ISA Marketing & Sales Summit

Are you interested in meeting influential marketing and sales executives from industrial automation companies?  If so, we’ve got an event for you.  The 7th annual ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in Austin (August 15-17, 2012) will bring toge

ther top marketing and sales professionals for a deep dive into the specific marketing and sales challenges unique to the automation industry.  Past events have included attendees from a number of Fortune 500 companies including ABB, Emerson, Honeywell, Jacobs Engineering, MatrikonOPC, Phoenix Contact, Rockwell, and Siemens.

We are seeking sponsors to support the continued success of the event.  I’m sure that you receive a number of requests to sponsor various events and activities.  So, what is it about this event that makes it different?  Following are some reasons to consider sponsoring…

1. The majority of attendees at the event have budget responsibility for marketing and sales related purchases for their companies.
2. The event schedule includes dedicated time for the attendees to mix and mingle with the sponsors.  All sponsors will receive a table in the networking area at which they can promote their companies products and/or services.
3. Sponsors will be vigorously promoted by ISA.  This promotion will include pre-event recognition on websites and social media as well as in-event recognition including signage, along with an opportunity to address attendees.  Sponsors are invited to contribute on a very active event blog that generates good traffic and referral links.
4. Sponsors will receive a complimentary registration for the event, among other benefits.
5. Sponsors will receive a list of all attendees (including email addresses) for post-event follow-up.

Some additional details about this year’s Summit…

The theme of the event is “The New Rules of Customer Engagement: Riding the Winds of Change.”  The event will include two conference tracks centered around Marketing and Sales.  Additionally, pre-Summit workshops will be offered on Inbound Marketing, Creating a Content Engine, and Solution Selling Strategies.

Please consider becoming a sponsor for the 2012 ISA Marketing and Sales Summit.  For more information, you can contact me via e-mail ([email protected]) or phone (225-291-9591).  Thanks for your consideration!

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 r

ole 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.

This article by Jon DiPietro originally appeared on the Domesticating IT blog and is re-posted here with permission.

I’ve read a few blog posts recently from a tribe of people I’m going to call the “Grumpy Old Marketers.” Not because they necessarily are actually grumpy, but because their rants remind me of Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” character from Saturday night live. Members of this group include grizzled industry veterans who insist that, “In my day, we didn’t have all this social media stuff. We spent 60 hours a week cold calling people who cursed at us and hung up on us until our ears were bleeding. That was the way it was and we liked it!”

If it stopped there, it wouldn’t deserve a rant. But one article recently set me off. The author had a sales and marketing automation system running on a Digital minicomputer back in 1982. He insists that his customers enjoyed the marketing collateral and white papers he sent, lovingly arranging them into three ring binders. In his post, the author wants us to believe that mailing brochures is the same as crafting an e-book, and pressing the flesh at a cocktail party is the same as connecting on LinkedIn. And while I agree with his central point that human behaviors are the same as they have always been, his final conclusion – and thus his advice – is simply dangerous in my opinion.

Permission Marketing

He argues that they did “permission marketing” back in 1982.

How exactly did he know when somebody no longer wanted their propaganda? Does he really think that people took the time to fill out his little postcard and mail them back to stop receiving his junk mail? Doubt it. And today’s permission marketing is all about people opting into the medium as well as the content. He had one tool – direct mail – where now, people can subscribe to email or RSS, fan pages, Tweets, SMS, etc…

Content Marketing

He argues that they did “content marketing” back in 1982.

“They [customers] received high quality, current information about products and the industry free of charge.” While this may be true, it’s like a caveman laughing at a tank saying, “We had artillery back in the stone age too! We called them ‘rocks.’” His brochures and white papers cost his company a fortune in production, printing and mailing costs. Today, I can write my own e-book with free open source software, upload it to a cloud-based host like Scribd for free, register with an affiliate sales channel for free, Tweet it, share it on Facebook and have it downloaded by a million people without spending a nickel. I can record high definition video on a $150 Flip camera and upload it to YouTube where millions more can watch it – for free.

Furthermore, his content was not discoverable. Your name had to end up in his database somehow or a colleague had to give you his/her copy. You couldn’t simply type some keywords into a brochure search engine and have it magically fly onto your desk.

I don’t think today’s low/no cost multimedia environment is anything remotely like what he’s describing.

Social Marketing

He argues that they did “social marketing” using telephones back in 1982.

Again, that version of social marketing was done on a one to one basis, where today’s version is one to thousands to millions. Apples and oranges.

Social Networking

He argues that they did “social networking” at trade shows back in 1982.

This one’s just flat out wrong. The definition of social networks today is a many to many network of producers who are also its own audience. When you’re exhibiting at a tradeshow, you are a producer and the attendees are the consumers. Period. Completely different paradigm.

Marketing “In Enfilade”

His conclusion is that marketing is “simple” and hasn’t changed at all – only the technology. I strongly disagree. When the machine gun was first introduced into warfare, they tried to use it the same as they would a rifle; head on. It turned out not to be very effective since they were so immobile. But when they figured out that moving them “in enfilade” (flanking the formation shoot along the longest axis), they created interlocking fields of fire that became the death traps in Word War I. The point is that the battle strategies had to change dramatically when they went from single shot rifles to machine guns.

Likewise, just because there are some similarities between direct marketing tactics and social marketing tactics, it doesn’t mean the strategies are the same. In fact, they are very different.