July 29 Show: Ruth P. Stevens

July 26th, 2011

2011 20 Women to Watch: Ruth P. Stevens, eMarketing Strategy

Ruth P. Stevens's expertise in customer acquisition and retention derives from a decade and a half of hands-on marketing for both large enterprises and start-up companies. Just prior to beginning her consulting practice, she served as chief marketing officer at an Internet company in New York City. Before that, she had broad responsibilities for direct marketing at three corporate giants — IBM, Ziff-Davis and Time Warner.

At IBM, she served as director of direct marketing, North America, for the IBM hardware, software and services brands, leading a team of 140 direct marketing professionals. She then moved to the IBM Software Group, where she directed global direct marketing.

At Ziff-Davis, she served as vice president of marketing for the electronic publishing division, and later helped launch Ziff's Consumer Media Group as its vice president of marketing. At Time Warner, she worked in marketing, new business development and general management for the Book-of-the-Month Club and Time-Life Books.

Ruth serves on the board of directors of Edmund Optics, a leading supplier and manufacturer of industrial optics and components, based in Barrington, NJ. Ruth is a frequent contributor to a variety of marketing publications and author of Trade Show and Event Marketing and The DMA B-to-B Lead Generation Handbook. She teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School. Ruth serves on the board of the Direct Marketing Club of New York.

She is past chair of the Business-to-Business Council of the Direct Marketing Association and holds a BA from Hamilton College and an MBA from Columbia University.

Questions we will discuss with Ruth: Her new book “Maximizing Lead Generation” (Pearson), best practices in sales lead management and her opinions on Social Media usefulness?

Other Books:

The DMA Lead Generation Handbook (2003) Trade Show and Event Marketing (2005)

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Posted in CRM and Related, Marketing Automation | Comments |

July 22 Show: Henry Whitfield, LeadFormix and James Wong, Avidian Technologies

July 17th, 2011

Henry Whitfield - VP of Sales, LeadFormix

Henry initiates outreach to our potential customers and communicates the unique value of the LeadFormix solution through presentations and demonstrations. Henry comes to LeadFormix with more than two decades of experience as a high tech sales and management executive and entrepreneur. Prior to LeadFormix, Henry founded TelID, a registry linking telephone numbers with Internet URLs. He was also the founder of AdExchange, and was responsible for creating a new industry around marketing service syndication. Henry has held key management positions at AutoBoard and Apple Computer. He earned an MBA from the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

James Wong, Co-Founder & CEO of Avidian Technologies

James is a seasoned entrepreneur and founder of three successful companies. He is co-founder and CEO of Avidian Technologies (www.avidian.com), the creators of Prophet, the world leading CRM software built in Outlook. James is a thought-leader, sought after speaker and writer on CRM, Sales Management & groupware applications. He was a regular writer for PCWorld and has been featured in PC Magazine, Small Business Computing, Inc., Entrepreneur, CRM Magazine, Washington Post and other publications. In 2009, he was named by the SLMA as the “50 Most Influential Sales Lead Management Professional”.

Under Wong’s leadership, Avidian was the winner of the Seattle Mayor's Small Business Award, honored for excellence in management, employee relations and community involvement. Avidian also won 3 years in a role as one of Washington State’s Fastest Growing Companies and 3 years in a role as One of the Best Companies to Work For.

Prior to Avidian, James was the co-founder and President of Foci Technologies (acquired by Meritage Technologies), and held positions at Arthur Andersen in New York City and Chevron Corporation in San Francisco.

James was named by the SBA as the Minority Small Business Champion of the Year in 2009 and was a winner of the Puget Sound Business Journal's 40 Under 40 award. He is a Past President and active board member of the Seattle Chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization (www.eonetwork.org), is an enthusiastic Rotarian and serves on the Board of the Seattle Rotary Service Foundation (www.seattlerotary.org). James serves on the board of the Group Health Foundation (www.ghc.org) and is a board member of his local church Renton Chinese Alliance Church.

We will ask Henry Whitfield about the growth of the Marketing Automation field and why recent pundits have said MA is slowing down. We want to know his opinion of best practices for Sales Lead Management. And what is the biggest obstacle to implementing a marketing automation system?

We will ask James Wong if the maturity of the CRM marketplace still has room for growth? Why is the Prophet called the easiest CRM to use? Does he have advice for Sales Managers to get their salespeople to use a CRM System? And we want to know his opinion on the best practices for sales lead management.

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Posted in CRM and Related, Current and Past Shows | Comments |

July 15 Show: Tony Jaros - SiriusDecisions

July 12th, 2011

TONY JAROS Senior Vice President of Research, SiriusDecisions

Tony is a sales and marketing thought leader with nearly 20 years of experience; he has led the overall research function at SiriusDecisions since the company’s founding in 2001. His b-to-b expertise spans a wide range of disciplines, including field marketing/demand creation strategies, tactics, metrics and organizational structures; general marketing strategy; marketing communications; and inside sales/teleprospecting. As a consulting principal, Tony has advised a number of organizations including Cognos, Symantec, CSC, Gartner, MasterCard and Factiva.

Prior to SiriusDecisions, Tony worked as a consultant and project manager with Norwalk, CT-based Peppers and Rogers Group (PRG), the world’s leading relationship marketing boutique consulting firm. His work included the creation of business-to-business and business-to-consumer customer value models and needs frameworks, the reorganization of a major airline’s sales and marketing organizations around its customers, the overhaul of a online retailer’s Web strategy, the development of a comprehensive customer touchmap for an automobile manufacturer, and the creation of hands-on, customer-centric sales and marketing training programs and field materials. His client roster included 1-800-Flowers.com, Rockwell Automation/Entek, British Airways, Volvo, Jaguar, Moore Corporation, Ford’s Premier Automotive Group and GE Capital.

Tony also was responsible for the day-to-day project operations of Stamford, CT-based Simba Information’s consulting services group, which counseled such clients as Microsoft, Miller Freeman, RH Donnelley, Ameritech, and Simon and Schuster. While at Simba, he also served as a managing editor and senior analyst in the organization’s New Media and Marketing Group.

Tony received an MBA with concentrations in marketing and management from New York University, and a bachelor of science in journalism from Northwestern University.

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Posted in Research, Current and Past Shows | Comments |

July 7 Show: Karla Blalock and Karen Hayward

July 5th, 2011

Karla Blalock, VP, Solution Services PointClear

Karla Blalock heads PointClear's solution services organization, responsible for all client operations, including program development, management, and delivery. Karla joined PointClear in 2004 after serving as director of marketing and strategic planning for Southern Company Energy Solutions, a subsidiary of Southern Company. She brings a diverse combination of business strategy, operational expertise and market development experience to her current role. She has held marketing, sales management and operational positions within the service, manufacturing and distribution industries. Karla draws on more than 20 years of experience to quickly identify strategic issues and develop prospect development programs that can be executed and measured against business objectives. The Sales Lead Management Association named Karla one of the 50 most influential people in sales lead management in 2010.

Karen Hayward, Executive VP, CMO CenterBeam

With over a decade of experience in Cloud computing, Karen has been instrumental in building and defining CenterBeam’s sales organization, sales processes and lead generation as CenterBeam’s EVP and Chief Marketing Officer. In 2010, Ms. Hayward was distinguished by CRN as one of the "Power 100: The Most Powerful Women of the Channel." Ms. Hayward was recognized for driving top-line revenue growth and revving up CenterBeam's social media program. In 2008, CenterBeam was honored with a DemandGen Top 10 Award for "Using Sales and Marketing automation to fuel Corporate Growth" and received Stevie Finalist recognition for "Best Marketing Department" from the American Business Awards. In 2004, Selling (a monthly publication of Institutional Investor) selected Ms. Hayward as its “Selling All-Star.” Ms. Hayward has also been a featured speaker at Interop 2007, On24 Webcast on Lead Farming, and a guest lecturer at USC Hayward. Ms. Hayward holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

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