Adobe and Microsoft expand partnership with Adobe Experience Manager and Dynamics 365 integration

Adobe and Microsoft expanded their continuing partnership today when they announced that they are making it easy to share data between Adobe Experience Manager, a website marketing tool and Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s CRM tool.

For a sales person that means seeing the latest sales activity and customer interactions from the company website right in the customer record. From a customer experience perspective, it means that if you are on a website and filling in a form to join a service or make purchase, Adobe can pull your customer information like name, address and phone number from the CRM record and fill in much of the information for you automatically, making it more likely that you’ll complete the transaction, while providing a better overall experience.

Dave Welch, vice president or Microsoft Solutions at Adobe says that from his company’s perspective, it’s really about streamlining the experience on the company website to turn that shopper into a buyer. “The more personal we can make that based on what we know about you, it makes the experience more integrated for a customer,” he said.

Dina Apostolou, director of Microsoft Business Applications Group says for her company, it’s about giving salespeople more complete data to work with to understand the customer better. The more information you can pull into a single customer view in Dynamics 365, the better you can understand their needs and sell to that.

Ultimately, this is a combining of sales and marketing data. Traditionally, sales and marketing, two departments that need to work together, for whatever reason have often had difficulty communicating. By integrating the marketing and sales information together at the data level in this manner, it puts the information in the hands of the people who need it without any politics involved. It just happens.

The companies have previously provided APIs that would allow customers to do this kind of integration if they were willing to put in the work to make it happen, but with the new agreement, the two vendors are doing all of the heavy lifting for them making it a simple configuration to share the data.

When you combine this with the Dynamics 365 partnership announcement around Adobe Sign announced last month and Adobe Campaign integration from last year, the two companies are looking for ways to work together by combining various types of sales and marketing information that play to their various strengths.