B2B Lead Generation: DemandCon

It’s a really different kind of conference than you are accustomed to.

Welcome to DemandCon, the first marketing and sales conference to address the entire sales funnel, from first contact to final close.

Demandcon was born when co-founders Steve Gershik and Shawn Elledge sat in the back of the room at yet another marketing conference and said to each other “there has to be a better way to teach and learn about marketing and sales!”

There are lots of sales conferences. There are lots of marketing conferences. But demandcon is different. (As a startup, we’re highly skeptical and choose carefully.) From the ground up, it is designed to span the entire process - from the time the prospect learns of your company to a lifetime customer.

DemandCon San Francisco May 18-20th

Features such luminaries as Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies

and Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions. Believe me - those two ladies are the very best in the business.

Here’s what Steve Gershick says about DemandCon:

My partner, Shawn Elledge, and I started DemandCon this year after attending roughly a skajillion sales and marketing conferences in our careers and thinking how we could do things differently if we were in charge:

First, we’d make sure that attendees had a good sense of the kind of conversations they were going to have coming in to the show since we were asking them to dedicate at least two days of their lives to sharing a space with us and learning together.

Second, we wanted to make sure that there was a clear path to learning, where people learned not only about the subject matter in their sessions, but how it fit in contextually with the entire sales and marketing framework.

Third, we wanted people to leave with a sense of “what to do tomorrow,” how to put what they learned into action at their own companies and organizations and schools.

Fourth, we wanted to bring together thought leaders, practitioners and vendors, as well as academia, to put together a complete a picture as we can of the contemporary thinking in demand generation.

Lastly, we wanted to make sure that we had fun doing it, creating the kind of conference that we wanted to go to ourselves — a bit irreverent, a little unpredictable and a satisfying use of everyone’s time.

Fortunately, we have a bit of experience at this.  Both Shawn and I have been in sales and marketing roles for a cumulative 33 years.   Shawn started his own marketing event firm called Integrated Marketing Summit, which — if you’ve attended any of the more than a dozen regional events throughout the country — has educated well over two thousand attendees.    I was the guy who started the Eloqua Experience user conference while I was VP of Marketing Innovation over there for a number of years, and invented the Markie awards, the leading awards for demand generation professionals.

Our vision with DemandCon is to grow the demand generation industry, bringing in new marketers, new sales people and students in order to make demand gen a widely accepted discipline within businesses of all sizes.

We welcome you to the conversation.  In fact, we need it.   We want to build the kind of community event that will benefit all involved  Please feel free to come to us with your thoughts and feedback.

I’m at steve (at) demandcon.com.  Shawn is at shawn (at) demandcon.com

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

If you wish to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers using the form below or follow Jeff on Twitter at @fearlesscomp.

Or you can follow us at @sgersh or @demandcon on Twitter, find us on Facebook, join in on the LinkedIn discussion group, or stop by for a beer after 4 if you’re around the Bay Area or Kansas City.

Looking forward to the conversation.