Announcing Demandfest – a SaaS marketing summit for practitioners, by practitioners
B2B Marketing for high-growth companies is hard: marketers are expected to find that magic bullet that drives sales velocity, with limited chips and a fail-fast but not-often, ethos. My bestie Jeff Nolan, Venture Capitalist-turned marketing operator and I have put our heads together over the years to cook the most complex, elaborate menus. And so we decided to apply the same rigor to this conundrum. The problem is that we’re both cheap bas%$#ds, always looking for a deal, so we knew that we wanted a return of 10x for what we would put in.
Here’s the hypothesis:
We sensed that if we could expand the pool of fiddlers and tinkerers and testers and hackers across marquee B2B SaaS startups and leverage the success of one, for the benefit of the collective, we would significantly improve marketing velocity. If we pulled this off, we’d end up de-risking the work of individual teams, and at the same time, significantly improving the odds of finding and employing methods and emerging tools that have legs. With the risk now spread out between high growth teams, yet equal gain for each from the wins, this could be a 10x idea.
And so we decided that a working session between our marketing and SDR professionals needs to happen – a forum where tactical teams could discuss clever, sneaky, cheap, high-velocity tactics and use of tools across content marketing, growth marketing, product marketing and outbound sales.
What started as a simple meet up between our marketing teams blew up into a few more companies coming together. And so we decided to give it a name.
Enter DemandFest 2017.
The rules:
- Less inspiration, big idea generation. More GSD type-stuff.
- Get into the tactics – this is for doers who are in the mud pit and go home winning or having lived to fight another day.
- A safe environment amongst peers. Be open about what happens in Vegas.
- No physical limits to great sharing. Continue scheming on Slack between events.
- Keep the intensity. Speed dating over breakout sessions. 5-hour time limit to the event.
- End with a social event. This is about feeling like you are always part of a much larger marketing network.
Is this a one-trick pony or will there be a repeat act? We don’t know. But we’re at capacity without even really advertising the event and we’re about to find out how good it was. All I know is that a bunch of super smart doers put the agenda together based on what they wanted to share and learn.
DemandFest 2017 will be co-hosted by Now Secure and Kahuna at the Kahuna offices in Redwood City, California on the 23th of February. No sponsor was harmed in the making of this event.
It’s going to be a hoot.
