The Congress was opened by Stephane Antiga, coach of world champion Poland men’s national volleyball team. Naturally, he has never used the Marketing Automation system, but they do have something in common. In fact, the keynote of each and all the speeches was – striving for victory.
Here are the main thoughts that we could hear from the stage during the congress:

• The most important thing is overcoming problems and adaptation – said Stephane Antiga, for whom the five months of preparing the players for the Championship was a series of making crucial decisions

• Buiness is like surfing – you start easy, on the largest board, then you take a smaller board and hit a larger wave. Sometimes waves are very short, so the key is to choose the right one or you need to create your own crest – the market

• You create an advantage and power in business by acquiring knowledge (Rafał Brzoska also added here environment identification) and this is where the success of MA lies

• It’s all about revenue! The main topic in MA is neither trade nor marketing – it’s the revenue

• Communication should be customized (so the customer does not feel the number of messages is increasing) and don’t be mechanical (remember about humor!)

• Top performers allocate 50 percent of their time and budgets to various campaigns (even if the customer does not use it now, they try with another one!), integrate CRM and MA, and… continue to make profit out of printed publications

• The hard relation of marketing and sales – when the marketing think they’re doing great job, the sales think it’s quite the contrary – the leads delivered are of little value. The remedy for often unsuccessful cooperation between those two has been offered by, among others,   Grzegorz Urban (deputy director PricewaterhouseCoopers): sales and marketing should share certain areas, e.g. one sales funnel, common data sources, agreed level of cooperation (what a lead should look like?), common sales plans – but should have different competences. Ian Michiels (key analyst for MA market) added that marketers need to have access to the sales’ information about customers (what does the customer buy?)
• the company should focus on developing an accurate customer profile, and if possible reaching with message directly to one particular consumer

• In B2B we often mistakenly identify the customer with the company. Meanwhile, one company is various people, so we vary the message according to their position and character

• How to change cookies into a customer in e-commerce? Classic MA has a problem with a large percentage of not monitored traffic on website. In the case of a „cookie” we don’t have its address and we can only communicate with it while it is on the website. Yves Rocher monitors all the website traffic and obtains leads through banners and pop-ups (DIV on each site) with targeted offer (based on the user’s recommendations and interests) and… discounts – the company gets the visitor’s data when that person places an order (and they know the data is real!)

• Market trends: services are customized instead of mass-produced, goods and resources are not owned but hired, mobile commerce is growing, cell phones change the way we buy (marketplaces, apps [Zara’s scanning product code with a phone so the store can send us another one], start-ups [e.g. Uber])

• Business models 3.0: marketplace or brand, with no agents

• New technologies in trade: digital payment, social CRM, contextual computing, sensors, delivery 2.0, 3D print, mass customizing, distributed POS (point of sale)