On the 13th May 2021, B2B tech marketers from 50+ countries tuned in to watch FINITE Fest – one day virtual conference covering B2B tech marketing trends.
Did you miss FINITE Fest? Don’t worry!
We’ll be giving recordings of the sessions to the FINITE community. So if you’re a client-side B2B marketer in tech, SaaS or software, apply for a free membership to join thousands of others and to connect, share, learn and grow.
It was a successful day of 12 back-to-back sessions with 32 B2B marketing leaders from top tech companies such as IBM, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Teamwork and Twitter.
Our guests gave presentations and joined panels to discuss current trends in B2B tech marketing like ABM, SEO, MOPs, events and marketing attribution.
Find more information about speakers and sessions at FINITE Fest 2021 here.
In the meantime, read on for our favourite moments at FINITE Fest 2021, including insightful quotes from our amazing guests and takeaways for your own B2B tech marketing career.
“During the pandemic, email open rates increased by 20% year on year. Don’t dismiss emails.”
– Shallu Behar-Sheehan, CMO at Truata
Shallu’s presentation on ‘attributing the ROI of your B2B tech content’ was a perfect start to the day. With content and marketing attribution tips, Shallu talked about important things to consider when proving the impact of content marketing on business revenue. This includes maintaining a clean database, owning your audience and delivering content in a dynamic way so the reader can decide how to engage with it.
“Encourage knowledge sharing and cross-pollination of ideas, so that we are more than the sum of our parts.”
– Kartik Krishnan, Director of Growth at Capdesk
The second presentation of the day taught viewers how to scale a growth team, whether they’re a startup, SME or enterprise. A growth team can be made up of existing employees, to work together to gain traction for your organisation. As a presentation on B2B growth, Kartik talked about communicating brand, being informed by data and adapting to the market.
“B2B as boring to boring is our biggest challenge. B2B is not boring.”
– Carlos Cantu, Director of Business Marketing at Twitter
Carlos and Eimear Hughes, Client Partner at Twitter, gave a great presentation on how the B2B conversation is changing and how Twitter can be used to leverage these shifts. Carlos opened the discussion with the idea that B2B is viewed as boring, and that as a marketing platform Twitter rebutes this statement.
“If we’re to truly elevate our maturity we need to look beyond the merely functional.”
– Matthieu Baril, Marketing Operations Leader at Qualtrics
In his presentation, Matthieu talked about leveling up the maturity of your B2B marketing team. He stressed that maturity isn’t just about putting processes in place internally, it’s about breaking through the noise and focussing on the long term.
“I’d rather have less content that is better.”
– Aaron Barefoot, Global SEO Lead, London Stock Exchange Group
At our first panel discussion of the day, Aaron was joined by Lyat Avidor Peleg, CMO at Precognize Innovations, Sonia Dorais, CEO at Chaser and our own FINITE Founder Alex Price.
The panel gave their advice on how B2B websites can move the needle on SEO. They emphasised that B2B marketers should remember there are humans on the other side of searches, and to perfect SEO is to write quality content for those humans.
The panel also covered:
- Is content the most important aspect of SEO?
- Are there challenges that come with separating different types of content?
- What changes are on the way with the page experience update?
- Tips for lower search volumes
- The future of SEO in B2B tech marketing
“In B2B, avoiding catastrophe is more important than achieving perfectionism.”
– Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman at Ogilvy
In his tremendous presentation about behavioural bias in B2B decision making, Rory discussed the psychology behind B2B purchase decisions. Specifically, the way B2B buyers are more likely to opt for a company that reduces the risk of tarnishing their careers and professional reputations. Rory explained this in the context of B2B tech marketing, and how B2B tech marketers can strategise according to behavioural bias.
“You start with one-to-one, you see how successful it is, and then you’re able to scale it out to others.”
– Brian Kardon, CMO at InVision
Our ABM panel gave advice for B2B tech marketers wanting to get on the ABM path, as they defined ABM and what it can do for a tech organisation by targeting customer pain points. They gave tips for starting and scaling an ABM strategy so that you can score enterprise clients and grow your tech company.
The panel was made up of notable guests: Fiona Gallagher, Head of EMEA Field Marketing at LinkedIn, Emmanuel Aremu, Marketing Lead at Community Growth Ventures, Gabrielle Pirzad, Field Marketing & ABM Leader at IBM and Santiago Dominguez, ABM Marketing Manager at Autodesk.
“I’ve probably reinvented myself 4 or 5 times in my career, otherwise I’d be doing 90s marketing and I wouldn’t have a job. A lot of heads of marketing get lazy and don’t reinvent themselves… so I will admit we’re not doing ourselves any favours to get the top position.”
– Scott Allen, Global Marketing Development & Strategy Director at Microsoft
Our exciting debate answered a contentious question that many B2B tech marketers have: should sales and marketing be consolidated under a single RevOps function?
Our debaters went back and forth to argue their cases, considering the stage at which a RevOps model could be effective, what it would bring to an organisation and if it’s really just a glorified head of sales.
In the end, the consensus was that both sales and marketing have to keep up to date with shifting technologies that enable their alignment. We also heard that CMOs are more frequently becoming CEOs, so perhaps this will affect the overall alignment of team within organisations.
The debaters were: Shallu Behar-Sheehan, CMO at Truata, Lorena Morales VP of Marketing at Go Nimbly, Jenifer Kern, CMO at Qu and Scott Allen (quoted). Moderated by FINITE Founder Alex Price.
“Throughout lockdown we’ve had really good results with putting on shorter online events focussed on very specific topics.”
– Robbert van der Pluijm, Global Lead, Events & Experiences at Permutive
The event marketing panel at FINITE Fest gave their experience-backed insights into the future of events as a B2B marketing channel post-pandemic. In particular, if events will shift entirely to virtual, if they’ll go back to how they were pre-pandemic or if there will be a hybrid model.
The panel agreed that the future of events is hybrid, as we can’t deny the technological innovation COVID has brought to event marketing.
Our event marketing experts were: Nirupam Sarkar, Head of Marketing at Digitate, Robbert van der Pluijm, Global Lead, Events & Experiences at Permutive, Ally Masi, Snr Senior Product Marketing Manager, SMB Executive Events at Salesforce Kathryn Frankson, Director of Event Marketing at Informa and Nick Forster, Co-Founder at London Filmed.
“If you look at the data, what do customers actually want in a sales experience? A sales person that can help them navigate alternatives.”
– April Dunford, Founder at Ambient Strategy
Customers don’t want to hear about all your great features and how great your company is. What they want is insights into the market so they have a clear understanding of competitors and how your tech company fits in.
We had a great session with our keynote speaker April on crafting stories that sell, and how to enable your sales team to tell them.
“If you don’t have the right data, you’re targeting blind.”
– Radmila Blazheska, CMO at SecurityHQ
The data and analytics discussion at FINITE Fest dived into the importance of tracking marketing results and how to do it optimally. Our guests gave their advice on starting out with data and analytics, measuring the right KPIs and the tools to use to track successfully.
Our amazing panellists were: Radmila Blazheska, Barbara Johnson, CMO/COO at Kortical, Tom Dubois, Worldwide Marketing Director at OneSpan, Christy Marble, CMO at Pantheon Platform.
“In these dynamic times, when companies are forced to pivot or to change their business model, execution really becomes the name of the game.”
– Darrell Alfonso, Global Marketing Operations Manager at Amazon Web Services
The execution of your B2B marketing is just as important as it’s effectiveness. Marketing isn’t just about the results, it’s about the processes too. That’s what our panel of Marketing Operations experts discussed at FINITE Fest, as they agreed that marketing ops helps you get a seat at the leadership table.
Our MOPs experts were: Jon Ashley, Senior Manager, Global Customer Advocacy at Sage, Darrell Alfonso, Gonzalo Garcia Villanueva, Global CMO at GfK and Tara Robertson, CMO at Teamwork.
Overall, FINITE Fest was such a success! We hope you enjoyed our presentations and discussions, gained some useful insights and expanded your own B2B tech marketing career.
We had some great feedback from our speakers and attendees. Here are just a few:
