LIVE SaaStr Annual Executive Debrief

the SaaStr Insider sponsor webinar. Today we're hosting it mainly for our execs of sponsoring companies who just attended these and participated in the SaaStr Annual this year. We are gonna be recording, however, though, and live streaming so that for the folks who couldn't join, we can send you this recording and slides after. Also, if you weren't a participating exec of a sponsoring SaaStr Annual company this year, there's still a lot of really great data in here that might be relevant to you. So yeah, feel free to sit back and watch. We're going to be covering a lot of data here today. We'll try and keep it, you know, try and go through it as smoothly as we can. So you guys have the gist of it in a shorter amount of time because I know time is tight for a lot of our execs. So without further ado, let's dive in. So as mentioned, this is going to be our post-annual executive debrief aimed a little bit more towards the exec level of folks who participated in sponsor the SASTRA Annual this year, or maybe you're a past SASTRA Annual sponsor who is watching this as well. Great, great data. So we pulled together a lot of really great data here over the past month after the event has ended and then put it all into this debrief so you can see really with the lens of sponsors, you know, how you might stack up against the average sponsors. Where you might be in kind of like the landfall of how people are giving us feedback post-event, all that kind of stuff. So that's what we'll go over today. So we'll, we'll, we'll start off with a high-level sort of executive recap, if you will. So for, for those who may not have realized, this was our 10th ever SAS TRA annual. You know, we've done these throughout the last more than 10 years since there was a little bit of a gap. 2020, but we've been doing these in person, for a while now. And so yeah, this was our 10th ever SAASTRA annual. So we hosted about 10,000 people across the 3 days. Keep in mind, you know, some people come 1 day, some people come all 3 days. We do get a mix of folks that have different attendee patterns, just as we've seen across the board. One thing we'll talk about a little bit later, we did see an uptick on where people come in those days, right? Day 1 is usually, you know, all the early birds get there, uh, the middle day being always our most populous. That was still true this year, just in a trend that we're seeing at our event. Um, and then because we added a lot of really great summits, which we'll chat about in a bit, we did see an uptake in our, uh, Thursday attendance. So the day 3, the last day if you will, uh, big uptick there just with folks coming specifically for the summits that we hosted this year. Um, so that was a positive trend upward, I think, both for us and for a lot of the sponsors. I know that came up in some of the survey feedback and some of the calls that we've had, that it was great to see, you know, not, not as much of a drop off on Thursday because we, the addition of those summits really did actually help anchor some of the audience and coming back on the third day. So, and consecutive day for most people, right? So, so that was a good positive trend year over year as, as we have been post-2020, we are, we still are and remain indoor-outdoor kind of more festival style. As a point of differentiation. We always do this a little bit differently every year. We'll do it a little bit differently again in May. But yeah, that's kind of part of our core aesthetic now. The stat on how many connections were made, this is a combination of both Brain Dates, in-person meetings, and LeadScan. So that's kind of a combination of that data, session registration, all that. So across everyone, about 34,084 attendee connections. So, you know, that's about a few per person. So pretty good there, right across 3 days. That makes sense. Some people, you know, do sit in a lot of content sessions. Some people are more social than others. So, you know, on average, it's about 3 connections per person each. The number of hours and brain dates hosted was about 2,192. And yeah, we do kind of, we do comb all of this data from various platforms and put it all together. So it's, you know, it's pretty on par. So that's why you'll see some numbers like that. It's like 2,192. So yeah, so A lot of hours of workshop sessions and brain dates hosted again across the 3 days. You know, tons of new voices in our speakers. So across 165 speakers total, 77% new voices. As many of you know, we added an AI Summit and AI Day this year. Lots of that came from that, of course. We always, you know, strive in our speaker guidelines to be, to make sure we have, you know, spots on stages for those that are underrepresented, et cetera. So good to see that we were over 50% on that this year. That is always one of our core goals. And about 50% C-suite. So as you guys will see in the audience data, if you don't know already, we do skew very heavily on our audience of being exec and C-level and VP level and above. So it just makes sense that our speakers are pretty much in the C-suite right now. Now you'll see some asterisks there, like why only 50%, shouldn't it be higher? You know, And then once you start to get to the public companies, you do get folks at the VP level that might be the equivalent of a C-suite for somebody who's more early stage, but that's, that's the way the data splits. Whether sponsors and attendees, you know, I think you guys can see from this photo and if you were on site, you know, the, the sponsor hall and expo hall, if it were, was pretty jammed pretty much at all points, which is always what we want. You know, we try and engineer the show floor so that there is what I call no bad booths. If I close my eyes and pick a booth, any of them would really be good. Some are better than others. Others, which you'll see in the data. Um, but they're all good boots, right? So there's— there was no bad boots this year, as you can kind of see here. Um, we always have had a big, um, uh, or I should say strong international presence, um, at the SASTRA Annual. So this year is no different. We had attendees from 62 different countries, um, about 72% US and 28% international. So something I always call out for sponsors, if, you know, if that is at all a surprise for you, you know, I always try and bring at least one international rep or one person on the sales team who can speak towards international attendees, right? If you do both, it's always good to just have at least one person that can speak to that for, you know, those third of folks that are going to be from an international contingent, but also great if you, you know, service multiple markets, you can kind of do it all in one stop because they're coming here, which is some very long plane rides that we saw on Twitter. So important data we'll get into. Super Gold leads were up 89% from 2023. Again, we really took the time from 2023 to 2024 to engineer this show floor so that there were no bad booths and that traffic was improved. And we saw that in the data, which is great. Something we've seen this in the last, you know, few years post-2020, I'll say we're calling it out here. About 44% of all of our attendees now attend SaaStr Annual as a team. So we consider a team 3 or more attendees, right? If you count the duos, then It's a lot more. I think it's something like 70%, like almost everyone comes in pairs. But really to come in a team is almost half of all attendees come in a team, right? So yeah, that's, that's for, for us, we counted 3 or more attendees from the same company. And I know this again because we, because we pull the data from so many places, this, you'll get numbers like this sometimes with at least 1.5 of those people being exec, right? So again, that's the average. So sometimes you'll get 2 people being an exec, sometimes you get 1. But yeah, at least, you know, at least one full person being an exec if they do come in a team. So again, really great data here of, you know, a little bit on how buying patterns have changed. Obviously you guys have felt this more so on the front lines of, you know, buying committees getting bigger, maybe deal cycles taking longer. Why the SaaStr annual is great because, you know, these people are coming together as a team and as a conglomerate to things like the annual. This is honestly something we've seen post-2020, you know, pre-2019, Pre-2019, when we were back in like convention centers, it was mostly individual attendees. It's definitely flipped in the last few years that most people do come at least as a duo and then as a team of 3 or more, again, with at least one person being an exec. So it's just food for thought too, if you're thinking about coming back for May, you know, of how you staff the booth. We did see more executives come and spend time in the booths. Again, I think to the stat, because it's something we called out pre-event, but a good reinforcement here that once we crunch the numbers from 2022, before, right? It was no different. So a lot of folks coming as teams and coming with at least one executive makes a really strong case to have your exec in the booth at least a little bit, right? To do quote unquote booth duty. I really think it's just talking to customers. I know I don't really call it booth duty anymore. We're going to upgrade this whole notion of booth duty. But that's the breakdown for SaaStr at least. Now I can't, you know, speak to other events, but that's the breakdown for SaaStr. So how did this translate, you know, to our overall audience? This slide will look familiar to many of you. You probably will have seen in our, you know, 2024 perspectives and a lot of our lead-up comms, et cetera. Our audience breakdown. This is the 2024 updated breakdown. I'll call out some of the changes and differentiations for 2024. It really hasn't changed a lot, right? So, that's really the big call out here is that our audience remained consistent from 2023 to 2024. I think that's a good thing. We did actually go up 1% in the percentage of attendees that are VP level and above. So previously in 2024, this slide said 56%. Now it says 57%. Again, that just goes to folks coming in teams, people coming to the summits, people attending that are at that, you know, us hosting a few more things that are VP level and above only to increase that number. So very strong here, right? I know we've done a lot of calls with sponsors post-event who also spoke to the quality of the attendees being better this year. You see that here in the data, right? So now we're 57% of all attendees being VP level and above. A lot of CEOs and founders, that's our core, right? So that was about 33% of our audience. Again, that's about the same as 2024. Those, these numbers are pretty much the same. Sales and marketing, always our second most popular. CXOs did go up, I think, 2 percentage points year over year. So again, with the summits that we've done with some of the more AI AI summit that we did, we did see a lot of CXOs come and register for that specifically, right? So you'll see that in the data. It kind of makes sense in how we engineered the agenda that you see this now in the data of, of who came, right? CS, product, and ops, typically our next big bucket still was for this year at 14%. Investors remained at 8% year over year. Again, we always have a fair amount of investors who come. So we have a whole Meet a VC program. All that kind of jazz. I think just one important call out here for our execs who are listening, it as a sponsor, you're not excluded from that. So I know we talk a lot about on the sponsor webinars and it's hard to make them because I know they're once a week. But something to realize is our sponsors are not excluded from participating in Meet a VC. It's oftentimes easier to as a sponsor because we have a little bit more data we can share with the investors if they want it. So just something to keep in mind there. If maybe for me it's, it's something that you're considering. In terms of our target markets, again, these remain the same from 2023 to 2024. So mid-market still at 40, how we define that is $10 to $40 million. SMB still at 33%, that's $1 to $10 million. And enterprise 27%. So that's $40 million plus, right? So again, really strong, I think, to see us remain consistent in our audience year over year. You know, always great to see that our, even though it's one percentage, you have to realize these numbers are quite big. So raising any percentage points is actually kind of a big feat for us just because there's so so many data points that we, we do this across for all attendees. So getting, you know, our percentage point even up 1 point from 56 to 57%, VP level and above, is always a good thing for us and then a good thing for folks. I am getting people asking in the chat for the link to the deck. So if you're not on the livestream, I'm going to throw this in the Zoom right now. So one second, guys. It's a good call out. Hold on. Let me share this. All right. Good question. Let me just copy this link. Okay. I'm going to throw this into the chat for everyone. All right, cool. You can follow along. You could share this at your whim. As I said, we are recording this. I'm also going to do a little write-up on sasfor.com recapping a lot of this. So if you guys have to drop, don't worry about it either. Again, you want to share this out with the team or others, please feel free to do so. None of this is private, right? Nothing we ever do at SAS is private. So feel free to share, use the data, do your own write-ups. We would love that. OK, sponsor survey results. So as many of you know, Ms. Trish, who is watching and listening to this call, did a— helped us do a sponsor survey to all of our sponsors post-event to SAS for Annual. Sponsor NPS this year was at a 92. Obviously, that's quite high. Take that for what you will. It's a sponsor NPS, right? Whether you like NPS or not, that's the number. You know, we didn't skew it or anything. So that's the number for NPS. It is pretty high, but it does mean that most sponsors objectively would recommend sponsoring SAS Re:ANUAL to a business colleague, right, in particular. Some of this is from the— I just put some bullet points here of some of the data and callouts that people wrote in to the sponsor survey and also gave us verbally on some of their post-event calls. Again, we've talked to almost every sponsor now because it's been a month post-annual. I've personally talked to at least one a day. So I've talked to many of you. And this was just some of the key points of differentiation that we called out in the data that I think led to a higher NPS than previous years, right? Again, we just looked at the data a bit, but speaking to that higher quality of attendees, That was a big differentiation and key feedback for folks. The improved lead scanning app. I know it sounds minor, but we did change lead scanning apps from 2023 to 2024 and saw a lot of really great feedback from that. We talked about it briefly, but the better flow of the show floor and booth placement for sponsors that were '23 and then 2024 sponsors. Last year we split up the sponsor hall. This year we combined it, right? And made— we— We did, as Jason M. Lemkin, our founder, calls it, made deadly sure that there was no bad foods going into it. We spent a lot of time on it, and that did show up in the results and the data of people really liking the show floor as a whole, and then particularly, you know, individual booth placements. The next thing we saw a lot in the data and feedback results from the surveys and calls was the addition, as I mentioned, of the AI Summit as a day on Wednesday, and then the AI Summit stage that was all 3 days. That was a really big addition for folks. I know a lot of people too geared their sponsor content if they had it towards AI. It was the majority of our sponsor content. We talked a lot about AI on yesterday's Workshop Wednesday. So you can, there's more, there's a lot more food for thought there. If you haven't listened to that at an exec level, good one to watch or listen or, you know, listen to it when it comes out on the pod. The addition of the summits, I have a whole slide on this dedicated to some summit data, but we, for those who don't know, or may not have realized, we did add summits for CEO and CRO, CMOs, CCOs, and CFOs. So again, the addition of those summits really did drive up a lot of really great attendance just for SaaS as a whole, but also back to sponsors, right? Like those people did go to booths, have interactions with sponsors. And so it was a really great addition overall. I think we— the last point here is we got a lot of really great feedback on the turnkey setup of the physical booths, right? Coming on site, having that extra time. As many of you may know, from '23 to '24, we changed the schedule of how we did this, which was, for us, seemed a little bit dramatic because we had never done it this way. But we changed it to give sponsors a bit more time actually to build out their booth versus like jam it in in like 2 hours and then open the show floor. So we got a lot of positive feedback on there, which means, you know, we'll likely carry that through to May. But great to see that, that, you know, it was a little bit of a bet for us, but good to see that it, paid off slightly higher on our sponsor survey result. And these are my only 2 NPSs, so I'm sorry if you don't like NPSs, but last NPS is sponsored communication was at a 94. Obviously you're on a webinar or watching this back later, so you are dialed in to our communications that we do specifically for sponsors. These are things like all of our pre-event webinars that we do like this, sometimes a bit more tactical, sometimes a bit like this, more high level or from an exec lens. But all those pre-event communications including webinars, emails, emails, you know, person— Zoom invites, one-on-ones, in-person meetings, whatever it was. And then on-site setup rated slightly higher than our overall NPS, which I think is great here. So again, good to see that our communications were well received. There's a few points here I'll call out on the next slide here. There it is. Of sponsor feedback points just on how SaaSware interacts with sponsors. If you didn't get the chance to fill out the survey and you do have thoughts on this, please just email me directly. I know I emailed you all to get on this webinar, so you have my email. You could just respond there. If you forgot it, it's just ai@saastrink.com. Really easy. Feel free to email me there. It's also not like that's a secret because I'm pretty sure that's my email on Apollo. But other key sponsor feedback points again that we got in the survey, and if you hadn't had the chance to chime in and you you have, you know, you have feedback on this, again, just let me know directly. But these were some active discussion items that we're now internalizing just based on some of the feedback we've heard. Again, this was also the first formal year we did the sponsor portal. So we got a lot of really great feedback on that. A lot of folks were actually saying to put more in it. So, you know, I was like, first I wasn't sure if anybody would use it and now we did it and now people actually want more of it. So that's good. That's helpful feedback, right? I think a few folks are calling out, you know, putting things like these recordings in would be helpful. Doing like announcements in there so that it's all in one. Sometimes you miss an email or you miss a webinar. Totally get that, right? So that's, that's helpful feedback. We'll do that going into May. I know a few folks asked like design templates. I think that's just something industry-wide we're kind of seeing now, but specifically at SaaStr too, right? Back in 2024, folks weren't really asking us for things like email templates or, or design templates to help to showcase, you know, their sponsorship at South by Annual. This is also the first year I would say anecdotally, but if I had kept the data, it would be another data point. We got a lot more requests this year for booth templates than years previous. So that is something again we'll do for May. We'll improve that process. Again, it's not something people asked us previously for. But, you know, we got a few requests for it this year, and then it— so we'll improve that for next year. Again, we— nothing we do was ever held secret. So that's easy enough for us to do. This is always, you know, the— I would say dealer's choice or personal choice of on the sponsor communications. While we did rate high, you know, some people said, yes, I give you like a 9 or a 10 on this, but also there were too many webinars or there were too few. Or it was just right, right? Like, depending on how you make your webinar or sponsor comms porridge, you may have liked it or you may have thought it was not enough or too little bit. But all that to say, you know, we'll, we'll keep doing it all right, because everyone likes different things. We have a lot of sponsors. And when you think about all the different contacts, right, many of you have multiple contacts for a sponsor. It's on this deck, but I would say on average there's probably 3 to 4 POCs per sponsor outside of maybe like one core POC. For each sponsor. So getting this right for everyone is always a balancing act for us. Um, so again, we'll probably just do it all for May, and then you can pick, right? Like, if you want to keep coming to these weekly sponsor webinars, cool. As you know, we've been doing them now kind of more so bespoke, or like every other week, just so it's not every week. I know sometimes people like, okay, they're too long, they're like an hour, or I just want like a digest. So again, we'll probably just do all those things, and you do get a weekly, um, sponsor email as we get closer to the events. So again, we'll probably just do it all and you could just pick what you consume so that it works for you. We did see anecdotally here more leads across our, you know, SMB, mid-market and public sponsors. Again, that was, that was something you guys saw in the data. It's something interesting we're seeing in our post-event calls. Jason M. Lemkin mentioned it a bit in yesterday's workshop. And you guys will see the data on the next slide of how many more leads on average sponsors got by level. It's interesting now to hear that some people are saying it's actually too many leads. So that's interesting feedback. It is something I, you know, we're marinating on. It's asked of like, okay, how can we help with that? If like the quality was great and the quantity was great, but it's now maybe too much for your team to work if your teams are smaller or they're split or you did other events or you know, you're in the thick of, of, uh, budget planning right now. So, uh, something we're, we're trying to help on too. You know, we, we do take all feedback seriously. Um, but yeah, that is a serious data point that came up is, is it's maybe too many leads. Um, but you know, most of you, all of you on the Zoom and then whoever's watching on from an exec standpoint, you can give me your feedback on that directly. Um, but just interesting that we were hearing that more so on the front lines. Um, and then, okay, as promised, I will show you guys here the updated version of the data of the average leads per sponsor level. Again, this will look familiar from the 2024 data, which is on the next slide. So you'll see that in a second, literally head to head, year over year. But you will see in a second, and I'll just give you the context that across the board, you know, we saw leads by sponsor level go up year over year. Again, to the degree where some sponsors are now telling us they have quote unquote too many leads. I get it. But here you can see the number of qualified leads per sponsor level. And this is the average, right? This is not a range. This is just a straight up pure average of that number. So Gold being at a 207, you'll see the different colors. So the purple being the leads from the booth and then the, the kind of lighter turquoise being the leads from their booth plus their activation. And then for some qualified sponsors, their who do you want to meet leads, which we'll explain in a second. So if you're wondering why Gold only has one column, that's because Golds don't do activations. So that's why it's at 207. Super Golds, you'll see without an activation we're at 299, with an activation 418. That is a big difference. You'll see across the board that sponsors with an activation typically perform about 60% better in terms of just pure lead volume. Platinum, Platinum Plus, again, you go up when you go up a level. Average leads without activation, 3. $691, almost double at $643 with an activation. Diamond, similar, $554 and then $949, right? So you, you do see these numbers start to compound as you, um, go up in level. Um, I know it's gonna go up on zaster.com, but we did write up, you know, does a, does a bigger booth make a difference at an event? At least at Zaster, it does. You know, the data seems to indicate that. Again, we don't skew this data in any way. We try and be very agnostic and neutral when we present these things. Obviously I add a little bit of like color commentary, but the data is what it is, right? So we don't cut it in any particular way. So that's the data. Here's the lead scans head to head year over year. So if you're looking at 2023 on the left, 2024 on the right, you know, you can see gold is about the same actually year over year. The super gold going up on average, right? Both of those numbers without and with an activation went up. Same thing on platinum, right? You see a big difference there on the activation side. as well as the Diamonds. So good to see that, you know, year over year, most folks on average got more leads. You'll see that also on the next slide. So, for 2 years consistently now, right, we have seen sponsors with inactivation perform again roughly 60% better. That's on average, than those without inactivation. So if you're looking just at pure across all levels, right? So this is data across all levels, all sponsor groups of of folks with an activation that are eligible, right? So we're not going to count the Golds in this, but with an activation or without, if you're super golden up, you do get almost 60% more having an activation at your booth. An interesting data point here too, that 70% of all eligible sponsors hosted an activation. That's the highest we've seen it. Last year I felt like we had a lot of activations. This year we actually did, right? So that's more than half, that's a majority of sponsors. So 70% did do an activation. I'll get into it on the next slide here. I think it's on here. Yeah, as a, as another data point of differentiations, maybe on why that number went up to 70% and why some of the sponsors did so well with the activations they hosted. It was a key differentiation for us. And again, any feedback you have on this, if you did this, Um, let me know, um, from 2023 to 2024 is that we actually were more active in helping sponsors, um, produce their activation on-site at the booth. So this was as in-depth as giving, you know, folks a list of vendors, uh, primarily local vendors, pricing, working with the vendors, working with the sponsor, helping them pick their activation, uh, pick the hours, get the permits, do the health department approvals, which which, believe me, takes a lot of time in this volume. It is something that's required by San Mateo, whether you realize it or not. It is something that is required by San Mateo County to both have the permit and the approval from like the health department and all the food inspectors and any building and fire inspectors that show up on site. We did this a bit more on our end. We did a lot more of the heavy lifting this year in 2024 than we did in 2023. So that was a big differentiation, which I know helps a lot more sponsors secure an activation. So I think that's, that's part of the data of 70% of them having an activation. Notably, you'll see it on, I think, the subsequent slide of the top 12 sponsors. They all had an activation. That's probably no surprise, just when you look at the data as a whole. This year we did see a rise in some of our data that the custom activations do not always have to be food-based, right? So So I think that's a common misconception. It's something we tease out a lot pre-event that just because you wanna do an activation does not necessarily mean that you are boxed into it being food or beverage based. Now, that is still the most popular. Most of those 70% of people did do a food and beverage activation, but you'll see in a second, some of the people who were in the top 12 actually had a non-food based activation. I'll define, you know, activation versus swag briefly. I think that's something that folks also get a little bit hung up on. You know, swag is the shirts, the water bottles that you're giving out at your booth. You know, there's nothing custom involved, if you will. There's not— there's some interaction there, but there's nothing custom, right? So when we say things like an activation, you know, this— I use this photo in particular. This was the Booking.com team who brought their money machine and then obviously did it all themed for, you know, sweating to get the money. And it was like the whole— it was the whole like aesthetic. So they made the whole thing tie in together, right? So, so one, two, like, you know, they're a great example because they tied in— not, not only did they bring in an activation, but they tied in, you know, their costumes, how they presented themselves. These tracksuits are obviously their Booking.com blue. Like, this is— these are very panto to their blue. Everything is very, you know, set around their activation. When folks walk around the show, it is something that gets their attention, not only because there is an activation, But it's something where, you know, the team carried it through of now they're all matching and they all, you know, their, their, their theme was being like, you know, faster or whatever. And that's why they're all in the race tracksuits. Anyways, you get the gist of like, you know, they, they, they took it to the full degree of activation that you can. And that's what I mean. Like, that's a lot different than swag, right? If they're giving out Booking.com t-shirts, which I think they did too, but like they had the money machine and these kind of themed— I'm not going to call them costumes, but just you know, booth outfits, if you will. And that led to a higher uptick. And again, that had nothing to do with food, but it was still something more custom, right? Versus just hanging, handing out, you know, shirts or branded headbands, if it, as, as you will. So, so that's the big distinction there is like, is there a level of customization and personalization between the sponsor and attendee? That is really what we consider an activation. For some folks, that is food, right? Because that's turnkey, that's easy. But for other folks like this, you know, We helped them— they, they brought up the idea of having a money machine. We helped them secure the vendor because they are— some of their team is international and then, you know, helped them get it all set up. And then they did, they did all the rest. Right. So again, it's their ideas. It's something we, we helped a lot more sponsors with this year, which I think led to the uptick. But again, we, we did see an upward trend of not all activations being food and beverage based this year more than previous years. So Going into it, if you didn't see this on social or saster.com yet, these were the top 12 most popular vendors at SaaStr Annual. I will ask right there, no particular order, they're just randomized. A few people were like, oh, I'm number 1 or I'm number 2. I'm like, they're random, but you're in the top 12. It's okay. It's, it's, they're random. But anyways, as I said, notably all sponsors in the top 12 did have an activation. We're calling out a few other data points of maybe why these folks were in the top 12 and if you don't see yourself here. The majority of these, while the majority of these sponsors were returning sponsors, right? And by returning, we mean they sponsor 2023 and then they sponsor 2024. We do hear that a lot from sponsors as once you go one year, it does get easier to show up subsequent years now that you've had that experience of coming in person and knowing just how the SaaS community and audience is a little bit different and how they interact, right? With booths and vendors when they're on, when they're on site at SaaS Annual. So that's what we mean by returning. So most of them were returning sponsors. A couple were new. New. So not to say that you can't break out as a new sponsor if you were new, you know, notably Runway was— isn't a newer— literally new entry, um, and cracked the top 12. Um, and if you were alumni, so we call them alumni sponsors, the sponsors who didn't necessarily sponsor '23 but have sponsored in the past, right? So having that experience does help. Just something to consider if you were a new sponsor, or maybe you are a, you know, considering being a returning sponsor. It does get a little bit easier. In terms of company categories, if you look at these just as a whole on the top 12, you know, finance and AI pretty much dominate the top 12 currently. You know, they are companies of all different sizes though, so take that as you will. But the majority of companies in the top 12 also participated and benefit from this year's Who Do You Want to Meet program, which we'll chat about. And they on average also invited 13 customers/prospects to attend using their customer passes. So I have a slide on this, I think, next. Yeah, which I'll get into. If this is your first time hearing this, it saddens me. And we can obviously do a little bit better on our NPS, even better at our communications. It's something we tell out a lot on webinars, but maybe doesn't always go all the way up to the exec level. So whether you realize it or not, All these Super Gold, Platinum, and Diamond sponsors were eligible this year, as years previous, to invite current customers or active prospects to SaaStr using what we call the SaaStr customer passes. So these are literally full passes that we give to sponsors as long as their customers and prospects meet the guidelines. So we did increase the eligibility of passes from 2023 to 2024. So Super Gold had, you know, 5 passes, Platinum 10, Diamond 15. There are a few sponsors who had more. There are a few sponsors who used zero. So in the data, you know, we saw some people use no passes. We saw some people ask us for extra passes. There was, you know, outside of the top 12, the average was really skewed. It was kind of all over the place across Super Gold, Platinum, Diamond. You know, I would say the Platinums and Diamonds used all of their passes, if not more. Super Gold, it was very hit or miss on whether they used any of those 5. A lot of folks actually used 0, some used all 5, and then some asked for a few more. So really interesting there on just the how much people used these customer and prospect passes. We did ask that, you know, nominees be sent to SaaStr and be director level and above. That really wasn't the issue on people. On people getting passes ticketed or folks nominated, right? I would say we probably only rejected 2 people out of all the, you know, hundreds of submissions we got from sponsors who wanted to ticket eligible either, again, customers or prospects. That really wasn't the issue there. Again, we just saw some people do 0 and some people do 10. So it was either you were into this as a KPI. Or you kind of weren't, or maybe you ran out of time. But we call it out because it may be something that, you know, at the exact level you might not have tracked yet or may not be tracking, or it may not yet be on your radar for 2025. If again, if this is the first time you're hearing about this, it is something we offer to all Super Gold and up sponsors. Yeah, unfortunately some folks did use zero of these. I think, you know, it's the feedback we hear from the folks who use zeros, you know, I'm sponsoring Zaster to literally get new leads. Yes, of course, like get new leads. Like as you guys saw in that data, leads are up year over year. Some people are telling us they have too many leads, but I'd be remiss to say if it's not also in your, in your KPIs to track how many customer meetings you have at SaaStr, you're probably not, you're probably just being a little bit too narrow on the KPIs of an event like a SaaStr, right? At an event like our scale, and I hear anecdotally all the time, we saw it in the feedback of the survey results. So many people tell us they meet so many customers on-site at SaaStr, whether it's formally through things like customer passes or just, you know, people coming to their booth, they're like, oh yeah, hey, I'm a customer of you guys. I actually have not met you IRL yet. It's just something we hear a lot from our sponsors. So not to harp on this, this is just something we unfortunately saw in the data that some people did not do even though it's there for them. And so again, we just call that out as something that you may not have tracked, right? Maybe something to investigate with your team. Post-annual going into May. I can always send you the data of who you guys might have invited, right? Again, if you need that and maybe weren't aware, but we just call it out as something to track maybe a bit more distinctly as an overall event KPI going into 2025 because so many people told us they had customer meetings either through the passes or just customers coming up to their booth. Again, something that should be tracked, right? The magic of a event at scale like a SaaS or that's in the Bay Area, that people are going to come that are your customers. And so we do always recommend when staffing your booth, you have at least one, you know, CSM or account manager there, other like in addition to your sales team to keep track of that, right? To keep them happy. It would save them a lot of time to do one flight to SaaS Annual than like 10 flights to the Bay Area or maybe 5 different ones, even if you meet 5 customers. So just something we call out there since some of these customer passes were not used at all. So some, again, some use more, but some use zero. So that's why we call that out from the data. Two last things. One new thing we added this year, it was a bonus lead gen program that we piloted at SaaStry Europa this year and then brought it over to SaaStry Annual. I don't know if they're watching, but, you know, big thanks to the IBM team. They did help me a lot with this on a lot of their feedback on how it went. They were a good game, if you will. And you can imagine their, their wants and requirements were a little bit different because they're a public company. But they did help me and faster solidify this for the rest of the sponsors, which was a really big help and boon for everybody. So what we did this year through the Who Do You Want to Meet program is this is a completely optional bonus lead gen program again for sponsors at that Super Gold and up level. If you're listening to this call and you're like, wow, there's a lot more benefits of being Super Gold versus Gold, Yes, there are. Like anecdotally, yes, there are. There's Who Do You Want to Meet? There's speaking included in Super Golden Up. There's customer passes included in Super Golden Up. It is our most populous level for that reason. But yeah, if you're, if you're thinking like, man, I really need to try and get to that Super Gold versus Gold level because there's a lot of benefits. There are, right? So that, that just is. So what we did in the Who Do You Want to Meet program is What we did for annual this year, again, for Super Golden Up sponsors, for those who had like a speaker and even for some of those who didn't, we put into the system and emailed all of our attendees pre-event saying literally, who do you want to meet? That was the subject line of the email. It said, who do you want to meet? We solicited out to our attendees, the, you know, vendors who were going to be the vendors and sponsors who were going to be on site to meet with them. So in the end, what we were able to do is we were able to deliver 2 waves of what we called bonus lead gen of additional qualified opt-in leads ahead of the event. Now we do do this right before the event starts, and I know some of the feedback was like, can you do this earlier? Well, yes, of course we can do this earlier, and we may do it earlier for 2025. It does mean though you're going to get less hand raisers because in it's not here, but in, you know, the data we see a lot of, which is probably no surprise for you guys, a lot of attendees sign up last minute. So if we send this out too early, you're gonna miss a bunch of people. Now that's why we did 2 waves this year. We may work on the timing of those waves to be a little bit early, as early as possible without, you know, excluding too many attendees at the last minute. But it did mean that this year sponsors got 2 waves of, I think if, you know, a few, like 5 days before maybe, and like the day before, they got additional hand raisers who said, yes, I opted in as an attendee to meet, let's say, Jada, Google, Front, IBM. Like, that's literally— they raised their hand to say, yes, I do want to meet this person on site. We gave those leads to the sponsors. You can see the data here. Um, Jada had the most with 124 additional leads. You know, Google, Front, IBM all got over 100. The average across all the Super Gold, um, Platinum, Platinum Plus, and Diamond sponsors was 50. Think about that for a second. I'll let the data sink in. 50 additional leads. These are 50 people who are saying, I'm coming to SaaStr Annual in a couple days and I want to meet with Dialpad. I want to meet with Capchase. 50 people is a lot, right? If you look at those scans, that's, that's almost a quarter of a Gold's leads. Now I get Golds weren't eligible, but it's a lot of leads. It's a lot of people to meet on site potentially. Now, are they all qualified? You know, that's between you and your sales team, but they are all hand raisers, right? So they did literally opt into this. So it is a program we will continue into 2025. So if you have any feedback on this of like if these were better quality leads than your others, let us know. But we just know from like a data perspective, right, of how many leads people got is pretty good. So we'll continue it going forward. My last thing and then just a quick touch on the date announcement of May for 2025. So as you might have noticed, we did do these, we actually did 5 summits, but one was a closed door one, but a truly closed door one. But we did 4 summits this year. They were basically events within the SaaStrE annual events within the event, if you will. We did Poker Night, which you guys might have seen, but it was still gated even though it was in the event. We did CMO Brunch, we did the CCO Meetup, and then the CFO Summit. So these were ones that we had kind of dabbled with in 2020. '24 and then really went heavy on, you know, delivering these in quality for, or sorry, dabbled in '23 and then really delivered on in 2024. So this was technically like our, I think, second time doing CMO Brunch. We kind of did an impromptu poker night last time. So we, you know, made it a real thing this time. All that to say, you know, there were over 300 attendees to the poker night and they were all CROs and CEOs, over 200 to CMO Brunch, 330 The CS Summit, that one we did do the first, that was the first one. So that one got the most. If you're wondering why that one had the most out of all the four, the CFO and CMO one we did slightly last minute, but still pulled it together to get over 130 CFOs. Disaster. I know for some of you listening, watching, you're like, I always want more CFOs. I'm like, well, they came to the, they came to the SaaS-ter and they came to the summit. All of these summits, you know, held a week. We kept it to a max of 250. We'll play with that number for 2025. But they were all hand-curated and approved by SaaS, meaning, you know, if you came to CFO brunch, you were literally a CFO. If you came to CMO brunch, you were a CMO. Now again, there are rare exceptions at like public companies where that might be a VP of marketing instead of a CMO, but they're a billion-dollar company, right? But with those, and there were a few of those folks as you'll see in the data, but outside of that, you know, people really were in those titles. It was all handpicked. We did man it at the door, right, just to do a double check if folks showed up. I do remember a few folks coming to CRO and CEO poker night that were VPs of sales, and I said, come back next year when you're a CRO. And we had a few VP of Marketing try to go to CMO brunch, and we said, come back in a year or two when you're a CMO. So yeah, these are literally, you know, the highest quality things we do on campus. All summit attendees being, you know, C-suite executives. The majority of summit attendees were enterprise and public companies. So when we took the data from all 4 of these summits, we saw that the average, the average revenue of these attending companies was $100 million. Obviously that's a lot higher than Saastr as a whole. Saastr as a whole has a lot more people coming. You know, the summits has these people uniquely, and those are uniques. A few people went to both, right? Of like, okay, I've got a CMO, so, so I'll send my CMO, and I've got a CFO, so I'll send them to the CFO bunch. So those companies had, you know, we counted their uniques, but across that, again, average revenue being a lot higher than just SaaS or overall attendees at $100 million. That is a lot, right? You guys saw the numbers of how we skew mostly towards SMB and mid-market as a, you know, mid-market SMB and that enterprise as a whole. It's SaaS or for the summits, it's, it's almost completely enterprise. So, and about 9% of the summit attendees were actually representing billion-dollar companies. Again, highest quality thing we do. We are going to invite a few sponsors that we know to basically have like first right of refusal on these for 2025. So if it's not something you've talked about yet with myself or somebody at SASPR, just let me know. We do have to cap them unfortunately, right? Because there's only so much capacity. It is something where we have seen in our early data of just all these calls I've been on, literally everybody wants to do it. That also diminishes it, right? So, so for 2025, we are going to, you know, increase the size but not sacrifice the quality of these summits, right? They still won't be any more than 300 or 400 folks if I had to guess right now. And attending companies will be very similar to what we saw this year. So I put a few of the names here, you know, like the JPMorgans, the Wells, Salesforce, Coupa, New Relic, Autodesk, Zoom, monday.com, Grammarly, OpenAI, all huge, right? Like huge. So it is going to be one of those things too where like you do need to have a booth if you want to participate in all those other things. But again, not too complicated on this call, but just really the point of this slide was to call out that we did do these summits. Hopefully you got to attend. So if you did, give me your feedback on them because we'll make them even better next year. And all that to say that, you know, The average company coming to the summits is more of the enterprise. So if it's something you serve, again, just let us know. We'll, we'll, we'll explain the complexities. But just to say we did that and we'll do it even better for 2025. We're starting now on these summits, obviously. So not only from a sponsor perspective of, you know, we're talking about it post-event, we're already working on improving it for next year. It's something too we're already looking at, you know, we're sending like save the dates to all of the top execs we want to come back from those billion-dollar companies and to try and get more of them since it's October and I've got time to get them to come to May. So that's it on the data. I know I hit you guys with a lot, so thanks for listening. Again, I'll try and summarize this a little bit more distinctly into a blog post in case you missed it or you want to share it. SaaStr Annual will return next year. We've talked about it a little bit, but just as a note here, if you've missed it, we are going to be in May of next year. For a lot of reasons. I'll just explain a couple to keep it simple. You know, first and foremost, I don't know if you guys realize this, pre-2020, uh, SAS Re:Invent was in February. So when I joined Foursquare and whatever, almost 7 years ago now, um, SAS Re:Invent was always in Feb. It was like the first week of Feb forever. Um, and then we started Europe with that year. Um, but then, you know, 2020 happened and September of 2021, we were the only event, literally only, this is not a stat we made up. This is like literally we were the only event in the Bay Area in 2021. Uh, you know, the world was just reopening. We had, we literally had to do a lot of testing, uh, temperature checks. It was extremely expensive. Um, everything was outside. Um, we had to have all these extra like EMTs and security measures, but we did it right. So we were the only ones in September of 2021. That was just the first feasible window we had to come back and do a SAFSTER. And a lot of folks were like itching to try and get out of the house after like a year and a half, right? So that was the first time we could feasibly do it. And then we kept it in September. It made sense for, you know, the last 3 years. And as we got into the end of 2023 already. Sometimes these things take time. We already knew in the back of our minds we want to start to shift back towards Feb. Whether we'll actually get back to Feb, I don't know, because weather is not as great for being an outdoor event in February of the Bay Area. If you've ever been here, May is actually pretty good. It just starts to get a little bit warm. It's still, you know, notoriously foggy in the mornings, but it's pretty good. It's right before, you know, people go on summer breaks, etc. It's usually a calmer time. It's a good time to get, you know, those Q2 head start on leads, really boost your lead gen and demand gen at that time. And so for a lot of reasons, that's why we're going back. We've known in our minds for the last year and a half we wanted to start edging back towards being early in the year as we used to be pre-2020. So that's the short and the long of it. You know, we, I do already know that, you know, next year something that comes up in maybe more nuanced sponsor feedback is a lot of folks do do SaaStr and either HubSpot's inbound or Dreamforce. And we do hear from those sponsors, there's not a lot of overlap in the audience that comes, but sometimes it just comes down to a budget thing, right? Of like, that one's in September and I've got September budget and that one's in May and I've got May budget. I do know too, HubSpot, which announced they're gonna do inbound in the Bay Area. Next year in September. Dreamforce, I think, is moving to the first week of October, I believe. Don't quote me on that, but that's just what, that's what my sources say. So I'll believe them. You know, end of September, early October. It's been crowded in September for the last two editions of the annual. Whether this is TMI or not, you know, there's only so many dates where you can actually go live at the event center. It takes a lot of time to build out SaaS or annual. Notoriously, it takes us two weeks to load in. For a 3-day show and then a few days to load out. But, you know, the putting up of the tents takes some time. So it notoriously takes us a long time. And so the window to get, you know, basically 3.5 weeks, almost a month, if you think about that, it's quite hard at any event center. And so it actually just worked out that, you know, we, we settled with them again a while back now to come, come in May. So that's why we're going May 13th through 15th of 2025. I do think it'll lot, it'd be a lot better. I didn't put it in this deck. I should have. We wrote up on Saster.com that, you know, attendance even adjusted for time is already up for 2025 than it was for 2024. Same thing with sponsorship. So even time adjusted, we're tracking ahead right now. So that to us is a, it's very early in the data, right? Take, you know, take it as it will. It's early data, but even that to us is maybe a leading positive indicator that that, you know, we should have even more people coming to SAS for 2025 because there's less conflict. So that's the data so far. Last note, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention to everyone here, as you probably know, our early renewal period runs through October 31st. Now, why October 31st? Yes, it's Halloween. It's also my birthday. And so a long time ago, we settled on the fact that early renewals post-annual would go through October. I guess we'll have to change it for May. So it won't be my birthday anymore. But for now, it goes through October 31st. I always joke with the sales team, the best birthday gift they could give me is a closed deal. You can ask them, they will tell you that I've said that. And you know, what are the benefits of renewing early? Well, for a lot of folks that have already renewed early, many of you said you want to keep your booth. So we literally wrote it into your contract that, you know, you can, you have first right of refusal. On your booth for 2025. So that's why, if you're wondering why some people have already signed, that's a big reason why. The other big benefit being you can lock in your early renewal rate, um, for May if you do it now. The other last thing to keep in mind is some of the very best sponsorships literally have a limited capacity of n 1. So things like the Founder's Lounge, things like coffee, things like the lanyards, there's only one of those. Um, and usually those are gone by late October, early November. We did do a whole blog post on that. So if you're listening, you can go to saastr.com and read that there. It's, you know, the best stuff to sponsor that Saastr Annual. That is, and you, you can see the same image there, but some of these were n 1, right? Brain Dates, there's only one of those. So just some final food for thought there with that. Again, thanks everybody for watching. Hopefully this is helpful data to see it presented this way. This is a little bit of a different format than we've done in years previous, but hopefully super helpful. We'll write this up again, 'cause now we know from the feedback that some people like it in slightly shorter versions. So yeah, we'll write up a brief recap so that everybody has the data. We'll send out the deck so that you guys have it and can share it around. If you have any questions at all on this data or SaaS in general, just let me know. Again, I am ai@saastrank.com. Let me know. If I can't help you, I'll get somebody on the team to help you. Usually I can. Sometimes, you know, I don't have all the answers, but I'll get there. Thanks again for listening. Hopefully this was helpful to see some of the events data just as a whole for SASster, give you some good food for thoughts on, you know, the things like the summits and the Who Do You Want to Meet programs that were new. Even if you're a returning sponsor with that, you know, we'll, we'll keep doing these webinars. Again, we'll probably go for like an every other week cadence going forward. Some will be more exact, some will be more front lines. We'll, we'll, we'll make sure we announce those names beforehand so you guys can join or get the recording. With that, any other feedback? Let me know. Thanks everybody who is a sponsor of this year's SASSTR Annual. If you already renewed for 2025, thank you very much. We're excited to see you all there. Again, early, early, early data, but attendance is so far up right now. And thanks for watching, and hopefully see you in May. Catch you on the next, you know, SAS Start Workshop Wednesday podcast, whatever