What a way to kick off the summer season in San Francisco, at our first stop of the i ???? marketing – an Adaptive Journeys Roadshow. It was an action-packed, hands-on experience for both our customers as well as the entire Act-On team!
This was my first customer user conference at Act-On as the new CMO, and it was a blast! I just love meeting customers, learning about their use cases and success stories, and hearing their candid feedback and ideas. I’m so pleased to hear that many of you who attended have already leveraged some of the tips and tricks learned at the conference, and some were already applying them at the office the next day. High five for hitting the ground running!
“I attended this roadshow in 2015 — while that event was nice, this just blows that out the water; I can really tell that the company is evolving.”
Hands-On Training
The customer user conference started bright and early with the Pre-Con training: Marketing Automation 101 Strategy Session – led by our very own Kyle Guiao and Leah Bartell with Act-On University. The hands-on workshop allowed end users to think big picture about their marketing efforts, learn directly from the experts, as well as network with others to become better marketers – and users of Act-On. Attendees established their buyer personas, identified content for each specific stage of the buyer’s journey, created their own lead scoring model, and ultimately learned how this all fits into segmentation and automated programs. A great refresher for some, a step towards Act-On Certification for others, and a great way for everyone to quickly ramp up before the deep dive breakouts later in the day.
Discovering New Trends and Act-On’s Product Vision
After the welcome address from Act-On’s CEO, Andy MacMillan – Adrienne Weissman, G2 Crowd’s CMO, opened with the keynote discussing “The Power of Relationships in the Age of the Customer.”
Gal Josefsberg, SVP Tech & Products, and I then walked through Act-On’s vision for Adaptive Journeys, and our three product missions for 2017. Afterwards, I jumped into moderation mode for a panel discussing Marketing Alignment with the C-Suite where we talked about how to organize teams and create better alignment between sales, customer success and the executive team. We also discussed the difference between “alignment” and ”collaboration” – how do you think they differ? We’d love to hear your comments below.
“Marketing & the C-Suite panel was stellar; it’s valuable to hear how marketing aligns with the broader business goals”
Learning Best Practices
I think I loved the breakout sessions the most! It was too hard to choose between all of the amazing sessions – (I think that’s why many people took advantage of the 2–for–1 Early Bird Conference promotion (which we’re offering again for our New York Roadshow, Aug. 8th) so they could “divide and conquer.” Act-On’s Karra Hendrix, Product Marketing Manager, kicked off the Dashboards, Data, Oh My! by diving into reporting and showing off pre-configured templates in Excel and Google Sheets that get “automagically” generated with our new Data Studio Lite.
Act-On’s Melissa Barker, Senior Manager, Marketing Operations, then wowed the audience with a look into setting up the best KPIs across your marketing organization in Marketing Analytics Demystified. Adam Wong from Bisco Industries presented their impressive (and Nucleus Research award winning) ROI case study.
“Great session on marketing analytics; takeaways have been driving our meeting today”
Adam Mertz, Sr. Director, Product Marketing and Jake Cable, Director, Product Management then kicked off the Adaptive Journeys in the Wild session – where customers were able to dive deeper into Adaptive Sending, Adaptive Social Posting, and Adaptive Forms. Then Max Spector, Senior Product Manager, gave us all a closer look at two features that will help users drive more adaptive experiences – Advanced CRM Mapping and Adaptive Scoring.
“The way your Adaptive Journeys will allow for greater personalization of content is really exciting.”
Discovering New Ideas
Then it was back to the mainstage where we heard from a few customers in a panel discussion. Thank you Rosaline with ActivePrime, Jacob with Inbound Optimization, and Kevin from Vonazon for sharing your insights on Marketing Automation Strategies – and SugarCRM’s Martin Schneider for sharing your thoughts on the new rules of sales and marketing alignment in “Disrupt or be Disrupted.”
Being the First to Hear…
Finally, we ended the day with a sneak peek into the new Act-On University – something we’re incredibly excited about! We’ll be announcing more around this on the blog soon.
Connecting and Having Fun
At the networking reception and throughout the day, attendees were able to swing by the Genius Station, and visit our sponsors SugarCRM, Evergage, G2 Crowd, and TechnologyAdvice.
How could you not love the hip hop violinist Brandon Summers? He started the day off right and kept us groovin’ during the network reception. Check out this video of his incredible talents!
Our Next Stop is New York City – August 8, 2017. Register Today!
We had the best time meeting all of our West Coast customers who came out to the first leg of the i ???? marketing roadshow. But we can’t wait to meet our East Coasters, too when i ???? marketing hits New York on August 8th! In fact, one Act-On customer who attended in San Francisco loved it so much that he plans to return and bring a few more colleagues to New York City.