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A look back at our Revenue Marketing Summit London

Events

On December 1st and 2nd 2022, the Revenue Marketing Alliance hosted its first in-person event in London.

The Revenue Marketing Summit brought together marketers from big names like Adobe, HSBC, Uber, and Google to share their challenges, wins, and best practices in their organizations.  

With panels, talks, and roundtable discussions, the event was truly a hub of inspiring content created and delivered by pioneering revenue marketing champions.

We have loads more events, both in-person and virtual, in the pipeline. So to give you a taste of what you could look forward to in the coming year, here’s a look back at our Revenue Marketing Summit London event.

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And don't forget to sign up for a Revenue Marketing Alliance membership for instant on-demand access to this and all other previous events!

Chairperson opening remarks

The event kicked off with Yolanda Valery, Former Head of Digital Engagement at Ocado Group, running a short icebreaker and introduction to the summit. She asked the attendees what they were hoping to get out of the event, and some key answers included:

  • How to work more effectively with CFOs to help them better understand marketing
  • How to integrate events with digital content to better tie a campaign journey together

Building a solid revenue marketing strategy

In this first panel, we were joined by Nina Reschovsky, B2B Marketing Lead UK at Uber; Nick Dunse, CRO at Shuttle; Cory Johnson, Growth Marketing Manager at Synthesia; and Tamana Faizi, Head of B2B Marketing at Florence.

To kick things off, Cory gave a great answer to the question "what is a revenue marketing strategy"?

“A typical b2b marketing strategy is pretty heavily focused on top of funnel kind of demand generation lead generation, and brand awareness, whereas a revenue marketing strategy is more closely aligned with sales and tracking specific metrics that are all geared at generating pipeline that, as the name implies, will ultimately convert to revenue.”

The discussion continued into attributing marketing to revenue:

Nick: How would you benchmark that MQL?

Cory: I have generally worked at organizations where marketing is targeted with pipeline creation, so not with MQLs. And it's important to obviously understand your conversion rate. So you can understand how many MQLs I need to generate in order to generate X amount of pipeline. But I think looking at pipeline as a marketing target, rather than any of these other sorts of metrics is really how you can actually attribute that way.

The panel also covered a range of topics outlining how to build a revenue marketing strategy, including:

  • What is a marketing strategy vs a revenue marketing strategy?
  • Presenting a business case to seniors
  • Understanding where revenue is coming from
  • What are good and bad conversion rates
  • How to deal with B2B channels that aren’t working
  • How to get sales to buy in from the sales team
Building a solid revenue marketing strategy

Scaling your business with revenue operations

Next, Paolo Negrini, Head of Marketing Ops, Tech and Analytics at Adobe, took to the main stage to give a talk on Revenue Operations - a holistic approach designed to break down silos between departments via data, technology, and operational efficiency, and explain how it can be replicated in your organization.

Paolo looked at what’s driving change in business, how marketing has become technology-dependent, how revenue operations can support other areas, and how to tell if your business is ready for a new marketing strategy.

“So we've got customers everywhere, they're overly connected, they engage with us in all sorts of different ways with sales, customer success with partner resellers, all different tools like digital destinations, social media, email, etc. How do we make sure that we've got a really good customer experience across every single channel?”

The wins and challenges of aligning the sales and marketing team

The classic battle between sales and marketing. It’s a problem that plagues many organizations but one that is rarely addressed.

In this panel, Radmila Blazheska, CMO at SecurityHQ; Marina Pape, Head of Country Marketing UK at Mollie; Amie Stankiste, CMO at ION; Sarah Swain, Head of Marketing and Growth at myTomorrows; and Alun Swift, Head of Revenue Operations at Ably, tackled that battle once and for all to outline how these two teams can work in harmony.

“Let's say I'm a salesperson, for example, when I'm reaching out to a customer that's come from this lead, it's come from this event, for example, I want to know what they've done before, why they came? Did someone from our team invite them? Who'd they talk to there? What's their market size? Am I even allowed to sell to them? Salespeople need just as much context.”

Discussion points included:

  • The challenges of marketing and sales alignment
  • Should marketing get involved in sales hiring?
  • The need for transparency at all stages of the funnel
  • The need for transparency at all stages of the funnel
  • The practical steps you can take right now to align sales and marketing
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Last week I spent a really valuable couple of days at the Revenue Marketing Summit. There was some fantastic content from a variety of speakers and I had several lightbulb moments, but the one message that came through loud and clear, time and again, was the fundamental need for close alignment between marketing and sales.

Debbie Davies, Head Of Campaigns and ABM at Redgate Software.

The wins and challenges of aligning the sales and marketing team

You can also download our Marketing and Sales Alignment Playbook to discover more tips and tricks for getting these teams aligned.

How brand drives revenue

Brand is a crucial way for organizations to open the door to sales, but it often doesn’t get the credit it deserves.

In this talk, Katherine Lamb, Global Head of B2B Marketing Strategy at HSBC, outlined how one of the world’s biggest B2B organizations uses brand as a key driver for revenue and NPS.

Points touched on included measuring the performance of demand-gen and brand-building campaigns, building trust through brand, and connecting the dots between performance marketing, brand, and sales.

“If you're only concentrating on the bottom of the funnel, you're swimming in quite a small pool. And you're also competing with all of your competitors for whoever else is looking today. It's the brand that is going to open up the market to and create a much bigger overall market share and overall opportunity for you.”

Three for 2023: the essential content strategies to drive brand partnerships in 2023

George Sullivan’s company The Sole Supplier has grown rapidly from a one-man-band operation to driving over £52m a year for partners like Nike, Adidas, ASOS, and Foot Locker. The business is built on the premise of understanding users and putting them first.

In this session, George talked about how his business leveraged content to drive million-pound partnerships with the world’s largest footwear and fashion brands, using his three-step process:

  • Engage
  • Convert
  • Retrain
Three for 2023: the essential content strategies to drive brand partnerships in 2023

Next up, CMO of SecuritHQ, Ramila Blazheska gave a talk on reshaping your marketing strategy with your MarTech stack. With an observation of the practices and approaches, including personalization, customer-centric focus, AI, and data privacy, this talk explored what works best for you and your business needs.

With talking points like VR, chatbots, and data privacy, this talk was a must-attend for those wanting to know what tools they should choose for making data-driven decisions.

“Data is key. So to be able to have data as a single source of truth, you need to have ownership of that data.”

Conversational roundtable discussions: tools of choice

As a marketer, you have many responsibilities. And to tackle those responsibilities you need the right tools in your tech stack.

In this roundtable, attendees had the chance to find out what their fellow revenue marketers are using, get the answers they've been searching for, network, connect, and overcome their challenges in this insightful and collaborative roundtable session led by revenue marketing experts.

Conversational roundtable discussions: tools of choice

The business impact of revenue enablement

This talk from Vinay Khanna, Head of Marketing at Savant, defined the commercial aspects of revenue marketing and talked about the shift towards enabling specific channels in marketing that offer revenue growth and align sales and marketing efforts with revenue.

Points Vinay talked about in this talk included:

  • What is Revenue Enablement and how does it work?
  • Revenue enablement through the stages of the customer journey
  • Best practices for sales enablement in the omnichannel business.
  • How do you identify KPIs that can be shared between the sales team and the marketing team?

“At all three stages, acquisition, renewal, and upsell, revenue enablement can help us optimize the touch points at every point on the customer journey.”

Panel: engage, convert, retain; understanding and identifying your customers

In this final panel to round off the first day of the summit, our panelists Charlotte Ford, Head of Brand Marketing and Engagement at heycar; Luke Richardson, Senior Director of Brand and Comms at Pleo; Lilian Oke, Field Marketing Manager at Indeed; and Ilias Tsatalmpasidis, Head of Growth at Superscript, discussed how to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

They talked about how to increase conversion rates and encourage customer loyalty with the right strategies and shared their best practices, top tips, and wins and challenges.

“We are a B2B. But we tend to refer to ourselves internally as B to Bob, meaning there is a person called Bob, what kind of content would they be engaging with? What kind of tonality should we be hitting? What do they think about when they're not thinking about expense management, the sort of value that they tried to bring in within the business? So that's something that's really sort of paramount to our creative efforts, as well as our performance habits.”

Panel: engage, convert, retain; understanding and identifying your customers

Revenue marketing metrics - defining and measuring success

To kick off day two of the summit, Gastón Tourn, CMO at Curio, and Maud David, Director of Field Marketing EMEA at HashiCorp, joined forces for a panel on how revenue marketing opens up new possibilities in terms of measurement and analysis, ultimately revealing new sources of revenue and growth.

In this session, our panelists dug deeper into the revenue marketing KPIs and metrics they use within their organizations and what metrics you should consider implementing to reveal the full picture of marketing’s impact on sales.

Topics the panelists cover included:

  • Are we too obsessed with metrics when it comes to marketing? When should we measure it?
  • How do you measure the success of your business?
  • Why you need to speak the same language in the marketing and sales teams.
  • How to measure the long-term impact of your business.
  • Where do you place things like social media in the whole metrics game? Do they help at all?

“Metrics are important. But I think there are two pitfalls when it comes to metrics. One is not choosing the right metric. In a mobile app, push notifications really help you to bring users back to the app. In a previous role, my intuition said, we're sending too many notifications. However, the product team was very convinced that we were doing the right thing. But if you keep sending immediate push notifications, by day 30 it’s goodbye I’m leaving. And that's why this thing is really, really important. First of all, to question, have you chosen the right metric? And if your intuition says something is wrong here, keep questioning. The second thing that I think is the pitfall of perhaps metrics, sometimes they don't show you the nuance. And I think it's really important that you consider that nuance.”

Myths debunked: separating facts from fads in demand generation

In this talk, Dan Jackson-Whiteside, Global Head of Demand Generation & Marketing Operations at MindGym, took us through some of the most prevalent falsehoods about demand generation and how to combat them.

“But one of the observations I feel within demand generation where we've got to be careful is this idea of Pandora's box. This idea that we're the world’s best secret. We do a lot of stuff, there’s paid social, remarketing, white papers, events, etc. And so we're doing all that because we're good at what we do, you don't need to worry about it. You only need to get involved when the leads are generated.”

Myths debunked: separating facts from fads in demand generation

Ask Me Anything with Ilias Tsatalmpasidis

Event attendees had the chance to get their questions answered by Ilias Tsatalmpasidis, Head of Growth at Superscript!

Some questions asked during this session included:

  • What kind of automation tools do you utilize?
  • What’s your experience if you were to launch a marketing campaign? How do you initiate that process?
  • What is the importance of having a cross-functional team for product?
  • What are the components of a good revenue marketing strategy?
  • Is there a concern that when you scale, it becomes harder to reach out to all of your teams?

Why the future of marketing is cross-functional and customer-obsessed

Finding alignment between sales and marketing teams has become more critical than ever in an era when customers are both swamped with options and largely driving their own buying journey through digitally automated channels.

But how best to achieve this and what tips are there to ensure your teams are united around customer needs? In this panel, Chris Hooper, Global Head of Content Marketing at GoCardless, and Keith Povey, Director of Revenue Marketing at Panaseer, outlined how to build cross-functional teams united around growth and customer need.

“So we've got customers that we've on-boarded, even in the last nine months, they're not really ready to tell me what they feel about the platform because they haven't used it for a year yet. So getting advocacy and getting feedback is tough.”

Why the future of marketing is cross-functional and customer-obsessed

Conversational roundtable discussions: revenue teams

In day two’s roundtable discussion, attendees had the chance to get the answers they've been searching for, network, connect, and overcome their challenges in this insightful by having collaborative discussions with their fellow attendees and revenue marketing experts.

Imposter syndrome within marketing

Everyone’s had that feeling. That feeling that they’re going to be discovered as a fraud and sacked from their job. Imposter syndrome is real, and it affects so many people in every industry.

In this talk, Tom Livingstone, Head of Marketing and Talentful, discussed his own experiences with imposter syndrome, why it’s so prevalent in marketing, and what can be done to counteract it and find confidence in yourself to try and fail at new things.

“Ultimately, there are traits that don't get you very far in your career. So stamp them out. And if you're in a position where you see someone else who's struggling with this, they're a bit of a perfectionist, or maybe you're managing someone who just wants to do it all alone, or, you know, deflects ownership. Rather than turn against them, maybe reach out to them”

Imposter syndrome within marketing

How to build high-functioning teams

Revenue marketing is still a relatively new concept to many organizations. So how are those who have brought this role in building out their teams?

In this final panel of the whole summit, our panelists Nick Roberts, VP Marketing at MotorK; Tom Livingstone, Head of Marketing at Talentful; Alysha Spencer-Pares, Head of Marketing at Shieldpay; and Renata Pasternak, Global Marketing Lead at HSBC, discussed hiring, retention, team structures, and cross-collaboration.

“And the reality is that everyone's different, and different working styles work for different people. And there are some people who maybe live around the corner from their office, and they're happy to pop in and spend the day. And there are some people, who're commuting, they've got kids, it doesn't work for them. So different working styles for different situations.”

How to build high-functioning teams

We hoped you enjoyed this brief look at our Revenue Marketing Summit in London. We have plenty more events planned in 2023 and beyond, virtual and in-person across the globe.

To keep up with all the latest going on at Revenue Marketing Alliance, and to find out if we’ll be hosting an event near you, join the community today.

And if you’d like to watch all of the panels and talks from the summit, you can do so with a Revenue Marketing Alliance membership! Gain access to on-demand footage from all our past and future events that you can watch as often as you like.

Speak at our events

Would you like to take part in one of our future events as a speaker? We’d love to hear from you! Simply fill out the form on our speaking opportunities page to discover how you can get involved.

Written by:

Hannah Wesson

Hannah Wesson

Hannah has worked in content marketing since graduating and has a wealth of experience writing for a wide range of B2B and B2C companies.

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A look back at our Revenue Marketing Summit London