Ayan Barua’s advice for first-time exhibitors sounds like what you’d tell someone about to go scuba diving.
“Just go and enjoy,” he told Vendelux. “If you’re doing this for the first time, go in with a learning mindset.”
Like any good athlete, the Ampersand co-founder and CEO put in a fair share of practice hours before striking out on his own.
“We’ve gone to a lot of events, but this is the first time we sponsored a booth,” he said.
And it all paid off. Barua and his team are still sorting through leads from this month’s SaaStr Annual conference, where he says the company achieved a three-to-five-fold ROI. They went as a gold sponsor, enjoying the spoils of a dedicated space for the first time since their founding in 2022.
The San Francisco-based company has 10 employees, most of them engineers. While that helped them apply real-time feedback from customers in attendance, Barua was keen on leaving his computational brain at home for his first exhibition.
“If you over-index the number of leads and demo meetings, you get into this rabbit hole of over-engineering your first experience,” he said.
Some people respond warmly to that amateur diver energy, he said, which made his team more approachable than the experienced bigwigs with massive booths.
“A first-time booth has that ‘I don’t know what I don’t know’ energy, so that can create a good experience,” he said.
Ampersand’s chief product helps software companies connect to their clients’ existing CRM and marketing automation tools. It provides bidirectional syncing, meaning anything that’s done on one platform is mirrored on the other. For example, if an employee updates a profile on a lead scanner app, the same information will appear on Salesforce or Hubspot thanks to Ampersand. This allows for real-time information sharing, a must for companies that use different tools for marketing, sales, HR and other functions.
“There’s been, as you can probably understand, a lot of interesting work happening in the go-to-market stack,” Barua said. “As a company, you need to be really good with integrations in general. Ampersand is growing really fast because of the market demand for these deep, flexible integrations.”
Asked about a customer success story, Barua is quick to single out 11X, an AI-based firm that sells digital sales workers.
“They are driving all their CRM work to us, and that made them scale super fast,” he said. “They went from zero to 500 or 600 customers really fast because they connected with the CRMs really fast.”
For SaaStr, Ampersand worked with Kalos on a custom booth, as well as denim hats that were a massive hit on the trade show floor.
“You find these hats with such a big logo that you don’t like wearing them, but our Ampersand hats were very succinct and well done, so they just flew off the shelves,” Barua said.
Though he took a mostly free-spirited approach, Barua still kept an eye on his return-on-investment (ROI), especially as the cost of a single conference can easily reach the six-figure mark.
“The metrics we used were basically the number of companies that talked to us at the booth, if they said yes to a demo, and if we booked a meeting at the conference itself or if we followed up and booked a meeting later,” he said. “Events are generally a double-funnel exercise.
“Success criteria would be brand awareness, and how many people enter the pipeline,” he added.
Ampersand’s overall experience at SaaStr was “very good,” with little to no hiccups from beginning to end.
Next time, Barua might give himself a little more prep time before diving in head-first.
“[Building the booth] took more time than we anticipated, and there was a little bit of nervousness that we might not finish in time,” he says with a laugh that only a past trauma can draw up. “We thought it would be a 30-minute build, but it was half an afternoon and half the morning, so yeah, like seven or eight hours.
“But it did the job.”
