Adobe uses Predictive Insights to identify high-propensity accounts post-acquisition

Massive enterprise accounts are easy to identify and pursue, but finding focus in a sea of commercial accounts is much more challenging. For Adobe, this challenge became particularly acute when trying to grow acquisitions that focused on the mid-market. Although Adobe continues to pursue growth with large, billion-dollar-plus customers, the sheer volume of accounts below this threshold created obstacles to success. Even after applying firmographic filters, like company size and number of employees, the remaining market was far too big to address. Adobe needed a better understanding of their ideal customer profile, including key predictive insights and intent signals, to identify accounts with the highest propensity to buy. They recognized that it was critical to use data to align sales and marketing with the best opportunities to maximize the return on their go-to-market efforts.

Anaplan Predictive Insights provided Adobe with a high-definition picture of their ideal customers in the commercial space. Beyond simple firmographics, Adobe’s sales and marketing teams gained access to technographics, hiring trends, growth trends, and buyer intent They also built a predictive model to score and segment their accounts by combining these third-party insights with their first-party data and leveraging Anaplan’s powerful AI and machine learning algorithms. This model helped them surface the latest set of high-propensity, in-market accounts to pursue every quarter. Furthermore, as prospects engaged with marketing efforts, the model helped prioritize follow-up from sales.

By concentrating their efforts on ideal commercial accounts that scored highest in their predictive model, Adobe saw win rates shoot up by 81%. Not only did conversions increase among top-ranked accounts, but they also saw a healthy 15% bump in average deal size, increasing overall productivity and sales investments.

“We recognize the value of marketing with precision, and Anaplan has provided us with the third-party insights we need to focus our go-to-market efforts on the right accounts,” said Ewan Auguste, Director of Global Marketing Operations & Technology. Building on their success, Adobe plans to take full advantage of the Anaplan platform, including unlimited data to enrich their CRM and the ability to easily build predictive models for multiple use cases. In particular, they want to create models focused on sales velocity and deal size, for both accounts and leads, to further accelerate growth.

“Entering a new market is costly endeavor for any business,” says Auguste. “To allocate resources effectively and not waste your sellers’ time, you need to have an ear to the market. Anaplan provides that critical insight, guiding you to the best opportunities.”