ISA Marketing & Sales Summit

Webinar:  Wednesday November 16th  12:00 pm EST

Download the presentation PPT

Many technology and process automation firms adhere to a rigorous product development process, but few have mastered the art of adapting that process to build customer-centric, high value solutions.  In this webinar, Matt Leary and Nikki Fisher, Senior Principals with  Solutions Insights, Inc.,  will introduce elements unique to successful solutions development from deep research on customer business imperatives, to building mass customizable solutions.   Matt and Nikki will present examples from industry leaders, and provide you with tips and recommendations on how you can adapt your development process to deliver more effective, high value solutions to your customers.

Solutions Insights, Inc. (SI), is a consulting and training company that works with B2B firms interested in providing real solutions to their customers’ problems through better integration of products and enabling services.  SI has worked with leading technology firms in IT, telecom, industrial automation, manufacturing and professional services.

Attendees will learn:

• Understanding the Solutions Development Continuum
• Building systems that ensure that your customers and channel partners are part of the process
• How to adapt the product development process for solutions
• Filling the competency gap between product managers and solutions creators

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer

Space is limited.

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/516498182

About the Presenters

Matt Leary, Principal, Solutions Insights
An expert in solutions development, management, and sales, Matt has spent the last 15 years helping leading technology companies improve performance in market strategy and planning, services and solutions development, sales enablement and impact.

Prior to Solutions Insight, Matt was Vice President of Business Development for commercial partnership activities at a Boston-area technology start-up. Previously, he was Director of Member Engagement at ITSMA, where he managed several of ITSMA’s industry segments and developed custom research, consulting, and training programs for a wide variety of leading technology firms. While at ITSMA, Matt led projects in such areas as value proposition for services, customer loyalty, strategic account planning and training, solutions sales training, solutions marketing, and solutions business transformation. Matt also produced a number of thought leadership events, published and spoke on services and solutions issues, and contributed substantially to ITSMA’s ongoing research on marketing and sales for services and solutions.

Nikki Fisher, Principal, Solutions Insights

As a marketing and sales executive at pioneering companies in telecommunications, mobile technology and Internet consulting, Nikki Fisher gained deep, hands-on experience in developing, marketing and delivering successful market-based solutions.

Before joining Solutions Insights in 2011, Fisher was President of The Fisher Group where she specialized in helping B2B companies improve the effectiveness, customer focus and integration of their sales, marketing and service functions. Strategic projects include helping a multinational company develop a detailed strategy and roadmap to transform itself from a product reseller to a services/solutions business; designing and delivering solutions training for all customer-facing employees at an IT services firm; and creating a new solutions-development process for a Fortune 50 telecommunications company.

As a Senior Associate at ITSMA, Nikki has provided solutions consulting to a number of clients including Dimension Data, Avaya, Nortel and Verizon. Nikki was also the principal ITSMA consultant to Xerox Global Services as that company built it’s award-winning ABM program.

Webinar hosted by ISA’s Management Division

Thanks to all our presenters, sponsors and attendees who came out to St. Louis in early September for the 6th Annual Marketing & Sales Summit.  The available presentations are now posted on our Marketing & Sales Summit SlideShare account.

Here are the presentations available:

Keynotes:

Dr. Peter Martin, Invensys

Julie Fraser, Cambashi

Dick Morley

Pre-Summit Workshops:

Search Marketing: 2011 SEO & PPC Update, Shari Worthington, Telesian Technology

Advanced Content Strategies for Inbound Marketing: Jon DiPietro, Principal, Domesticating IT

Part One: Introduction

Part Two: Characteristics of Effective Content

Part Three: Planning

Part Four: Crafting

Part Five:  Promoting

Sessions:

The Essentials of Webinars, George Buckbee, Expertune

Increasing Our Value to the iPod Generation, Rick Dolezal, ABB Inc

Marketing & PR Food for Thought, Valerie Harding, Ripple Effect Communications

Web 2.0 Strategies to Reach Vertical Markets, Jeff Cawley, Northwest Analytical

Winning Complex Accounts, Katherine Persac, ProSys

Collaborating with Key Accounts: The New Imperative for Marketing & Sales, Steve Hurley and Rob Leavitt, Solutions Insights

Transforming Local Best Practices to a Global Competence, Marcus Tennant, Kyoko Fukuda, Yokogawa

“The Day We Failed” Success Story, Rick Caldwell, SCADAware

How Prepared Are We for Customer 2.0? Juliann Grant, Telesian Technology

Applying Baldridge to the Marketing Function, Doug Brock, Kendall Electric

On Thursday during lunch, we will be holding a plenary panel to explore the need for marketing automation to support Customer 2.0.

This year’s Summit is all about exploring how industrial and automation companies are adjusting to the evolving role of creating and supporting customers in a socially connected world.  Customers do not need to rely as heavily on the sales cycle and sales personnel to acquire the information they need to make a decision.  At the same time, marketing and sales personnel need to make sure that prospects and customers are seeing information that supports their buying cycles at the most opportune moments without being in their face.  It’s the ultimate balancing act.

We have organized an esteemed panel of marketing automation professionals from leading software companies to help us explore how marketing automation can benefit your organization.

Panelists:

Bryan Brown, Director of Product Strategy, SilverPop
Kristin Hambelton, VP of Marketing, Neolane
Gaurav Kotak, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Marketo
Jim Williams, Director of Product Marketing, Eloqua

Questions being posed:

1. How has customer 2.0 put more emphasis on the need for marketing automation in a socially connected world?
2. What information holes does marketing automation provide that helps both marketing and sales execs?
3. What are the top 3 ROI factors marketing automation can deliver a business?
4. What are the most common obstacles that marketing can anticipate when it comes to proposing an automated solution?
5. What if I don’t have a CRM system or are starting with an excel spreadsheet for a database?  Will it still work?
6. What examples of cost savings can be expected from deploying a marketing automation system?
7. What does a marketing automation system replace in terms of traditional/free tools?
8. How would a company / its marketing efforts be negatively affected if they do not implement a marketing automation system?
9. How does the cloud impact future functionality?
10. How do marketing automation systems help deliver more qualified leads?
11. What about Microsoft’s impact on this market?
12. Why is marketing automation taking so much longer to catch on than sister systems like CRM?

Did we miss anything? Feel free to add your questions by adding a comment to this post.

Kristin Hambelton, VP of Marketing, Neolane

Kristin Hambelton is the Vice President of Marketing responsible for North American marketing efforts in all areas including field marketing, partner marketing, and product marketing. As an expert in digital marketing, she launched and continues to lead Neolane’s worldwide social media, website, and search marketing, as well as corporate marketing efforts including analyst relations.

Kristin has spent her career in global marketing leadership roles driving leads, building brands, creating desired market awareness, and providing competitive advantage for the high technology products and services companies that she worked for including IDC, Kronos, and Digital Equipment Corporation. She has won numerous awards for her contributions and is a frequent guest speaker at events and contributor to industry publications.  You can follow Kristin on Twitter @KMHambelton

Gaurav Kotak, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Marketo

Gaurav leads product marketing at Marketo.  His team drives strategic marketing for Marketo’s Revenue Performance Management products and go-to-market planning for new products and releases. He has over 10 years of marketing, technology and business development experience at companies such as SuccessFactors, Intuit and Scale Venture Partners. While working in venture capital, Gaurav helped scale the revenues of over a dozen software and Internet businesses.

Jim Williams, Director of Product Marketing, Eloqua
An Eloqua veteran and pioneer of the company’s Cambridge presence, Jim directs Eloqua’s demand generation and product marketing strategy (aka: cooking for chefs). It surprises many that long before untangling the complex dynamics of revenue creation and dissecting pipeline reports, Jim was a White House intern. It’s true. Follow him on Twitter at @jimcwilliams.

Presented by Steve Hurley and Matt Leary, Solutions Insights

Recorded Webinar:

Wednesday August 24, 2011  12:00 pm EST

The data doesn’t lie – your best opportunities for additional revenues will be with your top accounts. In slow-growth economies that are hyper-competitive,  you need to use every tool and method available to meet the business demands of your key customers. If you do a good job, you will lose these accounts.  If you do a very good job, you will likely just maintain them as customers.  If you can do an outstanding job, however, you will have a chance to grow your business with them.

Steve Hurley and Matt Leary, senior executives with Solutions Insights, Inc.,  have just completed a study of over 20 well-known companies — including IBM, Boeing, AT&T, Ericsson, and many others – about how they continue to build stronger relationships and  grow their key accounts while their competition struggles.

This webinar will share the results from their Best Practice Study to provide you with insights into what global companies are doing to grow their footprint inside their best accounts. They’ll share their findings around new ways to structure your key account teams, how to leverage all of your corporate assets, the changing role of the Account Executive, and a number of other surprising findings. Their insights will be useful for sales directors and executives, marketers, and strategic planners.

Please join Steve and Matt in an interactive webinar where they will answer many of your questions about how you can improve your company’s key account management practices and structures.

Register today

About the Presenters

About Steve Hurley
A leading expert on solutions and solutions marketing, Steve has worked over the past decade developing and implementing innovative methodologies and tools that have enabled companies to transform their business models to be more solutions-focused.

In 2009, Steve established Solutions Insights, Inc. (SI), a consulting and training company that works with companies in a diverse set of industries on solutions sales and marketing issues. Most of SI’s work in helping large technology-based companies with the key account strategies.

Prior to establishing Solutions Insights, Steve was Vice President at ITSMA, the premier association for technology-based companies focused on marketing and selling services and solutions. Steve was a major contributor to ITSMA’s solutions publications and tools, including its Solutions Roadmap, and its Account-Based Marketing methodology.

Prior to joining ITSMA, Steve spent more than 15 years with Arthur D. Little, Inc. (ADL), formerly one of the world’s leading management consulting companies. At ADL, he worked as a senior consultant in the International Economics and Development practice.

About Matt Leary
An expert in solutions development, management, and sales, Matt has spent the last 15 years helping leading technology companies improve performance in market strategy and planning, services and solutions development, sales enablement and impact.

Prior to Solutions Insight, Matt was Vice President of Business Development for commercial partnership activities at a Boston-area technology start-up. Previously, he was Director of Member Engagement at ITSMA, where he managed several of ITSMA’s industry segments and developed custom research, consulting, and training programs for a wide variety of leading technology firms.

Before joining ITSMA in 2000, Matt helped create and manage the custom marketing programs group for Horizon House Publications, publisher of Telecommunications Magazine. He began his technology marketing and sales management career directing the activities of a niche outbound call center. Matt holds a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He is currently a Senior Associate at ITSMA.