5 take-aways from the Ascent Conference

The Ascent Conference in NYC was very fun last week. Here are 5 takeaways from the event and the dinners I joined:

1. It's not all Inbound or Outbound anymore

Lots of talks about new "movements": Half of those movements ends in "-bound" like "Allbound", "Nearbound". The other half ends in "led" like "people-led", "customer-led", "community-led", "product-led", etc :)

None of those approaches are new. But Cold Outbound is not working anymore and Marketers are quickly adapting to stand out from the noise.

Take-away -> Don't drink the latest cool aid, but do allocate resources to initiatives that complement the main motions. Things like: dinners and micro-events, co-marketing with partners, customer referral programs, warm outreach, or outreach to former customers.

2. Marketers are now aligning themselves on "Revenue" with a capital "R".

In a time when CFOs look at marketing budgets with skepticism, there were lots of discussions on aligning marketing with Sales. For example, I liked this point made by our friends at HockeyStack : marketing should understand and care about the sales velocity formula because they have an influence on every single variable:

• number of qualified leads
• conversion rate to won
• ACV
• time to close

For many, alignment went beyond sales. For example, Jonathan Pogact , VP Marketing at Seamless shared that he owns an ARR and a NRR number. This is more and more common. Growing new business sales has gotten harder. Companies are shifting their effort to customer retention and expansion. Marketers are asked to help.

Take-away -> Protect the marketing budget and the team by having goals tied to revenue, including retention and expansion.

3. Not everything can be measured. And it's OK.

For the past 15 years, Marketers have been asked to show their contributions with hard numbers. They invested a lot in digital channels that allowed them to do this (e.g. paid ads). Everyone did. Those channels have become saturated.

The channels that might perform best today might be those you cannot measure performance for. Daniel Cmejla from Apollo.io had a nice session on the "ROI of kindness" (e.g. customer advocacy). You cannot measure it by any means, but it might be one of the highest ROI in marketing.

Take-away -> (1) Educate the CFO and leadership team about the saturation of channels that can be easily measured. (2) and implement a process to capture "self-reported attribution" to bring some data on channels hard to measure.

4. GenAI is on everybody's mind, especially those of vendors.

Everyone I met believed that GenAI was going to dramatically change their world. No doubt. The question is when. There seems to be a gap between the excitement of vendors and what revenue teams actually experience right now. Most CMOs/CROs are cautiously experimenting with Gen AI, but I have not heard much about concrete success stories from them yet at the event.

Take-away -> Don't look for a problem to solve with Gen AI. Start with the biggest problem you have right now (or opportunity), see if Gen AI can help there, and run a quick experiment to see if the technology is ready.

5. NYC has so much energy!

And based on many conversations, it seems like Brooklyn is where the action is :)

Curious to hear what people see as obvious, non-obvious, or any other take-aways...