A Pendo speaker tells SaaS companies outside the Bay Area to lean into regional traits like Southern hospitality as a brand advantage, while benchmarking against the world's top 1% of companies instead of local competitors. Set global ambitions and compete at the highest level.
How do we take what's unique and differentiating about our region and make it a positive? So one of the aspects of our area is Southern hospitality, treating customers really, really well, going above and beyond, being thoughtful. And we try to say, how do we infuse Southern hospitality into our brand and make that. That a differentiator, rather than being stressed about the fact that there are some negatives of being where we are. So again, we felt that there was much greater value in being authentic than trying to be someone that we weren't and try to find positives. So wherever you live, wherever you're from, there's something really unique about that area. I encourage you to think about what's unique, think about what's differentiated, and use that as a positive. Also, part of that is being intentional about who you want to be as a company. We started this company, and I think this is one of the great things about being in SaaS and all of you at our SaaS conference is that you can address the entire world. The world's your market, right? So when we benchmark ourselves and we started this company, we didn't say we wanted to be the biggest company in Raleigh. We didn't say we wanted to be the biggest company in North Carolina. We want to create a category leader. We want to be one of the biggest companies in the world. And we've always held ourselves to the bar of what are the top 1% of companies in the world doing? How fast are they growing, how are they behaving? And we've always thought ourselves as that's our comparative set, not our local region. So that's helped us make sure we don't get too caught up in the fact of how we're doing in relation to other folks in our community. It was always make sure we kept a really, really high bar.
