SaaStr Insider Webinar: Mythbusting Events!

We do this every Thursday, 9:00 AM. We talk about what's going on inside Saastr for our Saastr Insider series, mainly for like, you know, partners and sponsors, but also just cool FYI. Especially today's topic, having it have just been Halloween, we decided we would do a little myth busting around events. So yeah, I think it's kind of fun.

Myth bust, am I right?

Let's, let me share here. I think this works. All right, cool. Slideshow. Perfect. Okay, so yeah, that's the topic for today. We thought we'd keep it a little fun, but also these are all tied to what actually drives event ROI. We know we've had a lot of like inbound interest lately, and so we thought too this would be helpful for folks. To maybe don't know SAFTR as well and maybe if it's your first time maybe considering sponsoring something like a SAFTR Annual or Europa, there are a few like I think common, I don't know, they're not really myths, more like misconceptions or things that maybe people brush off as like, you know, kind of taboo in events. But we wanna talk about what actually drives event ROI. We've published some of this lately, but we thought we would consolidate it here. To make it a little bit more easier to digest. So without further ado, so we've talked about this a little bit, but if you haven't seen our latest webinars, I think this is a common misconception for folks, and obviously we'll talk about it a bit. I see Brian already has thoughts here.

I see Stevie smirking.

I'm like, yeah, this is it. That's why I want to start off here that I think there is this misconception that booth placement doesn't matter.

Yeah, uh, when it does, comes up a lot. In fact, a ton. Uh, and every year and every venue and every version that we've done, uh, it's come up. Um, there are— there's, uh, there is a sentiment that says, well, you know, I'm sure you— how you guys build out the floor will do fine. And look, and Amelia will say this too, we always—

there's no bad booth.

No such thing as a bad booth.

But, but there are better booths.

There are better booths. Yes, there are better placements for sure. So yes, placement can matter. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We say that a lot at SaaStr. There are no bad booths at SaaStr, at least because of how we trigger the floor plan, which I'll show on the next slide of how we, how we, how we architect the campus and then the expo hall specifically for traffic. Again, if you're kind of newer here, just to know. But yeah, we published this lately. We, we, we took a look at the data from D'Asturiano and Europa. And we saw that booth placement really does matter. You know, like, again, there's no bad booth at D'Asturiano. They're all really good. But we did see about an 18% lift for those that were near, you know, what we call end caps, which I'll show you in a second. Those are kind of the ones, you know, on the end. So you're kind of front and center, even though it's called end. Ones that were near—

Oh, Amelia, we love— are you there, Amelia? Okay, we, we had, uh, we, we had some sound technical difficulties. It happens, it happens to the best of us. Um, But I do think one of the big things too on activations that come up, we have brain dates, we have different food activations, we've had—

Tell me this, Blue Jacket.

We've had lots and lots and lots of different areas in which we do things on the floor. Hello, there she is. Where we do things on the floor and being near them does help affect increased foot traffic. So again, no bad booths, but how you're near things where people are, how you're near things where people congregate does matter. And we've seen that come up each year. And every time we make a change, it kind of changes the flow path a little bit, which is good. We kind of learn from that. So we've over the years taken pretty careful data as to where those spots exist that are going to have even higher propensity for return.

So yeah, I'm sorry about my audio. Yeah, so here is the— I don't— you know, sometimes the AirPods don't work with you, they work against you. So, so yeah, something we've talked about in, in, in facturation for, you know, booth placement. Again, there's no bad booths, there are just better booths mattering. And specifically at SaaStr, right? Is we, I wanted to show this last annual, so just the one from September, it's campus map. We are already working on even improving this layout above and beyond for 2024. But I just wanted to show two things, these two things side by side. Again, if you're newer to something like a SaaStr, or even just as a really great refresher, the campus map. So this is what you see on the left here. Um, this is the whole entirety of the campus. This is obviously not the scale. It doesn't do it justice. It's 40 acres. It's massive, right? It's super expansive. Um, but how we have registration and how we have the main stages— there's a main stage in here, there's another stage in here. We concentrate everything in what we call the hangars. So there's Hangar West and Hangar East. We connected them this year in a really cool way. And yeah, we've, we've, we've architected the show so that most of everything that attendees are doing, so Brain Dates, which is our main networking, you know, going to stages, coworking, food, happy hours, all of that is in these sponsor halls, right? Basically, they're only leaving to go to other sessions or maybe take a meeting outside, and then they're coming back to the hangars. It's also something we architected this way after, you know, a few years of being strictly outside just because there is, you know, sun fatigue. If you've ever been outside for a long amount of time, you do get a bit sun fatigued, especially after multiple days. And that was something we were hearing a bit from both sponsors and attendees. So we architected it so it's indoor-outdoor, which is a big differentiator for Safter, which I know will be one of our upcoming topics as well. But yeah, this is a big differentiator for us is everything is based around these two hangars. So Hangar West and Hangar East are really the main, the center of everything. And it's why we say there's no bad booths, there are just better booths. So When you zoom in, which I think is my next slide, yeah. So the sponsor hall here, you could see this is our kind of blank sponsor hall of how we have it this year. You know, you'll see things like the networking lounge, right? Again, this is not to scale. This is barely massive. So it fits hundreds of people at a time, all doing meetings, right? So you can think of our, our Braindate networking lounge is always a constant source of traffic because people are checking in and doing meetings all day long. The founder's lounge is something new we added this year, sponsored by Roam. Shout out to them. They're doing it again next year. But this was a super awesome, high-traffic area. It was badge check, so that was only for founders and CEOs. And this is a great area. I saw a lot of founders go in there, use the space, take meetings, take a call. Great area for, you know, founders-only style activities. And then we have our gold booths in Hangar East, right next to our cantina. And then one of our stages was in here. So that was a really nice anchor. So if you see on like this red dot map, right, you'll kind of see the end caps here near the stages. And then near the Founders Lounge are, were very high traffic. And that makes sense, right? Because basically folks are flowing from the stage, right, up and down. And so the end caps are a little bit more noticeable because you're not sandwiched in, if you will. Same thing for the Founders Lounge. And then these ones on the end obviously kind of were double noticeable because they have a T, right? Like you're kind of getting people as they're coming this way from the Cantina or the stages, and then you're getting folks as they go across. So you got that nice spread of like cross-traffic. And so that is why a lot of those, again, there are no bad booths, there are just better booths, and this really shows it. And so, you know, that 18% lift in leads really does make a difference if you're trying to maximize your investment. How we do booth placement, for those who may not know, is we do it in order of contract signature date. So essentially we've had folks who renewed and signed early in September and October. This is where we, we start to get more of our newer folks, more of the later renewals. But it's still a great time to get really good booth placement. Basically, if you still find in November, you, you could feasibly choose one of these end caps, right? One of these really great place booths and have a really, have a really good built-in list by sure location. Right. And it's such an easy hack, I think, because you don't really have to do anything other than sign early and be like, all right, I'm like, when it comes my turn to pick, I'm going to pick an end cap. Like, there's literally no extra work. And then you get extra lift just by being early. Right. So it does make a difference.

I couldn't concur more. Not to mention, if you're, if you're doing things now and you're not only do you getting early booth placement, but you have other benefits which I know are going to be somewhat— but there are a bunch of other benefits that come along with that as well.

So yeah, but that is a good one where like, you know, again, no extra work for you guys. Okay. This is a funny title card, but related to placement, booth size. Doesn't matter has been, I think, a big myth in Booth, right? Like if I get a gold, I'm gonna get this, I can like hack a gold and get the same ROI as like, you know, the, like the diamond or the unicorn, which for us, those are our biggest tiers of sponsorships. We've actually seen the booth size actually does matter and affect how many leads you get. I get that this is obviously a big like tableau. Like I think there are folks, you know, every now and then there's that one sponsor who's the exception to the rule and they really can, you know, pack of gold or they're, they're a big up and comer and maybe it's their first time sponsoring and so they're not comfortable with it or they only have the right amount of team members, right, to staff a gold booth. But surprisingly, you know, we kind of ran the data again post-annual, post-Europa this year and we saw that the booth size actually did make a, a material difference on how many leads each person got in the end. So, you know, in a range for, again, for context, right? Qualified, and we're only counting qualified leads. Like when we pull the data at Saastr, we're counting qualified leads. So we kind of naturally suss out anyone who, you know, maybe isn't actually a qualified lead. So any, you know, staff, any of their own team members, they might have scanned other sponsors, et cetera. And then so the range was like a widespread this year, right? We had folks all the way from, you know, 100 on the low end to 1,600 on the on the high end. So really widespread of how many leads you could get. On average, right, we did see about 207, again, qualified leads for any given sponsor at the Gold level. And then as you go up in size, the qualified lead counts did actually change on average. So Super Gold had 249, and this is just on average, right? 249 on average. Platinum had 481. But do you think that's the best value there? The diamonds, which are huge and like really visually stunning, had 661. And then the unicorn, which was like Expensify and up, had over 1,000 qualified leads. So again, it is a matter of, it is a factor in these things, right? Like it's a combination too, I would say it's booth size and also how much staff you can fit in a booth and what you do with it, right? Obviously folks like Expensify had a huge booth. They put a bar in it that really helped as an activation. They did like a lunch activation with folks, like they, and they brought the staff, right, to back it up and have those conversations so that when people were coming to their activations, they had enough, you know, staff members to scan and capture all those leads so that they could maximize their lead count at FastFair. So that's really great. And I do think, you know, it, it does show that, yeah, you know, the bigger the booth is, like inherently, like you are gonna wanna have a bigger staff to match it so that you can capitalize on the amount of overall leads that you will get. But it is something interesting where, you know, we did see that the size of the booth did correlate to the amount of leads on average that folks had post-event. And we'll talk about this chart in a little bit again because we do separate out, you know, average leads of booths without an activation, booths with an activation, which we'll explain in a second because I think it's another big kind of misconception for folks. But yeah, we've seen, you know, just on sheer size of booth that the bigger booths really were worth it in the end because they got more leads on average. So you could see here this chart right at a glance. I think it's super helpful of, you know, how many leads each level kind of got. So the blue is the ones with, you know, that's no activation just by sheer size of booth. Anything you want to add here, Brian, on this one?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's a couple of really important things that, like, in my brain I'm hearing the but. Go off, right? But Brian, I heard that there's like 7,000, 8,000, 10,000, 14,000 people that are coming to SaaStr. How is it that I can only get 1,400 leads? Look, every single— there isn't a sponsor out there that I know that doesn't have a different way in which they interact with the audience and community and get lead scans. But not everyone gets scanned. And so that is something to call out. That would be, you know, first and foremost, not everyone gets scanned. Second, We don't give attendee lists to sponsors, right? Like that, where we— intent matters for us and privacy matters for us. And we want to make sure that you're engaging with the audience that you're reaching out to. It's our, it's our, it's our partnership that we have with the audience that attends also for that. We, that we just promise to make sure, you know, if they're going to swipe, then they're opted in and life's good. What I would say on that is why that's helpful for you to know, because the bigger your booth the more likely you're going to attract the eyes to bring those individuals to you. And what this graph I love shows is that food matters because the more, the more, the more you can speak to someone having fun or having a good little snack on site, the increase there is in qualified individual that comes to the booth and goes, oh, what is it that you do? And there's an opportunity to engage with them in that way.

Yeah. And then so yeah, this is a— I wanted to drop in a photo of our, of our unicorn sponsor who was Expensify this year. You know, they had a bar upstairs. They, they travel with this booth. They own it. And yeah, they did have a fair amount of staff, you know, in the booth. So you can see right there kind of actively in conversation here. They've got enough people to do so. They had really great swag. Yeah, I should have added swag as one of the myths, but Um, yeah, that's just an anecdote. I do say I, I've seen less and less swag actually at events like SaaStr, not just ours, right? We just went to Money 2020. Um, I know Brian went to GTM and you went somewhere else. Yeah, like, yeah, IMEX. Yeah, swag is getting less prevalent. Yeah, same.

You know, it's, it's funny, right? Like, um, IMEX, which is a very different show, and I won't go too much on a tangent, but very different show. It's very regionally set up. It's very, if you've ever been, it's very much set up by state. They show to different places and venues that are in each state that you could run events. But like they understood, it's like their marketers understood the mission, right? Like Kentucky, for instance, Kentucky's known for horse racing and bourbon. So what did they have their booth team? Horse racing and bourbon, right? Like they just, they, they just understood the mission. I think that like, um, it's the same thing with Milwaukee, I came home with a lot of like Milwaukee had their giveaways were all very much Milwaukee-centric, like food items.

Like burrito. Yeah.

Yeah. And like, that's really cool too. So there, there is, I think if you understand your mission, that swag water bottle, as fun as it is to make and your team loves them, there's so many of those. How else can you engage your audience to get them to kind of get better hands on? In fact, I'll just call out one thing here. When it comes to Expensify, when it comes to Ramp and Brex and all the, all the, you know, carriers out there that do anything with a credit card-esque type thing, the hotel keycards used to always be branded for one of them, like, yeah, because it's a tangible way to get people to actually almost use your brand without using your brand, right? So yeah, that's a better experience, a better way to activate in a way than the same old water bottle, although I always could use a new water bottle. So, you know, just—

but yeah, so, you know, we've seen to recap, right? Like bigger booths really are worth it. Here's a look at their huge unicorn booth. We also wanted to put in samples, right? If you haven't seen our booths, what they do look like, just so you have a little bit of context. So this is our standard kind of full booth. The right is like, you know, the rendering and then the left is in reality what they look like. So close to the rendering. So yeah, these are again, these are compact, right? You really can only fit 2 or 3 team members at a time. Again, if you don't have the staffing, it's a good entry-level point to faster. But yeah, you can only do so many things. So Golds don't actually fit, you know, if you noticed on that chart too, I'll flip back. One thing I'll call out here and then we will talk about activations. I think it's the next one or so. You'll notice there's no distinction on Gold if there's, you know, more leads activation And so that's a big distinction too on whether size matters, right? If you're considering how do I maximize, you know, how do I maximize spend? Sometimes it does make sense to actually go Super Gold because, or Platinum, right? Platinum, if you have the budget, it's a really great value because you get so many of these things. But yeah, I would say at a Super Gold level, you get the space for an activation. It also has speaking, right? So you get that extra exposure and it has customer paths. So there's a lot there that is added value in addition to the physically bigger footprint that you get in a Super Gold, which is this one, so that, you know, you can see, right, you've got more space, you've got an extra table here. A lot of folks use this table for their activation, right? Because it already had a table, you know, you've got a vendor who's bringing in food or something and they need to set up. This is the perfect place to do it. Or we've also had folks— it was kind of 50/50. We had folks take it out and put their activation there. But you have the space, right? It's a 10 by 15. So you've got that extra 5 feet, and that 5 feet does matter, to put your activation in as well as, you know, countertop space here. And that this one was a cabinet so you could hide stuff in it for more swag kind of thing, right? And also it's a great space if you don't do an activation, right? Not everyone has to. This was a really great opportunity for folks to take meetings, right? It's a power table. Your team can work there. They can take meetings, they can be engaging, they can show prospects what they need. So yeah, I really love the I consider Super Gold, right, the actually kind of default entry-level booth. It's just a bit of a step up from Gold, but I consider it our default since it does have, you know, the space for an activation, speaking, customer passes, all that kind of stuff. But you do get that at the other levels, but more so there. The Platinum, really, you could see, right, you can actually stack this up. It has kind of a micro lounge in the booth. Again, we had a few number of folks to, took out the micro lounge and put like activations or did the lounge and the activation because there is that much space, right? You do also get these nice like dual monitors so you can have one that is like strictly a demo space, one that's more of a theater style in your lounge. So folks do like that about the Platinum and you could see it there in the lead counts that yeah, it actually does make a difference to have kind of this wider double— you get a double wide basically, right? A Platinum is two Golds. So you get a double wide space here to, to engage with folks and have a little bit more of a conversation. And also, I think people don't think about this enough, in, in a platinum, like, the attendee doesn't feel cramped, which I do feel like is important, right? Like, if we're having that conversation and it's really good, but then if you're in a gold and there's like people walking by or people starting to bump into you, you're kind of not wanting to stay there that long, right? So I would say, you know, it's not something we've measured previously, but I would say anecdotally, the, like, the amount of spend time in the booth is a bit longer in, you know, the platinums because there's just that nice elbow room to actually do so.

Yeah, it's actually, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's one of our best cost per leads too, is it not?

It is. Yeah, it is. Absolutely. I think the Platinum is absolutely our best cost per lead booth. So a big consideration there. Again, if you've got the budget, Platinum Plus is a little bit more customizable. So I like using this example from Salesforce as, you know, they had, they basically did a micro ecosystem in their booth because it's not, you know, this kind of turnkey demo kiosk. And so they showed off their different services, right? They had Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Slack. And so they could showcase all those different things again as like a micro ecosystem in a Platinum Plus. You know, they brought in their greenery, which is very on brand for them. They had the space to do so. They had a food activation, right? It's really obviously too, it's visually, it's visually Salesforce, right? They did the wood grain here. It's, visually Salesforce. So yeah, I do like the Platinum Plus from that perspective. If you have kind of a micro ecosystem to showcase or you want to have that bit of flexibility, the difference on the Platinum and the Plus is the depth. So it's, it's maybe a little hard to tell because of their greenery, but the depth is there. So that's why they, they're able, you know, to add these things again because they had that, because they did a micro ecosystem, easy for them to still showcase their partners in this size footprint. So super customizable there. And then also on the floor plan, the Platinum Pluses are right near the stages, right? So they are those, they are the end caps. They are basically built-in extra traffic.

It's a great, it's a great natural— it's where this is where it starts to feel like a booth turns in from a booth to more of a lounge where if you really want to have an engagement area, you have the room and space to do it starting here. It's kind of that.

Yeah. Spot. Yeah. And then, yeah, obviously kind of pseudo last but not least because the unicorn is always the custom. We've got the diamond booth. So these are the last of our, you know, turnkey levels. You can see the Google Cloud one here. They added greenery. These are tall, right? Again, photos are kind of hard to scale. I think these are about 12 feet tall. So yeah, visually, because all the other booth levels are 10 feet, these literally tower over. The other booths and you can see them like literally in the attendees' line of sight, right? Because these are taller, you naturally actually see these. They do have a hanging banner, which we'll show next time, that go above them. So again, they've got another visual call out there. But yeah, these were great. Obviously lots of room for demos, lots of room for activations. We had some folks, you know, kind of configure their diamonds a little bit differently. But yeah, these are great because they are so visually stunning and tall that it kind of like draws people in there and it's, it's open, right? It's, Once you go Diamond, you have, you have that open flexibility of you can engage attendees on all sides, whereas like, you know, Platinum Plus, you're still kind of in, again, these are on an end cap, so you do get the T of the cross, but pretty much Platinum, Super Gold, you're on one row, right? Whereas Diamond, you have all four corners because it's a diamond open to you, and it's great to engage the traffic kind of more naturally so you don't miss folks right as they're coming by. And that's why you can see that kind of differentiator in the lead count for Diamonds too. OK, so yeah, we've talked about activation. So I think this is again kind of a common misconception we hear from some newer sponsors, even some returning sponsors of like, you know, what, what we do within the booth doesn't really matter. Or like, you know, if you've, you can kind of like do, do, do it a bit last minute, which you can and still have a really good show. But I would say, you know, they do require some prep and what you do within the booth does matter, right? So We've talked a lot about activations, but activations do really make that big of a difference. So when we ran the data, we found that sponsors within activation actually had 60% more leads than those without. So just to go back to that chart, so now we're looking at the red, right? We were first just looking at the blue based on food size and kind of location. But now if you look at the red, which is the spread of folks who have an activation, you can see there's about a 60% difference kind of overall on how much more leads you get when you have an activation. How we qualify an activation too, it's not always food related. I think people do also misconceive that it's just food, right? It's just popcorn, ice cream, whatever, candy corn, cotton candy, whatever it may be, flavor of the day. But if we have activations that weren't food related, so, you know, I know Vender did a really popular activation this year where they did screen, like custom screen printing on t-shirts. It was really cute. It was like their little, like, their tagline, right? It's like death to the discount. And so there's like a bunch of like skulls and like little skull logos you could put on and customize it. Yeah, it was really cool and it was a really great activation for them. They had the space for it and the diamond did lead to them having more leads. And then there are ones, you know, we had folks do headshots in their booth. We had folks do, I think like resume reviews or something. But yeah, they don't always have to be food related is the moral of the story. A lot of them are, and that's fine. But some, you know, a lot of them aren't. Case in point, right? These are like on the laundry list of food and beverage activations we have off the bat. And so yeah, one thing, you know, for sponsors is if you are again looking to maximize your ROI, because activations do really make that big of a difference, it's really great to pick your activation early because they are on a strictly first-come, first-served basis, right? So basically once the list of activations kind of run out that are approved, we do try and source more. So we are trying to constantly make sure, you know, we have enough activations for those who want to activate in that way. Again, I just pulled the food slide. There's— they don't all have to be food-related. And some of them do have size restrictions, right? Some of them we called out if you need to have kind of like a platinum just for the size and space of what's needed to do something like an activation. Pretty much, you know, the kind of bigger tier activations need the larger space as well. But you can see, right, just to give you an idea of the kind of things you can do on site to help activate. I know Dorada was platinum this year. They did like juice from Juice Shop. It was really great. They were also by a stage, right? So they had like a double lift of they're by a stage, they did a juice shop. And they did even like, I know one of them was like coconut water, so it wasn't strictly juice either. Like, you know, it's kind of nice also to have variety within these activations. And it is something where too, like I will say from a production standpoint, we try not to repeat any of these things, right? With the exception of probably coffee because you always need coffee and water. Everything else is pretty much we try not to repeat too many things, right? So we try and do if someone has ice cream sandwiches and someone else has like ice cream and then somebody else has gelato or somebody else has like a local vendor or shave ice or something like that or soft serve, right? And then from a, from a SaaS standpoint, we try not, we don't do those things, right? We're like, okay, that way it's kind of somewhat, if you will, exclusive to that bunker, like, you know, we're not going to do churros on campus because then you're like, oh, well, if I'm going to do churros and SaaS does churros, like, why did I just do them? Like, We don't do those, right? We don't do the Ruby clothes, the instance ice cream sandwiches. Like, we don't do them if a sponsor has them. We'll do them if a sponsor doesn't have them. But if a sponsor has them, basically from like a campus-wide spread, we won't do it so that you have that more of exclusivity. And these lead counts that you guys see on the right is based on just doing a 2-hour window a day, right? And some people, different flavors for different folks, more, most folks like to do this 2-hour window per per day. I would say the most popular time we had was right after lunch, right before happy hour. That was like the most popular time for folks doing their activations. Some people did theirs during happy hour, right? You get that double whammy of people are coming around, they're drinking, they might want a snack or something sweet. So those were kind of our popular ones. Some of the coffee ones were more popular in the morning, obviously. But yeah, those were our popular activation times. And these are all— these average additional leads are all based on, you know, a 2-hour window per day. We had other folks though who were like, you know, I'm just gonna do 6 hours the first day and that's it. Like, I just wanna do it for one day so that we can do other things, right? They wanted to do other things in their booth. You've gotta also think of the fact that like for the 2-hour window a day, like you are taking up a lot of space in your booth for this 2-hour window. So that is why, you know, some folks decided to do it maybe all at Wednesday or the first 2 days. And then some folks don't do an activation, right? Because it does take up space.

Yeah, yeah. I think the only thing I would call out is this is a very expansive list and you might be looking at it going, oh well, if I do this, everyone else is going to have an activation. So how does this make me different? These are things that we've been tracking now and we have the data behind to say that no, if you do these, you're going to have over 250 sponsors. If you do these, like this helps you stand out. These are limited inventory, as Amelia just said, they will go. And what we're finding, and that has been happening now in a lot of our conversations, and will probably through the end of the year, is that most of these will probably get taken up and scooped soon. So like, yeah, have the convo, because when you come up to me later on, we're 2 months out from the show and say, hey, Brian, I want to bring in this outside vendor, the venue doesn't allow that. So we get them now. It's like, do it.

Yeah, we do try and do some, you know, if you've got an idea, I will say that is more creative. Specifically for annual, we can, we usually try and see if we can bring in an outside vendor. There's like some permitting rules. These are ones where we know we've done them literally this year. So we're like, they're by default, right? Like we just redo the permits for '24, but they've been activated in the venue. So we know that, you know, they can be done. We know the size that they fit in. But if you have a custom activation you wanna bring in, it's just a matter of, you know, us making sure we go through the proper channels to ensure it can be done. But yeah, we do try and do as many custom activations as we can. Again, to the point, right, of like, oh, well then if everyone does an activation, it kind of loses its sparkle. No. Again, that's why we try and keep them differentiated, right? Of like people doing different things. I know some people like double down on some of like what they were doing of, again, like you know, folks who like had their mascot and did this or did like a game and did an activation or did something fun around their activation, right? Like basically further activated the activation to be a differentiator. And again, they don't always have to be food. So bear that in mind, right? Like I just pulled it for this webinar, but yeah, especially when they're not food, right? That like something like a headshot station or otherwise, or magician or caricature artist or cutout artist, like We've seen folks do that. That is, those are just fun things for attendees to do, right? And you're not gonna get everyone each day, right? People are going to different content sessions. They're walking around in different patterns each day. So it does help, right, differentiate. And I will say word of mouth does spread between attendees, right? They'll be like, hey, where'd you get that gelato? Or, hey, where'd you get that thing that I want as well? So yeah, there is kind of, you know, different, different things. But all of these are really great to help Again, they really do help activate. And the biggest thing I will say for sponsors with activations, we have some sponsors be like, we have so many lead term activations, we're still working them. Great if you already have a talk track handy, right? Of like, okay, as we are getting folks during— again, this is why it does help to limit it somewhat to like that 2-hour window a day. You gotta think that's gonna be a con— that's a constant block of time, right? You know for sure you're gonna have the max staff in your booth at that time. It's helpful to bound it versus have it just open-ended like an Expensify, but you know, they had the room and they had the staff. But if you bound it a little more like this where it's just, you know, a 2-hour block, then you know, right? Like, okay, if we're gonna do it after lunch, we're gonna rotate folks for the beginning of the day, then we're gonna have everyone during our activation and we're gonna have a certain talk track that maybe ties into whatever our activation is. So that you're ready to go. And I do think that people, you know, appreciate that a bit when you're efficient in that way too. OK, we've got 2 last ones, and I know we're running out of time. So I think the big one we've heard in the last year— I know, Brian, you've heard a lot from DistribuIRIS clients— that it's twofold. How people measure event ROI sometimes is only on net new leads. And that, you know, there is this big myth. And I do think it goes back to how people measure because we've been doing all these what we call GBU calls post-event with sponsors. To see, you know, again, that's how we got a lot of this data, how we talked to them anecdotally as well to see what's been driving value for them at SaaS so we can improve. And some folks were like, yeah, you know, I didn't, you know, I just kind of, we're only measuring, you know, the leads that we got. We're not measuring anything else. I think that's a big myth, especially at SaaS because we do such a concerted effort to have a thing called customer passes. So we do offer out to the various levels, you know, different levels of different packages of customer passes to meet your— it is actually customers or prospects on site. So I think this is something that is sometimes lost upon folks because you can get so in the weeds with, you know, the production of, okay, there's the booth, there's the design, there's the activation. I gotta get people out for travel. That is a lot already. But I do think this is something to work more with your CS and sales team on, or even your CEO on of like, who do they want to see on site, right? You're already traveling to either the Bay Area for annual or London for Europa. It's a— those are hubs, right? So those are great chances to meet maybe customers you haven't been able to see on the plane yet. Or, you know, if you— if your travel budget has gotten a little bit tighter for the next year, great place to meet them all at once, right? Without you guys having to fly. You've already flown somewhere, bring them to you basically. So I do think this is something that is coming up more, but I would say not enough of, you know, measuring the ROI of meeting those customers and current prospects on site. Obviously the booths are all centered around net new leads. That's why, you know, the footprint is the way it is, the size, the activations, that is all geared towards net new. But that's also why we do these, you know, customer paths and prospect paths programs because we do, we have seen a rise in this and we should see more of it, quite frankly. Because, you know, we, I just pulled a few of the sponsor posts we've gotten from folks who did customer passes this year. And we had folks that were literally like, you know, we had 5 passes available. We used 2 of them, but those 2 people were current prospects and they closed. And so that's why we're renewing next year, right? It's like that literally saved them from going to each of those 2 customers themselves in person. They just met them at SaaS and then closed them there, right? So I do think this is, this should be more prevalent for folks. It's something, you know, we've kind of doubled down on with customer passes, et cetera, but should be more top of mind.

I'll just add one thing to this. I, yes, in '23, '24, right, NRR couldn't be more important. We have to look at our customer base and we have to retain. Like that's the most important thing in the world. That new business is not gonna grow the needle these years, right? Like they're gonna grow, that's good, we need to do it, but you need to be thinking about your current customer I just called, called to mind, Amelia, when you were talking of a couple, a couple years ago we had Calendly and Calendly was one of the first ones to bring their customers on site. And when they brought them on site, not only did they do that, but they brought a custom piece of like gift swag just for those individuals, just to know they were meeting them and engaging with them and they wanted to make sure that they did something extra special. And these are those moments. If you think about a customer event that you might be thinking about or your marketing team would wish they'd like to do, they're so expensive, they're so large cost, and we are the largest SaaS fest that is out there, right? So the chances that your customer is gonna be here is high. The chances are that they'd like to come if you were to invite them is high. So if you're going to go and, and sponsor, it's a really great extra value opportunity for you to go and engage with your customer base. So yes, bar none.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then last one, right? I think we get this one again, mainly from net new folks or maybe new team members on kind of some of our legacy sponsors that, you know, there does become this misconception with so many events now being in the September timeframe around annual or some of, you know, Europe is in June, right? Kind of the summer gets a little bit busy that too many event attendees are just unqualified. So, you know, size and booth location aside, it doesn't really you could be like, eh, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day because there's just, there's too many people going to SaaStr. So like there's, I'm gonna get too much noise. And so I should have made the font on this bigger, but an interesting counterpoint to that kind of misconception, which I totally get, right? Like I get it if you're going to other industry conferences that are kind of different than SaaStr, but you're still seeing a lot of like, you know, more practitioners. I think one, keep, keep in mind, you know, SaaStr is not a user conference. So unlike, you know, we, we do have friends in, in other industries who have their own conferences that are super huge. Um, they are at the end of the day user conferences. There's no platform for SaaStr, right? No one's logging into SaaStr, SaaStr.io or anything. Um, so yeah, it's a bit different from that perspective of like everyone who comes to SaaStr One wants to be there. There's no built-in like, oh, you, I've gotta, gotta go because I'm a user of this and my boss is making me go. Um, So yeah, it's, it's 100% elective, right? And something we saw this year was that the percentage of attendees attending SACHSR across annual and Europa at a VP level actually rose. Like, we used to be at 52%, now we're at 56%. I think it's, it's something I'll, I'll talk about on the next few slides of why that is, right? So 56% VP level and above. SACHSR's always had a really high spread of VP levels and above, a lot of those big, you know, CEOs and founders. Based on the content of spaster.com. That's what fuels this whole thing. But also, you know, as we pulled these, this kind of broader attendee data, which we maybe don't talk about enough with our sponsors, is on the attendee side, I was just telling somebody else about this today or yesterday, you know, more and more of our attendees are attending as a team. And I do think it speaks to buying cycles, right, in 2023, because we kind of saw that maybe to no surprise to you guys, most folks who came as a team brought their CFO, their CEO, their CTO, their CRO, in that order of popularity, which is driving up that, you know, previously 52%, now 56% VP level and above, because more folks brought, you know, the actual signer, the decision maker, the person who has to ultimately say yes to something, right? And also, I would say too, I know reporting structures have changed a bit, so I think this is is also to, as folks have been consolidating their teams, this is more of who folks are starting to report to now, right? Like CROs versus VP of Sales or VPMs, or maybe both, right? CTO or CCO, like as folks are kind of, you know, maybe getting or maybe consolidating their orgs a bit, we've seen more of this being the default kind of titles that folks also report into. And so I think that's important of how, you know, to bear in mind of how people are attending SaaS or they are still high quality, right? You've gotta think more than half the folks coming are VP level and above. More and more folks are at this level that you see a title right here based on how they're coming as a team and the team is needing to bring, right, these titles with them to kind of justify, also justify the spend, right, as something of attending faster to kind of show the ROI. Like what better way to show the ROI than to bring this person with you? So they can feel, right? And more needs to be done in person. And so I think that's just something interesting, right? Of like, just wanted to call that out. Like, you know, we did see a raise in our attendance for VP level and above. We saw a raise in these titles specifically year over year, as well as team packs of how folks are attending the annual. So just a kind of a last attendee trend, right? We've seen as more folks are coming as a team, they're bringing their decision makers, which I think speaks a lot to how, you know, '23 and '24, how the buying cycles have changed. But it is something, right, to bear in mind. I do think based on this, anecdotally, as we've been doing, right, these what we call GBU calls with our sponsors, we saw more and more sponsors this year either already bring their CEO with them or their CRO or CCO to work the booth or got the feedback of, oh my God, like our value of attendees, like our quality of attendees went up so much year over year that next year we wanna bring these people to actually be in the booth. I do think that's a big final takeaway of like, based on, you know, who actually comes to SaaS. Or I know a lot of the default staffing is like, you know, I'm gonna send my VP of sales, VP of marketing, CRO, and then like, you know, the events team, maybe somebody on the event side if you've got one. And then AEs, right? I'm gonna send all the sales reps I can. I think that's a myth. If you're not sending somebody at an executive level, I would say the folks who've had, maybe we could parse this out separately to a chart, but then there's too much data, right? Folks who brought their CEO actually had more leads too because, you know, you're basically talking VP and up or CEO to CEO. Like, that's a much higher value conversation than, you know, talking to, again, no offense to the Bryans and the AEs of the world, but, you know, some folks don't wanna talk to the CEO. And so I think that's an important call out too of like, we had anecdotally more sponsors tell us that next year they're gonna bring, you know, somebody on their C-suite to actually to actually do booth duty. I mean, what a concept, right? Booth duty has typically been kind of the same that's like, I think, seen as grunt work. Maybe that's our final myth. But we've seen more of the C-suite going, right? We've seen more VPs going to do booth duty. And it just speaks to like, you know, because the buyers are the ones coming to SASR and they want to have somebody, you know, basically on their level and not be, you know, maybe be overtly sold to. It helps to have somebody of your C-suite actually attend and actually do booth duty. I don't think it's I, you know, I don't think it's grunt work at all. I think you can have a lot of really great conversations with your, with your C-suite or your VP of sales or VP of marketing that you can't otherwise have, you know, if they're not there and they're just asking, like, you know, they're just FaceTiming you, how's the after going? It's a little bit better if they can be there, right? To have those conversations and, and shake the hands and close the deal.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Boot to the man. Not just for, not just for SDRs anymore. I'm gonna put on a shirt. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. We've come up with a couple of shirts.

Okay. I know we really have. Yeah. With that, that is our— I mean, I feel like we added in a few extras kind of. So bonus ROI mythbusting. But yeah, we do have two, you know, we talked about them a lot, but we do have two major events next year. Europe is our big London, London, you know, European event. We're back for the FIBCODocs. And then Safter Annual is our larger Bay Area event. This is our big one, you know, festival style, 40 acres. And yeah, so if you guys have any questions or if you're like, all right, like I want to maximize everything you guys just said, help me, help me do so, reach out to Brian. His email is brian@safterco.com or you can email me, ai@safterinc.com. We have different domains. It's a long story.

It's a thing. And I'll just add one thing. Although Amelia is absolutely right that Annual is our big show, Europa is getting big, man.

It is. It's getting big, man.

Big show. And that's awesome because only a couple of years ago it was an okay show. It was a good show, right? It's getting big. It's becoming a big show. So please inquire. We're happy to talk to you.

It's becoming big. Yeah, early attendance tracking actually super well for both events. But yeah, I would say Europe especially looking— looking— I was like, oh, maybe too many people. But yeah, looking big. So yeah, it'll probably be around 4,000 for Europe next year, which will be incredible because yeah, it was just— it's just a peanut size not too long ago. Yeah.

Yeah. Holy cow. Anyway.

Fantabulous. Well, fantabulous. Yeah. Thanks everyone for joining.

Thank you, Amelia, for hosting.

Later. Of course. Thanks for joining and giving some context. Thanks to everyone watching on the livestream. Let me see if there's any questions on the livestream. Oh, there actually is. Hold on. Okay. I'm actually, I'm trying to get better at this. I know Taylor's really good at this on Workshop Wednesday. So is Caitlin. What's the advice for entrepreneurs trying to scale their business? Yeah, we can respond to you separately on that one. Yeah, there's a good comment here from Naomi. It's not a question, more of a comment, which I think is a good one worth noting. She said, "Hi, I'm Naomi, event marketer based in SF. I think also besides the size and the staffing of larger booths, you want a sensible booth strategy with associated tactics that attract the qualified prospects. So yeah, that's, that's a super good point. I think that points out to what we were saying of like, you know, more folks bringing their C-suite to actually come do booth duty. You know, having a talk track ready for those activations, having something as simple as it seems is like, you know, your booth loop ready, having collateral, you know, I don't see a lot of handouts these days. I'm like, ah, I think handouts are gonna come back, guys. Like, I miss the good old pamphlet. And, you know, a lot of folks are like, oh, let's connect on LinkedIn. And like, you know, I miss the old, you know, here's my business card. I'm gonna write how we met on the back. You know?

Yes.

You know, not enough of those.

The old, the old times for sure.

Yes.

Yeah. Having a good strategy though, just in general is important. Everyone should have a job.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the, thanks for the comments, Naomi. That's a, that's a, that's a great call out. So yeah, thanks to everyone who watched on the livestream. I think I got, I think that consolidated the chats, but if I missed any, I'm so sorry. I know a lot of you now watch on the livestream as a preference. So thanks for watching there. And yeah, we will see you guys next week. Yeah, I know. And in future ones, Brian and I will talk some more about different activations that aren't food, things like food sleep, all that kind of stuff. And then I know we're going to— I'm going to try and wrangle in our Dasher CEO and founder Jason Lemkin to do one of these. In the near, in the near weeks to do more of an open forum around events with Jason, which will be fun, which we haven't done in a long time. So yeah, stay tuned for that. But yeah, thanks for tuning in. You guys know how to reach us, and we'll see you next week.

See you then. Bye everyone.

Adios.