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Catching a break after SaaStock’19 in Dublin and the shortstop at London, I’m consolidating my learning from SaaStock even as I gear up to attend Web Summit in Lisbon. Which usually receives a question, why so many events, conferences, and summits – a question I ask myself from time to time.

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Events have their unique offerings and I believe their benefits vary from company to company and the attendees too. But when asked if attending one is worth the time and resources, there is no short answer, I believe it can be made worth it though.

Why SaaStock?

If you haven’t heard about SaaStock already, I’d love to be the one you hear it from! It is one of the must-attend events for SaaS companies, known as the ‘Disneyland for SaaS companies”. And I must admit that it lives up to its reputation.

CrewScale at SaaStock’19It brings together founders, executives, and investors to build and scale B2B SaaS companies bringing together the best mentors, investors, partners, and customers for your SaaS business under a single roof.

Important mentions:

SaaStock’19 was, in short, wonderfully organized.

  • The workshops and talks were generously distributed across the different stages of a startup’s life, covering most of the points that need addressing.
  • The SaaStock app allowed us to connect and meet up with fellow attendees, the integration with Brella made the scheduling of meetings easier and faster.
  • The diverse profile of speakers ensured that attendees from all verticals and domains had something to take away from the event.

CrewScale at SaaStock’19

I had a great time at SaaStock though I was juggling a lot in terms of the sessions I wanted to attend and the people I wanted to meet.

CrewScale at SaaStock’19We had a booth on one of the days, that gave us the chance not just to showcase our offerings, but also get feedback and insights from several attendees. I had a chance to meet amazing people like Joi Sigurdsson, Nathan Latka, Fraser Davidson, and many others who shared their insights on the growing SaaS market and the State of SaaS in 2019.

CrewScale at SaaStock’19
CrewScale at SaaStock’19

4 Key takeaways from SaaStock19:

1. Unlock growth through your Voice of Customer

The workshop on the voice of the customer by Georgiana Laudi and Tara Robertson was one of the three in the growth marketing Bootcamp. I was excited about the boot camp and the very first session landed its punch.

Voice of Customer is all about the customer experience they have had while using your product or service. Retaining a customer isn’t always about the product or the price, it is their experience with you that becomes the deciding factor. It becomes the feedback loop that makes your offerings better and your clients happy.

Voice of Customer is a widely known term in marketing, though how often it is taken into consideration is up for debate. 90% of companies incorporate VoC in their business growth in some way or another, high growth lies in the customer-centric approach. But are they collecting VoC data and translating it into actionable insights? Not so much.

This session introduces a shortcut for capturing your VoC, regardless of your company stage and domain and provides the tools and resources to leverage it.

2. How do SaaS companies fail in growth and scale?

Patrick Campbell, the CEO and Founder of Profitwell explains how and why SaaS companies fail to grow or scale with insights into retention and pricing. Most companies fail to scale, a hard fact that growing companies need to acknowledge and plan for. Campbell shares his insights using research from more than fifteen thousand subscriptions and SaaS companies.

He also shares his take on pricing, subscription, retention and churns stats – covering the breadth of product pricing and billing models.

3. Competing with clickbait

In an interview, Nathan Latka, a prolific podcaster and author of a book on How to be a capitalist without any capital. In his book, he talks about how he raised $2.5 million in the capital, among several strategies and experiments to build his own brand.

One of the roadblocks to reaching the right audience and widening your marketing funnel is the attention economy. Content, today needs to be more than just value addition as we compete with clickbait headlines and trending titles.

Latka talks about his strategy for driving sales built around getting affiliate partners through hosting webinars and podcasts. Engaging content can just be what draws in buyers for your SaaS product and exposure is the key to reaching more audiences (the right content is a given). He shares his piece on controversial content and a parallel to how bad publicity is still publicity.

4. Reigniting your startup growth

This session by the Predictable Revenue team totally nails the problem most startups have while they are shifting gears and picking pace. The four pillars of outbound sales, as explained, targeting, messaging, channels and tactics break down the formula needed to keep your sales going.

When it comes to outbound sales, most startups fall into one of two buckets – those that know who to target and those that didn’t. Their interviews with all their customers led to some insights that Aaron Ross shares with us.

The chain of relevance connects what your customers already want to what you have to offer to them and is the key to nailing a niche. Targeting and messaging can be based on this chain of relevance. What I couldn’t help but notice about this, is how similar it was to Voice of Customer.

To conclude, it was a great experience attending SaaStock19 and it already has me in anticipation for the next year. The SaaStock community is ever-growing. Conferences like these help us network better, keep up with the trends, develop ourselves, and boost business.

Nirmaan Agarwal

About Nirmaan Agarwal

View all posts by Nirmaan Agarwal

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