Personalized Gifting, Direct Mail, and AI Driven Outbound

The next five years in marketing are going to change more than like the last 25 have because of AI. And I totally believe that. But I still don't think that the things you mentioned. It's interesting to hear $100 million company go back to basics. Everybody can do that now, right? We can all just write like shitty emails and shitty content and send it out and it's just not going to work anymore.

Exactly. But I think some of these more automated personalized orchestration, bringing in intent data, bringing in other signals and thinking about it from a more holistic, you know, almost like more of a marketing mindse than just, hey, you need a person that's going to go look through lists, they're going to copy and paste data that are going to like write manual things. You're almost doing a better job of bringing in like specialized expertise than just throwing humans to like run tasks.

All right, Chris Knight. We've crossed paths, I'm sure multiple times over, over the years. I think the first time that I heard about Sendoso was I was working with G. Guillaume at Drift and he was a. He wasn't at Drift yet. He was like a. He was VP of Growth at Segment. It must have been that segment.

He was at Segment and he had.

Some crazy like he did this presentation and he had this crazy like automation that he built that was like using Sendoso to like send somebody a co, like a direct mail play where it's like send an executive a coffee or something and that.

But it was actually a real in person coffee. Like while you're on the chat asking what your Starbucks order was. And then we would go and use a third party delivery service to actually go grab the Starbucks and try to deliver it while they're on chat.

It's unbelievable. I remember that presentation. I remember everybody being like, this guy's nuts. This is an amazing, amazing place.

Just an awesome brainstorming genius with growth ideas.

Yes, he is. He will give you more ideas than you can handle. I love G. So you started Sendoso seven years, almost eight years ago. But what I think is interesting now to look back at your story is the role that you had before becoming CEO was you're a senior AE at Talk desk. I don't want to replay the whole Sandoso founding story, but this is a crazy eight years going from an AE carrying a quota, you know, doing inside sales to running a company. Can you share a little bit about that journey? And then let's eventually get to Sendoso today. How many employees? What does the company look like, and we'll go from there.

So, you know, like, you saw, spent about a decade in software sales before starting the company. And I had always known that I had this itch to want to start a company, but you needed that really painful problem to solve in order for me to really want to jump in. And so, you know, while I was in sales, it was just kind of, you know, obvious to me at the time that email was becoming very spammy and very hard to get into people's inboxes. This was eight years ago, ironically. And so I said, hey, why don't I start writing handwritten notes and sending out gifts or hearing a dog on a call barking and sending out like an Amazon, you know, shoe toy. And it worked so well. It was just, I was operating like a mini mail room in our office. And so I said, hey, there's gotta be a platform that I can like click and send a button or sequence out gifts and mailers. And there wasn't. So I was like, let me start it. And I think that's how crazy entrepreneurs are. It's, you just like, you don't know what you don't know, so you just jump in.

That seems like a crazy lift to go think about. Given that you weren't a software developer, the product that you wanted to build was not there. Obviously software was a key component of that. But like, at the end of the day, it's that last mile, like physically delivering the box. You know, I remember I had, I had my first kid when I was at Drift and somebody sent me a direct mail. The best direct mail campaign I ever got was they sent me diapers. Fantastic. You need, you need them. They're expensive. Yeah, I had a newborn and so it was like, they weren't, they weren't out of size yet. That was like the best one. So what, what was going, what, what crazy thing was going on in your head to think like, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna solve this problem. And what was the hardest part about solving that initial? Like, actually send, sending out gifts.

It was a mix of solve the problem first. I'd been in, you know, early stage startups for the better half of the last decade, so I had seen it play out in front of me. So I kind of had an insider look. I'm like, okay, here's how we built the software. Maybe I wasn't building it myself, but I was saying, here's how we do it. Here's the team that is early stage building. So I kind of understood, like, how the org chart develops. And you know, I think in, in sales I was a very, you know, my strategy was I was super confident and like, hey, I'm going to close this deal no matter what. And so I took that kind of sales mindset to say, I can go figure out how to build software, I can go figure out how to raise money, I can go figure out how to get customers. And honestly, some of my sales skills worked really well for me in starting the company because one, you know, I knew what I wanted to build because I was going to be the end user. So I was like, well, if I wanted to use this software, let me just draw it out and then let me go on upwork finding an engineer to say, hey, here's what I want to build. Here's the screens on what it could look like. Please build it for me. And that actually worked out. Luckily, I've heard a lot of horror stories, but mine was the success story there. And then I'm like, I know how to sell. So I'm going to go sell customers day zero to get them on the platform. I'm going to go sell VCs to why they should invest in me. And then I got to go sell people on why they should join me on this crazy journey and fill me.

In on Sendoso today. What's the. It's, it's. We're recording this in mad. I'm like, what, what day is it? We're recording this May 2024. What, how do you talk about the company today? Stage size.

So stage C in funding. We've got kind of mid two, hundreds of employees on North Star. By the end of this year, we're shooting towards 100 million in revenue. We think we'll get there early next year. We're a couple of months away from profitability, which is an exciting metric for us given the last couple of years. We've seen about give or take 10 million sends and about 100 million spent on our platform. So that's been a really interesting data set to look at. And I think we're just getting started.

And then you've obviously had to ride the roller coaster of the last couple years in SaaS. As a CEO in SaaS right now, how do you talk about the. The market? So I'm, I'm, I'm starting a new company. I. Starting a media media company and not, not really in SaaS, but our customers are in SaaS either the B2B marketers, like the B2B marketers that would buy for subscriptions to our community, listen to our podcast, subscribe to our content, but then also sponsors like we. We've been talking to Sandosa about doing a sponsorship. We have lot. Lots of the top SaaS companies are sponsoring anecdotally. To me, I feel like within the last three or four months, like we're actually hiring more people right now to, to to scale our business and create content because I don't know if it's because we're riding this trend of like community and influencer marketing, but we have an overwhelming amount of demand from companies like you all in this space who want to do stuff. I'm reading that as a sign that like demand is back. People are playing a little bit more offense again. But what's your perspective as a CEO?

Yeah, I agree there. I think people are going back in. CFOs are loosening budgets over the last couple of kind of half a year, I'd say the last, you know, three, four quarters, we're seeing a big uptick in spend on our platform, which is a good sign because a lot of marketing and sales budgets are loosening up to spend on our platform. So I think we've, you know, we did the hard work the last, you know, end of 22 and end of 23 of kind of resetting, reorgang, you know, re strategizing on some more efficient growth across a lot of the SaaS tech space. And now metrics are looking good again. And you know, the economy and some of the other macro factors are giving people a bit more confidence as well. And I think all that's boding well for the software SaaS smart tech space too.

I hope so. I would love to see the. I don't think we're going to get back to the 2021 craziness, but it seems like we're going to make some thoughtful, rational decisions and spending lots of money on budget should kind of feel a little bit uncomfortable again. We're like, all right, I'm gonna do this, but like, I gotta make this work out. And I think that's a healthy behavior versus just like, yeah, I don't know, we'll just write a check and hopefully this works out. And it doesn't work.

Exactly. And I think there's also like for a minute there was a big like, halt everything, let's get, let's focus on profits or reduce burn. But then there's that catch 22 where you still need to grow. And so I think we're seeing that come back even more where people got their metrics in order and now they're like, let's grow again.

Where are you guys? Where are you seeing growth from a, a business standpoint? Like not that you're, you're the CEO, so, so not that everything is marketing, but just as a, as a growth channel. What seems to be working for you all right now at this stage? Right. You said you got 200 employees, you're closing in on $100 million in revenue. You've kind of gone through all of the early stage startup growth tactics at this point. Like what, what's working to grow right now?

Yeah, so we're kind of coming back to some of those tactics and rethinking them. So one of the ways that we're seeing growth is through kind of some more automated programmatic outbound. So rethinking our SDR org using clay.com and a myriad of service integrated and connected to that kind of rethinking how we orchestrate outbound from a more marketing programmatic, data driven approach. So I think that's a big change From Call it 2021. We probably had 10 times as many SDRs. Now we're seeing, you know, more effective outbounding at more and better results than we would have in terms of the burn needed to support that many headcount. So that's one area I'm excited about I think community. I mean I'm kind of preaching the choir here, but we're investing more in these communities with thought leaders, with peer groups and trying to be invest there, which is interesting. We also invest a lot in our own community. So we have like a super sender community of power users. I have like an advisor community that has a really interesting story behind that. There's our senfluencer program that we have that's building community. So that's a big one. And then I think micro field events that are more fun different than 10,000 people in a Las Vegas conference hall are working well for us too. I'll shut up. We can dive into which ones you, you care about most.

No, I think you, you mentioned the overall like macro trend of like just it's still going to be outbound, but it's got to be more thoughtful. And I see questions like, I see questions in our Exit 5 community like some from maybe early stage companies and they're like how would you go about getting your first customers? And it's like man, it always kind of comes down to like e, like email. Like that's how I would do it. I would, I would do a Lot of research. First of all, I'd have a clearly defined icp. I'd have a clearly defined problem that we solve. I would do a ton of research and find a way to reach out to Chris. Oh, I sell to SaaS CEOs. I'm going to find a really highly targeted way to reach out to Chris directly and give him the why you, why now? And here's how we can help. And the hard part is that's a hard thing to automate. I totally believe in AI and I do think AI is going to be changing the game. Kip, who's The CMO of HubSpot, a friend of mine and somebody I've talked talk to regularly about marketing. I heard him say on his podcast the other day that like the next five years in marketing are going to change more than like the last 25 have because of AI. And I totally believe that. But I still don't think that the, the things you mentioned. It's interesting to hear a hundred million dollar company go back to basics and do those small things. I do think that's how it's going to be. You're going to win. The days of spray and pray are not going to work because it's just everybody can do that now, right? Like we can all just write like shitty emails and shitty content and send it out and it's just not going to work anymore like ex.

But I think some of these more automated personalized orchestration, bringing in intent data, bringing in other signals and thinking about it from a more like holistic, you know, almost like more of a marketing mindset than just, hey, you need a person that's going to go look through lists, they're going to copy and paste data that are going to like write manual things. It's like you're almost doing a better job of bringing in like specialized expertise than just throwing humans to like run tasks.

So you mentioned this to me that you have a AI ified your tech stack, which is interesting. I think a lot of companies are, are looking to do this now and really take AI seriously as a strategy. It seems like that's something you've done. You mentioned AI outbound, AI content and AI executive sponsorship program. Let's talk about how you as a SaaS CEO are thinking about AI and bringing it into the company.

Yeah. So I think for me, really exciting time where I can see a lot of interesting technology out there and then we can go implement it and I can learn from it. So I love sharing back. So on the AI outbound That's really where we switch from this very like tons of humans doing very manual tasks outbounding to how do we centralize that around more of a growth ops function and use clay.com to do really interesting orchestration at scale and using AI to craft some of the messaging, to normalize some of the data, to use more of the web scraping and a lot of these different things that would have been very manual human tasks. Also seeing with our webinar and event strategy where Goldcast has a really interesting content lab where you can use AI to remix and take out really interesting content snippets and then use that as part of your content strategy. So I think that's really cool.

You mentioned this, a couple of that. What is clay.com?

Yeah, clay.com is the kind of orchestration tool that we use that connects tons of different data sources, that connects into sequencing, that will write emails, that will use AI to kind of normalize or clean up data. We'll dynamically generate images that we can insert into email, dynamically find and write personalized content based on more vague topical points. So I think it's a really cool tool that has helped us scale that.

And you mentioned Goldcast Content Lab. We use them for all of our virtual events and webinars. And I think that's something that's really useful because it's like this is something that you're already doing like we're already going to record this conversation and then to get those timestamps and clips and you know, notable moments back to you as opposed to in the past and you know, in the past I've had to hire like a video team and have full, full time in house video people like cut the clips. And I think that's a, that's a perfect use case to AI. How do you, how do you know what's what's worth like sharing your to your team about sharing with your team versus like being a distraction. Sometimes I feel like I'm like check this out, you know the chat GPT 4. Chat GBT 4. Oh like check this out. I can get this translated. We should think about this. And it's like how do you balance the between like sharing new technology and new ideas versus like being a distraction because in some cases you want to, you want to. It's your job to push the team and to like have them think about new ways to do things at the same time. Like you can just throw a hundred things at them. They're like man, we got so much other stuff to do.

It's a great point. I mean, first and foremost, I'll take demos with all these new companies, or I'll even take free trials and sign up and play around with them a little bit. So there's a bit of me learning first to make sure it's just not like a shiny website. And I'm like, oh, this is cool. Go check it out. But I'll actually get in the weeds, and that cuts out like 90% of the crap. And then if I'm like, hey, this could actually be really good, then I'll say, here's a cool idea. Here's something. I tend not to push it on, like, go do this. But a more of like an informative, you should check this out. And then I cross my fingers and hope that they actually want to check it out. If not, you know, no harm. But, you know, my goal is really just to be kind of a collaborator with a lot of my different.

I think it just. I think that the technology piece is such a important part of marketing and really just revenue in general today. Like, we mentioned Guillaume earlier, but, like, he's somebody that I learned a lot from working together where I come from. Much more of, like, the copywriting, storytelling, brand positioning, background. He's much more. He's the growth. He's the growth guy. He's the hat. He's the growth hacker. But what I saw him do, and I've seen other people do this, like Tom Wentworth, who's a CMO of a company called Recorded Futures, a friend of mine, and he's somebody that's always trying new things, always trying new products. I see this with Kip, like, signing up for new products all the time. I feel like you can create it. There's such. There's such few advantages that you can create in your career. Being an early adopter is one of them. And like, being super curious and like, signing up for tools and technology, trying to bring new things into play. And so I'm saying this on this podcast because I do think for the people that are listening, like, don't let all the noise about technology and AI this and that, don't let that blind you from, like, there actually is an opportunity. And how can you be the curious early adopter and be like, yeah, we're going to try this thing and bring this in and be like, this is the CEO of $100 million company telling me he still signs up for new tools and takes demos and trials. Like, don't you see that that can be an advantage for you? To be an earlier adopter with tools and tech, Right?

Yeah, exactly. Great point.

What else is interesting to you about AI? Like how does, how is AI going to play? With what, with what you all do with direct mail and gifting and outbound? What role is it going to play?

No, I'm really bullish on AI and gifting or direct mail. I think AI has a really unique place where you can use it to increase convenience versions for us and increase productivity. And so I think AI is really good at analyzing like gazillions of data points, writing and messaging, providing recommendation engines and so plug for us. Plugging in the tens of millions of gifts sent the hundreds of thousands of senders. We have this really interesting data set of what works. And so our end goal is like, how do we help our customers drive conversion or productivity by way of like what's the right message to send, what's the right gift to send, what's the right time to send it, who's the right person to send to and what's the right delivery channel? And so all of those things play into how we can leverage AI and a really strong data foundation, which was one of the reasons why we picked up and acquired Alice not too long ago was because of our kind of our future vision of this core data foundation to really build this AI engineering.

Let's talk about like a specific example for people so how like let's give the marketers that listen this like a maybe an actual campaign example of where AI would sit and what. Doing what doing this without AI would look like and versus what it could look like.

So I'll go down that kind of message gift time person delivery channel. So we could you know, find the right gift for you through our Smart Send feature. You can just plug in like your email address and we'll come back and say hey, we know Dave likes xyz. And so that's a. Shortens the time that could have spent 15 minutes researching or 0 minutes sending the wrong gift to. Wow. Instantly getting suggestions. You could also plug in if you don't want to put in a specific email. You could say hey, what are people in, you know, Boston like versus Florida? And so there's that kind of recommendation more on like a Persona basis.

Oh, that would be. That's juicy. That's their. That's for the off the record comedy.

Yeah, I'm actually thinking about doing some like a LinkedIn Live weekly where I just like plug in some of these recommendations and just like see what, see what it spins up live and Send out gifts live.

So I think you should bring that in and bring in the election cycle into that layer on politics and then get really spicy with what people.

Yeah, and then we can write the message and craft that through a feature we call Pun Pal where it can use AI to write the message based on the person, the gift, the value prop. And so again, saving someone 15 minutes or saving them the better written message that converts more than a crappy written message. We also like on the right time, going to be pulling in first and third party data around. Hey, send this because of this data happening in your CRM or this data happening in the intent world, et cetera. And then we're innovating right now on a really interesting smart delivery feature that we'll be releasing where we can say, hey, don't send to Chris, he's not in the office, send to his home and here's his home address. Or hey, you, we know that, you know, Dave goes in the office because of xyz, send it to his office and surprise him. So there's a really interesting data set too around suggestion engine for delivery to.

How would you get all that? How do you. Where does that data come from?

There's a mixture of proprietary data, a bunch of data available that is available for consumers that were matched to business profiles.

Like how would somebody know if I work from home or go to an office?

Yeah. So there's a mixture of IP data that we can pull from your IP and where you're sitting, there's interesting data that we can pull from content that you're posting about or maybe you're talking on a podcast and mentioning this. Or there's a video where we can see you're at home. Or we can check that you don't even have an office or there's your office is so far away from where your LinkedIn location is. Or we know that your office address is this and your home address is this.

This is all data that like lives in send that you have.

This is a mixture of data that some data we have some data that's sits in other data providers. There's like, you know about 500 data providers out there. A lot of this is not necessarily new for consumers. It's new. It's applying some of this really interesting data set that's more consumer ties into the business B2B world. And at the end of the day all that AI just drives more conversions because if you get an interesting gift like some diapers at your house at the right time, at the right Message.

Yeah. You know, let me tell you something, Chris. You know what the worst thing people send is? Any. Any one of those buy. I've never had an opportunity to talk about this. Any one of those boxes that has all of the freaking, like, zigzag stuffing in it. Like, people will send me a mug. And inside of that box, in the mug, there is so much trash and nonsense. I instantly hate the brand that sent me the mug because it becomes more of a nuisance on the other side. If you want to. If you want me to love you. I forget what. I forget what I did. Who. Who sent me this, but I spoke at somebody's event, and they sent me, like, 24 cookies. Like, amazing. Oh, my God, we crushed those cookies in, like, five days. That's how. That's how you do. Anyway, this is a. This is a soapbox for a different. A different podcast. But I do think that stuff matters. It's like, make. Make, make the packaging. Make the packaging easy. But that's not on you. That's on the. That's on the people. That's on us.

We help suggest these things to our customers. We help with really thinking about.

But you don't own, like, the. You don't own the actual products, right? Like, aren't you working with companies that, like, create the products?

So we work with companies that create the process, the products. But. And we're not necessarily manufacturer, but we do do logistics and warehousing and fulfillment. So we are helpful in some of that as well. But, yeah, a lot of it goes into our global marketplace, our global fulfillment network that we can influence.

So does everybody that uses Sendoso. Is it to send gifts specifically? Or, like, would I use Sendoso to, like, I have 500 exit, five hoodies. I want to store those somewhere.

We'll do storage and shipping of swag. You could send 10,000 hoodies or one hoodie at a time. You can send unlimited swag, either swag on demand, one off, or we can source and procure tens of thousands of swag items. There's really infinite gifts that we have in our marketplace that you could send, you know, someone macaroon cookies if they're in Paris, or, you know, Dunkin Donuts if you're in Boston. You can send direct mail, flat mail, printed booklets. Like, maybe you have a really interesting book that you release and you want to send that with a page highlighted in it. We've sent Oculuses. The list goes on. It's really infinite. There's experience you can send that's an.

Interesting thing to sell then like as a, as a service, as a product. Right. Because the use case is different. Like how do people think about the. Like the ROI is different. Right. Like if I'm using this to, for sales, then it's like, it's pretty easy to, it's pretty easy to measure. Like, I sent Dave some cookies, he booked a meeting and he bought like cookies for the win. But there's also a whole use case for like just the logistics part with like, I'm sure you have so many customers that are like using it, using your product for customer marketing or like surprise and delight or even large teams that need it for fulfillment. Do they think about the ROI of like a platform like this differently?

They do, yeah. So some of those examples they might have, you know, like the customer welcome kits or things like that. They, they might think of the ROI as less of like, hey, I'm trying to drive an instant conversion that I can track. But more so like, hey, I, I can outsource all of the sourcing procurement logistics effort. So I just click a button or I set up a complete automation. Anytime something equals closed one in Salesforce, automatically send this and you can kind of set it, forget it. We also have huge economies of scale, kind of like Costco, in effect, where we can say, hey, we'll buy that hoodie for you cheaper than you could buy it yourself. And we can ship it cheaper than you could ship it yourself. And you don't have to spend any hours of your payday shipping it or your employees, you know, your director, demand gen or director of customer marketing. So there's a lot of different productivity, time saving, cost savings, ROI analogies.

So you just look at it differently. Like instead of having to hire someone and manage this whole process, here's what we spent. Do you do, do, do you do any like the print? Like, do you create swag for people you have?

Oh, yeah, for sure. We, you know, we will rely on a lot of partners, but we'll provide a lot of suggestions. We have a whole campaign services team that will kind of be almost like agency ask and pitching ideas or validating your ideas and we'll go out and procure all of the items and source it. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes.

Yeah, I worked for, I worked at Drift and I worked for this guy, David Cancel, who's amazing founder and CEO and he was unbelievable at marketing. And the reason this topic is interesting to me is because I think that in marketing we often look for like the, the hacky stuff, the optimization stuff. And he was so big on from like we started a podcast called Seeking Wisdom. From like day one we got our first like listener email. He's like, send that person. Oh, we talked about a book. We talked about Ogilvy on advertising. On this podcast episode, some woman writes in and it's like, I love that episode. He's like, send her the book. And I'm like really? Y. Yep. Spend the $20. Send her the book. Send her the book. She takes a picture, she posts on LinkedIn. Like it. It just. There's something about, especially in this digital era and the era it's like the physic, physical goods, physical gifts. Whether it's a handwritten note or, or cookies or a book. Like he showed me that those interactions like the brand affinity and create and connection that you can create when doing stuff. And so I think it's easy to look at something like Sandosa and say like oh yeah, yeah, I get it. You send gifts to prospects. But like I actually think there's a whole marketing, there's a whole marketing and brand building like affinity play here. You have to work for someone who understands this and is willing to spend on it to do it. Because otherwise it's like, well we, we spent $30 and send Chris a hoodie. Like what's the value of that? But he, you know, one of the greatest brands to ever do this was mailchimp and they would like, they would do random things like they would like do like custom knitted like hats for your cat or something and just people would take pictures of that and post it on social. And I think those, these opportunities are so underrated and undervalued. Like what, what could. Even if you can only send out 10, 10 thing, you know, to, to 10 people because you have a small budget.

It's amazing what like the psychology of gifting or the tangible nature of opening up a box and the surprise of that and delight with that. And like you said, the, the brand affinity, the building of a community, the social. It's like I think everyone got overly focused on like results, attribution, Demand gen. Every dollar equals $10. And some of the indirect ability to build brand and community is paying off. For those companies that did have executive leadership saying let's do this. I think it's huge.

We need to figure out how Sendoso becomes the exclusive swag provider for, for exit 5. Let's do it because so I wrote a book to you. I wrote a book two years ago and I, I got all these books, like the extra copies that came to my house from it, from the publisher. And just like even sending those out, like a friend would be like, yo, send me a copy of the book. And I'm like, okay. You actually have no idea how much, how much, how much effort that is to like package an individual book, get their address, go to the post office, pay for shipping on each one of those. It's like, it's a nightmare.

Yeah, that's where you just load it up in our platform. You click a button, you could ask them for their fill in their address. So you don't have to worry about that if you don't have it. We've even done some fun things where it's like, we'll highlight like page 8 and then have a handwritten note go along with it saying, like, I think you'd like this. So there's really interesting things. And like you said, a click of a button, an automation, a, a CSV upload if you want to go that route. But it's so much easier to click a button than it is to like run to the post office and find a box and, and it saves you money. We have such economies of scale that like our shipping rates are way better than you'd ever be able to get.

Yeah, I think the book sold for like 1299 or something. And it was like 895 to ship it to somebody. And I'm like. And then like, God forbid it was someone from outside the US I'd be like, oh, I'm not shipping them. You're not, you're not getting this book. So we talked about, we talked about like the surprise and delight type of gifting. Where do you think the best point in the sales funnel is to deploy this? Is it like before the meeting to get a meeting, after the meeting. Do you have any best practices around that?

Yeah, so I'd usually look at. And I think about this case by case of. And that's where our sales team really becomes consultants for new prospects. It's like, well, where is the specific company, company Acme codes, Where is the biggest pain? Are they booking a lot of meetings but have a 50% show rate? Well, let's solve that. Or hey, they, there's a huge gap in, you know, top of funnel pipeline. They're not getting enough meetings. Let's focus on that. Or hey, their sales cycle has been getting longer and longer. How do we shorten that? And so I think about it as this, like, not, it's not like a One size fits all. Close your eyes and shoot out a gazillion gifts. It's how do you figure out where in the cycle you're optimizing for? And then what can we. How do we make that easy to, to drive results for you? So I know it's not the perfect answer, but I think it's a better answer for marketers or salespeople to think about. Hey, where's. Where can we look at metrics that we want to improve on in business?

What else is interesting to you, Chris, that we should talk about with this, with this engaged audience of marketing folks? Hungry, Hungry to get better.

One area that I really like is this. What we're kind of dubbing internally is like growth Ops. It's kind of like a, what I think about it is kind of a rev Ops mindset taking action. And so really I'm excited for this kind of team that's focused around orchestrating a lot of our outbound, finding talent that's more obsessed with APIs and automations and data and how they can stitch those together, and then also managing some of the AI centrally in one team versus trying to think that everyone can just pick up these really robust, complex tools overnight. Which again, that is one of the catch 22 is some of these AI tools are not easy to pick up on. And so having a centralized growth ops.

Team, I think it's going to be a whole new job function. I mean, I, I gotta listen to other people's podcasts and read other people's stuff. I, I open up Chad GPT and I feel like I'm using one feet. I feel like there's a million ways and I'm using it like one way. But you. So you're. So growth ops is different than revenue ops. Revenue ops is more like defense.

I think it's more defense. It's more, it's more system focused, maybe data focused, but mostly behind the scenes and less like taking action. Now I'm generalizing because there's probably some Rev Ops people listening saying, like, fu, I do all that.

Yeah, they're gonna hate me. Sean, Sean, my boy. Sean Lane, if you're listening to this, I'm sorry, man.

No, but I love the function. My goal is just to try to like, rephrase it so that we think about, hey, how do you use that stuff, that, that expertise and then apply it to outbound? Because I don't know, there's not as many rev Ops people going out there and like owning all of the outbound and trying to Drive pipeline. They might be stitching the systems together, pulling in data but then maybe there's an SDR doing the legwork. This is more of a big data, big systems, big automations approach and like.

Working with a like so for me, I'm, I'm director of marketing Dave at a, you know, $12 million ARR B2B SaaS company. This team is like my partner. Like hey we, we want to do X, Y and Z. This team is like my partner. It's like an enablement role so we can go do cool stuff.

I think it's bridging the gap between like where demand gen and kind of rev ops meet but also centralizing that across. We use this to help drive automation with our partner engagements with our customer expansion and customer upsells. So I think it's a team that's going to be able to utilize all these somewhat complex, tricky tools to drive way more exponential value than just like one plus one equals two. It's like some of the new modern tech is going to be 1 plus 1 equals 10 if you get it right.

What's an example of like what growth ops is doing inside of Sendoso right now?

Yeah, so I think it's like our whole clay and outbound approach has been built centrally where it's been managed from more of a marketing centralized function than maybe you know, a sales development group sitting under sales. That team is savvy enough to know about APIs, about connecting data around, you know, waterfalling multiple data sources around integrating that into the multiple martech systems, around pushing data into Snowflake if we need to. You know it's kind of like G, if we go back to what he did back in the day, it's kind of thinking about this growth function which I think is some teams have it, some teams don't. It's somewhat more popularized than kind of maybe B2C where you're, you have to fight fires with one to gazillion scale. I think B2B for the human combat, let's just throw more heads at it. And I think this new team is able to drive exponential results and really create a killer, you know cactelf TV because you're not inflating it with you know, so many heads you're able to do way more with with data.

It's almost like the whole role of like Martech honestly like martech and sales to any of the. There's so much like we talked about earlier, there's so many tools and technology like to have somebody to Have a team and people that are responsible for, like, knowing the ins and outs. Like, I'm. I'm really good with ideas and strategy, but I'm often not good at, like, knowing what's possible. And so, like, when I worked with G, as any, as an example, I'd be like, oh, here's how we could do this and this. And here's how I'm gonna do it. He's like, no, I wish I could do his accent, but he'd be like. He'd be like, no, you. Like, we can actually automate it with this and this and this. And so give me the copy. Give me this, like. And that created an amazing partnership versus, like, me trying to figure out everything with like Google Docs and Zapier is. Is like V1, but V2 is now like Zap Zapier custom GPTs. Like figuring out all these age, like, just so there's so many ways to do something. But I think having that carved out as a dedicated team is interesting. It puts everybody in a. In a better position.

I think it allows us to go find and hunt for talent that wants to think differently, that wants to find the modern tools. It also is a forcing function for us to say, hey, go do it differently. Like, don't run the playbook of, you know, 2010. Go reinvent a new playbook and kind of excited for, you know, the next. Like you said, next five years are going to be a huge unlock and a huge, you know, transformative years for marketing.

Everybody talks about intent signals, right?

Oh, yeah.

What are some of the intent signals that people might not be using yet that you think could be interesting?

Yeah, I love intent. I mean, it just warms up the reason for you reaching out and provides that much more personalization, I think, you know, there's a lot of the web intent, first party intent. There's a lot of this third party. Someone searched on Forbes.com for an article and you got that. But a couple of the ones I'm we've been exploring and having some success with, especially now with AI and that you can use AI to really take on summaries or use API calls to gather tons of audio and video content. So one is podcasts. There's a tool called Listen Notes that's interesting because you can go and leverage. We just talked for the last 45 minutes or whatever, and there's some interesting tidbits in here that you wouldn't want to necessarily listen. You wouldn't want to. For every Prospect listed for 45 minutes, perhaps but if you could pull out four things really quickly and use that in prospecting into me, Chris, or you, Dave, that's like super valuable. So I think there's a lot of intent data that was locked in interesting podcasts, interesting video webinars that will now be instantly available through AI tech to pull out the snippets and then very easily transform that into an email personalization. So I think that's really interesting. And then I think there's, there's still a lot of interesting intent locked up in partners. And I think some of the tools like Crossbeam and Reveal have really interesting data sets that if you can use that wisely and at scale for intent, it's going to help with your both acquisition leveraging partners as well as cross selling.

All right, Chris, I'll give you the, I'll give you the mic for the final, final thing, something I didn't ask you or we should have talked about before we wrap up.

I think we had a great conversation. I mean, what other things that are burning to me maybe is just I love getting involved in meeting new people. So if people want to reach out to me, Chris, at doso.com or follow me on LinkedIn, join the conversation there. But a big networker, you know, hopefully I can get out to your event too. I was reading up on that in Vermont. That looks kick ass. So I know you sold out pretty quickly, so maybe I'll sneak in a ticket or something if we can.

I have some reserve. We did sell it out, but I pulled the CEO card and I got a couple reserve and that comes with a turkey sandwich, so lucky you. All right, man, well, nice to meet you. Thank you for hanging out on the podcast. First time we've covered the topic of gifting and direct mail and I think there's a lot of people listening that are trying to do creative things out there. And I think that's what's exciting about marketing right now is there is, you know, the world is your oyster. There's more tools than ever at your disposal. But what are you going to do that stands out? How are you going to be different? And I think that's something that we want to help people do through this podcast. So I appreciate you coming on. Check out Chris on LinkedIn. We'll link to him. Check out Sendoso. And thanks for hanging out with us on the Exit 5 podcast.