With SaaStr Annual 2023 now only a week away, we’re getting loads of questions from sponsors eager to know easy methods to get the very best ROI from their sponsorship bundle. So we reached out to a couple of our returning sponsors who completely crushed it on the 2015-2022 Annuals to study what labored for them. Give their recommendation a shot and watch your pipeline develop!
Know your targets & talk them to your workforce.
1. Perceive upfront the way you’ll measure the success of your sponsorship. Will it’s scans on the sales space? Variety of conferences set with prospects? Dinners or occasions held exterior of the venue? After getting a shared imaginative and prescient for the metrics that matter most, you may rally the workforce and construct your occasion plan accordingly.
2. Should you’re taking your workforce with you, do a day by day morning assembly. Have the workforce go round and every state their greatest spotlight from the week earlier than and what they plan to perform as we speak. Put together a 2 minute rallying cry message to get the workforce on level for the remainder of the day. Intentional is all the time higher than winging it.
Get laser-focused on the conferences you wish to schedule.
3. Set a aim for quantity of conferences that you just wish to schedule by the top of the occasion. Then begin shopping the listing of sponsors on the location and look to social media channels, leveraging the occasion hashtag to determine who’s speaking concerning the occasion and kickstart the dialog. Be intentional a
bout the conferences set earlier than you arrive on opening day.
4. Make a dedication to scheduling post-event conferences in the course of the dialog. It’s nugatory having a dialog and leaving with a enterprise card and the promise of follow-up the week after. Seize your cellphone, open your calendar and set the assembly proper then and there.
5. Think about making 1-2 dinner reservations simply in case you meet prospects or clients who don’t have dinner plans post-happy hour. You’ll have already got a dinner reservation and a recreation plan to ask them to a small dinner the place you cannot solely put money into them; hearken to their experiences together with your firm/product, however study a few of their current challenges.
6. For early stage founders and sellers, pre-schedule at the very least 4 conferences with people who you usually wouldn’t join with. Don’t know who’s coming? BS. Each speaker and sponsor is listed.
Tactical tip: ship an e mail to the speaker you wish to meet most. Inform them you’ll be on the occasion and have a query for them. When Q&A comes round, be the primary to ask the query after which shake their hand after. State your worth prop with a small request. Most ought to recognize the hustle.
7. Spend a while reviewing the agenda and the listing of audio system. Dive into their subjects and make a listing of the classes that resonate nicely together with your area of curiosity and line of labor. Share on social the highest classes you can be attending and why. Get to the classes early and sit on the entrance to interact with the speaker in the course of the session; ask significant questions and be intentional about partaking with the speaker after the session.
Sales space responsibility performed proper…
8. Should you’re giving out swag, don’t have it’s targeted on your self. Make it targeted in your buyer and prospect heroes. Salesloft went a great distance once they switched out the t-shirts which stated “SalesLoft” with those that stated “Rainmaker” & “Gross sales Nerd”. Clients wish to characterize their greatest selves, not yours.
9. Put on a emblem t-shirt on the occasion, however look sharp. 
The 2023 Annual is Outdoor + Open Air, so simply this 12 months, sandals, work shorts, and a pleasant T-shirt could be the best way to go!
10. Ensure to construct out & enrich lists of your fellow sponsors. Typically your greatest prospects, future companions, and contacts are proper throughout the ground!
Don’t blow it on the observe up!
11. Personalize your convention emails and make them well timed. Put up-event outreach is commonly left within the palms of SDRs or regulated to generic blasts. At SaaStr, LeadGenius discovered success sending emails towards the top of the first day mixed with personalizing the e-mail with common environmental context. For instance: final 12 months it was sweltering on the 2nd ground, so of their follow-up, they talked concerning the braving the warmth to speak. Their emails stood out due to the context.
And a bonus tip for each sponsors and attendees:
12. SaaStr is probably the world’s densest focus of SaaS entrepreneurs and enterprise capitalists. You actually by no means know who’s standing subsequent to you at Starbucks or using beside you within the resort elevator. Go away your self open to happenstance.
An enormous because of those that submitted their learnings for this information; many of the above ideas are direct quotes, and we couldn’t have created the information with out you!
