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This week on How To Win: Muhammad Younas, CEO of vFairs, an all-in-one events platform that allows users to conduct virtual, in-person, and hybrid events. Founded in 2016, vFairs experienced accelerated growth during the pandemic and ballooned to over 250 employees with offices located around the world. In this episode, Muhammad breaks down some of the strategies that have helped vFairs win. We discuss hiring for hyper-growth, the power of word of mouth, and why delivering high-quality customer support is essential. I weigh in on hiring for talent and training for skill, why providing an exceptional customer experience is good for business, and the importance of conducting regular customer interviews.
Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
Muhammad Younas:
Okay, what are some of those other long tail use cases where we can really serve our customers really well? And you cannot go that deep unless you have spent years with your existing customers.
Peep Laja:
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff, I don't do filler, I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win?
This week, Muhammad Younas, CEO of vFairs, an all-in-one events platform. Founded in 2016, vFairs experienced accelerated growth during the pandemic and ballooned to over 250 employees with offices located around the world.
In this episode, Muhammad breaks down some of the strategies that have helped vFairs win. We discuss hiring for hypergrowth, the power of word of mouth, and why delivering high-quality customer support is essential. Let's get into it.
Muhammad, your company is in the virtual event space that saw a meteoric rise during the pandemic. How are virtual events now?
Muhammad Younas:
The virtual events were growing even before pandemic. Again, contrary to the belief that's out there is that it might be something that only became popular during the pandemic.
Again, we started back in 2016. From 2016 all the way till end of 2019, early 2020, we were already growing 50% to 100% year on year, and we were already profitable from year one. Now during the pandemic, anyone within our industry would've seen great growth and so did we. We are one of the largest players in the industry.
From the peak, as expected, things have come down, but we can already see that 2023 is a far better year versus last year. I expect virtual events to continue to grow from the base that we have settled in 2022.
Peep Laja:
You grew your company fully bootstrapped, did not raise any money. Where some of the players in the market, like Hopin, raised huge amounts of money. How do you think that determines how these companies are doing today?
Muhammad Younas:
We didn't raise any money just because we didn't need any money. We got, I think, a knock on our doors pretty much from every single VC that exists out there. And again, our just conversation with them was that, see, we know that we are going through this hyper-growth. We already have tons of money. We don't know how to even invest that money.
And again, one thing that I didn't wanted to do was to again, set false expectations with them of what will happen after the pandemic. We told them what, "You know what? Let the pandemic be over. Let us find out, okay, what's the impact that it's going have on our business? And then from there, it's going to be very easy for us to predict the next six to 12 months," which typically any VC really cares about. And we would be okay to have a conversation at that time.
For us, just because we didn't raise any VC money, we were in full control of our destiny and our future. And that's why vFairs is one of the I think only players in the industry who didn't let go of anyone. We were very reasonable of how we were spending money.
I think anyone else who would've raised money, like Hopin, and they are many others. I think they would have a lot more pressure on them to keep on showing that exponential growth. That is just almost impossible to achieve. And hence as a result of that, I just believe that they will have to make a lot more tough decisions than what we have to.
Peep Laja:
You did not lay anybody off. Is that because you hired conservatively during the mega years?
Muhammad Younas:
We hired pretty aggressively when it comes to providing the most amazing customer support to the people who already have signed up. But we didn't hire aggressively by hiring 50 SDRs overnight or 50 As overnight just because we were of the opinion that this hypergrowth will continue to exist exactly the same pace the way it would be.
We went from almost 25 people to 250 people in a period of six months. You can imagine that we did hire a lot and we did hire aggressively. But we're still at around 250 people. We just picked the people in the right departments where we knew that, okay, even when things will settle down, even if things will come back by 25, 30%, we would still need these people. We would still need the skill set. We hired aggressively, but just I think in the right departments.
Peep Laja:
When you enter a hypergrowth period, it's easy to fall back on the adage hire for talent, train for skill. This allows you to hire many more people faster, provided that you have a strong internal training program in place.
What I've learned from hiring for talent and training for skill is that it takes a long time to train someone for skill. It could take years, which is a really long time. Nowadays, I hire the most senior, most skilled person I can afford. This will save you time in the long run, even if it's hard to find skilled people quickly during periods of hypergrowth.
Starting from your inception of the business until 2020 spring, how were you acquiring customers? What worked before the pandemic?
Muhammad Younas:
I'll tell you, up until now, which is again, the start of 2023, all of our business is generated through inbound word of mouth and referrals. We literally hired our outbound team late 2022, early 2023. That's where we are. Again, we have always been of the opinion that the events industry in general, as much as it's a tech industry. It's a software as a service, and in the industry.
It's also a hospitality industry, which means that we have to serve this customer to the best of our ability. We have to make sure that the reason that they're subscribing to our service, which is to run that big event or those series of big events, they get the best ROI out of that.
And pretty much like what happens in any hospital industry as a result of that, the word of mouth, the referral, the recommendation that we are going to get from that customer will help us fuel the growth for our future sales. Again, from the very first customer to over 2,000 plus customers that we serve, they all somehow have come from a referral of an existing customer or a word of mouth from existing customer. Or they were participant of one of our events that we were serving. That's how we have been growing up until now.
Peep Laja:
You have enterprise focus. You're one of those companies that has a request demo on the website? No self-serve. Were you enterprise focused from the start?
Muhammad Younas:
We were enterprise focused from the start. And again, our thesis on day one was that we participated in a lot of physical events. I participated in a lot of physical events just purely as a student. When I was graduating from my master's degree, I used to participate in job fairs.
And I just used to look at that job fair and I always wanted to see how can I make this event provide the same kind of benefits that one expect to see in a physical event, but in a virtual format? Which is a lot more scalable. You don't have to be there in person if you cannot be.
I see tons of benefits of in-person events and we serve in-person events as well. But the idea was that people who cannot be there, whether it's from an exhibitor perspective or attendee perspective, how can I better serve them?
In that regard, we wanted to solve that particular problem with scale with being a lot more cost-effective. And that's what we focused on. And in most of these in-person events, the people who typically run those events are big enterprises, or even the people who participate on those in-person events usually are the big enterprises. Again, naturally the focus went into that enterprise sector, that mid-market sector from day one.
Peep Laja:
Usually when a company is enterprise- focused, you're thinking long sales cycles, a lot of ABM, definitely outbound heavy. And you guys are inbound heavy, so I'm guessing you still have inbound SDRs, qualifying leads.
Muhammad Younas:
We have the inbound SDRs. Again, those inquiries that comes on an everyday basis, they're picked up by an inbound SDR. They vet that customer that they're looking for an event that fits the kind product that we offer. And then from there, they book a meeting for an A.
That's typically, our sales cycle. I just also want to quickly comment on that. See, the sales cycle is, of course, it involves human, it involves people. But once a customer do purchase the product from us, the product itself is fully self-serviced. Again, when a customer go ahead and log into our product, they can use that product to pretty much run an event from A to Z all by themselves.
We do provide them with both a project manager and a customer support person just because again, we have this internal philosophy that we don't want to just give the technology and walk away. We want to make sure that we do share the best practices with the customer of how to run a successful event.
It's like you're getting married. You can run your entire wedding event all by yourself, but you want to brainstorm with other people who have already got married or who already have rented a venue. You want to brainstorm with someone of, okay, where to go for the right thing.
And we do provide that support free of charge. We are one of the only key players in the industry who never ever charge on our customer support. It comes free of charge for as many hours as you would want to use that service for. Because again, for us, it's a cycle. Help customer run a very successful event so that they and their attendees phase about the event and the provider. And that help us our future growth for the business.
Peep Laja:
A lot of SaaS companies underestimate the role of support in retention and adoption. When someone creates an account, this is a chance for you to get a customer for a long time. Now, when that person runs into any issues, they hit up support. But in most cases, instead of instantly solving that issue, they get back to that user 24, 48 hours later, or maybe link to an FAQ page.
Too many support organizations also send you a boilerplate or even dismissive support message that assumes you're an idiot only to further confirm that this app is really not worth your time. I've canceled so many SaaS subscriptions because of slow and dismissive support. Why companies don't do realtime live chat support is beyond me.
Don't tell me it costs too much. I offer live chat on two of my companies, have been doing it for years. It's not that hard if you want to make it happen. Muhammad and vFairs go beyond live chat. They spend time with their customers, making them feel valued. Here's ISG's, John Boccuzzi with more on the benefits of creating a quality customer experience.
John Boccuzzi:
Delivering customer experience isn't just good for the customer, it's actually good business. And Forrester Research did a study over a five-year period. And in 2016 they published this paper. And what they found was companies that truly focused on exceptional experiences for customers outperformed the leaders, outperformed the laggers in customer experience significantly in revenue.-
It's not just good for customers, it's just good business to have excellent customer service. As we look forward, technology, marketing techniques and sales channels will continue to evolve and continue to push these businesses.
Peep Laja:
Companies that rely on referrals, word of mouth for their pipeline usually have a particular problem. And the problem is typically that, if you want to have 30% more demos next week or 100%, you have no lever to pull. You can't say make more dials or send more emails, whatever. What are you guys doing to get more demos next week, next month, next quarter?
Muhammad Younas:
First of all, we never had to face that issue just because again, we are here for the long term. There's no one telling me that, "Oh, by the way, you have to somehow get this crazy growth in the next 1, 2, 3 months."
For us, we just want to serve our customers. We want to serve our customers to the best of our ability and we can take time. We are not one of those companies where we have to, I don't know, do an IPO tomorrow or get acquired tomorrow or have a VC fund tomorrow.
We have been running this business in a pretty reasonable way for the last seven years, and that will continue to remain our focus. Now, having said that, we do believe that we can serve a lot more customers. And we would love to serve a lot more customers given that the industry has gone through a rapid pace. We want to make sure that we are the leader in the G2 category and we want to scale the leader in the G2 category.
And that's why now we have built the outbound team. We're building the outbound team. We're building based on a lot of success that we have had in the past. But again, I just want you to know that we don't go through the same pressure that a typical B2B VC funded SaaS company has to do right now.
Peep Laja:
What is working in your marketing to help with the word of mouth? Are you incentivizing word of mouth? What's going on there?
Muhammad Younas:
We do have incentive schemes both internally and externally, where again, that word of mouth, it happens organically. And honestly speaking, that's still the biggest contributing factor.
But are there other incentives internally and externally that help that person go to the next step of actually go ahead going and recommending that? We do have, whether it's with our customers where they get a certain amount of discount for their next event if they have recommended us to someone. We do have that kind of a referral scheme.
And then similarly, internally, people who are working with these customers to follow with them and ask them again to go ahead and recommend internally within their company or through their friend circle, there's something in it for them as well. That does work.
But again, by and large, I would say good 80% of all of that happens organically without anyone seeing any benefit in it. They just feel that, okay, someone has served me really well. And you know what? Let me share that happiness with a lot of other people who might be able to benefit from the service. Right?
Peep Laja:
Word of mouth has the highest conversion rate. How do you generate it? For Muhammad, it's about delivering the best customer service experience, then encouraging and incentivizing customers to refer others. There are, of course, many other ways to create word of mouth traffic.
Your network and relationships is an underappreciated acquisition channel. Your network powers so much of word of mouth, especially in the early days. The leads are high trust, high conversion rate, so cultivate your network.
The more people know you and know what you do, the more word of mouth you get. Put yourself out there. This is a key reason why I'm very active on social media. But you also want to take the relationships offline. I have a goal to meet two new people every single week, usually for lunch. Over many years, it adds up.
Here's Devin Bramhall talking about the impact of word of mouth at Animalz, a content marketing agency on a previous episode of How to Win.
Devin Bramhall:
Having strong word of mouth really helps because this is one of those businesses where, if someone needs a content marketing agency, they're not going to Google it. They're going to ask a friend who they really trust. Or even if they do Google it, they're like, "How do I choose all these websites look the same?"
They need a recommendation, really strong recommendation. If you think about it, B2B SaaS is still somewhat of a small, very tight... Or it feels like a very small industry. It's a small area to float around in, so it elevates it automatically.
Muhammad Younas:
The second thing is we always go deep in our product offering. Again, a lot of other players in the industry, they have a product. It is meant for let's say a virtual conference, but then there are 20 other use cases that try to use that product by again, just configuring it.
In our case, we have a very deep product offering for different industries and for different use cases. For example, when our customers use us for a virtual product show, we have a fully self-service e-commerce bundle in there where people can upload products, people can come and can view those products, people can purchase those products. There's a shopping cart and so forth.
For anyone else, it's Zoom or Zoom++ or again, a meeting tool. And then you have to make a lot of that purchase outside the system from the customer's website. Similarly, if it's a job fair, a virtual job fair, we have a job board. People can have their resume in there, people can apply for jobs. Others can view those resumes, they can shortlist them, they can hire them.
We go deep with our product offering whereby for 20 plus different use cases for which people would need a virtual product or a virtual event solution for, we have that depth of knowledge that others don't.
Peep Laja:
Tell me About your product strategy. How did you land on this particular strategy that you have and how is it different from, well, competitive players?
Muhammad Younas:
Again, it all started by just closely participating in a lot of those physical events. Again, by and large, the virtual event industry believe that, okay, physical events are happening. Let me replicate that in a virtual event.
Let's only focus on the communication part. Which is a core, and again, we do that as well, but the idea is that, okay, in that physical event, what is that end problem that they're trying to solve? In a job fair, a recruiter or a company is trying to interview someone. And then get the job applications in the form of resumes. And then actually try to hire that person. We conduct in-depth interviews on that end goal for which people are going into that particular physical event.
Similarly, for a trade show, okay, if there's a buyer and seller, they're meeting with each other. Okay, what are you doing when you meet with each other? How do you place orders? What happens after an order is placed? For us, it was those in-depth interviews that we have done across each and every industry. And again, that's how we even got our first set of customers.
Again, when we were participating in that, when we were saying, "Okay, you're doing this physical event, you're participating in one. You're able to meet 50, 100, 200 people over here. What if we give you the same benefit that you're getting in physical fair or physical event, however, help you do it at a scale? 200 people, 2,000 people, 20,000 people."
People who were willing to try it out, we built the MVP. We let them try it out. They saw the benefit and again, signed up for a paid version then. But again, it all started by just closely monitoring and interviewing again, five to 10 customers in each and every industry.
Peep Laja:
To find out their pain points, you need to talk to your customers. One-on-one meetings are always going to be the crème de la crème. The cost is too high for most things to be justified. Interviews are high quality, but expensive, inconvenient and slow.
That being said, Muhammad set up a mote via his mission to provide a deep product offering with high-quality bespoke service. His company is also enterprise-focused, high ACV. Therefore, it makes sense for him to incorporate longer and more in-depth buyer interviews into his process.
Not everyone can do this, but when you do have this valuable time with customers, you don't want to waste it. Here's author Justin Wilcox with some advice.
Justin Wilcox:
The script that I use looks a little something like this. Number one, tell me a story about the last time problem context. For example, tell me about the last time you were late to an appointment. Now, the reason why we ask this question first is because it's very open-ended, if asking for a story. And it's asking our customer to sort of go on whatever tangents they want.
And what we're looking for here are things that are particularly difficult or annoying for our customer. Your job is to ask this question, listen intently, and then dig in. When you find your customer, talk about something that's interesting to you that you don't know about or you don't fully understand. Dig in, ask questions. Why was that hard? What was annoying about that? Why is that that way? This is where you're going to spend most of your time.
We're going to ask how do you solve this problem now? I might ask, how do you solve this lateness problem now? They might say, "Oh, I just am not late at all. I just don't care. I don't do anything." In that case, we know this isn't a real pain for our customer because they're not trying to solve the problem.
If they are trying to solve the problem, "I set my clocks forward fast and I try and get reminders from Google. And blah, blah, blah." Then we can ask the next question, which is, why is that solution not awesome? If they say, "Oh, you know what? I know the clocks are set fast and I just ignore the reminders." We've got a problem they're trying to solve, so it's a real problem and their solution is not awesome, so maybe we can solve it in a better way.
Peep Laja:
When you look in the virtual event space, there's a lot of players that are very similar to each other. You do a webinar. I do a webinar. You can hold a virtual conference, a networking table. Everybody seems to have almost every feature. What can you differentiate on and what do you differentiate on?
Muhammad Younas:
I totally agree with you. I think from an external customer perspective, if they're all going to check the website with time, they all would look the same because everyone will just have the checkbox or I can do that. I can do that. The challenge that any prospective customer would have is that, okay, are they willing to go ahead and have deep demos with vendors? And again, ask them for that specific end problem that they're trying to solve.
Again, I can bring a customer in a demo call. In 30 minutes, I can show them all the big features. But I think what we try to do with, again, the leads that we get or the customers that we speak to, is that, okay, you want a virtual conference, but tell me that end goal that you're trying to achieve.
And again, the reason that we're able to speak about that end goal, whether it is the trade show or the conference or the job fairs or the open days or any other type of event, we are able to show them that extra 30% depth of features because we have been doing this for the last seven years. Most of these other players, they're an aftermath of COVID or just launching right before COVID.
When we have been investing in this product for the last seven years, in most cases, we have that extra depth of features that others don't. We have that extra depth of integrations with the big players, whether it's Marketo or HubSpot or Salesforce that others don't.
And again, where we then significantly differentiate from anyone else is that, okay, here's a product that no one else have, at least certain features. And then here is the list of 2,000 plus customers that we have served. You pick up anyone from this list and we will set up a reference call between you and them.
They will tell you how we have served a similar use case with them and how they have been very successful with their event. And again, these people also then care about the social world that's out there. They will do their research on whether it's on Kept-It or on G2 or LinkedIn. They'll also call our customers. I think that's where we again, just stand out compared to a lot of other people out there.
Peep Laja:
You're a big believer in customer attention or acquisition. Can you elaborate on that?
Muhammad Younas:
The single biggest goal that we as a company of 250 plus people have is, okay, what's our NPS? It's not about, okay, what's the growth of the company? Or okay, how many new customers you're going to acquire. It is about what our existing customers are saying about us, whether it's about us as people. We have an NPS for every customer facing role, and then we have the NPS about the product. We have both NPSs that we closely monitor.
That's our OKR. Our OKR is to improve on the overall NPS of the company. That's what we track our success with. And we are of the opinion that if our existing customers are going to be happy with us, this company will continue to grow. And it has been growing for the last seven years.
For me, I'm a big believer on just if I have taken someone's money, I want to make sure that I serve them best. And that's where my focus would be. And everything else will come naturally as a result of that.
Peep Laja:
There's some leading marketing thinkers saying that a company cannot grow just by relying on retention. That acquisition drives more growth than retention. What are your thoughts about that?
Muhammad Younas:
If you have more than 100% of net revenue retention, there's no better way of growing than by just retaining the customers and expanding into those customers. Specifically, if you're dealing with enterprise market and with market. In a perfect world, you should be growing in both. That's how you'll get the ultimate growth.
But if I have to pick one 100%, it's the net revenue retention from the existing customers. It helps you, of course, grow your revenue. It helps with customer retention. It also with time help you learn those I think a little bit more about the industry and the company that you can then go back and use in your sales and marketing efforts.
The virtual conference industry is a really, really big one. We dominate that as well. But okay, what are some of those other long tail use cases where we can really serve our customers really well? If someone want to do a sales kickoff, I want to have a product that's specialized for a sales virtual kickoff meeting.
If someone wants to do a virtual benefits fair letting their employees and dependents meet with vendors like MetLife and Fidelity, I want to have a very deep product in there. And you cannot go that deep unless you have spent years with your existing customers.
Peep Laja:
How did Muhammad win with vFairs? One, he retained strategic control through bootstrapping.
Muhammad Younas:
Just because we didn't raise any VC money, we were in full control of our destiny and our future.
Peep Laja:
Two, he focused on superior customer experience that also feeds the referral engine.
Muhammad Younas:
We have this internal philosophy that we don't want to just give the technology and walk away. We want to make sure that we do share the best practices with the customer of how to run a successful event.
Peep Laja:
Three, he built the deep product, able to satisfy a large number of edge use cases.
Muhammad Younas:
We are able to show them that extra 30% depth of features because we have been doing this for the last seven years.
Peep Laja:
One last takeaway from Muhammad.
Muhammad Younas:
The single biggest goal that we as a company of 250 plus people have is, okay, what's our NPS? It's not about, okay, what's the growth of the company? Or, okay, how many new customers we are going to acquire. It is about what our existing customers are saying about us.
Peep Laja:
And that's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter.