Since almost a decade I´m running Business Development for Adobe´s Creative Cloud in Central Europe. More than product it´s all about connecting to the right people: customers, coworkers but also influencer, technology partner, associations, industry contacts and press. To gain their trust and be a valued adviser it´s essential that you not only understand products and workflows but even more that you understand their painpoints and challenges.
Business Development in Central Europe means...
- Provide fact-based Thought Leadership
- Exemplify a Growth Mindeset
- Act as a Trusted Facilitator
Taking the customer´s perspective is the first step in experience business
To grow the business and to build and educate new target groups I partner and work closely with different communities, speak at conferences or support other departments like marketing, solution consulting or the customer success teams with their events and workshops. The two most important external communities that I´m responsible for:
Influencers at Adobe Central Europe cover all fields of design and creativity and range from author and trainer to user group chapter rep and luminary. Our group consists of almost 130 individuals - most of them with their own portrait as spark page.
Adobe Technology Partners range from AddOn or Plugin Developer to system vendor for editorial systems or layout automation. Europe has the highest density of those partners and Germany delivers the only dedicated partner event globally: In 2018 we had 90 attendees from across Europe and 15 Adobe speakers from Noida, Warsaw, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Chicago, New York and San Francisco.
Excerpt of recent activities
Influence in products:
- Connecting the BU with the local communites and organizing on site meetings with customers, partners and usergroups: Indesign and Illustrator Team, Dreamweaver PM, Design Management Team, Partner Ecosystem DME
- DUDEN dictionaries. Native integration into InDesign CC2018 (and now also Framemaker). First major general in-product value since CS6 for publishing (part of Growth Hacking Project Germany)
- Realization of features required by the German community: Footnotes, Endnotes in InDesign
- Workshops with different PM teams including Shared Cloud
- Only point of contact for InDesign Server in Europe
Enablement:
- Story Telling workshop in February that now gets rolled out globally through the DVA team. (helps to position and sell Adobe Rush)
- Adobe Spark: Influencer Network, Technology partner day, local activities Central team and spark brownbag
- Modular Lettering workhop to educate on Libraries and collaboration
- Contact for Press, Customers and TA for Creative Cloud Workshops at Max
One Adobe:
- First Prototype for marketing automation with InDesign Server and AEM Assets by Technology Partner Werk II in May
- Org-Team for Adobe Growth Day
- Growth Mindset initiatives like #adobecoffeblinddate
Communities & Partner:
- Management and communication to the German Creative Influencer Group (130 people, among them many usergroup chapter reps)
- Business partner for local technology partners (200 across the German speaking countries). Organizer and host for the yearly Technology Partner Day (see above)
- Microsoft local partnership CC & Surface: 20 people on CC within Microsoft, series of webinars powered by Adobe (and paid by MS)
- Relationship to local design associations (GWA, Landesverbände Druck & Medien,...) and enablement of their staff
- Support of industry partnerships (in sync with affiliate Marketing team): HP, HEIDELBERG e.G.
- Push for Creative Jams for Business in Central and also support for community creative jams
- Push for new developers (CEP, new Adobe Exchange, soon Adobe XD)
Awareness:
- Spokesperson for Adobe
- Multiple talks on events or conferences on Design & CC (currently TDM, priint-days, Kommunikationskongress Aalen, Cloud Publishing breakfast)
- Speaker for general topics like new work (The Sooner Now, 2017)
- Internal partner to SC, CSM, Marketing, AE, Consulting…
- Covering One2Many and Non-Enterprise which both is coming short with other teams
It´s all about influencing individuals and teams without dedicated authority ;-)
Credits:
Portraits by @WalterFogel