With much eager anticipation and excitement, Day 1 of Subscription Show 2021 – live in New York City – is a wrap! We’ve looked forward to this day for an entire year, and we are thrilled to have dozens of amazing sponsors and vendors, including our co-host BillingPlatform, and hundreds of participants, both live and virtually. Thanks to everyone who has played a role in today’s success. Here are a few highlights from Day 1.

Welcome and kickoff with Kathy Greenler Sexton

Two years after the last in-person Subscription Show, Subscription Insider CEO Kathy Greenler Sexton kicked off Subscription Show 2021 with a warm welcome and a peek at the exciting things to come this week.

The event will feature more than 30 sessions on payments, pricing, retention, monetization, acquisition and more. She thanked co-host BillingPlatform and Gold sponsors (Gravy, Paul Larsen Consulting, Vindicia, FlexPay, WorldPay from FIS, Recurly, DigitalRoute), Silver sponsors (ACI Universal Payments, J. P. Morgan, Gotransverse, Verifi, Wiland, Payway, Bold, Aria Systems, Adyen, Chargebee and Checkout.com), Bronze sponsors (SFG, PowerSync, evergent, Zette), wireless sponsor Gravy, streaming sponsor evergent, and association partners MCMA and Renewd.net. Participants can also look forward to meetings with sponsors, networking opportunities, roundtable discussions and an exhibit hall.

The bottom line: we all serve some part of the subscription industry, and we are here to connect and learn from each other. With open, honest dialogue, we can take away best practices to apply to our own businesses.

“Your relationship with your subscriber and their experience with your brand are how we are going to retain our customers,” Greenler Sexton said.

Subscription Show keynotes and sessions

Keynote:  Ron Insana, CNBC, MSNBC, The Market Scoreboard Report and Author: “Subscription Megatrends: Understanding What’s About to Transform Your Business”

Ron Insana gave Subscription Show participants an overview of the economy as it tries to recover from the pandemic. He called it a “wildly uneven economic rebound” with demand outpacing supply in many industries due to supply chain issues, material shortages and labor shortages, driving up prices. People now want more control over their work lives – how and when they do it – and they are looking for more affordable areas of the country in which to live. Insana also discussed how the advancement of technology accelerated dramatically after the start of the pandemic, and it will continue to grow at breakneck speed. Companies that don’t keep up will be left behind.

Keynote: David Foster, CEO, Business Valuation Resources; John McGovern, CEO & Owner, Grimes, McGovern and Associates; and Errol Glasser, Partner, Triangle Capital LLC: “Is the Subscription Economy Transforming Value Creation?

In this session, David Foster moderated a panel with John McGovern and Errol Glasser to discuss how to drive value in subscription businesses. One of the key factors is the availability of data. Years ago, businesses could only guess at how many customers they had, why they chose their businesses over competitors, or why they left. Today, metrics provide so much critical information – CAC, LTV, churn – about the health of a subscription company. This information and the predictability of an organization’s recurring revenue stream drive value, making successful subscription companies attractive to the M&A market which is flush with capital to spend.

Keynote: Eva Rapp, Managing Director Pricing & Billing Transformation, Wholesale Payments, J.P. Morgan and Dennis Wall, CEO, BillingPlatform: “The Future of Billing and Payments: Delivering a Frictionless Subscriber Experience”

Kathy Greenler Sexton moderated a discussion with Eva Rapp of J. P. Morgan and BillingPlatform CEO Dennis Wall to talk about various aspects of the customer experience. Since COVID, expectations have changed in the B2B world and that includes the need to have a frictionless experience for customers. If customers aren’t getting flexibility, customization and innovation in a frictionless way from the companies they do business with, they will go elsewhere.

Subscription Show extras

• Mobile App
• Meeting Concierge
• Exhibit Hall
• Roundtable Discussions
• Networking Opportunities
• Ability to watch replays and on-demand for any sessions you missed

For more highlights, follow us on Twitter. We’ll be tweeting throughout the conference. If you’re posting too, please tag us @SubInsider and use our Subscription Show hashtags: #SubscriptionShow2021 #SubShow21 #SubShowNYC

Key takeaways

1. The relationship with subscribers and their experience with brands are how subscription companies are going to retain their customers.
2. The pandemic has forced companies to accelerate their technology very quickly. This pace will continue. Proceed without technology advances at your own peril.
3. The physical footprint of businesses is going to decrease over time, and the labor force is regaining some power and control since the pandemic has changed our work lives.
4. Subscription content businesses can work from anywhere, because they can engage with each other from anywhere. They have flexibility that some other industries don’t have.
5. We’re experiencing a wildly uneven economic rebound from the pandemic, unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
6. This is a great time to launch a subscription company with the availability of capital and low barriers to entry.
7. Big data is critical. It goes to predictability of cash flow. Having key KPIs (e.g., CAC, LTV and churn rate) will allow companies to predict value and get a better price in an acquisition.
8. To be a valuable, successful subscription company, be the need, not the nice-to-have.
9. The expectations of B2B customers are impacted by their personal B2C experiences. Example: Joe orders a pizza online and can follow the process from acceptance of the order to the delivery. The banking customer now wants that same level of transparency.
10. Some customers will walk away if they can’t get customized experiences that meet their needs. They may move to competitors.

For tomorrow’s agenda, visit SubscriptionShow.com/Agenda. Highlights include a keynote presentation from Isaac Sacolick, president and CIO of StarCIO, on accelerating transformation; a session on solving the hidden cause of customer churn; a session on ways to monetize your products at scale; best practices for managing lapsed subscribers; a VISA fireside chat, and more.

Tickets are still available – UPDATE

Tickets for this year’s Subscription Show are still available. Visit our Tickets page at SubscriptionShow.com to get your tickets now!