Business of Software Conference USA 2015 Workshops

Imagine this. You spend two and a half days listening to inspiring speakers, meeting world class future partners, contacts, or friends, and then you return to the office on Monday to a mountain of emails and ten thousand questions. Soon after the invigoration and fountain of ideas you were going to implement fall to the back burner cause, hey, everything else is more important right now, right?

Business of Software Conference USA promises to give you the chance to work on, not in your business for three days. To deliver on this, we’re announcing our practical workshops to be held over two sessions at BoS Conference. Interactive, engaging sessions. Leave BoS Conference with not only ideas, but the plans to compliment them.

MONDAY AFTERNOON – Registration Not Required

Wistia Workshop: 3 Videos every business should make and how to get started Trevor Holmes, Chris Lavigne & Dan Mills

As the world becomes ever more social and mobile orientated, video is becoming a more powerful part in marketer’s tool kits. Ignore it at your peril.

But video marketing is tough. It’s costly, time consuming, and a specialist endeavour, right?

As is often the case, it’s the first steps which are the hardest. In this interactive workshop, the Wistia team will run you through the three videos every business needs, and how to go about creating high quality video which will set you apart from the crowd.

Software Pricing Surgery Jim Geisman & Chris Mele

Jim and Chris, owners of Software Pricing Partners (SPP), are putting on their surgical gloves to dive deep into YOUR software pricing approach.

SPP will be sharing key lessons learned and insights from over 400 software monetization engagements with software giants like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Gartner, Cisco and Oracle, as well as many of the fastest growing software companies in the world.

Do you have the GUTS to let these gurus dissect your pricing approach and stitch your monetization strategy back together in front of the entire BoS audience?

Missing the Blindingly Obvious – Your Website Through Cold & Cynical Eyes Dave Collins

The experience you have with your website is far enough removed from that of a regular visitor as to render it meaningless. What do other people see when they arrive at your homepage? Having a second set of eyes is useful. Having someone look over your website with years of experience is invaluable. Having a slightly mean and sarcastic Brit doing so is priceless. Having all of these criteria combined with the feedback of peers is indescribable. Not for the feint-hearted, this workshop will tear apart any voluntarily submitted website to invaluable and actionable shreds. Guaranteed to be slightly embarrassing but incredibly useful.

Burnout, Depression, and Software. Greg Bauges

Designing for Future Complexity Brad Holtz & Michael Riddle

We are increasing the rate at which we are making demands of our software. The interaction between software systems is similarly growing at a difficult pace. We’ve been able to keep up so far, but we can’t keep going in this direction without similarly increasing the programming burden and decreasing programmer productivity. Internet of Things is exacerbating the problem. In this workshop, we’ll begin by presenting some new (and old) thinking to approach these complexity issues, and then rethink the specifics of the challenges of workshop participants  in this context, and offer paths to bypass some of those challenges.

The Art of Selling Software | Hacks to Help You Hustle in Your Business: The Workshop Steli Efti

If ‘hustle’ and ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ are synonymous to you, you might think this talk won’t be that relevant. You’d be wrong.

It’s fashionable to think that sales are the result of Inbound marketing in some circles – perhaps every sale you make comes to you magically through the Internet with no human touch. Does that mean you can’t do better? Steli has accelerated sales in some of the fastest growing Silicon Valley startups as well as growing his own SaaS business, Close.io. He will offer some proven techniques to grow your sales revenue and improve your sales processes. You can apply many of the same ideas to get things done in your own organization, regardless of your role. As Dan Pink said, ‘To Sell Is Human‘.

SaaS Metrics Masterclass: techniques for using your data to drive growth Nick Franklin

Discover new ways of using the data you’re already collecting to help drive predictable recurring revenue growth.

This workshop is for anyone working in SaaS close to the revenue generation (and retention) side of the business, e.g. founders, CEOs, CROs, CFOs, CMOs, VP sales, Customer Success, etc.

Some of the topics we’ll cover:

• How to track which channels (paid and unpaid) produce the greatest MRR and customer lifetime value.
• Using cohort based analysis at every stage of the funnel.
• How to determine the maximum you should be prepared to pay to acquire a lead.
• The difference between being hypotheses driven and data driven.
• This is not a workshop on the basics of measuring churn rate, etc,. some prior domain knowledge is assumed.

Please be ready to join in and share what’s worked (and what hasn’t) for your business.

Product Management Masterclass Rich Mironov

Rich has three big things he cares a lot about:

• Organizing the product organization.
• Being agile.
• Scaling up.

He wrote The Art of Product Management and is a voice for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us. In this workshop, he will be chanelling the best of his ideas on Product Management. Offering insight and help with your product management strategy.