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Combining the Power of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign to Create Robust Account Signaling for Inside Sales
It started as an internal experiment; a hackathon to
determine how Adobe could use already-collected data
to benefit its internal sales teams. The experiment turned
into an opportunity—not just for Adobe’s inside sales
teams, but for any B2B organization that wants to identify
and connect with prospects earlier in the sales cycle.
This experiment is now a successful program: Adobe Visitor Insights (AVI).
AVI identifies new, existing, and anonymous account visits to Adobe.com
and alerts the sales team with information necessary to connect with the
accounts in a way that’s relevant to their phase of the customer journey.
Every B2B company faces challenges equipping its internal sales teams
with the right tools and technology to personalize interactions with
prospects and customers. With AVI, Adobe is using the Adobe Experience
Platform, including Adobe Analytics and the Unified Customer Profile, to
unlock sales opportunities via triggered emails. Its efforts demonstrate how
other companies also can adopt data-driven marketing technologies and
methodologies—often using tools and data already at their disposal—
to advance their account-based marketing and sales process.
Using the Power of Adobe’s
Experience Platform to
Create Robust Account
Signaling for Inside Sales
How Adobe’s
internal email
marketing program
and use of the Adobe
Experience Platform
gave its sales team
a jump start.

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Combining the Power of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign to Create Robust Account Signaling for Inside Sales
The business challenge: How to apply data
to build relationships, accelerate sales cycles,
and improve customer interactions.
Adobe has millions of visits to its website each day, from visitors with a variety
of interactions, behaviors, interests, and intent. Historically, a site visitor had to
log in or fill out a form upon arrival, providing basic information later shared
with the sales team. This step limited the data received by the sales team,
only sending them information after a clear “hand-raise” behavior—an explicit
interaction from an individual user, letting Adobe know they were ready to
engage. Signals that occurred before the hand-raising activity
were usually lost, including data tied to the visitor’s point of origin
and interests, among other key points. Without this insight it
was almost impossible to be proactive and, with that, effectively
meet the needs of existing or potential customers—until
those customers explicitly informed Adobe of their interests.
“B2B transactions generally have a lengthy sales cycle, and B2B
buyers conduct a lot of research, usually online, before they
make an investment. They frequently visit vendor sites to gather
more information before making contact,” explains Parthiv
Sheth, senior director of marketing technology at Adobe.
“To get early insight—even before an account tells us they’re
ready for a conversation—it’s important to understand where
they have been, what their point of view is, and where they
are in the customer journey,” Parthiv says. This insight helps
a sales team better understand the prospective buyer and
how best to help them. “Without that ability, you’re essentially
flying blind when you start a conversation,” he says.
To gain a better understanding of early intent, Adobe dedicated
a group to detecting account traffic on Adobe.com. However, the
group initially ran into difficulty when they tried to identify who
most site visitors were as only 20 percent of site traffic could be
linked back to an existing account. This was primarily caused by
the fact that Adobe had previously relied on using only third-party
data to detect accounts, Ashley Penn, group manager of account-
based marketing and customer insights at Adobe explains.
As a B2B company, this low identification rate was unacceptable, especially as
Adobe worked in parallel to enhance its ability to create unique experiences
for individuals and companies. In addition, the website behavior that was
being collected wasn’t being funneled to the people who would benefit
from it most: Adobe’s account development managers and inside sales team.
“B2B transactions generally have a
lengthy sales cycle, and B2B buyers
conduct a lot of research, usually online,
before they make an investment. They
frequently visit vendor sites to gather
more information before making contact”
—Parthiv Sheth

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Combining the Power of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign to Create Robust Account Signaling for Inside Sales
To enhance the customer experience, Adobe needed to gather as much
information as possible from its website: the account type, its customer
journey stage, the account was in, behavioral signals, and more.
“The lower detection rate was limiting us in our ability to personalize,” says
Ashley of the technology. “In order to address the issue, the teams built out
tools and matching algorithms that would allow us to enhance our first-
party data. The tools also allowed us to join third-party data to our own
data sets, which ultimately improved our ability to identify site visitors.”
With these tools, Adobe now can pull more pieces of information together to
more consistently identify website visitors—doubling the previous detection
rate to over 40 percent. Now, for every five visitors, two can be identified and
linked to their company. Although the rates have improved, Adobe consistently
looks at other methods to improve detection rates. “We’re working towards
leveraging the Adobe Experience Cloud Device Co-op and device graph to
enhance the matching,” says Fred Kuu, group manager, Adobe MarTech.
Hacking a solution: The birth of Adobe Visitor Insights
Once the web detection rate improved, Adobe returned to the idea that
the web-based behavior data contained a wealth of information, but it
wasn’t being widely distributed throughout or used by the organization,
says Becky Tasker, senior manager of account-based strategy and insights at
Adobe. In a collaborative effort, the martech, marketing, analytics, products
and services teams held a hackathon to answer the question of how to
best use the data on hand. A winning idea emerged quickly through the
team’s collective expertise, and Adobe Visitor Insights (AVI) was born.
CRM:
Experience System
of Record
Artificial
Intelligence:
Find patterns related
to interest and signals
Surge in interest
Sizzle alert of targeted activity
New leads
Summary of actions for
specific accounts
Adobe Campaign:
Email to sales
specialist or ADM
Adobe Analytics:
Online
Visitor Data
Marketing Automates Delivery of Customer Insights to Sales
“We’re working towards
leveraging the Adobe
Experience Cloud Device
Co-op and device graph to
enhance the matching”
—Fred Kuu

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Combining the Power of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign to Create Robust Account Signaling for Inside Sales
AVI launched in September 2017 with 40 account development managers in
North America. To sign up, the account development managers submitted a watch
list of domains and accounts for which they’d receive web-based behavioral
information. Once martech received the list, the team synced it with contact and
account information from Adobe’s customer relationship management (CRM)
system and uploaded it into Adobe’s internal email system.
Whenever a known visitor with a recognizable cookie or email
domain visits Adobe.com, the system recognizes them and gathers
their interest, intent, and behavior. At the end of each day, Adobe
sends an email to the account development manager based on
the visitor’s behavior. The email contains a daily summary of
activity for the accounts on their watchlist, including a list of web
page visits related to Adobe’s own products, contact information
for the individual, and an overview of activity at the account level.
“AVI is meant to deliver relevant behavioral signals and intent
at the account level to account development managers. The
information empowers our internal sales teams to have access to
early intent signals and to create a more targeted experience in the
conversations they have with a prospect or account,” explains Becky.
The triggered email also showcases Experience Data for contacts
that are not currently listed in Adobe’s CRM. This empowers
the account development and inside sales team to identify new
contact opportunities that they can connect with.
One of the most exciting features of AVI is enabling marketing groups
to uncover and share new insights with their sales teams:
• For example, a change in a visitor’s historical behavior or pattern may indicate
an increase of interest, so an email can send to the sales team and alert them
that the visitor has shown more interest than usual in an Adobe product.
• Emails can also be sent that contain the most engaged accounts,
which can assist with prioritization of outreach efforts.
Scott Leslie, senior manager of enterprise marketing automation at Adobe, says
AVI is all about realizing more value from the tools and information Adobe
already has. “We want to empower our sales reps with our own tools and data to
inform them and help them craft experiences, which can ultimately lead to more
sales,” he says.
“The availability of data, and the need to
create experiences, is forcing us to think
differently about the world of marketing
in the sales process. Marketing’s job isn’t
just to generate leads, but also to think
about how we assist sales and go to
market together. That’s the advantage of
a customer insight function.”
—Ashley Penn, Group Manager at Adobe

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Combining the Power of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign to Create Robust Account Signaling for Inside Sales
Moving from insights to action: The ultimate benefit of
Adobe Visitor Insights.
AVI is now being implemented with Adobe sales teams throughout
North America. After positive feedback from internal users, the program
eventually will expand to sales teams in other Adobe regions. While
AVI is still in an early stage, several individuals are leveraging the
tool and new users are signing up for the notification regularly.
“Account development managers are engaging with customers six to eight
weeks earlier than if the contact was not made until the visitor filled out
a form. The result? Each rep gets a new opportunity per quarter,” George
Sadler, senior director of enterprise marketing says. “That translates to a
15-percent increase in the yield of those sales teams each quarter.”
Account development managers say that with AVI, they can better prioritize
their efforts and can be more proactive, contacting the prospect relatively
immediately—while the customer is thinking about Adobe—
and initiating a conversation that is more meaningful.
Already, sales teams are adding potential contacts into
Adobe’s CRM system and say they are gaining a better
understanding of what products customers are interested in.
“The sales team is eager for even more information
from AVI, including how long a visitor has stayed
on a page, what product they were most interested
in, and what country a prospect is in,” says Thomas
Finet, solution architect for Adobe MarTech.
As the program evolves, Adobe plans to enhance it with
many of these capabilities, as well as new emails that contain additional
information to help create the best experiences for prospects and customers.
Building blocks for enhanced B2B
account-based marketing.
Although AVI was developed for Adobe’s internal use, the program exemplifies
best practices B2B marketers can implement in their own organizations to drive
account-based marketing, using many tools your company already may have.
“Account-based marketing, or account-based experiences (as we call it), is
about improving the customer experience with meaningful sales and marketing
outreach that align to where the customer is in the buyer’s journey,” Ashley says.
“This way, we can better provide them what they need, when they need it.”
However, the real key is interpreting account behavior based on marketing
impressions, George says. To do that, several critical actions must be taken:
Using AVI, sales teams see a
15% increase in yield each quarter.

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Combining the Power of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign to Create Robust Account Signaling for Inside Sales
1 Focus on account identification and your site’s taxonomy.
First, identify the accounts coming to your website, and second, have a
taxonomy of what’s on the web pages—the products, services, and business
topics visitors are looking at and interested in. Adobe used machine learning
to develop that taxonomy, first tagging by hand information from 1,000 web
pages with the most traffic, then building a model and training the model
on those pages, and finally scaling it to the site’s other 50,000 web pages.
George explains the need for taxonomy on a web page, in an email, or
any channel. “If I send emails to a client, that’s interesting. If I know they
opened the emails, that’s also interesting, but not really actionable. But if
I know that of the emails I sent them, these three were about product A
and those four were about product B, and they opened the ones about
product A, it’s actionable because I have it matched to a taxonomy.”
2 Give your sales team real-time insights.
Beyond linking impressions to accounts and mapping them to products
and services, then interpreting that data, marketers must have a way to
inform sales of its insights in real time. Adobe was able to achieve this with
its personalized AVI email alert. Instead of sending email to customers,
the recipients are the internal account development managers.
3 Optimize the experience.
Determine how to optimize your information. How will you deliver your
information? If it’s by email, what triggers will you use to determine when to
send it? What time of day or day of the week will sending the email help the
sales team use the information most effectively? How do you visualize the data
so it’s immediately actionable to the team? Just as marketing organizations
craft marketing campaigns to build great experiences for customers that
ultimately drive purchases, you can craft a program such as AVI and optimize
it to create a great internal experience for your sales team—one that
ultimately drives increased conversions and revenue for their company.
While the tool is important, the process is even more so. Consider how to start
implementing training and coaching to ensure the tools and processes to support
your program are used collaboratively, and that the insights plug seamlessly
into your sales team’s existing workflow. Additionally, reach out to your Adobe
Account Manager to help think through your own organization’s needs.
With AVI, Adobe is maximizing the engagement data it already has to better
understand customers’ intent signals and their readiness to purchase. By
surfacing prospects that are further along in the buyer journey, and who
should be connected more quickly to a sales rep, you can provide the timely,
personal interactions that will shorten your sales cycle and close deals.
“Organizations that want to
implement a visitor insights
program can take simple steps
to start. Provide a handful of
inside sales reps with insights
and give them a chance to test
and learn it. Optimize and scale
over time to demonstrate the
impact of your marketing on
sales activities and conversions.”
—Ashley Penn, Group Manager at Adobe
Find out how the Experience System of Record can help you drive more results.
Visit https://www.adobe.com/enterprise/cloud-platform.html to learn more.