This presentation explains the roles that the Geek (technologist), the Nerd (analyst), and the Suit (strategist) must play to effectively support customer centricity—delivering quality data, deep insight, and effective action plans. It also highlights the most common barriers to this collaboration and offers tips to help attendees to remove silos and to create highly functioning teams that deliver business results by ensuring that data, technology, and business strategy support customer needs.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are becoming more common, not just in B2C applications but also in B2B marketing. But many marketers are still not sure what a CDP is, how it differs from other databases, and why they’d want one. This session resolves the mysteries and helps attendees decide whether a CDP makes sense for their businesses. It also covers what separates CDPs from other marketing and customer databases, their capabilities and strengths, how a CDP relates to your larger marketing stack, and what to look for in a B2B CDP.

Looking at the marketing technology landscape, you might think marketing is all about the tools we use: data-driven marketing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Is marketing now a tech job? Actually, marketing still remains in a delicate balance between art and science. And believe it or not, technology enables us to be more human in our marketing, not less. In this session, you learn to develop marketing that is more human as a result of modern marketing technology. We dispel common myths that hold us back from embracing essential technology and learn how to think about AI as an authenticity tool.

In this session, attendees hear how two industry-leading marketers maximized their CRM email engagements with big and small data to determine the most captivating creative content. DIRECTV NOW reaches the most receptive prospects across channels while identifying and tailoring messaging to prospects with high and low levels of engagement. American Express uses recommender models, driven by customer behavior and big data, to deliver contextually relevant email content that maximizes cardholder engagement. Attendees also learn how both of these companies succeeded using proven strategies for data-driven, rules-based, and personalized creative to match customer segmentation needs for maximum message relevancy and engagement.

According to an Ovum report, about two-thirds of U.S. companies believe that the GDPR will require them to rethink their strategy in Europe. Even more (85%) see the GDPR putting them at a competitive disadvantage with European companies. Join our panel of experts who discuss how to become GDPR-compliant and what it means for companies doing business in Europe.

Up to 70% of all CRM implementations fail to meet expectations, resulting in the loss of money, time, resources, and credibility. This session addresses the most common CRM challenges and offers effective solutions. Participants gain insights and learn best practices for CRM success while engaging in discussion and exchanging ideas on a variety of topics, including lessons from leading organizations that have succeeded, gaining management support and buy-in from key stakeholders, and getting users to want to use the system by providing value.

The battle for a customer's discretionary share of wallet is fierce and ongoing. Not only do sports compete on the field with each other, they compete for customer spend with movies, restaurants, concerts and staying at home. But they have a unique advantage that almost no other industry has—their advocates already exist—they don't have to strive for them, but instead have to figure out how to handle them so they remain fans. This experienced and fun panel of current and former sports practitioners tells you their stories—the programs, approaches, and thinking they used to translate the passion of their fans into benefits to the bottom lines of their organizations.

One of the top reasons that customer care processes fail is a lack of alignment with the customer's preferred process, and a one-size-fits-all approach. Do you know your customers well enough to know how to design a process that delights them at every step of the process? Join your peers in this workshop as you learn how to understand customer personas and create journey maps to drive more effective customer service, including how to the following: Listen to your customers so they can tell you what their journey looks like; identify what customer personas look like and how they will affect your process and technology decisions; discover the starting point for persona definitions—and how to strategically expand from there; and define a journey map as the foundation of customer experience management processes.

This non-technical session will give you a step by step game plan on how to successfully implement CRM strategies, technologies and processes into your business. Each participant will receive a sample CRM roadmap and sample process maps. 

• Positioning the ROI on CRM for business decision makers
• Understanding CRM Applications:
  • Sales Force Automation
  • Marketing Automation
  • Customer Service
  • Partner Relationship Management
  • Field Service
• Overview of Steps to CRM Success
  • Creating a long-term CRM roadmap
  • Planning your CRM project
  • Building your CRM system
  • Building a successful user adoption program

Most marketers are using marketing automation to "spray and pray." They're blasting messages to the masses with decreasing effectiveness. When it doesn't work, they increase the frequency, urgency, and scarcity. All of this turns off customers. When utilized correctly, marketing automation can actually create deeper, more meaningful interactions and relationships that produce more value over time. Garns shows attendees real case scenarios of how effective automation can be utilized to serve customers better and sell more.