As an agency that helps early-stage companies generate leads, our bread and butter is focusing on lean strategies that will produce quantifiable results in leads and pipeline.
Now, we’re sponsoring our first event: The Obility B2B: Marketing Loves Sales conference on Monday, Oct. 7th, 2019.
Given our focus on marketing, sales, and social media, this conference is perfect for us.
So why are we sponsoring an event, and why are we sponsoring it now?
Why event sponsorship? Why now?
We’ve been in business for almost two and a half years, made it to seven figures in ARR, and grown our team to 15+ people. Up until now, we’ve grown without any paid ads, growing entirely through organic content, LinkedIn, outbound sales, and referrals.
Outbound sales is all about the short term. You need pipeline, and you need it now. Inbound marketing and SEO is all about playing the long game. If you need pipeline today, you should have started your content marketing strategy six months ago.
Events can be both long and short-term strategies. For many companies, events, conferences, and tradeshows are a direct source of leads. Send your sales team to a tradeshow, set up a booth, and showcase your product. For tech and software companies that are highly differentiated, this can be a fantastic and consistent source of leads.
At the same time, events are a place to build your brand and establish yourself as a presence in your industry. Dreamforce, SaaStr, INBOUND, TOPO, The Sales Development Conference; companies sponsoring these events aren’t fly-by-night shops that are satisfied with the status quo. They are making themselves known and setting the stage to make sure their brand is recognized as a player in their industry.
As an agency that runs lead generation, social, and content programs for startups our services are highly customized to each company we work with. Having built go-to-market plans for 70+ companies in the last couple years we understand exactly when our strategies will work and when they won’t.
Because of that, our focus is on building our brand, evangelizing our expertise, and establishing trust within our market. To a large extent, this has been the guiding light of our LinkedIn strategy which has resulted in close to 40 percent of our new business over the last couple years.
Event sponsorship is just the next phase in this evolution, a part of the larger strategy of establishing ourselves as a powerful force in the sales and marketing space.
Why sponsor THIS event?
Obility’s aim with the Marketing Loves Sales Conference is to “bring together sales and marketing teams to share key learnings and explore industry expansion.”
These days, B2B growth leaders are realizing that their sales and marketing teams need to be more aligned than ever. Nowhere is this more true than in the social world of LinkedIn where some of the best strategies involve producing content for your LinkedIn network.
If you’re a founder or growth leader producing content on your LinkedIn and using that to start social selling conversations with prospects, is that sales, or is it marketing? Does it count as inbound or outbound? The truth is, it doesn’t really matter what you call it. What matters — are results.
Sales and marketing teams both hold different pieces of the social puzzle. Sales knows how to build personal 1:1 relationships with prospects. Marketing knows how to tell stories. Sales talks directly to the market every day. Marketing has access to analytics to understand market behavior.
Companies can no longer build out siloed teams and expect results. The biggest challenge we see in both the sales and marketing worlds is that these teams aren’t learning from each other as they should. That’s why we’re sponsoring this event. We want to help bridge the knowledge gap so companies stop isolating their growth teams, and starting sharing learnings.
We’re also passionate about the sales and marketing community. With a big part of our team based in Portland, we’ve seen how Obility has done a fantastic job cultivating a healthy, vibrant sales and marketing community here, with a focus on people and relationships and not just transactions. As a brand, this conference is the perfect place for us to continue to build valuable relationships and community by sharing sales and marketing knowledge and best practices.
Plus, our CEO, Alex Boyd will be speaking at the conference about social selling. He’ll be diving into all of the same LinkedIn selling strategies we’ve used to grow our agency via LinkedIn over the last couple years.
When and where
The Obility B2B: Marketing Loves Sales conference takes place Oct. 7th, 2019 at The Armory in Portland. We’d love to have you there! If you catch this post before then, you can get a 20 percent discount on a ticket by clicking here.
