Celebrating 10 years of B2B Marketing Leaders Forum in 2025!
Next May you’re invited to come and celebrate our 10th year of the B2B Marketing Leaders Forum in Sydney!
Held at the Doltone House, Jones Bay Wharf in Sydney 21-22 May 2025, we’ll be celebrating 10 years of invaluable business contribution, revenue and profitable growth driven by our outstanding community of B2B CMOs and Marketing Leaders.
Join us for a celebratory two day conference plus dinner and party on the evening of the first day of the conference!
10 years of developing and growing B2B marketers as business leaders driving profitable company growth!
Now in its 10th year, APAC’s largest gathering of 500+ B2B CMOs and marketing leaders will gather in May to discuss our roles as business leaders driving profitable growth, how we balance brand with performance and revenue investments, sharing leadership challenges, advising future aspiring CMOs and CEOs, discuss how we get more CMOs onto boards, how we maintain a firm seat at the leadership table, all while investing in our personal career development, ensuring we personally stay relevant as modern marketers…and much, much more!
Due to limited venue capacity the event sells out - Book early - Forum will sell out!
Call for sponsors and sponsored workshop leaders!
If you’d like to be involved as a sponsor and meet over 500 B2B marketing leaders please download the partnership prospectus here.
You will learn from over 70 B2B marketing leaders:
First confirmed 2025 speakers include:
Unleashing the power of B2C storytelling for B2B audiences
Emma Chalwin, Chief Marketing Officer, Workday (US)
Emma Chalwin is chief marketing officer (CMO) at Workday. She oversees the global marketing organization, with responsibility for building the brand and creating customer demand in markets around the world.
Prior to joining Workday in July 2023, Emma was executive vice president of Field Marketing at Salesforce, where she was responsible for creating go-to-market plans, driving brand awareness and messaging, as well as leading demand generation globally. Earlier, she held global brand and marketing leadership positions at Macrovision, McAfee, and Adobe.
Lessons from leading Growth at Atlassian, Ebay and now Docusign
Robert Chatwani, President and General Manager, Marketing & Growth, Docusign (US)
As President and General Manager, Growth, Robert Chatwani leads Docusign’s Marketing & Growth organization to scale its digital strategy across marketing, product, technology, and sales. Robert is responsible for Docusign’s product-led growth and execution, encompassing growth product and engineering teams, related data analytics, and all marketing and operations teams focused on digital expansion, demand generation, and lead qualification. He also leads all Chief Marketing Officer functions, including product marketing, field marketing, communications and public relations, content, creative and brand strategy.
Before joining Docusign, Robert was CMO of Atlassian, a pioneer in product-led growth, and led global teams across marketing, brand, communications, and data science. He also spent more than a decade at eBay, ending his tenure as Chief Marketing Officer for North America where his teams supported $35 billion in trading volume.
Producing Highly Creative B2B Marketing Campaigns – Global Viral Marketing and Clever PR Strategy that Deliver ROI
Ingela Nordenhav, Former CMO, Volvo Trucks (Sweden)
As Global CMO at Volvo Trucks and responsible for a product launch of five new trucks Ingela introduced one of the world’s best-known B2B video content plays, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s epic split between two reversing trucks which to date has seen 122M views on YouTube.
An absolute pioneer as media consumption changed from traditional TV to social media, Sydney Morning Herald called the YouTube video back in 2013 “The art of going viral”.
Ingela will share her team’s strategy of repositioning the brand and boost brand awareness and how they got one of the world’s best-known B2B video content play ideas across the line, the objectives, the results and the following campaigns. In 2015, it won the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity award for Creative Effectiveness.
The Rise of Enablement’s Influence – Empowering GTM teams to break down silos and maximise customer engagement
Paige O'Neill, Chief Marketing Officer, Seismic (US)
Paige O’Neill is CMO of Seismic where she leads all marketing functions including corporate, product, field, partner and customer marketing. She has more than 25 years in marketing roles with experience leading global marketing teams across product, partner, customer and corporate marketing. Previously, O’Neill served at public and private software companies including Sitecore, SDL, Prysm, Aravo and Aprimo. She also spent nearly a decade at Oracle in product marketing and public relations roles.
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Marketing stand for growth, or they stand for nothing - Thomas Barta
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We’re seeing a large skills gap today in B2B marketing, and it’s conferences like these that help fill that gap as this is the only place they’re going to get this kind of education`` - Carlos Hidalgo – Customer Experience Strategy, B2B Demand Generation and Change Management Expert (USA)
Thank you to our 2024 sponsors
Headline Partner
Strategy & Integrated Marketing Partner
Content & Marketing Strategy Partner
AI Powered and Enablement Partner
Digital Experience Partner
Data & Analytics Agency Partner
Demand Gen Strategy Partner
Strategic Customer Experience Partner
Digital Asset Management Partner
B2B Marketing & Events Partner
Revenue Data Platform Partner
Email Marketing Partner
Associate Partner
DAM Partner
Marketing Operations Partner
B2B Intent Data Partner
Associate Partner
Gifting Intelligence Partner
Video Partner
Registration Partner
Venue Partner
2025 SPONSORSHIP BOOKINGS NOW OPEN!
A very limited amount of partnership opportunities exists at the forum. Contact Kristy Kelly kristy.kelly@b2bmarketingleaders.com.au
Interested in becoming a sponsor?
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What you'll learn at APAC’s largest B2B marketing conference focused on revenue, growth, leadership and personal career advancement!
CMO LEADERSHIP
For our most senior marketers there will be specific sessions and invite-only networking activities dedicated for you
We’ll be discussing marketers as business leaders driving profitable company growth
Strategic thinking, opportunity identification, leadership, supporting teams and examples of how marketing structures influence the effectiveness of your marketing
How to build great teams and cultures that support business objectives. How to nurture a high performance environment sustained over long periods of time, managing change, resilience and burn-out
CMO/CEO and internal stakeholder alignment
Authentic leadership & leading through change. From a former Australian Army Captain and Prison Psychologist
The art of budgeting – from allocation to attribution: making transformational marketing investments
Securing board roles
EMERGING LEADERS
As you aspire to the next step in your marketing career, you’ll hear actionable advice and strategies to help you build your roadmap to career success
Personal leadership and career advice and paths for emerging B2B marketing leaders
Taking a strategic approach to building your personal marketing brand
The importance of keeping up with change, self-education and staying relevant
Developing your commercial mindset, building business acumen and financial literacy
Advice for working with sales and other stakeholders
How you transition from peer into a leadership position
Which skill sets are most in demand to boost your career as a future CMO. The areas and experiences crucial to build now, to set the foundations for personal growth
The importance of mentoring and how to secure a mentor
STRATEGY & GTM LEADERSHIP
Marketing as a business leadership function, and how to get there
Having a long-term actionable strategy is crucial to help you move beyond the frenetic cycle of quarterly targets and tactical tasks, to build a plan which delivers sustainable results and gets you out of the hamster wheel.
How a defined long-term strategy helps you take back control of your agenda, align your marketing priorities to commercial business goals, think critically about your customers, your competitive landscape, and develop value propositions to cut through the noise, resonate and drive demand in market.
Why marketing is the rightful leader and creator of GTM strategy, and how you and your teams can fulfil that role to deliver sustainable business growth
Principles of effective GTM planning with constrained teams and budgets
How to deliver to growth targets without increases in budgets and head count
GROWTH
Increasingly B2B marketers are owning aggressive growth targets which present a great opportunity to firmly cement that respected seat at the leadership table.
During the growth focused track we’ll be discussing strategies that enable marketing to be the engine room for growth for the business. Weather it’s growth through existing customers and ABM or demand gen and securing new logos or pipeline acceleration and campaigns that drive faster conversion. We’ll be discussing marketing’s involvement in identifying growth segments and opportunities and how to gain greater accountability for, and embracing growth as our North Star.
How do we deliver growth without increased budgets and headcount
DATA, INSIGHTS & DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS
In order to make any kind of data-driven decisions, derive insights and slice and dice your data it has to first be clean, stored in one place, with a 360 view of the customer, a scenario most marketers and businesses very rarely see.
So, what do you or don’t you know about your data?
How do you act on insights that truly benefit your customers and help guide them down the decision making journey?
What if you don’t have a data science team, how can you as a marketer develop the data-insights and curiosity mindset?
B2G - GOVERNMENT
Focus on B2G – Marketing into Federal, State, Government Agencies, Defense & Education and the specific challenges when pursuing growth and building partnership when marketing into Government such as:
• Understanding the complex procurement, “Bid & Tender” processes and how to get on panels
• Increasing market share in priority government accounts/clusters through Account Based Marketing
• Creating customer communities and prioritising executive engagement
• Scaling through partners and industry associations
• Building trust, credibility and understanding your customers
• Using a tightly integrated campaign approach to broaden reach and brand awareness
• The importance of working in close alignment with sales and marketing through stakeholder engagment
• Ensuring the internal cross-mapping of all bid opportunities across all internal departments
• The importance of ESG in government
ATTRIBUTION, REPORTING, METRICS & ROI
To maintain credibility and budgets, marketers must be able to quantify marketing’s contribution to pipeline and revenue. Yet, over 50% of marketers in APAC don’t have a ROI or pipeline contribution target
What earns marketing a seat at the leadership table is knowing your ROI, revenue contribution and being able to walk into a board room and report and defend your data
Learn the skills, processes and tech needed to set up attribution, ROI and reporting frameworks for communicating the value of marketing to the businesses – aligning metrics to business financials
We’ll be discussing metrics such as CAC, CLTV, Conversion rates, Sales pipeline velocity, Churn rate, ROI by channel, Upsell & Cross-sale rates
CONTENT MARKETING
Learn how to map content to the end-to-end buyer journey and how to optimise messaging for omnichannel strategy, how to use content to progress conversations during long selling cycles and customer journeys and the best distribution strategies for content amplification.
We’ll be sharing ABM case studies focused on supporting ABM programs and keeping up with their content demands. The importance of storytelling when tapping into unique buyer committee pain points, predictive content marketing analytics for forecasting your B2B content calendar, the methodologies, measurement models and data used to prove the effectiveness of content efforts and how it drives business and revenue.
ICP, PERSONA & JOURNEY MAPPING
Learn how to develop your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), Persona and Customer Journey Maps that visualises every experience and touchpoint, both digital and physical your customers have with you.
Understand how to tap into the organisation’s insight, experience and data to map out the customer journey and learn how to execute on your journey maps.
Review examples of unexpected customer journeys and what you can learn from them.
DEMAND GENERATION
During this track we’ll dig deep into demand generation in APAC with case studies followed by interactive group discussions.
From building APAC Demand Centres, we’ll be discussing the scaled services provided, the processes, roles and KPIs. We’ll be sharing examples of demand gen programs for local and vertical requirements.
Customer Engagement as new indicator for campaign targeting. By measuring customer engagement, competitors and 3rd party content, you can provide much richer insights into both purchase propensity and warning signals to sales.
BRAND & CREATIVITY
Brand positioning, strategy, and creativity – B2B marketing examples of both successes and failures
The balance between brand and revenue investments (and the budget allocation split)
How you build your “board and CFO friendly” brand strategy – ensuring they understand how brand investments create growth over time
Explaining the importance and benefits of brand investments to non-marketers and the value & impact of brand building from the CEO’s perspective
Measuring brand health, brand measurement tools and metrics
How great brands are established through culture and why delivering on your brand purpose starts (and ends) with your employees
How to not alienate a loyal customer base whilst driving new segments.
ABM - ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING
Strategic, one-to-few and ABM at scale
As the most exciting and revenue rewarding marketing and sales initiative in B2B marketing, ABM, where treating individual accounts as markets in their own right is finally gaining huge momentum in APAC
Learn how to get started, organisational pre-requisites and how to set up for future scale from scratch
How to build the business case for ABM, starting with a proof-of-concept and winning the support of the sales and senior stakeholders internally that ensures internal adoption
Account selection, account mapping and scoring and building the team
How do you progress your ABM strategy?
How do you get the 1-to-1 engagement deeper and wider?
How do you get better C-level engagement with Enterprise customers?
Change management in an ABM world
GROWTH & BUDGETS
How to deliver to growth targets without increases in budgets and head count
Budget negotiations with HQ – when competing with EMEA and the US for budget and impact
The best business case to your CFO for more budget
Zero-based budgeting to try new things and innovate
Marketing in SMALL businesses – marketing with tiny budgets and teams
ESG MARKETING
The role of marketing in communicating and promoting the environmental, social and governance (ESG) attributes of your company’s strategy to investors, buyers and other stakeholders in alignment with corporate purpose and mission.
The role of marketing in driving ESG initiatives within your departments – what can you do to make an ESG impact?
ESG storytelling – examples of successes and mistakes
FULL FUNNEL ATTRIBUTION & REPORTING
How do you measure full-funnel attribution with multi touchpoints?
How do you measure Enterprise pipeline acceleration?
How do you measure account engagement across all channels, digital and physical?
We’ll discuss attribution models and dashboard reports
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN B2B
Understand marketing’s role in building customer-centric cultures that consistently predict enhanced, sustainable business results.
We’ll be discussing the CMO’s role in building CX capability, structure and culture and how to influence departments and generating impact without direct authority, the power of brand for great customer, employee, and product experiences, the role of data and tech to support CX strategies and ROI models organisations are using to drive CX.
PARTNER/CHANNEL MARKETING
In this session we’ll focus on communicating value to, through, with and for channel partners and/or brokers.
Today’s partners typically work with 5–25 vendors at any given time. The constant flow of information coming in from these vendors can be disruptive, overwhelming, and confusing.
Vendors who understand how to better engage and align marketing with their channel ecosystem are the ones winning the customers’ mindshare.
We’ll discuss revenue contribution, partner engagement, partner led demand creation, marketing contribution, ROI and how to drive better engagement and fuelling marketing performance with partners.
MANAGING ASIA & HQ
We’ll discuss some of the biggest challenges faced when marketing into the vast amount of very different individual countries in Asia and the constant need to balance local customer and sales demand vs the efficiencies and scale provided by a more regional focus.
The magic formula of localisation – finding the balance when providing locally relevant messages and the global brand challenge when localising.
How do you best circumvent HQ control?
How do you get local autonomy to try new things?
Breaking down internal silos and opening barriers between head office and local office and ensuring HQ understands local market dynamics so we can focus on driving an APAC agenda.
AI IN B2B MARKETING
Revolutionise your marketing strategies with generative AI – A Roadmap for Forward-Thinking Marketing Leaders
We will unravel the dynamic world of Generative AI and its potential to revolutionise marketing strategies.
Learn how to construct an effective AI roadmap for your marketing initiatives, identifying and prioritising areas where generative AI can provide the maximum impact.
We’ll discuss potential challenges in adopting AI, such as data privacy and technology integration, and offer guidance on how to navigate these obstacles.
Learn how to leverage the power of AI, revolutionizing your marketing approaches and steer your organization towards the future.
You’ll learn from brands who are already leveraging these technologies to improve customer outcomes and marketing ROI
INDUSTRY SESSIONS
Industry Focused Tracks
As one of the forum highlights, join your industry peers for these one hour group discussions with your competitors and peers.
You’ll be discussing challenges and pressing topics that are most relevant to you and B2B marketers in your specific industry.
The industry round-table tracks this year will be catered specifically for B2B marketers within:
- Banking, Financial Services & Insurance
- IT/Tech/SAAS/Cloud
- Manufacturing/Construction
- Professional Services
SMALL TEAMS, BUDGETS & RESOURCES
Stretching smaller teams and budgets
Not everyone has huge budgets and teams. This session is for both global organisations with smaller local teams, as well as medium-to-large local businesses with limited marketing resources (roughly yearly budgets of below $600k and with a team size between 1-6 marketers).
Stretching smaller budgets and resources further – where you can make the biggest impact with what you’ve been given
Budget planning and making friends with your CFO
What to outsource and what to get your hands “dirty” and learn to do yourself
The importance of team culture and accountability of every team member.
Getting business buy in for bigger budgets, new projects and initiatives
How small players compete for talent with the big brands offering huge salaries