Talking to B2B Marketing Masters: John Watton

Announcing a one-on-one video interview with award-winning B2B marketer John Watton

I’ve long had the wish to sit across a table from some of the world’s best B2B marketing minds, and fire questions at them. I want to find out what makes them tick, what makes them succeed and what knowledge they can share with you and me about the dark art of technology marketing.

We’re making this happen now with John Watton, a long-time friend, a client (first at ShipServ, now at Expedia), an award-winning B2B marketer, a panelist in Econsultancy’s Innovation Awards and a fan of Chelsea and new gadgets.

John and I will have a 1:1 video interview here at Velocity on the evening of 2 February, which you can follow live on Ustream (tech gods willing!), on twitter (@velocitytweets, for sound bites) or in subsequent v-log posts here. If you want a reminder of the interview, fire us an email (actually send it to Ryan – [email protected]) and we’ll push an email at you that morning.

In his understated way, John’s become a giant and leading light among us B2B technology marketers. He single-handedly brought marketing automation kicking and screaming over the Pond. He was the first user of Marketo in Europe. His pedigree reads like a top 10 in B2B tech: Oracle, SAP, Ariba and Microsoft. And he’s an experimenter and innovator par excellence.

So we’ve asked him to come in for an exclusive video interview. I’ll sit with John for a good hour and pull out every insight I can manage, and see if I can put him on the spot for some predictions and expectations for the future of B2B technology marketing.

So here are some of the kinds of things I plan to throw at @jwatton (but not all of them; I’ll keep some hardballs up my sleeve):

• How are the marketing organizations of B2B technology companies changing?
• I know you’re an active user of social media (twitter, blogs, feeds, etc.). Do you feel like social media is a channel that can scale in B2B marketing?
• What’s become achievable to B2B marketers that wasn’t achievable before?
• What kinds of things, in terms of services, products or solutions, would you like to see for B2B marketers that you’re not seeing today?
• What are the qualities in a B2B marketer that would make you think “I’m hiring that person tomorrow”?
• B2B and B2C seem to be converging in the software space. Do you think the two will be separable in 5-10 years?
• Do you feel like there’s a unique B2B marketing community in London? Why?
• B2B businesses typically don’t believe in or trust marketing? Should they?
• Who in the B2B technology marketing field would you most like to interview or talk to?

If you have any specific questions you’d like me to make to John, drop a comment and maybe we’ll put it to the B2B marketing master.

Hope you enjoy the show!