Adobe’s $5 billion enterprise business is defined by these three “pillars” of strategy

Adobe’s enterprise business has been lucrative for the business, with the company’s $5 billion digital experiences business continuing to grow under the leadership of enterprise CRO Stephen Frieder.

Frieder has been with Adobe since 2009 but took on this role in January 2023 to lead the company’s go-to-market strategy for digital media. With an AI and digital-first approach, Frieder and his team have been able to streamline the presales process, onboard clients quickly, and show immediate results for clients like Tesco and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Revenue Brew sat down with Frieder to discuss what’s leading growth in his sector and how AI is playing a role in his GTM strategy.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Where are you seeing growth coming from?

The strength of the dialogues we’re having with customers right now is how we use AI to drive through customer experience engagement at a high level—really driving personalization at scale with three main “pillar plays.” One is content supply chain, so how do you produce the amount of content you need through agentic at scale and personalizing it and doing that in a very efficient way.

The second one is what we call customer engagement, so how we drive that engagement and real-time activation, whether you’re at a sports venue or you’re online or at a call center, being able to really understand that personalized experience for you through our solutions and through AI in that area.

The third one, which is exploding for us—and we just made an acquisition of a company called Semrush—is called brand visibility. Today every one of the CMOs is struggling with the traditional way they marketed 12 months ago. [It] has changed in a dramatic way because there are so many customers who are doing that research through OpenAI or Anthropic or Gemini, through those different channels, and we have the ability to help them understand where the customers are going and what’s happening to the conversion rate in a more efficient way and what’s the next generation of their digital experiences.

And how are you leading growth in these different pillars?

It is a very exciting time because every chief digital officer, CIO, CMO, and CEO is looking at what’s the next 18 months of innovation.

Take a company like Tesco, where we went through a long process with them, obviously a business with tight margins, but they know that if they can drive that personalized experience in every channel—and we’re doing that with them and we had a long relationship with Tesco before—but now it’s: How do we use deployment of our technology organization and our products to build that type of data and personalized experience? It’s all done through use cases. All the selling, everything that we do in the business is based off business value and making sure that we’re delivering real value for them along the way. It’s the data, the contents, and the journeys that we drive with a company like Tesco.

AI is now a big part in driving growth for enterprises. Are there any challenges in getting these companies to adopt an AI-first approach?

The big challenge and big opportunity right now is the technology is changing so quickly. The way that we look at it is: How do we make sure that we’re driving value in the first 90 days that we work with somebody, but set them up also for the next 18 months because we know the world is changing? Our whole interaction model of how we interact with our customers is going through a massive transformation now. The old days we used to do demos, and we do a long elongated presale sales process and then we would take nine months to get to value, and it was a much longer sales cycle. Today when we go in there, we’re talking to a customer, and we’re showing them before we even sign contracts: This is what your digital property will look like, this is the business value, and you earn value much, much quicker.

The opportunity is how we’re switching our organization to be able to drive that value immediately in the presales process to value. That’s a big change in our organization, but it’s a top strategic priority for us so that everyone in the organization, through the use of our AI tools, can show that business value right away at the signing of contracts.

How is your team adopting AI in the presales process?

Last year I think we did 30 customized interactions, and this year already in the last quarter we did 500. A general verticalized demo used to take three weeks. Now it’s done in 20 or 30 minutes, and it’s a much less [skilled] person that can do that. The ability to customize and drive those demos in their prototypes is much more efficient by order of magnitude. We’re saving millions of dollars in that process, so that has been a huge one for us.

The ability to understand which business problem we want to solve for our customers, AI is helping us tremendously. We’re using Claude to really get a better understanding of our customers’ needs quicker and be much more prescriptive, like even me when we used to go and do meetings with C-suites, it would be much more of an ethereal discussion.

Today, it’s very easy for us to come and say, “This is the business gap that we see for you based off the data, and this is our recommended use cases.” It’s much more attack to the business and show quickly the value that we can drive.

How do these practices feed into your long-term growth strategy?

If you look at the percentage of our organization that will switch what they do every day within the next six months, it’s going to be drastically different. It’ll be a very different go-to-market model. We will deliver value immediately upon contract and show it before we go live, so our sales cycles will get shorter and our value will get quicker to our customers. The way that we’re going to interact with the market is going to be different as well.

Some customers like a Tesco or a Dick’s or Eli Lilly will want to go all in in the transformation, but some are going to want to try use cases, and it’s going to be much more a rapid deployment and a rapid iteration that we’re going to look at as we look at to change the model in the business.