The Shortlist - Account Based Marketing for B2B SaaS Manchester Meetup
The Shortlist
Join our November meetup for marketers and founders doing account-based marketing, this month together with Silicon Mingle. It's a two-hour networking event to share ideas, learn, and take away proven tactics you can apply in your day-to-day marketing work.
If you're an aspiring marketer, it's also a great place to learn, build connections, and get a better idea of the challenges scaling companies face.
The Shortlist x Silicon Mingle
This month's session is run together with Silicon Mingle, a community of tech and startup people who get together to make real connections. Their monthly Manchester meetups are known for feeling like meeting friends at the pub. If you enjoy the networking, you'll find them on the last Wednesday of every month.
https://www.siliconmingle.com/
This month's session: getting your data ready for AI
Everyone is telling marketers to use AI. Far fewer show what needs to be in place before it does anything useful. Plenty of teams, including some at companies with millions in revenue, are still working from patchy analytics, a CRM nobody quite trusts and spreadsheets exported by hand.
Our guest speaker is Jonathan Catton, Head of Data & Insights at the digital agency Hallam. He'll walk through, step by step, how Hallam brought its data into one place, put a layer on top so they can ask questions of all of it at once, and what that changed about the way they work. It's a talk about how, not what: the specific setup, the trade-offs, and the things that didn't work. Whether you haven't set up Search Console yet or you're already asking AI questions about your numbers, you'll leave with practical things you can apply to your own workflows from day one.
After the talk and a short Q&A, we split into small tables. Each table has a host and takes on one specific challenge from the room, for example where to start when almost nothing is set up, what to connect first, or how to get the rest of the team to actually use the data.
Sound familiar?
Most marketing advice assumes your market is huge. Ten-thousand-person email lists, ads that only work at volume, playbooks written for products chasing a million users.
But your entire market fits on one list. You know their names. You could probably recite half of them. And the mass-market playbook doesn't just underperform for you, it burns through the only market you've got.
If that's your world, you've probably noticed there's no dedicated corner for this side of marketing in Manchester. Now there is.
Who you'll meet
Marketing managers, specialists and CMOs at B2B SaaS companies who grow by winning specific, nameable accounts. Some just starting with ABM, some years in.
How the session runs
Each month we pick one specific challenge in account-based marketing and work through it together, in three parts.
A short talk from a member. A marketer from the community opens with how they tackled this month's challenge in their own company.
Small-group discussions. We then split into small tables, each with a host and one focused question. Groups are kept deliberately small so everyone gets to speak and everyone gets heard.
Open networking. The rest of the session is yours. Carry on the conversation from your table, find the people working on the same problems as you, and swap details with the ones you'd like to stay in touch with.
Where
Campfield on Lower Byrom Street, one of Manchester's old market halls, now a bright workspace in St John's, a short walk from Deansgate. Right next to the Science and Industry Museum.
Getting there
Deansgate-Castlefield tram stop and Deansgate rail station are both about five minutes on foot.
Driving? Nearest car parks:
NCP Great Northern Warehouse 1, two minutes' walk, https://maps.app.goo.gl/p3NcJ6piHDN3WQQH8
SIP Duke Street (M3 4JL), cheapest nearby, a few minutes further, https://maps.app.goo.gl/ADNi8ep6wH2toJ4g7
NCP Spinningfields, New Quay Street, https://maps.app.goo.gl/J59sXP5CV2Ae7jZ5A
Our hosts
The Shortlist is generously hosted by Campfield, a tech and media campus run by Department, inside a pair of Grade II-listed Victorian market halls that have been part of Manchester's story since 1878. It's home to hundreds of tech and media businesses, which makes it about the most fitting room in the city for our event.
Big thanks to the Campfield team for having us. If you arrive early, the coffee bar is worth your time.
https://www.campfieldmcr.com/