We held at SaaStr Annual executive de-brief to share some of the last Annual data and trends we saw across all 100+ sponsors and 10,000 attendees of last SaaStr Annual. A lot of this proprietary data is I think too good not to share, and maybe help even give you a gauge on where at least some of your compatriots in B2B trended for an event at this scale.
It’s not too late to sponsor SaaStr Annual 2025 — May 13-15 in SF Bay — but it’s getting close to too late! 🙂
A few interesting learnings:
#1 57% of Attendees are VP-Level or Above
Many of the top 12 vendors at this year’s SaaStr Annual hosted a mix of execs, product, sales, CS, and marketing in their booths. We also saw an uptick and now see 57% off all attendees at SaaStr being VP level and above which likely directly correlates to who to staff your booth with.
And while we guide sponsors on the mix of who to bring to Annual for ‘booth duty’, our rough rule of thumb post-2020 has always been to have at least 1 exec / VP in the booth as much as you can. Ancedottely in our sponsor survey results, the majority of survey responders wrote-in that they met a lot of existing customers at the Annual this year. So while it’s great for your sales team to engage with these folks, it may be time to add customer meetings and retention as a core KPI for your in-person events based on this data.
Net new leads and revenue are always what we hear as the #1 KPI for Sponsors, but in a year when most of us saw churn rocket the past 12-18 months, and NRR fall across the board — maybe in 2025 it’s time to consider adding Customer Retention as a core event KPI.
#2 The average Super Gold sponsor received 470 qualified leads, up from 249 the prior year.
Leads per level were up across the board this year, proportionate to level of spend and booth size. We’ll do a separate post on this data alone but for the super gold booths in particular, sponsor-qualified leads were about 100% more than 2023.
Leads per level were up across the board this year, proportionate to level of spend and booth size. We’ll do a separate post on this data alone but for the super gold booths in particular, sponsor-qualified leads were about 100% more than the year before.
Across the board, in addition to a bigger booth correlating to more leads, similarly, we see in the data that Sponsors with an activation perform 60% better than those without. (*and this data set is only on sponsors who are eligible to host an activation in their booth.) And 70% of eligible sponsors did host an activation.
We define an activation as a custom interaction or giveaway at your booth. Different from pre-printed swag, we define activations as having a custom touchpoint with the Sponsor. IE — instead of static, pre-printed t-shirts which we would consider swag, if a sponsor hosted a print-on-demand custom t-shirt where the attendee could choose a design, that would be considered an activation.
But as a data point, the majority of sponsors hosted an activation in their booth this year at SaaStr Annual, and saw a difference in the amount of leads they netted in the end. We did see an uptick this year as well in the number of non-food & beverage activations. For example, booking.com brought a money machine, while bill.com did a custom Lego station. Others like Google Cloud did custom boba drinks, which were still popular as a food item, but this is the first time we’ve seen non-food-based activations crack the Top 12 most popular vendors and booths.
#3 Companies in the Top 12 invited 13 of their customers to attend Annual as our guest
A few interesting data points here, but for those who don’t know, since 2020, SaaStr has been working with its eligible sponsors to help provide a VIP pass to customers and prospects of Sponsoring companies. Of the vendors + sponsors in the top 12, on average they invited 13 customers or prospects to come to this year’s Annual on Us.
For the top 12, it was a gift to go to a prospect or customer and say ‘Hey, do you want a $1,500 ticket to SaaStr Annual on us in exchange for a quick meeting?’.
However, once you look at the data beyond the top 12, it gets a little bleak. Most of the eligible sponsors outside of the top 12 only invited 2 customers or prospects to come to this year’s Annual. It’s a steep drop-off from a half dozen to two. And some sponsors used none of their passes.
Again, these passes were for the Sponsor’s eligible customers OR prospects. And our only requirement was that they be director-level and above.
So why were some top SaaS companies inviting 12 people to Annual while others invited zero?
Not sure yet, but given the data, it’s something we’ll have to work harder these next few months to get it more towards equilibrium on average.
#4 We rolled out a ‘Who Do You Want to Meet’ Program that drove (on avg) 50+ extra opt-in leads ahead of the event. And in some cases, 100+.
Something new we piloted and added to SaaStr Annual and SaaStr Europa this year was our ‘Who Do You Want to Meet Program.’
The premise was simple. We asked attending companies who they wanted to meet with. And the end result was that SaaStr drove, on average, 50+ additional opt-in leads to each Sponsor. In some cases, 100+!
Our survey said they used the additional lead gen data in a few ways:
- Some Sponsors booked additional meetings on-site. As many as they could
- Some sponsors qualified out some hand-raisers and put them into nurture while trying to meet the more qualified ones on-site
- Some execs held “office hours” in their booth to meet the hand-raisers
- Some grouped them in with their lead scans
#5 700 Additional VIP C-Level Execs Attended Our Summits: Top CROs + CEOs, CMOs, CCOs and CFOs
For 2024, we added four formal summits within the event where we specifically hand-invited members of certain revenue ranges and titles to come to these gated events within the SaaStr Annual this year. We added:
- CRO + CEO Poker Night
- CMO Summit and Brunch
- CCO Meet up
- CFO Summit
Each of these invite-only Summits held a maximum of 300 qualified attendees who were all C-suite executives. Across the board, we saw in the data a majority of the attendees come from Enterprise and Public Companies, with the average revenue per Summit attendee being $100M. And 9% of attendees across all 4 summits were representing billion-dollar companies.
Join us for the next SaaStr Annual: May 13-15 2025!
If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor:
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email sponsors@saastrinc.com
or
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click here to learn more to get started, before it’s too late!
