Editor’s note: This is a sponsored article, which means it’s independently written by our team but financially supported by another organisation, in this case, SaaStock. If you would like to learn more about sponsored posts, read this and contact us if you’re interested in partnering with us.
SaaStock, Europe’s biggest SaaS conference, returns to Dublin later this month. The three-day conference brings together some of the SaaS space’s most influential CEOs, founders, and investors from both sides of the Atlantic.
Tickets for the two-day conference are still available and tech.eu readers can get a discount on prices, so ahead of the main event, we’ve compiled five of the best speakers coming over from North America that will be speaking at this month’s SaaStock.
Bill Macaitis
Bill Macaitis is a veteran presence in SaaS and has worked with some of its biggest names. Currently he is a startup advisor but was the first chief marketing officer at Slack and had previously made his name holding senior marketing roles at Salesforce and Zendesk. In the case of the latter he led the firm’s marketing team through its IPO.
One of his key messages is not fearing your mistakes. As SVP of marketing for Salesforce, he headed up a team that harnessed the power of SEO very early on but he made his own fair share of mistakes along the way. On Tuesday of SaaStock, Macaitis’ keynote “Unicorn Growth Secrets. GTM strategies of Slack, Zendesk, & Salesforce” will delve into the growth tactics that worked at each of these giant companies and how they can be applied to your SaaS startup.
Macaitis will also be attending SaaStock’s day-long accelerator SaaS.City on Monday before the main conference. He’ll be at the Growth Marketing Bootcamp to answer attendees’ questions and will be taking part in the Point Nine Capital panel on the best tips for European firms on expanding into the US market.
Mark Organ
Mark Organ is the founder and CEO of Canadian marketing technology firm Influitive and an expert in advocacy marketing and go-to-market strategies.
Organ believes in the power of advocacy marketing – getting people to talk about your company and spread the word. He puts this into practice every day by making sure he makes his kids laugh every morning before they go to school so they leave with a positive interaction with their father. This sort of attitude can be applied to marketing as well, in building better relationships with employees and customers alike.
At SaaStock he’ll be discussing how to turn people into advocates for your business and how to build your SaaS company into a category leader with his talk entitled “How to Build a $B Category King and Not Get f*'d” on Tuesday.
Ryan Smith
Qualtrics cofounder and CEO Ryan Smith has been through the mill and seen it all. Qualtrics was founded in 2002 in a basement in Utah with a simple idea of creating a system for managing customer, product, brand, and employee experience data. Much has changed since those humble beginnings.
The firm closed a $180 million funding round earlier this year and is now valued at $2.5 billion, making it one of SaaS’ biggest success stories.
Smith will be kicking things off on the first day of SaaStock with his opening keynote “5 Tips to building a SaaS Unicorn” where he will lend his insights and the experience of his 15-year long journey from startup to billion-dollar company with everything that went right and wrong.
Promise Phelon
Promise Phelon is the CEO of TapInfluence, a platform specialising in social media influencer marketing, a relatively new field of marketing that’s continuing to rise.
Phelon became CEO of TapInfluence in 2015 at a critical time for the company. Social media influencer marketing was beginning to blossom and it was time for TapInfluence to scale and keep up. Since that time, it raised a $14 million Series B round and innovated in the world of influencer marketing, most recently launching a tool to help influencers to stay on top of their regulatory compliance.
On day two of the main conference, Phelon will deliver her talk “From Services to SaaS to Scale: The Essentials of Strategic Leadership” with vital lessons on scaling your company. She will also be participating in Monday’s SaaS.City accelerator at the CEO Bootcamp.
David Skok
David Skok is one of many investors that will be at SaaStock this year and is a crucial voice when it comes to SaaS investing. He is a general partner at Silicon Valley-based Matrix Partners, which has invested in Zendesk and was an early investor in HubSpot where Skok still sits on the board. Prior to his investing career, Skok founded three companies, which have gone to have successful exits.
Meanwhile his blog For Entrepreneurs has become a go-to resource for startups looking for practical insights and advice on SaaS, sales, and marketing.
Skok will be taking part in “Best Practices for Expanding to the US” at SaaS.City alongside Bill Macaitis and on Tuesday of the main conference he will be delivering a talk entitled “The SaaS Founders Journey: What matters at each stage” to help guide founders of young SaaS companies through the journey ahead.
Check out the full list of speakers.
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments