Getting Experience Data to the Sales Team for More Personalized Interactions

How an internal hackathon became a B2B inside sales tool using Adobe Experience Cloud

It’s not easy for companies to equip their internal sales teams with the right tools to personalize interactions with prospects and customers. Our company is no exception. We get millions of visits to Adobe.com each day from visitors with a variety of interactions, behaviors, interests, and intent. The question is – how can our sales teams benefit from them?

Historically, for Adobe to understand who these customers were, a visitor had to log in or fill out a form providing basic contact information that would later be shared with the sales team. This step has two potential drawbacks:

1. It limits the data received by the sales team – only sending them basic information after a clear “hand-raise” (opt-in from the potential customer).
2. Even when the potential customer fills out the form, the sales team doesn’t receive the experience data on what occurred before the hand-raising activity. All of the clicking around, the visitor’s point of origin and interests, time spent on page – is lost. Without this insight it’s almost impossible for sales teams to be proactive and, with that, effectively meet the needs of existing or potential customers—until or unless those customers explicitly informed Adobe of their interests.

To help solve these issues, our measurement team did a little experimentation by hosting an internal “hackathon,” which led to the development of Adobe Visitor Insights. AVI is a new internal program that uses the Adobe Experience Cloud to give our B2B inside sales teams the technology to personalize their interactions with prospects and customers.

The promise of the AVI solution starts with the ability 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. Without that ability, you’re essentially flying blind when you start a conversation,” says Parthiv Sheth, senior director of marketing technology at Adobe.

To gain a better understanding of early intent of web visitors, our internal measurement team dedicated a group to detecting account traffic on Adobe.com. They found through our regular reporting with third-party data, that they were able to identify customers from only 20 percent of the web traffic to Adobe.com. Not enough. So they created new algorithms and tools to enhance our first-party data. Now they could pull enough pieces of web-based behavior data together to identify 40 percent of the web traffic as customers. This ratio was enough to lead the team to host the hackathon to answer the question of how to best use the Experience Data coming in – and that’s when AVI was born.

Forty account development managers at Adobe submitted a watch list of domains and accounts for which they’d receive web-based behavioral information. The AVI team synced it with contact and account information, and uploaded it into our customer databases and email system. Whenever a known visitor visits Adobe.com, the system recognizes them and gathers their interest, intent, and behavior. At the end of each day, AVI automatically 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, and an overview of activity at the account level.

The triggered email also showcases Experience Data for contacts that are not currently listed in the legacy CRM system. This empowers the account development and inside sales teams 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 sent to the sales team can alert them that the visitor has shown more interest than usual in an Adobe product.

The results: better leads for the sales teams.

AVI was developed for our company’s internal use, yet the program shows best practices B2B marketers can implement in their own organizations to drive account-based marketing, using many tools your company may already have.

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Download the whitepaper for more details on our Adobe Visitor Insights program, to learn how you can empower your sales team with Experience Data, too.

To learn more about Experience Data, read about the Experience System of Record, to help your marketing and sales teams achieve their goals.

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Thanks to George Sadler, Parthiv Sheth, Ashley Penn, Fred Kuu, Thomas Finet, and Scott Leslie who also contributed to this article.