Last week I spent two jam-packed days at the B2B Marketing Leaders Forum APAC, held in Sydney. It was fantastic to watch so many inspiring talks, reconnect with familiar faces and meet new ones.
Set against a beautiful backdrop overlooking the Harbour Bridge, the forum brought together leaders, marketing and sales teams from across the Sydney B2B community. This was the 11th annual event and my first time attending, and it certainly lived up to the hype. The two days were focused on Growth and AI within Marketing, and the agenda was packed with back-to-back sessions, full of ambitious, curious minds and genuinely engaging conversations.
What was stark was just how clearly B2B marketing is being reshaped. There is a growing pressure not just to do more, but to operate differently. It is pushing us to relook at the fundamentals, from how we structure marketing teams to how we demonstrate value, become more commercially accountable, more creatively distinctive and more intentional in how we show up.
However, despite all the change and unknown we’re facing, I came away feeling energised. Not just by the ideas shared on stage, but by the opportunity to play a role in helping clients navigate this shift and to keep learning alongside them as it unfolds. And across countless conversations, it was clear that everyone is navigating similar challenges. There is a real sense that, while the answers are not always clear yet, we are working through them together.
Below are a few themes that stood out to me across the event that I’ve been reflecting on since.
AI was, unsurprisingly, everywhere across both days. Yes, we still spoke about creating ‘Agents’ for experimentation, but it felt as through the conversation had shifted to real adoption, real impact, and in most cases, real pressure to keep up.
Thomas Barta (CEO, Marketing Leadership Institute) touched on this on day one, talking about how the nature of the ‘knowledge economy’ is changing with the introduction of AI. For a long time, much of an organisation’s differentiation has come from its knowledge, expertise and skill set – and marketing has traditionally been built around communicating that.
But increasingly, knowledge itself is no longer scarce. People can access answers, and in some cases solutions to complex challenges, in a matter of seconds through AI.
Which raises an important question: If everyone has access to the same knowledge, what’s your differentiator?
The answer to this seemed to be focused on three things: the need to have better judgement, sharper prioritisation and stronger orchestration. Wonderfully articulated by Gemma Davies, Global Head of Pipeline Excellence at ServiceNow, “Marketers need to stop using AI to generate ‘more’ and instead use it to govern existing pipeline”.
In summary, AI isn’t replacing marketing but it is forcing a reset in where marketing teams create value.
2) Be brave and be bold
And that differentiation could come in the form of creativity.
Simone Burtnett, Chief Member Experience Officer at Australia Retirement Trust, ran a great session that really proved the value of bold and differentiated creative marketing, using the lovable Super(annuation) Monster, Artie, to bring the point to life (for the non-Aussies imagine people riding around on a giant blue monster). Artie became far more than a campaign asset. The mascot used humour and emotional connection to capture hearts of the audience, creating a long-term brand platform as opposed to an ad-hoc moment. An excellent example of how distinctive creative can build both memorability and emotional resonance over time.
With the underlying tension that AI is accelerating output yet increasing ‘sameness’, it’s more important than ever to move beyond the ‘safe’ options, and invest in the ideas that will cut through. AI can be used to scale production fast, but it can’t create original ideas. Thomas Barta talked to statistics comparing AI and Human outputs, where AI resulted in 40% greater execution but scored 41% less in creativity. Ultimately, AI needs a layer of human judgement and decision making.
And then of course there’s making sure you’re targeting the right people across the right channels. A great point made by Andrew Matthews, Director APJ Growth Marketing at CrowdStrike, is that we need to analyse the 20% (customers) that make up your 80% (revenue). Focusing on those buying groups, targeting them with stand-out creative that speaks to their challenges, across channels they engage with will be where the best outcomes lie.
And that brings me onto my next theme…
‘The funnel is dead’ definitely had its moment across the event with the fifth mention prompting a few eye rolls from the audience.
A takeaway that came up across multiple sessions was that because of AI, buyers can go from top to bottom of the funnel in just a matter of clicks. When you combine that with what we know about complex buying groups, it becomes clear that, journeys aren’t neat, decisions aren’t sequential and marketing certainly doesn’t control the process.
One of my favourite panels was on day 1, under the topic of ‘unlocking’ growth, with Kelly Ryan, Global Chief Brand Officer at TCS, Sara Elgoweiny, Head of Marketing ANZ at Westpac, and Jen McCarthy, Head of Marketing ANZ at Elastic. These absolute powerhouses in B2B had an engaging discussion around how to achieve sustainable growth with tighter budgets and higher scrutiny, all whilst shifting mindset from a funnel-based journey to a full-life cycle growth system.
Lots of thought-provoking points were raised during this panel, such as ‘are existing customers actually choosing you as number one?’, ‘if teams are working incredibly hard but customers still can’t articulate your differentiation, then something isn’t aligned’ and ‘if you’re stuck, always go back and ask yourself, what is your chief marketing objective?’. These all prompted great conversation around truly understanding your audience (and all personas in the buying group), focusing on creating customer brand experiences throughout the life cycle and which metrics to focus on (performance vs. preference).
Towards the end of the panel, an interesting question was posed to each of them, ‘what would you invest in if you had 25% extra budget?’, and the answers were surprisingly varied. One focused on investing into digital marketing tactics to ensure your brand is being pushed across the lifecycle, another focused more on hiring people (to ensure a human-led approach) and building an in-house studio for regular podcast creation, and finally, another focusing on boosting creativity to enhance the brand experience. To me, this only solidified the fact that context is everything – every organisation is on its own journey, and it is not a one-size fits all response to AI adoption.
Now, speaking of budgets… the conversation that I expected to come up was the age old ‘Sales and Marketing need to be more aligned’… but what I didn’t anticipate was so much discussion around bringing your finance team into the mix.
We all know how important the role of Finance are in marketing decisions, but it felt like this now has a whole new focus. Annette Dal Pra, CFO at Boral, put it plainly, “Finance write the script”, and they have the visibility across a lot more functions than most.
At the start of day 2, Andrew Knott, CEO of efm Logistics (former CMO: JPMorgan Chase NY, NAB Bank, McDonalds, Salesforce), made it clear that CMO’s need to speak the commercial language and own a number – and this is vital to get a seat at the table.
In a panel with Kelly Ryan (TCS), Kelly was passionate about bringing CFOs into your brand activations – let them be part of the customer experience to connect the emotion and show them what impact the money is having on the brand. Another seemingly obvious but often forgotten point was made by Sara Elgoweiny (Westpac), in that you need to understand how your organisation makes money first, to be able to have productive commercial conversations.
Don’t get me wrong, the ‘Sales vs Marketing’ conversation was still very present, however this certainly put greater emphasis on the budget pressures we’re facing and how marketing need to adapt to this.
A lot of great themes and insights across the 2 days, but in summary my key takeaways were:
To navigate what’s next, Marketing needs to be:
More commercially fluent
More intentional in where we focus
Braver in how we show up creatively
Of course, there is no single blueprint for this. What works for one organisation will not necessarily work for another, especially when it comes to AI adoption and how teams are structured. Context matters more than ever.
At tmp, we’re already partnering with clients on this journey, from shaping AI adoption strategies to building more distinctive creative platforms and designing marketing systems that drive real commercial impact.
This is something we’re actively exploring as a business too. Our Chief Creative Officer, Dylan, recently shared a perspective in Executive Magazine on the importance of creative leadership, the role of emotion in B2B marketing, and why coherence matters more than ever in a complex market - which closely aligns with many of the themes coming out of the forum.
You can read Dylan’s article here:
If any of these themes resonate, it’s a conversation we’re always happy to have.
A special thanks to Emma Roborg, Founder of the B2B Marketing Leaders Forum for building this community.