As a digital marketing professional, I attended Web Summit for the first time this year with low expectations on learning new marketing trends.
For my surprise, I discovered, not one - but three stages that included various marketing talks: "Panda Conf" (marketing), "Content Makers" (content/media) and Growth Summit (Growth/Scaling).
The "Main Stage" and the "Startup University" stage had as well many different (digital) marketing talks.
But what about sales? I didn't find a single one, and there was no stage that covered that.
But isn't sales an important part of business growth? Of course, it is.
My vision is that the buyer has changed a lot. The buying process changed, and it’s now mainly using digital channels to search and consume relevant information.
This results in marketing becoming now responsible for the most part of the revenue funnel. Sales is only managing the end of the funnel.
All of this said, no wonder that all these new startups that want to grow fast need to focus their developing efforts in digital marketing in order to have predicable and scalable revenue.
I believe that the current marketing and sales manager roles will merge into a "Growth Manager" role responsibility.