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Category
B2B
Vanguards
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Aleksandra Panyukhina
SEMrush
Amy Barone
Splash
Beth Elkin
JDA Software
Aleksandra Panyukhina
Head Of Event Marketing
Aleksandra Panyukhina, Head of Event Marketing at SEMrush, believes live events are an invaluable driver of retention and acquisition at every level of the B2B marketing funnel and are the ideal channel for engaging highly targeted audiences with measurable outcomes. She took on the herculean task of establishing a more global presence for SEMrush at the largest industry events and also helped create the company’s first-ever user conference.
To best engage diverse audiences, Panyukhina executed an event strategy to create highly tailored experiences that help build credibility, engagement and loyalty with attendees, all while maintaining a unified brand look and feel. She skillfully aligns each event with the appropriate level of the marketing/sales funnel, including trade shows for lead generation at the top of the funnel, roadshows to establish a personal relationship with customers and prospects and a new user conference to retain and deepen relationships with existing customers.
Panyukhina has more than 10 years of event experience and approaches events with a marketer’s eye for metrics, scalability and focus on the bottom line. She leads a 100% female event marketing team and together, they have proven time and again the efficacy of live events as a profitable B2B marketing channel.
Under Panyukhina leadership, the company’s event marketing channel has seen a five-fold increase in revenue. The first-ever SEMrush user conference in 2019 earned an incredible net promoter score of 74 out of 100. In addition, SEMrush has more than doubled its geographical event coverage and launched a series of 15 annual roadshows across the globe.
Innovator of the year
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Amy Barone
Chief Strategy Officer
With 20 years of experience in the event marketing industry, Amy Barone is recognized as a leader who is spearheading innovative concepts within the space as well as for women.
Barone is pioneering a new vision for the Chief Strategy Officer role at Splash. She leads both the product and marketing teams — teams that would generally roll up to two different C-suite leaders. But Barone had a different vision for how technology companies can approach building and marketing great products.
By connecting both teams closely and working collaboratively, she helped Splash build world-class products and marketing programs based on a deep understanding of the customer. She has also created a space where women have more visibility and input into how a product is developed. This new environment fosters collaboration and enables women to have a larger share of voice in the growth of the product they are working on to market efficiently and effectively to customers.
In addition to driving concepts that bolster women in the marketing and tech industries, Barone also utilizes her role as Chief Strategy Officer to serve as a mentor, providing guidance and expertise to her team members beyond direct reports. This means continuously carving time out of her day to meet and check-in with women across the organization, navigating institutional constructs that often limit upward mobility and taking an active interest in and supporting her female team members professionally.
Barone’s leadership strategy at Splash can be attributed to her experience navigating through typically male-dominated industries. She has utilized her insights to not only create a space for her female colleagues, but also for female customers that are trying to navigate their respective industries.
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Beth Elkin
Group Vice President Of Marketing
While women continue to make gains across the broader economy, they remain underrepresented in STEM jobs. JDA has made it part of its mission to increase the number of women in its global workforce and change the perception that gender impedes career success. In 2018, JDA CEO Girish Rishi pushed for greater diversity and inclusion and Beth Elkin, Group Vice President of Marketing, saw an opportunity to expand upon the company’s current initiatives.
Elkin developed a “Wednesdays for Women” blog series, which shines a light on the role of women in the world of technology and supply chain. Every Wednesday, a new blog is posted that highlights the journey of some of the incredible women who work at JDA, female executives from among JDA’s customers and partners, interesting points-of-view from both women and men at JDA and more.
Each blog shares perspectives and best practices designed to improve awareness of gender issues and help advance women in technology and supply chain careers. Popular themes include women empowering women, strengthening and cultivating a diverse workplace, finding work-life balance, why emotion and passion at work are OK, showing appreciation for the people we encounter throughout our day and the power of taking calculated risks.
Since “Wednesdays for Women” began, there have been 94 posts that have racked up more than 25,000 page views and 201 comments. Visitors spend an average of three minutes on each page. The series has also won several awards, including a Killer Content Award at the 2019 B2B Marketing Exchange, for its content and for the initiative it stands for: diversity and inclusion.
