Bowery’s Sales Summit Closing the Year Strong

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Bowery Capital wrapped up its fourth and final thought leadership Summit for the year, closing out a quarterly Series bringing together similar roles beyond the CEO to learn from some of the biggest leaders in SaaS. One hundred attendees came together with a goal of learning tactical lessons from some of the most experienced executives in the space. CROs, Heads of Sales, and CEOs from Slack, Stripe, Yext, Bitly, and more discussed themes around hiring, culture, sales velocity, and what it takes to successfully scale.

One of the best parts about being onsite running these events is the having access to elite thought leaders and a front row seat to insights and content. Here are my top five tips I learned from these Sales Execs (in no particular order):

1. Slack’s motto when building a “freemium” model: Build a product people love (make them want to buy the product).

2. Lesson Learned from CEO of Bitly on scaling: Everybody is in sales. Recruit your allies. Nobody wins unless everybody wins.

3. Everyone is always trying to master email marketing: SalesLoft discovered ending with a colon (:) is 35 percent better than ending with a comma (,)—I personally prefer a dash!

4. Hiring Strategy (and applicable across not just sales teams): Your starting pitching pitcher (i.e your first hire) won’t be your closer.

5. Even if prospects aren’t ready to speak now, keep ‘em warm with insightful content:  Give them a reason to come back.

Bowery Capital Summit: The Changing Role of the CFO

Bowery Capital’s Summit series, a structured quarterly forum built to generate opportunities and insights for thought leaders at early-stage companies, made its return this week in New York. This quarter we focused on finance leaders, where CFOs, Chief Accounting Officers, COOs, and even CEOs yet to hire a full-time finance leader, were invited for a day of networking and tactical dialogue. The goal of the day is to create engaging content for the audience, covering real-life topics seasoned finance leaders have experienced, such as creating an effective forecast, reporting measuring and metrics to management, and how the role of the CFO has evolved to include leveraging data, managing people, and building processes.

Highlights included Lorcan Malone, Boxever’s COO, taking us through his pitfalls and lessons learned around scaling companies in size and locations. FreeConferenceCall.com CFO Scott Southern took the stage to share insights on the freemium business model.

To close out, we invited attendees to participate in roundtable conversations, where they could share their lessons learned on the day, engage with speakers on any additional questions, or just connect with like-minded peers on some of the challenges and questions they face in their role.

Watch out for our final Summit of the series in December, where sales leaders will congregate in NYC. If you’re interested in speaking at or sponsoring any of the Bowery Capital Summits, please get in touch!

Interested in hearing more about the role of the modern CFO? check out this article from our friends at Toptal!

Investing in Human Capital at the Bowery Capital People and Talent Summit

People and Talent are hot topics for early stage companies growing quickly in this culture-focused workforce. How do you recruit the best talent? What tools can companies utilize to build diverse and powerful teams? How do you maintain culture and shape company values?

Leading up to the Bowery Capital People and Talent Summit, cred worked with speakers to create sessions built around answering these questions. Speakers and panelists included leaders from Rent The Runway, Button, WayUp, The Muse, Justworks, and others.

WeWork Bryant Park was packed on Thursday, June 7 as the morning started off with a tactical chat by Nikki Goldman of I/O Coaching and WayUp explaining how to build an effective Values Playbook for your company. Following her was a dynamic presentation by Jacqui Maguire of Greenhouse about structured hiring.

Kirsten Behncke Colyer of Justworks, Jordan Wan of CloserIQ, and John-Paul Sukkar of Rent The Runway rounded out a panel called The Company Glow-Up: Maintaining Culture as You Scale. They were followed by the panel: Tools of Engagement: Tools and Data in the People Space, featuring Ilya Usorov of day100, Jennifer Williams of Drive Change, Inc. and John Erban of Axiom. Panel discussions explored the data points that are worth focusing on and the resources that can be used to measure outcomes.

To finish off the summit, Stephanie Mardell of Button taught on how to put ideas into action to sustain diverse and inclusive company growth, then Toni Thompson from The Muse explained the importance of using storytelling to create an image of your company.

This was the second installment of Bowery Capital’s Quarterly Leadership Series this year. Join us in New York on October 11 for the Finance and Ops Summit! If you’re interested in updates on that event, or want to hear more about what we do at cred, email us: hello@credpr.com.

Bowery’s Marketing Summit Hits the Mark!

The Bowery Capital CXO Quarterly series made its way to San Francisco yesterday for its first Summit of the year with a focus on Marketing. cred worked with The Bowery Capital Team to coordinate a series of tactical chats and panels discussing Marketing for early stage SaaS Marketers. Eight speakers brought insight from their experiences in marketing roles at  Salesforce, Slack, Rubrik, SurveyMonkey, Oracle Data Cloud, and more.

The morning started with a captivating presentation by Bill Macaitis, former CMO of Slack, Zendesk, and Salesforce on “How to Grow Your Unicorn.” His talk was followed by Kara Wilson of Rubrik’s lively sermon about “How to Not F#@k it Up.” The audience was incredibly engaged as discussions around “What is Brand?” and “Scaling from 0 to 100M” brought panelists and the crowd into some spicy debating.  

Maria Pergolino, CMO of Anaplan ended the day with this message that was a crowd favorite:

“Marketing:
Everyone sees it.
Everyone knows how to do it.
It costs a lot.”

Click through the photos below to get a glimpse of the event! Keep your eye out for the next Bowery Capital Summit in June!