Customers as Advocates Conference 2016

If you sell and market enterprise technology, this conference is for you.

How to grow and manage a store of referenceable customers

Take steps to identify, encourage, develop and nurture a thriving community of advocates

How to feed the content monster!

How marketing automation fits into the advocacy process

THE VIEW FROM OUTSIDE THE INDUSTRY
Gerry Pennell OBE, Chief Information Officer (CIO)
London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games 2012
Strand partners

Gerry Pennell OBE will use his experiences as a CIO in financial services, in retail and for the London 2012 Olympics to illustrate his views on whether the typical enterprise IT sales process is effective and how, perhaps, it could be improved. Gerry will speak for around twenty to twenty-five minutes followed by a Q&A session.


THE VIEW FROM CUSTOMER PROGRAMMES
Senta Cermakova, Worldwide Director, Customer Programs
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Strand partners

Senta brings more than twenty years of experience to her role as the Director of HP’s Global Customer Referencing program (GCR). Her career highlights include international experience in not only customer referencing, but also in Sales, Marketing, and Mergers & Acquisitions.

Senta has been instrumental in transforming the way HP’s customer references are engaged by both Sales and Marketing. Under her leadership of the Centers of Excellence GCR team, the program introduced a new reference platform to end-users in April 2013; this new platform – known as the Reference Success Center – is fully integrated with Salesforce.com and provides HP teams with automated functionality to access global customer references for a variety of Sales and Marketing needs. Building on the solid foundation of the platform, she standardized key reference services, introduced Customer Advocacy, and opened three reference services centers, in Poland, Romania and Mexico.

Before leading the GCR program, Senta worked as the Worldwide Director of Analyst and Public Relations team on behalf of Technology Services and Industries. Prior to joining the Global Analyst and Public Relations leadership team, Senta served as Director of Marketing and Strategy, as well as Chair of the Marketing Council in Central and Eastern Europe and the International Sales Europe Region (including Africa, Middle East, Israel, Turkey, Greece and Central and Eastern Europe).

Senta is a graduate of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic, and holds the Masters of Science in Biocybernetics.

In 2011, Senta won the Czech “Business Person of the Year” award, becoming the first female ever to win this coveted prize in 20 year history of this competition.


THE VIEW FROM CORPORATE MARKETING
Chris Willman, Head of UK Corporate Marketing
Kaspersky Lab
Strand partners

Chris Willman has been the Head of UK Corporate & Channel Marketing at Kaspersky Lab, the world’s largest privately held cyber-security company, for the last 4 years and is accountable for the organisations marketing delivery from SMB through to Enterprise. With responsibilities ranging from conception and delivery of GTM strategy, through to customer acquisition and retention marketing, he remains driven to ensure ROI focused, end-to-end marketing execution. Along with delivering major improvements for the business in terms of marketing revenue contribution, he’s overseen the implementation of a marketing automation system for both customer lifecycle programmes as well as demand generation and scoring.

Chris has spent the last 10 years in IT and software centric marketing management roles, with market leaders such as Ingram Micro Distribution – working alongside global brands such as Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco and Symantec – and heading up the software division for the UK’s largest tech retailer, DSGi (PC World and Curry’s). Chris is passionate about implementing strategic and targeted, technology orientated marketing, ensuring an optimal customer experience from first stage engagement through to conversion and retention.


THE VIEW FROM CONTENT GENERATION
David Northover, Director of Operations
Strand Writing & Design
Strand partners

David is Director of Copywriting at Strand, ensuring crisp, clear copywriting for every purpose – case studies, white papers, blogs, tweets and much more.

Strand copywriters speak with more than 1,000 of your customers, in-depth, every year, teasing out the stories behind new technology implementations. David will share feedback from customer interviews that perhaps you would not normally hear – and how customers are often very keen to act as advocates and how you can capitalise on their enthusiasm.


THE VIEW FROM THE AGENCY ANALYST
Mike Weston, Former CEO
Profusion
Strand partners

Emerging from a background in national newspapers, Mike was an early convert to the world of digital marketing, helping to set up Associated Newspapers’ online business from 1997. Beguiled by the idea that online we could understand audiences so much better than was ever possible offline, he has built his career at the cutting edge of the coming revolution.
Much as Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, Mike believes that the most exciting opportunity today is to help businesses make sense of the ever-growing ocean of data that they now have at their disposal.
For the past four years, Mike has been pursuing this vision as CEO at data science consultancy Profusion. His recent conference talks have included Internet Week New York, Dubai Lynx and Smart IOT London.
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THE VIEW FROM LIVING, BREATHING CUSTOMERS!
Customers who have experienced the sharp end of participating in customer case studies, references and similar promotions will share their no-holds-barred views:

Victor Henken, formerly at John Lewis Partnership