, talking about what that's going to look like. So I did not do that awesome work. I just get to tell their amazing stories, so huge credit to everyone in the room from Vanguard that has been part of this, our Australian team, IIG FAS. But let's talk about financial advisor services first. So that's that world in which you have an advisor. Maybe you have one that's working with you today on your investments. We know who those folks are. We know the advisors. They're registered, right? So we know that universe. It's not huge. So speaking to Bob's comment on this is not millions and millions of touch points. This is a very, very-- It's a shooting fish in a pond, right? We know who they are. We also know when they're engaged with us and care about things that we are sharing with them and when they are not, right? So super important that we have this leads in this funnel. They know where everybody is in that funnel, but they also have a really complex ecosystem. So maybe you have an advisor who is in your community and they have their own personal shop, right? You know them and they're your neighbor. But maybe you work with an advisor at a big company like a Merrill Lynch, right? And they are beholden to lots of rules, and we need to respect those rules but still communicate with those advisors. And what FAS would tell you is their goal in life is to be the advisor to that advisor. So we want to touch those 24 million investors that those advisors support because we want them to have Vanguard because Vanguard's going to get them where they need to go. And so when we think about how we communicate with them, they don't stay at their companies all the time. They move around frequently. Some are at these big houses. Some are independent, right? So the data is changing all the time, and we need to keep track of it. So we're highly regulated in financial services. If we're not keeping track and we're not sticking to that and being compliant, we're injecting a lot of risk to our situation. And then if we're fined and things like that, we're not helping meet that goal that we have of everybody's financial success, right? And we lose trust.
In addition to that, there's also these unique rules, and I was getting at that. So if you're an advisor at a big house, you have a relationship with Vanguard at that company level. So you have people talking to Vanguard every day and saying, hey, you can offer this fund and not that fund. You can direct our advisors to your website but not to social media. So there's all of these rules of engagement on how to market with these people, and even the content we share with them needs to be approved by that home company, right? So you're talking about huge amount of complexity to deliver anything to them and to deliver something relevant, right? So what was the FAS use case that they started with? And they were our-- I can't remember if Australia, if you were first or if our FAS team was first, but they were right out of the gate really early on in our CDP journey. Their use case was this idea of they called it automated acquisition journey. All that really means is they were, like, we know the advisers that aren't engaging with us. Can we get them to move down the funnel? Can we talk to them in the right way? Can we segment them and share the right content following all the rules that have been laid out for us and take those high propensity audiences and actually turn them into something we can hand to sales and have a real conversation with, right? So they're not just once in a while looking at our website, but they've done those high value activities. We've tracked them in the CDP, and we can deliver them that next message that gets them engaged with Vanguard.
What does that look like, right? What are the data sources that this team needed for this very initial use case? They needed-- Especially in the B2B space, we rely a lot on webinar and event attendance, right? So we needed all that data from whatever tool we're using to track that. That's changed over time. We also needed that omnichannel engagement. Are they reading our website? What are they reading on our website? Are they clicking on things? Are they looking at email that we've sent? Probably not, if they're not engaged. The offers we can give them, this goes back to the rules of engagement we have. And then what are their preferences, right? They might have expressed preferences. Maybe they advise a lot of people on kids 529 plans, or superannuation, retirement, as it is in Australia. We needed all that data. That data sat everywhere, right? And I think all of you can identify with that, right? We are all rich with data, not always enabled to use that data to drive these experiences and these outcomes. So that's like the situation that they approached CDP with, and I want to tell you what it was like. They were able to deliver experiences like this and journeys like this before CDP.
It just was extremely painful and manual. And I'll give you some stats, the before and after. So the before world, before Marketo, before CDP, that integration, they could deliver this journey, but it took them 10 different teams in Vanguard, teams across data and analytics to help with putting a list together, team from CRM who was actually bringing that stream of data from our relationship management tool, IT delivery, MarTech. They're marketers, right? So it was this huge group of people, heavy, heavy lift manually, and it took them three months. So 10 teams, 3 months. Just think about the value of that group of people and all their work, and they got that journey out the door. And they learned a ton about it. And they wanted to prove that a journey was possible, that they could deliver that experience. And once they did that, the appetite for doing that more efficiently and at scale, it was massive before they succeeded in a manual journey, but this is the before and after. I'll just, like, let that sink in for you. After they brought in CDP and leveraged that integration between CDP and Marketo, then they delivered 27 journeys in 9 months, right? Just two teams marketing and I think CDAO, our data and analytics group, to make sure that we had the right data in place for it. So when we calculate, that outputs an 800% increase in speed to market, right? So all of a sudden, any journey that they could imagine, any experience they want to deliver to any niche audience, they could now do it. So instead of we have three use cases, can we deliver on them? They were like, "We have a million use cases, and we can do it," right? The sky's the limit on what the marketers are thinking about and how they want to communicate. And then what is today? Because this is I want to say that nine months ended maybe in the fall of last year, right? So now it's been another six to nine months. They have this idea in mind of these scalable journeys. So they're looking at those audiences and their audience strategy and saying, now how do we deliver on all those unique smaller experiences? How do we do it minding all the rules of a lot of these companies but delivering it quickly? And so the CDP lets them say, if one advisory house says, "Hey, you can go. You've approved everything. They don't have to wait for all the others to do it," right? They can deploy to that one small audience of advisors at one company. The next time the next group comes in, they can do it again. They can set it to be always on. So as advisors pop into that category and that audience, that journey goes out to them. So they've really taken a small team and been able to scale this. You can see the quote from them, which I think is really powerful, right? It's like, "Hey. It took us a long time. We succeeded. But in order to be a modern marketing organization, we have to be able to do this at scale." And I'm sure you've heard that in every session, the at scale part. But that that piece of it is so crucial for those B2B teams who don't have hundreds and hundreds of marketers that are across all these channels and doing all this work themselves. So it's an incredible story. If you see anyone from our FIS team, I don't think they're in the room, but ask them about their success story because it's pretty amazing.
All right. Should we talk about IIG? That's our other B2B line of business. Make sure I'll time check it. So our institutional investor group, this is the company we-- We're targeting these companies that offer an employee benefit of a great retirement plan, right? These are really, really small groups of people we're communicating with. In fact, sales knows who they want to target, right? They know which size of business. They know tons of stuff about them. Are they up for renewal with their existing provider of plans, right? We know who they've used in the past. We know how many employees they have, the value of that business. We know what we can do for them, right? And the whole idea of what they do in this marketing team is enable sales. So they're looking at all that digital signal. They're trying to give them insight to help in that very long selling cycle, right? We know who these companies are, but, again, a very complex ecosystem. They have, like I said, renewals coming up. They have consultants. So when you're a big company, Adobe is a client, and they're making a decision as big as this, which is part of a recruitment and retention play at an employer, they're working with a consultant who's like, "Hey, this is the right thing or this is the wrong thing or let me guide you or what are you thinking about." So you have this whole group of influencers who are also engaged in this universe. We have in this world demos. So they're going out and they're showing the experience to a company that their company is going to have if they work with us as the plan sponsor, and they're showing demos of what it's like for the investor, their employees. So there's this huge amount of tech around it and complexity in that world, but they still want to enable sales, right? So their use case in IIG and they actually put together four really incredibly defined use cases that powered this experience. But this very first one probably resonates with all of you, right? They're very thought leadership driven. Many B2B organizations are. And they said, "Hey, we put out this incredible piece of thought leadership every year. If you haven't read it, go check it out. It's called How America Saves." It's a general interest, like, survey and story about what our habits are in America in terms of saving. And they put up tons of great content, but that initial campaign launch with the report comes out. They send it to a lot of their clients or their leads, I should say, and then people read it and engage with it. But, subsequently, we have lots of follow-up thought leadership that comes out focused on different industries, right, focused on all these different areas. And they said, hey, can we increase email engagement by following up and sending triggered, focused thought leadership emails after someone engages in how America saves? This is like 101, right? I did email marketing for a very long time at other organizations and, like, triggered emails based on what you're interested in is basics, right? But I can tell you, I spent quite a bit of time my first year at Vanguard following one of their marketing pods in IIG. And the thing that shocked me that I heard from them was, like, "Hey, we're given up on the email channel. Like, it's not working well for us." And it was for many reasons, right? But I was shocked to hear that having done email for a very long time. And so for them to test into this, and Ashwin's here, he can tell you all about this, I think they were like, is email viable if we do this right? If we actually segment the audience in a precision way, if we share content that they actually care about, and you'd think we could do that, right? We have all this data, but it was not in one place. It was nearly impossible to pull it. The data quality wasn't great. They were sending a lot of batch and blast emails, right? So I say, "Oh, let's send it to everybody who clicked." Well, that's not enough, right? You don't want to send the same piece to everybody who clicked on the initial piece. You want to send something that they're really going to care about, and so they were able to define that audience using CDP. And the data sources that they leaned on up here, web engagements, that's key, right? If they're already reading How America Saves, that's on our website. They use account-based marketing data, so our IIG group does use account-based marketing. That's a big part of their strategy. Their email ID is the CRM first party demographic data, which for this team is really crucial because they're really looking at how to defend against that cookie less future. So leveraging that first party data and showing their marketing org that they're working towards that was really, really critical. So that before was, like, we did batch and blast. We didn't have a lot of trust in the email channel. It wasn't working well for us. It wasn't worth continuing to do the amount of effort it took versus the engagement we got. But the after, when they actually brought CDP in to launch this use case is, again, pretty incredible. And if you're into email stats and you look at the experience that they had, they had tremendous increase over their benchmarks. It's something I mean, again, having worked in the email channel for a long time in other places is unheard of. And for them, again, small audiences, so these increases, while huge, it doesn't it's not millions of clicks. But what it is the right people engaging so that they can give that crucial information to the sales team and have a really relevant conversation with that company when they get the chance. So really, that idea of marketing isn't just marketing, but we're enabling sales comes through in this example. And then today, and I shouldn't even say today because it's already done, three other additional use cases that they'd scoped out when they started the CDP process were around other activation channels, so LinkedIn, right? So they have a really great-- The team is represented here today. That's on our paid and our media. So LinkedIn targeting that first party data we have, targeted ads on Trade Desk, which is another platform like that. And then they have and I don't know if it's live, so hot off the press. Not yet. We're almost there. Ashwin Singh. An example, a use case of real time website personalization once Web SDK is live, right? So they had put together use cases with capabilities we didn't even have yet because they saw that future value when CDP was live. So they have a really great road map of use cases very well defined that let them achieve this. So they didn't come to us and say, "We want all the data," right? And I know Bob talked about this. Because it's not a curated marketing dataset for marketers if you just put everything in it, right? So they were very, very crisp and clear on the use case, what they wanted to approve out or accomplish with the use case, and then they got that those results to back it up. And they're very prescribed in how they report on this. So they actually pull that data. They shop it around. They show everybody what worked and what didn't. So they're very much about iterating, which I love because the CDP and use of it only gets better as they enable everybody to understand the value of it. So they're doing that marketing it internally to their own crew to get into that mindset of using the CDP and defining their audiences really well.
Okay.
Should we talk about outcomes and measuring value? So I was touching on this, but the fact that you start with a really defined use case and maybe a hypothesis about what might happen, like, hey, if we actually give them follow-up email on content they care about, we're going to see an improvement that was our hypothesis, which we proved, is one of the ways in which these teams are in a really straightforward way, measuring outcomes. But we have a broader vision. So within MarTech at that enterprise level, we look at adoption of all of the tools that we brought into our stack, and we've been on a journey for a couple years to bring in a lot of modern capabilities. And we say, hey, these tools and these capabilities, if you start to adopt them and then succeed in adopting them, what value is it generating for you? And the way that we look at that, the framework is across three areas of value realization. We look at capacity created. So you could say with our FAS example that we brought up, if you can deliver that many journeys with the same number of crew or fewer, you've created a ton of capacity. In fact, they can probably deliver as many journeys as they can imagine, right? But sometimes we also have just flat cost saved, right? So this comes up a lot if we move to a new platform and we can retire a server, or we don't need in two entire IT delivery teams to help us with something, right? All of a sudden those costs are saved or those resources can be used elsewhere. And then at Vanguard, it's important. We also measure risks mitigated. So we think about that FAS example. If we are sending messaging to advisers that we aren't supposed to be sending, that's a big risk that erodes trust. In some cases, if it's a risk and we break that trust, you can be fined, right? So we're actually also measuring that value of the risks we're mitigating using these tools, right? Just not having it be manual is going to mitigate risk because I'll just make a mistake if I'm the one putting the list together. So we look at that across the board. We do that with more than our MarTech investments, and what I love about that process of talking through value realization for a tool like a CDP is it opens up the discussion between MarTech and IT and the marketing teams on that business value, and that's the language that all the marketing leaders speak, right? Well, it actually puts real numbers on something where in the past, we're like, it's going to be awesome. Well, this actually gives us numbers to show what that awesome is and lets them think out in the future about what that means for them, other investments in IT and in MarTech that are going to help them achieve their goals. So what I've loved in the role I sit in in enablement is the conversations that value realization generates, that bring it up a level from the team deep in the weeds building out the tool to now what is the impact of having brought this tool in? Awesome. All right. This is the more fun part. Then you can hear a little bit-- We'll be a little bit vulnerable about what we learned in this process.
So some tips and tricks, and this is really from that I think we could all look at CDP as people, process, and tech, and a lot of this is less about the tech and more about the people and process. And it's fun to see all the amazing things that are coming out and all the technology. But in the end, all of you have to go back to work and work with the people and change the processes and do the change management to actually bring any of this to life. And so the position that I'm in in MarTech lets us see what it takes to achieve that change management support, that comm support, and to help teams through that tough change process to ultimately see the other side of it and deliver the value. So the big thing I would say is the CDP is not going to come in and solve everything. And I think probably those of you in the room know that, but your colleagues might not know that. Your leadership might not know that. So it's about really getting granular on like we can bring this in and solve for these use cases, but it's not going to magically make your audience strategy appear. We're going to still have to build that out. We have to use the brains of all of the awesome people on our team to do that. We touched on it quite a bit, but both FAS and IIG, these businesses spent a lot of time upfront to build out some really solid use cases. They partnered with MarTech on that. They sometimes partnered with partners on that to really get the thinking straight because it's not always the way that your marketing teams are thinking in that use case way. They would just be like, "Hey, we need all the data," right? But it's really hard to measure how you did if you just put all the data in and didn't have a plan for how you were going to use it. So the use case process took time. In fact, I want to say it took four or five months for IIG. Ashwin will feel the pain of that. He'll tell you about it. So having time is your friend. So if you can look at the process of bringing on the CDP and do the pre work, you can say, hey. We're going to start the implementation in Q4 so that we have these two quarters to get ourselves square, make sure the use cases are in place, and we have a change management plan. That would be my strongest suggestion. You're going to have brilliant tech people, and you're going to have brilliant marketers with brilliant ideas. But still when the tech comes in, they have to know how to use it. They have to be ready and be able to manage the new process and the change there. So invest that time if you have that time. That would be my biggest recommendation.
So your speed of adoption is going to be impacted. So if you just bring it in, immediately, your marketing leaders are going to say, "Okay, what are we getting for it?" Well, if you weren't ready and you didn't put in the time for the use cases and the change management and communicating with everybody, you're going to have-- it's a bad look. You want to be able to say, "We think we're going to actually see value by Q1 of next year because we put them all the work in advance." So what about pitfalls? And I think this will go to some of the structure at Vanguard and how all of our teams work together. So our enterprise MarTech team, we don't do the campaigning. We're not the users of the tools. We're building the platforms, and we're enhancing the platforms, and we're thinking enterprise level. How can we set this up so that everybody gets value? Our marketing teams have their own local IT teams that support them to take it the last mile, right? And you need that partnership of that local IT team. You need partnership if that local IT team doesn't have the data and analytics people and they sit separately, you need those people, right? And so what we learned is if we don't involve all the stakeholders that are going to help make it successful from the start, we are going to be delayed. We are going to struggle because everybody knows in that IT space, we're all have different roadmaps and different budgets, right? And you'll run into an issue where you're not aligned. So if you can bring everybody from the beginning along on the journey, you can communicate with them at the right level, that's going to help you save time.
Consider that architecture upfront. I showed a little bit of the picture, but don't just go into and say, "Hey, we got the CDP." But think about future proofing it. What does it look like to add it to your broader architecture? What is your North Star goal in the future as you bring on more and more tech? Maybe you're at the beginning of the transformation, maybe you're at the end, but think about that. So it means you're going to need partnership from everybody, those IT teams, those data and analytics teams, your marketing team to plug in the right way.
We talked about this a couple times already, but don't bring everything into the CDP. Just start with the data you need for your very well defined use cases. It's very difficult to back it out. So if you throw in a whole bunch of stuff and then your marketers can't actually segment because it's a mess in there, it's very difficult to pull it back out.
And then be thoughtful about all the teams that could benefit from the CDP. So I'm sure your heads down on whatever team you support or the team that you're on. But at Vanguard, we have a couple different groups that use B2B data, not just the IIG marketing team that's represented here. And so if there are other stakeholders that are going to come after and benefit from it, bring them along on the journey even if they're not ready to be using it. And we've come across that already, and B2B CDP, and institutional marketing is just a couple months young. And we already have other teams that are like, "I have use cases. When can I use it? We're not ready today, but can I do it in 2026?" So think about bringing everybody along, making sure people understand what you're doing and why you're doing it, because you might come to find later an entirely other team can get benefit from it, which just increases your ROI on bringing in the tool. And then one thing we learned in MarTech is that we need to be really clear on what the handoff is. So I explained some of our structure. That at some point, we say, here's the tool now. We've helped you learn how to use it. You're moving forward. But when does that handoff occur and to whom? And that's going to vary depending on how your teams are structured, but think about that. What's the end state? What's the definition of done? Because for CDP, it's tough because you've all partnered together for any number of months to deliver it, and then you're looking at each other like, "Well, now I need a new dataset. Can you help me?" Well, if that's not how you intend for it to go on and be sustainable, think about what that endpoint is and set it up upfront so that you're communicating it. Everyone's really clear on what that looks like so that it can then go live on and deliver value for all those marketing teams.
Okay. So we might have to run, move quickly. - Right, Bob? - We can run. We can run. Let's run because I want to make sure there's time for questions if there are questions. - Yeah. Just real quick. - So yeah. So we talk about evolution of B2B. Data just becomes-- It's always been important. But now with AI what's that work off of? Data, right? There's another reason, that to get the data house in order, and we offer a solution that does that. We have one CDP. It has two editions, but really, the B2B edition is a superset. It has everything that's in the B2C edition plus the ability to deal with accounts, buying groups, all those objects that we have to live within in the B2B world.
- And what are my takeaways? - Yeah. Again, we talk this upfront, but really, the CDP can take your complex data and turn it into an easy to use way for marketers to create those precision audiences that really move the needle that go from your batch and blast world to your-- "I'm sharing the right content with the right person at the right time," which we hear over and over. But for B2B, that's actually super important. These are not millions of people that you're actually communicating with. It's just a handful. So giving them that right thing could be the one factor in getting that conversion moving down the funnel, helping the sales teams.
That's the second one on here, right? Number four, audiences don't have to be massive to get big business value. So you might be sitting here and saying, well, I know my 150,000 advisers is really necessary for me. If you have a complex ecosystem like what we talked about, yeah, it could really help you. And then don't skimp on the prework. I know I hit on that really hard, but really do spend that time upfront to think about it so that you're ready to hit the ground running when the tool has been put in place and the capabilities are there for your marketing team. - Yeah. - Cool. Yeah. And I think one thing I meant to say before, and you guys are beginning to use it in the consumer side of your business-- We are. Yeah, Vanguard's using it for B2C as well. And that's its own other set of use cases and journey, but very focused on hyper personalization, which we've heard about at a lot of the keynotes as well. And to B2B divisions are really very different in their go-to-market, but it's the same CDP underneath all of it. - Yeah. - Yep.
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We got one more day left. I just want to let you know we're not done yet. We have more sessions. I'm going to call out two here at PwC. That's a really interesting one that gets into the role of a CDP and protecting data privacy and managing that. And then the Red Hat session at the very bottom. I know it's a tiny logo there. Chris from Red Hat's a great speaker. He's done sessions with us before. Erik Rucker, if there's a father of the B2B CDP, it's Erik Rucker. He's the overall product manager for the B2B edition of our CDP. And what they're talking in there is about companies, not all-- This doesn't apply to all companies, but they're using both for B2C purposes and B2B and there's some cross value. You can picture I'm going to use a different example but a telco company that maybe has a business relationship with somebody, but they also have a phone line with them on a personal basis. How can they use what they know over here to influence their marketing over there? Things like that. So that's an interesting one. And then outside of the core data management CDP place is the broader B2B ecosystem and applications there. PitchBook's got a great presentation on marketing attribution, the evolution of measurement. We have a session with Adobe, that's Adobe's-- Our marketing team, and how they're using Adobe products to do our own marketing to market to all of you. And then Qualcomm. Qualcomm, I started off with how last year we had a lot of implementation sessions and now it's value acceleration. Qualcomm's an example of that. They did a session last year on B2B CDP implementation. This year, they're taking a different tack. They submitted two sessions to us. One was to do something similar to what Nina did, which is let's come back and talk about the progress we've made on CDP. And they also offered to do a Marketo session. These are two Marketo rock stars presenting from Qualcomm and Perficient. So we took them up on the Marketo on this time, but that's another one I would recommend to you.
And that's it. Okay. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank you. [Music]
