SaaStr Insider Webinar: Annual 2023 Sponsorship Recap & Review

And folks joining, welcome, welcome. I'll share my screen here. As always, there we go. Welcome to a FASTR Insider sponsor webinar. We do these usually every week. We skipped a couple weeks to recover from FASTR Annual, but we wanted to use this first one back as a bit of a recap specifically about sponsorship. And the event overall, just to give you guys more of a sense of how we net it out post-event, because I think a lot of you, you know, kind of read and study the prospectus of our marketing materials pre-event, and then, you know, and then post-event we like to reconcile and see either where we were either spot on or where the numbers kind of fluctuated. So for those who may not know, I'm Amelia Barra, I'm the SVP here at Saastr, and I'm joined by Waylon.

Yeah, I'm one of the, uh, partnership managers on the team. Nice to meet everyone.

Cool. Uh, we're gonna give everyone just a run-through, like I said, of SaaStr Angels 2023. This will not take us the full hour, um, so hopefully this will be a good recording that you guys will share around afterwards as well. Um, and welcome to those who are joining on the live stream. If you are or are not a current sponsor, this is still good information to know as well if you're thinking about sponsoring and becoming a partner of disasters. So cool. Let's get into our sponsor recap. So just from a super high level, like post-event overview, just in general, we did host more than 10,000 attendees across 3 days. This was notably the first year we did a Wednesday through Friday configuration, mainly because the week that we did Annual was also the week of Labor Day in September. So it was, I think, best to give folks a bit more of a travel day. In that week, we continued our newer tradition of being indoor/outdoor/festival style. Notably, this is the first year we had a zipline. Also the first year where the sponsors were back inside. If you were a, you know, returning sponsor or new sponsor, that might have felt maybe more traditional in a sense. But fun fact, if you didn't know, sponsors were traditionally outside. So like they were all in tents and the expo was all outdoors for the last 2 years since, you know, rebooting our events in 2021. And this is the first time we moved the sponsor halls into the big hangars that we have on site. So I'll share the numbers, but it does seem to be like that was the right move for both of our sponsors and attendees. It did seem like attendees were able to interact a bit more with sponsors because they weren't as fatigued from being out in the sun all day. And then we do have a number of stages that are still outside and speakers and content. And then we did some newer activations as well that are not on here. You know, we did a Casino Royale for the first time. That was sort of an experiment that funny enough worked very well. It is something too where, you know, I'll talk about activations on this presentation, but we do see that sponsors with activation generally get a lot more leads than those without. And the Casino Royale is actually one that we did as an activation for our Diamond and up sponsors. So if that is sounding enticing, let us know. But yeah, that was actually a partially sponsored activation as well. And something new we tried for this year. 25,000, which is a crazy number, attendee connections were made. This was mostly via Brain Dates and our Brain Date app that I think many of you use, which we'll touch on. There were about 3,200 hours combined between workshops, content, and Brain Dates hosted, so a lot of learning on site. I think what we've seen year over year, specifically for SAS TR, you know, most people come for the content. It's, I think, one of our, like, one of our taglines is like, come for the content, stay for the networking. So that kind of held true this year. Lots and lots of hours of content. I know it's sometimes too much content at once. We did livestream it all, or most of it, I should say. So if you missed any of it, it is on the live tab of the SASTR YouTube page. So you can go there if you missed the content because you were in the booth or doing another piece of content. Lots of really great sessions to catch up on and to learn from. You know, we had maybe the best lineup of speakers we've ever had so far, and some of those are going out across, you know, saster.com. YouTube and the SaaStr podcast. So hopefully you subscribe to our newsletters and we'll get those learnings stripped out to you in the coming weeks. But if you want to do like a binge watch on some of the content and sessions, you can definitely do that on our YouTube channel. We had 289 speakers this year. We always have a goal for being inclusive, and we did have 52% women and 53% Black represented. In terms of speaker chips. So that's really cool. We also had a lot of new voices which we didn't capture on here. So even though we had what we call fan faves like we do year over year, so some of the folks that you guys really know and love and that you continually go to their sessions like Michael Seibel or Mark Reverge or the State of the Cloud. Yeah, really, really good ones. Or, you know, David Sacks is a fan fave. Some great ones there that have already gone a little viral on YouTube. We did have a lot of new voices as well. So I think really exciting time. Just in SAS World, it's also the first time we did an AI track. So that'll probably stick around for years to come if I had to guess. We had 159 sponsors in total. More than 200 people rode the zipline, which is pretty fun. Hopefully, you got a chance to do that. We had attendees come to SAS World Annual from 100 different countries. And one thing I'll say about that, something we've been looking at in our kind of overall event metrics post-event is, you know, this is specifically geared towards SAPPHIRE Annual as a post-event overview. We internally look at it between all of our events, right? So we did 3 major events this year. We did APAC in the beginning of the year, which was in Singapore. We did Europa, which was in June in London, and then we just did the Annual in September in the SF Bay Area. So I think one interesting learning we saw was most attendees actually did not— it did not cannibalize our audiences to do multiple events. So most of our audience were actually different between our 3 major events, which is super cool. There's always a subset of super fans that literally went to all 3, which is very fun. Like, you get an award. So yeah, super— I'm like, that's a lot of miles they racked up this year. But yeah, most, you know, most folks are actually different audiences. So something to bear in mind too, like if you're looking at, you know, Europa Annual and other SAFTER events and partnerships things, the audiences are in fact unique to each event. So that's pretty cool. And yeah, we had a really good big party this year with Cheat Codes and Annabelle England. I know a lot of folks gave us some feedback that they didn't really know of Annabelle beforehand. She's totally up and coming, but then like really loved her vibe. Yeah, and got some feedback on the really good tunes that were going on all week at Vastor. So yeah, you know, we will continue this festival style into 2024. If you had any concerns, you know, that will continue to be part of our core. Is this big festival-style event. And yeah, we already have a lot of ideas, some of which we'll share today, on how we're gonna make it even bigger and better next year, 'cause it will be our 10th Zaster Annual next year. If you were a sponsor last year, you probably know we also celebrated 10 years of zaster.com last year, which might be a little confusing. So last year was 10 years since we started Zaster. Next year will be the 10th Zaster Annual. So we're definitely gonna go all out for that one That's a big milestone. Okay, one thing I wanted to touch on was just this audience breakdown. So many of you have probably seen this, maybe had not seen for Waylon, because it's kind of retrospective, but this is our audience breakdown going into SAS TRA Annual just from our core SAS TRA attendees. And so I wanted to share where we netted out for this year on any similarities or differences. So I did flip the slide. So across the top, you'll see that that actually remained consistent. We funny, I mean, oddly enough, I was like, is this right? But it was. These buckets actually remain consistent year over year, which I think is great. We've always had a high audience of CEOs and founders. So that remained at its 34%. Marketing, sales, and CS, I think between the three, they fluctuated a little bit, but altogether they actually rolled up to the same 36% of our audience. We did remain at, you know, 14% CXOs, which I think is fairly strong. And one thing that's not on here that we'll probably add later is a lot of our attendees this year came on team packs versus individuals, meaning more folks brought more decision makers from their team. That's something we've seen across all of our 2023 SAS events, and it definitely held true for SAS Re:ANUAL. So just, again, something to bear in mind for future years when it comes to staffing your booth. We've heard some good feedback when attendees were able to meet with your C-suite, that they really enjoy that and appreciate that. Because a lot of folks in attendance themselves are, you know, the decision makers, the founders, the CROs, CFOs now, and so on. So yeah, just a good reminder there on an audience breakdown of how that might impact you for future years, you know, from everything from staffing to swag and everything else. So yeah, keep that in mind. And yeah, we stayed the same percentage for product ops and then investors. So we always have a fair amount of investors. For those who don't know, we do this Meet a VC program that is now becoming a year-round program for Meet a VC. So if you don't know it yet, just meetavc.com, you can learn more about it. And it is actually a big driver of why folks come to SaaStr as well. There is a big kind of VC presence at the event. And so one kind of cool fun fact I will say post-event, so I'll just flip back for a second. So you'll notice in our audience breakdown pre-event, So last year, 52% of our attendees were VP level and above. This actually went up this year, and that does actually tie to what I heard just anecdotally from sponsors telling us that, you know, they felt like the quality of attendees just overall was a bit better. So yeah, that kind of tracks with what we've heard from all of you guys. So yeah, kind of 4% higher in, you know, attendees being VP level and above. Again, I think that speaks to more folks coming on team packs. I think that speaks to more folks being decision makers and being in the SaaS ecosystem, which is honestly only good stuff for you and good news for you guys. Company stage, not a whole lot of change here, year over year from pre-event to actual post-event Saastr Annual in our attendee numbers. The mid-market percentage grew 2%. That's really the only difference there. And again, kind of on par with what we've seen with our other events throughout the year. And yeah, I think the biggest news there is like our attendees, or the attendee rate of being VP level and above went up slightly. So that's always good news. Okay, a few sponsor highlights. And again, this will not be a full hour webinar. So we're just using this as like a quick recap, if you will, and then we're happy to answer any questions as we go on. So yeah, okay, sponsor highlights. We wanted to put this in as, again, this was something that was you may or may not have seen in a prospectus or in, you know, some of our Know Before You Go information of like the average number of bleed scans you could, you might expect per your level. And then I'll talk a bit about on the next slide of some of the nuances within that. So I think an epic stat we have for this year, and this is actually true, Expensify, who was our biggest sponsor, actually did get the most lead scans of any sponsor. That is obviously really great news for both them and us. We always, you know, you always want as an organizer to have your highest sponsor be the one with the most leads at the end of the day and the most interactions. So yeah, the award goes to them, having the most lead scans of any sponsors. I know some folks too are always curious about this double-decker booth that Extensify brings. They actually own this booth, so this is something that they travel with because they do that many events. This is the BYOB, bring your own booth situation that they bring, and we help them rebuild basically at SaaStr Annual. So just a fun fact there. So yeah, that's a fun stat. Xpressify had the most scans, so kudos to them. I know a lot of their team came, and even though they had the biggest booth, it still requires a lot of input to get those numbers that they got. So, um, huge kudos and congrats to them. Um, and then just on average per level for some of our other— or I guess the rest of our levels here, I should say— um, the Diamonds had on average per level between 650 all the way up to 7— 1,700 and above in terms of lead scans. So a really high volume of lead scans for our Diamonds. I think that speaks to a lot of them again having activations in addition to being, you know, um, activation sponsors of the Casino Royale, and also we always try and, you know, make sure our Diamonds have the best footprint and natural kind of foot traffic during the show. Platinums were an average of 500 to 1,000+ leads. Again, we'll talk about activations in a minute of where, you know, that range kind of kicks in. Super Gold was between 250 to 500, and then Gold, the 150 to 300. So a lot of these numbers are super similar to what we were publishing out free events. I think the biggest change was maybe the diamonds went up a bit on like the upper end of the range. But yeah, fairly consistent in what we saw last year as well. And then again, you know, a lot of folks have told us anecdotally they feel like the attendance quality has been a bit better this year. So yeah, that's, that's, you know, the long and short of it on Lead Scans. And then I think the most interesting thing we found internally just as a And it's maybe not shocking because, you know, we kind of theorized this pre-event. I know a lot of you maybe saw some of the activations that were going on during SAS for Annual. So these are things like the coffee activations, ice cream, juice. What else was there? Boba, chocolate, cookies, popcorn. There's a lot of— they weren't all food too. Like, vendor had like 3 printed t-shirts. I actually wear mine a lot. It's like very— It's very soft and very Halloween, so it's a good, uh, spooky season repertoire shirt. Um, so yeah, there are things like that. I know there's like physical giveaways, uh, not everything was food. Um, so you guys probably saw these sponsor activations throughout the campus. Um, and just from an overall perspective, something we saw was like for Lead Scam overall, from any sponsor, like regardless of level, when we just added everything up was about $284. Which I think tracks again fairly well in what we've had year over year. But the lead scans with an activation on average were almost like— they were literally 60% more. So 475 on average there. So it really is helpful to have a sponsor activation. And it's one thing that is super top of mind of us for 2024. And we'll talk about how, you know, we're thinking about it now. But just some, you know, good food for thought. We obviously want to try and maximize these. A lot more going forward since it does have such a huge impact on, you know, the average amount of leads for sponsors with the activation versus without. Two other things that I'll touch on that we did with our sponsors this year. So the first one being, you know, we did these sponsored guest passes. I think the eligibility is something we'll play with for 2024. We had 67 sponsors this year participate. Out of those who were eligible. About 700 folks came on a sponsor guest pass or pass pass or however you may call it. So yeah, I think that's, that's incredible numbers. Like last year we only, I think we granted about 200 of these. So a big year over year increase. I know a lot of folks have brought up to us in their post-event calls that these were super helpful. So yeah, that is something that we will broaden for eligibility. And solidify for next year. We really started these customer passes in 2021 because it was our first year back after a gap year. We did it, you know, kind of lightly in 2022 a bit for the 10-year anniversary, and then this year we did like more of a concerted effort, which is, I think, seen in the results. But it's something that, you know, you'll probably actually see now is in our perspectives. You'll probably see our team talk about it more, utilize it more. It is something we want to try and get folks to utilize as much as they can. If you were unfamiliar with this program, it did have some specific deadlines to meet in order to get your customers and prospects ticketed. But basically we have like a, a form that folks could fill out if you had customers or prospects that you wanted to nominate to come to SaaStray Annual. Basically, if they met the criteria, we would help invite them and ticket them to SaaStray on your behalf. But then, you know, the onus was on the sponsors to then meet with these folks on site. Et cetera, and take it from there. So I know this is not something that may naturally fall into lots of folks' events ROI. I think a lot of you are gold on lead scans when you go to an event. So sometimes this is something that ends up falling through the cracks. But this is something where, you know, we'll probably double down our efforts for next year to get more folks to do it. Because it is something that, you know, from a CEO's CS perspective is of very high value, you know, to meet your customers and prospects all at once. I know some of those who did use it said, you know, it's, you know, no matter the size of the booth that they did, because these were folks of various levels at SASTER, you know, it is actually very helpful for them to meet these folks all at once during SASTER, right, versus like if you add up all the plane rides it costs to go then see these people post-event or later in the year, it's a lot more effort and initiative than, you know, trying to get them to come to SASTER. So Just something else that's top of mind for us for next year to continue improving with our sponsors. Brain Dates is again something else. We do this, you know, kind of year over year. This is our main networking platform. This is again something we're looking to continually improve. We've done these for the last couple years now, and every year I think we try something a bit new to help refresh it and keep it fresh and make sure people— we maximize the attendees who participate in the Brain Dates as well as the sponsors. So again, you know, we had over 25,000 direct connections made, which is a ton and huge. I do know this year we launched our Brain Dates a little bit earlier, so we've seen that that was helpful. It was something we did at Europa. We also did this new thing in 2023 called Brain Date Power Hour. So I think that helped us as well. On like the first day, there was a gap of like basically no content, so folks could focus on getting into Brain Dates, and that did seem to help folks make connections. So hopefully you guys were able to participate in these. I know this was the first time the first time for annual we did the moderation progress. So that was— if you were at Europa, you were probably used to it, but if you weren't, then that might have been something new. But yeah, that is something where we will continue to improve and refine our moderation process so that, you know, as many sponsors as can, can use them to network and do more of them next year. But I know a lot of folks did them for this year. So just to wrap, so we can keep it short today. Next week, I think what we'll do is a full overview of our 2024 kind of like roadmap. Well, actually, maybe not a full, if we're trying to keep it short, maybe we'll do annual and then Europa. But yeah, so if you have not seen the news yet or the website, SAS for Annual will in fact be back next year. You probably have seen some of the ticket and attendee announcements. We do a full year-round cycle for tickets, which is why we've already launched. So yeah, we will be back next year, back San Mateo County Event Center. The dates that we're holding right now are the 10th through the 12th. I know this year there were some overlapping conflict between like everything. It felt like everything was all at once between Inbound and SaaStr and Dreamforce and Disrupt. And, you know, September has become a busy event season. So yeah, hopefully this is a little bit easier for folks. It's, you know, the week after Labor Day, not the week of, which should be helpful. And then we'll go back to our Tuesday through Thursday kind of usual configuration. So I think that will help folks as well versus the Wednesday through Friday configuration that we had this year. Okay, a couple things top of mind for 2024, and then Waylon and I could just chat through a few incentives for the 2023 folks who were sponsors, which is our last point of business for today. So a few things from me and Safra that are top of mind for 2024 specifically. Specifically for sponsors. Um, again, this will be our 10th FASTR annual, so this is one that, you know, we're gonna blow out, make it even bigger and better than ever. Um, and, you know, obviously try and get as many, uh, high-quality speakers and attendees as we can to help celebrate, um, the 10th one. Um, so yeah, kind of, kind of amazing it's now at it in its 10th year. Um, I usually find too, just anecdotally, usually like a year 10 event is kind of explode a little bit or like reach the next threshold is something, because there's some like momentum and like cool, I think just kind of like brand equity. Once you kind of hit like the 10th year, you've hit the double digits of existing as an event, which I think is super cool. I'm already thinking of so many artists for the big party to celebrate Sophie. Sponsor activations, like I said, now that we know internally that we've run the numbers, that those with activations are about 60% more leads than those without. This is something that, you know, we'll work through both internally and with our vendors. To maybe help make eligibility a bit broader and then fulfillment a bit easier. I know this is something where there are quite a bit of rules and regulations to follow between our various vendors and venues and San Mateo County and all that fun stuff. So yeah, that is something we'll try and as much as we can either simplify or help do more on this side so that we can have more activations next year. Brain Dates, again, this is something where this is our first year moderating, so it's something we want to continually improve, especially for sponsors. I think attendees had a higher NPS on Brain Dates this year because it was moderated, so they felt like they had more high-quality meetings. So now we've got to, you know, nail that for the sponsor side of Brain Date participations. You know, we will plan to keep the sponsor halls inside. It was kind of a It was kind of a, you know, experiment moving them back inside this year and putting them in 2 hangars versus like 1 area. But I actually think it worked really well, and you can see in the averages between our levels going up a bit that I actually think it was better for our sponsors. And again, it encouraged attendees to keep going back to those sponsor halls. The way that we do these events, right, we won't change that of like lunches in there, there's content in there, there's Brain Dates in there, there's coworking in there. We're always gonna keep that core. To us so that, you know, people have a reason to be in there and that they can't just search by it. And then, you know, obviously the quality and quantity of attendees is always top of mind for us and will remain top of mind for 2024. And then, yeah, like I said, we know the dates are a different week in September as well as a different configuration of days. Tuesday through Thursday are like core dates that we usually try and go for as we see it works a little bit better for our audience just from a pure like how many attendees per day perspective there. So last thing we'll touch on, and Waylon can help me out here, is, you know, for those who are sponsors of the FASTRA Annual 2023, we do have a number of early renewal incentives if you sign by Halloween. Fun fact, we picked Halloween because it's my birthday. I don't even know if Waylon knows that's why we picked Halloween, but that's why we picked Halloween. Uh, and yeah, so there's a number of incentives. I know the first one is locking in your pricing, right, Waylon?

Yep. So, uh, the big two that, that people might be aware of are locking in your 2023 pricing. We have seen significant increases in our costs, most of the suppliers that we work to pull off the event. Um, so that does lead to some price pressure, but we will lock in anybody who signs by October 31st with their 2023 rate. And the other big one is booth selection. Uh, we do everything we can to optimize the floor plan so that Sponsors really are the core of the event. You're the ones that make it all possible. But inevitably there are some differences in terms of what areas get more traffic.

Yeah.

So booth selection is just a huge thing to, to get in early and be able to determine where you think the most traffic is gonna be. So those are the two big ones. And then the next are, and this is new for us, options to get in front of the SaaStr community throughout the rest of the year. So it might be something that you wanna promote. It might be 3 or 4 months after SaaStr, you might have a new product launch. You might have something going on that you want the world to know about. We've got a lot of different media options for you to get that message out there. So ads in the newsletter, podcast, our Workshop Wednesdays. For anybody who doesn't go to those, they're really fantastic. But basically opportunities to get in front of our audience throughout the year included just for renewing by that October 31st date. So some pretty exciting stuff.

Yeah, great point. I think too, some of the feedback we've gotten from sponsors is you know, kind of rolled up to 3 things, which is why we rolled out these early renewal incentives. You know, one, obviously getting that first right of refusal, so locking your 2023 pricing so you're not impacted by any of the inflation that might be happening out there. And then yeah, booth selection. I think booth selection was maybe more prevalent this year than it has been in previous years with us moving these sponsor halls back indoors as they were— I think the last time they were inside was like 2019. So it's been a while, and that was a different venue. So I think, you know, for folks, we saw what we always kind of tend to see— folks gravitate towards those end caps when they get to pick first. And yeah, and that is something that does affect the number of leads. That's why there's a range, right, on those levels that I showed previously. You know, some of those end caps typically perform higher than the average per level. So yeah, that is something where, you know, if you're If you really liked your booth, I know some folks were like, I really loved the booth that I got, and it's because I pre-signed early. Then yeah, that rings true for this year as well. And then yeah, I think just lastly on the media component of it, um, we had a lot of folks, um, say, you know, they want to get in front of the broader community, um, before next September, right? Because basically this sponsorship and booths are for not till next September, and there's a while between then and now. And yeah, we kind of We did this as an incentive to help with that and help combat that. And again, you don't have to use it right away. It's something where we can work with you on timing of when you would want to be in one of these media assets. So if you, you know, if you need some extra Q4 leads, cool. If you need to use it in Q1, you can maybe start the year off stronger. It's a little bit more flexible so that you're not waiting, you know, a full kind of year's run before you get back in front of the Saastr community. So then the last thing we'll just leave off on, and again, more on these two things in the weeks to come. If you've not seen it yet, these are our two major events that are announced so far for next year. So SAS Europa will be back June 4th and 5th. We're going back to London at the Tobacco Docks. So if you were there this year, this is actually the same venue we were at this year. It is indoor-outdoor, so it's got similar vibes to how we do SAS Annual. And then South Bay Annual is obviously our big, big mecca of past festivals, if you will. Again, back in September in the Bay Area. So hopefully, since we're right at the 30-minute mark, hopefully this is a helpful recap for all of you. We will be sharing the slides, and I'm actually gonna write this up as just like a little recap, so it's a little bit easier to digest if you didn't have time to join, or if you want team members, or you wanna send it to your boss or whatever, if you beat the average leads. That's cool. Or, you know, if you want to use it for reference in any post-event calls with any of us. So with that, thanks everyone for joining. We are, you know, as always doing these pretty much every week on Thursdays at 9 AM Pacific. And so we'll hope to see you next week. We'll actually probably chat, you know, we'll chat about these two 2024 events a little bit more in the coming weeks and do some fun other things like case studies and just general events. Marketing. That's kind of how we treat these in Q4 of, you know, the year of our events, just to help process the learnings as you guys are, you know, wrapping up the quarter and the year. So thanks for joining, Waylon. Anything else you want to add?

No, this is great. I guess one thing actually, just as far as like early renewals go, you know, knowing that we've got a 60% bump on activations, activation first come first serve as well. So it's also an opportunity to kind of pick those activations that drive the most traffic So just one other thing, one other incentive on early renewals there.

Yeah, that's a great call out. All right, well, thanks everyone for joining. Thanks, Waylon, for, for the insights as well, and we will see you guys next week.

Bye everyone.