SLAM 2008 Agenda

7-8:15 Registration

8:15-8:30 Welcome – John Cargile, Conference Director, Software Business Media Group

8:30-9:10 -- The Changing Face of Technology Marketing, and How to Stay Ahead -- Dom Lindars, CEO, Marketbright

9:15-10 --Closing Time: The Science of Negotiating and Closing Software and SaaS Sales Opportunities -- Ron Hubsher, Managing Director, Sales Optimization Group

10-10:50 – Networking Break in Exhibit Hall -- (Product Demo: Salesforce.com Booth #205)

10:50-11:30 -- Developing and Executing Revenue-Focused Marketing Programs -- Ameeta Soni, VP, Marketing & Business Development, VFA, Inc.

11:40-12:15 -- Educating Your Evangelists – How Management Can Mentor Their Team to Meteoric Growth -- Karl Goldfield, Director of Sales, Demandforce

11:40-12:15 --If You Have Enough Channel Partners And They Are Selling Enough Of Your Products …Don’t Attend This Session! -- Robert M. Cohen, President and Business Editor, Integrated mar.com Corporation

12:15-1:15 – Lunch

1:30-2:10 -- Sales and Marketing Expense Benchmarks for SaaS Companies -- Lauren Kelley, CEO, OPEXEngine

2:20-3 -- Capturing Available Money and New Revenue In Any Market -- Rob Cecil, VP Business Development, PowerPay

2:20-3 –- Increasing Revenue and Brand Recognition with Proven Online Marketing Techniques -- Jamie Smith, CEO, Engine Ready

3-3:45 – Networking Break in Exhibit Hall-- (Product Demo: Worldview Booth #106)

3:45-4:20 -- B2B Social Networking: Important Lessons for Software Marketing and Product Development -- Clara Shih, Founder of FaceForce and Product Line Director of AppExchange at SalesForce.com

4:30-5:15 -- Relationship Marketing 2.0: The Demand Creation Model to Align Marketing Strategy with Sales Execution in the On Demand World -- Henry Bruce, President, The Rock Annand Group

4:30-5:15 -- Virtualization and Virtual Appliances: The Opportunity for Application Vendors -- Billy Marshall, Founder and CEO, rPath

5:15-6:30 – Evening Reception

April 4
8:00-8:35 -- Challenges and Opportunities for Software Companies: A Licensing and Protection Vision -- Thomas Lindeman, Group Product Manager Software Licensing & Protection Services, Microsoft

8:40-9:15 -- Software Marketing in Troubled Times -- Guy Smith, President, Silicon Strategies Marketing

9:20-10 -- Think Outside the Box: The End of Standalone SaaS -- Treb Ryan, CEO, OpSource

10-10:45 – Networking Break

10:45-11:20 --Revolutionizing Customer Service with On-Demand -- John Ball, VP, Salesforce.com

11:30-12:30 – Lunch

12:45-1:15 -- The Business Value of Integrating Software Rights Management Into the Product Lifecycle -- Chen Arbel, Vice President, Aladdin Knowledge Systems

1:15-2 -- Simplicity is Power -- Winning the User's Heart and Mind -- Anthony Deighton, Senior Vice President Global Marketing, Qliktech

1:30-2 -- Incorporating IOC (Impact on Climate) in to Your ROI Message -- Drew Wright, Co-founder, Technology Finance Partners

2:15 -2:45 --  SaaS and the Changing Economics of Software Relationships -- Keith Carlson, CEO, Innotas

Thursday, April 3
7-8:15 Registration Check In

8:15-8:30 Welcome – John Cargile, Conference Director, Software Business Media Group

8:30-9:10 -- The Changing Face of Technology Marketing, and How to Stay Ahead

How much visibility do you have into your marketing budget? How effective are you vs. the competition? Technology is moving at a faster pace than ever, and technology marketing organizations must adapt if they want to stay ahead of the competition. When investors, the board, and the executive team are looking for hockey-stick growth, how can marketing drive and enable sales like never before? What technologies and techniques are leading technology organizations adopting today to ensure that they become or remain the leaders in their industries, and can manage their growth successfully? How are they building awareness, generating demand, and tying in more closely to sales than ever before.

These are the questions that Dom Lindars' presentation will address. As a former marketing executive for Oracle, Lindars was a pioneer in online marketing and web site management for one of the most successful technology companies of our era. Now as CEO of Marketbright, Dom and his team are enabling technology companies like Varonis, eVault and Selectica, to achieve rapid growth with limited marketing budgets. Dom will discuss how companies can leverage new technologies and best practices to gain a greater ROI from their marketing initiatives, and drive the leads and campaigns that sales needs to keep your company on top.

-- Dom Lindars, CEO, Marketbright

9:15-10 -- Closing Time: The Science of Negotiating and Closing Software and SaaS Sales Opportunities

Negotiation is a vital and often misunderstood area of software and SaaS sales. Many times good sales efforts are crippled by poor negotiation strategy and tactics resulting in lost opportunities or lost margins. Corporate profits and sales rep compensation and moral are needlessly crushed and contentious client relationships can begin during this process. This session will help demystify the negotiation process and help you reduce or eliminate discounting entirely, improve your close rates, accelerate your sales velocity, create better agreements for both parties and command price premiums against competitors.

The speaker will walk you through the differences between closing small deals, large deals and Saas deals.

We will break down negotiation into a simple to execute process and science. You will learn how to:
• Negotiate and win opportunities in a non contentious manner
• Improve your close rates
• Reduce discounting and command price premiums
• Increase the number of opportunities sold without any discounting
• Recognize and increase negotiation leverage
• Close opportunities while being the highest price competitor
• Help prospects fully appreciate the value of your offering and premium price
• Execute a easy to use seven step negotiation strategy and tactical plan
• Dramatically increase sales, profits and market valuation

-- Ron Hubsher, Managing Director, Sales Optimization Group

10-10:50 – Networking Break in Exhibit Hall -- (Product Demo: Salesforce.com Booth #205)

A keen understanding of the market and customer pain points is key to developing revenue-focused marketing programs. Savvy marketers use this knowledge to effectively position their offerings, and to show how they can address the customer’s economic pain more effectively than the competition.

The promise of growth in the top line and/or reduction in costs serves as a powerful call to action. However, it is important to look for fresh ways to break through the “marketing noise”, which together with other marketing mechanisms result in a balanced marketing mix appropriate for the target market. In her talk, Ameeta will make extensive use of examples to illustrate how you can readily develop and execute marketing programs that generate revenue.

-- Ameeta Soni, VP, Marketing & Business Development, VFA, Inc.

11:40-12:15 -- Educating Your Evangelists – How Management Can Mentor Their Team to Meteoric Growth -- Karl Goldfield, Director of Sales, Demandforce

Join Karl Goldfield, Director of Sales with Demandforce as he shares strategies on building a sales organization. Demandforce is a fast growing SAAS startup in the emerging CDM market.

Karl plans to discuss the journey of selecting your team, training them on your products and process, and then pointing them in the right direction. From innovators to laggards he will share best practices that make for effective execution.

-- Karl Goldfield, Director of Sales, Demandforce

11:40-12:15 --If You Have Enough Channel Partners And They Are Selling Enough Of Your Products …Don’t Attend This Session!

Recruiting Channel Partners is easy. The hard part is getting them to sell your products. They’re techies who are more interested in providing solutions that work then in selling your products. They want to work with Vendors and Software Developers who have great products and who understand that partnerships are based on trust and working together for the good of both.

The session will discuss how you can move from Partner Recruitment to Engagement, Enablement, Collaboration and dramatically increased sales.
• Gaining the confidence and trust of Channel Partners.
• Comfort Marketing.
• Educating Channel Partners on what you do and why they should sell your products.
• Partner Enablement.
• Taking more control of your Channel sales.
• Implementing lead generation programs that work.

-- Robert M. Cohen, President and Business Editor, Integrated mar.com Corporation

1:30-2:10 -- Sales and Marketing Expense Benchmarks for SaaS Companies -- Lauren Kelley, CEO, OPEXEngine

What are the comparable benchmarks for sales and marketing in SaaS companies today? What are similar sized SaaS companies spending on sales as a percent of revenue, or on marketing as a percent of revenue? Sales typically is the largest expense bucket in a company past the start-up stage, so careful attention to sales benchmarks is critical to achieving growth and profitability. Marketing investment is also key to achieving market success as a SaaS vendor – how much is too much, and how much is too little? Looking at what comparable companies are doing can provide much needed context to determining the right targets for your company.

In this session, Lauren Kelley, CEO of OPEXEngine, Operating Benchmarks for the Technology Industries, will discuss current sales and marketing benchmarks for SaaS companies. She will review how those benchmarks are different from the sales and marketing expense structures that are common in more traditional, perpetual license software companies, and the metrics that companies are using as they transition into SaaS vendors. This session will look at benchmarks for total sales expense, and break-outs between fixed and variable compensation benchmarks, plus travel expense, in addition to percentages spent on marketing and the major buckets within the marketing function.

Lauren Kelley, CEO, OPEXEngine

2:20-3 -- Capturing Available Money and New Revenue In Any Market

-- Rob Cecil, VP Business Development, PowerPay

2:20-3 – Increasing Revenue and Brand Recognition with Proven Online Marketing Techniques

PPC Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Contextual Targeting, Social Media – How do you separate the true marketing opportunities from the hype?

Studies are showing that upwards of 80% of B2B marketers plan to increase their online marketing spend in 2008. As software companies increasingly recognize the importance of the web as a potentially robust promotional tool, they must: understand which types of marketing opportunities are right for their target market, and; find solutions to the challenge of how to allocate their marketing budgets most productively among the myriad of online options.

In this session, you’ll hear success stories based on proven online marketing techniques as well as specific tactics to help you maximize your return on online ad spend. Through extensive testing and analysis of paid search tactics, landing page variations and form modifications, you’ll hear how one software company accomplished sustained double digit increases in software revenues from its online presence. You’ll also see examples of landing page modifications that increased free trial sign-ups by over 150% and will leave with a list of proven online marketing techniques that can be implemented immediately to increase online revenue and brand recognition.

-- Jamie Smith, CEO, Engine Ready

3-3:45 – Networking Break in Exhibit Hall-- (Product Demo: Worldview Booth #106)

3:45-4:20 -- B2B Social Networking: Important Lessons for Software Marketing and Product Development

What does the rising prominence of online social networking mean for today's B2B software companies? How can software companies ensure their marketing and product development strategies fully consider these new technologies and user behavior? What lessons can learned from the successes of consumer networks such as Facebook and YouTube?

Join Clara Shih, Founder of Faceforce, the first enterprise mash-up on Facebook, and Product Line Director of AppExchange at Salesforce.com, to learn about the future of B2B social networking and strategies for building better customer relationships and communities using social data. You will hear about innovative ways software companies are transforming their customer, recruiting, reseller, and vendor relationships with online social networking technology.

-- Clara Shih, Founder of FaceForce and Product Line Director of AppExchange at SalesForce.com

4:30-5:15 --Relationship Marketing 2.0: The Demand Creation Model to Align Marketing Strategy with Sales Execution in the On Demand World

The struggle for SaaS software companies to profitably attract and retain customers has never been greater. Innovative SaaS/on-demand delivery models require far more effective sales and marketing strategies, practices and cost models to reach and develop relationships with buyers. SaaS software executives can no longer afford to prioritize lead quantity over lead quality to build stronger and better performing sales pipelines. Numerous research and case studies repeatedly show that the market leaders drive significantly more value from their marketing budgets and lower customer acquisition costs when their marketing organizations are qualifying, classifying and routing suspects to sales executives with the best potential to buy.

This session will present:
• The market trends and challenges SaaS marketers must overcome to effectively
improve their lead management practices.
• The methodologies, resources, lead management processes and automated
tools needed to evolve toward this new model.
• How to develop programs to nurture leads that are not yet “sales ready”.
• How to develop closed-loop demand generation processes that are multi-
channel, repeatable, measurable and executable for multiple target audiences.
• Case studies of SaaS software companies that are using the Relationship
Marketing model to dramatically increase qualified leads and conversion rates.

Henry Bruce, President, The Rock Annand Group

Virtualization is revolutionizing the IT landscape and changing the way companies and people compute. Analyst firm IDC predicts the number of virtual servers will grow by 41 percent between now and 2010.

How is virtualization creating new markets and growth opportunities for application vendors? As virtualization adoption reaches critical mass, virtual appliances will emerge as a new distribution format for applications that open up new markets by eliminating software complexity. A virtual appliance is a software application combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) for it to run optimally in any virtualized environment. 

This session will demonstrate the value of virtual appliances as an application distribution format.

-- Billy Marshall, Founder and CEO, rPath

5:15-6:30 – Evening Reception Combines With SaaS Economics Summit Attendees

Friday, April 4
8:00-8:35 -- Challenges and Opportunities for Software Companies: A Licensing and Protection Vision

For the software business, licensing and protection technologies for software products are vital - they protect sensitive IP, they enforce and enable the rules of business models, and they directly influence the customer experience. More and more, the software industry is reinventing itself to shift from simply offering one-size-fits-all products to offering tailored, on-demand products in concert with responsive software services. In the midst of these new and exciting opportunities however is the old and ever present threat of piracy, hacking and reverse engineering - draining our industry of over a third of our revenues worldwide. Microsoft is committed to addressing these issues - not just for itself (Microsoft loses more than a billion dollars a year to piracy) - but for the entire software ecosystem.

-- Thomas Lindeman, Group Product Manager Software Licensing & Protection Services, Microsoft

8:40-9:15 -- Software Marketing in Troubled Times

Two colliding trends in the software industry will create a financial train wreck in the next few years. With IT budgets shrinking and the complexity of market trends/demands for growing, many software firms will get crushed and vanish.
Smart software companies are refocusing their products, delivery, and messaging to their customer’s “business disciplines.” Identifying and matching customer business disciplines, and matching your value proposition to those disciplines will draw the narrowed attention of newly frugal IT buyers. Building a matrix around customer business disciplines and core product values leads to precise promotions that gain traction in each segment where you market your wares.

In this presentation, Guy Smith of Silicon Strategies Marketing will cover the economic pull-back in the industry, the growing demand for diversified software delivery models, and the core business disciplines that drive buyer motivations. 

-- Guy Smith, President, Silicon Strategies Marketing

9:20-10 -- Think Outside the Box: The End of Standalone SaaS

Until this point, SaaS applications have been created in separate silos. However, now there are platform choices that enable mash-ups and composite applications. Learn how Web services affect application development and integration. As SaaS applications become mission critical for the enterprise, these applications need to be integrated into wide variety of applications: other online solutions, behind-the-firewall legacy applications, etc.

Learn how to incorporate SaaS integration into your go-to-market strategy. Lack of integration with legacy data is the #1 sales objection for SaaS vendors. So, not only is this important for your end users, but it will also help you develop the next generation sales channel. By becoming part of the SaaS ecosystem, your application will be considered by systems integrators for inclusion in complex enterprise software architectures.

Today, only the largest SaaS companies have the ability to integrate their applications with legacy systems and other Web applications. This session will help SaaS companies of any size overcome the integration hurdles and break out of the SaaS-only box. Learn about the advantages of becoming a player in the larger SaaS ecosystem, integrating behind the firewall and opening new channel sales. This seminar will explain how Web Services platforms solve the integration problem, which has been a major impediment to SaaS adoption.

-- Treb Ryan, CEO, OpSource

10-10:45 – Networking Break in Exhibit Hall

Do you want to learn how to transform your customers into evangelists? Are your call centers productive and efficient? Do your call center operators have all the information they need when they need it? How do you get your self-service customers to keep coming back for more?

Join John Ball, VP Salesforce.com, to hear how you can transform your customer service with easy-to-use on-demand applications that not only enhance agent productivity, but also improve the end-customer experience and build loyalty through an integrated community model.

Learn from a successful customer, how to get up and running in weeks and dramatically improve agent productivity from the very beginning. Hear how you can transform your agents into brand champions with easy-to-use customer service applications that provide a true 360-degree view of the customer. See how Web 2.0 Customer Portals can drive greater customer loyalty through customer driven communities and unprecedented online access to information and resources.

-- John Ball, VP Service & Support Product Line, Salesforce.com

This session discusses how an advanced software DRM solution that aligns with a software product's lifecycle can influence a software publisher's organizational processes, drive future sales and reduce operational costs. Gone are the days when Software Digital Rights Management (DRM) was just about engineers integrating protection and license terms into a software product to prevent theft and revenue leaks. Software protection and licensing solutions have long since evolved from preventing software piracy and illegal use to business enabling solutions that provide a competitive edge, increase sales, and accelerate growth. While traditional solutions address publishers' needs, new challenges are now emerging.

When considering the ROI on any software DRM solution purchase cost plays a small part in the overall calculation. Software publishers have come to realize that software protection and licensing cannot be implemented in a void and that creating, releasing and licensing a protected software product is merely a single, small step in a much broader lifecycle. Traditional software DRM solutions enable increased revenue; however if they are not well designed or implemented improperly, they may yield time-consuming and ineffective processes, and cannot address critical business issues. This can negatively impact a company's margins. Such challenges are pushing software publishers to search for advanced software DRM solutions that not only increase sales, but also optimize productivity and drive profit to the bottom line.

-- Chen Arbel, Vice President, Aladdin Knowledge Systems

1:15-2 -- Simplicity is Power -- Winning the User's Heart and Mind -- Anthony Deighton, Senior Vice President Global Marketing, Qliktech

There is a widening gap today between what software users experience in their work environment and what is available on the Web.  As the line between work and home life blurs, people expect the applications they use at work to be as clear, simple and user-driven as the applications they use to run their personal lives.

Companies today are much smarter about purchasing software. They’re insisting on solutions that have a faster time-to-market, higher ROI and better end-user adoptability. Enterprise vendors must embrace the philosophy of simplicity in business software or risk being sidelined by innovative, emerging vendors in the near future.

1:30-2 -- Incorporating IOC (Impact on Climate) in to Your ROI Message

Return on Investment (ROI) messaging has become an integral part of most enterprise software selling strategies as it rationally states how a technology investment will pay for itself and often times includes the methodology for calculating such benefits. Many of these benefits go beyond just the “green” of money in the form of reduced power consumption, hardware consolidation or lifecycle extension, increased employee location flexibility, elimination of paperwork, reduced travel and more. Empowering customers to calculate the Impact on Climate (IOC) of their technology investments in reduced tons of carbon emissions per year is the next wave in demonstrating the total value of your offering.

This session will provide core IOC definitions and categories as well as examples of IOC calculations incorporated in to ROI driven business cases for recent and contemplated technology acquisitions.

-- Drew Wright, Co-founder, Technology Finance Partners

All of us agree that SaaS offers a more efficient alternative to traditional installed software and with this efficiency, a new economic model for software production and consumption has emerged. While many of these developments have already been demonstrated in the market, these differences are in their early stages, and the gap between installed and SaaS vendors will only grow wider.

Moreover, SaaSimpacts both the vendor and the customer by forcing a closer vendor/customer relationship, one that is far more closely measured by economic metrics linked to customer success and renewals. In a perpetual license model, vendors focus on the initial transaction sizes for growth and the ongoing maintenance fees for an ongoing annuity stream. This leads to a reversal of economic incentives between the two models.

In this presentation we will take a closer look at the changing economics of software relationships, and what SaaS companies must do to better market, sell, service, interact and renew with their customers.

-- Keith Carlson, CEO, Innotas