2017 Masters of B2B Marketing Presented by ANA’s Business Marketing Association

Choose between four workshops. Sessions run from 9am-12pm and will include lunch.

GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT- HOW TO HUMANIZE YOUR PRODUCT, SERVICE OR DESIGN

People don’t buy your product or service, they buy the story that’s attached to it. So it’s best not to start with the data. Because despite the facts on your side, people don’t always believe the numbers. So where should you start? How do you capture the imagination? What creates empathy and relevance? Especially when your product is disruptive, world-changing, or challenges the status quo. Discover what makes a story believable, when inventing the future.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to communicate world-changing ideas and innovation from a two time TEDx speaker, featured in Fast Company, TIME, and Wired who is also left-handed, color-blind, and eats more chocolate than the average human.
Takeaways from this workshop include:

• How to tell your personal story in less than 2 minutes
• 3-part framework for getting your business story straight
• How to transform dry facts and data into a compelling narrative
• Storytelling techniques that make your breakthrough ideas stick
• How to increase the perceived value of anything you’re working on

Michael Margolis

CEO Get Storied

SEVEN DESIGN TRICKS TO MAKE YOU TWICE THE MARKETING GENIUS YOU ALREADY ARE

Aside from being a fun way to spend three hours, this workshop will provide practical experience in some basic tricks of the designer's process to help you sharpen and expand your marketing skills. Neil Stevenson (Executive Portfolio Director) and Clark Scheffy (Partner, Managing Director) from IDEO, the award-winning global design consultancy, will facilitate. In this workshop, you will learn new ways to gain useful insights, how to run a design process as an approach to building a marketing plan, gain practical experience trying out some of the techniques, and leave with some new ideas to take with you.

Clark Scheffy

Partner, Managing Director IDEO San Francisco

BUILDING ENDURANCE: AN INTRODUCTION TO AGILE MARKETING

Our audiences love content, and we love producing it for them. But the demand for new forms of content at an increased quality and frequency has our teams working harder than ever. We need to find a suitable pace to give us the ability to regularly publish great content over the long haul. It is time to embrace more efficient marketing practices to help us reach our goals and our audiences.

Jeff Julian, CEO/Co-founder of Squared Digital, will present an approach to content creation he has used for over a decade commonly known as Agile Marketing. Using the Agile principles, you will get hands-on experiences with planning and developing your content in a team-based and energetic environment. Flexibility is required, but running shoes are optional.

In this workshop, we dive deeper into the following areas when doing group exercises to ensure everyone understands the process:

• Current Problems with Content Planning
• Introduction to Agile Terms and the Scrum Process
• Persona Development
• Content Backlog, Content Item, and Task Creation
• Estimating Content Items and Tasks
• Time Boxes and Planning
• Personal Planning Tools

Jeff Julian

Co-Founder EnterpriseMarketer.com

COMMUNICATING LIVE IN A DIGITAL WORLD

Have you ever earned a promotion because of a brilliant email? How about closed an important deal via text? Do your clients and colleagues love you because of those amazing voicemails you leave?

Hardly. Business is, and always will be, a personal thing. In today’s global economy, it’s not the smartest, hardest working or most technically savvy who succeed. Instead, it’s the people with dynamic and honed communication skills. Those who communicate strategically, effectively and persuasively — every day, in every situation.

Learn the skills and strategies that come naturally to the best communicators, from someone who can’t do math but can communicate with the best of them. Join Jodi Glickman, founder and CEO of Great on the Job, author of the critically acclaimed book by the same name and a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, to learn how to:

• Get everyone to take your calls
• Get anyone’s attention (in 30 seconds or less) in any medium
• Exceed your boss’ (or board’s) every expectation
• Find out what everyone (really) thinks of you
• Get the work you want, not the work that comes your way

Jodi Glickman

President & Founder Great on the Job

Opening Remarks

Bob Liodice

Chief Executive Officer ANA

MARKETING, WITH WATSON

It's no longer enough to be a digital marketer. Every marketer must become a cognitive marketer. IBM's Jon Iwata will share how marketing is changing in an era of data, artificial intelligence and the challenge of building trust in uncertain times.

Jon Iwata

Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications IBM

HOW TO BE A DISRUPTIVE FORCE IN A WORLD OF CHANGE

Matt, whose company (HCL Technologies) has grown at a rate of 13% annually, will share his insights, perspectives and examples of how he and his team have effectively competed in the IT service industry. He will address how in this age of disruption, marketers has to drive change, not wait for it to drive them. Since Matt has taken the marketing lead two years ago, HCL Technology has increased sales to $7 Billion, a gain of $1.5B; his presentation will outline some of the practical steps HCL adopted to achieve this phenomenal growth.

Matt Preschern

Chief Marketing Officer HCL America Inc.

FINDING YOUR CRAZIES: TO CHANGE YOUR MARKET, ENLIST YOUR CHANGE AGENTS FIRST

B2B is always about change — reframing how people buy, introducing an innovation that disrupts your market, or getting people to think about your company in new ways. One of the most important decisions you can make as a marketer is WHO you get on board to drive change.

The problem?

You’re wasting money talking to people who don’t care, and you’re missing the small subset of the market who can make the biggest difference. We’re not talking about traditional influencer marketing, which too often means renting other people’s audience and cache.

We’re talking about the people who share your vision or have shared stakes in your success. They can be employees, customers, anyone in your ecosystem, and people who don’t even know you but believe in your mission. These are the crazies, but for most companies they’re sitting on the sideline rather than helping you succeed.

In this Firestarter, we’ll do an exercise that helps you identify YOUR crazies. And we’ll share five strategies for making common cause with them, sharing examples from Unconventional companies both big and small — GE, Big Ass Fans, Hiscox, Waze, Peloton, and Red Hat, among others.

What’s in It for you?

The crazies are the human resource that you’re not leveraging. Get them on board, and they can market for you, bring you new ideas, and make your product better.

Mike O'Toole

President & Partner PJA Advertising + Marketing

SHIFT THINKING: HOW TO BUILD BRAND ORBITS

Marketing strategy is undergoing tech-tonic shifts, and as the earth moves beneath our feet, we must update our mental maps to engage prospects, earn loyalty and energize teams. What we do makes us good, but it is how we think that makes us remarkable. This illuminating talk will reveal the mental models of marketing that have grown outdated and introduce the concept of Brand Orbits, a powerful model for thinking about marketing in a digital age. Learn how to generate gravity around a shared purpose and pull people into your ORBIT, an Ongoing Relationship Beyond Individual Transactions. You won't see your business the same way again.

Mark Bonchek

Chief Epiphany Officer Shift Thinking

DISRUPT YOU: INNOVATIVE PERSONAL BRANDING TO GENERATE MORE POWER, OPPORTUNITY AND ADVENTURE

In today’s business world brand identity is key. As a marketing leader, you have a brand whether you can be found actively engaged creating it or not. Just as a company will harness your skills as a marketing and branding expert to create a powerful brand, marketing leaders have an opportunity to do the same for themselves as a connected human being, not only helping yourself but your employer at the same time. Being famous is not a prerequisite to enjoying a potent personal brand. Discover the keys to crafting a powerful personal brand and unlock an extraordinary career and deeply fulfilling personal life.

Tamara McCleary

CEO Thulium.co

The B2 Awards recognize the top performing Business-to-Business marketers, large or small. In 2017 nearly 200 firms submitted over 500 entries for evaluation, with the top 82 being rewarded a prestigious B2 Trophy!

The B2 Awards' six Top Award winners – including B2B Marketer of the Year, Agency of the Year, Best in Show, and Marketer of the Year will be recognized on the first evening of the annual conference. The evening’s festivities will be emceed by comedy writer and Webby honoree, Tim Washer. Tim studied improv under Amy Poehler, comedy writing with Tom Purcell, executive producer of The Colbert Report, and has appeared on SNL, Conan O’Brien, Onion Sports Network, and HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. His award-winning B2B comedy videos have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Advertising Age.

Seats at the ceremony are complimentary to registered conference attendees. Individual tickets to the Awards dinner may be purchased here.

Join past BMA Chicago President Suzanne Martin for a sunrise run along the beautiful Chicago lakefront! This is an informal meet up. Just show up by 6AM in the Sheraton Grand main lobby. The group will leave promptly at 6AM. Suzanne will lead everyone out to the lakefront for a run and have you back between 6:45-7AM. Walkers welcome. Suzanne will be posting logistics on her twitter @suzannedmartin

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE B2B MARKETER?

Start your morning by showing your B2B marketing savvy and have a chance to win great prizes! Test your B2B marketing knowledge with IEEE Engineering360 Media Solutions. This session will focus on insights and results from IEEE Engineering360 Media Solutions’ recent research reports on The Pulse of the Engineer, Digital Media Use in the Industrial Sector, and Manufacturing Content Marketing.

Debbie Yarnell

Principal Subject Matter Expert Engineering360 Media Solutions

NAVIGATING THE CLIMB BY BUILDING A BETTER YOU

The business world has long referred to itself as either "B2B" or "B2C." But Bryan Kramer argues that it's humans who do business with humans – not companies – and in 2014 his "H2H," or "Human to Human," movement inspired the world to humanize the way companies operate.

Now three years later, individuals are realizing that to strategically climb in their career, they need to get clear about why they do what they do, and be "self-marketers" of their own personal brand in order to stand out for what they stand for. In this information-packed talk, Bryan will walk you through why now is the time to be personally armed to weather any unforeseen change in your business, how to define yourself clearly, and what tools and processes you can implement to climb your career ladder with more ease.

Join Bryan as your personal change agent and personal marketing consultant, and learn the steps to take control of how others see your most valuable asset – you.

Bryan Kramer

CEO PureMatter Brand Marketing

WHEN MARKETING BECOMES THE GROWTH ENGINE

How does a large conglomerate that has successfully grown annually for twenty straight years, from $2 billion to $41 billion, move from a being a successful supply-oriented organization to a customer-centric one? How does Marketing whose role was essentially to “sell what the factory produces” discover its true potential and move to a position of deeply understanding customers and their demand, developing insights, designing solutions and then leading the whole organization to deliver them? How does Marketing take its place as the engine for the next phase of rapid, profitable growth? Where does one start in the journey and how does one overcome the inevitable challenges of inertia, lack of awareness and capability – all in a rapidly changing external environment?

Prakash Nedungadi will share how over the past 4 ½ years as Group Head for Customer Insights and Brand Development for the Aditya Birla Group he has tackling these issues within a global conglomerate. While his journey is not over by any means, he will outline the challenges he has faced, the experiments he has tried and the successes and failures he has had as they are key lessons for any Marketing Leader who is on the quest to lead his entire organization, not just his Marketing team, toward a culture of Customer Centricity and Marketing success.

Prakash Nedungadi

Group Head for Customer Insights and Brand Development The Aditya Birla Group

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION – THE CHANGE IT’S DRIVING

We live in a world gone digital, social and mobile. Today’s buyers have nearly unlimited access to information and people. They have more choice and louder voice. It’s no longer word of mouth; it’s world of mouth.

Buyers are empowered, but overwhelmed. You are competing for attention. The buying process has changed more in the past 10 years than the previous 100; more in the past 5 years than the previous 50. Marketing gets this, but broadly, sales doesn’t.

Eighty-six percent of CMOs say marketing will own the customer experience by 2020. CEB research shows that 53 percent of customer loyalty is driven by a salesperson’s ability to deliver unique insight to the customer. Increasingly, these insights must be delivered digitally and in social networks. Salespeople need to be visible and valuable where their buyers are learning. This requires a new mindset, an expanded skill set, and an enabling toolkit.

In this session, we will cover what best-in-class sales and marketing leaders are doing to stay ahead of the curve.

Jill Rowley

Evangelist & Startup Advisor #SocialSelling

WHAT DRIVES DECISION MAKING? MOVING FROM THE AGE OF REASON TO THE AGE OF FEELING

The advent of ‘big data’ has led businesses into what seems like a new age of reason. We have the technology now to quantify our world in endless rational ways. We see more, we know more and we have the algorithms to reach people with more precision than ever before. Choose the channels; decide on the message and press send. Relevance is guaranteed; success will surely follow. There’s just one flaw in this analysis: human nature.

For any important decision, we must first engage our hearts. Only then will our minds follow. 

gyro U.S., will share the fundamental shift that has occurred as we move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Feeling, and why striking the balance between feeling and precision is not only the future of business communications, it is the future of marketing and advertising as a whole. 

Mike Hensley

President gyro Chicago

THE CHALLENGER BRAND ADVANTAGE

What more could a challenger brand ask for…than to be fifth in a category defined by a group of leaders called “The Big Four?” That’s the situation professional services firm Grant Thornton found itself in, and has fashioned itself as the ultimate challenger brand as a result. Grant Thornton found that breakthrough growth would require the organization to take bold, innovative steps to build its brand with potential customers. In an industry sometimes viewed as commoditized, the firm placed big bets on culture, technology, and people – and it has begun to pay off, with record growth, earnings, employee retention, and reinvestments in the firm. Bringing that to life was a core tenet and challenge of the firm’s new marketing strategy – one that has aimed to break the industry’s mold and create brand permission in a congested market.

John Harmeling, Grant Thornton’s CMO, shares the journey the brand has taken and offers tactical recommendations for other B2B challenger brands.

John Harmeling

CMO Grant Thornton

CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN- STORYTELLING STRATEGIES FOR LARGE-SCALE CHANGE ADOPTION

Nobody likes a change story. What we really want is a continuity story. To know at the end of the day that it’s all going to make sense. Yet change is what’s before us. So how do we make sense of this transformational change for our organization? And more importantly, how do we communicate this change to all of our people, teams, and stakeholders? How do we address the fear, disbelief, and resistance that comes with any big change?

In this keynote, Michael will share insight he has learned as an educator, cultural anthropologist, and best-selling author. The son of an inventor and artist, who is also a two time TEDx speaker, and has been featured in Fast Company, TIME, and Wired, Michael is obsessed with how to communicate world-changing ideas and innovation.

Luncheon attendees will learn:
• How to tell an effective story in less than 2 minutes
• A 2-part storytelling framework to dramatically convey the change Storytelling techniques are undergoing as a result of organizational transformation
• How to make room for the past, even as you embrace the future
• Storytelling as a leveraged tool for the future of our field

Michael Margolis

CEO Get Storied

CHANGE YOUR VIEW ON ANALYTICS: THINK SUCCESS PLANNING

The root cause of failure in most marketing campaigns is rarely the creative, the budget or the people involved. Rather, it's often the lack of structured thinking for defining the real purpose of the campaign, coupled with a lack of objective measures for determining success or failure.

During this session, we will explore Success Planning: a simple model that aligns a campaign to its overarching business objectives, defines its desired outcomes, and establishes the technical and creative requirements necessary for its success - all on one page. Fiercely loyal to objectivity, the Success Planning model drives collaboration among internal stakeholders (sales, marketing, public relations, IT, etc.) and between external partners (agencies, vendors, etc.) by delineating who is accountable for what and how the contributions of each party benefit the whole campaign.

The end result is a one-page Success Plan that leads to more effective work and better outcomes. 

Mary Owusu

Director of Analytics Eric Mower + Associates

HOW TO COMPETE IN A WORLD OF CONSTANT CHANGE. DO LESS, BETTER

Competing to win today means that B2B marketers must unearth insights that prove marketing's business value... in a long, fragmented, complex buyer’s journey. Additionally — the business world is changing and the speed of change is twice as fast as it was just three years ago. In fact, only 24 percent of the Fortune 500 companies from 25 years ago are still in business.      

So how do B2B marketers create the vision and programs to drive critical change? Learn from research compiled from over 30 senior marketing leaders how to: 

• Mine the right secrets of data to make the case for change
• How to measure key metrics in order to prove change is having impact
• How to use that data to change your marketing approach in order to compete.
• Plus — learn how to pinpoint where good advertising dollars are wasted — and how to change the client-agency-media dynamic.  

Join Thad and Kelly as they dive into how to compete and capitalize on the evolving landscape in today's market.

Thad Kahlow

CEO BusinessOnline

HOW TO GET & KEEP GREAT TALENT

We’re not facing a war for talent. We’re amid a full-blown crisis. Most companies across the U.S. are grasping at straws for how to attract (and keep) today’s best and brightest. As the global thought leader in talent, prepare for a journey through the mind that leads us to a secret conclusion on exactly how to unlock human potential.

Samantha Dawkins

Vice President, Client Strategy & Advocacy ADP

MIND THE GAP - THE POWER OF THOUGHT LEADERSHIP IN B2B DEMAND GENERATION

During this session, executives from LinkedIn and Edelman will discuss the joint research they conducted on perceptions of the business-development power of thought leadership. They found that perceptions of thought leadership’s effectiveness in driving business outcomes vary widely between its creators and its audiences. But the difference isn’t quite what you might think.

Jann Martin Schwarz

Global Director, Agency & Channel Development LinkedIn

THE CMO CHANGE AGENT: HOW TO LEAD CHANGE IN COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS

The way marketers used to operate was to make decisions annually, wait for the dust to settle, and adjust plans accordingly. Not anymore. The rise of data-driven decision making affords every CMO the opportunity to be far more accurate and real-time in their investment and strategy decisions. But this represents a major change in “business as usual,” and a huge opportunity for Marketing to take a leadership role in the organization. How can CMOs drive change in companies where it’s often difficult to earn trust and prove impact? In this session, two leading CMOs will share their real-world strategies for becoming change agents within their organizations. Join Fuze CMO Brian Kardon and Allocadia CMO James Thomas as they share how to:

- Cement trust between Marketing, Sales, and Finance to drive operational alignment.
- Track and prove Marketing’s impact on the business across global teams and complicated tech stacks
- Put the promise of data-driven marketing into action in your next board meeting, planning session, and budget decision

It’s time for CMOs to move faster, make better decisions, and inspire the rest of the organization in turn. It’s time to become change agents.

Brian Kardon

CMO Fuze

Join past BMA Chicago President Suzanne Martin for a sunrise run along the beautiful Chicago lakefront! This is an informal meet up. Just show up by 6AM in the Sheraton Grand main lobby. The group will leave promptly at 6AM. Suzanne will lead everyone out to the lakefront for a run and have you back between 6:45-7AM. Walkers welcome. Suzanne will be posting logistics on her twitter @suzannedmartin

PROGRAMMATIC MEDIA BUYING: MYTHS AND REALITY

Programmatic has become the dominant method for digital display advertising transactions and these shifts in digital budgets are accelerating. However, the gap between marketer demand and qualified inventory availability in the programmatic ecosystem is widening. Historical open market models and scalability requirements have alienated specialty publishers, leaving marketers with limited solutions for premium inventory. Under David's leadership, his agency has taken advantage of the efficiencies of programmatic buying while maintaining the quality for his clients. He will share his observations and experience with these market trends.

David Adelman

Managing Director OCD Media, LLC

5 STEPS TO STARTUP SUCCESS

Most business owners start their companies with the best of intentions. They are passionate about developing a product or service to fill a marketplace void. What happens between thinking of an idea and launching a company is where most business owners make their biggest mistakes.

Brian will address why people think it’s reasonable to invest their time, money and other resources into starting a business without fully mapping out what it will take to make their company successful? He will talk about the keys to successful planning:

1. Have a Vision – When you come to forks in the road, which way should you turn.
2. Create an Operational Plan – Your operational plan is like a GPS; what do you need to do to achieve your yearend objectives. Use “What If” scenarios to regularly test your plan.
3. Understand the Competitive Landscape – Know your competition and how to beat them. What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)?
4. Make Changes When Necessary – When you hit a dead end, and you will, do you have a Plan B, C, D, and E?
5. Don’t Go It Alone – you don’t have all the answers. Seek help when you hit an obstacle by having the best people possible on your advisory board and talking to them often.

Brian Moran

Founder & CEO small business edge

TRANSFORMING AN ICONIC BRAND THROUGH TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES

One of the primary drivers of change for businesses and marketers is digital transformation. But with that journey well underway at many enterprises, marketers are turning their attention to “transformational experiences” – powerful and connected experiences that define and differentiate brands for customers, prospects, employees and partners. In this session, Toni Clayton-Hine, SVP and CMO, will share how Xerox is undergoing its own transformation as well as impacting the experience of its customers, in the context of spinning off its services business in order to focus on its core digital print technology and services. Toni will reveal her vision and her team’s journey – the successes and the challenges – in evolving the brand experience of a company that lives at the intersection of physical and digital transformation. 

Toni Clayton-Hine

SVP and CMO Xerox

INFLUENCER MARKETING: HYPE OR HOPE FOR B2B?

Think of the last time you made a decision to buy a business product or service. What were the major influences on that decision? B2B buyers do research, create specifications and might even form a committee. Without realizing it, most are influenced by peers, industry experts and others who they trust.

But how can B2B brands make an intentional effort to collaborate with the right influencers in a way that is genuine and believable to their buyers?

In this presentation you hear the results of recent research on enterprise influencer marketing from Altimeter, TopRank Marketing and Traackr outlining key trends, goals, budgets and best practices. You will also hear how enterprise level B2B marketers like Dell, SAP and Oracle are incorporating broad and niche influencers to scale quality content that attracts, engages and converts more buyers. Key learnings from this session include:

- What influencer marketing actually means for B2B companies
- How B2B marketers can catch up to and surpass B2C influencer marketing trends
- How to integrate influence into an optimized, socialized and publicized content marketing mix 
- Essential goals and measurement strategy for influencer driven content programs

Lee Odden

CEO TopRank Marketing

THE [DIGITAL] CMO IMPERATIVE

Today we’re faced with an abundance of data, and BIG Data is the shiny new penny. YET executives still express frustration when making major business decisions; feeling they either don't have enough data OR the right data. With all this talk about data, where is the perspective of experience? At the risk of making the "perfect" decision, we may be overemphasizing the need for more or better data and not on the variable that distinguishes us from robots and software algorithms -- human experience or simply: our gut instinct. This presentation will review today's decision-making process, the part gut instinct plays, and our role as market leaders to cultivate the human point of view in ourselves and for our teams.

Jennifer Fondrevay

Former Vice President, B2B Marketing & Communications Apollo Education Group

EMBRACE CHANGE, TO STAY WHO YOU ARE

What happens when maintaining the status quo is no longer an option. When things around you shift so drastically and rapidly that the only way to stay who you are is to leap into the arms of who (and what) you are going to be.  When being the catalyst of a new way of doing things beats the heck out being left behind.  Let’s have a candid chat about change that makes it as natural as welcoming a new day vs. something to be avoided at all cost.

Lauren McCadney Williams

Director, Marketing Delivery CDW