SaaStock's Top 3 Tactics to Lead Better B2B Virtual Events

Alex Theuma, CEO & Founder of SaaStock, shares what you need to consider when planning and running your own online B2B conference or event.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Google Podcasts

Before running conferences worldwide and community events in more than 30 cities, SaaStock started off as a blog.

After noticing the need for a SaaS conference in Europe (and getting a few nudges from the SaaS community ) Alex Theuma took the jump and built the conference. The brand’s mission: to help make a difference in the lives and companies of the SaaS community.

Then 2020 happened. The SaaStock team took swift action and went from being an in-person conference business to a virtual one.

The team’s first virtual event: SaaStock remote. Put together in under 90 days.

You would think that a company that has been hosting events for more than 4000 people for years would have no problem turning its flagship event into a virtual event. Well…this is exactly what you’ll learn about in this interview.

Love the show? Please review us on Apple or Google podcasts.

Quick bio

Name: Alex Theuma

What he does: Founder and CEO of SaaStock | host of the SaaS Revolution Show podcast

Matthew on the web: LinkedIn | Twitter

Episode highlight: Launching an online conference with a super tight turnaround doesn’t come without a few setbacks. SaaStock’s story about navigating the challenges that came with the conference’s digital transformation is not to be missed.

SaaStock: top tips from this episode

Rethink everything

If you think an online platform can do 80% of everything you would usually do during an offline event, think again.

When the SaaStock’s first virtual event went live, it had almost 200 speakers and five stages of content running simultaneously. In-person, the format would have probably broken yet another record for the participant number.

Only now, the participants were also homeschooling their kids, checking work emails, and worrying about the state of the world.

After getting the first feedback from their audience, the team decided to keep their events focused and memorable. What they found is having just one stage of content to focus on and keeping everybody in one place worked better.

In virtual, it’s about your content and the way it is delivered.

Not just content: bring in the fun to your virtual event

One of the challenges every marketer faces is how to translate the thrill, fun, and feeling of being connected into an online event.

For the SaaStock team, it starts with storytelling – having speakers who can engage and present in a virtual environment.

Next, creating content that feels less like a fireside chat and more like a Netflix series. Head over minute 44 for Alex’s insights on how to pepper different content formats into your events.

Finally, give people the chance to participate. Organizers often get busy making sure everything is running smoothly, and they rarely mingle. Make sure you also get the chance to participate while being there for both new attendees and speakers.

Figure out the best way to build two-way interaction

The event was meant to include an expo hall, so the SaaStock team built a digital experience inspired by the act of browsing booths. Attendees from around the world were free to explore the sales booths. A company expert hosted each room, sharing demons with visitors and answering questions in real-time.

In theory, this sounds like the perfect experience. Visitors could now engage with content in a way that was more active than logging into a scheduled meeting.

For some participants though, some interactions were intimidating. The team tweaked the experience and turned it into a self-service one. This way, everyone had the freedom to watch the content or take the offer if they wanted.

SaaStock: episode highlights

Transcript excerpts from the interview

On the aftermath of launching the first online conference

[22:35] We saw a little bit of churn within the team. A couple of people kind of left, quite a few people were really tired and sort of burnt out. We definitely saw a dip in motivation in July after the event. I was trying to figure it out but I could see that really, there was this motivation issue within the business.

I was feeling pretty tired as well. But again, because of the position that we were in, I didn’t feel that I could have a vacation at the time. I wanted to steer the ship through because we were generating revenue, but also our costs were quite high still. So, that quarter we were still losing a bit of money, and I needed to continue to get us back to profitability.

Once we understood the problem, we’ve kind of managed to fix it. Then started to pick things up again, as well and the performance of the business started to improve.

On learning that online events are different from in-person ones

[33:37] A big learning from running an online event is we saw Hopin as “oh look, it can do 80% of what an in-person conference can do”. Virtual Expo networking, different stages of content, etc to set up a high-level kind of calling out three things. So, we basically took our template from the in-person doubling event, we put it onto Hopin. That doesn’t work.

[35:33] That was just the feedback that we got, like, “Guys, we’re overwhelmed. Like, you’ve got all of this good stuff going on. I don’t know where to go.” At an in-person conference, we have five stages and content. People will say, “okay, I’m gonna go watch that, or go watch this one, and etc.”. So we’re not just giving them one option, we have a bit of something for everyone. It just didn’t quite translate, for us online.

On the future of SaasStock’s events

[42:09] We’ve gone through this digital transformation (still going through it). But we want to be subscription-first. We want to kind of play, we’re still working on our kind of membership offering.

[42:41] I am a big fan of the online events and the benefits that they bring. There are new things to do with online conferences and we have the ability to be more experimental around content.

SaaStock: top quotes

[09:17] SaaS is having a banner year. It’s one of those industries, that has almost been COVID proof because everything’s kind of online. It’s been able to kind of help that transition. A lot of the tools in SaaS really enables things like remote work and so on.

[10:33] I think some of those businesses that are not essential, not core would have suffered. Seeing that even a thing, it’s fine to talk about it because it was in our own podcast.

Buffer has grown very well as a bootstrap business to be surpassed 20 million in ARR in revenue; we had Joel Gascoigne from Buffer on our podcast, the SaaS Revolution Show. He said, “well, we got to 22 million in ARR. But this year, we got down to 21. Because we’ve had a lot of like high churn”.

Businesses that are doing well are the ones that are really kind of core and embedded into the work essentials. They’re essential for businesses. If you’re just kind of a feature or a nice to have, and if you serve SMBs, then you may have experienced quite a bit of churn.

[17:52] We had a war room meeting, and we had seven ideas of how we can pivot and get back to revenue, quickly.

The one that we decide to go for was obviously virtual events. We thought, well, it’s the quickest time to value, quickest time to revenue and it was, from our skillset of what we’ve been doing, probably the one that we could execute the best, like, with more certainty.

[18:57] I mean, revenue was nowhere near what an in-person conference is. However, the costs were so low from a business model perspective, much more profitable. Yeah, so I was actually “Oh, hold on a minute, I quite like this as a business model. If we can figure this out, then, you know, do I need to be spending hundreds of thousands on costs to run in-person events?”