These are the speakers and topics event founder Emma Roborgh is most excited about at this year’s top B2B marketing conference in the Asia-Pacific.
With more than 40 B2B marketing leaders speaking, six different tracks and 23 group and round-table discussions to choose from, what’s the key to making the most of the fourth annual B2B Marketing Leaders Forum APAC 2019 to be held in Sydney on May 22-23?
Focus on SMB: B2B marketing with smaller teams and budgets
We have a strong focus on SMBs this year. Here are three SMB-related sessions I’m really looking forward to:
- Creating the marketing revenue engine with limited resources: Ljubica Radoicic, Marketing Director APAC, Hexagon PPM
This session is for both global organisations with smaller local teams, as well as medium-to-large local businesses with limited marketing resources.
Ljubica will share how she’s changing the “cost-centre” role and perception of marketing to a genuine revenue driver. She’ll explain how she achieves this through a comprehensive and holistic change management program across strategy, teams, culture, operations and programs by stretching her limited resources across the APAC region. She’ll share success stories, lessons learned and good practices.
She’ll also discuss and share a copy of her “B2B Marketing Playbook” that supplements the marketing plan and clearly shows the business how marketing is going to deliver revenue. The Playbook covers the ‘’What, Why, Who and How’’ and is an exclusive gift for session attendees.
- How to market at a hyper-growth start-up: Eva Ross, CMO, Sendle
How do startups build sustainably high growth with limited marketing budget? Airbnb’s first employee in Australia in 2012, Eva expanded her marketing remit across APAC before bringing her experience in growth back to Australian small business parcel delivery start-up, Sendle. No stranger to hyper-growth, Sendle has had 36 straight months of 15% month-on-month growth as a major disruptor of Australia Post.
In this session, she’ll share her incredible story of growing Airbnb in APAC and the lessons learnt that she’s now bringing to Sendle’s expansion.
- Stretching smaller teams and budgets: Group discussion with Kelly Chapman, Head of Marketing, Genie Solutions
Kelly will host this roundtable/group discussion where you’ll be learning from and sharing experiences, learn about other’s pitfalls and success stories and benchmark with peers.
Having spent four years with ASX200-listed technology company NEXTDC, Kelly last year joined the much smaller team at Brisbane-based medical software company Genie Solutions.
She’ll share how she allocates her limited budget and resources, with focus on the importance of lead gen tracking, quickly changing direction when things don’t work, the importance of team culture and accountability of every team member.
Focus on budgeting
Cisco’s ANZ CMO Ray Kloss told me one of the best presentations he’d ever seen was when Andy Lark, former CMO of CBA, Xero and Foxtel presented at a dinner how he uses budgets to transform his marketing.
- From allocation to attribution: making transformational marketing investments: Andy Lark
Andy will share how he uses budgets to drive marketing, transformation and get the stakeholders on board. He’ll be discussing why most marketing investments don’t work, his marketing dashboards and how he deliver and demonstrate value and aligning the team around spend.
Budgets in enterprise vs SMB
Managing marketing budgets for enterprise teams vs if you’re heading up a team in a small-medium sized business are very different. You will therefore be able to choose which of these panel discussions you’d like to attend.
- Enterprise CMO track: Panel with Natalie Feehan, Global CMO at MYOB, Sian Chadwick, Head of Business Experience at Westpac, and Ray Kloss, ANZ CMO at Cisco.
They will discuss their most important marketing objectives and how you can realign your marketing budgets and activities to achieve these.
- SMB CMO track: Panel with Joanna Greenham, Global CMO, SDI and Jeremy Mead, CMO at family-owned Hyne Timber.
They will share how they invest and spend their budgets, spend per channel, what they’re investing more and less in and how they get increased budgets.
Brand and customer experience leadership during business transformation
This year we’ve introduced an even stronger focus on brand with a dedicated track. Among other things, we’ll be discussing the balance between brand and revenue investments.
- A Silicon Valley CMO guide to customer experience transformation and growth hacking: Ann Sung Ruckstuhl, SVP and CMO, Unisys
Having led seven and sold four Silicon Valley startups and worked for five Fortune 1000 companies such as HP, eBay, Sybase (now SAP), Symantic and now Unisys, Ann has earned the reputation as a CMO skilled at business and marketing transformations.
Two years ago she joined Unisys, which hadn’t seen growth since 2003, to lead their re-invention and customer experience transformation. Since then, Unisys has delivered four consecutive quarters of growth with Unisys Australia seeing its regional Net Promoter Score (NPS) increase by 79 per cent.
Ann will share how she’s transforming customer experience and accelerating growth by bringing her Silicon Valley start-up mindset to the 146-year-old B2B IT company.
- Brand and the connected customer strategy – driving business transformation: Mim Haysom, CMO, Suncorp
With 12 independent, mainly geo-focused brands including AAMI, GIO, APIA and Shannons, Suncorp has embarked on a journey of transforming its brand strategy and connecting the many brands into the one Suncorp Group brand.
Mim will share how by moving to a customer focused, rather than product focused strategy, Suncorp is delivering a personalised, consistent, friction free and compelling omni-channel customer experience for its B2C and B2B clients.
Sales, marketing, product and distribution alignment
No B2B-focused marketing conference would be complete without success stories on sales and marketing alignment.
- Driving business growth by personalising complex buyer journeys and aligning product, marketing, sales and distribution partners across every channel: Craig Griffin, Head of Marketing and Sales, Macquarie Banking and Financial Services
In 2016, when Craig took the reins as Head of Marketing and Sales within Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services division, marketing was closely aligned to business units with a focus on compliance comms and product marketing. The retail business lacked a central brand strategy.
In his session, Craig will share the journey of bringing sales, marketing, product and distribution partners together with shared accountability for common goals and objectives.
He will share why it's important to focus on sales training and enablement programs and the fundamental steps of realigning the teams to becoming a combined revenue and growth machine.
- What? No more MQLs?! Group discussion with Natalie Truong, CMO Asia & Head of B2B Marketing - Pacific, Mercer
In 2016, when Natalie joined Mercer, MQLs generated were roughly 200 and the sales acceptance rate of MQLs was only 6 per cent. Despite this, HQ demanded more MQLs from marketing and they weren’t measuring conversions, pipeline or lead rejections.
In 2017, Natalie threw away the lead-scoring model and put together the sales and marketing handshake. She promised HQ she would double the conversion and revenue (and she delivered on her promise).
In 2019, she’s taking it even further and throwing away MQLs altogether. A lead is no longer a lead until it’s been accepted by the sales team.
By popular demand, Natalie is back at this year’s forum to share her insights and strategies for creating successful sales and marketing handshakes. This is your chance to ask your questions.
Marketing leadership
- The role of the CMO as a business leader first, marketer second – and the CEO’s trusted adviser: Tracy Gawthorne, CMO/ MD, Marketing & Communications, ANZ, Accenture
Having spent 20 years leading marketing teams worldwide with Accenture, Tracy is responsible for building a world-class marketing growth team in ANZ.
In this session, she’ll share how she’s had to re-educate the leadership team that marketing is a business leader first, marketer second and how she’s elevated the view of marketers as strategic leaders of growth.
- Performance management and leadership engagement: Pamela Cass, APAC CMO, WMware
During this CMO and Leadership group discussion (which is open to everyone), Pam will focus on how to build high-performance teams that are diverse, inclusive and innovative. She will provide real-life examples and techniques the industry can emulate for the future.
Also, how to nurture a high-performance environment over long periods while managing change, resilience and burn-out.
- Build your influence as a marketer: Thomas Barta, former CMO and author, 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader
What makes you an effective and successful marketing leader? How can you achieve an even stronger voice in the C-suite?
Thomas is a former McKinsey partner and co-author of the book based on the largest ever research study into marketing leadership. He will provide answers to the important question: “What makes an effective and successful marketing leader and how do marketers achieve a stronger voice in the C-suite?”
In this inspirational closing keynote, he will challenge you to embrace your role in a totally new way.
- State of B2B marketing – the road to 2025: Jay Gaines, Global CMO, SiriusDecisions
Jay is the global CMO of US-based research firm SiriusDecisons, which was bought by Forrester Research late last year. He will share the latest research and advice for how SiriusDecisions and other high-performing B2B marketing, sales and product functions are preparing for the future.
He will also reveal key results from SiriusDecisions’ latest global CMO study that demonstrates where CMOs expect to focus their investment, skills/capabilities development and organisational change over the next few years.
The B2B Marketing Leaders Forum events in Sydney, Singapore and Melbourne feature insights from the world's leading marketers. To find out more, go to b2bmarketingleaders.com.au