ISA Marketing & Sales Summit

ISA’s 7^th Annual Marketing & Sales Summit
“The New Rules of Customer Engagement: Riding the Winds of Change”

CALL FOR PAPERS
Abstracts due 16 April 2012

August 15-17th, 2012
at the Historic Driskill Hotel in Downtown Austin, Texas

You are invited to submit an abstract for ISA’s 7th Annual Marketing and Sales Summit, sponsored by the ISA Management Division.

How do you reach your customer today?

Regardless of how the world’s economies shift and sway, connecting with the customer is what it’s all about. But customer engagement has changed.  How is your company adjusting to these changes? We want to hear from you.

Share your expertise, solutions, and with other marketing and sales professionals in Historic Downtown Austin!  Join us at the 7th Annual ISA Marketing and Sales Summit to discuss these core issues and how it’s affecting companies like yours in the automation market.

How to submit an abstract

Abstracts should be submitted based on the summit theme and topics below. Abstracts should be 500 words or less and describe what the presentation will cover. If your abstract is accepted and you agree to submit a presentation for the conference proceedings, you are also agreeing to register and present at the 7th Annual ISA Marketing & Sales Summit.

Two Conference Tracks:  Marketing & Sales

• Strategy and Business Development
• Integrated Strategies for Marketing and Sales
• Digital Marketing and Social Media
• Complex Sales Best Practices
• Strategies in Vertical Markets

Sample topic areas include best practices in social media, guerilla marketing, brand marketing, winning complex accounts, market-driven product development, business development and engineering, product marketing management vs. product management, sales vs. marketing, branding in the web 2.0 era, redefining advertising in the digital age, and more.

Submit Today!

Please submit your abstract no later than 16 April 2012 to Shari Worthington, program chair at sharilee@telesian.com.

Conference Location

ISA’s 7th Annual Marketing & Sales Summit

15-17 August, 2012 – at the Historic Driskill Hotel in Downtown Austin, Texas

$170/night

http://www.driskillhotel.com/

This topic will be presented by Steve Hurley and Matt Leary of  Solutions Insights at the ISA Marketing and Sales Summit.

Paradox is the new normal for B2B marketing and sales: Customers 2.0 don’t want to spend money but they absolutely want to invest in solutions with real business impact.  They are skeptical of every pitch and want to do their own research, but they’re anxious for new insight and practical advice.  They’re impossible to reach but they want stronger relationships with a few trusted partners.

Amid the paradox, key account relationships are more important than ever.  It’s not just that key accounts typically drive a disproportionate share to the top and bottom lines.  It’s also that working with your key accounts is the best way to gain deeper insight into the market, test new products and solutions, and learn more about what really works in serving customer needs.

Succeeding with key accounts 2.0, however, means going far beyond the basics of strong account leadership and focused sales plans.  Join Steve and Matt for a fast-paced, interactive session that digs into the specific ways marketing and sales can work together with key accounts to build and sustain strategic relationships, deepen understanding of critical challenges and opportunities, co-create new solutions, and generate greater mutual value.  The session will include a model for key account collaboration, examples of where it’s working, and a practical roadmap to guide the move toward key account success.

Rick Caldwell will be presenting on this topic at the ISA Marketing and Sales Summit.

This is the evolution of how one idea turned years of production monitoring experience into a revolutionary product development that enhanced the software that was being produced and resulted in increased orders.  The key to this story that was originally deemed a “failure”, was the ability to adapt, listen and provide what the customer actually wanted, turning it into a success.   

Rick Caldwell is the founder and President of SCADAware, a leading system integration company specializing in large PC based SCADA systems. He pioneered one of the largest early SCADA systems in 1989 using a DOS 286 computer with 40 serial communication lines connected to 370 PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers). This system monitored 40,000 data points in real time.   The SME (Society of Manufacturing Engineering) published this work in their handbook, “Continuous Improvement” in 1993.  Rick has also authored articles for Industrial Computing Magazine, Control Engineering Magazine, as well as other publications. His experience from that early system extends from Manufacturing to Gas Transmission Pipelines, Water/Waste Water Treatment, all the way to involvement in the SCADA design for NASA’s Space Shuttle launch pads.  As an entrepreneur and innovator, Rick has attended EmTech, MIT’s Emerging Technology Conference and is recognized as a mentor for top entrepreneurial MBA students. He facilitated a series of Fireside Chats for MBA students at Babson College and mentored students from the University of Missouri for their Capstone Project.  He was recently a guest speaker at a SCADA Conference in Bogota, Columbia.  Rick is involved in Lean Manufacturing initiatives and holds an annual conference to discuss methods and new technology.  He has developed several products from within his integration company, SCADAware, that help enhance production efficiencies.  StatusWatch® production monitoring software and StatusLight Smart Andon system are used in companies world-wide.

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.