In a subscription-based business, the sale is never complete and revenue comes from loyal customers over time.

Instead of waiting for multi-year renewal cycles to come around again, the big difference with subscription and consumption models is that B2B marketers now need to consistently nurture their customers and receive recurring revenues rather than one-time purchases. As such, marketing has a critical role to play in shaping and maintaining the long-term customer relationship and retention tactics must be given a front row seat in the organisation’s marketing strategy.

In this session, Bhupesh, APAC CMO at Autodesk, a design software company for the engineering and construction industry will share how Autodesk, five years ago embarked on this transformational change of introducing a  subscription-based marketing model.

He’ll share how his team now has to stay involved with customers long after the sale.

• The importance of marketing’s role in the post-sale, on-boarding process and customer service when using a consumption model
• The retention tactics and engagement marketing strategies they use when continuously connecting with customers
• The importance of working with internal and external partners post-sale
• The metrics of subscription-model marketing – the greater emphasis on the recurring revenue metrics and the measurement of your effectiveness in engaging and nurturing existing customers.

Back in 2016, as Craig took over the reins as Head of Marketing and Sales within Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services division, marketing was closely aligned to different business units with a focus on compliance comms and product marketing. The retail business lacked a central brand strategy.

In this 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 the strong focus on sales training and enablement programs and the fundamental steps of realigning the teams to becoming a combined revenue and growth machine.

At the beginning of the decade, the term “sales enablement” was nearly nonexistent. Today, Forrester research is calling sales enablement a “cornerstone practices in sales and marketing” and organizations have rolled out worldwide sales enablement programs with hundreds and thousands of employees involved. In fact, the number of people with ‘sales enablement’ in their titles has increased by more than 130 percent since 2016.

What caused such rapid change? In this keynote, Seismic CEO and co-founder Doug Winter will reveal the real reasons behind sales enablement’s skyrocketing growth and incredible future. The answer, it turns out, is not surprising or magic. It involved an incredible amount of hard work, ambition, and talent held by sales enablement’s early practitioners—the pioneers in the room who have shaped the future of sales and marketing for the foreseeable future.

Having spent 20 years leading marketing teams worldwide with Accenture, Tracy is now responsible for building an ANZ world-class marketing growth team. 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.

She’ll share:

• Positioning the CMO as a business centred leader first, marketer second
• The importance of business acumen vs focus on brand in isolation of the business
• Advice for presenting to the leadership team; understanding the need to focus on their pain points vs your own day-to-day agenda, the importance of being prepared to defend your data and ensure the data presented are linked to business objectives
• Stakeholder engagement – work your network – how to be present and relevant in their worlds.

Global CMO, Jay from US based research firm SiriusDecisons will share their latest research and advice for how SiriusDecisions and other high performing B2B marketing, sales and product functions are doing to preparing for the future.

Accountability is at an all-time high for B2B marketing teams. They are expected to drive more revenue with a limited budget — while also guaranteeing that success can be easily measured. CMOs must refine their operations to streamline their marketing efforts and position their teams to easily measure the impact of future campaigns. This session addresses these realities by providing insight into how leading CMOs develop seven key operational characteristics that drive performance and efficiency, and future-proof their organization.

Jay will also reveal key results from SiriusDecisions’ latest global CMO study that demonstrates where CMOs expect to focus investment, skills/capabilities development, and organisational change over the next two years.

Communications industry leaders, Chris Savage, a former COO of STW (now WPPaunz), the largest listed marketing content and communications group in the southern hemisphere and a highly regarded inspirational speaker, will provide you with 10 leadership lessons to keep yourself relevant and valuable as you ride the tidal wave of marketing change.

It’s an opportunity to spend some time thinking about where you are in your career – your objectives, goals,aspirations and intent, and how to evolve your personal “brand, offer and value proposition” to remain at the leading edge of the industry by “thinking new, thinking big, and thinking quick”.