The 5th Annual Ascent Conference

Tech can provide some of the most powerful tools when it comes to making the next iteration of the virtual workplace more inclusive. But it won’t happen by chance. Building a diverse, inclusive workforce requires intentionality around getting input across groups or else we risk building a new system that is just as segregated as our current world.

In this roundtable discussion, we will discuss:

● How incorporating DEI makes teams feel more included within a company’s virtual culture.
● Advice for companies looking to consider inclusion as they build new products.
● Insight into how we can ensure we are taking a broad approach that considers how to build inclusivity for groups of all kinds.
● Why inclusivity needs to go beyond basic accessibility and include building processes and systemic behaviors that address inequities by building and maintaining connections, removing barriers, providing resources and creating equitable opportunities.

Attendees can expect a discussion with CROs about what it’s like managing a sales team in a post-Covid world. How do you encourage remote working without losing in-person bonding? What are best practices for offsites and kickoffs? What’s working well and what isn’t? Please join Natan Edelsburg, Muck Rack’s CRO for a lively roundtable. Muck Rack’s Public Relations Management (PRM) platform enables thousands of organizations including Google, International Rescue Committee, Pfizer, Golin, Zapier and Duolingo to build trust and tell their stories through earned media. They recently announced their $180 Million Series A with SGE.

When recessions hit, new deals tend to slow down, sales cycles drag for months on end, and marketing budgets are cut to make ends meet. But shrewd businesses leaders can turn crises into opportunities for rapid, intelligent growth. During this session, we’ll discuss how small companies can thrive in turbulent markets, realign their visions, adapt their product offerings, discover market gaps, and restructure teams for maximum efficiency.

Optimizing demand generation across touchpoints can help businesses maximize campaign ROI, by ensuring every opportunity is converted through hyper-personalization. It can set companies on the path to long-term, sustainable growth by reducing the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).

The roundtable covers best practices in getting conversions from qualified leads by optimizing the demand gen strategies. We will discuss new-age marketing strategies in terms of:

• Steps for optimizing demand gen with custom landing pages, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) and dynamic pricing strategy Etc.
• Revisiting the conversion funnel to identify areas of improvement
• Role of martech in accelerating the conversion opportunities.

While AI delivers massive value in internet companies what do enterprises need to do to get ROI by embedding AI in the right manner? How to match innovation with product market fit when it comes to AI.

In a hyper-competitive world, top-of-the-funnel leads and sales conversions are business critical for high growth businesses. By leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) in data solutions, businesses can improve sales velocity and accelerate revenue growth. AI enables sales conversion by enriching data with relevant data points from highly accurate sources. AI also helps gather intent signals from social media and search engines to reach in-market audiences.

The roundtable discussion will throw some light on how artificial intelligence enhances the B2B data for modern businesses and help them grow.

Some of the key discussion points include:
• AI enabled B2B Data enrichment for marketing campaigns, automated lead nurturing, email marketing, and automatic proposal generation
• Programmatic ML drives real-time B2B Data enrichment for hyper-personalization, target segmentation Etc.
• AI triggered sales acceleration

Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer of Zift Solutions, will walk SaaS companies through the crucial steps needed to take their channel partner program from fledgling to full force. By learning the tried-and-true methods Zift’s international customer base has utilized to launch and grow its partner programs, attendees will walk away from this session with actionable steps for how to attract partners, nurture those relationships, and transform them into consistent ROI for their business.

The growing usage of AI and ML in B2B marketing is helping businesses identify their ideal customer profiles, seamlessly nurture them through the funnel, and consequently convert them into customers in an expedited manner.

In the roundtable discussion, we focus on the role of modern technologies such as AI & ML in reshaping of traditional lead generation methods. The discussion will cover:

• Role of AI & ML in lead qualification, content personalization and multichannel integration
• Leveraging AI and ML to automate marketing operations
• Use intent signals from search engines and social channels to improve lead quality

With thousands of data points spread across accounting systems, CRMs and marketing automation, there is no shortage of data for Revenue Operations teams to analyze. However calculating and tracking metrics for key routines such as forecast and pipeline meetings, talent reviews and quarterly retrospectives can be a challenge.

This session will explore the top KPIs RevOps teams should focus on and the challenges / solutions to effectively monitor them.

Join us for a compelling discussion on the state of onboarding today. Collected in 2022 from HR professionals across the U.S., Click Boarding and Aptitude Research unveil exclusive, hard-hitting data on how to save new hires from the Valley of Uncertainty™.

– A lack of focus on the experience during the key transition from candidate to employee
– Disparity in investments and ownership between recruiting and employee engagement
– Leveraging data, platform strategy and automation to drive meaningful work

One of the fastest and most efficient ways to accelerate revenue growth is to develop, nurture and operationalize your company’s channel sales motions. Join this roundtable to discuss the steps to take to build out a partner sales strategy that can scale in kind with your business growth — and amplify your brand awareness. Together, we’ll cover staffing, partner tiering approaches, incentives, co-marketing initiatives and more.

Join CEO of Recruiter.com, Evan Sohn, as he dives into the world of work covering job market predictions, retention tips, and tools to help hire.

What percent of your employees truly know how they are performing in real time? And how many of your managers are drowning in browser tabs, dashboards, and reports? In today’s hybrid world, companies are struggling to understand performance. Join this roundtable to discuss how empowering teams with realtime transparency into performance insights can transform your managers into coaches and supercharge your sales team’s performance.

Expand and explain the role of the CRO in the realm of Geospatial intelligence. Will include discussion of Defense/Intelligence, Government and Commercial Business. Address the interaction of business operations and government engagement. Conclude with CRO next steps and where the role will be in the next ten years.

It’s harder than ever in today’s hybrid/virtual workplace to maintain a corporate culture. How do you monitor and measure your brand culture?

Imagine you woke up tomorrow, and your business was ten times the size it is today. What would break? It may sound like a hypothetical question, except it really isn’t. In this discussion, we will dive into the three main drivers of scalability issues– People, Processes, and Systems– highlight how to identify these issues, then discover ways to address them.

Prior to the COVID crisis, the world was already competitive. Post crisis, competition has intensified with new business models and additional “clutter” making it even more challenging to stand out from the crowd – even when we have compelling business propositions. In this session, Lonely Entrepreneur founder and CEO will outline what are the top skills and perspectives leaders need to implement in their companies to win in a hyper-competitive world.

With the rise of product-led growth at many SaaS companies, we’ll discuss what PLG is, how it changes the various roles across your company, and marketing’s role in enabling PLG and uncovering revenue opportunities in product-led organizations.

Many marketing professionals and executives struggle with this dynamic. How do you manage short-term versus long-term dividends and focus relative to marketing strategy and revenue outcomes? Join this round table discussion to discover ways in which you can find success in the short and long-term.

What has international expansion got to do with cooking a wonderful meal? Albert Vazquez-Agusti is the California-based Sway Ventures Partner that grew up in Barcelona, and ran European businesses before moving to the US. In Barcelona, one eats well on the restaurant terraces and also cooks well at home. The special ingredients are time, creativity and the best local ingredients . . . this session will cover why these are also important in international expansion especially for a US-base company, which targets Europe first.

The pandemic shifted so many trends in talent – it accelerated predictions about the future of work, caused a “great resignation” and re-shuffling, and flipped the table back and forth between an employer and an employee market. What have we learned and how are we thinking about the future?

Today’s sales leaders and their organizations have a mandate to hit their targets with less budget and headcount than expected to drive that growth. Revenue organizations must become more efficient and productive to deliver the committed results with less resources. Join this roundtable to discuss the 5 most proven methods to increase sales rep productivity, improve sales execution efficiency, and reduce forecast risk in difficult economic circumstances.

In this roundtable, we explore why diverse spaces matter when it comes to talent, and how sport and technology can learn from one another when it comes to developing more diverse and inclusive outcomes which ultimately transform into results!

Category creation has been around since the dawn of business to enable organizations to innovate, differentiate from the competition, drive financial results, improve employee drive, and so much more, but the successful application of category creation has never been more defined than it is today. During this roundtable, we will discuss the evolution of category creation, how today’s leaders are connecting the dots between category and strategic value, and how to apply modern methodologies to be your own category leader.

How would you operate if you had instant access to information about your customers, your operations, workforce and suppliers? What if you could more accurately predict and adapt to shifting markets and consumers all at the speed your business demands? Growth in mobile, artificial intelligence, edge and analytics are bringing the world of real-time to your business. How could real-time accelerate your growth and reshape how you connect with your customers?

Customers and investors have an increasingly higher bar for evaluating solutions that claim to use AI/ML. We will discuss the scenarios, metrics, and pitfalls that seperate the companies that successfully deliver solutions that transform their customers business.

Join us as we discuss the pros and cons of taking capital versus self-funding, and how to best prepare and manage your organization for either path.

This presentation will cover best practices for navigating through major changes within the sales and client success functions within any high-growth business. While change is normal, it isn’t easy for employees, managers, or leaders within any business. The discussion will cover the typical challenges individuals go through as they face change. It will cover pitfalls and how a leader can best position themselves as a support mechanism for their teams as they drive through the cycle of the different stages associated with change.

RevOps function has been on the rise in the past couple of years stirring the waters of more traditional Marketing and Sales operations. How should marketing, sales and revenue leaders structure their operations teams to ensure alignment, seamless collaboration and focus on growth.

How to evaluate and maintain a WTMD/WDS that will comply to government standard NIJ 0601.02 which will help defend your company against lawsuits like a 20 million dollar wrongful death incident.

A discussion around hacking growth related choices to maintain brand positioning, operational workflows and other roadblocks when scaling.

Growth is not about the success of a single department. It’s about focusing all teams across the entire business on outcomes that matter. Selling is about more than sales. Building is about more than engineering. In this practical session, we’ll discuss how to unite teams – regardless of function – and the positive impact it provides to scaling businesses.

Raise capital from your customers, ecosystem partners, and way more. Describe your ideal and your most likely investors–and why they fit that persona. Target them with creative communications across media. Convert your investors into customers Accomplish this all at scale. Raising capital is never easy, and some processes have way better long-term benefits. Come and learn some of the criteria to see if your raise fits equity crowdfunding, some pointers to get started and a few “inside baseball” tips as well.

Learn how to increase cross-discipline exposure, broaden team member perspective, and realize innovation—all from the perspective of an 18-year-old Enterprise Marketing Agency.Paxton Gray

What should you prioritize when marketing your startup? How do you get in front of brands and agencies to secure ad budgets? What kinds of marketing hires should you look for next, and how can you find them? Come with all your marketing questions and challenges, and we’ll learn from each other so you can focus on what should be most effective for your business.

It’s critical that we, as investors, take responsibility for the direction of innovation and technology rather than merely try to manage a portfolio. And while many of us talk extensively about this responsibility, few are able to live up to its requirements. Although it maybe easy to blame moral character, or incentive structures for such failings, I believe we should blame our intelligence and moral imagination. If only we had a model to deliver the kind of ethical and compassionate impact we all too readily ascribe to oursleves and our decisions. Innovation Ethics is such a model, which asks the investor to answer three simple questions: 1) what counts as innovation?; 2) who should be innovating?; and 3) how should we value innovations? I argue that answering these questions not only inspire the kind of moral imagination we need to cultivate in the investor community, but they also allow us to hold each other accountable in unique ways not afforded by other, abstract concepts such as CSR, ESG, and Effective Altruism.

We’ve entered a new world of work. Compliance-based people practices no longer cut it if you want to achieve sustainable success as a business. It’s time for a new mindset. It’s time to become a people-first company. Join Donald Knight, Chief People Officer at Greenhouse, for this roundtable discussion on how businesses can become talent powerhouses by fostering cultures and values that put their people first and unlock their potential at work. Join your peers to delve into specific actions you can take to build a competitive hiring and people strategy that is both equitable and human-centric.

The pandemic changed how America worked almost overnight. People left the office. Zoom and Google Meet replaced the conference room. And…people began to employ digital tools to a greater degree than they ever had before. More pdfs are being created. More documents are being emailed. More e-signature ink is flowing from the digital pen. But this way of working is far from the promise of digital transformation. People are employing digital technologies and they’re realizing some efficiencies – but, they’re not really changing the way they work.

Dive deep into the S&M Funnel 2.0. Discuss org design, KPIs and more from demand generation through customer adoption and growth.

How to adapt your management style to each unique situation or task to meet the needs of the team or team members.

Unpopular opinion – start ignoring your top performers more. The highly motivated seller who always tops the leaderboard and the super enthusiastic marketer who nails every project are not the team members who need your attention – so how do you motivate and engage the middle pack and tackle that untapped resource? Join this roundtable to discuss how you can rally around your middle performers to increase the productivity of your full team.

Keeping your sellers motivated and engaged takes more than your traditional leaderboard and is even harder to cultivate in all remote or hybrid environments. A healthy sales culture helps your team own the process, have autonomy in their own decisions, and achieve (or surpass) their goals. Join this roundtable to discuss tactics which can be employed to build a cohesive and motivational sales culture

What to do when the economy goes into crisis mode? Tactics and strategies on how to navigate tough times and emerge stronger than before.

The internet works with the fundamentals of its architecture. Master the architecture and you can help prevent most attacks. In this session we will go over DNS and how you can use it to safe guard your organization from desktop to mobile devices including 5G on an iPhone.

Attendees can expect a discussion with CMOs and Marketing VPs about the optimal ways to build a lead generation foundation from scratch. In this roundtable we will discuss: – Tips to develop a content library to fuel future campaigns – The optimal channels to stand up and pass up when building your marketing engine – Deploying timely marketing campaigns during all stages of your sales funnel – Putting in place the appropriate KPIs to track and maximize ROI for all deployed channels

Many companies – entrepreneurs are looking for ways to improve their business but are not aware of challenges faced and how to handle them. This discussion is to bring awareness of those and also how to overcome them?

The onset of Covid changed how we market and sell in dramatic ways. Gone are the days of relying on traditional media and sales techniques to find and win business. To that end, we will discuss: – Putting in place the appropriate marketing tech stack to compete and win in today’s remote world – Leveraging digital asset management platforms to optimize your online sales efforts – Leveraging the latest tools and platforms to build 1:1 relationships with your prospects and buyers.

Oftentimes companies purchase the latest technology and tools but are not leveraging them to their fullest. In this roundtable we will discuss the bare minimum tech stack SaaS companies can get away with as well as provide practical tips to get the most out of your CRM, website, email, ABM campaigns and cold outreach efforts.

In the last 6 months, the game has completely changed. Tightening funding and market means: it’s no longer a valuation chase for early stage founders. It’s a value game now. But, which specific value game should you be focusing on and how do you maximize returns from those games? The acquisition volume game? The hyper-target game? The referral game? The wait-and-see game?

Innovation as a service has a strategic impact on your organization. To be sure that you are on track helps this round table discussion. Intetics Inc. founder and CEO Boris Kontsevoi will outline the current innovation setup: processes, org structure, its elements: Digital Transformation, Automation, BPM, Software, Data, Analytics/AI, CoEsresources (infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity), talent availability, and team formation, and will explain if it can be outsourced.

– The pandemic has changed the game – opportunities for individuals and companies have grown exponentially
– Those that act and recognize this change have a massive opportunity to scale – efficiently & effectively
– Those that don’t will be left behind and will face serious challenges that will impact their entire business.
– ‘How’ can you take advantage of this exciting new opportunity?

It’s no secret that employee retention rate shows how the company takes care of its team. It is a great indicator of the company’s stability and ability to find personnel that become loyal. High employee retention rate is also a perfect way to save expenses on the recruitment process.

Seven of the nine SaaS IPOs which had the best net retention over the past few years employed usage-based pricing models, companies including Slack, Snowflake and Elastic, according to “The 2021 State of Usage-based Pricing Report” by venture capital firm OpenView Venture Partners. Let’s focus on how to scale your business by leveraging usage-based pricing models. The discussion will center around how to model costs, determine product value, transforming your GTM motions, as well best practices for implementing and transitioning to usage based pricing.