This overview is part of a series of track spotlights we are doing. You can read up on Rocket Fuel, our brand new track, SaaS.City, and Growth.

Welcome to the stage of your company where stuff gets a bit crazy and quite expensive. Not that it was normal or anything before that. If you thought that you have to focus on a million things and that was a bit overwhelming, they have just become a zillion. The tricky part here is that not only do you personally have to figure out what to focus on but you have hundreds of employees trickling behind you. At any given point in time, they need to know the direction and how it relates to the point of the existence of the company. Not easy having in mind they are probably spread between multiple time zones.

Your aim shouldn’t be to stay sane in all of this. It’s to not go too insane.

If you play your cards well, sales can become a weapon with dozens of BDRs and reps, marketing can turn into a machine, and hypergrowing even through unscalable ways is in the books.

Look at it from the bright side: to get here you probably will have built a movement, established a category and will most likely be sitting on the makings of an IPO. Not a bad sacrifice to make.

So without further ado here is a brief overview of what you will learn from this track and who you will be learning it from.  

Enabling sales to be your secret weapon

Ten years ago, being a good salesperson was a face-to-face art form. You had to be able to read your customer, influence and convince. With the rise of the Internet, achieving this level of excellence is a struggle for most businesses nowadays. In this keynote, Intercom’s Director of EMEA Sales, Stan Massueras, will talk about how businesses need to find the right balance between smart automation and upfront generosity in order to cut through the noise and accelerate their growth.

Stan started his sales career in 2003 in B2B companies such as Hewlett-Packard before joining disrupters such as Facebook and Twitter in 2008 as one of their first European Sales Leaders. Since then, Stan built multiple sales teams from the ground up. He launched his own company (Pulp) in 2014 and joined Intercom 18 months ago as their EMEA Sales Leader in Dublin.

Why building a brand is the single best investment you can make if you’re serious about growing your business this year

It’s 2018. Every company has a blog and a podcast. Every company is making videos. Every company is spending money on AdWords, Facebook ads, and retargeting. And on top of that, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of competitors in every industry leaving more options for your potential customers than ever before. We live in a world of infinite supply. And in this world, traditional marketing and demand generation just aren’t working like they used to. Yet most marketers continue to play by the same old rules and that’s why they keep getting the same old results. But that doesn’t mean that marketing doesn’t work anymore.

In fact, marketing today can be even easier because you don’t have to learn all of the tricks, algorithms, and formulas: you have to focus on being you and building a brand. During this session packed with lessons and real examples from Patagonia, RXBAR, Casey Neistat, GaryVee and more, Drift VP of Marketing Dave Gerhardt will break down how you can compete in a world of infinite supply, and show you why brand is the number one way to drive demand.

Dave Gerhardt graduated from college in 2009 during a global economic crisis, with no clue what he wanted to do. Fast-forward 7 years: Dave runs marketing at Drift, one of Boston’s fastest-growing startups, and is a figurehead in Boston tech.

The role of the CMO in the fourth industrial revolution: Tech, trends & transitions

You are in for a treat with this one. We are bringing together 4 CMOs, all hailing from public companies to help you figure out what is at stake for the CMO. Today, consumers are in charge: choosing the platforms, devices, and means of communication with brands. CMOs need to evolve their teams from solely orchestrating brand-driven activity, to listening and taking part in all consumer-driven activity.

In this session, the four panellists will give you the low-down on all the marketing trends you need to know to set yourself up for success. They will debate what it means to become engagement-driven, why two-way, real-time engagement with consumers is critical, and how you can get ahead of the curve in the age of intelligent marketing.

Panelists include:

Eileen O’Mara is the CMO for Salesforce in EMEA. Over the last 20 years, Eileen has worked in a variety of international roles with large and medium-sized organizations supporting companies to transform their business through technologies. Her experience spans sales leadership, marketing and business consultancy roles at senior levels in the technology sector.

Heather Zynczak is the Chief Marketing Officer at Pluralsight, a technology learning platform. Heather joined Pluralsight in August of 2016, excited by the mission, culture and enormous opportunity to solve strategic business problems for companies of all sizes. At Pluralsight, Heather is focused on leading a data-driven marketing organization that delivers real qualitative results. She spends her time driving go-to-market strategy and increasing global brand visibility.

Meagen Eisenberg brings more than 19 years of experience in the high-tech industry to her role as MongoDB’s CMO. She has been recognized as one of the Top 50 most retweeted by mid-sized marketers according to AdWeek and one of the Top 25 B2B Marketing Influencers according to InsideView. In 2014, she won the Marketers that Matter award.

Ryan Carlson is Chief Marketing Officer at Okta. As the head of Okta’s Marketing team, he oversees Product Marketing, Corporate Marketing, Demand Generation, Sales Development and Pipeline Strategy and Operations. His charter? Get the world to know, love, and share the Okta story.

Obviously awesome: How to use context to unlock growth in noisy markets

Vicious competition, saturated media, overwhelmed customers – have you ever felt that breaking through to your customers is almost impossible? In this talk, you will learn how to avoid the three killer positioning pitfalls and how to use market context to make the value of your offerings obvious for your target customers. April Dunford will also teach you a simple four-step positioning methodology that will make your products stand out and shine.

April is a Positioning expert and CEO of Ambient Strategy where she helps companies successfully launch new products by shaping the markets they compete in. Previously April worked as a marketing executive at a series of 6 successful startups and 3 Fortune 500 companies where she launched 16 products into market. She is an angel investor, board member and mentor to dozens of startups. April is also the author of the upcoming book on positioning titled “Obviously Awesome”.

Lessons from creating a movement and scaling a leading SaaS company in emerging markets

Scaling a SaaS company outside the US isn’t an easy task. Even more challenging when you’re based in a country like Brazil (with limited access to talent and capital), and taking a contrarian approach of expanding to other emerging markets first. In this keynote, Eric Santos will share the main lessons learned in the process of scaling RD Station past 15K customers/700 employees, becoming a leading player in the marketing automation category.

Eric Santos started RD Station in 2010, which offers inbound marketing automation software to companies that want to ace their digital marketing efforts. When he started it, however, no one in Brazil understood marketing automation. He started a movement and reeducated the market.

Bonus

Meet the investors – what growth investors look for

Growth investors are looking through a different lens for Series B/C rounds as compared to earlier stage venture investors. Join growth investors as they discuss how they make decisions and what they see as the key drivers of a high-quality growth round. They will share their views on:

  • Growth round readiness and their key considerations,
  • When a founder should start thinking about it,
  • What your SaaS metrics should look like as you approach a growth round,
  • how to select and approach the best investors,
  • what materials you need to support the process,
  • the pros and cons of using an advisor

Four VCs are sitting for this panel including:

Alastair Mitchell, Partner, EQT Ventures
Alastair is Partner at EQT Ventures and has in-depth experience of B2B software, sales and marketing. In his role, Alastair leads EQT Ventures B2B strategy and is establishing EQT Ventures presence in San Francisco.

Michael Brown, General Partner, Battery Ventures
Since joining Battery Ventures in 1998, Michael has made or managed, multiple investments spanning the financial-services, enterprise-software and technology-enabled business-services markets. Currently, Michael serves on the boards of IDI Direct Insurance, J. Hilburn, Joor, KeyMe, Mendix, Newforma, Nitro Software, Panjiva, Q2ebanking, RiskIQ, Vidyard and Xenex.

Jos White, General Partner, Notion Capital
Previously the Co-founder of MessageLabs, Jos White is an entrepreneur turned investor and currently serves as a General Partner at Notion Capital. Notion now has more than $300m in funds under management and a portfolio of more than forty companies.

Nicola McClafferty, Investment Director, Draper Esprit
Nicola joined Draper Esprit as Investment Director in 2017. Prior to this, she was co-founder and CEO of Covetique.com, a leading online retailer of pre-owned luxury fashion. Prior to this, Nicola spent 5 years as a Venture Capital investor, focusing on early-stage consumer internet and media start-ups with Balderton Capital and latterly Ravensbeck.

Ready to amplify? Grab your ticket before October 1st when prices are increasing.