It was three full days of inspirational speakers and new insights into exciting trends in sales and marketing. Speakers included Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tony Blair, Alexander Wang, and companies ranging from the largest tech companies in the world such as Google, Amazon, to new pitching start-ups.

 

This year, Upsales made our way to Portugal as well, to gain inspiration, exhibit, and continue our international expansion by meeting new potential key partners and customers.

 

With up to 24 separate tracks and stages taking place over four large exhibition halls, and with the main stage at the Altice Arena, there was many interesting speakers and talks to be inspired of.

One of the major topics during Web Summit was the power of strong consumer insight, AI, and to customize your marketing efforts.

A prevailing opinion and prediction among many of the speakers is that AI will change the relationship to how we buy things, and therefore also the way we market. To become successful with the use of customer insights there are some vital takeaways, and also pitfalls to look out for. With big data comes big responsibility. Data can empower us to do marketing better, adapt content, and personalization. In an ideal world using data successfully will enable you to close deals faster, get bigger deals and to reduce churn.

But as many of us might have experienced, customization done wrong can jeopardize the brand and be perceived as intruding, which will reflect poorly on your brand.

Customized communication should be about what the consumer wants to hear, not only what you as a company wants to tell. And most importantly, customer insights are nothing but data (nice to have), if not making it into use and incorporating it into your strategy.

Wes Nichols at Upfront Ventures pointed out that there is an ongoing money shift. More money is being transformed from traditional media to digital media. As a result, it makes marketing actions easier to automate and track. Also, it enables companies to start using data not only for backward-looking but also for forward-looking, to predict and decide marketing actions. For marketers, it becomes an exciting battle between creativity and data, and to enable decision engines to help marketers identify precisely where their money should go for the best results and to know how marketers’ efforts are contributing.

Summarizing Web Summit 


Overall, we came back from Web Summit equipped with inspiration, trends, and best practices, but also with the confidence that our solution is in line with what we have ahead of us.

Our focus is to be the revenue engine for fast-growing businesses. By uniting sales and marketing in one system, we will enable you to stay on top of all your revenue with an accurate view of sales and marketing data and provide you with the insights and knowledge to choose the right path forward.

Favorite speakers:

  • The SaaS business model & metrics: Understand the key drivers for success - David Skok at Matrix Partners.
  • Forever Faster - Adam Petrick at PUMA – Talked about how to go from storytelling to StoryDoing.
  • The four growth marketing principles you need to create your unicorn - Larry Kim at MobileMonkey.
  • Will an AI be your next Chief Marketing Officer? - Wes Nichols at Upfront Ventures.

See a similar presentation from Wes Nichols from CogX 2018 here.

See also more about our Business Intelligence solution Upsales Insights, and how you can get an accurate view of your sales and marketing data with Upsales.