B2B business has a bad reputation for continuing to push traditional, lengthy, inhuman sales cycles on its prospective buyers. However, a variety of vendors and practitioners in the space are making the push to turn the B2B buying process into a conversational, personal experience. At this year’s Adobe Summit, in particular, we saw Marketo and Adobe unveil integrations with a variety of companies in an effort to better enable companies to offer frictionless customer experiences with a conversational approach.

At the company’s annual summit in Las Vegas, Marketo, an Adobe company, unveiled new partnerships with Demandbase, an account-based marketing platform, and LiveRamp, a customer identity platform. The partnerships aim to help mutual customers combine their individual and account-level data to better target prospective customers across multiple channels. It also deepens the relationship between both companies and the Adobe Ad Cloud, better positioning marketers to leverage their own data and insights garnered from Demandbase or LiveRamp to target and engage accounts.

At its annual summit in Las Vegas, Adobe announced a new integration with LinkedIn, as well as a deeper partnership with Microsoft. The company stated that the partnerships with both companies better position B2B customers to deliver targeted account-based experiences to prospective buying teams.

On the opening night of the Adobe Summit, senior-level executives from Adobe and Marketo recognized their 2019 Adobe Experience Maker and Marketo Revvie Award winners. The Marketo Revvie Awards are designed to honor Marketo users who are driving business growth and positive buying experiences, while the Adobe Experience Maker Awards aim to recognize best-in-class Adobe Experience Cloud users.

The idea of a physical event focused on webinars is a bit ironic, but the more than 600 attendees that gathered in San Francisco this week for the third annual Webinar World demonstrated that the evolution of online events is having a fundamental influence on overall content and marketing strategies.

AdRoll Group announced former Marketo executive Robin Bordoli as the new president of its RollWorks division. 

Leadspace, a customer data platform for B2B sales and marketing, announced it had doubled its annual returning revenue after a year of record growth.

Marketo unveiled its 2019 Marketo Champion Class, which seeks to recognize users who are Marketo Certified and act as brand ambassadors to share their knowledge and expertise with others in the Marketing Nation Community.

The topic of Televerde’s “workforce” has drawn a lot of comments and whispers over the years. Sometimes, there is a bit of a sarcastic tone attached as it’s referred to as the “prison company.” Other times, there is an insinuation that women in correctional facilities aren’t worthy of investment, either because they're in prison or because of the belief that they aren’t capable of real change.

Adobe announced that Marketing Nation Summit will be integrated into Adobe Summit, which is scheduled for March 24-28 in Las Vegas. The news follows Adobe’s $4.75 billion-dollar acquisition of Marketo in September.