The Smarter Go to Market: Appian's Strategy for Complex Enterprise Sales Cycles

Modern B2B marketing is a perpetual transformation through a highly dynamic landscape of company go-to-market strategy, technology, complex integrated datasets and execution. It isn’t just about chasing leads anymore, but also about understanding and orchestrating the ideal customer journey or “golden path.” At Appian, our mission is to transform how customers operate with AI-powered automation. We are building a marketing engine that prioritizes orchestrating a journey that effectively guides our customers through their transformation and modernization efforts while simultaneously supporting our sales team in building high-value, trusted relationships with the world’s largest enterprises.

Enterprise B2B purchasing is complex and lengthy, spanning 18 to 24 months and involving 20-30 people who engage with 30-40 marketing tactics throughout their journey from technical leaders who download a whitepaper, test the product and attend technical workshops to the executives who are looking for opportunities to network with peers and learn best practices around modernization and AI. Traditional metrics, like marketing sourced and MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), don’t adequately represent the customer’s actual buying behavior. Here at Appian, our marketing team is focused on driving target account engagement through a journey of touches that builds trust. This engagement correlates to shorter deal cycles, higher win rates, and increased average deal values.

Our marketers have become strategists who are orchestrating a “golden path” of engagement, a multi-touch journey serving both technical and executive decision-makers. Our strategy is built on a blend of data-driven insights and market research. To enable this level of analysis, we are creating a unique set of marketing dashboards that enables us to see the lift in win rates and deal sizes based on the patterns of marketing engagement and then proactively use that data to optimize the customer journey. The goal for us is simple: ensure Appian is not just participating in the conversation, but leading it.

Currently, there is a tremendous amount of noise in the market. Everyone is talking about AI and many boards are mandating that their companies implement AI, but in the race to participate, MIT reports that 95% of GenAI pilots are failing.  At Appian, we are already driving real value through numerous customer success stories by AI embedded directly in a process or applications.

We directly embed AI inside critical process workflows where business really happens. This distinction resonates with our customers because it’s not theory; we have proof. Our campaigns showcase real-world outcomes: AI in-process, tied to compliance, onboarding, fraud, lending, and more. Our customers say Appian is the only vendor bringing concrete customer proof with this level of detail, which means that our story telling is working!

We are building a global campaign strategy and messaging platform that enables us to cut through the noise and speak clearly to both technical and business personas across different industries and lines of business. 

• For Business leaders: We create digital and in-person experiences that showcase our ability to generate revenue, reduce costs, or accelerate time-to-value. It’s essential for us to put their journey in the context of their role and their industry. A CFO for a Global 2000 is working to mitigate risk and drive profitable growth while a mission owner for a defense agency must provide comprehensive logistics to support operations readiness.
• For Technical leaders: We design experiences that discover new ways to solve problems through innovation workshops and hands-on technical labs. 

Scaling a successful campaign globally requires finding the balance between a unified, strong brand message and the local relevance needed for execution. I get excited about a framework that is both highly effective and easily adaptable, ensuring every dollar spent is driving meaningful opportunities.

Our Appian Marketing team is dedicated to tight alignment with Sales. This requires us to collaborate to define optimal go-to-market approach and strategy, from account segmentation and sales plays to messaging. To facilitate this, we build strong relationships across the company, joining sales calls, understanding priorities, and providing self-service resources. With every dollar invested, Appian is considering the long term cycle. We lean into the “Marketing Mix,” leveraging every approach in the toolbox and ensuring we continuously innovate. 

I like to use the Samba shoe example. Your Samba purchase didn’t happen because of a single ad. It was influenced by multiple touchpoints over time: seeing Dakota Johnson and Olivia Rodrigo wear Sambas, in-store displays, social media feeds and fashionista friends recommending them. This multi-touch reality is even more pronounced for an enterprise customer buying group of 30 people buying a software solution for a critical business challenge.

Today’s Marketers navigate through a highly dynamic landscape of disparate systems and datasets. It’s often extremely time consuming to gain insights from the data and overcome  execution hurdles like data privacy, email touch governance and financial compliance. At Appian, we are uniquely equipped to address these challenges and modernize the marketing workflow. First, Appian is a software company that provides an AI-powered process automation platform for businesses and government organizations to design, automate, and optimize complex business processes. Second, innovation is at the heart of our culture, we celebrate all employees who ask questions, bring new ideas and challenge the status quo. If you are a change-maker who wants to help us transform marketing, we would love to meet you!

Interested in driving market transformation? Check out our open marketing roles here.