Conference

Sales and Marketing

Social technology is the first sales and marketing processes improvement since the evolution of the modern sales person, fundamentally changing sales and marketing by merging them together. At the same time, conventional selling is winding down and the customer buying and the vendor revenue cycles are spinning up.

Sales and marketing departments and their jobs won’t go away, but the Internet has shifted us from a world where vendors controlled information and customers purchased from lists of relatively limited options. Change shifted power to the customer but it added confusion. With much more to consider, conventional sales processes often slowed down.

Social media has given vendors back a degree of power. Through analysis of huge amounts of data that customers routinely generate, vendors can recapture some control in sales situations. Vendors may not be able to dole out information as they once did, but at least they are now in a position to understand, to a statistically relevant degree, what customers want and design customer experiences that match those needs.

Change benefits all parties. Vendors can conduct more efficient and effective marketing and selling and customers can more quickly satisfy their needs. This track will offer ideas on how modern social techniques can help streamline the marketing and sales process and help organizations better understand revenue cycles to manage their businesses more effectively.

Chair

Denis Pombriant

Founder and Managing Principal,
Beagle Research Group

Sponsored by:

Tuesday

Thursday

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Tuesday, June 19
11:15 AM – 12:00 PM Social Marketing Teams: Secrets of Success in B2B Location: Room 313 This session will present IDC research on how large B2B companies are responding to the challenges of social marketing. IDC analysts will present research showing what roles are being created to manage social marketing, what resource commitments are being made, and how they relate to other marketing and sales functions. Presenters will delve into the details of what social marketers are doing in terms engagement, content marketing, measurement, and evangelizing best practices. Key questions to be addressed include: How many people do they have dedicated to social marketing? What are their key responsibilities and how are they being measured? How do they work with other marketing and sales teams? What tactics are they using to achieve their goals? What does the maturity model for social marketing teams look like? Speaker - Gary Murray, Research Manager, IDC Gerry Murray covers marketing automation and best practices for IDC's CMO and Sales Advisory services. He focuses on the people, process, technology, and data issues necessary to optimize marketing and sales operations and better align the two organizations. Gerry has 15 years of high technology marketing experience both as a researcher and practitioner. Speaker - Joe Ferrantino, Research Analyst, IDC Joseph Ferrantino is a Research Analyst with IDC's CMO Advisory Service. Joe manages the team's major research, including the Tech Marketing Barometer, Marketing Benchmarks, and the Best Practices series.
1:30 PM – 2:15 PM The New Customer, the New Revenue Location: Room 313 Today’s buyer – whether it’s for a new snowboard or a multimillion-dollar defense contract – come to the ‘sales moment’ with more knowledge than ever. No longer relying on the sales representative to educate and inform, the buyer is turning to online resources (review sites, user forums, whitepapers, news, webinars) and their own social networks (friend/colleague recommendations, Likes, tweets, and more) at a rapid rate. The reality is that the buyer is socially empowered and in the driver’s seat. Sellers can either play along (and win), or continue to ignore theses changes (and lose). The winners – those who embrace this new relationship – will uncover a kind of revenue growth they’ve never seen before. The difference is how sales and marketing teams – and the entire enterprise organization – can align operations, culture and measurement around the single most important function: driving revenue. This session is geared toward director and executive-level attendees and will cover: The Death of The Sales Cycle: how the common sales cycle model still driving business today remains stuck on near-term revenue opportunities and misses the boat on long-term, predictable growth. The Birth of the Revenue Cycle: the role of marketing in growing revenue, how to actually align sales and marketing organizations around revenue, and the best practices in overall revenue performance management. Revenue Performance Management: Organizational changes you can make right now that will result in predictable revenue growth, and what to expect in the long-run under this new strategy. Speaker - Phil Fernandez, President & CEO, Marketo Phil Fernandez is president and CEO of Marketo, the fastest-growing provider of Revenue Performance Management. A Silicon Valley veteran, Phil has 30 years of experience (including a couple of successful IPOs) in building and managing breakout technology companies. Phil is a regular contributor to Forbes, FastCompany and VentureBeat on ways companies can improve and center business process around revenue, and specifically align sales and marketing around today's social customer- and cloud-centric reality. In both 2009 and 2010, Phil was named to the Sales Lead Management Association’s list of "50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management." Phil holds a BA from Stanford University.
2:30 PM – 3:15 PM Social Selling for Banks and Telcos Location: Room 313 Ever wanted to know, each time somebody walks into your office, who they are? Wouldn't it be great to know up-front how influential they are or how trustworthy? What is their professional background and their current position? Would you like to get this information, in just a blink of an eye, each time somebody wants to buy something from you? In our session we would like to discuss new kinds of sales interfaces embedded into Facebook that allow businesses managing consultative sales processes (car dealers, real estate brokers, financial services, telcos etc.) quickly score new customers, provide 100% of the branch/offline functionality on-line and sell new kinds of products driven by virality and recommendations. Speaker - Jarek Sygitowicz, CEO, Smartupz During his career, Jarek had multiple roles always tightly connected to the Content Management and Knowledge Management areas of expertise. Jarek started as a programmer then moved to managerial positions. For the past 2 years he has been running his own company named Smartupz.
3:30 PM – 4:15 PM Why Virtual Agents Will Revolutionize Ecommerce and Eservices Location: Room 313 With the growing popularity of virtual agents, like Apple’s Siri, more than ever, consumers expect fast, yet personalized and engaging self-service. Over 247 million U.S. adults interact with businesses online, and with applications like Siri, virtual agents are positioned to revolutionize ecommerce and eservices as we know them today. Attendees will learn about recent trends that have virtual agents on track to be the standard for online customer interaction by 2015. In addition, the audience will learn how progressive companies are already using virtual agents to improve conversion, increase average order value and increase customer engagement and brand loyalty. Speaker - Steve Adams, CEO, VirtuOz Steve is a seasoned technology executive with 20+ years of hands-on experience building and leading technology companies. His executive leadership spans large and small fast-growth companies. As president and CEO of VirtuOz, he is responsible for the overall vision and strategic direction of the company. Steve has deep expertise in managing early stage enterprise software companies through aggressive growth phases to successful outcomes. Prior to joining VirtuOz, he served as president and CEO at Sabrix where he expanded the footprint of the company into global enterprises as well as the SMB marketplace, resulting in acquisition by Thomson Reuters. Steve also served as CEO at Uniscape and was responsible for worldwide marketing at Novell and Citrix. Steve has a M.A. and a Ph.D. from Florida State University.
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Thursday, June 21
9:45 AM – 10:45 AM Converging Technologies, Maturing the Vision Location: Room 309 This panel brings together a rich assortment of people who have contributed to the evolution of sales and marketing in the Enterprise 2.0 context. We will ask them how the convergence of sales and marketing, social media, analytics and cloud computing have changed the nature of how we generate revenue. This discussion will add to what you have learned through the sessions and give the audience a chance to ask about how the changes we see today will affect how we work in the front office tomorrow. Moderator - Denis Pombriant, Managing Principal, Beagle Research Group LLC Panelist - Louis Columbus, CEO, Software Strategies My areas of expertise are in the areas of channel management, quoting, sales and product configuration, pricing, contract management, order management, CRM and ERP systems and their use in attaining sales and profit objectives of organizations. My interests specifically are in the areas of how Web Services and XML are making it possible for companies to attain their selling goals profitably through their channel networks. I’m a regular contributor to industry blogs, participate in webinars, and have written several ebooks on my topics of interest in addition to assisting in sales cycles, system architecture, solution and pricing planning discussions. I also teach MBA courses in international business, global competitive strategies, international market research, and capstone courses in strategic planning and market research. I’ve taught at California State University, Fullerton: University of California, Irvine; Marymount University, and Webster University. As I have a passion to write I am currently completing a book on how collaborative platforms including Web 2.0 can significantly improve value chain performance with publication scheduled in 2011. A few years ago I founded LWC Research with a few friends and the results of those studies will be published on Amazon.com, Google Books and on my website, http://softwarestrategiesblog.com/. Panelist - Gary Murray, Research Manager, IDC Gerry Murray covers marketing automation and best practices for IDC's CMO and Sales Advisory services. He focuses on the people, process, technology, and data issues necessary to optimize marketing and sales operations and better align the two organizations. Gerry has 15 years of high technology marketing experience both as a researcher and practitioner. Panelist - Cary Fulbright, Chief Operating Officer, Jobscience Cary Fulbright is a high tech industry veteran with an unrivaled track record in growing revenues in the on-demand market. He was salefore.com’s first Sr. VP of Worldwide Marketing and Products and the company’s first Chief Strategy Officer. He helped grow salesfore.com’s revenues from $7M to $165M and played a key role the company’s IPO. Previously, Cary was President of Saaspoint; VP and General Manager of OnDemand for Saba; and VP of Marketing & Products for Five9. Cary has a BSFS in International Politics, a JD from Georgetown University and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. Panelist - Brian Zanghi, President & CEO, Kadient Brian Zanghi is President and CEO of Kadient. Brian brings more than 20 years of sales and executive leadership in the high technology industry to Kadient. Since joining the company in 2004, he has led the transformation of Kadient from an RFP automation software company to the leading provider of on-demand sales knowledge applications. Brian is a frequent speaker and writer on the topics of sales and marketing effectiveness and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model. He is author of The Role of Venture Capital in Transforming Your Business, published by Aspatore in the book Inside the Minds: Software Venture Capital Best Practices. His article Ten Lessons from a SaaS Transformation was featured on Sandhill.com. He has spoken at the MIT Sloan Sales Conference, the MIT Venture Capital Conference, Software 2008, the IDC Sales & Marketing Effectiveness Summit, and Softletter’s Marketing & Selling SaaS Seminar. Prior to joining Kadient, he was the Chief Operating Officer of SPSS, Inc., a $200 million publicly traded software business well known in the predictive analytics and statistical analysis market. He was formerly Executive Vice President of Worldwide Operations at eRoom Technology (acquired by Documentum), which was an early leader in web-based collaboration and hosted document management software. He was also President of PC Docs, where he was instrumental in that company’s high-growth phase from $8 million to $80 million and beyond. Earlier in his career, Brian was with Interleaf, a provider of integrated hardware and document creation technology that was, at the time, the leading provider of advanced document generation systems.
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