065. The Role of Gifting in Demand Generation with Kris Rudeegraap

Foreign hello everyone, my name is Emilio Garcia. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. I welcome everyone as always, I'm hoping that you are having a great week. And with me today I'm happy to be joined by Chris, Rudy Grab and hopefully I said that correctly, Chris, CEO of Sandoso. We have the opportunity to meet over email and exchange some conversations. I thought it was a great opportunity to invite him to Demand Gen Studio and talked about gifting and how it might have a play as part of broader demand generation program. Really excited to have you Chris. Thank you for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.

All right, so let's start right away. Chris. I think most of our listeners will be, you know, interest on learning a little bit more about you. Obviously you are the CEO of a well known company and brand but tell us a little more about you, what you do, how you got here, your story and then we can dive into some of the details of this conversation for sure.

And I'll preface if you don't know what Sendoso is at a high level we are a corporate gifting and direct mail platform. So we help marketing teams and sales teams with pipeline, driving revenue, improving win rates by sending stuff out. Could be a bottle of wine, could be some swag and a T shirt, could be printed collateral, you name it. We help with the global fulfillment, integrating into your tech stack and making it as easy to send physical items as it is to send emails. And that all came about about eight years ago and then that's when I started Sendoso because I had a background in sales. So I spent about a decade in software sales and I found myself sending out lots of spammy emails and figure and getting lower and lower response rates. And I said what else can I do to grab the attention of a prospect or to differentiate myself during the sales process. And so I was manually, you know, writing a handwritten note, sending it out. I was manually being on a call and hearing a dog bark in the background and being like, ooh, I'll buy a little dog toy and send it. Or at the time marketing had this swag closet and I'd sneak in, grab stuff, pack it up, ship it out to prospects and it worked so well. It was just super manual and tiring to like pack boxes, click on tracking links, you know, send expense reports to my boss. And I dreamed up of a solution that automated it all especially so that it integrated with my day to day tech stack workflow tools. And that's how it was born. You know, basically built Sendosa for myself and then realized that it was a huge problem that, you know, every marketing and sales team was. Was needing.

Yeah, love it. And yeah, I agree with you. Right. There are situations where transforming it, you know, digitizing some aspect of it really makes a. Makes a difference. And I can definitely relate to that. I think that's how I came across the company in the past. Right. I, at the time I was thinking of maybe, you know, the, the one that you will do maybe at the end of the year, thinking, well, I would like to send something to some of our clients. And now I start. And then I started thinking, well, I will have to ask for the addresses and I don't know exactly what they will like. And so it's got to be something. And literally that's what I did. I just went in and. And kind of search. I don't remember exactly what, but kind of search around the idea of is there a way to send him in, you know, gifts in mass or in batches? And I can. I came across your solution. So yeah, I think definitely there's a need down there for sure. So you are therefore both the founder and obviously the CEO right now. How, how that trip has been so far. The. Yeah, I'm sure it was. It is, it is, you know, full of ups and downs.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely quite the journey. I think, you know, when starting out, you're really trying to prove that there's a product market fit. You know, I built this for myself, so I instantly knew, like, at least there's gonna be one customer, it's gonna be me, and I'm gonna use this. But then I really, in the early years, had to invest in like brand and category development because, you know, people didn't know who Sentosa was. And also people didn't know they might have needed us or knew that we were a solution available or even thought that, like you said, how do I find addresses? Oh, we can solve for that. Oh, how do I figure out what the recipient wants? Oh, well, we have an exchange process. You can send them something and they can pick something else or. Oh, so there's all these different things that people don't know. And so that was a lot in the early years, which was, how do I build this like category and educate the market that we exist out there?

Yes. Now there's actually a ton of questions that I have as a follow up on, you know, how gifting might match into different programs that demand generation professionals and B2B marketers in general might think of where Solutions like Sendoso might make sense, right. In general, let me give you some background here for, for you and for, for the rest of the audience. I, I came into this marketing, you know, industry from engineering. I got drawn into the numbers. So I don't have, I don't have formal marketing, you know, like learning or education from college. So there's a whole bunch of things that I was not aware of that over time have changed my mind. For example, one key important one that have developed over time is this idea of the quality of impressions, right. It's like it's not the same that you see an ad, or we almost ignore them nowadays, but still see them. An ad on, let's say displayed on a banner on a website versus seeing the same ad on, let's say on feed, on LinkedIn or actually in the physical world on a big billboard or when you were walking through the airport. Right. It's like I used to discount things that couldn't be measured digitally. Just because you can measure it doesn't mean that the impression itself is not of quality. And the example that I use all the time is when you get these pieces of mail at your home. Right. Totally unmeasurable, typically from credit cards and banks offering you loans and all that, you know, there's, there's an impact that happens from getting them from time to time, even if you cannot make a direct attribution to some of them. So I, I feel that one key, different, one way that we need to think about solutions like gifting or in general sending gifts for, for potential buyers is this. There's a higher quality of impression on what your brand, your brand is about. Just because obviously the, the, the, what do you call the analogy there? The Troy horse, I think, or yeah, the treasure horse is the gift.

Yes.

So I don't know if you, you know, what are your, what is your thinking around that? How, how you frame gifting as a way of, you know, building brand awareness and even self activation.

No, I think you, it's a great point. Not all impressions are created equal. And I think with gifting, the couple things that stand out for me that relate to that statement is one is you gifting is inherently a bit more personal. You know, if you can personalize the gift, hey, Chris likes golf, hey, Chris has a dog, Chris likes plants. You know, then it intrinsically gives you that much more of an impression. You know, you're going to use it more, it's going to sit on your desk.

Yeah.

And so that gives you a lot longer of an impression. It also has a word of mouth factor too. You know, there's not, there is some ads out there that are like, ooh, that was super creative. I'm going to share that with a friend or I'm going to save this as inspiration. Same. A couple of times I'll get an email being like, ooh, that's a good opener. I'm going to save that. But like it's way more common with gifting that you're like, oh, I'm going to post this on social or I'm going to thank the person for sending it. I don't think I've thanked anyone for like at, you know, sending me an email or an advertisement too frequently. But you thank people for gifts, so there's that portion of it. It's also a lot lesser of a fatigued channel because of the inherent costs. So built in, you could send like a million emails or run a bunch of ads and you see them all the time, but you don't get like 100 gifts in your, in your mailbox every day because it's costlier. So then it creates. Those moments are more impactful. I think like, like the, the airport ads, there's not like a thousand of them in the airport. There's usually a smaller amount of them because it's limited space. And so you see it more frequently than like maybe a banner ad because there's just so many of them.

There's so many of them. Yeah.

So.

And again, drawing into these things that I learned, I learned later in life, if you want to call it my, my, you said something very important that we tend to forget that even when we have all these great attribution tools and kind of like measuring all that, what really are trying to do is to, is to build in the mind of our potential buyers the reference to the brand. Right. And as you said, it's harder to reinforce the brand on digital because you have to continually spend to show up that impression again over time. And when you have something like a gift or a piece of material, even a piece of mail that you just stick in your, in your drawer or in your desk, you are remind, you know, that brand building is reinforced every time that you look at the piece, even if you're not acting on it and that out of itself has value and even when it's very hard to measure on the digital world. So I think, yep, that's something that it's a dimension that sometimes is not appreciated. Now that we are so entrenched on the digital channels and activities that as you said, is actually a potential advantage when you go back to a channel that is considered traditional now it's not so saturated and you can actually stand out.

Exactly. I don't think it's like, is it digital or is it offline? It's both. And I think in today's world, if you're a marketer, you need to be touching the buyer or getting in front of them and driving awareness across as many channels as you can, as often as you can. And I think while why we saw such a surge and are seeing such good growth right now for our gifting and direct mail platform is because it's harder to do. There's more operational complexities with global shipping, with global procurement and supply chain with tracking and all of that. And so it was a channel that was lesser used because it was harder to use than maybe just saying, hey Google, take some money and go run ads. And so that's why I think people are saying, okay, well now I can introduce, you know, a gifting or direct mail component to my integrated campaigns, or I can enable my sales team to say, hey, you get some budget to go and send some gifts to break into some of these accounts. And we'll, we'll help with that as well. But I think it's an and it's never an or. So I'm pro digital too. We run digital ads and, and I'm not talking smack on digital. I just think people that are over indexing and saying only digital need to think a little bit more outside the box.

You, you win me on the comment that was my next comment on that one is literally that one is that probably you're familiar with this. I remember years ago, I don't remember unfortunately the actual source, but they have run these experiments where you say, well, what if you do email campaign, right. And run it for a few months and to a specific set of audience. And then what if you run a mail campaign and run it for a few months and then what if you run a campaign that combines both.

Yeah.

And the expectation is, well, one will work better than the other world. The thing is that the one that combines the two channels, the real physical world and digital, is the one that always work better. And it's not just the sum. Right. It performs above what the two channels combined will do. So yes, I agree with you. I'm also not saying it's not pro diesel. On the contrary, is that the best combination is to as to mix them or put them together as a comprehensive strategy, not just like I call it.

Like the multiplier effect where you can stack different channels together. You create a multiplier effect where, you know, one, one, you know, one channel by itself, like you said, drives this much, but if you can do two or three or four, that's where you're really, you know, have exponential likelihood of driving conversion. Because at the end of the day that, you know, maybe they didn't see the email, maybe they open up the gift and saw, but didn't reply. But then they, you know, two days later saw a podcast advertisement and then we're like, ooh, aha. And then they went to the website. You know, you never know what's going to hit. And so you need to, you know, run these experiments, work through multichannel and really be where the buyer is as much as possible.

Now I have a, an exam, if not an example, at least a reference similar to that idea of the combining mail with email that I know how true it is. It was just the observation of a marketer in LinkedIn where, you know, there's a ton of comments about branding and effectiveness of marketing strategies that he was, he was arguing that part of the reason Nike CEO kind of like dropped the ball in the last few years for the company was that they, I don't know how true it is or if you're a weirdo informat one, but that they decided to, if not pull completely, at least reduce the exposure of the brand on retailers and just on their E commerce channel where obviously they have more, you know, more margin because they control the channel of that. And the argument of that person was, yeah, but you will, you're, you were ignoring that the function of having the shoes on retail stores was to remind people that along with Adidas and Converse, there's Nike. Because if you just, if you are using your own space right, you are limiting where people will find you. We're reminded of you. So it is an interesting argument that the point that I'm trying to make here is that probably some of our listeners will be thinking, yes, the gifting probably is in a different level of expense. You know, if I look at the, at the effectiveness of that channel and how much it will cost compared to running digital, for example, or order mediums, they have different levels of cost. But I don't know your take on.

Yeah, when you go actually have a hot take on the cost kind of misconception, because I think a lot of people think, ooh, gifting expensive. I send, if I send somebody, you know, a $25 succulent in the Mail who? Someone who likes succulents like myself. Like that's $25. I could send them an email for $0. Yeah, but I think the two things that I think about is one, at the end of the day, if you're a really savvy marketer and you really obsess over data, sounds like you do, you could look at some analytics to say, hey, $1 sending, spending $1 in ads drives, you know, $12 in pipeline, but sending $1 in gifting drives $40 in pipeline. And so that, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is, well, if I, if it takes me four months by sending email, email, email, email to get someone into my pipeline, but it takes me one week because they sent them that perfect gift that converted them, what is that like three and a half months of time that could have been a customer and paying you revenue versus you know, you being a little bit cheaper and saying hey, I don't want to afford these more maybe costly looking channels. And so I think that's another misconception is the time to drive revenue and the time to bring pipeline in sooner and to shorten those, those like shorten your sales cycles or improve your win rates.

I love that because it's a great segue into my next comment, I guess or my next question probably in the mind of some of our listeners. Yes, I love what you're saying. Right. Is the cost is. Well, closing a deal at a lower cost is not the only way that you can incrementally increase profit. Right. Or revenue or profit coming from revenue. You can just sell more, more deals, faster, larger deals and a shorter time. Do you have many levers that you're mentioning? Obviously the one is like what if it shortens the sales cycle? Yeah, but my, my next question will be in, in my mind at least how I see it for B2B. Typically some of, of of B2B marketers will consider like a go to market motion where gifting will be more on the high end, high touch kind of larger deals, longer sales cycles maybe worth obviously more money where gifting might be justified. Listing principle. And I remember in our conversation before you were mentioning, well maybe Emilio that that barrier is not necessarily, you know, it can be even lower. Not necessarily no touch. But, but maybe what you will consider in the past something where gifting was not an option might be with, with how technology has progressed and maybe the, the way it works now, something for marketers to consider as well. I don't know what Is your take on that one you probably have heard right. It's like, well, how do you set up your sales team and your marketing motions, depending on the types of deal, how big they are and all that?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's definitely true that the bigger the deal size, you have more customer acquisition costs or CAC built in that you can afford to say, hey, this is $100,000 ACV. We could spend, you know, thousand bucks on a gift and still have a good roi. But what I, my answer to that is it's not always the cost of the gift, but it's that, what is that gift? How personalized is it and what triggers that response? For an example, I might be selling a very, very small end. Maybe it's 50 bucks a month solution that I'm just like trying to market and, or maybe it's a thousand bucks. Let's say it's a really small costing solution. And my prospect, you know, maybe mentioned on a podcast or maybe we were maybe they had shown on like a LinkedIn post that they love, like pumpkin spice lattes this time of year. And so if you send them a, you know, a $5 Starbucks card saying, hey, get a pumpkin spice latte on me, they're like, oh, wow, you, you know, you know, I like these things. And yes, I'll go get a, I'll go get one. I want one. Anyway, I mentioned it two days ago and that's five bucks. And that's not an expensive gift. But it was like the personalization that was the value that drove that person to saying, so. So I don't think you need to go spend, you know, and spend, you know, thousands of dollars on a gift. It's, it could be the right gift. And I look at personalization either personalizing the person like that Starbucks latte, it could be, hey, I, I want to get Chris to this, you know, golf event and I'm going to send him a single golf ball that has our logo on it with a little note about, hey, have a hole in one with us. Like that. Again, that's probably seven bucks to send. Not expensive, but it's personalizing for the action, which is, I want them to come to this event. We've seen people send out like golden tickets in the mail. That's like, hey, come and meet with me. Here's your golden ticket. And again, like five bucks to send something like that out. Not crazy expensive. Now, you know, you can send, spend more money and it will likely increase the chances of conversion. Or maybe someone Mentions hey, I have a dog. And you know, maybe there's. You send a $40 dog toy that's really cool and it's new and that will trigger it. But again, it's not about the money. It's about personalizing it and trying to elicit a response and elicit that, you know, breaking through the noise.

Gotcha. And I don't know if it's the last one, but definitely one that I want to move us into. Well, how can I make this actionable for those of us thinking, you know, some of our listeners thinking about maybe including gifting and the strategy. I typically Chris, frame any digital non digital channel or format as being capable of helping you on either marketing efforts or sales activities or customer success efforts. Rather than example content you can use on your website to educate your buyers on the marketing journey, build trust on the sales process and finally help them help themselves with the documentation. Right. Using the same idea of content. Or you can use, you can use that for email. But for in your perspective, based on what you have seen your clients do and the broader use of gifting as a part of a channel, first, where do you see it most? You know, where do you see it used most, the most. And second, if someone here listening is thinking about gifting as adding part of their tool set, what are your recommendations? Where do you think they should start? Most of the time in this bucket or realm of marketing, sales, customer success, if it applies. And second, even when it's clear to me that it's not about, you know, necessarily the size of the gif, but the, the action and the intent on it, if you have any, you know, insights into typically where it's used on, on, on the on deal sizes or types of, of of deals and even, you know, if you have a recommendation there as well.

Yeah. So let me break that down. That was a couple of different things you said. The first was around the rec. Well, you said recommendations on thinking about what to send then, then your where to where. When and what. When to send. Yeah. So the first one I'd say is, you know, the most, the, the most obvious place that we see people using gifting and direct mail is top of funnel trying to grab that attention and driving them in. Whether that's driving them into a book meeting with the sales rep, whether that's hey sign up for this webinar or hey come to this event. So it's really trying to grab that first prospect's attention. So and I think that's the easiest one to, to start with. However for most of our clients in a consultative kind of approach that we look at our clients is like, where is like the leaky buckets in your business? And not all the same. Someone might be like, hey, I have a ton of top of funnel, but our win rates suck. How do we improve win rates? Or hey, I'm getting a ton of people booking meetings, but I'm only getting like a 40% show rate. How do I improve show rates? Or hey, we get, we're signing up like hundreds of new customers a month, but like a lot of them are starting to churn on us and we don't know what we could do to engage them more. Hey, maybe a customer welcome kit or a graduate from onboarding gift. And so we like to think of ourselves as like, let's go look at the leaky buckets and figure out how do you patch those with gifting so that you can improve your win weights, improve your churn, improve your second call rates. And so it's a little bit more prescriptive and consultative, but I think that's better because then it's not like a one size fits all. It's a, where can we fit into your biggest pains or your biggest leaky buckets? Yeah, I love that. And, and so I, so that's the first answer. The other thing about like what to send, you know, the way that we have this framework that we like to talk about, which is like, right gift, right message, right time, right person and right delivery channel. And we're building innovative tools based on data and, and AI to make that easier. Because, you know, I might have mentioned that like that pumpkin spice latte or that golf and some. A listener might be like, well, I don't want to go scour through like hundreds of LinkedIn profiles that figure out that like Chris likes pumpkin spice lattes. Well, you don't have to. You know, a tool like Sendoso has a smart send feature where you could plug in someone's email or plug in someone's like Persona and we'll go out and spit out what this person would like and give you guest suggestions. Or you can use us to say, hey, we thought you like this, but you can also trade it in for this and this, or you could donate to charity. And so I think we try to remove the barriers of, like, of the paralysis of, well, I don't know what to send. Okay, well, we'll help you with that either through our product or we have a campaign services team. They'll actually like, hands on, talk you through, like what campaigns you should run. And so it's more of like ability for us to give you like really easy suggestions and then that also like, well, I don't know what should be on that gift message or that handwritten note. Well, if you don't know, let us use AI and we'll actually write that based on a lot of data that we have on what converts better. What you're trying to accomplish with that, whether that's booking a meeting or improving dental show rate. And so the beauty of that is we've been at this for like 8 years with hundreds of millions of data points, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on our platform. And that gives us this advantage of helping kind of all of our customers, including the new customer that signs up tomorrow based on all the data in the past.

Yeah, love it, love it. Yeah, that's fantastic. I really don't have any more questions. I think you have coverall. I, I love what you're saying. Right. I use the same idea when we're talking about you. All the things that you can do on demand generation, right. For prospects and clients is well, where are you leak?

Where are you leaks?

Right. Typically.

Right.

The top is the one that is the most for almost everyone. Yeah, but, but it's. Let us not assume that is the only place that you can use the channel in this case gifting as something that complements. And I love the fact that you're saying is that the assumption here is that your platform or solutions like yours allow the marketers to connect with the rest of the tech stack. Right. To say, well, I can leverage the information from my CRM, I can leverage the information from my marketing list or the customer list that I have to segment and therefore use AI to personalize.

What we are seeing. And use it inside of HubSpot. Use it inside of your CRM using sales tools like outreach or Clay or sales Loft etc, so you know, you can use gifting where you're already using your other digital channels.

Yes. Yeah. Orchestrating is the other big challenge.

Orchestration is key. Engine is tough because there's, you know, adding another channel means adding more work but you know, making it easier. A part of your workflow is going to make it a home run.

Fantastic. Well man, I have nothing else to say. Thank you so much for, for, for joining the show. Any last comment or recommendation that you might have if people want to learn more about you or connect with you and, and even Sendoso, what would be the best next thing to do?

Yeah, you know, check out sendoso.com. email me if you have questions. Chris, it's K R I s@sendoso.com or add me on LinkedIn. Always love chatting with, with other folks, other marketers, or, you know, follow along to some of the content I post.

That's our place. Fantastic man. Thank you so much. Thank you for everyone for listening. And until the next one, bye bye. See you.