Moving from CMO to CEO & Securing board roles
CMO/CEO and internal stakeholder (C-suite) alignment
“The P&L CMO” – Driving business revenue with sustainable profits through P&L ownership
The future of the CMO function in driving profitable business growth
Marketing leadership – How to be the CEO’s most valuable strategic partner
How do we ensure the CMO function retains a firm seat at the leadership table
Advice to better sell, measure and prove the commercial impact of their work
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
The art of budgeting – from allocation to attribution: making transformational marketing investments
Celebrating 10 years of B2B Marketing Leaders Forum in 2025!
In 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 awards 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!
Sponsorship is sold out!
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.
Creative, B2B Global Viral Marketing and Clever PR Strategy
Ingela Nordenhav, Brand Consultant & 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 experiences of how to reposition a brand and boost brand awareness. She will discuss the importance of a brand promise, how to get your ideas a cross the line and the results it can create.
From IBM Spin-off to Growth Engine: Rewriting the Rules of B2B Marketing
Lisa Gilbert, VP Global Marketing, Kyndryl (US)
Before helping launch Kyndryl’s brand from scratch in 2021, an $18B IBM spin-off with over 4500 existing clients and 90, 000 employees globally, Lisa held several key leadership roles at IBM, including CMO of IBM Japan, CMO for UK and Ireland, and VP of Marketing for IBM’s Growth Markets based in Shanghai. During her time at IBM, she not only pioneered the company’s first Net Promoter Score program but also played a pivotal role in accelerating the tech giant’s growth across diverse global markets.
Today at Kyndryl, Lisa leads global marketing strategy and Account Based Marketing, leading a team of CMOs across regions to forge and deepen strategic customer relationships that drive substantial business outcomes. She’s known for building high-performing teams that deliver results, with a proven track record of delivering revenue growth and exceeding business targets through the marketing programs she builds. Her expertise spans across brand development, market expansion, and implementing transformative go-tomarket strategies that enhance business performance.
Lisa’s unique combination of international experience, proven track record as a transformation agent, and team building has made her a distinctive voice in the B2B marketing world, particularly when it comes to navigating global markets and building brands that resonate across cultures.
-
Marketing stand for growth, or they stand for nothing - Thomas Barta
-
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)
What you'll learn in 2025!
At APAC’s largest B2B marketing conference focused on pipeline acceleration, revenue, profitable growth, leadership and personal career advancement!
CMO LEADERSHIP
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
PIPELINE ACCELERATION & GROWTH
As marketing teams face increasing pressure to drive leads, they must also focus on accelerating pipeline growth and improving conversion rates.
Accelerating Pipeline and driving closed won business
We will explore the current state of B2B pipeline performance, key growth metrics, and strategies for maximising marketing’s impact on revenue.
Strategies for optimising marketing-influenced pipeline growth
Improving opportunity tracking
Strengthening alignment between sales and marketing.
Friction points in the funnel, the shift from traditional pipeline contribution measurements to a focus on Sales Stage One, and how to balance long-term marketing impact with short-term sales demands.
FROM BRAND TO DEMEAND TO REVENUE
As pressure mounts to deliver business outcomes (not just leads), the pendulum is swinging back in the favour of brand, investing in strong positioning, cutting through the noise, and arming sales with tools to drive stronger relevance with discerning B2B audiences. This shift is about driving business growth which means extending beyond awareness into the entire buyer journey.
- Brand as a burning platform – and how it drives demand and growth
- Alignment from business strategy to marketing and sales, and how to achieve it
- Balancing budget and resource constraints with the need for local campaigns and autonomy
- Defining and measuring outcomes and ROI
- Lessons from program successes and failures
BRAND & CREATIVITY
Data vs. instinct: Striking the right balance in creative campaigns
How Virgin Australia secured board funding for a completely B2B segment – and the “phenomenal” growth that followed
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.
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
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
GROWTH
“Marketing stands for growth, or they stand for nothing” – Thomas Barta
Increasingly B2B marketers are owning aggressive growth targets (often without increases in budgets and resources) which present a great opportunity and unique challenges.
During the growth focused sessions 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
Leading international hypergrowth and expansion into Americas, Asia & Europe
PLG & PLS – How to drive sustainable revenue growth and brand love through product-led sales
STRATEGIC ABM
Scaling Strategic ABM & Intent based ABM at scale
Efficiently Scaling Personalised Strategic ABM Programs
From the first ABM pilot to scaling Strategic ABM to 100 accounts within Banking & Finance, Government, Telco, Energy & Utilities
How to scale a cluster approach over multi-segments and how to align with Industry Marketing
How ABM strategy has seen marketing moving closer to the business in a predominately Sales-Led organisation
How strategic ABM is the foundation for personalisation at scale
INTENT DRIVEN ABM
Intent – Buyer-led Journeys and Buying Groups
As buying priorities change, brand-to-demand strategies, AI-powered personalisation, and pipeline efficiency are becoming more critical than ever.
How to engage entire (and defensive) buying groups, and create a buyer-first experience that drives real pipeline
Brand’s comeback era: AI growth, buyer-led content, and evolving buyer journeys
Data and AI investments reshaping demand-to-revenue strategies
ABM Roadblocks to success: Budget & resource constraints, data inconsistencies and accessibility limitations, cultural and linguistic diversity
Global vs. Regional ABM: Evaluating the effectiveness of global ABM frameworks versus regionally adapted strategies.
Scaling ABM Efforts: Best practices for expanding ABM strategies while maintaining personalisation and efficiency:
Driving ABM success with Agentic AI
EVENTS
Events, experience marketing & executive (C-suite) engagements
Focus on: internal events for Customer, Partners and Prospects, 3rd Party events and Customer/C-suite engagement events
How do you drive innovation in B2B events
How Enterprise marketer is building strong relationships with key C-Suite execs at high-value accounts.
Picking an approach that works at a time when the C-Suite are being bombarded with offers from multiple invitations
Measurement
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.
ICP, Persona & Customer Journeys across various BUs
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
TARGETING ASIA & JAPAN
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.
Understanding Asia for personalised, localised story telling
The magic formula of localisation – finding the balance when providing locally relevant messages and the global brand challenge when localising.
Insights into demand generation, performance marketing and the digital landscape in Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Singapore & Japan
Alignment with local sales teams
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
DATA QUALITY
Clean, accurate and constantly up-to-date data quality in your CRM and Marketing Automation systems is the necessary foundation for the use of AI tools, ABM and Intent-Data signals, to accurately measure marketing performance and to get through to your prospects premier “Focused” Inbox.
But with the average person leaving their job every three years, 33% of your data is outdated (not to mention duplicates and errors in your data entry) unless you have the processes and ownership in place for the upkeep.
• The 18-month data-quality clean-up project “Project Top Gun”
• From process excellence to routine clean-up – How to clean your data
• The results and impact
• Learn how to audit and clean your data
• Recommended tools for automated vs manual cleaning and maintenance
FROM BRAND TO DEMEAND TO REVENUE
As pressure mounts to deliver business outcomes (not just leads), the pendulum is swinging back in the favour of brand, investing in strong positioning, cutting through the noise, and arming sales with tools to drive stronger relevance with discerning B2B audiences. This shift is about driving business growth which means extending beyond awareness into the entire buyer journey.
- Brand as a burning platform – and how it drives demand and growth
- Alignment from business strategy to marketing and sales, and how to achieve it
- Balancing budget and resource constraints with the need for local campaigns and autonomy
- Defining and measuring outcomes and ROI
- Lessons from program successes and failures
PRACTICAL EXAMPLES OF CAMPAIGN FAILURES & SUCCESSES
As one of the Forum highlights (and most requested) we’ll bring you some real-life practical examples of B2B campaign successes and failures.
We’ll hear from B2B marketers, sharing practical presentations about campaign delivery – integrated marketing communication campaigns in a B2B environment.
Each speaker will share both successful and failed campaigns, what were the goals, the tactics implemented, how they measured success or failure and key learnings.
STATE OF AI ADOPTION
The use of AI tools making marketers more productive, efficient and creative is today a non-negotiable and has in 2025 become a race for team adoption and usage.
How many can confidently say their teams are adopting and using AI tools efficiently?
How many of us have an AI technology adoption roadmap and strategy in place for their marketing teams and what does it look like?
AI agents and their impact on operational processes, marketing structures & change management
How are marketing leaders building AI-enabled marketing teams?
How do you ensure balancing personalised AI driven customer interactions and human trust
Guidance and considerations around AI tools and governance, 3rd party liability and the protection of brand integrity
What are the key technologies best-in-class brands are embedding it to dial up their marketing productivity, creativity, and performance
B2B branding and findability (SEO/Search) in the era of AI
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
INDUSTRY SESSIONS
As one of the forum highlights, join your industry peers for these 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.
Choose from B2B Marketing in:
- IT/Tech/SaaS, Cloud
- Banking, Financial Services & Insurance
- Professional Services (Accounting, Engineering, Legal, Consulting)
- Manufacturing & Health
- Property & Construction
You will learn from over 70 B2B marketing leaders:
First confirmed 2025 speakers include:
Thank you to our 2025 sponsors
Helping APAC's B2B marketers turn their departments into revenue generating machines in 2025:
Headline Partner
Platinum Partner
Digital Experience Partner
Gold Partner
GTM Intelligence Partner
Integrated Agency Partner
Branded Demand Partner
Demand Excellence Partner
Silver Partner
Revenue & Content Acceleration Partner
Global Insights Partner
Marcomms Strategy Partner
Account-Based Experience Partner
Asia Agency Partner
Collaborative Event Partner
Silver Partner
Silver Partner
Hosting Partner
Global B2B Data Partner
Aligned Event Partner
B2B Publisher Partner
Registration Partner
Gifting Technology 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