Live SaaStr Insider Webinar

Good morning. The majority of today's webinar will be to go through sponsor speaker updates and deadlines for those who have speaking in their sponsor packages for this year. We are gonna hit some reminders first. So if you are like a gold or silver or ancillary sponsor, and maybe you don't have speaking, we'll do them after all the reminders. That way, if you don't have speaking, you can drop off after like 10 minutes. So. Okay, just a few reminders of where we are now in the timeline. So hopefully you guys have been into the sponsor portal by now and are familiar with the portal and our timeline. So basically, where are we at today? Today's the 13th. We're gonna again use this webinar to mostly go over sponsor speaker guidelines and an overview. We'll record it. So for those that miss it, you can watch this back later. You know, slide deadlines are going to be upcoming, um, for those again that have speaking in their packages. But where we are today, just if you're catching up on all things SAMHSA, hopefully by now you've logged into this portal and sent us, um, things like your logo, your company address. I know the team is starting to send reminders to those that are maybe missing it, so you will get a proactive email from our team if you haven't done so yet and completed those action items. Really important we get those just so we can make sure everything is set up in our backend as well. The floor plan, which I'll flip to in just a second and just explain booth selection a little bit more. In case you're wondering why you haven't picked your booth yet, we do booth selection and activation selection in order of level and contract signature date. So I'll explain those two things, just give a high-level overview in a second here. We do have like two previous webinars. That cover those just in full. So you can also watch those here on the webinars tab to catch some of the replays. The biggest next upcoming deadline for all sponsors will be that the booth artwork is due to our sponsor portal and our Dropbox link no later than noon time on Tuesday, April 1st. So now that's just a few weeks away. So please make sure again you're on track to use those sponsor booth guidelines and deliverables we have in this portal to design your booth and send it to us in the portal so that we can get it before any late fees might apply. So that's really the biggest deadline. Again, hopefully you guys are already fast at work on those. Again, we'll be, we'll be using this to to, to hit some deadlines this week, we'll use the next webinar again. We'll give maybe just another overview on booths next week as well, just before the deadline. And then I know things like people are starting to do things like book hotels or swag. Those are all really great things to do now, just in the background, if you're on top of everything else in your sponsorship. So just to that, on a few things for the upcoming deadline of booth graphics being due on April 1st. If you haven't seen this yet, there's kind of like two places you can go when you're designing your booths right now. One would be these sponsor booth specs, which is off the nav on the sponsor portal. These are 3D renders. I find them a bit helpful so that they can give you context on, you know, how you might picture the whole booth together, um, in the booth. It also has, you know, what each booth has, which is quite nice. So, you know, if you are unsure on how many, I don't know, stools are in the booth, that's in there too, which is quite nice. And yeah, it, it just gives you a nice 3D kind of design to reference as you're starting to build out your booths. You know, handy to keep in mind. But you do want to couple this with the full sponsor booth specs by level in the resources section. So that's called out here. But if you click that, that will take you to our resources. This is where you can download the full specifications. I know we're also uploading later today templates that you guys can use if you use like Adobe Illustrator. So that may help you too, just if you want to check your design so far of like, you know, where's the monitor in tandem to the rest of the booth. So super helpful things there. The other thing you'll notice in the resource section is the— if you haven't seen these yet, because we do again refresh this portal quite frequently, there are the shipping and handling labels in here. So for those folks that are starting to order swag and maybe you want to ship it directly to Freeman instead of shipping it to your office and then shipping it to SaaStr, It's obviously a little bit more cost effective to do it that way. This is how to do so. So this is where you can ship to the Advanced Warehouse. All the rates are here. Just keep in mind, you know, there's material handling rates for anything you ship in to the show. This kind of explains a bit more about it. So I'll skip over this, but you should definitely read all of these kind of like nuances on shipping just so you're not— there's no surprises when you come on site. And then things like, you know, services, if they have to unload vehicles, et cetera, are all on here. And then the shipping labels are at the very bottom. So you'll notice the shipping receiving date begins in about a month to Freeman. The deadline date for them, for you guys to ship to their advanced warehouse is the week before. And then there's kind of a gap period where after that point, you kind of need to just hold it to send to the event center. So all that is here for you guys. Again, really handy to read through this, know the rates and just kind of know the lay of the land when when it comes to shipping and material handling. And then kind of the deadlines are here too, just at a glance. So if you haven't seen that yet and you're starting to think about, you know, your swag and maybe your swag actually does take, you know, a couple weeks to produce, then it's a good time to order it kind of soonish and then just ship it directly to the Freeman advance warehouse. A lot of people do that. So other things to keep in mind are we are actively in the midst of booth selection right now. We just had another sponsor pick their booth last night. Um, so at the— you'll notice at like the very high levels it takes a little bit longer than maybe when we start getting into like the Super Golds and the Golds. Um, and that's because we do the higher levels literally custom one at a time. So, um, we've, um, we're still in the— we have one more like Diamond to choose, um, and a few more Platinums, and then we'll get into the Super Golds. Again, the Super Golds start to go a little bit quicker because we do it in small groups that pick concurrently. So yeah, I would suspect that if you are a Super Gold booth, I think last week I said it's probably going to be 2 weeks. I think that holds true. I think it's going to be another week here or so, maybe less, to get through the remaining Diamonds and Platinums, and then the Super Golds will start to pick and then it kind of starts to pick up in speed. How fast people want to get their boots in. And then, um, you know, a week or two later we'll do the Golds. So that's kind of the timeline now. If you're a Gold sponsor, just hold tight. Um, Super Golds, right, you know, kind of upcoming in the next week, week and a half to start picking boots. Um, and then we go from there. So, so that's the update on boot selection. It is strictly in order of level and then contract signature date. Um, if you guys missed last week's webinar, we went over activations. So these are things like food and beverage— excuse me— that you can have in your booth. Um, some of it's non-food related, a lot of it frankly is. But this is the deck here, um, and we do it very similar to booth selection. We do it in the same order of, you know, level and contract signature date. So concurrently, while, you know, the Diamonds are and Platinums are picking their booths, they're also deciding if they want to do you know, any activation. So you can see a few are starting to get taken, just by folks who are also picking their booths. So just bear that in mind. I know a few people have asked already about something they've seen in this deck. It follows the same rules of, you know, everything we do here is pretty much in order of level and contract signature date, just to keep it a bit more even keel. But again, there's a lot of options in this deck. I know a couple people too have emailed us of like, hey, I've got an idea for something I don't see in the deck, but do you have a vendor for XYZ item? Again, that's a perfectly fine thing to do. Even if you're at the Gold level, if you don't see something in this deck or at the Super Gold level and you're like, hey, I'm really thinking of doing again, some sort of giveaway activation, video game, things like that, arcade game, you know, again, one, it doesn't have to be food related. Two, if it's more of an interactive thing. Always best to just go through the events team. So email events@sastrank.com. So we can, you know, if, if you need help sourcing it, we've already helped a couple people source a few things for this year, or just to make sure, you know, things like, okay, whatever you're bringing in, again, we have to coordinate on, you know, getting it there, shipping, all things our team can help you with versus you trying to fact find and just bring it yourself. So usually best to do it there. Anything else there, David, on activations?

No, that's great. That's a great overview. I think, you know, the main thing is to coordinate with us no matter what. So if you have some ideas or anything you're thinking, just make sure you loop in the events at sasterinc.com. And yeah, this deck is a great resource. And yeah, no, I think Amelia, you covered it spot on.

Cool. Okay. The other thing we want to go over. So that's the majority of the reminders. I know a few folks have asked us for things like, you know, where should we stay? We've been able to write out the attendee block. We'll get it added to the FAQ there as well. But yeah, I think that's the majority of what you guys are kind of in the thick of planning right now. So with that, we're gonna go over more so in depth the sponsor speaker brief and FAQ. So if you are a member of a sponsor speaker team or you are the speaker yourself, this is a good time to just get a brief overview. And then for all of our sponsors who are maybe joining live or watching this back on the replay, if you don't have speaking in your package for this year, you can stay on if you wanna know what it's like for upcoming years, or you can drop off since we hit the majority of reminders and then just come back next week to the next webinar.

So, and I'll just call out, I don't know how many we have left, but I think we only have, we have like 1 or 2 spots if somebody who doesn't have speaking really wanted to upgrade, right? There's like, I don't even know if it's a handful, but if it's something you're really into, let us know.

I mean, just, I think it depends on how you define a handful, but yeah, like, like not 5, you know what I mean? That like, not 5, there's a few. All good. Yeah. Great call out. So yeah, for any of our sponsor speakers and their teams who might be tuning into this, we're just going to go through the guidelines here for speaking at SAS Re:Annual. I know some of you have done this before, but it does slightly change year over year. And our audience definitely is very similar and gets updated and changes year over year as well. So just as an overview for speaking, as you guys know now, the core dates of SAS Re:Annual are the 13th through the 15th. There is a speaker entrance listed on here. All of your speakers will get a calendar invite. With the POCs, CC'd, once you've determined your speakers and your time. I know from the speakers team, some of you still are going through topics and speakers, so you haven't figured that out quite yet. And then some of you now are looking to book times that you do have because you do have your topics and speakers more defined. So just know that's kind of like an upcoming next step is once you do get that all settled, send us your headshots and all that stuff. We'll also send you calendar invites with these specific addresses and reminders and stuff like that. If at any time you do have questions just related to your speaking in general, it's best to email the speakers team directly. Like, if you happen to email events, it's fine because we'll get it to the right place, but it is better to email speakers@sastrinc directly. So it goes just to the speakers team. In our breakdown, I think many of you know this by now because you've seen it in our prospectus and you've seen us talk about it on these webinars. But we are a very executive-focused audience, right? 61% of our attendees are VP level and above, with a lot of them being CEOs and founders. As you can see on this chart, the next bucket being go-to-market, right? And so a lot of the feedback we do give on content and eventual slide content is making sure it's relevant to this audience, right? Average company is going to be you know, at normal SaaS 3 annual, anywhere between $10 to like $100 million to public companies. So the average kind of like revenue range, right, is really gonna be the $10 to $40. That's how we define it as mid-market. So again, doing things like avoiding things that are too early stage in content. I've seen sponsors kind of fall into that trap. Previously, it's best to avoid anything that's too, you know, basic, bare level, or again, things we might have already covered on sasr.com. I've seen us call that out a lot of like, hey, we've kind of just covered this. Maybe do a fresh take on something you're a subject matter expert in that, you know, founders and executives can learn from. And just assume they're post-revenue, right? Assume they're post-revenue. Assume they're not just starting out. They've already got, you know, $10 to $40 million on average of revenue. Right? They, they know all the basic stuff. They, they've read Zaster. That's why they're at Zaster Annual. So, um, good to keep that in mind just when it comes to content. And also just, I think that's a good caveat on maybe where some of you have seen some of the feedback come from. It's all because we want to refine it, right? And make sure we serve this audience. The other thing you'll notice, I know some of you've gotten feedback on, hey, this is slightly too repetitive, or maybe it's slightly too, um, high level versus being more tactical. We give that feedback a lot, right? And if you look at the current agenda that's live on saster.com, which we'll show at the end, sasterannual.com, a lot of content you'll see has to do with AI. So just making your content about AI is not enough, right? You've gotta be fairly specific these days on like what part of AI are you talking about? Where does it sit? How is this useful? And what's tactical, right? We've pretty much rejected all the high-level AI topics that were like, Here's why you need to use AI. It's like our, our, our audience already knows it, right? They went to SaaS AI Day. They're really on the forefront of these things. They know all that stuff already, right? They're really here for like, what have you seen work specifically that I can steal or copy and learn from? So again, just keep it focused on folks that are you, right? Just kind of, if you're the speaker watching this, just kind of duplicate yourself. What would you want to know, right? in the audience knowing what you already know, right? Maybe skip some of the stuff that you already know. So, so that's a little bit more on speakers and content coming into timelines. So this is what we are in the thick of now. Again, as I mentioned, just a minority of you are still figuring out your topics and speakers. So thank you for that. Most of you have now, you know, have at least your speakers confirmed, and some of you were still working through just like topic tweaks and refinements. Again, kind of based on some of the things I mentioned there. And then again, once you do confirm your topics and speakers, the next step is gonna be working with the speakers team. They'll help you book a time, right? They're, they're gonna basically ask you for any holdouts from your speakers during the 3 days of SAS Re:Annual. And then they'll help book a time for your speakers and then send— and then the next step would be for them to send a calendar invite, which I think only we've done for like 2 or 3 people. So, The majority of you are kind of in the midst here of confirming your topics and speakers and getting us, again, kind of like holdouts for any times for booking. So that's where the majority of you are at. Again, one thing to note when you're emailing back and replying back to the speakers team on picking a time, even though some of your sessions are, you know, a duration of 10 minutes, you should plan and block off for your speakers at least 90 minutes. I know that sounds aggressive for a 10-minute session, but it, that includes travel time, right? Like if they're not already on campus at SaaStr Annual, I always like to, you know, worst case scenario planning. Like if you're, if your CEO's coming from the city and he's gotta get to SaaStr, get mic'd up and then get on stage, 90 minutes would be enough time to get there and then do your session. Because we do ask that they report into the speaker green room 60 minutes ahead of their scheduled session start time because we do run on time, right? So we start and stop literally at the agenda times. There's, you know, clocks on stage to keep everybody on time and moving. Obviously, there's a lot of content at SAS Re:Invent. And so yeah, we do run on time. We don't really let sessions fall behind. And so hence why we ask for things early.

I'll just add, I mean, it's a better experience for the speakers too, right?

It is. They're not rushing.

Yeah, the green room's nice. There's always some goodies for them. And they're just calmer. Like, I've seen speakers show up at the last minute, and they're all flustered, right? Yes. Definitely baking in some extra time for them to come chill out for a minute, have a cup of coffee or water.

Yeah, for sure.

And, and ideally spend some time at Saastr. I think they'll probably have a good experience too in checking out the broader event while they're there. So, but at a minimum, yeah, make sure they have a little breathing room.

Agreed. Yeah. And that's part of it, right? That's, that's a lot of the psyche of why we ask people to show up 60 minutes before their session is to exactly that point. Like if your CEO or exec is running around, And then they're rushing over the green room. We've gotta rush them to the stage, mic 'em up, and they're just gonna present like that. That is gonna affect their presentation and their vibe of the presentation. So yeah, that is why we like to get people prepped and ready. You know, we livestream in the green room as well so they can see what the stage will look like. They have a better feel for it. You know, the best, happiest path I've seen is speakers, and your speakers can come earlier than 90 minutes, like if they wanna hang out. And get prepped, right? And I've seen speakers go through their slides, you know, on their laptops or whatever, go through it with their co-presenter, make sure they have their timings down, um, make sure they are again essentially ready to deliver not only to the live audience that is there in person, but remember we do also livestream everything. So you are speaking to the people in the room plus everybody watching online. Um, so again, hopefully your speaker has done this before and they won't get get freaked out. But even so, like, you know, I think it's always best to just give them, again, a little extra time so they can get in the right headset and mind space to present. Having been a presenter myself previously at ASTER, trust me, it is better not to be rushing around from like the booth directly to the stage. That, that feels a little bit hectic. I think it's better to, as David mentioned, come hang out, have coffee, have a bite to eat, get yourself situated. right? And then do your presentation so that you're in presentation mode, right? This is the only thing that will matter for the next— whatever. So your session's 10 minutes, for the next 10 minutes, that way you can focus solely on that and what you want to say. Okay. Other things in the sponsor speaker timeline. The formal agenda is now live. We'll show that to you guys at the end here. This is the webinar that we're hosting again. We are live streaming. We are recording. For any speakers who wanna watch this back later. And then after some feedback, we did move this deadline a little bit out by just a week. So not an infinite amount of time. The slides were originally due next Friday. A lot of you were like, I just figured out our content and speakers with the speakers team. That's barely a week to get slides. And so yeah, with that, we've moved it out one more week because basically now everybody has their speakers and content. So that'll give you 2 weeks to draft your slides. So we did move out this deadline just by a week, but are still due in March. So by March 28th, and you'll see this in the email too in case you missed this webinar communication, but you'll see that they're due by the 28th for an initial first draft, right? Some folks have asked us like, how built out does that draft have to be? It should be close to final, right? It should be close to final. The real feedback is, you know, to get the feedback from our speakers team so they review content again. There's a lot of concurrent content between all the speakers we have at SaaStr, everything we've written on saastr.com. And so they'll check it to make sure, again, it's the most relevant and engaging it can be for our audience. Once you do turn in your slides, right, they'll go through with you on like revisions to get a final completed version done by mid-April, right? So anything else you need to know between now and mid-April, I think that's, that's kind of your biggest deadline for our sponsors who who have speaking and a booth, it's like, okay, your booths are due April 1st, your slides are due, and then by the 15th, which is mid-April, you should be kind of close to done with the speakers team on your slides. And then it just becomes, you know, making sure you've got your travel booked for your speakers, stuff like what else, you know, to David's point, when else are they going to be at SASTR, things like that. So you don't have to stress it. So this is more so When it comes to crafting your slides at this point, since everybody has crafted, or almost everybody has crafted their speakers and topics, again, super executive audience. So do craft, you know, sessions around your perspective, your lessons learned as like a founder, as an exec with AI, you know, in the trenches of it. Again, early stage advice, we nix actually. We don't need it. It's too early for our audience, right? They'll kind of tune it out. I hope this is clear by now, but all session content is meant to be tactical in nature and educational versus promotional, right? The best way you can really showcase yourself, your brand, your product is by being a thought leader, right? Trust me, I know people are like, okay, like I'm going to do 5 ways that we're using AI and maybe my product is one of the ways. And that's fine. Like, I think it's good that you tout your own products. But again, if it's overly promotional, if it's a pure one, we don't even allow pure demos of your product. But if it's— again, since you're speaking to such an exact level audience, again, pretend they are you. That's the best advice I could give you. What would you want to hear from this person, right? And if you're like, wow, I really got a lot of, a lot of, a lot of advice, a lot of tactics from this person. Yeah, they're going to come up to you at the booth. They're going to ask you questions about your product. Like, it's just a more natural way to build a relationship. Like, think of it as a mini relationship building exercise versus a speaker session. And that's honestly the, the, the way we've seen sessions perform the best previously. Like, you're basically establishing a relationship with all these other execs, showing what you guys know, what you've done, your expertise, and then they will, you know, want to naturally engage with you from there versus it being an outright demo or commercial. Again, all of you have met this requirement so far, but speakers do need to be VP level and above because again, our audience is going to be very VP level and above and C-suite heavy. Slides are required. I haven't seen any pushback on this one yet, but yeah, slides are required for all sessions. Again, keep in mind, because we are— there's the in-person audience and the livestream, there's no exceptions to this rule. It just makes sure, like, everybody can follow along in your sessions. You know, I would say there's, there's kind of like the porch trick on this of like how many slides is too many and how many slides is not enough. Again, you should be able to run through your slides or use them as, you know, points in the duration of your session, right? Again, I, I, I think 3 to 5 slides is kind of the sweet spot for a 10-minute session. Things that have a lot more than that kind of get hard to go through all the data. I wouldn't make your— I don't know if it's on here, but it wouldn't make your slides too heavy in content like that, or word saturated, right? Like People want it, it's gonna distract from what you're saying. People are just gonna be reading your slides or you're gonna be reading off your slides. It's best to use them as support, right? You don't need to worry about things like making an opening slide with like your headshot. Like we'll do all that stuff. We do have a template that's linked here. There's two you can honestly pick from, whichever one you wanna use. You'll see one is like the blue SaaStrangel branding and the other ones are like our AI-themed ones. So If your content's about AI, you can use that one. And then again, we will review all the slides. So if we see anything, you don't have to worry about all this now. But just, again, best practices to keep in mind as you're starting to build out your formal content and the slides themselves. Last but not least, and then we'll show the agenda and then answer any questions. Just because I have gotten this question a little bit from sponsors. Again, we've talked about planning off the 90 minutes and kind of like not having your speakers rush over there. How it works in terms of delivery is like the stage is a full-blown stage setup. You can see it here on this slide. This is a, this is what it looked like last year. It's gotta look the same this year. So if you're like, what's the stage gonna look like? This is what it looks like. There are actual, you know, the stage, I think, I mean, technically holds about like 300 people, but there's kind of ancillary seating for more. But yeah, the presenters stand and deliver in front of the screen. But it is like, you know, a big screen. So just keep that in mind for when you're making your slides. But it does mean, right, things like that's why we do slide delivery so far in advance because our AV team and speaker team will be running your presentation. You'll have a clicker. But, you know, that way you're not running it off of a laptop. Like, this is a full— like, you'll have people, they'll mic you up. They'll talk you through it and then they'll get you up on stage. Sometimes I've had people bring props. It's rare, but if you are a speaker thinking about bringing any like actual physical props, try and communicate that to us. I say this, you know, do try and keep in mind that swearing and profanity on stage is being livestreamed and recorded. So like we could take it out of the recording, but we can't take it out of the livestream. So don't, you know, say things that you may regret later because it is being livestreamed. You're also in front of like a live studio audience, right? So just keep it professional, keep it cool, keep it cool. And, you know, there are things like a downstage monitor, clicker timer, etc. that will keep you on track. Last but not least, we've already talked about the speaker green room. The dress code for your speakers is going to be business casual, right? Or even business formal. I've seen them. Listen, I know a few people like to do like the company swag on stage. Company jackets are fine, right? I saw— I forget what sponsor it was. They did like denim jackets that were kind of cool with their logos last year for their presenters. I think that's fun. What I would refrain from is just where having your presenters or speakers wear just a company t-shirt or like a company polo to present. Again, it doesn't look as good on like the replays because everybody else is like wearing blazers and like they're, again, they're fairly business casual, but they are dressed up, right? So just keep that in mind. It will just look a little bit better on the livestream and the replays if, you know, they, I mean, I know, again, I think company swag is good and there's a way to do it on stage that looks good. Maybe in forms of like jackets or I've seen a lot of people do like their Patagonia with their company logo. Jackets have worked really good. Again, kind of overlays, it works good. But just the company t-shirt, I would say doesn't look as good as it could on the replay. So just something to keep in mind there. If you have any questions, either in real time you can ask us on the chat here, or if you're watching this back later, as a speaker or a speaker's team, you can just reach out to the speakers at sastrink.com at any time with any questions just specifically to your speakers and content. With that, I'm just gonna jump to the agenda for a few minutes here in case you guys haven't seen this yet. So when you come to sasreannual.com, you can head over to our agenda and speakers. It is now live, meaning if you've gotten your sponsor registration codes, you can start signing up for sessions as well. Some of the things you'll see too will be helpful because it's a duplicate of what's some of what's in the sponsor portal, right? So sponsors do get early access and those hours are in the portal. But if you're looking just for general registration hours, they're here, right? So again, if like at a glance you wanna just add this to your agenda, easy to do so there just so that you have it right in your calendar, whatever you can sync it up so that you have all the times handy. You don't have to memorize what's in the portal. So easy to do that there. You'll see the sponsor hall hours on here. You'll see there are live Sessions on here already. And again, part of the steps for your speakers and content is once you do pick a time, um, or I guess some of it gets assigned from the speaker scene, but once your, once your time has been determined for this year's SAS Annual, they will add your session to the agenda. So keep that in mind. That's why they ask for things like headshots and other things, um, so that we can get it added here. Um, again, other good reminders you'll see things like Poker Nights and CMO and CRO Summit on here. So if that's something you want your teams to go to, good reminder to do so off of our networking tab that's at the top. So you can do so here. We're also trying, we're, you know, we're, we're also starting to be a bit more proactive on trying to get folks to come back or sorry to invite them out to this and these going forward. But again, if you want to just save us a step or you a step on, on guessing which of your execs should come. You can just nominate them through any of these pages there. So yeah, take a look at the agenda. Anything else, David, just for sponsors either in general or on speaking?

No, I think you nailed it. I think we covered a good amount today. If you have questions, remember speakers@saastrinc.com. That's the email that goes to the speaker team. We'll get you the best responses. The quickest. I thought it was a great call out on the networking summits, the C-level summits. Definitely encourage everyone to take a look at that. Nominate your execs to come to those. They'll have a great experience. And that's going to be a really exciting part of SaaStr this year. And yeah, keep it cool. Like Amelia said, keep it cool.

Keep it cool. Keep it cool. All right. If you guys have any other questions for either speakers or the events team, You can email speakers@saastrang.com or events@saastrang.com. Thanks for joining. We will be back next week as always. If you guys have anything in the meantime, you can also reach out to us and those teams. And we look forward to seeing you next Thursday. So thanks everyone for joining.

See you then. Bye.

Bye.