Marketing Disrupted: B2B Edition

Outgoing, entrepreneurial, performance-driven leader with experience spanning across domestic and international markets. With a passion to embrace the changing face of our world and the relentless rise of evolving technology to drive better digital transformation for all. Previously heading up the marketing team taking Enlighten Designs to Microsoft Country Partner of the year, now as Head of Marketing and Operations with Umbrellar. Championing the GTM strategy, execution and operational excellence across the Microsoft CSP Distribution and Cloud Operations and Advisory businesses, because everyone deserves the cloud done right!

International keynote: Creating the world's most successful B2B marketing campaign

Mark Lethbridge is CEO of Gravity Global, the most awarded B2B agency in the world. Livestreaming in from the UK, Mark will not only share the story of their award-winning ‘Profit Hunter’ campaign for the Embraer airlines, but also delight us with observations from his incredible global brand strategy experience developed over the last 38 years, working with leading B2B brands such as Airbus, Unilever, Aviva, and Mazda to name a few.

• Making your brand stand out: What successful B2B companies do differently
• How Embraer’s objectives translated into a multinational multi-award-winning campaign
• The challenges and hurdles that we, and Embraer, faced in creating the campaign and taking it to market
• How the campaign has been adapted, refined, and reinvented to be successful over multiple years
• How it has delivered real sales and marketing alignment
• What we can learn from ‘Profit Hunter’ and other successful campaigns

Mark brings extensive global brand strategy experience developed over 40 years. A major contributor to the industry, Mark champions marketing strategies that accelerate business growth and shareholder value.

Mark started his career with Unilever in 1977 the training ground for many of the UK’s top marketers, eventually switching to the agency side becoming Director of Client Services at a leading London advertising agency, Lovell Rupert Curtis, based in Covent Garden.
In 1989 Mark founded the AGA Group based in London- with the ambition of bringing best practice marketing to B2B global brands, a space that was incredibly underserved by marketing agencies. Mark held this position for 20 years.

In 2009 Mark created the Gravity Global which has reach across 5 continents. As CEO of Gravity Global, Mark is proud of the fact that the business serves many of the world’s leading B2B brands.

Mark is also Past President of MAGNET (Marketing and Advertising Global Network). This network of marketing agencies represents more than 800 clients with resources in 100 key cities around the world and total annual billings of close to $2 billion USD. He is an active contributor to the B2B marketing industry, identifying marketing best practice and serves as a Business Superbrands judge.

An Agile Roadmap to Commercialisation: How Tonkin + Taylor is Disrupting the Engineering Sector

Tonkin + Taylor is a New Zealand owned engineering consultancy and one of NZ’s largest professional services firms. But within Tonkin + Taylor sits their Digital Ventures team which functions very much as a start-up based on Lean principles. Over the last 12 months, Michael and his team have set up a new framework for commercialisation with three innovative digital products underway.
Michael joins us to share how this completely different way of approaching product development is allowing Tonkin + Taylor to move quickly and disrupt the engineering sector.

• Sprints, test and learn: Adapting to working as a start-up with an agile model
• Demonstrable products: changing our mindset from perfect to 50% ready when showing to customers
• How we set up our framework for commercialisation
• How to mitigate the risks of taking this approach
• Our three digital products and how we are scaling these globally
• Educating customers on niche, highly technical products
• Bringing your stakeholders along on the journey with you

With a marketing career spanning more than two decades, Michael has lead the marketing efforts of one of New Zealand’s most well-known professional services firms, Tonkin + Taylor. Through this, he brings a wealth of knowledge in user and customer experience, digital product discovery and marketing, as well as B2B marketing experience.

He is widely respected by his industry peers, not only for his technical skills in strategic marketing, user and customer experience, but his ability to think big picture and deliver best practice compliance, strategy and leadership

Previously the Head of Marketing and Communications at Tonkin + Taylor, where he is also a shareholder, Michael is currently a driving force in T+T’s newly formed Ventures Entity, where he and his team are focused on disrupting the environmental and engineering consultancy industry by building digital products to create new opportunities and revenue streams for the group.

International keynote: A New Approach to Account-Based Marketing

Andrea is the leader and evangelist for Account Based Marketing (ABM) in Fujitsu and is continually adapting and evolving their approaches, methodologies, and knowledge. She will share how she drives improved business results by ensuring her team of ABMers work closely with sales and account managers to devise and execute strategies, campaigns, and initiatives that open doors and deepen engagements with strategic and high growth customers across the globe.

• Fujitsu’s approach to ABM and why it works
• Making your B2B marketing a powerful business driver and sales enabler
• Creating a scalable ABM strategy
• How to secure buy in and focus from busy account teams
• How to build the next level of skills and competencies you’ll need in your team

Andrea is the leader and evangelist for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) in Fujitsu, and helps drive improved business results by ensuring the excellent team of ABMers work closely with sales and account managers to devise and execute strategies, campaigns and initiatives to open doors and deepen engagements with strategic and high growth customers across the globe. She thrives on building high-performance teams, and in continually adapting and evolving approaches, methodologies, and knowledge.

Andrea has been working in B2B marketing, in the Tech sector, and in various roles across several geographies.

Specialties: Account-Based Marketing (ABM), leadership of marketing and communications, strategic and tactical; M&A internal and external comms; culture and change management; branding and identity

Breakthrough Brands: Building a brand that means something. Xero Case Study

James is the Head of Global Brand and Marketing at Xero. Before joining Xero, James was CMO at Founder-led Global Business, Coretex, and before that CMO at one of New Zealand's largest tech companies, Tait Communications. Prior to that, he was with IBM for more than 15 years, where he had global sales and strategic marketing roles including focusing small business markets, along with running Asia Pacific brand and communications.

International keynote: How Digital Acceleration and Social Selling is Changing B2B marketing

The world of sales and marketing has seen a perfect storm of change; the internet, eCommerce, digital, social media, Covid19, and the global working from home experiment. This has meant that the B2B buyer today is very comfortable online and we need to meet them where they like to hang out …. on digital.

The modern buyer is jumping to conclusions about your employees and your business from your digital presence such as social media.
Join the session and discover:

• How can we get buyers to engage with our sales people and our business?
• How to get brand visibility and recognition without being spammy
• How to build your digital identity
• How social media can close the distance between clients, prospects, remote employees and potential recruits.
• How to get trusted advisor status as part of your ABM programme
• How sales and marketing can work together in this digital age and gain digital dominance

Tim Hughes is universally recognised as the world-leading pioneer and exponents of Social Selling and he is currently ranked Number 1 by Onalytica as the most influential social selling person in the world. In 2021, Linkedin said he was one of the top 8 sales experts globally to follow.

He is also Co-Founder and CEO of DLA Ignite and co-author of the bestselling books “Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers” and “Smarketing - How To Achieve Competitive Advantage through blended Sales and Marketing”. Both published by Kogan Page.

NZ Post: Changing brand perceptions with business audiences

A steady rise in online shopping, turbo-charged by COVID, means parcel delivery and logistics is big business for NZ Post – and online retailers are a very valuable audience. While NZ Post’s delivery performance leads the category, brand perception was still lagging reality. Small budgets, spread thinly across multiple innovations and messages, targeting multiple business audience segments, made this difficult to shift.

So, NZ Post embraced a brave new marketing approach which ultimately saw them win the B2B Sector Category Award at the 2021 TVNZ-NZ Marketing Awards. The NZ Post team joins us to share the story of the “Express Tonight” campaign project and how it has fundamentally changed how initiatives are conceived and developed internally.

• A new approach to B2B marketing: our 3 bold ideas
• The halo effect: giving one ‘hero’ product all the love (and budget)
• Giving the sales team confidence in the marketing strategy
• Creating demand from your customers’ customers
• Proving ROI in a B2B environment
• Learning and adapting from the initial one-month trial