Justin
Lehrbaum

He began his career selling group event packages for an NBA team. Today, he runs enterprise sales for one of the most powerful customer experience platforms on earth. The two jobs are less different than you think.

Justin Lehrbaum is Adobe's Area Vice President for Customer Experience Orchestration, the practice of coordinating every data signal, marketing touchpoint, and engagement moment into something that actually feels like a conversation. He sits in Portland, Oregon, but his mandate is global: help enterprise brands stop sending campaigns and start running journeys.

Fourteen years in B2B sales have taken him through three company acquisitions, four distinct VP titles, and five President's Club trips. He started as a business development representative in 2016 at a marketing attribution startup called Bizible. Marketo bought Bizible. Adobe bought Marketo. Lehrbaum just kept getting promoted.

That arc - from startup BDR to Area VP at a $23 billion company - is not luck and it's not just hustle. It's the kind of career path built by people who know how to sell, then learn how to lead, then learn how to translate product strategy into revenue territory. Each step in Lehrbaum's timeline shows someone who did exactly that: master the current role, earn the next one.

What makes the story worth paying attention to is where it started. Before enterprise SaaS, before Bizible and Marketo, before any of the acronym-laden territory of marketing technology, Lehrbaum was selling Cavaliers tickets in Cleveland, Ohio. Group event packages. Membership renewals. Real conversations about whether LeBron's latest season was worth another season ticket package. It is, in retrospect, the perfect primer for a career built on understanding what customers actually want versus what salespeople assume they want.

He returned to the University of Oregon after Cleveland - his alma mater - and worked in member services before making the final pivot into the B2B tech world. The University of Oregon Ducks connection runs deep. He graduated there in 2013 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and an Economics minor. The Pacific Northwest called him back, and Portland became home base for a career that would cross the continent and the enterprise software map multiple times over.

The technology stack Lehrbaum works with reads like a syllabus for modern digital enterprise: Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Real-Time CDP, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, Marketo Engage. These are not simple point solutions. They are infrastructure-level platforms that require sales leadership with genuine fluency - the kind of fluency that comes from years of being close to the product, close to the customer, and close to the data.

His progression through Adobe's organization reflects how the company itself evolved. When he joined through Bizible, the focus was marketing attribution - tracking which campaigns generated revenue. As the stack grew more sophisticated, so did his responsibilities. Customer Journey Management. Marketo Account Management. Data and Journeys. And now, Customer Experience Orchestration - the category that tries to unify all of it.

That evolution is the story of B2B marketing technology in miniature. The industry moved from measuring individual channels to mapping complete journeys to, finally, orchestrating experiences across every touchpoint in real time. Lehrbaum moved with it, role by role, taking teams with him.

He was also recognized by peers as Most Improved team member of the year - a distinction voted by both Sales and Leadership teams simultaneously, which suggests someone whose growth was visible not just upward but sideways. Colleagues noticed the change. That kind of recognition tends to matter more than plaques from the executive floor.

Portland suits the profile. The city has developed its own quiet technology presence, distinct from San Francisco's venture heat and Seattle's infrastructure scale. It's a place where people choose to build careers deliberately, not just opportunistically. For Lehrbaum, leading a regional VP territory from Portland while operating against enterprise accounts across North America reflects a kind of considered ambition: serious about results, clear about where home is.

In the world Lehrbaum operates in, the product he's selling - Customer Experience Orchestration - is the answer to a question every large enterprise is actively wrestling with: how do you make a brand with millions of customers feel relevant to each of them individually? Adobe's answer involves combining behavioral data, real-time decisioning, AI, and journey analytics. His job is to get the right companies to implement that answer, and to build the teams who can walk those companies through it.

The sports background turns out to be relevant in an unexpected way. Professional sports sales organizations run on urgency, relationships, and the ability to make the abstract feel personal. A season ticket package is a promise about identity - about being part of something. Enterprise software, at its best, is the same kind of pitch. Not a feature list. A future state. Lehrbaum has been making that pitch, in different languages, since he was cold-calling potential Cavaliers season ticket holders from a desk in Ohio.

The pivot from sports to tech is common enough to be a trope. What's less common is doing it at the BDR level - the most entry-level role in enterprise sales - rather than leveraging a big title from one industry to get a big title in another. Lehrbaum started at the bottom of Bizible's sales ladder in 2016 and built up from there.

Bizible, for context, was a marketing attribution software company based in Seattle. It gave B2B marketers the ability to trace revenue back to the exact channels and campaigns that generated it. Solving a real problem, with real data, for real enterprise buyers. It was acquired by Marketo in 2018 - and Lehrbaum, already a Commercial Sales Manager by then, came along with the acquisition. A year later, Adobe acquired Marketo for $4.75 billion, and he came along again.

Each transition could have been a dead end. Most people lose something in an acquisition - their team, their territory, their momentum. Lehrbaum gained VP titles, plural. That's not accidental. It reflects someone who made himself useful and visible through the organizational disruption that acquisitions inevitably create.

By December 2021, he was an Area Vice President. Then again in a new role in December 2023. Then again in December 2024. Then the current role. The cadence of annual promotions into new territory suggests an organization that kept finding new problems Lehrbaum could solve - and a leader who kept saying yes to the harder assignment.

Customer Experience Orchestration is one of those phrases the industry deployed before it fully defined it. At Adobe, it means something concrete: using data from every customer interaction - email opens, web visits, in-app behavior, service calls, purchase history - to deliver the right message through the right channel at the right moment, automatically.

That requires enterprise infrastructure. Adobe Journey Optimizer handles the orchestration layer. Adobe Experience Platform provides the unified data foundation. Marketo Engage manages the marketing automation. Adobe Real-Time CDP resolves customer identity across all the channels. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics lets teams measure what's working across the whole journey, not just at individual touchpoints.

Selling that stack is not a single-call close. It's months of discovery, technical validation, stakeholder alignment, legal review, and business case construction. Lehrbaum leads teams that navigate that entire cycle for enterprise accounts. The skill required is less about pitch decks and more about patience, credibility, and the ability to keep many decision-makers aligned toward a shared outcome.

Adobe's positioning in this space is significant. The company competes with Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP, and a host of point solutions across different segments of the CX orchestration market. Lehrbaum's teams operate at the front line of those competitive engagements. At $23 billion in annual revenue, Adobe is not a challenger brand - but in the CXO space, the sales motion still requires making the case that consolidating on Adobe's platform beats assembling a patchwork of best-of-breed tools.

It's the kind of strategic selling that suits someone who spent a decade learning how customers think before learning how enterprises decide. The Cavaliers taught him that the customer's experience of the product - attending a game, being part of a community - matters more than any feature sheet. Adobe is, in a different register, selling the same idea.