Our SaaSiest takeaways from SaaSiest 2022
Last week, I had the opportunity to join SaaSiest in Malmö as part of the Layke Analytics team.
Two inspiring days full of summits, networking, and great food and drink. I listened to numerous leading voices from the SaaS industry talking about sales, marketing, branding, company culture, and much more.
Throughout the event, I noticed three main topics that speakers focused on, no matter the industry or the job title: company culture, branding, and onboarding.
Company culture
One panel that stuck out to me was called “How to build an HR function to scale globally with?”, where Nanette Brink, CEO at Sweden HR Group interviewed three Chief People Officers from Talentech Group, Funnel, and Puzzle.
A subject all panellists couldn’t stress enough was that company culture is essential for the success of any company, no matter the solution or services it provides.
Culture is not a task or a project with a deadline that you can just mark as “completed”. Moreover, culture is not HR’s responsibility. Every employee is a representative of the company culture, and it is a constant effort made by every single person in the company — starting with leadership.
Branding
Like culture, branding is just as essential for your company’s success. Ling Koay, VP of Branding at Oneflow defined branding with incredible clarity:
“A brand is not your logo, website, colours, fonts, or buzz. A brand is your company’s most important asset that you can control.
It’s your reputation. It’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room that influences their decision to choose you over your substitute.” (LinkedIn)
As Ling mentioned, branding is not only about your font, logo, colours, and other design elements. They play an important role in distinguishing your company visually from your competitors, but it doesn’t say much about you.
A strong brand helps customers understand what you do. It is the story that the customers will hear and tell.
Onboarding
I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a simple, clear, and well-organized onboarding process when introducing your customers to your service or product. My thought has been confirmed numerously by many speakers throughout those two days.
As much as I enjoyed plenty of the conferences, my favourite panel was, for sure, David Nelson’s “What B2B SaaS can learn from casual games”.
David explained in three simple steps exactly how you can improve the onboarding process, giving the example of the popular game Candy Crush. His three main tips were:
- simplicity: even if you think the onboarding process is simple now, there is a way to simplify it even more;
- feedback: show the customer what they are doing and how it is going through small and encouraging messages (referring to the Candy Crush combos)
- progress: Candy Crush has a man that shows the player how long they’ve been on the journey; find a way to guide the user through your product.
Conclusion
SaaSiest may be over for this year, but the insights I gained through these two days will always stick with me. Remember the three areas you should start working with and/or improving:
- company culture
- branding
- product onboarding
