Adobe Summit 2026 · Session OS221 · MARKETO + AJO B2B · Watch on Adobe.com
Esri's shift from Salesforce Account Engagement to a full Adobe stack — Marketo Engage, AJO B2B Edition, Real-Time CDP, and CJA — is a useful case study in what a compressed, high-volume migration actually looks like at enterprise scale. The operational specifics here are worth your attention: 15,000 historical marketing tactics, roughly 1,000 Marketo programs, and a team of 12 standing it all up in two business days. That's not a marketing claim — that's a configuration story.
The Migration Math: 15,000 Tactics, 1,000 Programs, 2 Days
Robert Yocum, Manager of Marketing Technology at Esri, laid out the numbers that define this project's scope. Coming out of Salesforce Account Engagement, the team catalogued approximately 15,000 historical marketing tactics accumulated over a decade. Initial expectations were to migrate only a fraction of those. They ended up migrating all 15,000, consolidated into just over 1,000 Marketo programs.
The compression from 15,000 to 1,000 was made possible by Marketo's API and cloning capabilities. A team of 12 to 13 people stood up and activated those programs in roughly two business days. The technical implementation window ran from July 2025, with the go-live target of January 2026 — a six-month build preceded by three months of discovery. That discovery phase, Yocum emphasized, was non-negotiable: you can't compress the build if you haven't done the architecture work upfront.
The downstream benefit isn't just that they hit the deadline. It's that the program structure they built forward-reduces effort on every new campaign. Teams are now standing up new programs with significantly less lift than they experienced on their previous platform.
Audience-First Architecture: Build Once in AEP, Activate Everywhere
The core architectural decision Esri made was to centralize audience creation in Adobe Experience Platform rather than building audiences inside individual execution tools. Yocum described the old model — recreating audience definitions for every campaign and every email send — as a compounding inefficiency. The new model: define an audience in AEP once, then activate it across Marketo, AJO B2B, and any other channel in the stack.
This isn't just an operational convenience. It's what enables the strategic shift Steve Schultz, Esri's 12-year MarTech veteran, described as moving from campaign-first to audience-first. The old question was 'I have a campaign, let me find an audience for it.' The new question is 'I have an audience — what do they need?' That inversion changes prioritization, content strategy, and how teams are resourced.
AJO B2B Edition handles the behavioral response layer — listening for specific engagement events and triggering relevant messages through the appropriate delivery tools. Schultz noted the team is actively pushing the boundaries of what AJO B2B can do, and there's clear organizational enthusiasm around it.
Unified Data as the Prerequisite for Sales-Marketing Alignment
Esri's sales-marketing alignment problem wasn't a process problem — it was a data problem. Schultz cited inconsistent marketing-to-sales handoffs and difficulty defining target audiences as persistent friction points under the legacy setup. When marketing and sales are working from different datasets, alignment conversations produce confusion rather than action.
The fix was operational, not cultural. By moving to a unified enterprise dataset in AEP, both teams now reference the same target account list. Yocum put it plainly: sales organizations already work account-first — they maintain a target account list and pursue it. Marketing can now map directly to that list rather than operating in parallel. 'Being able to go into a meeting and have the same conversation about the same target account list takes a lot of the confusion away,' he noted.
Esri's stack selection was explicitly shaped by this requirement. The ability to create an audience in one place and deploy it in multiple places was, per Yocum, the deciding factor in landing on Adobe — not feature breadth, but that specific architectural capability.
Implementation Velocity: What Made a 6-Month Build Possible
Esri's implementation was, by Yocum's own characterization, 'highly aggressive.' The three months of pre-build discovery — mapping what existed in Account Engagement, determining what needed to migrate and how — was the enabler of the compressed six-month technical build. Skipping or shortcutting that discovery phase would have transferred the complexity into the implementation itself.
The partnership with PwC was a material factor. Schultz described the relationship as beginning at Summit four to five years prior, where the strategic conversation around Esri's roadmap started. PwC contributed business justification work and helped accelerate the implementation cadence. This is a useful model: the SI relationship was cultivated well before the project kicked off, which likely reduced the ramp time when execution began.
Esri also had an existing Adobe relationship of 11 years, which meant the Experience Manager and Target footprint was already in place. The new tools — Marketo, AJO B2B, RT-CDP, CJA — were additive to an existing Adobe environment, not a ground-up deployment. That context matters when evaluating how replicable this timeline is for shops without that foundation.
Key takeaways
- Marketo's API and cloning capabilities compressed 15,000 historical marketing tactics into ~1,000 programs, deployed by a 12-person team in two business days — do not skip the pre-build data audit that makes this possible.
- Centralizing audience creation in AEP rather than inside execution tools (Marketo, AJO B2B) is the architectural decision that unlocks both cross-channel consistency and sales-marketing alignment on a shared account list.
- Three months of discovery before a six-month technical build is not overhead — it's what makes the aggressive timeline achievable. Compressing discovery compresses nothing; it just relocates the pain.
- Sales-marketing alignment is primarily a data problem: when both teams reference the same unified dataset and the same target account list, alignment conversations become productive rather than adversarial.
- AJO B2B Edition is functioning as Esri's behavioral trigger layer — listening for engagement events and routing responses through appropriate delivery channels. This is the active part of their audience-first model, not just the segmentation.
Bottom line
Esri's session is one of the more operationally honest migration stories you'll see at Summit — specific numbers, a realistic timeline, and a clear articulation of what actually changed architecturally. If you're evaluating an Account Engagement exit or trying to justify AEP-centered audience management to leadership, this is the reference case to study.
