In 2020 the Topic and Industry specific group sessions will have an even stronger focus on workshop style format where each table will be given discussion points and questions to solve.

The hugely successful focus on SMBs at last year’s forum with tracks and sessions focusing specifically on challenges faced by B2B marketers with smaller teams and budgets will return in 2020.

In 2019 we’ve added a much stronger focus on brand leadership and transformation and during the plenary keynotes you’ll hear how Suncorp, with 12 independent, mainly Geo focused brands including AAMI, GIO, APIA has embarked on a journey of transforming its brand strategy and connecting the many brands into the one Suncorp Group brand.

Building a solid brand, telling your story, and engaging your brand ambassadors.

Growing Australian brands internationally – Global brands for local markets and individual customers

How are marketing leaders measuring and communicating their tangible and less tangible contributions to a brand

Demonstrating how the brand provides growth and financial value to the business

During this year’s plenary keynote on marketing leadership you’ll learn how Accenture’s CMO is re-shaping both our internal and external perceptions of the CMO.

She’ll share how CMOs must take on the role as business leaders first and  marketers second –  The need for CMOs to communicate a clear perspective on the company’s strategy based on industry trends, financial performance, value creation, technology and shareholder expectations

To gain influence in the c-suite and boardroom, CMOs must speak, drive and clearly demonstrate’s marketing’s contribution to “profitable” growth.

Earning a seat at the revenue table – turning marketing departments from cost to revenue centre.

As CMOs responsible for Customer Experience or CX we can control the technology and ensuring friction free customer journeys and that internally, every customer facing function within our organisation have a single customer view of our customers. What we can’t control as easily is what happens after purchase, especially when we hand over to individuals within external implementation partners. We’re also heavily reliant on customer support and service which we can’t directly control.

The CX experience becomes imperatively important as B2B organisations move to subscription models as instead of yearly contracts, the sale is now never complete.

During this plenary keynote Autodesk, a design software company for the engineering and construction industry, will share how  five years ago embarked on this transformational change of introducing a  subscription-based marketing model and what they now need to do to keep their customers for life.

Driving business growth by personalising complex buyer journeys and aligning product, marketing, sales and distribution partners across every channel.

Sales and marketing alignment for Account Based Marketing (ABM) success

Effective change management leadership skills to guide your organisation through transformational journeys.

The increasingly larger role of marketing leaders today to take ownership of Customer Experience along with leading Digital Transformation increasingly involves managing change.

Learn how B2B CMOs world wide are future-proofing their businesses to drive growth

Where B2B CMOs are planning to focus investment, skills and capabilities development, and organisational change over the next two years.

Are your leads being followed up by sales?

Does the business understand how you measure leads?

Does your reporting make sense to the business?

Do marketing and sales have shared objectives, goals and KPIs of revenue and pipeline?

Are sales satisfied with the quantity and quality of the marketing leads?

Do you have a mutually agreed service level agreement (SLA) with a mutually agreed definition of MQL, mutually agreed lead management and scoring process in the funnel?

Do you have regular collaboration sessions to review shared KPIs progress and alignment?

What, no more MQLs?!

In 2019 Natalie from Mercer is throwing away MQLs altogether. A lead is no longer a lead until it’s been accepted by the sales team!

Join us in these discussions and share your thoughts and experience

Maximizing business value with partners
In these round table sessions we’ll focus on communicating value to, through, with and for channel partners. The right approach depends on the Go-To-Market strategy and the objectives a business wants to achieve.

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.

Through and To-Partner Marketing – Revenue contribution, partner engagement and partner- led demand ROI and visibility

Driving Better Engagement and fuelling marketing performance with partners

Providing a seamless partner experience

Data-driven channel marketing

Persona Development to better understand my partner marketer needs

Mapping the Partner Journey: Applying Personas to Optimize Channel Marketing

Data Driven Marketing – Too much data, not enough insights
As marketers today we have more data sources coming our way than ever before.

But how do we use, and more importantly understand and interpret, the data coming in?
During these two round table sessions we’ll explain how B2B marketers:

Gain cross-channel visibility to see which channels, campaigns, and content best drive your KPIs
Optimise performance by making your data actionable with goals, pacing, alerts, chat– and more.
Centralise your marketing reporting across advertising, social, CRM– and anything else in your mix.
Create expert dashboards, reports and AI-powered insights to analyze marketing holistically

Metrics and attribution

How to set up attribution that works so teams can communicate the value of marketing to the business.

Marketing metrics that matter – pipeline, revenue, ROI, brand awareness, lead conversion, pipeline performance, campaign ROI,
first touch attribution and more.

Bring in your data sources and reporting metrics and we’ll discuss and advice.

In addition to the keynote presentation by Mahlab there will be two round tables discussing B2B focused content marketing strategy hosted by Telstra Wholesale and Origin Energy.

Karen from Telstra Wholesale will discuss content through the funnel, content lead-scoring and the on-going annual content program based on data, testing and learning.
Content for lead-scoring at every stage of the sales funnel – what, how and when do we reach SQL (Sales Qualified Leads).

Stefanie from Origin Energy will share, having spent over 10 years in B2B content marketing, most recently with MYOB she’s learnt along the evolution of content marketing.

She’ll share her view of the rise and rise of B2B content marketing – the past, present, future

Content ROI based on the reach, relevance and effectiveness model.

Make sure to bring your own content marketing success (and failure) stories and we’ll discuss and share learnings.

The tools needed to turn marketing from cost to revenue center

An integrated CMS, CRM and Marketing Automation stack is imperative to get the closed loop reporting you need to prove marketing’s contribution to revenue.

But what’s next for your marketing technology stack; Analytics, ABM, Social Media Management, B2B e-commerce?

In this session we’ll share our stacks, best practice, pit-falls and learnings such as:

Customer and business drivers for implementing your martech stack

Metrics used to define and measure impact and success

And the secret ingredient of integration and talent.

Team structures

What is best practice team structures, and how do you know what skills you need to recruit for?

Launching ABM as growth strategy for targeted accounts in the US

During this round table, Australian Fintech Ansarada will share their successful ABM strategy when launching in the US last year.

Learn the steps they followed to successfully launch their ABM strategy to build awareness, drive demand, and enable their sales
team to convert engaged accounts.
Hear the tactical plan they put into action, the metrics used, and the lessons learned along the way.

AI-Powered ABM – Insights to action – scale account based marketing success

Learn why artificial intelligence and machine learning are crucial to future proofing your account based marketing strategy.

MRP will share how they utilise AI to make predictions on prospects’ buying patterns and using those predictions to inform content strategy has shown greater results in account-based marketing strategies

During this round table session, in this campaign-case-study,Kate from JCurve Solutions (ASX: JCS) will share how the high-performing demand generation campaigns the team run last year, successfully increased the number of leads by 65 per cent, translating into a record-high sales pipeline growth of 49 per cent.

This resulted in 103 new ERP customers, a 30 per cent increase, and over 600 customers by leveraging repeatable success.

Bring your own campaign success stories and we’ll discuss and share learnings.

Customer journey mapping has become a favourite tool for visualising every experience your customers have with you.

In this session we’ll discuss how do you create them and what is the best way to use them.

What is customer journey mapping and how do you do it?

How to research your customer journey map.

How to use and execute on your customer journey map.

Bring your own and we’ll discuss.

During these two round table discussions we’ll be discussing  building high performing marketing teams

How to nurture a high performance environment sustained over long periods of time.

Managing change, resilience and burn-out.

CMO to CEO – we’ll also be discussing the attributes, skills and experience that will enabling
marketing leaders of today to become the CEOs of tomorrow

Leading the world’s largest Agile transformation project

Whether it’s implementing new marketing team structures, driving company wide CX programs or digital transformation initiatives, driving change and innovation is becoming an essential skill required by today’s CMOs.

The art of budgeting – from allocation to attribution: making transformational marketing investments

What are your most important marketing objectives and how are you realigning your marketing
budgets and activities to achieve these?

How do start ups 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.

Getting a seat at the revenue table – the future of marketing depends on our credibility – creating the revenue engine

Learn how SMB CMOs are investing and spending their budgets – what they’re investing more, less in and how they
get more budgets

Future proofing your career in marketing – mapping out the path to a future CMO role

As you aspire to the next step in your marketing career, learn actionable advice and strategies to help you build your roadmap to career success, in addition to insights and lessons learned from other marketers’ own career journeys.

Understanding your purpose and role in revenue and profitability

Building a solid brand and engaging engineers as your brand ambassadors at Aurecon
In a professional services firm, people are your product, brand and positioning plays an especially important role in an otherwise undifferentiated industry.

Brands as growth investments –  building a solid brand, telling your story, and engaging your brand ambassadors.

Learn how to brand from the inside out with corporate culture, community, and brand experience.

Growing Australian brands internationally – global brands for local markets and individual customers

With a strong background in brand building, Silvia joined Australian Nearmap in 2017 to continue to scale the brand across multiple geographies and drive the consistent and compelling global brand profile and positioning

How are marketing leaders measuring and communicating their tangible and less tangible
contributions to a brand

Can the brand truly drive growth and bottom line – how do you measure

How B2B marketers can drive CX business transformation (and boost your career)

The CMO as gatekeeper of customer experience in the businesses and how to prepare for a customer-centric future

Selling a customer-centric vision and then getting your organisation to live and breathing it every day

How to measure the customer experience and improvements (customer satisfaction, retention and advocacy, measure the quality of core products and services measure employee satisfaction)

The critical single view of the customer for effective customer strategies.

AI, Machine Learning, Agile Marketing, Growth Marketing and Innovation

AI and ML are fast revolutionising marketing and interactions along the customer journey.

Agile marketing frameworks are getting adopted for speed, flexibility and results.

Fostering a company culture of innovation that generates measurable revenue growth.