It's a wrap!
I said it last year but need to repeat it again this year... the B2B Marketing Exchange is the single best, most strategic B2B marketing event of the year.
This year, the crowd was amazing... over 1,400 registered attendees, more than a 40% increase in marketing practitioners. This is really the measure that matters. So many events are swarms of vendors trying to sell to other vendors. Not so much here.
Highlights of our trip to Scottsdale:
- The audience - Kudos to everyone... 300 people, packed house nearly every session
- Matt Senatore, SiriusDecisions - Always a great session, loved his Demand Spectrum conversation.
- Kelvin Gee, Oracle - Shared an amazing story of his journey to enable global adoption of ABM best practice and Insights: predictive, Intent, engagement
- Masha Finkelstein, Google - the application of SMB focused ABM
- Mark Stouse's house, Proof Analytics - a wonderful host with amazing tequila
Don't worry if you're not an "ABM Expert"
When kicking off the ABM In Action Live session track I polled the audience. I first asked how many people are here because they want to learn about best practices to start their first ABM program... about a third of the audience. Next, I asked how many people have, or have had a live ABM program, and the remaining two-thirds raised their hand. Finally, I asked this group to keep their hands up if they're here because they need to restart or re-engineer a failed ABM program. Half of the people kept their hand up.
About a third of ABM programs are yet to launch and a third are failed and need to relaunch.
To be candid, I believe that the majority of people who feel their ABM program is operating well cannot target, control or measure activities and revenue impact of their ABM efforts. To do so, would require that they have the ability to manage data across these platforms and report it in an account-centric manner. And, based on the research, only 14% of marketing organizations can do this. Hmmm.
In any case, everyone who attended these sessions appeared to learn a lot and certainly participated well. At times it seemed I could see more phones in the air taking pictures than I could see faces.
