Speaking at the FUNNEL Sydney event

I was very honoured to speak at the FUNNEL B2B Marketing and Sales event in Sydney on the 19th Nov. It was the first time this event had been run in Australia (it is well known in the UK). 280 delegates attended, from around Australia.

I enjoyed many of the other speakers' presentations and met interesting people - most of whom were there to discuss and learn about the impact of technology; digital, big data and analytics on the profession. 

The tweets flowed and a lot of great points were shared with the hashtag #funnel12. A few quotes that stood out to me from the day:

• "Inbound converts 300% more than outbound at SAP, which is why we're focussed on pull marketing" ~ Ray Kloss, SAP
• "Digital comms are about relevancy, not reach" ~ Benoit Droulez, Traction Digital
• "Begin with the customer experience & work back toward the technology" ~ Quote from Steve Jobs, used in a presentation
• "Stories are 6-7 more times likely to be remembered than traditional corp. messages" ~ Joanne Jacobs, 1000 Heads
• "I wouldn't call it social media - I'd call it digital relationships" ~ Ray Kloss, SAP
• And my favorite...?! "Lightbulb moment listening to @RoHetherington re Constituencies vs Audiences!" ~ Bronwyn Cook

Thanks to @greenhatmktg and @SocialSammy for taking these photos of my presentation:

I will share my presentation in the next post.

Many thanks to Brad Langton and the FUNNEL team for creating an enjoyable and valuable event.

 

Comments

[Tony Hollingsworth]

Hi Rowan

Fantastic summary of a great event. I loved FUNNEL - I'm preparing a blog post too so keep an eye on hashtag #Funnel12 and it will appear there soon.

One insight that stayed with me from the day was the idea that we can make customers heroes. By doing so, they become raving ambassadors for our products and services. Who wouldn't want an army of sales people passionate about your product? This is now greatly facilitated by "being more social" in a business context, and is a sure-fired way of generating more leads, and ultimately closing more business, sooner!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the event.

Cheers,
Tony Hollingsworth
Digital Business and Food Advisor - AskTonyIT

[Rowan Hetherington]

Hi Tony, thanks - and I will look out for your post too!

I agree turning customers into hero advocates is a fantastic idea! Are you familiar with IBM's developerWorks case study on this? This is the site itself: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/

If you haven't seen it, I will gladly dig it out for you. It created "raving ambassadors" as you put it, and resulted in some pretty amazing engagement, satisfaction and revenue data!

Looking forward to connecting more - hopefully in person again eventually!

[sap project systems]

Came across your site while browsing around…Cool stuff you have going on here, seems to have been a great event which Covers motivations well and shows the building strength in the relationship customer/vendor.