SaaS Dublin

SaaStock Dublin 🇮🇪 is a wrap! What an event, wall to wall jam packed with razor sharp leaders, founders and investors - where to start.

On Monday I joined the Sales track with some intimate workshops. Firstly, Daria Danilina (Salesroom ) spoke about #LeadGeneration in a downturned market, and gave us a reality check with some stats:
📉 29% of reps are on track to hit their 2023 quota
📉 Win rates are down YoY
📉 ACV too by a ⅓
📈 And sales cycles increased by a third

(Early) Executive alignment and coaching your prospect through their buying process were some of the top tips to maximise conversations and stay in control of your deals. 🤝

💸 Then we heard from Bethany Ayers (Advisor, COO) speak about scaling sales teams from £0-£10m. Some of the key indicators of success are:
🔢 Data - Have it. Interrogate it. Use it to drive your decisions
🌿 Learn - Quickly (using data!)
🕵‍♀️ Hire right

On Day 2, we heard from Amir Orad (Sisense), who has scaled to $100m - twice! My key takeaways:
✅ Product Market Fit is not a one and done; it should be constantly reviewed.
🤯 You can’t be everything to everyone; nail your ICP and let bad customers go (this was a theme across a number of sessions; they spend the least and take up most of your time and mental energy)

Nathan Latka then took to the main stage to present growth strategies and new performance metrics. The latter 3 were:
💵 ARR/FTE - $250k is good, $500k+ is best in class
⭕ “1 day payback” - a 5:1 LTV to CAC is useless if it’s over a 5 year period, when you might not be around then! Recoup quickly.
💰 Move from LTV to Collected LTV; banked cash.

We heard from April Dunford on how #positioning in your sales pitch is absolutely critical, and will ensure your true value proposition is both clear and lands hard with your prospect - diving straight into feature functions doesn’t work, nor does it help your prospect understand “WHY YOU”. 🤝

Day 3, Merve Nazlioglu (Insider.) covered about the curveballs #SaaS founders will face with the increasing prevalence of #GenAI. Some of those included:
#BYOAI is real and CIO’s need to get a handle on it
#GenAI may slash your ACV - as some of your functionality may be readily accessible by AI tools your prospects can access for free.

Mads 🍎 Wedderkopp took to the #Bootstrap stage to talk about how he has turned around Dreaminfluence. A very insightful session where we heard how:
🆔 A company's core #values can’t be decided/created, but should be identified - they’re already there!
⏫ Increasing prices (up to 6x) weeds out non ICP clients - and also cut out the noise
📉 Their CAC became negative - within a month, 1 new logo funded the acquisition of the next 2.

Interesting, exciting, and thought provoking stuff.

Out of hours, thank you to Emelie Linheden (Younium) and Chris Haddow (Planhat) for hosting drinks, and for Vasily Alekseenko for the The London Startup Scene Open Mic Pitch event at BrewDog - I was dragged on stage at the last minute; much fun!