ISA Marketing & Sales Summit

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.

The Marketing & Sales Summit is proud to be streaming live content for the third year in a row. You can watch a number of tremendous keynote presentations on ISA Interchange’s Livestream channel. We hope you’ll take advantage of this opportunity to get a small sample of the valuable content offered by the M&SS every year. Of course, there’s still time to register and gain all of the benefits.

Note: All times listed are U.S. CDT (UTC/GMT -5 hours)

Wednesday, 7-Sep

7:30pm – 8:30pm: Sales and Marketing on the Front Lines

Julie Fraser, Principal Analyst at Cambashi, will present Sales and Marketing on the Front Lines: Understanding and Delivering All that the Customer Values. In today’s connected and ultra-competitive environment, you need to understand not just what the customers want to buy, but how and why.  Customer 2.0 communicates, collects information, evaluates offerings and disseminates information differently and rapidly – and they are shopping for business outcomes, not always features and specifications.

Thursday, 8-Sep

8:15am – 9:45am: The Challenges of Being First to Market

Peter Martin, Ph.D., Vice President and Invensys Fellow at Invensys Operations Management, will present The Trials and Tribulations of Creating a New Market Space – The ECS Story. Dr. Martin will share the journey that Invensys took for the launch of InFusion ECS from a sales and marketing perspective.  He will expose the challenges, barriers and pitfalls and Invensys’ ongoing diligence and their continued persistence to overcome them and to thrive in a difficult industrial automation marketplace.

12:15pm – 1:00pm: Sales & Automation Panel Discussion

The lunch plenary will include a panel of experts in sales automation professionals who will discuss the latest technology trends in selling to Customer 2.0.

4:30pm – 5:45pm: Fireside Chat With Dick Morley

Join us for what will no doubt be a fascinating discussion with the father of the PLC; the indomitable Dick Morley. We don’t know exactly what he’s going to talk about (he likes to make us sweat), but we know it will be fascinating!

George Buckbee is presenting on this topic.

Would you like to meet face-to-face with 100 of your best prospects for an hour? With Webinars you can efficiently have positive, in-depth, targeted interactions with hundreds of clients, from all over the world, without ever leaving your office.

This session focuses on the basics of webinars: Uncover the motivations for webinars.  Learn how to choose topics, venues, format, structure, and content of your webinar.  Learn when to charge for webinars and when to do them for free.   Find out how to choose a host service.   Discover how to market your webinars for maximum effect, and how to stretch the  value of every webinar.   Come to this session to learn how you can apply webinars to prospect for new sales, to establish better customer relationships, and to reach your sales and marketing goals.

George Buckbee is V.P. of Marketing for ExperTune, and has personally hosted hundreds of webinars.  He has over 20 years of experience in process control engineering and extensive experience optimizing process operations. George is a skilled trainer and public speaker who knows how to translate experiences into engineering and maintenance practices.  George has a BS in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis and a MS in Chemical Engineering/Process Control from the University of Californina, Santa Barbara.

This topic will be presented by Robert Sammons and Katherine Persac

Current economic environments and the high demand for excellence put more pressure than ever on Business Development, Sales, and Marketing personnel. In addition the highly technical nature of selling automation adds a layer of complexity to the sales environment.  This means a demand of full utilization of sales & technical personnel to ensure the best solution is presented to meet today’s customers demand for the high value & low cost solution. These two key criteria make every step of the sales process hyper critical to winning a sales pursuit for a Control System upgrade, replacement, or expansion project.  Although relationship sells, it is absolutely crucial that any company pursuing sales in the technical marketplace establish solid relationships with product distributors while maintaining trained personnel and repeatable strategies and tactics in their sales process. This session will discuss key aspects in developing, executing and winning complex projects through managing critical areas of the sales process, developing and maintaining strong distributor relationships, and establishing the processes by which you may be more successful in screening, forecasting, and closing deals in your pipeline through new customer relationship management tools and techniques.

Robert Sammons is currently the VP Operations & Business Development at Moore Control Systems.  He has more than 20 years of experience in the energy sector supporting all phases of the project lifecycle from Conceptualization through commissioning.   His roles have included: Project designer, Project Engineer, Field Engineer, Project Manager, Technical Sales Representative, and Business Development Manager working with EPC’s, Automation Vendors, and Software Solutions providers catering to Owner Operators in the Energy Sector.   In the last 10 years he has performed in various Sales Representative & Business Development roles which have included selling software and Automation solutions to Fortune 100 & 500 customers.  He has both domestic and international work experience.

Katherine Persac is currently the Sales, Marketing and Recruiting Director as well as Corporate Secretary for ProSys Inc.  She joined ProSys as Accounting and Office Manager in 1996.  She accepted the position of Secretary/Treasurer in 1999, continuing in her accounting management position.  Since 2007 she has fulfilled the roles of Director of Sales, Marketing and Recruiting, as well as Corporate Secretary.  Katherine’s base is the U.S. office, but she maintains relationships with customers from the European office as well as in Asia and the Middle East.  She also oversees the sales and marketing departments.  She has 15 years of prior experience in Sales, Sales Management and Business Management roles.