With the B2B Marketing Exchange just around the corner, we wanted to spotlight some of the industry powerhouses taking the stage in Scottsdale next month.
To kick things off, we asked one of the newest additions to our B2BMX community, Andrea Fryrear, to give us a sneak peek into her presentation on agile marketing and why it’s an important model for today’s marketers.
Fryrear is the President and Lead Trainer at AgileSherpas, an agile marketing coach, keynote speaker and author. Learn more about her and the company below!
B2BMX: Tell us about AgileSherpas and how you are working with marketing teams?
Andrea Fryrear: AgileSherpas is pretty unique because we’re an Agile coaching and training organization focused exclusively on serving marketers. We help teams navigate the complex process of Agile transformation in all its phases, from initial education to rolling out an Agile practice and all the way through advanced process improvement.
B2BMX: For folks that are newer to Agile Marketing, can you talk about why it has become an important model? What are some of the business realities and challenges marketers are facing that are driving the change?
AF: There are three big drivers pushing marketing towards agility: complexity of marketing operations, sophistication of audiences and speed of market evolution. Marketers have all this technology to help us, but if we try to shoehorn new tools into an old process, we miss out on all the benefits martech has to offer. At the same time, we have audiences that are expecting personalization at a highly granular level, which requires us to get past generic campaigns that we planned a year ago. And then there’s the nonstop rate of change; new channels, new competitors and a 24-hour news cycle mean that marketers have to be adaptive like never before.
All of these factors are forcing marketers to change their process, and Agile marketing offers a model to deal with these challenges and more.
B2BMX: What are the top benefits of Agile Marketing in the B2B marketplace?
AF: My favorite outcomes aren’t related to efficiency or productivity, even though both of those happen when you transition to Agile. The top benefits are often less tangible and more unexpected: innovation and creativity.
We get those benefits because Agile helps marketers get out of crisis mode. It allows us the mental space we need to think critically about challenges and get back in touch with our audiences. B2B marketing can’t be generic and boring anymore if we want to have an impact. Agile marketing offers a systematic way to create exceptional experiences.
B2BMX: What real actionable takeaways can attendees expect from your session at B2BMX?
AF: I want people to feel comfortable enough to start using Agile the day after they’re at my session. I’ve got a four-step kick start that’s designed to help marketing teams get started in hours — not days — so you can figure out if this is going to work for you really quickly.
Of course, that means you need to understand what Agile in marketing really is, so we’ll start with that basic information before we get our hands dirty and start talking tactics.
B2BMX: Is this your first time at #B2BMX? What are you looking forward to the most about the event? If you’ve attended in the past, what is one takeaway or experience you will never forget?
AF: This is my first B2BMX, and I’m really excited because it comes highly recommended by other speakers that I know. I’m a B2B marketer myself, so I love speaking at events where I can actually learn, too! I’m psyched to check out the sessions and share war stories with other folks in B2B.
There’s still time to grab your ticket to the place to be for B2B. Register here.
