Keynote speakers

Lorraine Stone, Head of B2B Marketing, O2
Lorraine is responsible for marketing planning, propositions, direct customer contact, customer satisfaction, retention and brand delivery targets for O2's activities in the business market. By using expertise to work with customers to make sure businesses have joined up communications, O2 enables their business customers to concentrate on achieving their business goals.

Professor Merlin Stone
Merlin is one of the UK's top specialists in managing customers. His work covers key account management, sales and marketing management and delivery, customer relationship management (in particular strategies and tactics for cost-effectively attracting, retaining and developing customers of all types - from key accounts to consumers), database marketing, call/contact centre management and customer service.

His experience covers many sectors, including arts and culture, automotive, charities and other not for profit organisations, energy, financial services, information and telecommunications technology and services, pharmaceutical, public sector, retailing, travel and transport and utilities.

He is Research Director at WCL, specialists in change management and customer, citizen and stakeholder management. In this role he provides consulting, training, public speaking, public relations, research, expert witness, coaching and mentoring services. His current research focuses on customer retention, CRM in the public sector, Web 2.0 in CRM, the impact of smart metering on CRM in utilities and governance of systems projects.

He is author or co-author of many articles and thirty books on customer management. The UK's Chartered Institute of Marketing listed him in 2003 as one of the world's top 50 marketing thinkers, he was nominated as one of the 20 most influential people in the direct marketing industry in a Precision Marketing readership poll in 2003, while NOP World nominated him in 2004 as one of 100 most influential individuals for their input and influence on the development and growth of e-commerce and the internet in the UK over the previous 10 years.

He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and an Honorary Life Fellow of the UK's Institute of Direct Marketing. He is also on the editorial advisory boards of several academic journals and writes for several trade publications.

He has a first class honours degree and doctorate in economics from Sussex University, UK. In parallel to his business career, he has also pursued a full academic career. He has held senior academic posts at various universities. He is now a part-time professor at Bristol Business School and a visiting professor at De Montfort, Oxford Brookes and Portsmouth Universities.

Speakers

Will Schnabel, Vice President and General Manager, International Markets, Silverpop
William Schnabel is responsible for overseeing Silverpop's international operations and expansion strategy across Europe and Asia. Previously, Schnabel was responsible for overall operations and product direction of Silverpop's Engage B2B solution (formerly Vtrenz), an industry-leading demand generation and lead management technology.

Prior to Silverpop's acquisition of Vtrenz in 2007, Schnabel served as its president and CEO, where he guided the company's growth as an innovative thought leader in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and marketing automation industries.

Prior to Vtrenz, Schnabel served in an executive capacity at Accenture, a leading management-consulting firm, where he provided strategic guidance to global 500 organizations on the application and implementation of advanced business technologies. Schnabel is a frequent columnist and speaker on the topics of B2B Engagement Marketing strategies, relationship management technologies, and the influence of SaaS-based solutions on optimizing business performance.

David Beard, Pre-Sales Manager and CRM Evangelist Sage CRM
As Pre-Sales Manager for the Enterprise Division, David is responsible for ensuring that our sales efforts are backed up with quality support in all marketing and selling activities.

During his time at Sage David has also worked with our Business Partners, developing their CRM go to market strategy, as well as evangelising the CRM message to the world, and building the Sage brand beyond accounting software. David was an initial member of the UK team for a start up CRM company called eWare. The company became part of the Sage group, with the product morphing into Sage CRM.

Previously, David's career has spanned software development, project management, pre-sales and business development. He's worked for a range of very different companies both in the UK and Australia and New Zealand.

David is a voracious consumer of all things anthropological. He's fascinated to learn why people do the things they do, and how personality types influence team dynamics. In the CRM world, its people that make projects succeed or fail, so understanding more about them is vital.

Pamela Edmond, Professional Services Director, Volume Group
With over 15 years of marketing and brand experience within B2B sectors, Pamela Edmond brings a unique perspective to B2B channels, communications and customer engagement programmes. Pam began her career in exhibitions, with success in managing construction and safety trade shows in the former Soviet States during the early 1990s.  Since then Pam has worked in a variety of roles, including a PR role with the DMA and a category management role with Australia's leading industrial goods distributor and the country's largest retailer, Wesfarmers.  A key part of her career spans 8 years with the former BOC Group in a variety of roles and in different geographies.

Pam was instrumental in the creation of The Linde Group, after the BOC acquisition, where as Global Brand Development Manager she was able to leverage her natural communications style, a passion for B2B brand value and her understanding of both local and globalised industrial and engineering verticals. Today Pam leads the development of engagement solutions for Volume clients, across stakeholders, staff and customer groups.

Katie Colbourne, Marketing & Social Media Analyst, Volume Group
Katie advises clients on how to integrate complex social media and reputation planning into their marketing strategy, through the use of extensive background media research and knowledge of emerging media. Katie's social media strategies not only support demand generation, they can also act as drivers for brand association and awareness, by tackling the growing mass of user-generated-comment and helping clients to develop their approach and response to a variety of business issues.

Drew Nicholson, Joint MD, DNX
Drew's marketing career kicked off at Tesco plc where he worked as a Marketing Executive responsible for the company's local & regional advertising and promotions. Switching over to the agency side at Bates, he became their youngest ever Associate Director, contributing to brand strategies as well as advertising for brands such as Duracell, Heinz, Ski, London Boat Show and the Tea Council. This was followed by his move to Duckworth Finn Grubb Waters where he was appointed as a Board Director, and whilst at DFGW worked on Financial Services (Liverpool Victoria), IT (Energis Toshiba), Retail (Pizza Hut) and Motor (Duckhams).

In 1995, Drew moved into sponsorship when he established Price Nicholson, a sponsorship marketing agency but in 1997 broke away to set up DNA, a marketing consultancy. It was here that Drew began to provide a more integrated offering to technology clients including Sun Microsystems, Oracle and the Horizon Technology Group. After having partnered with them on a number of projects, DNA merged with X-ponential to form DNX in June 2000.

Scot McKee, Managing Director, Birddog
An agency professional from birth, McKee is a legend in his own lunch hour. Over 25 years of marketing experience in France, the USA and the UK has turned this mild-mannered wallflower into an opinionated and borderline psychotic champion of creative brand communications.

Managing Director of Birddog, the multi-award winning, top 20 B2B agency, McKee has led global brand strategies and pioneered creative change in B2B organisations. His role is to drag, cajole, entice and coerce marketing professionals kicking and screaming into new ways of thinking and communicating brand value.

A controversial speaker, he has addressed marketing conferences including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Johnson & Johnson, GeoPost and the IDMF. McKee was Chairman of the B2B Marketing Forum, is a columnist in B2B Marketing and a regular contributor in the business press.

James Hanson, Managing Director, Noiseworks
James started his marketing career doing consumer PR for an international car rally before migrating into the world of technology marketing and PR.

His background is a broad mix of agency and in-house having spent several years as the Enterprise PR manager for HP.

With 15 years experience in B2B technology and more latterly as managing director of full service marketing agency, Noiseworks, James has worked across virtually every IT sector and for many of the major technology brands from the big blue chips like IBM, Sun, Capgemini and Microsoft through to emerging UK start-ups.

James is a passionate believer in integrated Influencer Marketing and sales-driven PR and has spent the last three years building world-class propositions around both at Noiseworks.