LIVE SaaStr Insider Webinar: SaaStr Annual Sponsorship Deep Dive

So we will try and go through as much as we can and as always, if you have any questions as we go, please do drop them into the chat and we will try and answer them as best we can during and then we'll answer any ones we don't get to at the end. So cool. If we're all set, we're going to go ahead and rock and roll because that straight annual is quickly approaching and so we want to make sure you guys have all the info you need. I've got Kevin and David here with me today, so we'll be your trio and host of the day, kind of walking you through everything. ASTRA Annual okay. We do have actually a fair amount of new sponsors who have come on and I think newer folks who are joining these webinars. So we did want to give a little bit of a recap and overview and reminders. Just do a general overview today, present some new information. So if you have been on previous webinars, there will be some new information here for you today. But we really wanted to do like a deep dive recap of everything you need to know as a sponsor. As of today, July 27, with just, you know, a little over six weeks or so to go to the event, we are at the San Mateo County Event Center. If you've not attended or sponsored previously, the biggest thing to know is that this is a massive 40 acre campus. It is a indoor outdoor venue. We'll walk you through the campus map today, show you how that all works. But it is quite a huge space and so do bear that in mind. We we ask folks to keep that in mind when, you know, shifting your teams, maybe rotating team members, staying close by or if you're ubering in. Just something to factor in as well. It is quite a big expansive property and so we do quite a bit on site, which we'll see because you are kind of on this massive property, it's maybe a little bit harder than other events to get away, if you will. So there is a lot going on on campus. The campus is everything you need. Coffee, WI fi, water, lunch, etc. So yeah, San Mateo County Event Center, September 6 through 8 are the official days and we'll chat about in a second for the loaded days.

And Amelia, just to reiterate like, I think just to reiterate like a good point, everyone stays on campus here for the most part. It's not like a city convention center where people go walk off and go downtown or go to a Starbucks down the block. Like we offer everything Say on campus and folks kind of come for the whole experience. So. And you know, also, if you're in from out of town, what it's about 15 minutes from the airport. 10 to 15 minutes, depending on if there's no traffic. Yeah. So it's really, really well situated. About. Yeah. What, 15 minutes south of the airport, I think.

Yeah. Okay. Also, if you are new, we're here. Great points there. These are your main contacts. I think you guys know all these folks. They're here today. But if you need anything, these are the best folks to reach out to. If you're not sure who to reach out to, sponsor Success Disaster Inc. Is the best email to reach out to. There's multiple of us on there. I'm in it. The sales team's in it. We have a dedicated production team in it. You know, our general contractor looks at it like there are a ton of people in there. So. So they will route you to the right answer. And we try and answer things as fast as we can. You know, usually usually get you an answer within the same day, if not sooner, within a few hours because we know that everything is upcoming. So we try and answer those as fast and quickly as possible. So big thanks to our sponsor Success team. You can reach out to them with whatever you may need. A quick note and reminder here if you have not already. It is definitely pastime to book your travel to Saster Annual. That includes hotels, flights, possibly rental cars. As you've probably seen, the Crowne Plaza is, as of right now, sold out. We're trying to see if we can wiggle any more rooms free, but right now it is sold out in the block. There are other courtesy blocks we have listed here that are a little bit further from the venue, maybe about 10 minutes or so. And there are other hotels not listed here that are closer to Crown Plaza. So do bear that in mind. I know things are filling up really fast if you, you know, keep in mind the fact that this is a largely like international domestic event. Not every. Like, it is not a commuter event. People come into Saster Annual. It's definitely like a rideshare international event. So, yeah, lots of folks have already been booking, so some of the ones that are closer are getting either filled out or really. So again, keep that in mind if you've not booked your travel yet. Also, I know, like with airlines, you know, the later, the later you wait, the worse it gets. And one thing I do want to mention for folks, it is the day after Labor Day that sponsor load and starts. So if that is something you want to bear in mind for your travel of like traveling your team either on Labor Day the day before, you know, factor that in mind. There can be sort of a lot of delays at the airport anytime there is a federal, like US Federal holiday of like either getting delayed the day after because everyone's kind of leaving from holiday. Shockingly, I feel like traveling on holidays was quieter than the day after. But just something to keep in mind there, right. If you want folks there on time, might be something where you want to book them a day or two early just to avoid any potential delays that might occur with it being the day after a holiday. Cool. Keep your questions coming. Some of what you guys were asking is later on in our. In our deck. So we'll keep rocking and rolling. For now. A quick note on the event agenda, which I've. Which I've kind of prefaced, but hopefully you've booked your travel. If not, you'll book it today or this week. When should you get there? Right. People ask us this all the time, when should I get there? What do I. And what do I do? Like, what happens? Do I need to come to early sponsor load in? So we have a full kind of like day, if you will, a sponsor load. And it is Tuesday, September 5th, again, the day after Labor Day. It's from 2 to 8 o'. Clock. So what that is, that gives you guys time to pick up your badges, go to your booths. Your boots are turnkey. We'll talk about your graphics. It is turnkey. So you show up. You know, any shipments that you would have shipped, your shipments should be there. And then really what people use this time for is to get acquainted, right? Test out your monitor, test out the booth loop, get situated, get your badges, you know, roll any swag items, set yourself up, get any collateral you have ready to go for the next day. This is really like a plug and play. You're coming to your booth to spruce it up, set it up the way that you like, etc. So that's really. It's turnkey. So you can show up just Wednesday, the morning of. Some people do do that, but if you want to buffer a little bit more time, then you can do that. There's a question here on when you receive the Freeman show services kit that is already live. We'll drop it into the chat in a second and we'll try and go over it if we have time. Okay. So also on this day, I just want to know, early badge pickup is open this day, not only for Sponsors have two hours before it opens to just general attendees and then there is time for general attendees. Everyone on your team does need to pick up their own badge. Like if I'm coming, I cannot pick up David and Kevin's badges. Everyone needs to pick up their own badge. Another question we've got recently is like if I have a different team coming for setup than live days, do they need to be registered? Yes, they actually do need to be registered so that we know that they are officially part of your team. We can help you to get extra passes because you someone using a path for a setup day. But they absolutely need to be registered. This also goes for any activations or anything you're doing. You know, if you've got any vendors that you're bringing in, you also need to register your vendors so that they can get into the building. Like a badge is basically your go no go for all the days of Sasper Annual. So super important that you register anyone who's going to like touch your booth, come within your booth on any of the days. If for some reason again you get delayed or you come in late. There is satellite Registration open until 6pm at the Crowne Plaza. So there'll be a dedicated check in desk there. You can get your badges there. But same rules apply. Everyone does need to still pick up their own badge loading day. I'll kind of freeze through show days. We do have satellite open. Satellite reg open on Wednesday in the morning. So again if you want to get your badge before you go to Saast or annual, some people have asked us why this is important. You know, once all the attendees show up at once, there can sometimes be this thing called a little bit of a line. We don't love lines. And so as you'll see in our campus map, we do have like four different registration entrances. We will help you get to the one that has, you know, the least amount of lineage. We do try and expedite people through. So we've done a few things actually from Europa at our past three live events that we're implementing to annual to make it quicker for folks to check in. But you do still need to check in yourself and you do have to have a temperature check which we'll talk about. But that's what you have to do at check in. Also to note, you do have to have your ID for check in. So you know, David needs to present either his license or his passport, whatever it may be affirming that David is David and that Kevin is Kevin, that this does as you imagine Kind of stomp out the badge swapping. So again, if you have people who are rotating shifts, et cetera, badge swapping is strictly prohibited. They will cash it during the ID check. So just make sure you register each individual person. Okay. On the big day, Wednesday, day one, you've got kind of an hour, hour, two hours here in the morning for final loaded. Again, this is final checks. If you couldn't make it on Tuesday, spruce or booth, very turnkey, set yourself up for the rest of the day because it is going to be three very jammed days. So the sponsor hall officially opens at 10. Brain dates start at 10. You know, lunch is from 11:30 speakers and content start right at noon. And we go right from content into happy hour and the right into what we call this year the Saster wine and food festival and the sponsor hall hangers. So one thing to note on day one, right, that happy hour and that wine and food fest are in the sponsor hall hangers. So you gonna to make sure you are well staffed during those times because they're definitely peak like I'm talking about sponsor time and having a drink. So calling that out there show day two, Thursday, September 2nd. Because we're on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday mix this year, kind of a similar setup to Wednesday. We do start a bit earlier this day so it's something to bear in mind. Again you've got like an hour of early access in the morning from 8 to 9. You know, get your coffee, spruce up your booth, ensure everything is ready as you want it. And then again we've got a full jam pack. Days the sponsor halls are open from nine to about six. The mentorship, the brain dates are going all day. Speakers and content starts a lot earlier this day. We have all stages left this day so that's like all eight of them. Lunch of this day, happy hour and then the big party. So call out here that you know there's going to be a lot of content going on this day. There's happy hour this day and then the big party is out in stage A with a. I'm going to keep saying boundary dj. So I announce it. Band or DJ soon to be announced. That is the big party coming into the Last day, Friday, September 8th. The biggest thing I want to call out here is the loadout. So again you've got the early access in the morning from 8 to 9, brain dates, content all day and then we're going to kind of end the day with our beer garden happy hour again and the hangers as well as sponsor loadout. So sponsor loadout does not start until 6pm we put 5:30 on here, but really, you know, it's, it's depending on when the last attendee leaves the building. Important things there for, for loadout that we get asked a lot, like, what, what does loadout entail? What do I need to do? Do I like dismantle my poop? Like, what do I do during loadout? And basically what you'll do during loadout is like, if you have any swag that you want to ship back, you know, you will work with our partners at Freeman to ship that back to your home base. If things you want to track, you know, just make sure you work with us to label, like, hey, we're leaving this, we're donating it, whatever it is, and you're going to want to make sure, you know, you've got all your belongings, etc. It's really just if you have anything you want to ship back, that's what you need to load out during the loadout period. So if at any time you're like, you know, I'm done with all my swag, it's three o', clock, I've talked to plenty of people in our three days, like, we're good, then you are free to leave, right? There's nothing for you to physically do other than, you know, ship your things back, take all your belongings with you and that's it. So that's kind of what loadout all entail. Okay, one big reminder before we go into the rest of the reminders. Booth submission artwork for Gold Booth was actually due yesterday, so thanks to everyone who did submit. I think there's only a handful of you missing. So if you've not submitted yet or if you're newer, that might be why. But please do submit your graphics. And then for everyone else who is not a Gold Booth, your deadline is actually coming up. So July 31, which is quickly coming up next week. All other booth graphics are due. You can start this event now. All the links are in here if you still need them or if you don't know where to submit. But yes, please submit those on time so that you avoid the late fee. Because if you avoid after, you know, the 25th or the 31st for your level, you will incur a late graphic surcharge. Again, we're trying to avoid this, but it just is the fact of printing everything all at once. So try and get those in so you can avoid that. And then once you get your proof back, we'll be working with your team to make sure you get it back as soon as possible. Okay, cool. Let's talk about the campus and the venue again. We're at the third year in a row at the San Mateo County Event Center. Super massive venue. And I will preface and David and Kevin and I say this all the time, like our maps don't show scale. Great. It is a huge campus and we try and consolidate it so you can see everything on one map. But it's a little misleading because you're like, oh, that doesn't look that big. And it's ginormous. Bear that in mind. This is really big. If you're a sponsor and this is your first time or you're part of a sponsoring team and you're newer there, highly recommend you go on Google Maps. You like the virtual tour? There's a whole virtual tour of the San Mateo County Event Center. It is very helpful to get your bearings or also, you know, come for day zero, come early. It will definitely change your perspective on faster. You can't miss it. Also, when you get close, you know, you'll see the tents, you'll see the container parts. Like, you can see it from. I think you can see it from a plane if you're in the flight path. So it is quite big. It has a lot of sustenance to it. So be sure to get your bearings there. Let me walk you guys through the campus map because this is a bit newer, so I'm going to zoom in. One thing to note, this is a live link we've dropped into the stack, which we will share immediately after. Actually, we'll try and throw it in the chat too, when we get the formal Q and A. But let me just see if this will let me kind of zoom around and take you guys places. So there's a few things I want to call out. One, yeah, this is a live link. So we do update it, right? If anything changes, gets updated. This live link changes and gets updated too. You'll see it. It's called out in, like, the name, right? You'll see when we updated it, we updated it literally this morning. So this is brand new and fresh and up to date. Some people I know have asked, like, do big things change at this point? No, it's really small things that are changing around, shifting around. And that's due to like a few, you know, things like we're still working through with the fire marshal and the venue of where everything can be housed, placed, et cetera. And that's why things can move sometimes from place to place. So that's why I'm going to start in the hangars because that's where the sponsor halls are and we'll do a deep dive on the sponsor hall. These hangers are going to be the center of everything faster this year. You can see there's like two registration points, actually three. There's three of the four registration points are actually centered around the hangars. So we call them Hangar west and Hanger East. There are two very large buildings. Again, this is, you know, not a scale but they are super, super huge. So in the hangars there's a lot going on. There are both sponsor halls. There's, you know, the Founders Lounge, the Brain Gates, Cantina, Stages A and B. There's the big cantina, the co working space. Like the hangers are the hub of everything. There is a connector between the two buildings. And so again the hangar is going to be the center of everything. It's going to be where all your booths are and also where attendees mainly are throughout the day. So that will be a lot this year. There's a few other things I want to call out just on this half, you know, so registration again, we have various registration points. If you're ever wondering like which one should I go to? Amelia, there's four of them. It's I would say to you it depends on what you're doing. So if you're taking a ride share, gate one is a good place to get dropped off. This is actually the default of where the Uber will drop you. If you just put into your Uber or list San Mateo County Event center, they're going to naturally take you to gate one because that's where they take people for other events like the fair or other things that go on at the event center. So gate one, that's kind of like the natural drop off for folks. And if you're ever wondering like in the description on our map, we do have the addresses of things. So if you're like, I want to go to particular one, you can use these addresses. So gate one's at 2500 S. Delaware St. Good one. If you're doing rideshare, you know, you don't have a lot to carry with you. You just kind of want to pop in. Also a great place. If you already have your badge, it does have an express lane and so you can breeze through there. Also great for sponsors because you know it is close to the hangar. Gate one. If you get there and it's crowded, we may direct you to the Delaware registration because it is Much bigger than gate one. Gate one is literally a physical gate and it's not the biggest. So we've got a huge Delaware registration on this side. It does have rideshare drop off and it also has parking. So if you're a sponsor, definitely, you know, we'll drop in the link where to request parking. You can request sponsored parking and Delaware lot so it's closer to your booth. That's the place to go. Again, you may get directed here even if you couldn't get one if it's backed up because the Delaware Lake west lot is much bigger. So that's registration there. The speaker entrance is only for speakers and they do check. If you're like, I'm just going to go to the speaker reg because everyone else is coming through the other three, they do check. There is like a thing you have to show them and if you don't have the thing, they're not going to let you in. So if you're a speaker, great. Go that way. If you're not a speaker, don't go that way because they're going to turn you away. Speaker entrance only there. And then there's another one out in the what we call east. But this is like the outside part of a faster annual. There's a huge registration out here. We call it Saratoga registration because it's on Saratoga drive. It is 1346 Saratoga. Again, sometimes people will default route you here if you get an Uber, most of the time they'll see you to get one. The other half of the time they'll take you here because it's a huge parking lot. Totally fine. You can enter this way. It just means you're going to walk a little bit. The other thing to note is like this is where Ubers and Lyft will pick up at the end of the day. They prefer to pick up here. So we do want you to keep note of that again, especially as the sponsor. If you're setting like an Uber pickup, they're probably going to pick you up here. Slash4,2 to pick up here because this is where they have their dedicated pickup points. If you've ever been at Coachella, it's kind of like that or any big festival where like, you know, they've gotten dedicated Uber ride share like pick up zones with like the numbers. That is how big sasper is. It really has the same Uber style as Coachella. So bear that in mind also out here. And I see the questions coming and David and Kevin are doing a great job of answering them. Again, some of this we're still getting to. But also out here in the E slot we've got two workshop stages out here. A container park. So this is new. If you haven't been to the after. We're doing a container park this year. If you don't know what a container park is, you can like Google the Las Vegas Container Park. That's a good component one actually it does have a fun thing like a zip line that goes over it. And then we also have our stage A license out here. So this is all outdoors obviously. This is, you know, open air, good weather, it's fun to be out here. Go to a content session, hang out, there's drinks, etc. The outside and then coming more so for the inside we've kind of covered the hangars and the other things just to note out here is there is a new stature royale that is probably what you think it is. It is a sort of take on Casino Royale. There's no actual betting. You'll be betting with chips but then you'll win faster buck. So yeah, no actual money will be involved but it'll be really fun. If you want to take a break and try your hand and place your bets at one of the Zachary Royale games. Should be fun. It's outside so I am. Because I imagine people will get loud. It's outside so it'll be a bit of fun. You can do and take a break there. We also have Station Square Park. This is like our Central park, if you will. There is some content out here on the plaza stage. Our speaker green room which is again just for speakers. We do have two lounges this year. I want to call out. There's the founders lounge which is in the east hangar. There's also VC lounge. These are just for those folks. Right. Again, they're going to be doing bad checks like if you're a founder, CEO or if you're a VC investor. These are places for those folks to meet with one another and also have and host their meetings. We have a lot of founders who come on site. We have a ton of investors that want to meet with attendees and sponsors on site. And so that's why we've got these two lounges. I think a few people ask in the chat like where can I book a meeting space that's maybe a bit more private? So on 21 we do have this executive briefing center. I'm going to preface, it's not private. It is semi private. So there's not really a private space you can pop on on site at this campus, but it's really great. We had folks do this last year. This is opening in about a week. So it's the executive briefing center where you can have you know, again semi private meetings. There's pods. You can book a pod and it can host, you know, probably like a dozen people pod and you can have a meeting there. It's a much quieter space to hang out on. It is gated so you know you've got to match who you are meeting and that is the best place to meet people. So we'll roll that out next week after everyone kind of submits their booth to bookspace in the ebc. Other thing we'll just note here on the campus map is floor plan and booth selection. So we did see a few questions here about the like sponsor halls themselves. So again there is a dedicated if you will zoomed in map of the hangers so you can see into the sponsor halls a lot better. You can zoom in on this. It is literally 4K. You can keep zooming and it will load for you in a space where you can read the numbers. Sometimes if you see it load pixely, it's literally just loading because it's a huge file. So give it a second. As you can see like mine got really crisp which is nice. Also if you're watching on zoom though it might not be as crisp as my monitor but link is in the slides. So again this is the zoomed in version of both of the sponsor halls in the hangar. There's a lot going on here. You know some of our biggest sponsors bring the cantina. There's the Brandate networking lounge which we'll talk about a little bit. But this is our main like attendee networking. The gold booths are in the east hangar as well as you know, a cantina, the cantina stage and the founders lounge in hangar west. There is a co working space here. The super golden up are in here as well as two stages. So stage B is in here as well as Cantina stage A and then the really big cantina which is like one of our main lunch areas. So for those asking about booth selection, booth selection has started. That's why you'll see on this map some people do already have their logo on their booth. Also I'll call it on the second page there is a directory. So if you're trying to see who's where as you're picking your booth when it comes time to pick your booth, we'll send you the most updated version of this map so you can do so Obviously, some folks don't want to be near competitors or they want to be nearer to partners that they have in their ecosystem. And so this does have the directory on the second page. Boost selection has started. So it is an order of level and contract signature date. So I know some folks are asking, like, why haven't I gotten pick yet? It's sometimes really hard for us to gauge, like, how long people will take to pick ahead of you. And so it really depends on everyone else picking their booth. I would say folks have gotten fairly quickly so far on, you know, booth selection. So we're trying to do that as fast as possible. Like, as soon as people pick an order, we're literally slotting them in and asking the next round of folks to pick their booth. That's as fast as we can go. Obviously, we need everyone to pick in order. We do honor contract signature date very seriously. So it is an order when you signed your booth, and people signed as early as on site as last year. Faster Annual. So that is something to bear in mind, like for next year. Other editions of Faster, like, it is all based on contract signature date there. Okay. A few other things we want to hit before we run out of time, because there's a few reminders we want to go through. One, we touched on this briefly, but we haven't talked about it in a couple weeks on this webinar. So I know we used to have very more stringent. I'm going to say health and safety policies. I'm not going to say the C word because it'll get flagged on YouTube. But we used to have a lot more stricter health and safety policies. This year. Our policy is don't come sick. So there are mandatory passive temperature checks each day of the event. People ask us what this means. This means, like, as you're walking in there, it's going to be a thermal camera in the zone that you're walking in to pick up your badge. It's going to passively scan you. It's going to beep at our team. Our team is a team that we bring in of trained nurses. They're all trained medical professionals. They're not like me and David and Kevin. They're all trained medical. Medical personnel, and they will handle it. If, you know, it beeps, whatever. If it has a situation where it says that you have a temperature. Also, if you're not feeling well, they are people to talk to because they can kind of address your symptoms, et cetera. If you need to go back and rest in your hotel, Maybe come back another day, et cetera. So again, mandatory temperature checks each day of the event. We ask that you don't come sick. If you or anyone on your team is starting to feel unwell leading up to the event, we get that that happens. Reach out to our team so we can swap your ticket for somebody else. If you don't have that time and you get on site and you're like, oh my God, I need to take Kevin's ticket. Kevin got sick. We can help you do that on site. Just come to registration. Those folks are equipped to do badge, like, you know, ticket swaps for this situation. And if you're unwell again, please stay home, don't come sick. It's probably better for you too. You stay home at rest and as a sponsor, you don't try and send someone else on your team to take your place. And we can help you do that. So that is the policy. Obviously other things we are doing is this is a huge, again, 40 acre campus. The reason we picked originally is because it is indoor outdoors, you know, it's got airflow. The hangers that you guys are in have giant garage doors that we usually open again for like better airflow kind of, you know, for the comfortability of everyone. There is obviously a bunch of like, you know, things we do in the background that you probably won't see, like sanitation, washing, etc. As I mentioned, we do have a lot of increased medical personnel and security. It's, I think between the security guards and medical personnel, like 50 people for a 40 acre campus. And if you have golf carts, you know, they can get around, they can, they can address things. But again, if you're not feeling well, please just let us know or, you know, have your team let us know on site so we can swap your badge for someone else. And we hope you rest up and feel better. And that's the gist of that. Okay, next reminder is to register your teams. Many of you have done this, but some of you have not. If you have not yet, please do register your teams. There's a lot of things that happen when you Register your team. 1, when you register, let us know, like we are tracking, you know, who has registered as a sponsor and who hasn't. And if you want to avoid any annoying reminders that might be upcoming, register your teams now. So you don't get those because then you're all registered. Other things is once you register, you will get all the attendee emails as well. So you know, all those announcements on like the big party who's playing? What's the food and wine fest? All that stuff that gets sent out to attendees you would get as well once you register. Also, people I know people have been dropping it in the chat. Access to brain dates is only if you register. Otherwise we don't know if you're coming. So any of the networking, the mobile app, all that good stuff, you can only access once you register. So please do register your.

I just want to reiterate that point too. Like, a lot of times it'll save you if you're the event planner on this call or you're the key person, you know, running logistics for your company and you're getting a lot of questions from the folks who are planning to attend. A lot of them will be answered once they're registered because they'll be getting that attendee communications. So they'll find out about all these things, whether it's parking or food or brain dates, et cetera. So another good reason.

Yeah, great, great reminder. Okay, one thing we want to talk about, too, separate from registering routines, and we saw some questions on this in the chat is the questions around the customer nominations. David, not sure if you want to chime in here. I know you're.

Yeah, yeah, no, would love to. Would love to. I mean, this is, I think, one of the. We started this last year for, I think, the first time, Emilia, because I don't. I was here two years ago. We didn't do it, and we did it with a handful of sponsors and it was like super successful. So the way I think about this is, first, you should involve your sales orgs and your customer success teams. What it is is an opportunity for you to invite your customers or your prospects to Saster as your guest, essentially free of charge. They're going to get a free ticket courtesy of you. So I think the message is like, hey, we're sponsoring Saster this year. We're speaking at Saster. Our team's going to be there, our execs are going to be there. Whatever you're doing. We're sponsoring the happy hour, whatever it is, and we'd love to invite you as our guest to Saster. If you can come, we'll get you a free ticket. It's a value of 1500 bucks. That's what they cost. So, you know, one way that customers, I'm sorry, sponsors last year saw value. I mean, they got to immediately get like an ROI from Saster. It's a great touch point with their customers. They were able to convert bottom of funnel pipeline at Our event, of course, you're going to meet lots of other folks here. You're going to meet thousands of people. But this is just a great, easy win for it. Kevin, what I miss. I know you talk about this a lot.

No, I think you nailed it. The only thing I'll add one of my sponsors. They are actually creating a little bit of a competition with their sales and customer success team where there's a prize for each, but for those that get the most of their target account list to Saster, they're getting a really cool prize. I think it's like something really, really special. So again, I think the more you can maybe even like incentivize, gamify little competition with your internal teams to get the most key prospects, key customers at Saster. Again, I think it'll drive. Awesome, awesome roi.

So I thought that was a really cool learning. Emilia, there was a couple of, like, tactical questions. I think one of them I can answer, which is. Well, let me, let me just say it a different way. You can add your customer nominations here on a rolling basis. You don't have to wait till you have all 10 or all five. You could add one, hit submit, and then it goes to our team. Amelia, one of the questions is, once they're submitted, what's the process for that person to get a ticket?

Yeah, great question. So I just clicked on the page here that's in the deck. Once again, I have a free second here. I'll drop the deck into the slack and we'll drop this link in. So, yeah, you come here. As David mentioned, you don't have to fill out the whole thing. You can do this on a rolling basis. You can submit more than 10. And I say that because if you submit 10 people by chance, that some of these people are already coming to Sessor. So rather than us going back to you and being like, Hey, 610, we're already coming. Which actually has happened. I've seen, I've seen all these customer nominations. I'm like, happy. People are already coming. Which is great, right? Because then you know that they're will tell you that they're coming. You can set a meeting with them on site, but it doesn't take up one of your customer nominations. So, yeah, anyways, you can submit more than 10. You can submit one person at a time. You can submit. You know, this lets you do five at once. You could do it twice to do your 10 at once. You could do 15 just to buffer it. And what you'll do is you'll put in your company name. I have seen a few people put the name of their customer here and I think I've been, I think I can figure out who nominated them. But this is where you put your name. So if it was me, you know, I put faster, I put my email and then this is where you put each nomination. So this is where you're going to put your customers. We do need each person's first name, last name, company title and email. This is what the system needs to ticket them. This is also what we use to look them up. Authority ticketed. We tuning all those fields. So please do fill that in for each nomination. Again, these are not requirements. Right. So you could fill in like one person. Hey, got it right. If you got new nominations, just submit again and then submit. And what the process looks like that after is we are actually going through these, embedding these now. So if you already submitted, you'll probably hear back from us in the next day or two of hey, you know we've taken to these people or these people are already coming. And that's really it. It is that easy. Again, they can either be existing customers or active prospects. P.S. as you'll see on this page, you can bring your mascot or mascot equivalent to Saster as well. Just let us know. But yeah, we Recommend you invite CEOs, founders, directors, managers, etc. Don't invite your investors. We do a separate B2BC thing with them so you can tell us about them. But this is really mean to be for your customers and your prospects, not for your LPs, that kind of it. Let me pull up the chat and see what people are asking. Can we invite. Okay, there are some questions on this one. What's the SLA for Customer nomination approvals. So we kind of just hit that again. It's about a few working days. It depends on how many of these we get at once. I will say usually every Thursday after this webinar we get a flood. So I take a little longer than a couple of business days. But we're trying to keep it a couple of business days so that you know, you know with your team who you can keep nominating. So I've answered that one live. August. I saw something about August 4th being a soft deadline for the customers and prospects. Can you talk to this? Sure. So yes, as you'll see on this page, we do ask that you complete this by August 4th. Our deadline is going to be the 15th. So basically on August 4th, you know, we'll send everyone a summary of like hey, you've either used all your passes or it's open for like another week or so after that, you know, because the annual is upcoming, people do start to run out of time to book their travel as request as as your customers. Right. So keep that in mind. That's why we really have that deadline because it does help folks who are coming, meet you there, etc, give them time to book their travel, hotels, sales, etc. Since they're coming in a bit later to the show, someone else has asked, can you invite individual customers products who are individual contributors as long as they're not in sales? Yes, you can. Again, as long as they're not in sales. Unless sales is your buyer, which is just a few of you. Right. If you're a Martech thing or you're like a sales boss and sales is your buyer, that's a different story. But for the most part, yeah. Cool. Presentation link. Okay, we'll drop that in. I'm actually just going to drop that in now. Hold on me for those asking anyone with a link doing it live. I'm going to drop this into the chat for everyone. Okay. Slides are there in the chat and I'll also call out for everyone as you're bearing with me. Thank you so much. We did live stream these if you ever want to send them to someone else on your team or you want to rewatch something we said. I'll drop this in the chat as well. This is live streaming so you could literally watch this back right now if you needed to. I see everyone's joining. Hello. All right, cool. I'm going back to slideshow through your heart content again and let us know if you have any other questions. Okay. Other reminders I want to get to before we run out of time. Shipping. Shipping and SWAG guidelines. Actually, I'll say some of you have been asking us like swag guidelines because you're starting to ship your things or getting ready to ship your things or have ordered your swag. Obviously things like, you know, because it's an indoor outdoor campus, T shirts, water bottles, hats, sunglasses, portable charters, chargers, fans, I would add to the sunscreen things you can use inside and outside. Those are all super common, super fun giveaways. If you think about it again, attendees are kind of going inside and outside. They kind of love that kind of thing during semester. So those are things we've seen a lot of during faster annual. So you can use, you know, the indoor outdoor venue to your advantage. You can also, you know, now that the campus map is prettier than it used to be. You dissect it and peruse it and see if there's something you want to play up for like an activation or like, hey, you can, you know, picnic blankets you can use in Sasha Square park, stuff like that. I think people always kind of appreciate when you give them something they can use immediately because it's a bit of instant gratification. Any games that you're bringing in, so do let us know. I know a lot of you have let us know already. These do need to improve by faster because they do need to fit in your booth. And also if you're bringing games, etc, that you have to plug in, you may need to extraorder, you may need to order extra power which we can help you do. But again, things that you're bringing to faster, you know, to help drive traffic, doesn't need to fit within the bounds of your booth activations, etc, all that if you are bringing your own camera or video or social media team, they do also need to be registered. So do let us know. Preferably to let us know this because we typically want them to have your own waiver because you can't really film people willing. In case you didn't know this, probably best not to just people without their permission. They're again your team and you've gotten their express permission. So if you're filming attendees, you can again just coordinate with us. We can help you with that waiver, et cetera. I will say though, there's no drones at San Mateo because it's in the flight path. So please don't bring any drones. They're very strict about no drones. So sorry, but no drones. Also any ancillary activations if you're bringing in any food string. These do have to be secured by a staffster. And the San Mateo County Event center, it is a licensing thing. Like I don't have a food and beverage license. The San Mateo County Event center does. Most of you have been really great about looping us into that, so if you haven't yet, please do so. Or if you're looking to do one still, I know a lot like literally that entire deck of 100 pages we sent got taken up. Doesn't mean there's not. Yeah.

Oh, sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to pull out a question that I think could be useful for others, which is about quantity of swag.

Oh yes.

And yeah, I mean a couple thoughts for me, but you guys, you know, please, please jump in. Amelia, you know, I would, I definitely wouldn't overdo it right. I think it does depend on your level. So like if you're a diamond sponsor, you're going to get a lot more visitors than a gold sponsor. All booths are going to get traffic, so don't worry. I would say, you know, a lot of it depends on what you're giving out. We've seen folks do different, there's different approaches. What we've seen in the past few years is folks do some different level levels of swag. You know, think on one hand there's the pen that you could give to anybody who comes by or something and then maybe a high value swag item that you're giving to just like you know, your qualified prospects or your customers who come by. So you could vary that in general. I mean again depends on level but I wouldn't overdo it. I'd say a couple hundred of an item. Not while we'll have a lot of people. Not everyone wants stuff. There's a lot of stuff being handed out from a lot of people. We encourage people not to have too much waste, you know. So yeah, I don't know. Those are a couple thoughts. I don't know if that's specific enough but a few hundred of a given item is usually enough. What do you think Amelia?

Yeah, I'm down with that advice. I like that a lot. It's also something that's after like we order too much swag so we're trying to also not over order our own swag as well because we know, you know, people do like satisfied but then all of you are giving out swag. So like if you think about, you know, there's whatever, almost 200 sponsors, everyone pretty much has a swag item. It can be quite a bit of stuff. And yeah the David's point, you know, try to be a little bit more sustainable, trying not to waste as much on also all the boxes that it comes in. So yeah, I would say a couple hundred of items is good things you can do too. Like it's not like a cheaping out kind of thing. I do feel like like all of sound story as a whole as an audience is like getting away from waste. Right. They do use fun T shirts and giveaways but you know again things that they can use maybe more longer term or that they can use on site work a little bit better quantities of hundreds, hundreds are good. You can hear your swag. Some of the things that people did at Europa in the annual last year was like you know, kind of doing different games around the different tiered swag. So if you've got like, you know, one or two big ticket items or if you're like, I'm giving away a peloton a day, it does not mean you need to roll a peloton into San Francisco Event Center. You could do a roll up banner or a meter board that talks about the peloton giveaway. You could do it at certain hours to like gamify it to help, you know, again, drive traffic to your booth, drive more leads. But also, again, we've seen more folks gravitate to this of like they're gonna do a big ticket item, they actually ship it to the person who wins it. Or I've seen folks like, you know, enter to win the giveaway and in order to win it, like you've got to take a demo first after the event. But we've seen again, a lot of people do different things on their tiered swag. So that's not just like everybody gets one of everything, you know, things like food and beverage. If you do have an activation, those can go more faster. Right. Because that is something consumable. But yeah, that's a. Those are great points there. Just a quick reminder on other things that are, you know, prohibited at the event. Bringing or consuming outside alcohol is strictly prohibited. Again, San Mateo County Event center has a liquor license. So they are the ones who are exclusive providers for any alcohol. Some of the ways people work with them similarly at like Yoruba or like last year, what they've done is like if you want to do like a champagne giveaway or I say this a don Julio, like 1942 giveaway, people did that again. Same idea.

Like Amelia, you're going to be in on that one. So it sounded like pretty specific.

Yeah, okay, very specific. People do give those away and they did either like lock boxes of like, can you guess, you know, whatever XYZ thing. And if you guess it right at the end, you wouldn't buy with champagne. Cool. At the end they win. And like San Mateo can help deliver that. Or you can deliver it to them again, like to their place of residence after event if you want to deliver them alcohol. Because again, alcohol, most people are traveling so like they probably not going to drink it all in one shot if you give it to them that day. Yeah. Things to bear in mind there, again, you could do like meter boards, roll ups about it versus having it physically a booth, if it's a big ticket item or you want to do something that is alcohol related or one of these things that's prohibited Other things I'll just touch on sound and portable speakers are not allowed to be played. I had had previous sponsors at annual in particular ask if they can like podcast at their booth. You can, but I'm gonna say this big, but I don't recommend it. Like having a saster podcast where we are very, very particular about the audio. Like I would book a time in the ebc, I would find a quiet place around the venue to do so I would not use your booth to podcast. Just something to note there. Like I've seen people do or I've seen people do like cute little like live interviews, right, with people's permissions. That's all cute, that's all good. But like again it's gonna be. Just bear in mind it's gonna be loud. You know, there's stages, there's content, there's people, there's conversations. Like there are quieter places of annual for sure where you can go sit and think to yourself and do work, but it's a lot of stimulation. So we take up this question too. Helium balloons are not allowed in the venue and neither is things like, like glitter, confetti, fake snow, et cetera. And again, no drones. Okay, shipping instructions. So when you're shipping, these are the shipping things to take note of. Assay against warehouse is going to start receiving deliverables starting next Friday the August 4th. So you know you can schedule your shipments starting next Friday to get there. And how this works is like, you know, you would ship it to Freeman, Freeman would bring it do after annual and then they'll drop it off at your booth. They can also help you do managed storage. So if you've got a lot, you know, for all three days, they can help you do managed storage on site throughout the course of the event. But you don't have everything all at once in your booth. If you need to, you can ship to show site. Again, one thing I want to call out is they're only going to start receiving shipments on the Tuesday before, which is the same day as load in. So we highly recommend you ship to the advanced warehouse instead. Also because it's the day after Labor Day. Like if for some reason like your package is not going to get delivered on Labor Day because like UPS is closed. Yeah, shipping companies are closed. So bear that in mind. Again, highly, highly recommend you ship anything you need to that advanced warehouse. These are labels if you need them. Again, you guys have this. Now we'll just briefly on lead scanners and then answer any or final questions before the top of the hour here, some of you asked like how the lead scanners work. There will be. We'll do a whole deep dive on this. A bit closer to annual. There's nothing to physically do now because nobody has a badge yet. Yeah, not a whole lot to do. Basically, after you submit your graphics, we will ask you for your main lead pocket and that is how we will get set up. There's a bit of information here on like, you know, what you can and can't do with it. Again, we'll do more of a deep dive on this, but this is just a quick, rough and tough overview for lead scanning for those who have been asking about it. But yeah, there's not really anything you can do right now because again, it'll be for when you scan people on site. And so not a whole lot to do there yet since we're not on site yet, but just quick guidelines. The last two things I want to hit again, we do highly recommend you rotate your teams on site. So there's a whole agenda here for your teams, you know, take advantage of. There's a lot of speakers, really great content. Recommend, you know, carving out the time for your teams to be able to go listen to the speakers, absorb the content, you know, grow professionally in their, you know, subject matter expertise. Highly recommend you allow time for, you know, your team to do so. So, so three days, eight stages. There's a lot of really great content. Can't recommend that enough because we do record everything. But again, like things can take almost a full year to go out. Post the annual for like certain sessions. So it's better to catch it in real time. And again, it can also help break up the day if you've got teams like in the booth, you know, for three days can help if they're going to content, et cetera. Last thing I want to touch on before final questions are, I know you guys have been asking about brain dates. These are launching next week. I did link the link. So the link is live. But again, big reminder that you do have to be registered in order to do this. Brain dates are our main attendee networking. So attendees, sponsors, speakers, all use this for networking. It is one on one and group sessions. So there's kind of like two ways to do it. You can either join an existing brain date or you can book one. And so how people abuse this is like if you see a topic you like, you can join it, right and do a mind share on it. Or if you see a topic you are a subject matter expert in, that is not yet on the platform, then you can post a brain date. It does limit you on how many brain dates you can post. So you, you know, keep that in mind and don't go wild and be like I want to talk about these 10 things. Like pick one thing because it will limit you. Again, this link is live. It is a soft launch so you guys can go in there, play around with it, but it's going live to all attendees next week. So like there's not, you'll see our team in there, but like there's not attendees in there yet because it's not live for attendees yet.

Question for someone. So even though it's a soft launch, can someone here go in and set up a brain date or do they have to wait?

They can if you're registered.

Okay, cool. Another good reason to register.

Good reason to register.

So soft launch, you guys can access it now, but going out to all attendees next week, right?

So again you'll see like our team in there, you'll see some of our like pre suited topics are getting loaded in there. You can start to post your own topic so that you know when it does launch to try to stop launch it to you guys so you can post your topics. And now so when we launch it to attendees, they're already in there. So good thing to do. And yeah, gastranus2022.braindate.com yeah, super easy to use. I'll just go into final questions because I know we're running out of time here. Let me get out of my full screen. Okay. People have asked, do you know what percentage of the audience typically logs into brain dates? Yeah, it depends on our events. But you like the aggregate average I think of SAS or is like between 70 to 80% of attendees. It is a high percentage of our attendees. A lot of people are logging into brain dates using brand dates. It's getting, if you think about it, you know, it's all three days which is kind of the benefit of dafters. Like a lot of people can come on site, they'll see a brain date that they want to join and they still have time to join it throughout those three days. So a lot of I've heard, I've.

Seen people do it like just like you said, sometimes I would expect it to keep picking up steam as we get closer to the event and even gain steam at the event because people are like, oh, what's this brain date thing? And then they start registering and even starting a session on the fly on day two and it that works too. So keep your eye on it the whole time. There's another question about the limit on the number of brain dates one individual can submit.

Yeah, I think it's two. So again, that's why I say don't bam the platform with 10 topics pretty much going to limit you to two until those fill. So what that means is like, if I'm a million, I post a topic on in email marketing or event marketing. Brain date. If, if Kevin and David join my brain dates and their goal, it will open it up to let me book more brain dates. But if your brain dates are setting, they're empty. I do recommend you go through and delete it after a couple weeks if you're like, all right, no one's joining this topic so that you can free yourself up for more brain dates. A lot of our team too will like suggest that to you if your brain dates are sitting empty. So you can maximize the amount of like actual brain dates you host on site. So I do think it's. It's true that it kind of like limits you to by default and also to say like, you've never used brain dates before and this is your first time doing it. Good idea to join an existing group. Brain date versus hosting one. If you do host a brain date, just a pro tip, like treat it as a micro session. Like I've known people who like bring their laptops with slides. Those are some of the very best brain dates. You know, don't make it. It's not meant to be a commercial if it sounds like a commercial because our brain aids do have a moderation cue this time. Like it will get rejected if it sounds like a commercial. So again, meant to be thought leadership and the best ones I've seen or I've taken part in have had either like slides or like five points or examples data. Like some of. Some of those are the very best brain days I've been to. So just a pro tip there and answer any last questions we've got here.

Storage on site accessible.

It is accessible storage via Freeman. So you will need to coordinate on site with Freeman to, you know, access your items. It is accessible daily if you're bringing a lot for the three days.

But again, there's a fee, right? There's a fee for that too, from Freeman. Yeah.

So yeah, try and, you know, meter out your swag. I feel like people are going less of away from like super crazy flag items this year.

Amelia, question about booking the ebc.

Yes. So you can email us about that and like sponsor success Again, it's not launched yet, so you can't book anything yet. It's not launching until after booth graphics are done, which they're due, you know, that next Tuesday, July 31st. So again, there's that. We're not really going to release that for booking quite yet just because we don't want to confuse folks on that.

Cool. Musical guest. When's it going to be announced?

I saw that question and I dodged it.

Oh, you dodged it. All right, all right.

I was like, I know who our top two contenders are. Okay, Fun fact on booking a musical guest, you have to negotiate with their agent. And so as soon as one of our two choices says yes via their agent, then Faster Team will know and you'll know the day after.

All right, cool. Coming soon.

Coming soon. Yeah, I mean, we've been in negotiations, so we're hoping, you know, I'm hoping I find out tomorrow and the world of Samster finds out next week.

Cool.

Okay. Can you bring a live animal mascot? Live animals are not allowed. It's faster, so don't bring, you know, reptiles. I'm also not a reptile fan, but, like, birds, I don't know. No live animals are allowed.

No kangaroos. Sorry.

I'd love to see David box the kangaroo, but no, I know. Sorry, guys. That is. I don't. I didn't feel like I had to put that in policies. It's not allowed, but, yeah, technically not. Well, how to try? Yes, anonymous sponsor. I appreciate the gusto of trying, but, yeah, sadly not allowed. All right, friends, it is right at the top of the hour. Thanks for staying on. I know the majority of you stayed on for the whole time. If you have any questions, please email sponsor success. We're here to help. We will send out this recap again. You've got the slides in the chat if you need it, and the live stream. And we will see you all next week when you. You've submitted all your graphics. So thanks for joining and we'll talk to you then. Thanks, everybody.