SaaSiest 2023

Stop losing deals when you're not in the room, and learn to shape the internal buying conversations happening about you — without you. Leave this hands-on, highly-practical workshop with a re-written business case plus frameworks for selling with deal champions. Best for enterprise or strategic AE's and Sales Leaders. Led by Nate Nasralla, Founder of Fluint.io, as a free session for all SaaSiest 2023 Ticket Holders.
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You've heard you need to "turn your marketing into a media company." But what does that mean? Most companies in B2B interpret that as the lowest bar possible--getting good at distribution. That's part of it, but only a small part. In this workshop you will learn an 8-part framework to take your existing team and build a media engine that drives affinity and revenue for your brand.

This session will be a small group, roundtable-style deeper discussion of Positioning. April will cover a set of case study examples and common positioning hurdles and potential pitfalls. We will also talk about common mistakes companies make when executing on their positioning, particularly in sales. This session would be most helpful for B2B startups that are already in-market and trying to scale.

This workshop is fully booked now!

Who is the best SaaS company at padel? We are calling for all padel enthusiasts that are also joining SaaSiest 2023, to join us for a fun game of padel. Everyone that holds a ticket to the event is able to join free of charge! The competitive juices will be flowing for sure, but rest assured this is something for all levels of players.
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Exclusive for the whole SaaSiest CEO Network and the SaaSiest Executive Network ticket holders

Vicious competition, saturated media, overwhelmed customers - have you ever felt that breaking through to your customers is almost impossible? In this talk from April Dunford, Founder, Ambient Strategy, you will learn how to use market context to make the value of your offerings obvious to your target customers. This talk will teach you how to use a simple positioning methodology that will make your products stand out and shine.

2020/2021 was the party of all parties in B2B SaaS, with companies growing at breakneck speed fueled by unprecedented amounts of venture capital raised at increasingly stratospheric valuations. But a tumultuous 2022 left people wondering when the array of challenges would start easing and when things would return to normal again. Now, well into 2023, we can see that the grey clouds have started to clear up, but it’s a new kind of normal that we’re fast approaching. Mikael Johnsson, Co-Founder and General Partner at Oxx, has been an investor through three historical market mega cycles, such as the one we’re currently going through, and here he shares his insight into what is happening, what to expect next and the overall state of play in SaaS in 2023.

With an increasingly challenging macro economic and fundraising landscape, closing new business will continue to be a challenge for start-ups for the foreseeable future. In this session Rav Dhaliwal we will cover practical steps to maximize revenue from your existing customers. In particular how to effectively organize, align, measure and compensate your sales and customer teams to create a flywheel of sustainable revenue that will not only help you to weather the current turbulent times, but will help you to lay a foundation to thrive well into the future.

Companies with great products die because they don't have a great distribution strategy. On the other hand, the companies that perform best are the ones that have the best distribution strategy, having a great product is simply not good enough in today's competitive market. In this session with Rasmus Holst, CEO, LMS365 will share how they have strategically been working on their Distribution to gain competitive advantates and become one of the leading players in the world in its space.

The world is more global than ever before!  Our purchasing behaviors are more similar than ever before, regardless of where we live! Does that mean you can approach everyone the same way, with the same message, ideally in English? Or?
In this session with Susanne Rönnqvist Ahmadi, VP International Marketing, Hubspot we'll talk about her view on the Global vs Local approach and what we all can learn from it!

Looking at the success of other companies it is easy to be enticed to try to copy their go-to-market strategy and channels. While at some point it is correct to add new marketing and sales motions, picking the right ones is critical and depends both on the nature of your product, your pricing, existing go-to-market motions, and the capabilities of your team. In this session, Fredrik Skantze, CEO & Founder of Funnel, will talk about the most common GTM channel options for B2B SaaS companies and how to assess which ones are the most suitable for your business.

You've been enjoying success in your local market but hit a road bump going international. The scary part, you have no idea why the pipeline is not growing as fast as planned, and deals are not closed at the expected rate! In this session, Giles Whiting, COO & MD, Forsta,  and US Operating Advisor, Verdane, will talk about the legwork that needs to be put in to increase the likelihood of success when you go international!

In this session by Keshet Rosenthal, Director of Product Management at Hibob will share how they are leveraging the power of product discovery and close customer relationships to drive their product roadmap. Discover their methods for gaining valuable insights, identifying pain points, and uncovering new opportunities for product growth through effective product discovery research. She will also share tips from her experience on conducting effective product discovery research, and how to apply insights to fuel a product strategy. Don't miss out on this opportunity to discover how her approach can help elevate your product development process!

With funding harder to come by, “efficiency” and “break-even” are the name of the game. But which path to choose - cost-cutting or growth? In this session, Float’s founders Cedric and Jannis will assess both routes, share how investors look at them, and provide insights for founders and CEOs to develop a winning strategy for their businesses.

Few startups really take advantage of a good narrative to help them sell. Are your sales meetings closer to an overview of features than a set of compelling reasons to buy? Do your sales meetings leave customers excited or confused? Are you losing deals to competitors with clearly inferior products? In this talk, April Dunford, Founder, Ambient Strategy will give you a framework you can use to build a story that is differentiating, compelling, and most importantly, gets you business.

All companies coming out of the Nordics and Baltics have one thing in common - you all have to plan for going international from day 1! It's not a nice to have, it is must have if you want to build a strong and sustainable B2B SaaS company. 
It is easier said than done though! In this panel discussion, we will hear the good, bad, and ugly from 3 Founders about their international journeys, to make sure you can learn from their experience and how you best prepare yourself for international success.

Panelists: 
Nora Huovila, Co-Founder & CEO Videoly
Carl Carell, Co-Founder & CRO, GetAccept
Andreas Sjölund, Co-Founder & CRO, Quinyx

The economic downturn is here! Cutting costs quickly means having the means to weather the storm. But how does one get on with an efficient cost reduction without hampering growth? In this session, Marie Ahlberg, CFO, Quinyx, will talk about how to go ahead with combining growth and cost efficiency.

Customers expect more – in terms of agility, flexibility, and from the relationships with their vendors and partners using a SaaS based model. They expect one seamless experience without divisions or silos, and they also expect you to show them a deep understanding of their business, through meaningful relationships. Customer Success is all about relationships, in this session Osen Akkemik will talk you through Genesys' journey of bringing Customer Success and Services under one umbrella and how this transformation allowed them to deliver success to their customers ultimately.

With tight budgets, small teams, and lofty goals, you need to get the most effective results possible from your marketing with the least amount of effort and cost. In this session, Linda Souza, veteran head of marketing for early-stage and growth-stage SaaS startups, will give you concrete tips and ideas you can implement immediately to make the most of your marketing efforts and drive growth without blowing your budget or burning out your team.

"Raise your prices!" is a common investor-to-founder refrain. Going into 2023, pricing is popping up with increasing frequency in the boardroom. But while it's true that most SaaS companies would do well to review their pricing, that advice alone isn't actionable. In this session Ingrid Bonde Åkerlind, Principal, Oxx we'll go tactical. How do you know it's too low? Who should you involve? What does a pricing strategy look like? Where does pricing research fit in? How do you roll it out? What are some common mistakes to avoid?

In this session, Rav will cover a framework for successful customer success hiring in a highly competitive talent landscape. The session will cover how to understand the contextual skills and experience you need, how to map those contextual skills to a CS organization type to make candidate sourcing more efficient and finally how to build a CS hiring scorecard that makes the interview process far more efficient whilst improving the quality of candidates you put through.

RevOps is a hot topic in SaaS today, but getting it right is not simple! If you want to unlock the full potential of your revenue engine; a high-impact RevOps team is key. Tim Hurst, VP of RevOps at Funnel will share his learnings, key ingredients for success, and mistakes to avoid to help you create your own high-impact RevOps team.

In this panel discussion, we will be exploring the ins and outs of M&A strategies in the SaaS industry. Our esteemed panelists, all of whom have successfully executed multiple M&A deals, will share their experiences and insights on what it takes to make an M&A strategy successful. They will delve into the key criteria that CEOs and Founders need to consider before embarking on an M&A journey, as well as share their own stories of the good, bad and ugly of this growth strategy. Don't miss out on this invaluable opportunity to learn from the experts and take your business to the next level.

Moderator: 
Nils Vold, Partner, Verdane

Panelists:
Göran Lindö, CEO, EcoOnline
Karl Fredrik Lund, CEO, Papirfly

You're probably collecting a huge amount of data; about your products, about your users, and about how your users use your products. But are you making the most of all that valuable information? In this session, Matt Smith, Strategic Customer Success Manager, Mixpanel will share how best to use your product usage data. We'll look at what drives your users to value, and what keeps them coming back time and time again. We'll also show how your data, and a few hints and tips, can be used to build a winning product strategy.

Most people think sales reps close deals. But they don't. Buyers do. Because B2B buying decisions are made during internal meetings — not sales meetings. Learn the art of Buyer Enablement in this session with Nate Nasralla, Founder, Fluint: how to sell with deal champions, and close the largest deals of your career.

Customer Success can either be the most reliable source of revenue to turn a business profitable over time or an obscure and very expensive cost center. Either we run it the right way, either we’ll pay for it. We have identified 4 core areas to laser-focus in order to operate a scalable CS organization. In this session, Hélène Hulthin Hagnéré will share insights from her +15 years of CS career, from being a Support Agent to a CS Director, and what matters when scaling a CS Team in a SaaS business.

You're in a crowded category. You're not the leader. Everyone is copying everyone else's features, so you can't differentiate on product. Nobody wants to race to the bottom on price. So, how do you plan on grabbing market share? To this point, the only advice out there is "niche down". But let's be honest, you've come to far already, niching down isn't going to fly. So what do you do? You can't outspend the leader. And even if you could, is that really the best use of funds? There's a simple answer. You become the brand everyone wants to work with. And you do that by creating memorable marketing targeted to specific groups of individuals within your ICP. In this presentation, Todd Clouser, Marketing Evangelist we'll talk about the mindset shift it takes to go all-in on creating memorable experiences, and how you become the company your ideal customers want to have in their tech stack.

Bubbles and networking - after a jam-packed day of great sessions there is no better way into a relaxed and fun atmosphere to connect with your peers than Bubbles!

Welcome to a food feast! A selection of local flavors will be served for dinner, there is something for every taste bud out there :). Great food, accompanied by SaaSy drinks and lots of great conversations - a perfect way to get into dancing mood!

We've got a special trio of excellent musicians awaiting you. It's a take on modern music in a way you may have never seen before! 100% guaranteed that you'd like to hit the dance floor when you hear the first beat! Dance floor, disco lights, bars with SaaSiest signature drinks, bartenders with magical tricks up their sleeves, and great music all at your fingertips! Welcome to the party in the Club of Lights.

Welcome to a social morning run, a great way to start the 2nd day of SaaSiest 2023. Put on your shoes, come down to the hotel lobby, and take a run around the beautiful sights of Malmö 3k-6k at a pace that you are comfortable with together with fellow SaaSiest attendees.
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We’ll start the morning with some stretching and yoga moves, finding that inner balance of yours and resetting for the day ahead. This will be an instructor-led yoga class, all you need is to show up and the rest is handled by the SaaSiest crew! Only 15 seats are available.
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Customer marketing is one of the most lucrative ways to capitalize on customer enthusiasm. It is more important than ever to strengthen our focus on existing customers! Offering a unified experience by frictionlessly moving customers through journeys will generate a major uplift in total revenue. By ensuring high data quality, you can create personalized and relevant content, and meet your customers in the channel they prefer!

In this session, Lotta Forså, Customer and Partner Marketing from Sinch will share her best tips for creating Advocates out of your customers. Lotta has many years of experience building customer loyalty programs and will share her recipe to success with you - learn how the right Customer Marketing program will fuel your growth!

Product-led growth is more than a buzzword. It’s an innovative approach to scaling businesses and growing revenue. Even the term "growth" might not be the right one, since it's about putting the product front and center in an organization and expecting all teams to deliver value to customers. In this talk, Peter Sunna, VP Product, Kognic, will share his learnings for building successful product-led companies and give counterintuitive advice such as "listen more to sales" and "don't make your product lovable".

All this talk about turning your ship towards profitability instead of growth sounds nice and all, but have you done your homework? Setting the right type of scalability framework in place is the dark horse of reaching profitability. Michael Jerlin, COO Voyado, will share his learnings from building a strategic foundation that is applicable to any organization, big or small.

It's no secret that the market has changed and now favors sustainable growth over growth at all costs.

But what does this mean for our businesses and how can we achieve this? Short answer: By increasing Earned Growth. Niclas Ramon Staberg, Senior Advisor - GTM & Customer Success at Verdane shares what Earned Growth is all about and how you can increase it.

Your business can only be in one of two states: Profit, or Loss. Bootstrapped founders must find a path to profit to survive. In this talk, Bridget Harris, CEO & CoFounder, YouCanBook.Me goes through not only how she has built up the fundamentals of a profitable business and how to scale it to $5m ARR, but also how they decided early on to share part of that profit back with the employees. Sharing the rewards of a successful business has been a way to incentivize and motivate the team for the long term.

Account Based Marketing is more than just a hyped abbreviation. At Pixelz, ABM is integrated into almost all sales and marketing activities. Why? Because we're a small company with a limited number of target accounts, we must ensure we spend our resources correctly. In this session, Katrine Rasmussen, CMO, Pixelz, will show you how they got started with one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many campaigns, how they make certain sales and marketing are always aligned, and the tactics used to drive the ABM forward.

Most of you will go through some financial transactional process in your business! In this session, Erica Sandelin Ekelund, CFO, Voyado, will share Hands-on directions on how to prepare & present your company and team for a transaction process to maximize outcome!

Today’s environment of growing efficiently requires having the users’ interest at heart as well as an experimentation mentality that flows through the nervous system of an organization. In this talk, Haresh Bajaj, VP Product Growth, Pleo talks about how his teams are combining a bottom up, product-led approach with a top down sales on acquiring, retaining and growing users and customers.

You have a Product Vision tied to what you want to achieve as a company with a Product Roadmap as your strategy to get there. You’ve done it all right: it’s aligned with company goals, based on a deep discovery from customers, and ruthlessly prioritized. You’re still getting sidetracked, and progress is slow! Join Tobias Gunnesson, Chief Product Officer of Avinode Group, as he walks through the Top 5 reasons you fail to execute your Product Roadmap…and some tricks to get back on track.

Interactive session with Peter Sunna on all product-related things when you're running a PLG strategy.

Are boots on the ground the only way to do it? We've all heard it before, the US is a Pay-to-Play market! You have to commit, invest, and be willing to adjust to succeed. In this session by Emil Dyrvig, CRO, Templafy, we'll learn about alternative ways to get your US sales going, with some tactics that might surprise you and contradict what you may have been told to be true in the past. 

Global SaaS valuations have been on a rollercoaster for the last two years - but how can we read through the data to understand what the valuation implications are for our businesses? Bob Thomas, Partner, Oxx will walk through the data available on SaaS valuations, giving context on the connection from US public markets data to European and even Nordic private markets. We will discuss any questions that people have on the data, or on what it might mean for the financing of their scale-up SaaS businesses. This session would be most helpful for B2B SaaS leaders interested in the capital markets environment.

The SaaSiest Comedy Show in the world is back! The one and only Tom Boston, Brand Awareness Manager, Salesloft is back and has something special for us! Bring pen and paper for this one, you'll need it 🤣

Alexis Petrichos will be sharing more about how Chili Piper has demystified the term "partnerships" and how they're leveraging the broader tech ecosystem to generate more booked meetings, better close rates, and improve customer satisfaction, leading to faster and more efficient growth.

These days there is a solution for everything but often they are outdated and frustrating. How do you build a stand-out product in a highly competitive and saturated market? New advances in technology open new possibilities and can be a key driver for innovation. In this session, Dennis Keyser, CEO of Forecast will talk about the journey of building a product that stands above the rest by taking a new approach to an existing problem, ignoring what's been done before, and truly understanding what your customers want

How do you build a meaningful and strong relationship with your customers and prospects? One that goes beyond the customer-vendor relationship!
It all comes down to your ability to give! What you give, how you give, and when you give! In this session, Will Ballance, CEO & Co-Founder, Lavender.ai will share his playbook on how they managed to become one of the most beloved brands in the sales community, with raving fans without breaking the bank. 

Having the right people, with the right capabilities, at the right time is a key growth enabler in all SaaS businesses. And beyond that, creating an environment where these talents are able to realize their full potential. After this session with Ellen Marie Nyhus, CEO at Verdane Elevate, you will be able to implement small but impactful actions to ensure you are optimizing the impact of your organization’s key asset: its people.

If you are into poker this is the perfect way to end SaaSiest 2023. This is Exclusively for SaaSiest 2023 ticket holders. It will be a 3-hour tournament. 100 SEK buy-in and unlimited rebuys in the first hour. Who will be crowned the SaaSiest Poker Open Champion 2023? Sign up here