Gifting: Your Marketing Secret Weapon

If I was to tell you that I found a way that you can get 59 times better ROI on your marketing dollars than advertising, and over 20 times better than LinkedIn marketing, I think you'd be interested. I know that I would be. But also, what's nice about this is it doesn't include anything illegal, first of all, but secondly, you're going to be giving somebody that you care about or would like to know about something that they're going to want to have and enjoy. And so that's going to start the relationship with those people in a really, really wonderful way. We're very, very lucky today to have someone on the show who has built a business from the ground up since 2016 with his partner based in San Francisco. I'm joined today by Chris Rudegrap, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of a company called Sendoso. Chris, welcome to the show.

Jim, thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be here and, uh, to chat with you today.

Well, I'm excited as well because you've got a proposition that has attracted investment. You've raised over, over $150 million. You've gone global very, very quickly. So we're gonna talk about the business you've started, how you managed to survive COVID, and what it is that you're doing that's increasing the ROI on marketing dollars for your clients. Chris, tell us about Sendoso and your story first.

Yeah, so for those who don't know about Sendoso, so we are a global corporate gifting and direct mail platform. Um, the cool thing about us is we're built on software and data so that we integrate into companies' tech stacks like their CRM, their marketing automation, their sales engagement platforms, and make it easy to send 1 or 1,000, uh, gifts or mailers, uh, out at any given time through our global warehouse and global marketplace of gifting options. Come up with the— I came up with the idea back in 2016 when I was in sales. So I spent about a decade as a seller myself. And through that time, I really found out that email was becoming less effective, which is ironic because as of today, I feel like I'm getting more emails than I did 10 years ago. But even 10 years ago, I felt like I had too many emails. And so I started to test other things like sending out handwritten notes, like sending out swag from our swag closet, or I'd be on a call and hear a dog bark and send a dog toy after. And that, that just worked. But it was manual and time intensive. I was packing boxes, I was clicking tracking links, I was expense reporting. And so I dreamed up of a solution, a.k.a. Sendoso, that solved all that for me. And here we are today.

Well, and you're solving it for a lot of people as well, aren't you? Now you've gone global. Tell us then, Sendoso, just tell us which markets you're in and let's look at the kind of clients that you've got, Chris, and the kind of products that you're sending so we can just get a bit more detail on that.

Of course. So we're global. You can use us almost anywhere in the world we can ship to. We also have a global marketplace of localized products too. So you could send someone some macaroons if your prospects or customers in Paris, or you could send someone some cupcakes if they're in Florida in the United States. We have localized gift options around the world, whether you're in, you know, America and the North America region, South America, Europe, EMEA, whether in APAC, globally, you can use the platform. And then our options are almost infinite. So we have a marketplace of pre um, kind of shortlisted, pre-curated items. Um, and then we have our camping services team that can come up with custom ideas for you. Um, and so this team will brainstorm with you almost agency-like on what it could be, and then we'll go out there and source and procure those and then, and then store and ship those out on demand for you.

So Chris, that is Sendoso, which is as in to send something. Sendoso.com, by the way. And for anyone that wants to go to my YouTube channel, you can see I'm doing screen sharing as well, so that you can see what Chris and his partner, Braden Young, have come up with. You mentioned localization and really getting down to very personal gifts there, Chris, cupcakes, you know, giving just novelty items. So these are not, if you like, supposed to be contract winners. They're not sort of $100,000, $200,000 junkets, are they? These are very personal gifts. Why Why does that work, do you think, in a business setting?

Yeah, so, you know, I think when I think about personalization, we like to have kind of 3 different ways you can personalize. You can personalize to the individual, like Chris likes plants, Chris has a dog, maybe I'll send him something related to his personal interests. You could also personalize based on the signal, like Chris just changed jobs, let's send him some champagne and celebrate that job change. Or you could personalize based on the action, like I want to invite Chris to a golf event. So I'm going to send him some custom golf balls as part of that custom send. And so I think that those work because one, there's this psychological reciprocity built into gifting and direct mail so that you, when you get something you want, you feel more compelled to reply or respond or engage. There's also the tangibility and the tangible nature of gifting. You open up a box, you feel a bit more connected to it than just, you know, an ad or an email. There's also the scarcity. Not everyone is sending out gifts, so you receive less of them, so they feel more important. And then, you know, lastly, it really comes down to just the overall experience and getting a gift as part of a multi-touch experience. So We like to say like gifting is not just a silver bullet. You're going to send 10 gifts and instantly everyone's just going to come knocking on your door. But if you combine it with digital marketing, if you combine it with cold calls and emails, you're increasing your likelihood to get that response, or you're increasing the value that you're trying to receive or the conversion you're trying to get. So it's just another touchpoint to engage with prospects or customers.

Chris, you touched on something there that I would like to just ask because There is a danger, presumably, that if you give, say, the procurement manager in a company a gift, that other people inside of the organization may feel that person is compromised. What's your sort of guidance or thought about the danger that people who are receiving gifts might feel that they're being—

Yeah, I can give some—

In some way—

So there's a couple different ways we can take this. One is, we, because we're software-based, we can set up rules and validation and compliance. And so one of the things that this helps is, is that in a lot of organizations, this is already happening without leadership knowing. You might have a salesperson that just goes out and sends stuff. And that's like what I did. And it was, there was no visibility, there was no transparency, it was just happening. And so you're at risk. And so what we do is we say centralize all that activity so that we can track it and we could prevent it. You can set up these validation rules that says, Hey, if they're in procurement, don't send a gift to them. But if they're in marketing leadership, send a gift to them. So there's this compliance layer that's built into our software that tons of larger enterprises love and use. There's also the right time to send a gift, and it might be not at the very beginning of the sales process. It might be a thank you after they become a customer. And that could also help eliminate any kind of gray area. There's also, besides, you know, hey, you're not going to send— maybe it's a Rolex or a $1,000 iPad or a $200 bottle of wine. You could send a printed collateral booklet and/or you could send something of very low value. You could send a video box where the box opens up and plays a video and that shares information about the product or service offering. So not all gifts have to have a very high monetary value. You can be more thoughtful, and certain people that you're trying to sell into, or certain prospects or customers, can receive different items than others.

That's interesting, Chris. So is it also the case that people could, for example, develop a product? You mentioned like a video box, or maybe they've got— in the old days we used to use USB sticks, uh, dating myself a little bit now as everything's in the, in the cloud. But you know, we used to have branded sticks. So you're saying that a client may ship, for example, their inventory of promotional items, and then you would also manage the fulfillment for them?

Is that what I mean?

Yeah.

And we would be able to source print and do everything else on that side too. So, client could come to us with digital files or ideas and concepts, and then we'll do the heavy lifting of procuring or manufacturing or printing. And then we can print on demand or print them in advance to kit them into kits and send those out one at a time. You can also trigger it. So you can say, hey, in CRM, when customer equals closed one, automatically send this brochure and customer welcome kit. So that can have auto— be automated, or you can send in bulk too.

So really, Chris, you are helping organizations around the world to also be consistent, aren't you? Because as you mentioned, you were doing this in an isolated way, but let's say a company has a global policy of gifting, you can create some, if you like, standard approaches, can't you, for that organization so that in every country their approach to the market is the same? So I'm sure your clients are enjoying that ability to create consistency of customer experience. Is that, is that part of it?

The value? Yeah, we've been able to allow companies to systematically scale out these programs globally. And think about these as running campaigns. Now they can be localized to different regions based on what you're sending or the messaging or the language. But ultimately, companies want to be running programs in one region that they can replicate in other regions that are having success. And we can help scale that out, which prior to us, Gifti— you know, we didn't invest— invent direct mail. Gifting is actually way more common. Like 20, 30 years ago, everyone was doing direct mail first. But because digital and that pendulum shifted so far into digital, everyone kind of got over-innudated and saturated with digital and forgot about almost this, the creativity and the craft of sending out physical items and tangible dimensional mail. And so we're bringing that back, but we're bringing it back in a modern approach that's integrated into your software tech stack so that there's data. We can incorporate AI. We can incorporate automations, which modern marketers and modern sales leaders and modern customer success and account management leaders demand.

Yeah, and I think also what you're doing is you're creating that, um, transparency, aren't you? Both for the organization and also because the, the person who's receiving the gift, they, they may have to declare that they've received that gift, I would, I would think, don't they, as well?

Um, in certain organizations, yes. Different companies have different policies, uh, and so there's different ways that they'd want to declare that depending on what it is. There's also You know, some people might be just getting like a swag item, like a jacket with a logo on it. And then this, you know, certain swag items, you know, aren't necessarily as monetary based as saying, hey, here's like a $500 Amazon gift card or a $200 bottle of wine. So again, there's different things you can send based on your industry, based on your recipient's industry, based on title, and all that can be slightly automated and with controlling compliance too.

But I suppose, Chris, what you're also doing for the person who's receiving the gift is you're showing that you thought about them. Exactly. And ultimately, it may be not so much about the monetary value, but that they've been recognized in their cubicle, or sitting from— sitting at home, maybe now with the hybrid situation, they may feel very disconnected from that company that's sending the gifts.

Exactly. And some of it can be more quirky, creative It doesn't have to necessarily feel like you're sending like a bottle of wine. For example, you could send out— we've seen some folks send out like an empty bottle or an empty box of donuts with some like, hey, are you hungry for a new solution? Meet with us and we'd love to buy you breakfast or lunch. Like that comes across as more of a creative way to catch my attention. You know, there's not necessarily like a monetary value associated with that. But as the recipient, I'm much more likely to be like, oh, that was intriguing and interesting and creative. That got my attention. Yes, I do want to hear about your solution than maybe just sending me a cold email.

Yeah, Chris, Chris Rudiger over there in San Francisco, the co-founder and co-CEO of a company called Sendoso. So you have built a global business actually in a very short amount of time because we're only really 8 years since you founded and we've had the COVID incident in between. Let's just talk about that for a moment because what impact did COVID make on the business? Was it good? Was it bad? Plainly, you survived. Tell us the journey there and what you had to do as an entrepreneur.

Yeah. So, timing-wise, I started the company in 2016, took about 2 years to 2018 until we really started to scale. And then, COVID came in 2020. So we had about 2 years of tripling the business year over year. So we were able to get to a large enough scale that the business was at a great place. We had by that time raised tens of millions in funding. And we were at this crossroads because when everyone went home, you know, our business was in the business of sending things and mostly to people's offices. And so we had to think really hard overnight, what do we do? And so we came up with this solution that we built overnight called address confirmation. That actually leveraged email to say, hey, Chris, are you still in the office or are you working from home now? And if so, do you want to confirm your address so I can send— so we can send this to your home? The other thing that that did is that kept Sendoso as the middle layer for that address confirmation data, and that PII information was deleted after the delivery. So companies loved it because it was compliant. Recipients loved it because they're like, oh yes, thank you. I am not in the office right now. I am at home. And so they were able to receive it. And then ultimately, that allowed us to again, double the business pretty quickly. Because these other channels like field marketing events, or traveling, traveling to customers or prospects, that was completely gone. Even things like webinars were semi-saturated. So you had to figure out how else are you going to grab the attention of a prospect or customer? How else are you going to build rapport? How else are you going to thank them? How else are you going to engage with them? And so we were this prime solution ready to go. And we scaled really nicely through COVID because of that.

Yeah. And as you say, you, you'd managed to get across the hump from a funding point of view. So you already had distribution, I think, in place. Exactly. You've got Europe, America, and Asia Pacific as well. Chris, tell us the story then of how you've managed to build the brand, because obviously this is a show about getting noticed and Now we understand how companies can get themselves noticed with their potential clients or existing clients. But what about you as the entrepreneur building Sendoso as a brand? Because you've made it sound— effortless is, is, is not fair, but you've certainly made it sound very smooth so far. Yeah. What did you do to build this brand globally in less than 8 years?

Yeah, so I think a couple things. One, from a foundational perspective, we were solving a, a pretty big problem, which was first, people were seeing diminishing response rates from email and advertising and other channels depended on for the lifeblood of their business, aka revenue. So people needed new ways to, to drive revenue, to drive pipeline, to convert customers. And so we were solving that at the core. The second thing we were doing is direct mail and gifting was not something that was invented by us, but we made it like 1,000 times easier with software and global marketplace and logistics.. And so again, we were solving a true problem. So I think for some entrepreneurs, you know, they might come up with an idea that they think like is catchy and it's nice and cute, but, and it's not like a huge problem. And so that might be why they're, they're not seeing that brand traction. So at the core, we are solving a huge problem, um, and we're grabbing a lot of traction with that. We then invested a lot. Oh, you had to comment, Jim James?

No, no, sorry. Go ahead.

Go ahead. I was gonna say, we then started investing a lot in brand and, and, uh, in a couple different demand gen strategies. So one of the areas we said is, hey, we know we want to create this global company and we need to focus on thought leadership. So there was a lot of early content creation. There was a lot of going to conferences and speaking at conferences. There was a lot of coming up with data reports and case studies and interesting white papers. And a lot of these things, you know, were not as obvious back then in terms of connecting to revenue and and lead gen, but were a long-term play. And so I think that was critical. We also built a community very early on. We built a community of our super fans and advocates and invested in that community, had community events. And building a community, you know, kind of snowballed because the more people started to join the community, the more awareness we had. So that was really critical. And then we just, you know, we did a lot of eating our own dog food or drinking our own champagne, however you wanna call it, which really worked out well for us too when we were sending things out to everybody too.

So looking at the clients, you've got companies like VMware, obviously in the tech space. So who are you targeting inside of those companies to deliver that education piece to?

Yeah, so when I originally started the company, I thought it was gonna be sales leaders because I was in sales. So I thought, hey, this is a great tool for sales leaders. And we quickly realized that sales leaders were a good target,, but they're more of an influencer in the deal and the real buyer was going to be marketing. And so we shifted our attention pretty quickly to marketing. And this was either the CMO, the VP of marketing, or depending on the organization size, it could be, you know, VP or director in field marketing and account-based marketing and demand gen marketing and customer marketing, but really marketing leadership with influence from sales leadership. And then recently over the past few years, we've seen trends in post-sales and seeing account management and customer success leadership also be strong targets and wanting to engage and build out a better customer journey with gifting and direct mail as part of that.

Oh, interesting. So you say that the salesperson, which in your lifetime was you doing the work, you were actually covering for what the marketing team ideally would have been doing.

Correct. Or the, or the marketing team wants to manage the brand, manage the compliance, manage the budgets, manage the visibility and reporting. And so they wanted to kind of have a larger 30,000-foot view on what was happening, but enable the sellers to say, hey, sellers, you each get a couple thousand bucks a month. Here's your access. Here's your logins. Go at it while marketing is running other programs and running other kind of demand gen air cover or meeting makers or, uh, sending out, uh, top of funnel, uh, marketing campaigns, right?

And what's nice about the way you've grown the business is by selling to corporates as you've been doing, they also have a global footprint, don't they? Like VMware, for example, which I just happen to know from my PR days.

Small businesses that might use it around the world too that are not global, that are, you know, 20-person, 100-person, 200-person. So We've built a business that the large Fortune 500 companies can take advantage of it and benefit from it, but then also, you know, a smaller staffing firm or a small startup or a small, you know, legal business, any type of company who has prospects or customers wants to engage with them. And we're a tool for that.

Chris, that's great. Let's just touch on that because I did see that on your website, there was something about giving on average about 12 to 15 gifts per year. So presumably you have really made it very affordable for SMEs to gift clients both in their own home country or more and more maybe gifting, as you say, based overseas to a client. So is that a fairly large part of the business, the sort of the SME client base?

It is, yeah. I think we've seen that, you know, across the board, all different kinds of companies will use it and small and medium-sized businesses are being able to take advantage of the scale, being able to take advantage of the cost of good discounts we're able to provide because of our buying power and economies of scale, almost like Costco-like, in that we can go out and spend hundreds of millions of dollars procuring all these different items and then offer up discounts back to our users along with like shipping costs and other costs that, you know, we'll go to FedEx and say, hey, we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Give us a better discount, and then we pass that discount along to our customers who by themselves wouldn't be able to even obtain nearly the same amount of cost benefit.

Yeah, so Sendoso really does benefit from economies of scale, doesn't it? Exactly, yes. Which is tremendous. And I saw you've got a wonderful demo, this is at sendoso.com, showing a walkthrough. So you talk about education. What was a key part of the education that needed to be done, Chris? Was it about the value of gifting or how it could be done, or what, what did you do to maybe change behaviors or illustrate the benefits of gifting?

Yeah, so I would say there's a few different things. One was, uh, the value, um, and why you should do it and how it compares to other channels, or how it compares with other channels. Again, I think gifting and direct mail is a complement, and you need to be doing email and ads and gifting and mailers and cold calls. You need to do everything you can to grab that attention in today's really busy, noisy world. Then we need to showcase why Sendoso and why our platform is superior, why you should use software to enable, you know, offline gifting and direct mail. And so we need to educate on our solution. And then there was once you had our solution, we needed to educate on how best to like what's the right thing to send to the right person at the right time with the right message. And, you know, in the early years, that was more content thought leadership. Over the last couple years, we've built a really interesting data set and AI that will actually suggest for you what to send or suggest the message that goes along with the gift or the mailer. Um, and so we've been able to use the hundreds of millions of, of gifts and, and, uh, spend on our platform to, uh, incorporate a really interesting suggestion engine using AI.

Yeah, because what I was thinking there was often gifting is a challenge, and I'm going to hold my hand up and say, as a, as a, as a guy, I'm not that great at it, uh, you know. And so thank you. So, um, this idea that you could have a recommendation engine would do a couple of things. One is it would prompt us, but also it would enable us to stay consistent, because one of the challenges is you might have a flurry of gifting at, for example, in China, Chinese New Year. But if you're running a business that's also got clients in Europe, you might not be thinking about Easter, for example. So That's great. You've got that recommendation engine.

Yeah. And we also look outside of just seasonality in terms of like holidays, but it could just be something that you're sending to a prospect as step 2 in your outreach. And it's, it's less associated with the holiday, but more associated with, you know, maybe the message that you're trying, the value proposition you're trying to deliver. You know, you could send a, you know, a locked bottle of wine with a combo code on it. And the message should be, 'Hey, are you trying to unlock your IT spend? Talk with me and I'll show you how we help other companies like XYZ unlock IT spend.' And like, so the message and the value proposition play off on the gift as just a creative way to grab someone's attention.

Yes, I can see that in that way you become really good at helping to prompt ideas for that business owner of ways to use gifting rather than sort of, if you like, just being an order taker, right? You're actually helping to stimulate the thoughts as well.

Yeah, it's all being more creative because people buy from people and people are creative and people love the uniqueness and the fun aspect of receiving something. And so we can help provide that recommendation engine.

And Chris, have you seen any particular trends? Are there some gift categories that you think have been growing and some declining, either, you know, the last couple of years, or by geography, or even by gender?

Um, so, you know, some of the top things we see, uh, uh, and again, we have this personalization catch-all, which is like the trend— the biggest trend is personalization. So sending something different to Jim than you send to Chris. But if you look at a holistic approach of like what's the most popular, we see Drinkware like Yeti mugs and coffee, like thermoses and mugs is a very popular trend. Socks is something that's really interesting. Like, that's a trend we see. Drinks, whiskey, tequila types of beverages are trending well. And then again, things that are relatively related to holidays. And the fun thing about the holidays again is while there's things like Easter or New Year's, there's a lot of these like unknown, like National Coffee Day or National, you know, Spreadsheet Day or, you know, there's, you know, you know, Office Admin Day. And so there's a lot of these, I want to call them made-up holidays, but they're holidays that are meant to celebrate certain things that are not just the 10, you know, global holidays that everyone knows about. And so those are really fun reasons why to reach out and use that as a means to engage with your audience.

Well, it's interesting. You might call those hallmark days. I mean, what we used to do in the PR industry was we used to make a long list because those were reasons to reach out to the media with a story of some kind for a client. So you're finding a reason to send things over and beyond just the, you know, I want to sell you something, which is great, Chris. Chris, um, let's just think about the story, if we may, because you've built this amazing business in Sendoso. But is there a lesson of something that, that hasn't gone quite as planned, uh, without trying to embarrass you, Chris? Uh, a marketing story that you might have for us that, that Sendoso went down a path and didn't lead anywhere?

I mean, there's definitely been lots of learnings. I think One of the early ones for us was, you know, when building the category, we wanted to come up with the name of what we, our category was. And so we at first said, let's not be obvious and let's not call it a direct mail and gifting platform and let's be more unique. And so we said, hey, let's call this an engagement delivery platform. We thought this would stand out, this whole brand new category that people would rush to and be like, oh, I want that. After a few months of testing that, people were confused. They didn't know what engagement delivery meant. And we created some like white papers on it. And it was basically just all trash. And we had to go back to a more obvious category name, which was the direct mail and gifting platform. And then that spread like wildfire. So I think the mistake there is we kind of overthought it and maybe got too creative in terms of our category naming and moved away from the actual value we're providing to our customers.

Yeah, interesting, because of course if you're in Asia, people might think that engagement gifting is, is sort of mail-order brides. You could go, yeah, definitely get in the wrong space with that, Chris Rudolph. Chris, as an entrepreneur, over the last 8 years you built Sendoso into being a global business. From an entrepreneur perspective, is there one thing that you'd recommend, a tip that you would like to share?

Gosh, one of the tips I got back in college, which I still think about today, is it's not what you know, but who you know. Or another way to look at that is your network is your net worth. And so, I strongly believe in meeting other people spontaneously or randomly. And I set alone time of my work week to go have random coffees. In fact, Later today, I'm going to meet with two random founders just to grab coffee. Who knows where that will take us? But I strongly believe in, in the power of your network, and meeting people is a part of that. So as an entrepreneur, I think many people tend to want to say, hey, I'm going to stay in my garage and just build this thing in silence and stealth mode. I say get the heck out there. Or if you're a big, you know, founder, CEO of a big company already, go make time next week out of your busy schedule to meet a random person and build your network.

That is a really, really good tip, Chris, because it's too tempting, especially as we're working from home more and more, we can interact via the internet, to not get out and meet people. And as you say, without necessarily any structure, but just building and listening to what other people are doing creates some amazing creative energy as well. Chris, I know that you have for Sendoso a podcast, so you're plainly a listener of podcasts, and you've kind of come of mind to Share the Story. If there's a podcast or a book that you find useful and inspirational, what would that be?

Yeah, my favorite podcast is My First Million. Uh, so that's a great podcast. I also like the All In podcast. Um, on the book side, a book that I just read that I love, uh, was by Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point. I think he's a great author, and I'm always happy to see him release new books. I've read them all. Um, and then one other tip that I love is just staying up to date with podcasts, blogs, et cetera, through a tool called Feedly. And I subscribe to about 300 different blogs and pods and news articles through that. And that allows me to quickly scan through almost like a feed instead of scrolling through, you know, TikTok or Instagram. I'm scrolling through current events and different interesting news articles and learning when I scroll.

That's Feedly, isn't it? Yeah. Called Feedly. I think that's an amazing platform. You can put it on your iPad and so on. God, it's like a big RSS feeder into your iPad. Chris Rudigrop, if people want to find out more about you, connect with you and Sendoso, how can they do that?

Yeah, you can go to sendoso.com if you're interested in more information about Sendoso. You can follow me on LinkedIn, search for Chris Rudigrop. Or if you want to shoot me a note, Chris, it's kris@sendoso.com.

Chris, thank you. You've been a gift coming on my show, so thank you so much.

Thanks for having me on, Jim.

It's been a pleasure. Well, we've been talking to Chris Ruderkrupp, who is over there in San Francisco, the co-founder and co-CEO of a company called Sendoso, sendoso.com. And the reason I was excited to have Chris on is because in this day and age when it's all gone digital, there's actually a need for going back to personal. But it does create challenges when so many of us are working with clients around the world. And if you're trying to buy labels and you're trying to buy something on Amazon, you send it and it's got a little gift and it, it all is quite messy and doesn't look very professional. So what Sendoso have done is given us a platform that's affordable and enables us to send personalized, thoughtful gifts to people that we want to connect with and stay in a connected and valuable relationship with. So wanted to have Chris on the show to explain that to you. So hope you've enjoyed it. Do please leave a review and share it with a fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Until we meet again, I suggest you go on to Sendoso. I can give you my address if you like to send me something. If not, send it to someone that you value. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur.