So I want to tell you guys something a bit soul-crushing. We had 20+ of our top sponsors at SaaStr Annual this year tell us they got “Too Many Leads” from the event. Too many!
What?
We’ve spent years trying to make SaaStr Annual, Europa and APAC great for all 3 legs of the tripod: attendees, speakers, and sponsors. You need all 3 to be an A/A+ to really scale, and it’s hard. Part of that is delivering 100s of qualified leads to sponsors. You gotta do it.
Through 2021, the #1 complaint we’d always get was “We Didn’t Get Enough Great Leads”. 200, 400, 600, 800, it was never enough. Everyone still complained. It is what it is. 🙂
Then about a year ago we started to hear, “We actually didn’t follow up on most of our leads”.
This year it came to a head. We’ve had several conversations with VPs of Marketing and Field and heard the same thing:
“We can’t get our sales team to follow up on the leads this year.” 🙁
One of our sponsors even got 150 qualified opt-in leads before Annual. Folks that said they wanted to meet them onsite. It doesn’t get much better than that, folks. But no one followed up with most of them.
From marketers ever complaining about not getting enough leads for years (even when it was 100s and 100s), to now having more than the sales team is willing to follow-up with. That’s a huge change.
We heard this from start-ups, scale-ups, and public Cloud leaders. From all 3 segments.
The world has changed. If we can’t get sales teams to follow-up on leads, it’s a new world.
Time to change the playbook again. It’s not just low-quality outbound cadences that don’t really work anymore. It’s all of the decaying 2019 playbook. It has to be rebooted. Now. You have to do more for your prospects and customers, not less. Hustle more, not less.
And in many cases today, we are doing less.
Maybe AI will be the answer, in part. I hope so!
The post “We Have Too Many Leads, And The Sales Team Doesn’t Want to Follow Up”: SaaStr 2024 appeared first on SaaStr.
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
