(Publisher's Note: Our new Reporter Catherine Getches attended
her very first marketing conference last week. I asked her to
jot down her quick impressions of the show, and thought you
might get a kick out of them too.)

There was a silence on the other end of the phone when I told my
new boss Anne Holland that I had never been to a trade show.
"That's like someone telling me they've never been to 7-11," she
said.

I was determined to approach my first conference like a kid in
a candy store. On my way to the DMA's B-to-B Marketing
conference at the Wigwam resort in Phoenix, I rehearsed the pre-
conference tips from Anne and from Ken Magill, an editor at DM
News. By the time I got there all I could remember was Recency
Frequency and Monetary Value (RFM) and that a sure sign of a
good speaker was a post-presentation podium rush.

Over the next two days I sat through ten sessions, fearlessly
approached strangers, and tried to absorb as much as I could
about demand generation, ROI, multi-channel marketing, all the
while trying to figure out why everyone seemed to be talking
about B2C instead of B2B .

Ten things I learned from my first B2B marketing trade show:

1. "Multi-Channel Marketing" is the new "CRM" though no one can
agree on a definition for either.

2. The worst thing you can do with a new lead is give it to a
sales rep. You have to "nurture" leads.

3. With the exception of Reggie Brady, most speakers
didn't differentiate between marketing to consumers and marketing
to businesses. Brady was also the only "podium rush" I witnessed (maybe that's because she gave killer how-to examples, case
studies and research).

4. "Killer" is good thing: "killer leads," "killer online copy,"
"killer search engine placement."

5. Direct Mail is back. The best websites make it ways to
contact a live person. Email should be used as a starting
base for communications, businesses want in-depth information
via mail.

6. As a marketer, if you can just get the address, salutation and
spelling right you might increase leads/sales by 30%.

7. Treat businesses, especially small markets, as consumers: "B2B
customers are consumers too," "let them know they're special,"
"think of your consumer brother," "it's all about their emotional
behavior: nurture, nurture, nurture."

8. The buzz is about building a "community" between sales and
marketing. As Jere Brooks King of Cisco said, "Marketing is the
wind, sales is the sun." Huh? To further that notion she put it
another way: "Marketing is incredible, sales is credible" or
"Marketing reaches everyone, sales reaches someone."

9. The ravioli might not be that great, but the luncheon can
be the best place to learn what is really going on in marketing, unless you wind up with a clique of folks all from the same company
who just want to network amongst themselves.

10. As David Hirsch from Google put it, "Conferences are one big
handshake."