On January 18, 2017, NYC, MOCCA hosted an event “Account Based Marketing and 2017 Market Trends”. It took place in Manhattan office of Conductor, a sponsor of the meeting.

The biggest problem of most marketing events is their too broad, too generic content. That is entirely not the case with MOCCA that gathers marketing operations professionals and thus narrows a focus on a particular domain with its needs and challenges. It is especially important as marketing operations area is evolving, com
ing through a significant shift due to an unprecedented martech boom. MOCCA manages to offer a relevant, valuable perspective and expertise that somehow connect overused buzz words with business realities. On the top of that, it is an excellent networking opportunity, precious peer-to-peer knowledge exchange, and social event.

This time we listened to two speakers: Kathleen Schaub, Vice President, CMO Advisory Service at IDC; and Rishi Dave, CMO at Dun & Bradstreet.

Kathleen presented research on marketing trends, spending, and planning. As she says, marketing is becoming important: marketing jobs growth outpaces sales, martech budgets start increasing. Besides, Kathleen states an emerge of “Superhero CMO,” who “received C-level permission to disrupt traditional go-to-market operations.”
The expert predicts shifts in marketing program investments, including events becoming #1 spend in B2B marketing, and a budget increase for customer relations and loyalty. She shared several insightful predictions for 2020: 50% of commercial content will be created “outside of marketing control”; 50% of digital transformation projects will fail due to the lack of CX orchestration skills, and others. Kathleen gave advice on building a customer-centric organization and leveraging a martech stack in transforming marketing and breaking its traditional silos.

Rishi shared his experience in building marketing “tiger teams” around personas and account-based marketing. Each team was responsible for a range of marketing activities: segmentation, content, web, inbound & outbound, social, sales enablement, though their efforts were cross-coordinated. Rishi admitted a key role of data and deep, intense analysis in account-based marketing.  

Biggest takeaways? We live in the very exciting time. Traditional approaches to marketing are getting obsolete; technology is overriding rules and interactions between companies and customers. It brings both opportunities and challenges, especially
in regards to competencies and skills that we can only project and predict.

Photo credit: Jon Russo.