This year was my 5th Summit and I'm always envious of people that manage to pick the best sessions to attend. The good news is that everything is recorded. The hard part is finding the time after we come back to dedicate to listening to the recordings. For our last Marketo User Group meeting here in Silicon Valley, I listened to the top 8 sessions and summarized them for our local group as determined by attendance and rating. Attached is the slide deck for your enjoyment. Here's a brief summary of each of these sessions, who would benefit, key takeaways, etc. Feel free to use the slide deck to present internally or help justify next year's trip to Summit.
Session 1
7 Human behavior Hacks that Increase Engagement and Response
Nancy Harhut
Audience: Marketing Practitioners
This session really gets into the human behavioral science realm of marketing. It gave really great ideas on things to try for optimization on conversion rates, A/B testing, response to emails and landing pages. If you want to geek out about what works for your audience and the science behind how people respond to digital assets, then this is a great talk to listen to.
Session 2:
Analytics that Matter: The Right Reports For Every Step of the Buyer's Journey
Jessica Kao
Audience: Marketing Execs, Marketing Practitioners
We have so much data at our finger tips that too often we can get stuck in analysis paralysis. There are so many reports that we can generate, which ones do I even start with? The fundamental principles that should guide what reports to be looking at for each stage of the funnel and how to prioritize. Here's a hint: Reports should lead to an action. For those that want to get a handle around attribution and how Marketo calculates it, what it all means, and what questions are answered by First Touch and Multi-touch, this is the talk for you. Think that reporting is out of reach because your instance isn't ready? There are some quick wins that are covered about what you can do immediately to understand what is happening in your instance today.
Session 3:
Look Sharp! Data Visualization for Marketing Ninjas
Martin Kihn
Audience: Anyone who needs to make a dashboard of reports
At some point, we all have to make a dashboard of reports whether it's in SFDC, your CRM, Marketo, in PPT, etc. But we never really think about there might be a method other than slapping a whole bunch of charts and graphs. Usually its the last thing on our mind. This was the first time I had heard a talk about choosing different graphs or charts for displaying different types of data. It makes complete sense that data visualization is in a way story telling and some thought should be invested into how we tell the story and not just what we are showing.
Session 4:
Shake the Funk! The Data Behind Deliverability & How to Stay Clean
Jacob Hansen, Matt Rushing
Audience: Marketing Ops, Keeper of the Marketo database
If you send out emails and care about email deliverability (which you should), then this talk is worth your while. It goes into explaining what contributes to your sender reputation, how you monitor it, what you should do, and some basic technical concepts explained at a level for even the non techies.
Session 5:
How to Build a Killer Content Marketing Strategy
Amanda Todorovich
Audience: Content Marketers, anyone producing content that feels like they are staring up at an impossible mountain
The speaker was Content Marketing Institute Marketer of the Year 2016. It's a great success story from Cleveland Clinic about their journey. Prepare to be inspired.
Session 6:
Creating and Managing a Lead Lifecycle in Marketo That Will Make Your Sales Team Happy
Steve Susina
Audience: Owner of the Lead Lifecycle, Marketing Operations, Marketing Practioner
This is the perfect how to, recipe/protocol on how to go about building your life cycle. Just as important to actually building it in Marketo, is also involving the stake holders like sales, what meetings to have, what issues need to be discussed and agreed upon to ensure success as well as how to avoid the common pitfalls. If you are wanting to build out a lead life cycle in your organization, than this is on your must watch list.
Session 7:
Be the Exception! How Brilliant Marketers Get Bigger Results by Doing it Their Way
Jay Acunzo
Audience: Anyone looking to be inspired
It's talks like this one is why I love summit. I always walk away inspired. Its a high energy talk that keeps you engaged the whole time about how to not be ordinary. So, if you are staring out the window stuck at work on a sunny summer day, give this a listen. It might perk you right up.
Session 8:
Forrester Reveals the 7 Key Steps to Customer-Obsessed B2B Marketing
Lori Wizdo
Audience: Marketing Executives, Marketing Practitioners
At first, I thought this was going to be about Customer Marketing, ie marketing to people that were already customers. In actuality, it's about marketing to both prospects and customers but putting the customer persona, ie the person you are trying to sell to first. Perhaps I was the only one that made that mistake and now I have admitted to all of you. I hope you don't think any less of me. 
Anyway, this is one of those talks that makes you think, question how you are doing things now and how to fundamentally change the way you are marketing. You have to wield enough power in your organization to actually make these cultural or mindset changes. Or if you are a marketing practitioner its great food for thought for later on down the road when you are running the show.
Bonus Session:
How to Maximize your Value – Results from the 2017 Marketo Compensation Survey
Jason Seeba and Inga Romanoff
Every year they put together the Marketo Compensation Survey and review the results at Summit. Once this is out, I will post it here for everyone. This is a must have if you are using Marketo, which presumably you are if you have made it this far down the post. People have used this to negotiate their salary for new jobs, or to help justify yearly raises. We talked about this at our last Marketo User Group. Here in Silicon Valley, we've seen an uptick in folks renegotiating their salary every year rather than just being subjected to whatever meager raise. One of these reasons is that if you've got Marketo skills, you can find another job pretty easily that's willing to pay more so keeping Marketo talent around becomes challenging, especially where we are.
Were there any Summit talks that you found inspiring or helpful?
The slide deck also includes the new changes for MCE, new product announcements, and snap shots of the compensation survey.
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