My key takeaways from SaaStr Annual 2017
What I learned by talking to other SaaS entrepreneurs
SaaStr Annual 2017 was definitely one of the best SaaS conferences I have been to so far. With more than 10,000 attendees they roughly doubled the numbers from 2016. It’s great to see that such speciality conferences come up more and more as I usually get the most value if it really nails down to one specific topic. I talked with lots of people across the three days and got new inspirations from all the great talks. In this article I don’t want to repeat all the content from the talks, as a lot of summaries are already out there. I will rather focus on the things that I heard from people in the discussions I had. Here are some common patterns that I found over and over again.
Outbound sales gets more challenging
As more and more companies are switching to automated email campaigns with a very broad filter, the volume that individuals receive will just get too much. This has the result that delivery rates will go down massively as people mark more emails as spam or unsubscribe immediately. For me this means that either we need to ramp up the inbound part even more or find a more high quality approach to outbound sales, e.g. through a very targeted account based selling. A prerequisite for this is that you have great technology to help with finding the right people at the right time. At the conference this problem was definitely a common theme and lots of tools are out there to help.
Inbound marketing and sales will grow further
On the opposite this means that the inbound side will get more attention in the future. It means even more content marketing, more webinars, more ebooks, more landing pages, more targeted advertising and a lot of other things that result in more people coming to our website and signing up for a trial and showing their interest. The downside with this approach is that it’s tough to grow these initiatives with a very high growth rate. In the end we will not have a choice though and need to go into a more persistent and more organic mode of growing the targeted traffic to our owned channels. A result of this is also that companies are really open to cooperate on creating great content. I spoke to multiple other SaaS companies about ideas and you will see some of the results of such partnerships in our quintly channels in the next months.
The times of bullshit are over
After a lot of discussions I could really feel that the honest approach with potential clients picks up more and more, which is a good thing. At quintly we always tried to be very open and honest with our clients and if quintly would not be a good fit, we just tell them. A lot of other companies though were relying on selling a lot of deals that had a questionable retention probability which created a lot of problems in the end. As competition is rising in all areas and processes get more intelligent and automated, there will be only little room for unauthentic behavior. As a tech person I was always driven by content and not so much by talking, therefore I really appreciate that this is paying off in the end.
Find new ways to attract talent
Nearly everyone was complaining about how hard it is to find the right talent to grow the companies further, especially with the high salaries in San Francisco. For me this opens up the chance to look at the whole recruiting process in a different way. Why not look more on how much an individual could actually help in a situation rather than working with fixed job descriptions. It also forces us as companies to take initiative and hire more people on potential rather than experience. This changes a lot the type of people we are looking for and would rather prefer the “insecure overachiever” than the experienced guy with lots of ego.
There is not the one way to success
By listening to all the talks and talking to founders I heard a lot of different stories and it also showed that there is no real common path to success. Some companies bootstrap, some take incredible amounts of investor money and still both can become a unicorn in the end. It’s great to see that there are different ways and that every founder can decide which way he/she prefers. In the end it will be the best to stay authentic and move in ways that you feel most comfortable with. You will see in the end if your specific approach can work.
Metrics, Metrics, Metrics
You could really feel that the whole industry gets much more number driven. There were a lot of great talks about the best metrics and I could take some good learnings for things that we will implement at quintly very soon. I liked especially the approach to look beyond the typical success metrics like MRR/growth to find your “North Star metric” that really measures the value that your customers are getting.
Overall it was a real pleasure to be in San Francisco for this event and I’m really grateful to have met so many great and interesting people.
What were your takeaways from SaaStr Annual this year? If you want to see what we are up to at quintly and stay updated, feel free to follow me on Twitter.
