So I need to inform you guys one thing a bit soul-crushing. We had 20+ of our prime sponsors at SaaStr Annual this 12 months inform us they bought “Too Many Leads” from the occasion. Too many!
What?
We’ve spent years attempting to make SaaStr Annual, Europa and APAC nice for all 3 legs of the tripod: attendees, audio system, and sponsors. You want all 3 to be an A/A+ to essentially scale, and it’s exhausting. A part of that’s delivering 100s of certified results in sponsors. You gotta do it.
Via 2021, the #1 grievance we’d all the time get was “We Didn’t Get Sufficient Nice Leads”. 200, 400, 600, 800, it was by no means sufficient. Everybody nonetheless complained. It’s what it’s. 🙂
Then a couple of 12 months in the past we began to listen to, “We really didn’t observe up on most of our leads”.
This 12 months it got here to a head. We’ve had a number of conversations with VPs of Advertising and marketing and Area and heard the identical factor:
“We are able to’t get our gross sales group to observe up on the leads this 12 months.” 🙁
Considered one of our sponsors even bought 150 certified opt-in leads earlier than Annual. Of us that mentioned they wished to satisfy them onsite. It doesn’t get significantly better than that, of us. However nobody adopted up with most of them.
From entrepreneurs ever complaining about not getting sufficient leads for years (even when it was 100s and 100s), to now having greater than the gross sales group is keen to follow-up with. That’s a large change.
We heard this from start-ups, scale-ups, and public Cloud leaders. From all 3 segments.
The world has modified. If we are able to’t get gross sales groups to follow-up on leads, it’s a brand new world.
Time to alter the playbook once more. It’s not simply low-quality outbound cadences that don’t actually work anymore. It’s the entire decaying 2019 playbook. It needs to be rebooted. Now. You need to do extra in your prospects and prospects, not much less. Hustle extra, not much less.
And in lots of circumstances in the present day, we’re doing much less.
Perhaps AI would be the reply, partially. I hope so!
