It’s Not Over: First Thoughts from Marketing Vision 2020, and More to Come

ITSMA hosted its 26^th annual Marketing Vision conference over three weeks in October… and there’s still more to come!

Marketing Vision 2020 – a new virtual experience brought together 500 B2B marketing leaders over the last several weeks to explore what’s working and what’s next for marketing and selling high-value services and solutions.

Here’s what came through loud and clear throughout the 30+ sessions focused on marketing leadership, growth strategies, ABM, executive engagement, and more:

• There is no new normal other than continuing disruption and uncertainty. For B2B leaders, though, customer demand for innovation and new solutions has accelerated dramatically, so the key is to look for new opportunities and see where it’s changed for the better.
• The shift to crisis management mode throughout 2020 has brought marketing leaders closer to the CEO and other C-suite colleagues, thus giving Marketing a stronger voice in new strategies for growth; especially through better market insight, working more closely with sales, and diving deeper into key accounts.
• The pandemic accelerated the adoption of agile, new tools for digital collaboration, and new ways to engage with customers… and the pace of change is continuing to accelerate.

But that doesn’t even scratch the surface! We had more than 50 speakers and 30+ hours of new ideas, insight, and stories of marketing excellence and impact. If you registered for the conference, or if your marketing organization is a member, you still have access to some or all of the sessions.

Here are a few more highlights.

On Wednesday, October 14, we kicked off the celebrations with the Marketing Excellence Awards. Read more about the awards and the winners here, and take a few minutes to see them live: many of our diamond and gold winners submitted a brief video so you can see them all on our BrightTALK channel.

The main conference took place over three days, October 20-22, with a mix of live and pre-recorded keynote addresses, panel discussions, breakout track sessions, and case study presentations from our Marketing Excellence Award winners.

Keynote sessions included Michael Treacy of Treacy and Company talking about the new discipline for growth strategy in the wake of COVID-19, Julie Schwartz presenting new research from ITSMA on How Executives Engage, and ITSMA’s Charles Doyle interviewing SAP CMO Alicia Tillman on Building a Brand with Purpose. While each keynote was different, they all held clues to what the future might hold for marketers, who – having just endured the most rapid change in a generation – have to be ready for an even more breakneck pace of change ahead.

After talking about the state of marketing today, I facilitated a CMO panel discussion on Leading Marketing to the Next Normal where I was joined by Jim Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer, HPE;  Rajashree R, Chief Marketing Officer, Tata Consultancy Services; Ann Ruckstuhl, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer, Unisys; and Shade Vaughn, Chief Marketing Officer, North America, Capgemini, who engaged in a lively discussion on: how they’ve moved on from responding to the pandemic to driving growth, the heightened importance of engaging and nurturing their teams, and ways they’re reimagining the marketing journey and innovating creative digital solutions to meet the needs of their customers.

Another highlight of Marketing Vision was Julie Schwartz’s keynote address on October 21: How COVID-19 is Changing B2B Executive Engagement Preferences and Behavior. She presented the second wave of ITSMA’s How Executives Engage Study, conducted in September 2020. Julie will be unveiling the full results of the survey more broadly in a webinar on November 5, but some of the nuggets in this research show:

• Business and IT executives are hungry for new ideas to enable growth and transformation; the opportunity for executive engagement is enormous
• Across the board, executives are adapting and growing more comfortable with digital interactions
• A growing percentage of executives view virtual peer networking as effective or more effective than in-person
• Despite the shift to and increasing comfort level with digital engagement, executives still prefer smaller, personalized engagement over broadcast approaches

To learn more about the research, register for the webinar and subscribe to this blog; we’ll cover the research in more detail over the coming weeks.

In addition to our keynote addresses and panel sessions, Marketing Vision 2020 included a dozen breakout sessions across four tracks:

• Leading and Transforming Marketing
• Strengthening Executive Engagement
• Optimizing ABM
• Driving Digital Excellence

Further, each day included the release of four Marketing Excellence Award-Winning case study video presentations. Again, if you registered for the event, you can find those case studies here. If not, follow ITSMA on twitter (#MV2020) or LinkedIn, or keep an eye on this blog because we’ll cover these in more detail in the future.

Finally, this week included six live, interactive post-conference workshops with ITSMA experts on:

• Building and Scaling ABM for the Long Haul
• Marketing and the Myth of Digital Transformation: Responding to Endless Disruption
• Brand-Building After the Pandemic
• Rethinking Martech for 2021 and Beyond
• Orchestrating Executive Engagement: Strategy and Governance for Long-Term Success
• Putting Personas to Work: Crafting Value Propositions that Hit the Mark

While we missed seeing our friends in person, Marketing Vision 2020 – a new virtual experience was a resounding success. We are grateful to our sponsors and our speakers who made the event possible and applaud our attendees who brought the energy and the questions and new insights.

And best of all, the virtual sessions will be available here until February 22, 2021. If you’ve already registered, please go back online and check out the session you missed. And if you didn’t register but are interested, let us know.