S3E25 - LIVE Bonfire Session - Unique Gifting and Personalization to Inspire Human Connections

Hey. Hey everybody. Thank you so much for coming and joining us for this Surface Sales bonfire session webinar about the emotions of gift giving. And we are excited to have everybody here. It's going to be a very intimate conversation today, so we encourage all engagement. That means by all means, put questions in the chat, hit us up. We'll let you come off mute, ask questions, get to know Chris. If you don't know Chris, he's got a fascinating background story which we'll get into as well.

And certainly want to give a thanks to our my. Well, first of all, my close friend and co host and good friend Scott Lease, who is presently traveling post surfing sales, which I fucking missed because of COVID So sorry. Not sorry, I'm cursing. But Scott, good to see you, my man.

Sorry, next time. We got a couple more coming up in November.

We do, we do want to thank our sponsors, obviously, which are our good friends at Sandosa. So Chris, thanks so much for coming on. We also have Scratch Pad as a sponsor, we have Vidyard as a sponsor and we also have. Who's the other one? Oh, Outreach IO. So thank you to all of our sponsors for making these things happen. That being said, first, let's go in and I'd love for folks to go into the chat and just tell us where you're dialing in from of let us know. More than happy to just give a little shout out to all those places. Also in the chat I'm putting, I'm putting the landing page, but if you haven't at the bottom of the landing page, right under the. Join us. There's a worksheet download of like, well, what am I going to learn from this? What am I going to take away? What am I going to do? And so we always want to encourage people to do that so it's digitized so you can put stuff in. So Chris, give people sort of the quick version of your background and how you even got to Sendoso because it was kind of crazy as I recall the story.

Just let them know, yeah, we'd love to give it. Especially for people that have a sales background. It's pretty inspirational in my opinion. So I spent the majority of my career, about 10 years in software sales working for a variety of different tech companies. About six years ago, I was working at a company called Talkdesk and it was there where I found myself wanting to get more personal. I wanted to kind of break through this kind of mundane like spray and pray strategy that I had that I had slash, everyone was kind of using. And so I found myself, you know, writing handwritten notes. I'd go grab swag from our swag closet. After conversation, I'd go online and find random gifts off of Amazon and really started to integrate that into my outreach and saw results. So continue to do it. Um, but it was just manual and cumbersome, you know, trying to track links, trying to expense report. My VP of sales was like, why are you expensing your Amazon? And I was like, nah, they're gifts, come on. Um, and so all that led me to believe like, hey there, this is something that is a tactic and a strategy that salespeople around the world will want to adopt. And why isn't there a platform to make it easier and integrated and automated? And so that really led me to say, hey, I'm going to quit my job as an AE and start my job as a founder CEO. I did that in kind of. The rest is history. We now have something like 700 employees. We've raised 160 million in funding. We've just had our 3 millionth send and that accounts for tens of thousands of users on our platform. So.

Quite the fun story in the last 5 years from just know my AE days.

How big of an impact has some of the shipping and logistic challenges and all that stuff in the last couple of years?

Yeah, so I'd say there's a mix of different ways to look at it. So one is there's certain like delays in carriers like the FedEx is, you know, over holidays or things that are related to the carriers that have affect us from time to time. There was.

You know, there was talks that they would even limit the amount of shipments you're allowed to make over the holiday season. That never actually happened. But we did have to prepare for that and prepare to find other regional shippers like on track and some of these smaller regional shippers than just the national and international folks. And then there was the global supply chain which as everyone saw like six months ago was a huge, kind of grabbed huge media attention that it didn't hurt us too bad per se. Now we have the, we have some flexibility in terms of where we can source from and we're not ordering like a lot of cases like a million items in a.

Shipping container and grabbing it from China and having to wait for our goods at a port that's a little bit more focused on kind of e commerce scale. But there is certain scenarios where we'd have to shift it who we sourced certain items from just so that we could make sure our timelines match what our customer expectations were. And so there was a little bit more work on our end, but not, not a huge, huge impact like you saw in the press.

But for a seller, what did I would I have to like, sellers didn't.

Even know for the, for the most part, sellers didn't even know anything happened. There are certain, like marketing managers or VPs that are kind of doing some admin stuff behind the scenes that maybe we coached on what they should, you know, make available for their sales team. But for sales reps, there really wasn't any impact. Or sellers, there was no impact at the end of the day.

Yeah, I got a, I got an interesting question just because you brought up the shipping thing and you can be agnostic as to which shipper.

How. What's it like working with the FedEx UPS sales guy? Right? Like, that guy must love you. Those people must love you as their client. And the reason I'm asking is you started at this level, you grew to this level. And I'm curious for those who are salespeople looking to grow customers and things like that, anything about that experience that's unique, that stands out and again, maybe at some point you turn this over to your coo, it's no longer your deal. But I'm curious to that as the bot from the buyer's point of view.

Yeah. So I would say, you know, for.

The, I would say the account manager at FedEx, we're actually more maybe of a pest than a awesome story for them and that we are constantly going back to them being like, hey, we spent another 10 million bucks last quarter on you guys like give us better discounts. And so we're constantly beating them up for better shipping rate so that we can pass that along to our customers. So, you know, in that regard, don't.

You think any big customers doing that like anybody?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't.

Know that you're the worst.

And the whole name, that's, you know, I think a lot of the, you know, account managers at the carriers are used to clients like us that continue to drive volume, which for them is good. And then based on increased volume, we then beat them up on pricing so we can pass along further shipping discounts to our customers. So that was for the most part FedEx is our largest shipper domestically. And then DHL and then there's some regional carriers in Europe that are also picking up traction for us.

Let's talk about the emotion of the gift giving piece. Right. Like, you know, at Least for me, you know, I just. This is my son's stack of bar mitzvah things. Right. So, you know, from, you know, so he's had to write a ridiculous amount of thank you notes. Right. Because that's where it all started for me. I don't know about the rest of people here, but parents and the thank you note stuff.

Talk about that piece though, like, as you're seeing it beyond the which I, you tell me, people are like, oh, you're just trying to buy your way into my heart kind of thing. Right? Like, that's the what I can see people think. But talk about that emotional piece of why that matters so much for sure.

So I see the emotional component kind of two parts, one from the senator and one from the recipient. I think from the sender's perspective, you know, you're having to think, be a bit more thoughtful about what you're doing. And so you're spending a little bit of time researching who this recipient is. What would they like, what are they going to be more responsive to. And so I think from that perspective, you're kind of putting a little bit more effort into that relationship. Instead of, you know, in some cases, maybe as just a spray and pray email of, you know, eight years ago, you're kind of just like, this is just an email address and a first name and you're just going to go blast. And so I think with gifting, because there is associated cost, you'll. You'll see sellers being a bit more cognizant on like making sure they put that extra effort in. And I think that emotional effort really connects them to that prospect a teeny bit more because they say, hey, oh, I know you like, you know, I know you like surfing. Oh, I know you're in Orange County. I know you're in, you know, went to, you know, SF State University. And so some of that really builds an emotional connection to that prospect that you can kind of get behind more. I was one of our, in our weekly or every other week, all hands, we have some of our SDRs, nays and different folks at the company share stories of different wins. And one last week was really interesting where One of our SDRs had research to see that one of the sellers was actually or one of our prospects was into had honey and had like a bee farm and you know, was sending some, you know, emojis of honey in the email and then sent over this ingredient or this recipe on how to use honey with whiskey and make a little cocktail and sent over some whiskey along with that. And that just like totally drove a response and created this kind of personal connection. And in that case, the seller on our team, the sdr, was like, you know, in it to win it at that point and knew a little bit more about that prospect than, you know, maybe a seller who wasn't putting that much effort in. Wait, wait, hold on.

No, no, no.

Scott, have you done with honey and tequila? We got it done.

No, no, no. I've never done honey and tequila. If somebody has a honey tequila recipe that they swear by, I will try it. But that doesn't sound like the way to go. What I was, what I was going to say, Richard. I'll be the counterpoint to Richard's emotional aspect. Because if somebody said to me, why aren't you just trying to buy your way into a demo with me? I'd be like, yeah, I absolutely am. If somebody sends me a bottle of tequila, I will 100% take a demo with them. Maybe I'm just shallow and a mercenary, but why is that bad?

Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's like. So I think it's just a part of, you know, psychology where you're kind of, you're going to give me something of value. I'll give you something of value. And in this case for you, Scott, it was the value is you listening on the other side to their, what their, you know, what they want. And I think, I think in some cases, even if the ask is, hey, here's something to get your attention. I'm going to send you some tequila. You know, there's a scenario where they're, they're asking for something, hey, jump on a call and learn about xyz. And maybe you don't need that. Maybe you already bought something similar, but at least you're going to spend those two minutes replying to that person who thoughtfully spent time. And so I think it's, you know, in some cases you're.

I might try to help them in some other way.

Exactly.

Right.

Like, okay, this is not a fit for me because I run a two person consultancy.

Exactly.

But you should talk to my friend Danny or Angel or Stu who run these other sales orgs. Right? Yeah.

Do you, do you make them do shots with you during the demo? And maybe, I mean, I wouldn't, I.

Wouldn'T make them, but I would encourage it.

So that's on the sender side. And I think it's, it's, I think as you kind of mentioned too, Scott, on the recipient side, there's a bit of psychology around kind of reciprocity and hey, you, you spent the effort to send me something, I'm going to spend the effort to reply. And I think there's, you know, an emotional attachment there. And then, you know, I think that right there we're talking about mostly the SDRA kind of intro top of funnel scenario. If you think about using gifting throughout the entire funnel, there are scenarios where AES are, you know, in a six month, nine month enterprise sales cycle. And so how are you really building that relationship over the, the, the course of the time? And it, it's not really like a bribery situation when you know, you know that your prospect's having a birthday and you send them something or hey, they just mentioned they, you know, got Covid and you, you send them over, you know, doordash to grab some delivery soup or something. And so that's just more being a human. And I think that being a human is what people buy from people. People are not buying from a company. And in an increasing competitive world where there's commoditized solutions and lots of lookalike companies.

The recipient that has the best buying experience often will pick that. So I see it as that as well. And I think people overemphasize gifting and sending super top of funnel. Like hey, if it's only bribery, bribery. But you know, moving down the funnel, it's a, it's a technique to build rapport on a, you know, a multi month relationship.

Cool. Jared, I'm asking you to come off mute if you can. I know you put your question in the chat, but we want to drive engagement.

Right.

Like this is about the personal connection.

Yeah.

And so that we want to, you know. What's your question.

Jared?

Well, well, I see his question in chat. Maybe he's driving or maybe he's. Oh yeah, I don't know. But I'm happy to. Oh, looks like he's.

We cannot hear you, Jared, for whatever reason.

Well, while he figures that out, I see it in the chat. So really keep kind of going back to what I was kind of getting started before, but keeping prospects engaged during the sales cycle. So I think as you think about your sales cycle, especially if it's a longer kind of mid market or enterprise sales cycle, there's you know, many months that you have to figure out, what's that? What do you do in that many months? Instead of just like the checking in email, maybe you send over a printed collateral little white paper that they can read and it continues to build rapport. Maybe you're Using that time to engage others in the buying committee and you're reaching out to others at the, at the company and you know, doing a little lunch and learn to drive more, you know, executive buy in from others at the company. You know, maybe you're you know looking at life events where like I mentioned before, if this prospect's having a birthday or you know, it's a, you know, a Friday. Hey, want to buy you lunch this Friday. Keep me posted on your XYZ meeting with your boss in 2 weeks to talk about our solution. And so I think it's just, you know, a lot of times you can use gifting as a no ask ask scenario where you and take place of that hey just touch and base email or hey just following up email any updates which I think drives people crazy at times. But if you're instead saying hey Happy Friday, grab lunch on me, keep me posted if I can do anything and the response rate to that's going to be much higher than the just following up.

What, what about like with clothes lost, what about people who've said no and then you use some type of gift as a like thanks for being a part of this. Thanks for checking it out. Keep me in mind in the future for sure when your decision goes south and the thing that you got instead breaks. Here's a bottle of whiskey to drown your sorrows.

You know, some kind of we've lost the deal for the time being. It's a no for now kind of situation. Yeah, I think it could be inserted into that part of the process.

Can it not thousand percent. And I think especially there's different no's. There's no not right now and you know, hey, get back, you know, not right timing. Let's check in in three months. And so you want to make sure you kind of leave them with a takeaway and you know, have a follow up there. There's hey no loss to competitor and you can have a little bit of fun there, you know and some kind of gift that and back saying hey I'll probably see you in 3 months when XYZ doesn't work out for you or you know, I think it's you know, in the same way you're kind of breaking up in a nice way knowing that there's a good chance that you're going to be talking to them again instead of you know what I see sometimes in sales which is either you keep nagging them or you just go dark completely and you just say ah fm, I'll work another lead. But I think, you know, that person might switch companies in three months and now they're a customer or now they're another prospect and they're like, you know, so I think gifting in the breakup scenario is like a, a good way to kind of pay it forward and leave that reciprocity door open.

That's going to send out a half bottle of tequila and say, I had to drown my sorrows with you.

That's, that's actually not bad. Pour half of it out, send it to somebody and say, I'm splitting this with you. Get on camera with me and we'll finish it.

Right? That's funny. It's funny. I think the very first gift I.

Did.

Similar sort of to Chris, I was working at old school newspaper selling classified ads, and this guy from UPS called to run a help wanted ad. And I'm like, oh my God, ups, this is killer. And I found out he was a golfer, and so I sent him a box of golf balls as a thank you. You usually get four sleeves and I only put three in there. And I said, you can have the fourth one when we meet up on the first tee. Right. And so, you know, and since the guy turned out to be a very good friend of mine, he lives here, he was in my wedding. Like, you know, just like those things happen, right?

Yeah.

I think, you know, the best salespeople make friends with their prospects and their customers too. I mean, I even went to a wedding of one of our customers like a year ago, and that was just, you know, multi years of being friends with a customer pays off. And, you know, what do you do with your friends? You give them gifts at times and yeah, you know, you build personal relationships at times. So. Yeah.

Do you.

Just out of curiosity, when vendors are selling to Sendosa, do they actually try to.

Do they gift you guys or do they not guys? And will you ever buy from somebody who doesn't gift you?

Well, what I. If someone gifts me and they, especially when they gift me through Sendoso, I will like, you know, take my money. I'll, I'll answer whatever you want. I'll do whatever you want. Like as just kind of a, you know, a reaction to when people actually are smart and savvy about that. I think if somebody sends me just cold email, you know, I'll typically say, you know, give them because I've been in sales, I'll typically give them a response at times. But gifting me definitely is the easiest way to get into my heart. But again, I'm, I'd Say, for all the SDRs listening though, or AES, you know, I'm a CEO at a 700 person company, so people that prospect into me at oftentimes and ask for meetings might be going up the wrong path in terms of their. What they're trying to get if they're selling a marketing solution. I'm probably not the right buyer, but I do appreciate when. And I've seen this multiple times before where the sdr, the AE is just keeping me in the loop and kind of, you know, sending me something, saying, hey, I'm talking to your, you know, your VP of xyz. Just wanted to keep you in the loop. And I like that strategy. That's a good move when you're not selling to me, but you're telling me that you're selling to my colleague, especially if they're going to one day ask for money.

I'm like, oh, yeah, I might reach out to you and tell you, hey, here's this gift. You've made a good hire and such. And such. They're doing a great job right now. Compliment that particular.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Good. Stu, my man. Haven't talked to you in a while, bud.

Hey, man, how are you?

I'm good, buddy. I'm good. We need to catch up offline anyway.

But I know we're actually really, really close to each other. I'm in Moraga right now, so.

Oh, you're here. All right. So, yeah, street. So kids went to school together, swim together.

So.

Anyway, Stu, I know you got a good question.

Yeah. So I'm curious. I love this idea. I think it's super. I mean, the, the theme of this. But I'm curious, branded versus unbranded in terms of gifts and wondering kind of what works, right? Is it the kind of unique one off? Like, I was just thinking, I was gifted this really cool bracelet, right? And it, you know, kind of unique. It's sentimental, it had a. There's a spiritual story to it. You know, things like that. Does that connect with people? Or is it always mugs and hats and T shirts and things like that?

Yeah, great question. So I think when I think about branded versus unbranded, I think about, you know, what, where are you in the. Or what's your use case? You know, if you're super top of funnel, trying to set a meeting for the first time and it's cold, you know, something branded might not resonate well, but something personalized might resonate better. That's unbranded because, you know, they're. They're not, they don't have such a hard affinity to your brand quite yet. But, you know, when, when you become a customer and you want to send them a little customer welcome kit, that's a great time to get them some branded gear or when they're part of your community and they're actively engaging with other customers and you send them a mug or, you know, I think employees is the obvious one where a lot of times branded stuff works because you're trying to build this, you know, army of employees, advocates out there. But I think for, you know, our, you know, our best senders out there, they're savvy and sending a mix of branded and unbranded items. They're also sending digital gifts at times, like a doordash gift card to, to give someone lunch or they're using virtual experiences and they're kind of the gambit. And I think it's, I think that's advantageous to using our platform in that you don't have to just send the same branded mug every time indefinitely. You can get creative. And we have a unique integration with Amazon where you can go find something from Amazon and then we reship it out with custom node and a custom packaging so it looks like it came from you. That worked really well. We saw some super creative customers through like March Madness sending out different gear based on people's alma maters and so you can have some fun with it and hit people with branded at certain times of the funnel and unbranded at others.

Yeah, that's one of the things Richard taught me was when he was talking about sending emails into, for example, Pittsburgh. And it was during a World Series, you know, situation there. And, you know, he was sending stuff like, you know, that email had a title about, you know, what was going on with the Pirates or something like that. And, you know, we just blew up, like we started doing these different, Trying these different tactics at work.

Yeah.

And there's a couple things like that. But one of the other things that Richard talks about that I think is good with with gifting is kind of connecting and having an authenticity of what you're giving and why. Right. There's kind of. You're not just kind of checking the box, you're thinking about it. You're getting creative and you're putting something that means something to you. And when that person gets it, they feel it.

Exactly. And I think that's where like the handwritten note going along with the gift, you know, you have to be thoughtful about what you're writing there. And then you're also likely sandwiching that either before or after with another email or phone call or something else as a, as another means too. So it's, you know, it's not effective when you're just like, hey, I'm just going to close my eyes, spray and pray and just send stuff out.

I have a question, though. I want to follow up on Stu from, you know, on the branded side.

Yeah.

If I'm sending something, do am I better off branding it to me or do I make it with their logo? Like, hey, here's a cool, you know, luggage tag that I had made for you that has your company's logo on it. So something that they're like, oh, this person actually did think of me and Stu, I don't know which way you were asking in terms of the brand. Was it like me branding my own stuff and sending them a coffee, you know, something, or.

That's what I was thinking.

Yeah.

Yeah, but that's nursery. I hadn't thought about the other side.

I mean, we do see the revert. Like we see people sending out like cupcakes with the, with the, with the recipient company's logo on it, or we've seen scenarios where people send out bobbleheads with the recipient's picture on the bobblehead. And so there is, you know, there's, like you said, there's multiple ways that you can personalize whether it's personalized to the recipient's company, to the recipient's personal interests, to the senders company, to the, you know, to the product service value proposition too. You might, you know, want to send something that relates to what you're selling. You know, is it security? Is it, you know, social media related? Is it gifting? You name it, you could connect the item. So I think there's probably, you know, five or six different ways that you can think about how to personalize. We going back to the.

The World Series and like the March Madness we actually had some, some fun with. Some of our SDRs were sending out saying, hey, I bet you if your team wins, I'll send you this. This, you know, you know, Kansas State XYZ item. But if they lose, you take a meeting. That was a really fun program that.

We ran for about gambling as prospecting. Basically.

Ye. It's again, it's a little bit more just like the human side of things because if you're really drawn into March Madness, you're like, of course I want my team to win, and if they win, I get some cool little, you know, gear. But if not, you know, have some fun. I think humans at the end of the day want to have fun with their day and you know, gets you out of the monotonous. Just email inbox. So great.

That's great. Jeff. I know you have a question. Go ahead.

Yeah, it's more from my selfish.

User experience from that standpoint, trying to understand not knowing really.

Anything about Sendoso, the platform, what the.

Sales reps experiences and what the recipients experience is. But I'll tell you, just from my own personal.

Perspective, we this, this is part of our normal sales cadence at Oracle and, and we're actually mandated to incorporate X number of outbound gifts per month and our specific tool is extremely painful to use. And so my first question is what kind of platforms do you integrate with.

From an outbound sales standpoint? So how do you make that experience from the rep standpoint as frictionless as possible? Secondly is what is the experience from the end user's perspective and how does that information translate back to the sales rep? Because one of my biggest pet peeves around executing on this is that I don't know that they received it. I don't know that I chose the right, you know, item, tchotchke, whatever in the first place. And I don't have any analytics around what that engagement is and the value of that engagement other than being able to get a response back to an email, hey, did you enjoy that gift I sent? Or them actually picking up the phone and having that conversation, which isn't necessarily the normal course of how the gifting process plays out in our world. Yeah, I know it's pretty loaded, but.

No, there's a couple of different ways that I can take that. That was a great question. So from the first part in terms of the seller's experience, so we integrate with Outreach and Salesloft and Groove and we integrate with CRM, Salesforce, HubSpot.

I'll double check. And if we can integrate with Oracle Sales Cloud. Is that what you're using?

No, NetSuite is.

And then the marketing automation tools too, like Elo.

Marketo, et cetera. But we also have a standalone Chrome extension so you can send wherever you are on the web. We also have a standalone site, but most of the time users are sending from within one of those sales engagement platforms or CRMs, because that's where they're living. And so they're in those tools, they find the prospect, they click send, pops up what they want to select send, or what note they want to write to include with it, and we try to keep that seamless within the same experience.

And for the salesman standpoint, they just shooting them a link with a catalog and then the customer or the recipient is getting to shop or something that makes sense to them. Or is the rep actually having to, you know, throw his finger in the wind and say, do they want socks or golf balls?

So it could be both. I think there's a scenario where you want the surprise and the light component and you want that box to appear on the person's desk without them knowing. And, and that could be part of the use case that you, you want to. And the experience that you're trying to deliver. There could be an experience where you want to ask them their address to confirm before you send it because you're unsure of their address. Or they're working from home. There could be a scenario where you want to give them the option to choose and swap something out, like, or give them the option of a couple different gift cards and, and pick what they want. And so there's kind of a myriad of different ways that you can position that based on either the use case yourself. Maybe there's one prospect that, you know, likes playing golf because you talk to them, or based on our, you know, features in our platform, we can say, hey, we think this person plays golf based on social media data. And so you might be better off just being more personal and saying, hey, you know, so you liked golf, here's some golf balls. Or you might not have enough intel on that prospect to where you're like, hey, I'd rather not be specific and I'd rather just give them the flexibility or be more generic in it and say, hey, here's a Starbucks or doordash or Panera Bread kind of pick your coffee card kind of option too. So I'd say it's, I'd answer it with flexibility of the sender, which I think is helpful so that you can treat each prospect more uniquely than just having to blanket everyone the same. And then to your other points, we're going to automatically sync recipients into like campaigns in your CRM or marketing automation tools so we can track back the efficacy or at least marketing can be happy at the end of the day that sales is clicking and sending and they'll cover the costs. But for you, as I said, you'll get, you know, an email notification or notification in your CRM when it's delivered or if there's an E gift that's clicked on. There's also other customers that will put QR codes or short links on, you know, maybe a printed collateral piece in the gift to drive engagement, additional engagement that way knowing that somebody, you know, scanned a QR code when the box was received too.

Jeff, what time are you available this afternoon for a sales call?

Yeah, exactly. You want to demo.

I want to ask Jeff a question since they're tracking gifts sent as a KPI, like what is the expectation there around how many you send per month?

20.

Basically one a day. And then what do they expect the conversion to be in terms of number of meetings that, that you know, gets you and then deals that, that nets you out? Do you know?

I think it's about, you know, 20 to 30% is the, the expectation, you know, and when that does actually drive, you know, the, the engagement, the conversation and the connection, the close rate is extremely high. So we're experiencing, I think a greater than 60% close rate once that initial outbound outreach engagement is successful.

Now let me throw that back to Chris. Are those numbers atypical or pretty typical of, of what you see?

I'd say they're relatively typical. I mean again we have the gambit of numbers depending on the use case. But you know, I think the, the, the volume that you're sending and I assume you're, you're on the account executive side, right? You're quota carrying. Yeah. So I think that makes perfect sense. I'd say for certain, for certain AES where you're using gifting, like post demo, where you're using it to build rapport, there's more of a buy in from executives where you're not looking for a certain conversion metric. You just know that this works and it's going to rapport. And so you're bought into the general strategy and then you know, you're ultimately trying to figure out how do you execute more on this strategy, how did you automate this strategy, how do you make it easier for Reps to send, etc.

Yeah, you know, in my mind, you know, I'm just like envisioning kind of the perfect world for me, selfishly, personally. You know, it's on getting that initial connection that, you know, they downloaded a white paper or whatever, there's definitely some sort of interest there. But they're not replying to the emails, they're not, you know, responding to InMail or phone calls. And you know, if I am on that side and I'm getting a barrage because I've been out there researching accounting software and downloading, you know, 17 million different white papers, I've got all these reps now calling me because I did that and I want, I want something to stand out. And so me as a buyer on the buyer side, what I would love is to be able to get an email from this guy Jeff over at netsuite and it's just got a link saying, hey, I know I've been trying to get all, you know, you, I don't know if you're aware of this, but I've been trying to get a hold of you and you know, I would like to, let's just call, call it what it is. I'd like to make an impression on you. So, hey, click on this link and select an item from our catalog that I've, that I've prepared for you. And it sends them to a landing page and they, whether it's, you know, socks or golf balls or, you know, visors or, you know, what have you, they can actually go through and, and buy the item or select the item, not buy it, but select the item that they're most excited. Oh, wow, I can buy, I can get some, you know, chocolate chip cookies, whatever. And that would resonate with me if I'm in their shoes, trying to sift through all of these suppliers that are just hitting me up left and right.

Love it. You are speaking my language and you're hired if you want to work at Sentoso. So.

Well done, Jeff.

I was going to say thanks for being our additional panelists. I do have a question to you though, Jeff, because I think, I wonder if people are curious is if you're allowed to say, like, what is your average deal size? What's your average sales cycle? Like, where, where do you think the gifting helps the most? Because if people are in similar situations that, you know, they get to hear it from someone who's actually trying to do this. And I think that's a big piece of what we're doing with this community.

You know, for, for me, at least on the outbound, it doesn't matter whether it's a, a startup, mid market or, you know, what we call corporate deals that are all the way up into, you know, about a half a billion in revenue.

It's all about trying to get the attention of the individual that you need to talk to, that you need to connect with. Of course there's applicability, as you said, in building rapport and that works and it's wonderful and, or trying to, like, for us, predictability on the actual date of close is really super important. And being able to dial that in. Exactly. So using it as a Closing event item, doordash, what have you. Let's do a brunch or a coffee meeting and you know, you, you provide them with that gift as a way to facilitate that specific closing closing date.

But are you trying to do or your team try to send them to get the first meeting after or you know, after the first meeting after the demo or is it kind of like what we've been talking about? Well, it really just depends on where I am and who that person is and how big.

Yes, it really does just depend on what the use case is, the business case. I'll say that Grady then greater than 8%, I would say probably closer to 90% is trying to make that initial connect with the person that isn't answering returning phone calls or emails.

So. So you're using it though after you've made some regular attempts.

Yes.

Okay, so it's not your first attempt. That was kind of that to me. That to me is interesting because it's just like where in the flow is it? That's really cool. Interesting.

Yeah.

I'd be curious to see what would happen to your percentages if you took 20 of them and, and sent it as the very first thing before the first meeting. But maybe that feels weird. Maybe that feels, you know, the, the.

Challenge, I've done that as well. And really the challenge with that is making sure that you have A the right person B they still work there, see the right location and you know, really narrowing it down to who that individual is and validating that their they're still an employee and the proper person you should be engaging with.

That's really cool.

Go ahead, Chris.

I was going to say you did bring up a good point though Richard, in terms of like depending on the ACV and you know, depending on your Persona, you'd want to craft maybe a different gift option. Especially if, you know, some of your companies selling into, you know, micro SMB transactional deals versus some, you know, another group of the companies selling into six figure deals. You know, you can decide on different gifts to send to different people based.

Yeah, like, like me, you know what I'm, I'm selling into corporate, you know, long sales cycles typically really difficult to get the attention of the CFO or the CEO. That's key stakeholder. So to be able to not offer tchotchkes and be able to offer, you know, hey, select you like rum, whiskey or tequila or wine, you know, this is on me just trying to connect with you would be, I think I would have if I could do that. I Think that money spent, whether it's 25 or $50 would be a huge return on investment.

I was going to say for the, for the smaller startups and the younger generation, you should just say, you know, which house are you? And send them something from where they can choose, you know, whether they're Gryffindor or something from Harry Potter. Right. They can choose their own.

So I want to, I want to know about gifting gone wrong. We're talking about all of the good stories and I want to hear like one or two stories that, you know, Chris, where like it went spectacularly wrong.

Yeah, good question there. I think we, I mean for us gone wrong is more of like maybe customers who have maybe the wrong expectation setting and it's maybe a little bit more pre delivery for some of the gifting gone wrong. Like a few years ago, a customer, when we had our warehouse in Las Vegas, which was this warehouse was not.

Kind of set up for food, sent us some, a bunch of chocolate bars and they all were completely melted in Vegas summertime. And so that was kind of a fail. I mean, we caught it before because they sat in the warehouse for like a day and then were completely trashed. But it was companies that wanted, you know, had some custom chocolate bars made and didn't realize that the facility that we are sending out of, we do have other facilities that handle that better or, or partners that handle shipping, you know, perishables. But that was a fail. There was also somebody who sent us, who we sent us a bunch of barbecues to ship out. And that was just like extremely awkward. And we ended up not sending them out based on like the, the size of having that being delivered. But I think there's, you know, we, we oftentimes try to prevent fails, I guess you could say, because we do have kind of a, a quality assurance layer. Kind of goes to Stu's question there, which is like making sure that, you know, maybe that we provide a little bit of insight. And so I think there's our, what we call send curators will kind of give you a bit of a quality assurance look over when you're thinking about what you want to gift and send out or pull from our curated marketplace of things that are kind of good quality, good SLAs, et cetera. So you don't have a fail, which I think is key.

Do you know, do you know of stories where, where like even for your team, you guys tried to gift to get somebody and that company turned around and was like, you know, f you, Chris, like Or you're. I hate your tactic.

Or.

Or do people. Are people nice? Like, are you getting Is. You know, there's so many, as Scott likes to call them nasty grams. Right? Or are you guys getting nasty grams?

I mean, I think the nature of our business is. Is kind of the opposite of getting nasty grams. I think there's, you know, there might be a sensitivity gram where it's like, hey, like, thanks for the bottle of wine. I don't drink, but I gave it away to my colleague who does, so maybe, you know, they could have been like, fuck you, I don't drink. You know, I broke the bottle of wine on the ground. But for the most part, there's a thoughtful note associated with the gift and a bit of effort. Although maybe we should be sending out, like, glitter bombs and stuff and going for that nasty gram as a way to differentiate. Who knows?

Yeah, that would get. So that would get somebody's attention, right?

For sure it would get attention.

I know we're getting close to the end. I just want to see if anybody has any more questions for Chris or, you know, maybe even Jeff, since he's our unexpected panelist.

Power use the power user.

Yeah.

I do like the send fails, though. I feel like I should create a blog post and do some research from our customer success team to see what stuff worked.

I think it would be probably one of the. One of the greatest things that people would love to read to know that. One, because it's funny. But two is like, hey, life doesn't always work the way.

Exactly.

And we should own that. Right. I think that's. That's really good. So, Chris, you know, we always sort of turn this over. You've been on the podcast before. See if there's questions you want to ask Scott and I and. Or the audience. Maybe it's a chance for you to ask them their opinions of things. So give you a second to do that while I give a shout out to the sponsors. Obviously, Chris and the Sendoso crew for sponsoring surf and sales. We've got some cool swag going out to some of our attendees. They don't even know yet in some cases. Kelsey, you're here. You'll get something soon.

As well as to Scratchpad outreach IO and to Vidyard for sponsoring all the things that we do. We really, really appreciate it. So with that being said, Chris, any question you might have for us or the group that's here?

Yeah, I think two things popped my head. One is, I know you're fresh off Scott. A recent surf and Sales last week. Curious if there was any thought provoking topics or interesting insights that came out of that kind of surf and sales session this last week.

Well, certainly everybody's a little bit nervous about the market right now and moving roles and contracting and terminations and all that kind of stuff. So that was definitely on, on people's mind. There was a lot of leadership at the last surf and sales event. So there's a lot of people interested in like, how do you build and scale up a sales organization from scratch? So there were a lot of that kind of, kind of conversation and a lot of recruiting conversations and tactics as well. And there was a little bit of conversation around gifting in the recruiting process even I don't know, you know, if that's legal or not or what the rules are. But a lot of people had some interesting ideas around that. So, you know, this topic is certainly on people's minds as everybody is just fighting to cut through the noise and get a, get somebody's attention. And you used a key phrase earlier which was, you know, make it a memorable buying experience. And I think the buying experience is pretty miserable at a lot of, a lot of companies and a lot of products. People get passed over from one person to the next. I can't figure out the pricing. I just want a demo. I got to talk to four people before I get a demo. It takes five days. Nobody calls me back. And you know, so you speaking to how this enriches and enhances the buying process I think is super valuable.

Love it. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you having me on. This is awesome as always. And.

Wanted to add one thing to Scott's comment about, you know, the recruiting process. It's very interesting. Lots of companies, when you show up on day one, you get your swag pack. Right.

And in the previous market in the last 12 to 18 months. Right. Like, I think now we're going through something different where and it'll be curious to see if the talent pool in sales, even as people are getting laid off, is the talent pool going to be deep enough to fill all the position? Like it's going to be an interesting reset, but it does make you wonder like if you sent the swag ahead of time, would more people would lean towards taking the job? Granted, I'm not going to go work somewhere just because I got a cool sweatshirt or a water bottle, but it certainly puts you on the, you know, it certainly puts you on the short list. So it'd be very interesting for sure.

We have, I mean, we have a lot of recruiting teams and HR teams that are using Sendoso, including our own. But it's a popular new kind of use case for us. I mean last year was unbelievably popular as well.

Given curiosity, do you, can you even share if you used it in the recruiting process for people who are thinking about it? Wow. You know what, when we send stuff ahead of time, we actually close more people. You know, like do you, do you have data around that? I'm just curious. Which by the way would also be a very.

I believe we do have data. I don't know the exact numbers off top of my head, but we do track sending and candidate closes rates and we could tie those two together pretty easily. And we use it throughout the process. So even like on a first call screen we might send a Starbucks gift card the morning of to remind them to show up. Kind of as you would think about as like SDR trying to get a demo to show up, you know, and so there's similar crossover tactics that you. We'd use or thanking people for the first interview if they're a strong candidate. And we know there's going to be a month long interview process to, you know, send them things throughout that process. So now you're.

We could go on and on and on, but I know we got, we.

Could do a whole episode on recruiting talent.

I was going to say you could actually. We didn't even talk about it. Is there a sequence or cadence of gifting? Right. So for that first meeting, whether it's HR or sales. Yeah. You send the Starbucks gift card to remind them for the show up rate, right?

Yeah.

Then maybe if they take the demo, you know, you send them something else and then you know, you sort of have a sequence and cadence which is.

We've been, we've seen some sequences of gifts that actually go along. So there's one of our customers, when you became a customer, they sent you a watering can, this, these seeds of flowers and this. And then like three months later they send you this other piece of some like these shears to cut down your flowers and then there's a couple other things. So it's like a multi month gift. It's like three months, which I found was pretty interesting as you know, three different gifts, one each a month kind of thing.

That's really cool.

Yeah, I'm glad we sort of brought that up. At the end I had to talk about that because I'm, I don't run a sales team so I'm sort of on the outside looking at this stuff but thank you again Chris and and thank you to Sendoso and to Outreach and to figure out and Scratchpad and Jeff, thanks for, for coming in and bringing in some some fresh ideas and content man. We appreciate it. So for those who don't know we have another two surfing sales events coming up in November. Be sure to check them out@surfingSales.com we will be doing another one of these.

In the month of June which is a killer one. Chris we didn't even get into this one where it's a conversation about building a sales team with no commissions, paying a much higher base salary, no commission.

Interesting, right?

Like a different concept and the person we have coming on board has implemented it and done both sides of it. So it's going to be a fun one to talk to you and talk about. So anyway we'd love to see you at that one as well and thank you all so much. We appreciate it.

See everybody everybody.