Program Details:

Date: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 

Location: Maggiano’s on Clark and Grand: 111 W. Grand Ave., Chicago

Time:  7:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.

Member Rate: $55.00

Non-Member Rate: $75.00

REGISTRATION for this event is now closed.  Thank you for joining us.

* Sorry, no refunds or cancellations within 72 hours before the event. Walk-ins accommodated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Program Agenda:

7:30 – 8:15 Registration and Networking

8:15 – 9:00 Bag the Elephant: How to Get and Keep Big Customers

Steve Kaplan, Author, Bag the Elephant

Savvy business strategist and author of Bag the Elephant, Steve will provide practical, usable tips for marketing practitioners during an in-depth and interactive discussion on “bagging elephants.” In this hard-hitting, street-style session, Steve will share his many secrets to success, and convey the 5 critical “Must Knows” to get and keep the big customers:

1.       Who buys, influences and kills

2.       Using bureaucracy to your advantage

3.       Procurement programs and how to thrive in them

4.       Speaking Elephant-eeze

5.       Finding and closing internal champions

9:00 – 9:30 Getting it Done: How to Grow Your Organization by Landing Large Accounts

Stephen Meade, Chairman and Founder, MonetaPro, LLC

Stephen is a dynamic individual who has played an integral role in developing the business model, systems and marketing strategy that has helped MonetaPro, LLC achieve rapid growth. Mr. Meade will reveal his own secrets for successfully marketing to large corporations, and will share his experience from MonetaPro as well as two other successful e-commerce ventures.

9:30 – 9:45 Break

9:45 – 10:30 The Marketing Playbook: The Best Plays to Get Your Sales Team Across the Goal Line
 

John Fox, Founder and President, Venture Marketing

An energetic entrepreneur and seasoned marketing expert, John will share his deep insights into how marketing projects get done and the resources you'll need to successfully execute them. As the author of The Marketing Playbook™, John will identify step-by-step tactics and provide visual samples, benchmark costs and coaching points for the most powerful marketing plays. These valuable strategies and tactics will be delivered in clear detail and tied to the Sales Stage where it will most effectively help the sales team move the ball forward. The presentation is sure to deliver powerful and practical tools that you can implement immediately at your own company.

10:30 – 11:00 Q&A

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The following Sponsors of Chicago AMA's Business-to-Business Marketing Division helped make this program possible.  Thank you to Alexander Marketing Services and Plum Grove Printers.                                              

Speaker Bios:

Steve Kaplan

Over the past decade, Steve Kaplan has made a practice out of developing solid relationships with countless corporations that allowed him to build his company, SCA, from a basement operation, into a $250 million, 1,300-employee marketing company spanning 29 countries. Over the past 20 years, he has advised more than 100 businesses of all sizes and industries restructure themselves, increase their sales by getting big customers, get funding, improve efficiency, boost morale, expand into new markets, and evaluate exit strategies. As an expert on marketing and entrepreneurship, Steve has been recognized by Inc. magazine as a finalist for Entrepreneur of the Year and has won the Mercury Excellence Award in Employee Motivation. He has been the subject of many print interviews and profiles in such media as Advertising Age, Crain’s Business, Food & Beverage, Selling not sure about Selling-out of business, Target Marketing, and the Chicago Tribune. His business practices have also been featured in several college textbooks. Steve serves on the board of directors at Nations Healthcare, a fast-growing company supplying a variety of healthcare services in the United Kingdom. He was a member of the executive committee of Euro RSCG, a 176-company conglomerate, and is the founder of The Difference Maker Inc., a company specializing in providing packaged tools and advice across a variety of business disciplines. He is the owner of the investment firm Kaplan Enterprises LLC and a partner in eSkape, a 60,000-square-foot Chicago-area family entertainment center. Steve chairs the Kaplan Family Foundation, a private foundation dedicated to the advancement of entrepreneurship in the youth of today. Steve is married and has two children and a golden retriever named Clincher.

Stephen M. Meade

As chairman and founder of MonetaPro, Mr. Meade has played an integral role in developing the Company’s business model, management team, systems and strategy.  Mr. Meade has been involved in e-commerce for the past six years, having launched two other successful e-commerce ventures.  This success has provided for an extended base of knowledge in the transaction processing and payment facilitation space.  In 1999 SiteVisions, (www.sitevisions.com) was created and is an ongoing concern that engages in web site and database development. In 1996, Mr. Meade founded Virtualsellers.co (OTC BB: VDOT), a provider of e-commerce transaction processing services for Internet-based e-tailers. Mr. Meade helped develop the transaction processing systems at VDOT. VDOT was sold in 1999 to a public company that assumed the name Virtualsellers.com. Prior to founding VDOT, Mr. Meade was a regional vice president with Travelers Group, a Fortune 500 financial services company.  His responsibilities included hiring and training a sales force with full commission positions.  He was licensed in the insurance and securities industries and held a Series 6 & 63 license as well as Series 26 Principle’s license. Mr. Meade is a proven entrepreneur and leader, with a unique ability to network within high profile organizations.  A graduate of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, Mr. Meade started in business when he was 18 and also owned several retail businesses.  He has co-written three books, which were marketing through seminars, newspapers and infomercials nationwide. Mr. Meade is a proven speaker and has covered topics at industry events and given lectures at numerous universities including Northwestern University, University of Chicago, Loyola University, Peter Kiewit Institute, and University of Nebraska.  Mr. Meade is on the Advisory Board of the Chicago House of Blues, and is an avid soccer and volleyball player. 

John Fox

John Fox is the president and founder of Venture Marketing, a marketing firm for growing companies. Since 1997, he and his team have invested entrepreneurial spirit, insight and creative wit to help companies effectively jump hurdles in the sales cycle. In 1979, John began his career as a field sales engineer with Intel. Before his 26^th birthday, he had grown his territory from zero to more than $4 million in revenue, all from technology start-up manufacturers who previously had no business relationship with Intel. It was at this point he recognized his ability to make something out of nothing and discovered his passion for early-stage growth. He was awarded Intel's 1983 Distinguished Employee Award. Joining upstart U.S. Robotics as their 72^nd employee, John initiated and directed the company's sales and marketing efforts including the launch of the Courier modem line—the world's top-selling computer modem. After short assignments with then-tiny Tellabs and Engineering Tools, John went back to Silicon Valley and the modem business, heading Telebit’s new business development. Moving back to Chicago, he became the 12^th employee at Productivity Point International, a $5 million computer training franchisor. At PPI, he led a national sales and marketing effort that increased revenue to more than $100 million. Following a short stint at Automated Concepts and the realization his resume was looking more like Jacques Cousteau’s travel log, John started Venture Marketing. John is the author of The Marketing Playbook™ and has been featured in numerous publications, including BusinessWeek, Chicago Tribune, Crain's Chicago Business, Crain's B2B, WorldWIT, Sales & Marketing Management, Robotics Engineering, Control Magazine, National Business Association's boss Magazine, Female Entrepreneur, PCWeek/eWeek, and MyBusiness Magazine. He is a guest lecturer for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Engineering's Technology Entrepreneur Center. He has also been a guest lecturer at The Electronic Imaging Symposium at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, the Keller Graduate School of Management and Aurora University. He has served as business plan judge and coach for the Chicago Software Association’s Early Stage Investor Conference www.csa.org He most recently joined the Dean's Advisory Committee for the prestigious College of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. John is a graduate engineer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Computer Science. He earned his MBA from Keller Graduate School of Management. He and his wife, Ruth, of 23 years live in Naperville, Illinois with their five entrepreneurially-minded children.

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