SaaStock EMEA 2021: Our Top Highlights
SaaStock EMEA Online was a great success this year, with invaluable learnings and strategies shared by 60+ incredible experts in the SaaS field over two days of jam-packed content sessions, and one day of actionable and hands-on workshops. Here are some of our key highlights from the event...
Day 1: People, Runway & Retention
Accel Euroscape 2021: Global Dominance
Day 1 kicked off with Philippe Botteri (Partner), Varun Purandare (VP) and Candice du Fretay (Investor) at Accel unveiling the 2021 Accel Euroscape - the Top 100 Cloud SaaS companies across Europe and Israel. They presented their findings and answered the question "Are Europe and Israel on the path to global dominance?"
Some key takeaways from this report:
Head over to Accel's website to read the full report.
"Tug of War": Increasing Retention and Reducing Churn
Keji Mustapha (VP at VC Global Platform Community, now Global Director, Brand & Community at Partech) asked the panelists: Diana Brusilova (Sales Executive, Verifone); Chris Scott (CTO, Zephr); Charlotte Bailey (COO, PanIntelligence), for their top tips on how to increase retention and reduce churn.
They discussed the customer journey and how understanding the journey is vital in increasing acquisition and maintaining retention. One key thing to remember when thinking about the customer journey is to visualise it from the customer's perspective, by figuring out the pain points and mapping out how these can be changed and solved by you, your product and your business. Investing in customer success and customer success teams is something all the panelists strongly advocated as they are becoming increasingly important in boosting retention.
Proven Strategies to Accelerate Customer-Led Growth
Karen Peacock (CEO of Intercom) discussed the strategies on how you can accelerate customer-led growth. There were three main takeaways:
Day 2: Revenue, Marketing & Product
8 DOs and DON'Ts for SaaS Startups
Five years ago at SaaStock Dublin, Christoph Janz (Managing Partner, Point Nine Capital) delivered a talk: 8 Do’s and Don’ts for SaaS startups - it quickly became an industry-renowned guide for building a SaaS company. Five years on, in conversation with Jordi Romero (Founder, Factorial HR), Christoph revisits these do's and don'ts…
How to Combine the Power of Your Freemium Community with Direct Sales
In conversation with Philippe Botteri (Partner at Accel), Bernadette Nixon (CEO & Board Member, Algolia) discussed how to combine the power of Freemium Community with direct sales.
Bernadette started off by outlining key characteristics of Product-Led Growth (PLG) companies. Firstly, it is vital for PLG companies to have an incredible product that solves customers’ problems easily and without friction; the product should not merely show off all the lovely features that it offers, it should fix the problem. Additionally, it is important to have a low price and low complexity. The product should be easy to use and run on a self-service model that doesn’t require any external services or third parties.
She also emphasised the importance of a self-service model and quoted from a Forrester report that 75% of B2B buyers would rather buy through an app or online marketplace than have a salesperson sell to them. This shows how vital is it to have that self-service experience and extend it into self-education and exploration.
Bernadette shared her 3 top things to have in mind when starting direct sales:
How to Make Marketing into a Machine
In this presentation, Dave Kellogg (Executive in Residence at Balderton Capital) talked about how to make marketing into a machine. In essence, a marketing machine is one where money goes in and sales-accepted opportunities come out.
Dave outlined the key aspects of a marketing machine, which are:
Alongside opportunities, there are other by-products of the marketing machine. These are awareness (increase in brand awareness); positioning (strengthening the position of your product or company); and reputation (improving your company’s reputation).
This year's flagship SaaStock EMEA Online conference was a great success, thanks to our incredible SaaStock community, speakers and partners!
Next up we'll be hosting our Blueprint for CEOs conference and SaaStock Remote 2022, before we go back in-person next year in October 2022. We can't wait to see you in Dublin - stay tuned for more details on our website.
If you want to achieve success all year round, check out:
See you soon!