In the era of customer engagement, it’s actually 360-degree engagement that will win. 360-degrees around you, that is. While customer engagement is necessary, it’s not enough for Marketing organizations’ future success. 360-degree engagement across Marketing departments — and interaction with other internal groups — will set apart tomorrow’s stars from wannabes.
Gone are the days when silos can succeed. Silo-busting is imperative across data, technologies, processes, people, and ideas. This is not to diminish the importance of segmentation and specialization, but rather, to interact, integrate, and collaborate to generate value. This is the age of interactivity.
Strong, constructive interaction across the Marketing organization — and with your stakeholders across the company and agencies, alliance partners, and channel partners — is a key to giving Marketing the power to act as a value center, not merely a “cost center”. When the C-team seeks to cut costs somewhere, Marketing can rise above much of its old perception and track when it brings value to the whole company, well beyond revenue and customer engagement.
With that, Marketing Operations’ role must grow from tactical and technology-based to a much more strategic and influential impact across the Marketing organization and the C-Suite.
You can experience a great demonstration of this level of interaction at the Marketing Operations and Technology Summit, for example. Experience Marketing interaction in full force at the Summit, set for October 18-21, 2015 in New Orleans. The entire three days of the conference is designed squarely with attendee interactivity in mind — making it the most peer-to-peer focused event in the industry, even topping last year’s event.
Only four of the presentations will be traditional format. All of the other sessions will be facilitated — not presentations, so peers drive the attendee discussions. This is your chance to get to the heart of each topic, focused on what you care most about.
It’s the ideal way to get actionable takeaways from other organizations’ experiences, a more holistic and systemic view of MO, and a strong network you can build on throughout your career.
Here’s what you get (and don’t get):
- No death by PowerPoint: Only four short presentations by C-level industry leaders with focus on interaction and learning.
- No sponsors in working sessions: Marketing ops practitioners work together peer-to-peer without consultant pitches or “happy” customers touting their vendor’s alleged breakthroughs in marketing technology.
- Participants in working sessions are equals: No gurus or experts in the room. Guided by co-facilitators, you will set the context by leveraging relevant experience and then turn it over to the attendees to dialogue together.
- Daily attendee breakouts: Each day there are opportunities for attendees to break out into special interest groups and take a deeper dive into topics inspired by sessions.
- Focus on strategy and actionability: You’ll learn plenty about the big picture at this event and how to prepare for the future, but it’s tailored for actionable takeaways that can make a difference in your organization now.
Marketing Operations Partners’ chairman and chief strategy officer, Gary Katz, is chairing this Summit for the second year. Under his direction, this event’s topics span the full spectrum of the Marketing Operations field as we need to pursue it to be successful in the future. Besides three keynote presentations and a fireside chat, all of the sessions will be facilitated audience-participation sessions. And there are several birds-of-a-feather discussion sessions to take the conversation to the next level.
