Transforming Your Demand Generation Strategy Using the Power of Precise Gifting with Neil Shah
Overview
In this presentation, Neil breaks down the typical buyers’ journey and shares testimonials from people and businesses that Sendoso has helped in more ways than one.
Speaker
Neil Shah is director of Product Marketing at Sendoso, a sending platform for personalized gifts. Neil is a passionate B2B Cloud/SaaS Product Marketing Leader.
Quotes
“It’s not the channels that need to evolve. It’s actually how we use them”
“The key is to really get to know your buyers and really personalize the gifting options”
Key Points
- The challenges with today’s digital environment and engagement
- The solution that is the modern age of sending and precise gifting
- Key impactful sending strategies that he’s brought to life with customers
Transcript
Hello, everyone. My name is Neil Shah. I’m the Director of Product Marketing here at Sendoso. Super excited to be here.
The topic for today’s session is to transform your demand generation strategy using the power of precise gifting.
So, a quick introduction about me prior to coming here to Sendoso, so I spent almost close to 40 plus years in b2b hybrid SAS. And I’ve had the privilege to work for some really great enterprise companies such as automation anywhere, Hitachi and NetApp. By the way, I’m also a very proud Berkeley alumni so go Bears.
Let’s take a quick look at today’s agenda. We will talk about the challenges with today’s digital environment and engagement. We will then dive deeper into the solution that is the modern age of sending and precise gifting. We will walk you through our typical buyer’s journey, a full customer lifecycle engagement and how can you use personalized gifting to build authentic relationships with your prospects? And finally share some key impactful sending strategies that we have brought to life with some of our customers.
So if you’re a buyer today, this is what your daily world looks like. You’re getting inundated with messages across different platforms, right all the way like emails, countless number of calls, and DMS, you’re getting advertised with new products and services on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and many more. So as a marketer, if I’m constantly advertising my new products and services across all these channels, and the buyer is inundated with messages, the question for me as a marketer becomes what does it take for me to differentiate my products and services in the eyes of the buyer, and how do I get noticed?
So, if you look at some of the click through rates across all the different channels, right, look at Google search campaigns, email marketing, Facebook, Google Display ads, LinkedIn social, paid as. The click through rates continue to decline over the years, and I will not be surprised to see click through rates for the taking a nosedive in the years to come. Right. And so, the question then becomes if the marketer continues to spend all these platforms, right, so I’m going to continue to spend our ad dollars on emails. We’re going to spend dollars on digital advertising on platforms such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and many more. I’m going to continue to make more calls and I’m going to continue to do more virtual events, right? So, knowing the two facts that you know, click through rates are declining and ad dollars or budget continue to go up. The question then becomes it’s not the channels that need to evolve. It’s actually how we use them, right? And so it’s really time to stand out in the eyes of the buyer and make an impact. And the solution to that is personalized gifting that is sending, right why not send your presence? Sending is a differentiated way for marketing and sales teams to get in front of customers, initiate conversations, and build genuine and authentic relationships. And I’ll walk you through a typical buyer’s journey and how you can implement precise gifting as part of it.
So if you take a look at a typical buyer’s journey, right, there are five steps involved. Step one is to drive interest or awareness of your products and services. Step two, you continue to engage your prospects. At some point, you’ve educated your prospects and now you want to accelerate your pipeline and convert them to customers. Once they get converted to customers. Step four is you want to onboard them and then step five is you know, you’re out. You want to continue to get in front of them and increase your retention rates while upsells and renewals.
So, let’s break this buyer’s journey down. Step one, driving interest, right so let’s say you want to create awareness for your product in the market. A typical way for you to generate a meeting with an SDR is to incentivize your prospects to take a meeting with an SDR and you could do that by using UberEats, DoorDash or a Starbucks e gift card right? It’s a perfect way to get your buyer talking to an SDR team, right? Once they talk to an SDR team and the SDR team has now understood the problem of your buyers and they have a potential solution. You want to continue to educate your buyer.
So, step two is really engaging prospects. And as for the engagement prospects, you can put different types of gifting options or packages in place. You know, Sendoso is a marketplace where we have gifting options that range from eating gifts to virtual experiences to branded merchandise. So the key is to really get to know your buyers and really personalize the gifting options right? If they’d like to cook, give them a cooking class, if they like to drink wine, maybe give them the wine kit right so personalization is key. And, you know, continue to educate your customers with a combination of educational content coupled with gifting right at some point once you’ve educated the buyer there, you’re now accelerating, you know your sales cycle and now you want to motivate them to sign up, sign a contract. So, as you know, when the buyer is getting close to signing a contract, you know, complement that with some sort of high value, gifting option right so if you know that your buyer loves to play golf, maybe send them a golf kit. If you know they like to play baseball, maybe send them some sort of baseball gifting option available right. The key is really understanding your buyers and you know super personalize the gifting to them and motivate them to sign contracts right. And here’s the best part about the gifting platform: just to know so we literally have a limitless amount of gifting options available for you. So depending on the type of buyer and depending on the type of occasion you have plenty of gifting options to choose from. And finally step four is you want to onboard your customers.
So once your prospects have turned into customers, you want to start the onboarding journey with them so you can show appreciation to your customers by sending them random welcome kits. And that’s because the incentivization is a motivation for your customers to start their onboarding journey right. Once you’ve onboarded your customers and they have successfully seen the value in your product. Maybe a year goes by and as park management teams launch new products and features in the market you can further send some sort of an educational content and combine that with some sort of champagne and use that opportunity to further get in front of your existing customers and start having conversations around retention and then upsell and cross sell your new features and functionality. Again, this is a typical buyer’s journey that ranges all the way from driving interest to increasing retention. This is a framework to keep in mind and using personalized gifting as part of it.
So, what is Sendoso right? Sendoso is the leading sending management platform in the market and we’re a leader in enterprise corporate gifting. The three pillars that make us extremely unique and differentiated in the market are number one technology, number two logistics and number three expertise. So, from a technology perspective, we have a fully scalable platform that integrates with leading sales and marketing applications in the market. We can scale not only tons of users but also have built in analytics that shows deep insights into the ROI of your sending strategies. And finally, it also consists of an expansive marketplace that has gifting options that range from E gifts to virtual experiences to branded merchandise. Matter of fact, we also have a curation team where you can work hand in hand with them and really create customized packages for your prospects and customers. And it’s fully CSR and CFO group right. So that’s the technology pillar number two is logistics.
As a buyer, we want to ensure that you don’t have to go through the headache of sourcing, storing shipping and packaging and sending the gifts out to your buyers right. So we have, you know, warehousing and logistics in place where we get where we ensure that we can source, store, ship and package the gifts and then send it back to your customers in a very timely and transparent manner. So yeah, that’s the logistics element. And then finally we have you know expertise, so we are experts in the personalized gifting space. We have experts that will recommend new use cases. We will have experts that will give you and share industry best practices with you. We also have a very vibrant and an engaged community that will be available to answer any questions that you will have. So, we have deep expertise in the personalized gifting space.
Again, technology, logistics and expertise are the three pillars that make Sendoso the leading sending management platform in the market. So if you look at some of these common applications why you look at CRM applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, marketing automation platforms, such as HubSpot, Marketo and look for a local sales engagement platform such as sales, love outreach, and as you can see the list goes on and on and on. So these are the applications that you’re probably using on a day to day basis. We want to make something extremely easy for you. So, we’ve integrated with all these leading sales and marketing automation platforms on the market. So you can trigger the sense of your prospects. And customers with just a few clicks.
Most recently, Sendoso was awarded number five on G2s of best software products for 2022. For those of you who may not be aware, G2 is a global software marketplace that comprises almost close to 16 million buyers. So buyers come on to the G2 marketplace, and they provide reviews about new software platforms in the market. G2 takes all this data from 60 million buyers and then comes up with the list of ranking of all the software products and out of the top five that is going amplitude course AI sales loft. We were awarded number five into G2s list of best software products for 2022. So very, very proud about this accomplishment as a company here at Sendoso because it’s based on authentic and genuine feedback from our users or our customers love us some statistics about Sendoso so in addition to leading the market with a sending management platform category, we were founded back in 2016 by Chris and Braden and we were founded in San Francisco. We’re approaching close to 500 plus employees, almost going into 650 employees by now. We have served 900 Plus global brands successfully since our inception. And here’s the best part we’ve sent close to 3 million plus packages to prospects and customers. Now just imagine the amount of time it actually takes for you to source, ship, package and send it out to your prospects, right. If you’re building a package, it’s going to take at least minimum 30 minutes if not more, right. So the 3 million plus packages that we’ve sent to our customers. It’s a pretty big one for us. We were also recognized on NASDAQ. So, we have raised about close to 152 million different funding from our top investors to date. Some of our investors are Softbank, Signia, Kraft stage new capital struck capital and many more.
So, Forrester has actually taken notice of our achievements. We recently worked closely with Forrester to commission a report we engaged with Forrester Consulting, who came on site. They interviewed some of our sales and marketing teams, and they also interviewed some of our customers. And after conducting those interviews, they came up with a report we call it the total economic report the TE report and some of the key findings in this report are as follows. Sales and marketing teams that have invested in Sendoso have seen close to doing a percent or why on their sending campaigns why that’s number one. They’ve seen payback periods less than six months. Right? So, your investment. You get your investment back basically in six months, less than six months. And then number three, they’ve seen 15 closes to 15% reduction in your sales cycle as a whole right. So these three are like some of the key findings. Again, this report is packed with much more findings. And we can make this report available to you after the session for sure.
So, let’s take a quick look at some of the impactful sending strategies that we have brought to life with our customers. The first one is Guru, and this is a perfect example of you know driving interest as part of your buyer’s journey. So the business problem Guru had was the fact that they wanted to stand out in a very crowded marketplace and wanted to activate some of the prospects that had gotten cold. So Julia Borsen partnered with Sendoso and then she built out a campaign, a sending campaign to activate some of these cold prospects. She put together gifting options that comprises cupcakes, coffee, gift cards, and then personalized gifts and then sent this out to three hundred other cold prospects, the add ons and followed up with personalized thank you notes, right. So as part of this, sending a campaign and strategy. Here’s the impact that Julia saw. She saw a 5x increase in response rates, 3x increase in pipeline ROI and then sent those over; they will drive almost close to 40% of call outbound meetings. So demand generation leads such as Julia are definitely seen in the value of Sendoso at companies such as Google, the next one is engaging prospects.
So, this is step two of the buyer’s journey when you want to continue to keep your prospects engaged and also educate them, so Iden was a VP of marketing and the challenge he was facing was he was actually manually sending gifting options to prospective customers and to keep them engaged. Obviously, that’s a methodology that’s, you know, what’s not scalable. So, Iden came to Sendoso partnering with us, and then put together a gifting strategy to really incentivize the prospects to attend the webinar across the globe, right? So, they were hosting a series of webinars. They wanted to invite the prospects, so Sendoso was a perfect gifting option to incentivize some of the prospects to attend these ongoing webinars. And the sending campaign consisted of branded Yeti mugs and some mac like flashlights, here’s the best part: the marketing team at workhead. saw the falling impact they saw creates better response rates. They saw a 72% increase in webinar attendance and then for X ROI of their sending campaigns. So you know, heads of marketing such as Iden are definitely seeing the value of platforms such as Sendoso.
Next up are FireMon. This is a perfect case of accelerating the pipeline and getting customers to sign contracts. Right. So last year, the business problem at far more was the fact that within person it was cancelled because of COVID. The marketing team needed to connect with their prospects and drive to a manual very regulated compliance restrictive industry. Right. So Zoe, who’s a Marketing Program Specialist at FireMon. She partnered with Sendoso and put together a series of virtual experiences, right? And these experiences consist of, you know, events of cocktails and trivia that’s hosted by a professional mixologist, right, so they took the prospects through this series of virtual experiences, and then followed up with them with personalized handwritten notes and E gift cards, saying that the next round is on us, right? The BDRs then use SalesLoft integration to track how many meetings progress into opportunities and what is the overall impact of the sales pipeline. So, here’s the impact of using Sendoso as part of your gifting strategy, the marketing team at Firemon saw 1.8 million in new pipeline that was generated because of this campaign, and they saw a total of 4 million overall influence pipeline. So again, you know, marketing programs, a specialist such as Zoe are definitely seeing the value of using Sendoso as part of accelerating the overall pipeline.
Once you’ve converted your prospects into customers, this is the typical story on how we actually motivate them. To start the onboarding process as soon as possible. So the business problem at BetterCloud was the fact that they had converted some of the prospects into customers. Now they wanted to motivate their customers to start their onboarding journey as soon as possible so they could demonstrate the value of the product to the customer. So Joey partnered with Sendoso and put together a gifting package that consists of a branded t-shirt, a Chapstick and a physical copy of BetterCloud CEO David politics books, right. In addition to that, he also sent e gifts and hoodies to customers who actually successfully completed their onboarding process and then sent congratulatory gifts when customers actually achieved these milestones, right. So again, this is a perfect example of incentivizing or motivating your customers and then having them start that onboarding journey. Now, here’s the best part. Here’s the impact, after Joey worked with Sendoso to put together this ascending campaign, he’s saw 92% increase in direct meals pipeline influence, and he saw 529% increase in direct meals close one influence so again, you know, more demand generation managers such as Julia definitely saw the value of using platforms, such as Sendoso to onboard new customers.
And to wrap it up, this is a classic use case about increasing retention with your existing customers. So the business problem at Arctic wolf was the fact that they had already signed some customers. They have taken them through an onboarding journey, and now they wanted to get in front of them and increase retention rates and find an opportunity to upsell and upsell the products and services. So, Megan, who’s Senior Director of Field and channel marketing at Arctic Wolf, partnered with Sendoso and she basically put together a welcome gifts right so welcome gifts for new customers and appreciation gifts for existing customers. So as part of being a customer, you’ve got certain milestones that you get to that you will hit over the next one year. And by sending appreciation gifts, it’s really a way to show gratitude to your existing customers. So yeah, Megan did that. Basically put together a welcome gifting package and appreciate gifting package. The marketing team also provided email templates for CSM and then they followed up with these existing customers to serve a meeting and then sent e gifts to them after the meetings took place.
So again, this is a classic use case where you’ve signed existing customers, you want to find new ways to get in front of them, show your appreciation for having them as a customer and then initiate conversations around retention, renewals and upsells. Here’s the impact on our Arctic Wolf by using the Sendoso campaign strategy. It resulted in 41 influenced net new opportunities. It resulted in closer 27 closed won deals that is almost equating to 20% of quarterly revenue. And the marketing team at Arctic Wolf is now looking to also input gifting as a strategy to improve their net promoter score down the line.
So again, you know, marketing leads such as Meghan are definitely seeing the value of using Sendoso as a gifting platform to increase retention rates with customers. With that said that’s a wrap.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. Thanks and have a great rest of your day.
Bye