SaaStr Annual 2024 Sponsor Walkthrough

on either becoming or either already being a SaaS sponsor. We like to do these every Thursday at 9. So yeah, we are getting closer to the SaaS Annual, definitely not long now to go, uh, just a couple months away. And so we have some exciting updates for you guys to share with all of our sponsors and partners. So without further ado, we'll get it kicked off. If you have any questions on the live stream or on the Zoom, you can pop them into the chat, or as always, you can reach out to us after the fact, and we can help you out from there. So with that, yeah, a few things we want to go over today, and then hopefully— I know some of you watch this back on the recording, so hopefully this is helpful for folks as you're getting up to speed and maybe caught up on, on the annual and starting to plan out your presence a bit more for SaaStr. So We'll go through a few things here today and try and keep it short for those who are trying to get back to their holiday. So yeah, so yeah, a couple exciting updates. We went over Boost Specs last week. I'll go over some of these at a glance today just to hit some high-level reminders. And then hopefully this week you guys all received your invites to the SaaStr annual sponsors portal. This is now live. I know some of you have asked us to add additional team members, which is totally fine. Or if you haven't gotten your invite, just let us know so we can resend you the login information. But this is super handy. We rolled this out for London this year, and we're doing it again for Annual. Obviously, completely Annual content. But we got some good feedback from folks who just piloted this with us in London for Europa. So yeah, lots of good stuff in here. It is a living, breathing resource center, if you will. So yeah, we've been adding to this basically daily right now. So always good to check it periodically. So I'll give you guys a walkthrough of the sponsor portal. At a glance again, or if you send this to other team members on the recording, might be handy to have. So yeah, when you log in, this will be the dashboard where it drops you into. As always, if you have any questions, do reach out to our events team or events@saastrinc.com. This email is also listed like I think everywhere in this portal, so it should be easy to find us and track us down. But basically email, that goes to various people on our events team and we'll get you to the right place. If you're ever like, I'm not sure who I should be reaching out to, Use that email. That's the best one. Uh, 'cause anybody on our team there can get you to the right spot. So, um, yeah, a few things to keep in mind. Um, and some things we wanna go over in the sponsor portal. The homepage will give you the overview. I think you guys know now the location is the San Mateo County Event Center. Uh, we've been here since 2021. So if you're, um, a repeat sponsor, this will look familiar to you. If you're a brand new sponsor, um, this is also affectionately known as the San Mateo Fairground sometimes. They do host the fair here. It's a huge campus. Yeah, for those that are maybe newer or unfamiliar, unlike Moscone, right, it's in San Mateo. So you're kind of south of the city, about 20 minutes, but it's a large 40-acre campus. So you're not, you know, just plopped in the middle of the city. It's a little easier for attendees to get to. As a sponsor, you can drive in. Again, makes it super handy for things. And yeah, there's a lot more space to spread out for us, at least, to run faster across. The entire span of the campus, basically. So yeah, we, we do use, I think I looked the other day, it's like 58 acres. I thought it was like 50, so a little bit more than 50. But yeah, it's, it's a huge, massive space, and we do use it all. So September 10th through 12th, those are the dates to know. That's a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at the San Mateo County Event Center. Address is there. Shipping information is in here. So depending on, you know, when you're starting to ship your swag or things for your booth, you're probably gonna ship it to the warehouse. So that's in our resources once we get there. But just bear that in mind for shipping purposes. That's more for like, you know, when you're, if you're still booking travel, where to go on the day of, then you'd be going directly to the Events Center. Going over the schedule at a glance, 'cause I think this is helpful for folks just to know and keep in mind. Monday, September 9th is an optional day. So we got a lot of feedback last year that, you know, Annual really turns into like a 5-day event for some folks depending on how much loading they needed to do. You know, we had some custom booths. Even for the turnkey folks, you know, they come the entire day before. That's already a 4-day, you know, it's a, it's a bigger commitment, a lot of time and I know resources for folks to get away. And so based on a lot of the feedback we got from our sponsors last year, the, the event hours for the sponsor hall are a little bit more streamlined. I would say they're a little bit easier this year so that it's not overbearing of, you know, extra travel days, etc. You could do it all on the 10th, 11th, 12th. Again, that was based on the feedback we heard from our majority of sponsors last year. Make it a little bit easier, you guys said. And I know the hours are always really long in the sponsor hall. They're long days. So yeah, we took all that into consideration in forming the agenda for this year. So I'll walk you guys through it just briefly here. Again, Monday, September 9th. This is now an optional day. So it used to be you had to pretty much come what we call day zero to come and set up. Honestly, this is if, if and where required, right? Like if you have extra things, you know, you're doing in your booth, Freeman, you have an activation that you, you want to meet your outside vendor the day before, which we do recommend, right? You don't have to, again, it's recommended, but it is optional now because you have extra time now on the temp. So that's, I think, the biggest change here year over year in these sponsor hall hours. If you're coming the 9th and you're in town or you've already booked it, great. You know, you've got that extra time there in the afternoon to Come pick up your badges and set up, especially, you know, for folks too that have custom footprints or again are bringing in more bespoke things. Usually having the extra day before is handy so you're not as stressed on the day of. And then on the 10th, we do have sponsor early access in the morning. So again, keep this in mind. I know again, a lot of feedback from last year was it was really long days because it ended up being 4 days plus, you know, the 12th basically goes until the evening. You can't always get a flight out after Maven, right? This goes all the way till 9. It was turning into a 5-day event for a lot of folks. So we tried to consolidate as best we could for this year. It's still fairly long, but we did try and call— consolidate a bit. So yeah, if you wanted to, or if you want to split your team up, you know, as you're booking travel now, then yeah, that is something you could do in having folks, you know, just come on the morning of the 10th, or a majority of folks you have from 9:00 AM to 2:30. So that's a lot of time there, you know, almost 6 hours to pick up your badges, set up the booth. Again, if you have a turnkey booth, this will just be things like, you know, unboxing any swag or packages you might have sent over. If you have a turnkey activation that you decide to do with us, or you've already picked, then this would be something to where, you know, you want to get set up with your vendors beforehand, make sure everybody's in. It's also a good way to skip the lines at reg, right? Get there before all the attendees do, right? When we open and get yourself set up for the day and feel good about, you know, your monitors, your, your pitch, all that stuff. You're so, yeah, get all that down. So I would, you know, I think the best setup is coming the morning of. Again, only come at 9th if you feel like you really need it or you've got something custom. It's totally optional. We do try and work with our, our venue teams and our general contractors and all our AV teams to make sure everything is turnkey. So you can just plug and play and you can only come, you know, on the morning of the 10th, if that makes sense for you to skip, you know, an extra day of travel. A day at the office that you need to be, you know, on the computer, et cetera. So that's the setup for there. That's kind of the explanation there on the 9th or the 10th for load-in. And then the sponsor hall opens on the 10th at 2:30. So this is again shifted to the afternoon to allow people extra time in the morning if they're only coming on the 10th this year. So again, you should be ready and prepped by 2:30 'cause this is when reg will open for everybody outside. And so that's when people will start to come in, the, you know, they start to line up before 2:30. So be ready by this time, right? And we'll go to 7. So again, that's a, that's a fairly big chunk of time still on day 1 with setup and with that chunk of time with, you know, the sponsor hall being open, Brain Needs will be open. We're gonna do networking this day and Expo Hall activations. It's gonna be a heavy networking day. I think that's also some feedback we got from last year was, you know, it is 3, it turns into 3 plus plus days, almost 5. And there's really content jammed at all points of the event. So, so we really want to focus day 1 on networking, you know, give both our attendees and the sponsors a chance to get it set up, do brain dates, really focus on booking meetings for this day, and not worried about, okay, I've got to run to this other session I want to see as well. So really, that's the goal of day 1 is like a networking and con— networking and brain dates day for the day. And then coming into day— again, that turns into a full day because you're pretty much there from 9 to 7. So still a full day mentally, but at least, you know, maybe it helps chunk it up a bit more than prior years. And then coming into the 11th and 12th, again, these are full board days. So sponsor early access on the 11th starts at 7 AM. Again, that's if you have new team members showing up or you're swapping out team members and you want to come either refresh your booth or have them pick up their badges again before attendees get there. 7 to 8 gives you a whole extra hour that you can come and do that right when things are nice and quiet. And then yeah, I expect us to be roaring at 8 AM and bright and early, I think, for all of our new sponsors. Maybe a good reminder or learning that, you know, people do come at all hours of the day to Disaster, but especially in the mornings, that is when content is starting, right? That's when we have Brain Dates. That's when we're going, you know, all the stages are lit. We're doing heavy AI Summit this day. So yeah, that's, you know, it's gonna be a lot going on, a lot to the senses, but that's why we always recommend getting there an hour early when you can so that you can get yourself set up for the day and you're not feeling like you're scrambled or jammed or nervous later in the day because you got there when everybody else did. So it's just an extra extra time, you know, get your coffee, get your booth all set up, refresh your swag, talk to the team, you know, coordinate on the game plan for the day before all the attendees, um, show up. But yeah, they do show up early and they do keep coming all day long, so keep that in mind. The other thing I'll call out is, you know, during happy hour, this is one of the busiest times, as is lunch. I think sometimes when you're used to doing other events and they have either happy hour separately or lunch in a whole separate room, um, you feel like you can walk away from your booth and go do that, and then you know, just come back later. These are, these are actually two of the most highly trafficked times. I'd say the morning's fairly busy. Again, people are coming first thing in the morning. They're fresh. They have the want, you know, to talk to sponsors. So mornings, lunch, happy hour, those are like three busiest times of day. For our sponsors, the sponsor hall will be rocking and rolling all day long. It will be constant traffic because we have engineered it to be, you know, kind of the main hangout area this year in between our two biggest stages. So yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be a vibe. So yeah, come ready, but it does mean, you know, all day conversation. So I do like to point that out, whether it's the 10th or 11th or 12th, plan to have your booth staff during these Expo sponsor hall hours open. You see here, it's a good plan, right, to rotate folks if you can, because again, it's going to be constant foot traffic. So that's always a reminder I like to give folks of, it's not just, you know, kind of a one-off or a one-and-done, or there's just certain bursts you need to, staff or would make a recommendation on, I would recommend having full staffing throughout all times of the day. And if you can, staffing it with execs, right? So half of our audience is at that VP level and above. So always a good idea to make sure you've got an exec on hand to take higher-level conversations because, you know, the, the attendees really enjoy that when they can talk to your C-suite. So very similar for day 3 as day 2, you know, we, we open early just 7:30, so slightly half hour later than the second day of Annual. The sponsor hall is open from 8:30 to 6:00 this day. Again, it's a full long day. So yeah, these, these do become kind of longer days, but we do recommend, you know, having the staff around. I know some folks have been asking us lately on the loadout of like what happens here between the sponsor hall being open, the wrap party, and sponsor move out. So I'll give you guys the advice that I give kind of every year on loading out and the wrap party. We have attendees and folks who stay through the very end of the show every year. We're like, okay, we, you know, we're, the bars are closed, but people are still hanging out. We're not gonna kick anybody out. Like people are literally still there at SaaStr, especially when we've done this setup where it's Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Last year we had like a Friday mix. So yeah, when we've done it this way, people literally stay until the end. So there's quite a bit of people. I do know a few sponsors who are like, you know, the last conversation I had was like the best conversation I had. So again, I recommend staffing at all times where you see a sponsor hall open or happy hour. In day 3's case, it's happy hour going into wrap party. So it's kind of an extended farewell, if you will. And the sponsor hall is open. Now it doesn't mean you need to necessarily keep the entirety of your team, right? So if, you know, by 3:00 PM you're like, I need to start, you know, letting people get on flights back to the East Coast or et cetera, so they can catch a red-eye, go to the airport. So you're about 30 minutes from the airport, maybe 40 at that time of day, just given traffic. So keep that in mind, right? You're about, you know, 40 minutes on the safe end to the airport. So if you wanna get your team on, you know, a 5 o'clock flight, you probably gotta break them at 3. Again, it means they won't be around for that happy hour and wrap party. I would try and keep at least 1 or 2 people in your booth, um, till the, and through the entirety of the show and also to deal with move out, right? So even though all your booths are turnkey, you might have things you wanna ship back or you might have things that you've acquired, um, throughout the show that you wanna ship back. I know a lot of people have like their own activations and things like their own games or props or things that they're bringing. That they will need to ship back at the end of the show. So that's when you can do that at that 6 PM. So again, that's kind of how I recommend scheduling and staffing your booth. It's really a good thing to think about. The other thing to bear in mind is I know we've gotten some of, I think our main room block at the Crown Plaza is basically almost full now. I think there's only a couple rooms left. So we are getting additional room blocks for folks. But yeah, you know, if you haven't booked your travel yet, definitely a good time to do so. It is starting to fill up. Keep in mind, you know, vendors are booking hotels, attendees are booking hotels. A lot of people come from out of town. Down to come to SAS Re:Annual. So again, keep that in mind. Definitely plan your travel, I would say, as one of your top deadlines. It's not in the task list formally, but I would say that's one of my most important, like, non-task tasks is to book your travel now if your team's not local to the Bay Area. So hopefully that's a helpful walkthrough. And that's, you know, again, good food for thought to keep in mind as you're starting to plan and catch up on planning for SAS Re:Annual. The other thing is you'll see in here in the portal is there is a task list. It is handy. Like I said, you know, booking travel is not one of those formal tasks that we've put in here, but that is something you should do if you haven't already. Otherwise, these are more formal tasks. You'll see, um, it will update for you when things are due. So, you know, the first thing you'll wanna do is if you haven't already, give us your logo, your address, that helps all us, your contact email, right? Um, that really helps us out. If who should be the main point of contact, I know some of you replied to this already. Um, if you did, you can skip this, but it's just handy to give us, you know, the main point of contact, phone number, name, all that stuff. You know, website, again, that all helps us. I think the biggest deadline here is uploading your booth graphics, and that'll be by Friday, August 16th, 12 noon Pacific time. So do keep that in mind. The booth specs are here on their own tab. These are the ones at a glance in the resource center. There's the slicks that are more like, you know, this is how far the monitor is from here to this cabinet. These are at a glance, but I do like to use the at a glance ones for first. We did a whole webinar on this last week. So again, we'll, we're adding these, we're adding these webinars kind of medley, but to these, to this portal as well. But yeah, again, good things to keep in mind here on the at a glance that maybe aren't in the SLX. It's just kind of like a cheat sheet for how to do things of, you know, which, which panel is which, and then, you know, the, the specs and also what it comes with. I know that's in the SLX too, but I think sometimes because they're so long, people can kind of glaze over it. So we've put it into places here, but this your specs at a glance. They are more 3D too. So again, you'll see, you know, the, the other slicks we have are very like measurement production based, super handy, but also means like, you know, you might not be able to visualize as much. So we do like to provide both. That's why we do the at a glance and that's why we do the slicks. But the at a glance is really great. You know, I've had a few people give us some good feedback on this being 3D this year because, you know, having the person in the booth is good for reference on, you know, one, it's a good reference for any sponsor of how many people you can really fit at one time, right? You can see how much space there is between these folks, where Whereas like this one, you know, there's not as much space once you get 2 people into the booth on a Gold plus your staff, right? So it's really helpful for spatial recognition. I think it's also handy for visualizing what you want to do in the booth, right? What you want to say if you're a Super Gold, like how you want to use these headers, maybe the front cabinet, how you want to use the space for the activation. So again, it's, it's very handy to look at this and the Slick, which is more like, you know, by the books of this is how much space is from XYZ thing to XYZ thing. I would say give both to your design team. Both are handy to use. The measurements are the same at the end of the day. The Slicks will have slightly more, but this is good again to visualize at a glance and more of a 3D setup of, you know, okay, if I just say I don't know anything about my company, like what should it say on the booth, right? Should probably have your name and your logo somewhere at least. And I always, I always recommend putting what you do on there kind of like as a tagline or something plain as day that people, if they're walking by, And it catches their eye of what you do in a tagline that they might, you know, if they're going to a session, they'll come back later because they're like, oh, that's something I'm interested in or I need. And so that's always my recommendation. Like, just pretend you don't work at your company and that, you know, you'd have to explain this to a stranger of what you do. And that's really the best, that's really the best way to go into this. Or my other rule of thumb is, you know, show it to your mom and can she guess what you guys do? And if she can, great, then, you know, then you're probably headed in the right direction. For your booth design. You'll see the booth design guidelines on here. Again, these are also called out in some of the resources. So again, I'll just quickly float to here. You'll just see, you know, there's a bunch of PDFs in here. So download those. Again, it's a lot of what we chatted about. And then the other thing to keep in mind for folks is, you know, start to register your teams. So there's a walkthrough here of how to do that. It will basically take you, you know, out to the Bizibo portal. You'll put in your link and basically it'll appear as the sponsor all-access ticket. The thing I'll say here is reminders, right? It's all listed here, but I'll just verbalize a few of the heavy hitting points here. Everybody on your team does need a distinct ticket and pass. So you know, there's no— there's strictly no badge swapping. We do daily ID checks. So not just once when you come to get your badge, we do do them daily. So yes, that is something that, you know, if you— if Amelia is gonna come work the booth one day, And Trish is coming the next day, then both Amelia and Trish need to have their own badges. So again, everyone on your team needs to have their own badge. Swapping is strictly not permitted because again, they will fail that ID check. So just make sure everybody on your team is registered. If you need more tickets, again, reach out to our team events@stashrank.com to see if that's something we can help with. Just weirdly, we'll just ask you like, you know, do you have a shift schedule? Like, what are you doing with the— anyways, so reach out to us. We can help. Get you started on that front. And then, yeah, the other thing is like, you know, I know more than half of our sponsors do an activation. So anybody who's coming to also work your booth would need a pass as well. So if you're like bringing a photographer, if you're bringing, you know, a game, a game setup, and you've got somebody that needs to man the game and you want to ticket them, that person will also need a pass. So it is still a sponsor all-access pass that they'll get. There's no like vendor pass that they'll get. So bear that in mind and do register them with your code. And if you have content, I know maybe about half of our speakers or sponsors have sponsored sessions for content. You do also need to register your speakers with this code as well. So again, you're using this code a lot and heavy, but really it's for your team, your speakers, and any of your vendors that you're bringing in. Who you don't wanna register with this pass will be any customers. So if you have customer passes that come with your package, that is not this. There is a whole whole separate way to register those people. We will add those instructions to this shortly. We've already kind of hit you guys with a lot of information at once, so we're gonna have that when y'all are ready to in like probably a week or two. But those are different. Those we call customer passes. We've kind of called them like customer fast passes sometimes. Anyways, those are for your customers. So I have seen some folks like register their customers for this. Using their sponsor pass because they're like, okay, I've got, you know, 6 tickets. I'm only going to use 4. I'm going to use 2 to invite either prospects or I've got a customer in the Bay Area that really wants to come and this would be like a win for them. So I'm going to use my sponsor pass to register them. In that case, please again, reach out to our team. We can convert any extra tickets you might have to customer passes so that they have the right access. It's really an access control thing because the sponsor passes have As you guys saw on that schedule, right? You have early access to the 9th, which attendees don't get. So if they, you know, are rolling in as part of your— they'll also say on the badge sponsor when they're not a sponsor, like you're their sponsor, you're, they're your customer, right? You're the sponsor. Maybe you don't want it to say sponsor on their badge cuz they're not a sponsor. Sometimes they get mad too if they're like, oh, it's a sponsor, I'm not a sponsor. Like my, again, somebody who was sponsoring the show invited me. So again, we can help you convert those passes. Please don't register your customers on these passes. We can help you. If you already have your— if you already know you have customer passes, we'll get that out to you. Or if you, you know, want some customer passes, let us know. Or if you want to convert any extra tickets you have, again, really easy process for us to do. Just reach out to us. But otherwise, just use this for your team, your vendors, and your speakers, pretty please, because it does get you extra access to the grounds on days, hours, and times that, you know, regular attendees will not be around. You guys will have, have signed, you know, waivers as being sponsors. You guys are contracted with us. All sponsors do also need insurance. So this is also a good reminder for insurance purposes. You know, you guys are all self-insured and named in the venue. And so again, it's just a, it's a good CYA to not have your customers register with these passes. But anyways, that's enough on that. So, you know, don't register customers, use this for your team. And yeah, I kind of talked about it. Down here, but just as a brief reminder there. Okay, so I'm gonna hit the FAQs last to try and keep this shorter for the recording. But I know there's a lot of, there's a lot of really great questions and answers in here already. We actually started this as a document that was not this long, and then we've gotten some really good questions that we've been adding to it. So like I said, we've been adding to this almost daily on like, you know, format, boost selection, activations, how, all that works. I know those are your guys' top questions. All those answers are in here, as you can see, as well as, you know, do dive into those resources. Keep in mind we're adding resources all the time, and we are doing these webinars every Thursday. So as much as you can have your team or a member of your team join these on Thursdays, that is super handy too. So with that, I'm just gonna hit the deadlines real quick for folks, just so that you guys have that in mind again. So I'll wrap up on the deadlines and then send any questions you have to events@sasrain.com. But again, main deadline now is, you know, make sure you have access to this portal. I would say that's the number one thing to do. You know, do these two tasks real quick that are in here. And then I would say, you know, book your travel and then start to look at those booth specs that we have in this portal. Watch that webinar from last week if you haven't already. It's a, it's a really great deep dive. I know it's like 40 minutes, but it's, I think it's a great use of time to get caught up on how to think about the booth. Things to keep in mind when you're, you know, designing the booth. That's all covered there in very depth and in high depth. So use that. And then again, keep this, um, booth graphics deadline in mind. It's Friday, August 16th. There is an automatic late fee if you miss it. That's from our general contractors team. Um, so again, try not to miss this because otherwise you will, um, get a bill for a late fee. The late fees are in the FAQs. But again, I would— you've got, you know, 6 weeks from now to do it. You should have plenty of time to do it, even if your team is maybe slower or you're down a folk or two. Should be plenty of time. So those are the big deadlines. And then if you do have content, the deadline has now elapsed to submit your speaking session. I know we're chasing down some folks, so just a friendly reminder there while you guys are watching this to submit your speaking if you do have speaking as part of your sponsorship. So Without further ado, hopefully, you know, both this recording, the webinar, and having the sponsor portal is helpful for you guys. Reach out to us if you have any more questions. We'll be back again next week because we know it was a bit of a holiday week this week. We'll be back again next week. We're going to go over a lot of the FAQs, the deadlines. We're going to go over, you know, the things we've added to the portal, things that we're seeing folks, you know, get creative on, how to staff your booth. So again, we'll do like more of a formal walkthrough next week just to get you guys caught up on everything. If, if that's your first one that you're joining or you've got multiple team members or you've got an event agency, you want to join it. Next week will be a good one to join. We're going to do a good, like, you know, high-level walkthrough of basically everything. And then the week after that, we're going to hit the floor plan really hard. So some good ones not to try and miss or at least get the recording of in the next 2 weeks. And with that being said, happy Thursday. And if you're in the States, happy 4th of July. And we will see you guys next Thursday.