As the year comes to a close, on Thursday, the 10th of December, we settled down for our last FINITE Forum of the year. FINITE Forums are a space where our members get together for an informal, relaxed conversation around whatever is on their mind in relation to B2B tech marketing.
The FINITE community has been growing rapidly over the last few months, with members joining from Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, as well as across Europe, we have gone truly global. So, to give our members from across the pond the chance to meet each other, we decided to hold two Forums on Thursday, one at 8am GMT and one at 4pm. Here’s what happened in both conversations.
Following a brief round of introductions, the first FINITE Forum began with a discussion around an ABM challenge, moving into the second topic of discussion, which was around loyalty programs. The challenge here?
Loyalty programmes
Well, if you know that your loyalty program is working with regards to increasing customer retention, how can you incentivise more of your customers to sign up to it? (If you’re reading this and have a solution that has worked, or have been in a similar boat – please share with us on slack/email!)
Sales & marketing alignment
As always the broad, prickly topic of sales & marketing alignment came up. Particularly, looking at how to get sales buy-in when you may be working in a company that has a culture of not seeing marketing as being a strategically important function for the business. The solutions focused around creating an internal company champion & running pilot sales programmes that would spearhead the initiative and serve as an example in building a business case for it.
The advice came with a word of caution from a few of our members – there will be some people in the business that may not be convinced! Even if you clearly demonstrate the value add that marketing creates for a sales team alongside other initiatives.
Successful initiatives in 2020 and plans for 2021
The session concluded by our members sharing ideas of the most successful initiatives that they implemented in 2020, and what we can take into the new year. As if by gravitational pull, this is exactly the topic that our second forum started on. Diving into budgets for 2021, where we know that for around 50% of our members budgets in 2020 will remain the same, while for 35% they will increase! So the conversation looked at how and where these might be utilised best going forward.
We then discussed a broad range of topics. Looking at Christmas emails, segmentation, SEO, PPC, and CRM’s, with some really valuable advice, resources and tools being exchanged among our members.
In summary, the two calls focused on a number of different areas, each with its own specific challenge, yet it felt like broadly our B2B tech members are confident in their strategies and much like our 2021 research report, B2B tech marketers are positive and hopeful of what’s to come in 2021!
