SaaStr Insider Webinar: Early Renewal Incentive Program

Oh, okay. Hello.

I can't believe it's 24 on this slide. Can we just talk about that?

Isn't that crazy? It's crazy. Yeah, it's almost Halloween, actually.

Yeah, yeah, that's nuts.

Wild. Wild.

Well, hello, sports fans. Welcome back to another sponsor webinar.

Welcome back. Yeah, Thursday, you know, behind Workshop Wednesday. Thursday between our SaaS Insider and Thursday Night Football should be your second favorite day.

Yes, true. Although maybe I should say hello, SaaS fans, as opposed to sports fans. Some people are not sports fans, and I get that.

Yeah. Yeah. But all good. For those who don't know us, we're Amelia and Brian.

Yes. Yes.

Yes, we are.

Yes. In known circles, we just go by Amelia and Brian, actually.

Yeah. Yeah, we have no last names or titles. Kidding. Yeah, we're gonna be your host for today. We do these every week, Thursdays at 9 AM Pacific. We like to do these as a little insider, you know, kind of information scoop behind the scenes, if you will, for those who are maybe considering partnering with SAS or just curious, as well as, you know, our current kind of partners and sponsors for our various SAS events. So yeah, we do these every Thursday live. We do record these and try to share the recordings afterwards and livestream. So if you're watching on the livestream, hello. I know many folks have been tuning in there versus the Zoom because it's a little easier. Today's topic du jour is gonna be SAS for Annual Early Renewal Incentives. Because Halloween is so close and these do expire on Halloween, we thought it'd be hoo of us to go over them today. You might have probably already heard about them if you've had any calls with Brian and team and Waylon and David. Or if you've spoken to myself, though, this will be a reinforcement for those. Or if you're new here, these do still apply for early renewals through Halloween. So without further ado, let's get into it because I feel like these, these need a little bit of explaining.

Yeah, I mean, I'll put this out there for you, right? I've been a part of the team now for a little bit, and I can tell you that there's always been benefits that are obvious to signing early and that have been helpful. Um, like for instance, you get access to best pricing, right? You get access to best spots on the floor because you have earliest access to pick your spot. But one of the things that I found unique is that this year more than ever, we have an opportunity to really help support you all even more than, than even in past years. And that's where these incentives came in, where it was like, you know, we've always been there for you, but what else can we do to be there for you? And so I'm excited about these. These were— these have been well received. We are unfortunately losing them on the 31st, so there is some urgency behind them. But that said, like, you know, we're— I'm excited to see, you know, if anybody hasn't had these conversations with us yet or hasn't heard of them yet, by all means, like, we want to have that convo. They should have come up though. We brought them up.

So yeah, well, cool. Without further ado, I think that's a good intro to what we're doing today. So as Brian mentioned, okay, so early renewal incentive number 1, this is one we've had each year. Maybe it's a little bit obvious or on the nose, but I think more than ever, and we do have a blog post on sappho.com where you can kind of see where the most popular booths were. No surprise they were on the end caps or the ones closer to the stage. So with that, you know, if we go in order of contract signature date, so the sooner you re-sign or sign to be a new sponsor for Annual 2024, the sooner you get to pick your booth, right? Basically, you want to be kind of in that first flight of sponsors if you want to have first choice. And it is by level, so it's not just like, you know, okay, we're going strictly in order. It's in order by level of contract signature date. Bear in mind, as of, you know, today, the 26th, some folks have already resigned for SAS Annual, but you would still get into the first flight if you signed by Halloween, in essence. So yeah, that's why, you know, we put so much weight on this. I think especially as, you know, it gets further along and closer to the show, folks are always, you know, wanting to have good booth placement. I would say there's no bad booths at SASTR, right? We've gotten this feedback, I think especially a lot this year, of like, there's always, it's always high, it's always highly trafficked in the show floor, right? It is a lot. It's 3 days, it's a loaded day. It's a lot of hours that you are definitely on your feet and active, right? There's, there's really, for those who can swing it, we always recommend kind of like shifting your booth teams because it is always active. But there's no, there's no bad booths on the floor. There's just better booths, right, that are optimized to capture the most windfall in traffic.

100%. I mean, we, we stage our floor so that, you know, it's always the, the expo is always in the center of everything we do. And we did it on purpose because we want you guys all to have the best foot traffic possible, right? So, so to Amelia's point, I think that's exactly right. And you'll see, you can kind of see how it lays out everything from our coworking space down to our cantina. Or our stages down to our brain dates. Like there's always something going on that helps traffic move in between and increase the number of eyes and views. But, but it does not take the place of activations.

That's true.

Let me know, I'm coming after you this year. We're talking activations, bringing up every call. If you don't buy an activation, we're not friends anymore. I'm just kidding. But there is benefit of, of that being, being important.

Yeah, and there is a compounding effect of adding an activation to one of these end caps. I think that's like the best thing you could do is ask her, you know, again, it is still work, right? You still gotta engage the attendees, et cetera. But like you will get more sort of built-in traffic. So it's a good hack too if like maybe your team's a little bit later, you want it to be a tad bit easier than like getting an end cap with an activation. It's a pretty good step in the right direction already to help differentiate you. So, so yeah, I mean the end caps are always the first to go. I always think it's interesting to see, you know, how people move around the floor, but each year it's always the end caps, the things by the stages or the activations without fail, right? But to that point, again, there's no bad booths on the floor because of how we laid out these two hangars. There was constant traffic going back and forth between these two this year. We'll do a very similar setup for next year and just kind of expand some stages out, et cetera. But yeah, so there's really no bad booths, but there are better booths. So if you sign early, you can pick your booth early and be in that first wave. Let me tell you, it is important. Because how we do booth selection, we ask you for like your top choices. You know, if you're in that first wave, you usually get your top choice. As the waves go on and on, it's harder, right, to get the top choice. If you're like, man, I really want that end cap or something by the stage. So yeah, it's again, sooner the better for that. And that's coupled with the fact too that you can lock in your renewal rate by Halloween, right? So really great kind of built-in incentives. These are two we've done each year of like, you know, pick your booth early and lock in your rates. If you're an existing sponsor, that is, you know, whatever rate you had last year. If you're a new sponsor, it's like our best prevailing rate for Halloween, because we want to get folks in early for the same benefits, right? Of like, even if you're coming in new, it's in order of contract signature date. So again, if you're coming in new, but you sign, you know, now, then, then you've got a leg up on picking a good booth for this year. You're not kind of handicapped by the renewals coming first. It literally isn't in, in the order of Signing on the dotted line.

150%. Just, just so you know that your SaaS or sales team, we operate pretty much on this supply and demand model also of we want you to get the best possible rates. We truly do. We work with you on that. So our urgency that we're driving is usually driven in your best interest. We're trying to help, right? Like, because if you don't lock in at your best possible rate, you will ask for it later and we will be locked out of our ability to. And that's not because Amelia and I don't like you. It's because, uh, it's because we literally have different demands each year when it comes to our hard costs of putting on the show. And so we have to meet those, and that's just kind of— it's the burden of doing events, right? But the upside is that, as you all know, they're turnkey booths, and we make it— you don't have a lot of extra things to worry about. We just want you to worry about coming and getting there and having fun.

Yeah, 100%. And cool. So then there are some new ones we added. So maybe those are more familiar to you guys. We wanted to explain the newer ones that we added as early renewal incentives for this year. And look, some of these are just like different flavors of the same incentive, right? So we'll walk you through them. Also, our team has been very helpful in, I think, you know, guiding folks of like which early renewal incentive might make the most sense for them. And honestly, we did this as a feedback from a lot of our current sponsors on like, hey, you know, I'm signing up early in September, October for something that's not till next year. How do I get, you know, some sort of exposure to the SaaS community now in Q4, even in Q1 of 2024, so that all my spend is not just tied up in this event that is a little bit further away?

Yeah. So I'd also call out that like we've built this so that you will get one and two and one.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

You're, you're getting three incentives now in essence, right? So talking about what is the third incentive? This is like option 1 of the third incentive, right? But yeah, exactly right. We want to help provide value today for something that we know, like the next event we're doing obviously is Europa, and then after that will be annual. So we don't want you to have to wait until Europa in order to get value, right? By the way, you should be talking about media with us if you're not, because you want value today. Hello, it's there. But if you're not talking about media yet and you're like, what is media? Oh my God, help me. Like, please call me. I'll give you my cell phone number for that call. Okay. Like, call me if you don't know what media is. It's like, it's super important that you do. Okay. Anyway.

Yeah, no, it's super important that you do it. I think, dude, right with the— yeah, I think with a lot of, you know, the feedback of getting some of the value now, and either some of these folks are gonna— who've already signed want to do their flights for media in Q4, some want to do in Q1. And you know what, whichever it is, we do have a few early renewal incentive options here. So the first of which is the podcast episode sponsorship. This one I really love because for all the reasons I love our podcast normally, this is super turnkey as like an early renewal incentive. Like literally if you renew by Halloween and you sign and, you know, your inclusion is the podcast which you pick, all you have to do is give us a script. It's super easy. We record it professionally. It goes into the podcast right now. If you've listened to the SaaSder podcast at all, You've probably seen we're doing a heavy-hitting mix of both original content right now, plus some of the very best sessions from this last FastTrack Annual. So when I say downloads are up, like downloads are up because folks are listening to all those sessions from FastTrack Annual. So it's a good time to be on the pod, if you will. It's funny, I feel like at FastTrack Annual, I was like walking around talking about our podcast and someone was like, "FastTrack is a podcast?" So yes. Faster does have a podcast. Um, you can find it, yeah, anywhere you listen to podcasts, right?

I actually— my most recent media deal, not only did the person know we had a podcast, but apparently— oh yes, this is right, they're a runner and they're like, every single time I go on a run, I'm listening to the podcast. Like, come on, like, this is— yeah, it's good content. Yeah, good podcast.

So yeah, yeah, it's engaging, man. Like, it's, uh, honestly, I use it as a way to catch up sometimes. I'm like, you know, I haven't seen the full session or whatever. And it seems like, oh, this is a good one. Yeah, I mean, the, I would say the Y Combinator one right now is like heavy hitting on YouTube, but also on the pod. And then the Datadog one we just threw up, I think last week has been growing like crazy. That one's going wildfire 'cause it's like how to close deals with less, more deals with less budget. So you can imagine that's, that's a good podcast at the moment. So yes, anyways, first option, and for no one's setup, is a podcast episode sponsorship. This would go into one of our upcoming podcasts. 50-second pre-roll and post-roll. So basically before the episode and after. We voice it over. Super great, you know, chance to get in front of our community in a more evergreen way. So kind of love this one. If you've got something evergreen, you know, you know, try our product, whatever it is, ebook that we love going into 2024, whatever it might be. Love the podcast because it's super churchy. Okay. Option number 2, it's your early bird's handle. Yeah, early you were doing option number 4, but really option number 2 is the Saafter Weekly. So many of you probably actually get the Saafter Weekly. This goes out every Sunday. I call it our OG newsletter. It's the one that we've been building for the last 12 years. People have gone obviously on and off of this, but it goes to about 100,000 people right now and they are all SaaS CEOs, founders, and like revenue leaders, right? Really great audience to get in front of. You can run, you know, your ad for a week in this if you do the weekly newsletter ad as your incentive. Again, just a low lift here, you know, you'd have to send us the creative or, you know, quite frankly, we could make it if you need us to. Probably though, you want it to point to some sort of landing page just to drive and like capture all that traffic. But yeah, we'll put it in the Safter Weekly. This is our most popular newsletter we have. You know, it goes out to everyone in the database. People do read these things for weeks and it's our top content of of the week. So it's always a heavy-hitting kind of like best of the week roundups and new articles, what's going on, what's the latest. And yeah, we, you know, we've seen a lot of really great engagement on the weekly. So love this again, if you've got something maybe a little bit more timely that you wanna get in front of the audience in Q4.

I think we have two different types of reader of our newsletter, right? We have the frequent flyer, which we'll see soon. And we have one that's like, hey, during the week I'm slammed. Don't talk to me.

Yeah.

But on the weekend, as I'm drinking coffee, talk to me all you want. That's this, that's this founder, right? That's the guy. That's the gal that's sitting there going, I want to hear content on a weekend cuz it's when I'm not creating, you know?

Yeah.

That's, that's, yeah.

Yeah. I do love that. It, you know, it sometimes I feel like it seems counterintuitive for folks, but this does go out every Sunday, you know, for SaaS, it works, right? We've, we've tried around with different days of the week with our newsletters. The weekly goes out Sunday morning for a reason for the last whatever 6 years. Like it works, right? To Brian's point, these are folks who are maybe catching up on content that they missed during the week or saw something, but you know, couldn't fit. I've had a lot of people tell me actually on the weekly, like they started an article, but they couldn't finish it. And so, you know, they finally had the time on the weekend to sit down, take notes. And then a lot of people forward it actually to their teams, which is quite nice. So, yeah, I really like the weekly. It's our, it's our, I would say our, our best one. And then a different flavor of it is the daily, right? It's not that the daily is in any terms of quality lower, it's just that it's distributed more frequently. So this goes out every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, um, by email, similar audience, but probably maybe a bit more at the manager level. So if you've got something that's maybe a little bit more, um, top of funnel, if you will, I think the daily is a little bit better than that. That's, you know, the weekly I feel like performs better for like founders, revenue leaders, the daily. If you've got something that's more like the managerial level or just overall kind of like team incentive, super easy for individuals of a company to sign up, really does well on the daily is what we've seen. So yeah, the daily goes out a few times each day. This would be like a daily newsletter ad. The ad's a little bit bigger than the weekly, so I do like that for that reason. So like you do get a little bit more real estate in the daily, right? Because it is going out more frequently. But same story here, you really can't lose, great way to drive leads. We've had folks promote ebooks in here very well. So that's a good one to promote. We've also had people promote like upcoming webinars fairly well. So if you've got, you know, a webinar coming up with Q4, this could be a good early renewal incentive for you.

I constantly get the question of like, well, what is, what works, what doesn't work, what's the best newsletter, what should I do? I think it's all a matter of what you want to do, but the thing is like realize that we serve all parts of the cloud. And so a SOC 2 company is going to get different results than a marketing tool or a sales tool. And so just keep that in mind because it's not all apples-to-apples comparisons. That's why you see CTR rates of 7 to 12%, right? It's like, which part of the cloud is engaging? Yeah. So anyway, uh, just, just a good call out.

Yeah, that's a great call out. I will say too, um, as we approach— I think there's two more, um, as we approach the last two, this is something to where we've had a few sponsors be like, hey, I want an early renewal incentive, but I'm not sure which one, like, can I just write in that I get to pick one, you know, in Q4, my CRO or CMO approved something, or can I pick one for like Q1 and kind of earmark it? So we've done that too, right? Of like, these all, if you're not sure which one yet, or you're kind of waiting because you're not sure when you're going to launch the next kind of like client initiative, we've had folks just write in like, you know, I'm going to pick one, whatever, in January or November 16th. And then, you know, we'll reconvene then on which one makes the most sense. And that's where we can help as well kind of determine which one. Based on your offer, right? You may not know yet, like, which one you do want to choose to unlock because you don't know your incentive yet for your, for, you know, the SAFTR community. And so that's where we can help, right? You don't have to, you might know off the bat, like, I really want the podcast. I've been listening to it, or I read these newsletters, like, get me in there. But if you don't know, then that's an option too, right? You don't have to choose today. You could just say, sign me up for an early renewal incentive. I'll give you guys kind of a CPA. You tell me which one you think would work the best. Okay, this is another option, if you will, on top of, you know, early bird pricing and locking in your booth placement is we do this thing on Wednesdays called Workshop Wednesdays. We actually started it at the, I think the end of last year going into this year. So it might be Workshop Wednesday's birthday soon, but which is hard to believe, it's already been a year of Workshop Wednesdays. These have been super growing in popularity. We started them as just like a, you know, digital events were kind of dropping off in engagement, and obviously we had IRL events, but we wanted a way to bridge the gap between those events for folks in our community to get together. So we started Workshop Wednesdays. It's not a webinar, it is literally a workshop. It is done via a Zoom, a just meeting, which means everyone can see one another, right? People ask questions, it's interactive, folks are actually off camera. Like, I feel like if you go to one of these elsewhere, folks are just kind of off camera, no one's engaging, whatever. I think what's great about the Saastr community is we have had regulars on Workshop Wednesdays, so shout out to all of you that have been going. Literally, I think there are folks who have not missed a Wednesday and folks that have just missed a couple Wednesdays, you know, because of life. But yeah, we've had regulars on Workshop Wednesday, which is super fun, and they help seed it, right? They literally help engage, like they'll start asking questions and other people will start asking questions, and then you'll get brave and you'll come off camera and ask your question of the speaker. It's really fun. We just did a really great one yesterday with Sterling, who's the former CRO at Divi and Bill. And his was a great topic, right? It was kind of a refresh of what he did at Europa, but with some new, some new data, some new takes now that he's kind of helping a VC firm out, out where he is. But Salt Lake City, I think. So yeah, the— so yeah, it's a, it's a really engaging thing we do. We try and bring some of the best after speakers, live on Wednesday in a way that's more accessible, right? So our communities really love this. I love this as a, as a, from a sponsor perspective, it's not something we're selling yet. So it's kind of nice to get in on it because it's only something we've done so far for our top sponsors of our events. And now we're doing it as an early renewal incentive. And what it means is like kind of similar to the podcast before the workshop starts, you know, the host would say, you know, thanks for everyone for joining this week's Workshop Wednesday sponsored by, you know, Let's say Greenhouse, you know, use them for all of your recruiting needs. And so it would be like a quick blurb before and then one after. Super easy. It's super engaging, right? There's a lot of people watch these things on the livestream now, and it also goes on the calendar and email reminder that goes to, I think, almost 4,000 folks now. So yeah, really great way to get in front of folks for Workshop Wednesday in a way that's, you know, more kind of connective. And, and really based around learning, which I think is a beautiful thing. That's kind of the whole core and ethos of SaaStr. So yeah, if you haven't seen one of these yet, just go to our YouTube channel, look for the Workshop Wednesday, or you can just go to saastr.com/workshopwednesdays and you'll find the samples there. But these are really great. These are really great sessions.

I have nothing to add on Workshop Wednesday. You've nailed it.

Workshop Wednesday. Yeah, I was like, can you tell I've gone to— I think I've missed one maybe workshop at SAS. All right, last one. And I know this one's a little bit nuanced because you had to have had content with SAS either at Europa or Annual in the last year. But I'll just touch on it last because I do think it's the best one if you fall into this category. And I'll tell you why right now. It's kind of everything at once. So the content syndication, like I said, if you had content with SAS over the last year or so at Annual, at Europa, If we did some sort of write-up with you and you want it syndicated, this is the way to go. Like we write up this basically, if you haven't had this yet, this is a perfect example from G2. We take your session, this one's from annual, right? We'll take your session from annual, we'll get it professionally written up, SEO optimized. And then not only does it get publicized on safter.com, so it'll be on the homepage for a day. It will also go into the newsletter that week, meaning it goes into the daily and the weekly that week, meaning you get all those touchpoints. Not only that, because it's content, we do promote our content across social media, etc., and it's evergreen, right? So we'll continue to promote it down the road for the next year. So if you do have content, in my best, you know, wishes for you, you would take this one. I'd be like, take this one, because I do think it's the very best one because you do get a little bit of everything. Obviously, we know that, you know, not everyone is eligible for that yet, but also you could say I want a Super Gold for next year and I want this content syndication for when my content does come out. And that's fine too, right? It's, it's not that you've had to— if you've had it already, then we could fulfill it immediately. But if you haven't had it yet, but you have content next year, then we could fill it, fulfill it once your content goes live basically at the event. So I do love that, right? As long as you're eligible for it, you could take us up on this one. This is the best one, right? So yeah, content is for Super Gold and up sponsors at either event.

If content will travel, in essence.

Yeah, man. I mean, everyone's like telling me content, you know, I don't know how long people have been saying content is king and I'm like, this is the one to pick if you got content. Yeah. That we either just ran or some upcoming, like this is the, I'm like, this is the one.

Correct.

Yep. Yeah. Cool. Those are our early renewal incentives. So, Brian, I know the rest of this is really just, you know, boots and stuff, etc. So for folks who, you know, want to, want to take advantage of one of these, what is— and knowing the deadline is coming up in just a few days, right? Like, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, look, honestly, if you're not talking about this yet, right, you can— I'm Brian. It's very easy. brian@sasterco.com is my email. You could get me on LinkedIn. If many— if you're one of my clients, you have my number, flip and text me. Okay. It's like, just reach on out. But that said, like, you don't have to be— you don't have to be one of my accounts to contact me. You just reach out, brian@sasterco.com. The sales team here, we all work very close. We're very hand in hand. We'll get you taken care of. We'll make sure you're situated. But these are valuable, right? Like all of these assets so that, you know, when we sell them, We sell them in a package of like $20 grand. They go for $20 grand. So this is, this is a, this is a pretty valuable asset. It should be a powerful thing that you can use to robustly start your Q4. If you have a demand gen leader on top of that, that likes this, likes this sort of thing and wants to include it as a more of an ongoing thing. Again, we should talk about that too. Sometimes those are different budgets for you all. So yeah, but I said we are, you get some benefits, man. So let's rock and roll through them. You know, that's what I think. Anyway, yeah, yeah.

I mean, listen, if you've got the budget, why wouldn't you sign earlier rather than later?

Yeah, correct.

It's free to you, right? Yeah.

And look, I just got my first email. So look, we're starting, folks.

Hey, let's get it done.

Don't be, don't be the one that doesn't, that misses out on emails such as this. So there you go. All right.

All right. All right, Brian, thanks for the help. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back next week post-Halloween.

Let's rock and roll.

Yeah, rock and roll. You guys know how to get in touch with Brian. If you guys want to email me, I'm just ai@fastbrains.com. It's my initials, super easy. I can also help get you to the right place.

Oh no, but it means that the next time we see these fun individuals, Halloween is over. So happy Halloween.

I know.

Yeah, it's also Amelia's birthday on Halloween. I'm putting that out to the world. So, and she does accept birthday presents in the form of early renewals.

So just putting that out there. I do. Yeah. The more renewals, you know, the better the birthday. All right.

Very, very good. Thanks everyone. Thanks for your time and focus.

See you guys next week.

Bye.