Hailed as “North America’s fastest growing tech conference”, Collision Conference unites global leaders like Google and Cisco with budding startups and investors from all around the world. Atomic Revenue attended Collision Conference 2018 in New Orleans last month and we absorbed valuable insights from some thought-provoking sessions as well as made connections with some emerging tech start-ups from around the globe. We want to highlight some of our top takeaways for you here and help you decide if Collision, which moves to Toronto next year, is an event you should add to your conference list.
Most Thought-Provoking Sessions at Collision Conference
We attended the sessions below and there were some statistics and insights that really jumped out to us. Below, we have shared session speaker’s name, company, title of their session, and some of the information we found the most "tweetable." We strongly encourage you to reach out to any one of these Grade A speakers or reach out to us to learn more about what we took away.
1. Leading In Tomorrow: People and Pixels
During this session by Monica Adractas, the Global Director of Workplace by Facebook, we learned about connecting employees to the company vision, the future of work, and how to keep employees at every level heard. One of the highlights that really stuck out to us was:
“69% of leaders think transparency and the breakdown of silos and traditional hierarchy are necessary for growing companies to execute company vision especially with the attention spans for each generation - Gen X attention span is 12 secs, Gen Y is 8 secs, and Gen is a mere 2.8secs. We need to prepare for a faster world, faster decisions, and faster collaboration thanks to tech.”
2. What You Need to Know About SEO in 2018
Sarah Bird, CEO of Moz, shared a great deal of technical and tactical information during her sessions at Collision Conference 2018. There was one statistic she shared that really opened our eyes:
“90% of the budget for search marketing for businesses is spent on paid search. Paid search only accounts for 2% of the total clicks when it comes to all of search marketing.”
3. Customer Engagement: What Every SaaS Company Needs to Know
This panel discussion session featured Amy Pressman, Co-founder and President of Medallia, Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-founder of Algolia, and Lindsey Turrentine, Editor-in-Chief of CNET. The focus on the multiple ways to interact with customers and how companies need to evolve to satisfy customers in a digital age was a much-needed discussion. Our big take away was:
“Giving every employee access to good data and empowering them to take actions of value to the customer is critical. Technologies like Medallia and Algolia empower billions of good customer and user experiences in human to human interactions.”
4. The Secrets to Speed Your Journey from Startup to Scaleup
Brian Halligan, Founder of Hubspot’s session was a personal favorite of mine at Collision Conference. I think I rapid-fire tweeted the most during this session because it was full of inspirational and practical advice. One of the biggest insights he gave away that I find myself repeating to our team and our clients is:
“Humans today increasingly want to be able to self-serve. Think about that in your go-to-market strategy.”
5. How Not to Die
With a provocative title for a session like that, how could we not pop in? This panel discussion discussing how biohackers are injecting themselves with homemade cures and augmenting their body with new technology featured Dave Asprey, Founder, and CEO of Bulletproof360, Mona Siddiqui, CDO of the Department of Health and Human Services, Naveen Jain, Founder of Viome, and Jade Scipioni, Business and Health reporter for Fox Business Network. Dave Asprey’s question to the audience left us thinking:
“What creates a better ROI than living longer and healthier?”
Our Favorite Tech Spotted at Collision Conference
There were hundreds of new technology solutions featured at Collision. It’s hard to single out any of them as the best but here are a few that need to be on your radar.
1. Traaqr - Figures that we would run away to New Orleans for a week and one of the coolest tech we found was actually a company right in our hometown of St. Louis. Traaqr is a fully automated, click-to-call, conversion-level tracking platform. How often do you ask about calls you receive as a result of your PPC campaigns? How to do track offline actions based on online marketing? Traaqr is diving into this and providing a real solution for advertisers, marketers, and businesses alike.
2. Lovelytics - While at Collision Conference we met the team from Lovelytics and unlike other KPI dashboard companies or data warehouse companies, Lovelystics handles the cleaning and organizing of data on the back-end along with the visualization of real-time metrics on your front-end dashboards. Clean data, easy user interface, and data accessibility get resolved by Lovelytics.
3. Xinova - Companies spend tons of money on research and development for new solutions, but access to more than 12,000 inventors through an idea-to-builder matching platform is pretty freaking cool. Business cost savings and opportunity access spread worldwide can certainly improve outcomes for many. We were amazed at what the Xinova team has put together.
