EMEA Summit 2014, Day One: Transformation In Action

The SiriusDecisions' EMEA Summit, which kicked off at the London Park Lane Hilton today, is the premier b-to-b conference, attracting the best and the brightest in b-to-b sales, marketing and product from across Europe.  

Today’s highlights included:

• Tony Jaros gave the welcome address. This year’s Summit theme –“Transforming Sales, Marketing and Product” through alignment – is essential to powering b-to-b top- and bottom-line growth. Tony invited attendees to soak up the latest research insights, share best practices, learn from guest speakers, and network with peers and sponsors.
• What unites departments in all b-to-b businesses is the need to support the company’s growth plans. To support growth in an aligned way, every b-to-b leader must be able to answer fundamental questions: First, what is the organization’s growth target for the fiscal year? Second, what are the primary ways the organization is planning to grow? And finally, will the sales, marketing and product engine that the organization has built drive – or prevent – this growth? Discussing “Intelligent Growth: The Heart of Sales, Marketing and Product Alignment in Europe,” John Neeson helped us understand the implications of growth choices and showed how the SiriusDecisions Intelligent Growth framework can guide alignment within an organization.
• Summit offers an outstanding opportunity for all attendees to network and learn from the experiences of the wider b-to-b community. The rest of the morning was dedicated to our valuable sponsors, who invited their own clients to provide case studies highlighting the benefits they gained from using their solutions and services.
• After lunch, Tony Jaros returned to the stage to explain how SiriusDecisions has witnessed hundreds of b-to-b organizations attempt to transform their sales, marketing and product functions. Some have made great strides, while others have struggled.  Bringing together the experiences of the successful has resulted in the creation of the new B-to-B Transformation Model, which is designed to help organizations focus their  efforts to transform sales, marketing and product functions in an aligned manner.
• Next up was Marisa Kopec, who presented The SiriusDecisions Messaging Nautilus, a new methodology to ensure key message alignment across sales, marketing and product and develop a consistent, organization-wide, audience-centric approach to b-to-b messaging. For more information, click here.
• During the first afternoon session, we were treated to a wealth of insights based on in-the-field experience from Oracle. Joyce Boland, VP Applications Marketing EMEA, and Laurent Dechaux, VP Customer Experience for EMEA South, shared their joint journey of co-piloting and transforming their respective functions as Oracle moved its application business from an on-premise model to a cloud and software-as-a-service model.
• Now, even though nearly every b-to-b leader knows that forging stronger relationships with customers is mission-critical, they don’t necessarily know the best ways to do it. The truth is, many organizations are struggling to develop and implement systematic, highly measurable, aligned customer treatment methodologies, causing these efforts to fail to achieve lofty goals. In her presentation “The State of Customer Experience in Europe,” Megan Heuer provided insight into how companies are investing in customer experience and how the marketing-specific customer role is expected to evolve.
• The closing session honors were left to three champions from Polycom.  Again, we saw marketing and sales presenting side by side on stage. Tim Stone, VP EMEA;  Paula Morris, Senior Marketing Campaign Manager; and Jeremy Keefe, Areas Sales VP for UK & Ireland, led us through their transformational journey. Together, they explained Polycom’s journey from product-centric, siloed outbound campaigns to a fully integrated global campaign approach. Furthermore, we saw how a new inside sales function was established and new processes between sales and marketing were implemented to ensure that the revenue of every opportunity is maximized and waste is removed from the lead process.
• After a long day of learning and networking, delegates continued the dialogue over cocktails and dinner before having an early night in preparation for day two of Summit tomorrow!