Key Takeaways from the Adobe Global Sales Kickoff 2017

Celerity had the privilege to join more than 3300 attendees in Las Vegas, Nevada this past week, as one of 150 select Adobe business partners at the 2017 Adobe Global Sales Kickoff (SKO). After three days of learning about new approaches and initiatives, sharing client stories, and discussing strategies for delivering better customer experiences and powerful marketing solutions, we now firmly know that Adobe’s main focuses for advancing in 2018 are around ensuring customer success, driving product innovation and leveraging the business partner and strategic partner ecosystem. In summary here are some of the most important takeaways according to the Celerity team.

The Magic Triangle

The Adobe Experience Cloud is the most comprehensive suite of marketing solutions that unites all the key marketing technologies within one comprehensive platform. It’s everything a marketer needs to understand prospective and current customers, and to tailor customized campaigns to their specific interests. Based on presentations and discussions from the SKO, we think the magic triangle of Adobe Campaign, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager is the essential toolbox for effective marketing and measuring end-to-end ROI.

By using advanced analytics, propensity modelling and predictive intelligence, Adobe Analytics allows you to understand past, present and future customer behavior – giving you the information you need to shape personalized, highly profitable campaigns. Combining Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics unlocks the power of real-time analytics across all marketing channels. Segmentation and profiling become significantly easier, allowing you to capture more robust information, faster. Having Adobe Campaign as your platform allows you to harness this information and execute on complex and personalized campaigns with more attributable ROI. Combine this magic triangle with automation and integration with CRM, and your marketing to sales process will be a well-oiled machine.

Microsoft Partnership

Speaking of CRM…In 2017, Adobe forged a strategic partnership with Microsoft merging the most powerful engine for marketing with the most powerful sales and operational solutions. During the SKO, more plans and value propositions were shared for how this partnership and respective technologies, solutions and integrations will take your marketing and sales efforts to the next level.

Specifically, around CRM, the integration of Adobe Campaign and Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows you to automate a variety of business functions that will ultimately enable your organization to qualify and score leads so your sales team is working on only the best leads, drastically reducing the time it takes to ETL data between the two systems and deliver real-time lead and campaign attribution and performance reports to key stakeholders. Hotter leads, faster with less manual extraction and evaluation – allowing sales teams to focus on closing.

Adobe Business Partners

Adobe is leaning on certified business partners to help deliver excellent customer experiences for the many clients across the Adobe Experience Cloud. There is a vast network of partners that offer a variety of focuses and areas of expertise. To ensure each Adobe customer is receiving top notch service, Adobe will rely on their business partners to execute on a gamut of projects including implementations, integrations and operate and run services. Celerity has more than a decade of experience implementing, integrating and servicing Adobe Campaign, which makes us the choice partner for all of your campaign needs and for any system that needs to work with Adobe Campaign to boost personalization, streamline processes and attribute ROI.

What is Adobe Sensei anyway?

On the product development front, a lot of focus from the SKO was placed on the immergence of Adobe Sensei. A tool that combines artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning to help customers discover opportunities that are hidden, make tedious processes fast, and show which data insights matter — and when they matter. Key takeaway is that Adobe Sensei will create more automation across the experience cloud with interesting features like visual searches, predicative clicks etc., to make marketing simpler and provide suggestions for what the next plan should be.

It’s all about the blue dot…

One feature of Adobe Sensei is the ‘blue dot.’ It appears while using the experience cloud and when clicked, it provides marketing suggestions or looks into the decision trees and hierarchy for how a piece of content, a campaign or creative resource has gotten to that point via review and modification. It helps streamline review processes and final decision making. For experience cloud specifically, the blue dot shows what are the logical campaigns and segments to support your customers in their journey. Overall Adobe Sensei demonstrate a robust connection across all of the Adobe Experience Cloud solutions.

In short, Adobe’s main focuses alongside their business and strategic partners is to deliver impeccable customer experiences, leveraging robust, data-driven technologies to drive marketing and sales success for clients across all industries and sizes. Celerity is on the same page and we are ready for an out-of-the-park 2018.

See you at Adobe Summit in March!