Coming up for air...

Been at the ISA Marketing and Sales Summit since yesterday afternoon... Alison Smith of AMR set the tone by discussing what manufacturing management wants... Peter Martin of Invensys talked about how to speak to the C-level and why we should...and Jerry Gipson of Dow Chemical was the Voice of the Customer, talking bluntly and directly about "How End Users Want to Be Sold To." In between, Joel Blumenthal of Endress+Hauser gave a great breakout session on Marketing Communication, and Rick Dolezal of Rockwell discoursed eloquently on David versus Goliath...and you can guess which side he was on. Uniformly excellent, these presentations have been BY senior marketing and sales management FOR senior marketing and sales management...except for Gipson, who, as our designated token customer (as he put it), put everything into perspective. Later this afternoon, Shari Worthington will talk on SEO/SEM and Larry Thompson from Wago will present a breakout on selling "from the other side of the desk." After that, Con Lau from Yokogawa will really open the kimono and discuss Marketing KPIs. He's clearly a brave man. We all want to hear how he can quantify KPIs for an artform... Rick Zabel, architect of Automation.com, will discuss e-newsletter best practices, and then we all get to go home for the day. Tomorrow morning, yours truly will join all the other editors in a hopefully no-holds-barred forum that will talk about the issues of the automation industry as the media see them. Then Scott Sommer from Jacobs Engineering will talk about being successful at selling nothing...and John Cusimano of Siemens will ask, "What is the value of a value proposition?" For lunch tomorrow, Peter Zornio, now of Emerson, will talk on strategic issues in automation marketing for the future, and after that I will facilitate a workshop on channel marketing in the automation markets. Whew! Great stuff!