B2B Marketing and Sales Engagement Summit

This week I attended the B2B Marketing and Sales Engagement Summit. I’ve reviewed my hand notes and I thought I’d share some points I found useful:

Edurne Rodríguez?from Spotify Music Promotion opened things up nicely and highlighted the possibilities for creating greater alignment between sales and marketing and across multiple markets. There were plenty of handy tips in here for anyone working in international and tech organisations.

In several of the sessions that followed we were reminded that “people buy from people” and the importance of keeping your messaging emotional and lessening the reliance on stats. Then shortly after we were presented with many, many useful stats, most of which I have now been forgotten ?? ??

Almost everyone included Generative AI in their sessions. Paraphrasing Shantanu Shekhar from Gong “We’ve been living with AI for a year and it’s taken over” or at least that is my interpretation. As you’d expect, ‘Generative AI’ is used in everyday conversations now and is part of our day-to-day marketing and sales lives. It’s in our ‘Martech stacks’, we’re using AI? co-pilots, writing and receiving sales and marketing content generated by ChatGPT4, Claude, and other ChatGPT reskins. Microsoft were also keen to share how their AI was going to help us move to a three-day-working-week. In their keynote they showed how their AI was able to manage sales operations, respond to multiple communications, book meetings, respond to proposal requests, etc. In a separate roundtable we also heard how procurement was moving to a point where Procurement AIs will invite companies to tender and manage proposals, with these proposal requests being responded to by the vendor’s Sales AI.

Somewhat as an interesting counterpoint to this, there were strong cases put forward for sales teams to be more Human to Human. A point eloquently made and justified by Caroline Debenham (pictured), International Partner - Head of Sales Enablement, EMEA and Cushman and Wakefield. A point also driven home by a very lively Robin Hoyle of Huthwaite International who provided guidance on where AI makes sense and where it does not. Just think about how many sales emails you deleted from your inbox that are clearly written using a shared generative AI source? Think what presentations and collateral would look like if they were AI generated? Robin wants us to understand that people buy what feels most comfortable to us and at present most buying decisions are still made by emotional humans which requires empathy.?

Other sessions I found useful were the sales enablement discussion with Andrew Field VP of sales enablement at 3E.?

I found Lynzi Ashworth’s session particularly useful. Working in the same industry for quite a few years now, hearing Lynzi present her Aon case study on brand and demand generation was something I really related to and engaged with. I think I’ll do a separate post next week.?

It’s worth saying that the event was extremely well organised. The sessions I enjoyed the most were those presented by my CMO, marketing director and sales peers. The roundtable option was very useful, as were the product tech demos available in the open area. It was also really good to see some familiar faces and make a few new connections. I’ll try to connect with you all in some human way and hopefully meet you at a future learning event.

In the meantime I’m sure I’ll receive some AI generated sales follow-ups from the exhibitors - but I’ll let my AI co-pilot deal with those ??