B2B Sales & Marketing Exchange (B2BSMX) is returning to its live and in-person format at the Encore Resort & Casino in Boston, August 9-11. Hosted virtually last October, the educational and networking event offers partner program leaders a robust agenda of presentations addressing emerging opportunities and challenges in business ecosystem optimization.
Larry Walsh, CEO and Chief Analyst at Channelnomics, a business strategy and research firm, will kick off the Profitable Partnering agenda with a review of the growing importance of B2B marketplaces, especially for IT companies. B2B marketplace could generate up to $3.6 trillion in sales by 2024. A survey by Digital Commerce 360 B2B found that 57% of the respondents are spending more on marketplace sites since the emergence of COVID-19, 22% significantly more.
To offer the business-specific solutions that more and more companies require, technology vendors are collaborating with other firms to develop and deliver innovative products.
Crafting effective co-marketing programs to promote those solutions to targeted customers can be challenging. During a session titled, All Together Now! Harmonizing Marketing With Your Technology Partners, Melissa Nacerino, Head of Global Channels & Alliances Marketing at Netskope, will offer insights into the success of the co-marketing programs she and her team are developing.
Structing co-selling strategies with multiple partners can be equally challenging. In his session, The Growing Importance of Co-Selling and Strategies for Driving More Impact with Partners, Dante Gordon, Partner Sales Director, SalesLoft, willdiscuss strategies and tactics used by sales and marketing technology companies to solve these growing problems. He’ll explore how the game has changed with the availability of near real-time mapping tools. He’ll discuss how the data these tools generate can help SaaS providers collaborate more effectively with their partners, leading to increased revenue, accelerated deal cycles and reduced customer churn.
Optimizing digital strategies within ecosystems, especially with traditional partners, is a key goal for many channel marketers. During his session, Jeff Porzio, Senior Director, Digital Strategy & Activation at Lauchlan, a full service, technology focused agency, will share insights on applying effective, measurable digital strategies to channel marketing. The session will be based on the insights that Lauchlan has developed while creating partner training programs on behalf of large global accounts.
Jeff Mesnik, president of ContentMX, and founder of PartnerOn, a channel focused content sharing platform, will discuss how vendors and distributors are striving to provide single destinations for content from multiple suppliers. During his presentation, Mesnik will discuss how “content marketplaces” enable partners to more efficiently access content from multiple vendors by reducing the need to log on to each of the repositories their vendors offer.
Over the past year and a half, channel leaders have had to navigate markets that sometimes were ripe with COVID-19 related opportunity as well as those that were negatively impacted. During a panel discussion moderated by Kathryn Rose, founder of the consulting firm ChannelWise, channel sales leaders will share their impressions of the trends emerging from the pandemic and what vendors can expect in the coming months and years. Joining Rose on the panel will be Melissa Lyons, Regional Channel Manager at OutSystems; Kris Blackmon, Channel Consultant and Chief Channel Officer at JS Group; and Caralyn Stern, Vice President, Americas and Global Channel Marketing at Sophos.
While a more intimate audience of 500 top B2B sales and marketing practitioners across industries is expected to participate, significant efforts will be made to ensure that attendees are provided safe and comfortable learning environments.
“It’s been a long time! In fact, #B2BMX in Feb. 2020 marked the last in-person event many of us attended,” said Andrew Gaffney, SVP & Editorial Director of Demand Gen Report and Channel Marketer Report. “Now, we are thrilled to bring our community together again for the first time in more than a year. While in-person events were on pause, we never stopped working to deliver exceptional online programs for our audience. So, we are equally excited to layer our virtual event expertise and functionality into this real-world event as well. With sponsor and attendee experience, as well as health and safety concerns, top of mind, we’ve reimagined an intimate, safe and engaging experience that will blend the absolute best of our physical and digital event capabilities.”