The Missing Stage at SaaStr Annual - We Need a Different Kind of Conference

I’m a huge fan of SaaStr. I’ve learned a lot from Jason and so many others who follow him. I love the podcast with Harry Stebbings and I even go to the CoSelling Space a few times a week now. This column is just honest feedback from the bottom of my heart.

I went to SaaStr Annual this year. It was super fun, and I made a lot of good connections. However, many attendees had the same complaint “Everything I heard at SaaStr Annual, I had already read online.” If you follow Jason Lemkin, you knew 95% of the take-aways.

The problem was that these attendees were not looking for Strategic, Tactical, or Hyper-tactical advice (the name stages), they were looking for Practical advice. Let me elaborate using soccer as an analogy.

Strategy

Strategy is what the coach or the institution define as their style. If you know Barcelona, they play the Tiqui-Taca. Their strategy is based on maintaining possession and moving the ball around until they find an opportunity to get a through pass behind the opposing defense and score. Strategy is very high level. It’s not something that changes game to game, or season to season, it’s something that stays consistent for many years.

Tactical

Tactics are all about how you execute your strategy but they are still high level. Barcelona plays a 4-3-3 lineup, has a pivot player who is great at handling the ball, has very fast players up front and makes sure their players keep possession of the ball. Tactical advice is all about how you organize your team to execute on your strategy. This might vary game-to-game, as your opponents change. Your tactics playing against a team that stays back in their field is different compared to playing a team that applies pressure to your defense. The strategy is consistent, the tactics change.

Practical

Practical advice, is about how you execute every pass, and how you handle the ball. This is what players do on the field. The coach tells them what tactics to run according to his understanding of the strategy and the players execute the game plan by the minute. The “doing” is what matters here. That’s practical advice; your day to day plays in business.

Strategy and Tactics don’t change as often, and therefore you can write a blog post online that will be “forever helpful”. However the practical advice changes month to month and year to year. It’s completely different decade to decade. Let’s be honest, even f***ing LinkedIn just screwed all of us a few weeks ago with their changes. So, can someone write some practical advice on how to find leads in the most efficient way now?

That’s what these conferences are for, practicality. What’s changed since last year?

We have read and heard about the need to make more outbound calls, hire A players, have the founder sell the first $1M, or hire sales reps in sets of two or more. However, we very few times hear:

• How to develop your first cold calling script
• How to research a prospect before a demo, what to look for and where
• What data, beyond the basics, to track in your CRM and why
• What tasks to assign your sales hires during their first week of work
• Etc.

I know the answers to these questions. However, many people don’t.

SaaStr Annual was great, no doubt. But hearing “How we went from $0 to $100M” or “Lessons learned from my second SaaS Unicorn” didn’t teach me anything new. Even the panels in the Hyper-tactical stage were more strategic than practical. Hopefully next year, we can have more practical advice. I mean, I’d be happy to teach others about my experience, things like:

• How I am assigning leads to my reps in 2017, and why it’s so different from 2005 (hint: don’t do territories).
• How to build your first sales scripts
• What you specifically you need to measure when you make cold calls
• How to lower CAC by 40% and increase employee retention

I would also hope to hear more about how to:

• Execute ABM at scale; who in my team should do what and why.
• Navigate very complex technical sales when you are SE constrained
• How to get my sales reps to update SFDC daily rather than weekly/monthly

Wouldn’t that be more helpful? Let me know in the comments.

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