Cut Through the Digital Noise with Personalized Gifting

Overview

Kris Rudegraap begins his presentation by talking about the evolution of the digital landscape. He says that channels like email and digital advertising have become saturated and are becoming increasingly ineffective. Kris goes over ways to break through all the noise to drive more revenue with personalized gifts.

Speaker

Kris Rudeegraap is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sendoso, the leading Sending Platform that helps companies stand out by giving them new ways to engage with customers throughout the buyer’s journey.

Quotes

“It’s expected that 80% of b2b sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur through the digital channel in 2025 so hence, traditional methods such as broad cold outreach will really focus on quality over quantity and really creating personal interactions.”

“The pandemic has caused disruptions in the b2b Buying Cycle, the customer journeys have evolved well and sales teams, while used to be able to get in the field and deliver face to face customer interactions have now shifted to online and hybrid experiences.”

Key Points

  1. Traditional mediums of selling and marketing are becoming outdated 
  1. Buyers want a more personalized approach 
  1. Personalized gifting can build trust and deepen relationships 

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s session. I’m your host, CEO and founder of Sendoso Chris Rudeegraap. And today we’re going to talk about how you drive revenue by cutting through the digital noise with personalized gifting. So let’s get into today’s session.

A little bit about me personally, I am born and raised in Northern California. I grew up just an hour north of San Francisco, and I’ve lived here my entire life. I’m a dog, dad. So I’ve got a little miniature Goldendoodle named Stella. She’s our chief barketing officer. I want to be a pro croquet player, it’s one of my favorite sports in the summertime. Then about 15 years ago, I helped make Guy Fieri famous by making MySpace pages for him.

Alright, let’s get into the content now. So what we’re going to talk about today is one really start off by setting the stage on how the digital landscape has evolved over the last few decades. Getting into some of the details around email marketing, advertising, and why personalized gifting and that channel is more important than ever today. We’re going to talk about integrating personalized gifting into your current sales and marketing workflows. And then we’re going to use some examples of customers using Sendoso to impact revenue. And there’s a half dozen examples that you can get ideas from and takeaway today. And then lastly, at the very end, we’ll just summarize the key takeaways, so you can take home some ideas with you from today’s session.

So let’s get started on how the digital landscape has evolved over the last couple decades and the recent challenges with email marketing. So to kick things off, I want to paint a quick picture of you and tell you some stats. So in 1996, there’s about 15 billion emails sent. Today, there’s over 300 trillion emails sent a year. That’s a massive change. And what happened is, you also see click through rates diminish over time from what used to be extremely high click rates to now sub 2% click through rates with email. And this was really a shift in email marketing. Before marketers could rely on traditional email as a way to distribute their message and drive prospects and customer interactions. Today, they can still rely on it but they have to diversify across many other mediums in order to drive meaningful revenue.

Let’s talk about another part of the digital landscape and that’s digital advertising. And so again, if we look back a couple decades ago in 1994, there was less than a million dollars a year spent on digital ads with an extremely high click through rate of over 50%. Today, over 450 billion is spent with less than a quarter of a percent of click through rates. So again, these channels are being saturated, there is a lot of noise. And so you as a sales and marketing professional have to look at what are new techniques to break through the noise, because the playbooks that worked a decade ago don’t work anymore. And really, you know, another key takeaway here is interacting with targeted audiences has never been easier. Digital ads are easy. Email is easy, but that makes it that much easier for everyone to do it. And so you have to find new techniques to break through that customer noise and really drive meaningful revenue.

And so, really, the digital playbook has changed and so it’s more than competitive than ever and b2b buyers have kind of tuned out. And so what does that mean? One is and I think everyone can attest to this. The pandemic has caused disruptions in the b2b Buying Cycle, the customer journeys have evolved well and sales teams, while used to be able to get in the field and deliver face to face customer interactions have now shifted to online and hybrid experiences. Secondly, it’s expected that 80% of b2b sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur through the digital channel in 2025 so hence, traditional methods such as broad cold outreach will really focus on quality over quantity and really creating personal interactions. And then lastly, this is a stat from a recent CMO leadership vision 2022 hosted by Gartner.

And really the stat was that a fifth of CMO budgets in 2022 are now going towards innovative programs to help fuel revenue growth. So it’s critical to invest in new digital initiatives that will build a better differentiated digital presence.

So let’s talk about that. And really, today’s focus is around personalized gifting. It’s something that I find myself being an expert at. I started this company over six years ago, I’ve seen over millions of sends through our platform, and I’ve seen, you know, hundreds of millions in revenues being generated, if not more. And so today we’re going to talk about some of the different ways that you can evolve your team’s approach in today’s noisy digital marketplace and stand out from the competition.

And so that, really, let’s talk about three differentiated approaches. So one is how can you use gifting to get in front of your prospects fast? Two is how do you deepen relationships when you’re already working with them? And then three, How do you engage with them throughout the buyer’s journey, top of funnel, middle of funnel bottom of funnel and personalized gifting can help with all of these and so I wanted to really give you a quick overview on what is Sendoso so I brought it up before you may not be familiar with Sendoso. So you might be like Hey, how is Sendoso going to help with personalized gifting? And so we are a market leader in enterprise corporate gifting, the most comprehensive solution and really there’s these five key areas.

So the first one is global warehousing and logistics. So we make sure that we can process and ensure timely delivery of these gifts. And that we can outsource all the sourcing of packing boxes and shipping to our global fulfillment centers, so you don’t have to focus on that.

Second is a curated send curation. And this is a marketplace where you can have a myriad of different options, as well as send curators helping with that experience.

The next is being able to have an integrated tech stack. And this is really important so that you can track ROI from day one and allows you to shift expenditures from other channels into personalized gifting which can drive better revenue for you.

The fourth is a deep community knowledge and support and this gives you quick answers and helpful people that have been there and done that.

And then really lastly is just this curation team that helps you figure out what are the best experiences you can deliver to your prospects.

I really wanted to touch on three quick benefits of a gifting platform. So the first benefit is that Sendoso is going to integrate with existing sales and marketing workflows. So I’m talking about Salesforce, sales loft outreach, HubSpot Marketo, and many more. This enables both marketing and sales teams to work closely together to improve business outcomes throughout the customer journey.

The next is the benefit to sales leaders. So with sales leaders, we’re going to help build trust and interpersonal relationships with prospects helps accelerate sales velocity and shorten sales cycles. And ultimately, that’s going to help close more deals.

And lastly, thinking about marketing leaders, Sendoso is going to help influence the pipeline to acquire more customers will help keep prospects engaged and break into key target accounts. And lastly, we’re going to improve brand awareness, thus increasing customer lifetime value.

So now, I’m really excited to get into some examples of how Sendoso has helped companies that you’ve heard about drive revenue.

First one is with Anaplan, and this is working with Colleen, she’s the ABM manager, and we’re going to focus on how they drove 30 million in revenue through automated holiday bundles. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Anaplan, they’re a cloud based business planning solution that helps companies and organizations build more informed and better plans to make decisions faster. And so for the marketing team at Anaplan, they were looking for ways to reach, engage prospects, and accelerate revenue growth. And so what they did is they came up with this holiday bundle, and they worked with us to create an ABM holiday campaign that included a holiday card, a sweet treat, a piece of content, and a handwritten note. And so there were 800 executives that were targeted, of which 350 bundles were actually sent out and shipped. So they saw a 35% opt in rate for people that wanted to deliver these throughout the holidays. They also saw 65 million in pipeline influence and 30 million in recognized revenue, a huge campaign for them.

The next example is Cornerstone. So this is led by Sarah, she’s a senior marketing strategist over there. And again, Cornerstone is a cloud based people development solution that helps organizations recruit, train and manage their people. And for Cornerstone, the marketing team there were using some legacy tools and really needed integrations into Salesforce and outreach. So they could automate and track their sends better. And they wanted a platform that would make it easy to scale across a larger sales team and also be able to set one to one as well as one to many sends. So we looked at a partner with Sendoso and their sales ops team helped create sequences with an outreach that was integrated into Sendoso. So with a click of a button, now they’re securing meetings with strategic high value accounts. And so it’s really interesting data point here is that for every dollar they spent on Sedoso gifts influenced $4,000 in pipeline. That campaign also saw a 30% lead to opportunity conversion rate, and they saw 7 million in the pipeline.

Alright, next one is Zendesk, you all know Zendesk, their customer service platform helps companies build better customer relationships. In this case, we worked with Kimberly, who was a senior regional sales associate, Miru, who’s the Senior Marketing Manager, regional operations and programs and Aaron, an integrated campaign marketing manager. And so, the situation here was Zendesk when COVID-19 hit had a lot of pipeline that was kind of stuck, and they were looking at ways to accelerate those open deals. And so we helped him come up with this add home movie night kit, which was a complete success, and it came with popcorn, snacks, movie trivia game, movie themed cookbook as well as Zendesk branded blanket to include in the gift. And so the marketing team worked with the AE team to identify top contacts already in conversation, and wanted to accelerate these deals to create these really memorable brand experiences that Zendesk could stand out from competitors. And some quick results so after using Sendoso, their campaign achieved a 15x ROI. They saw a 2,000% quarter-over-quarter increase in pipeline attributed to direct mail. So a huge win here for the Zendesk team.

And lastly, here is Guru. So we worked with Julie over there, she’s an attractor of demand. Gen. Guru is a company wiki that helps your team stay informed and do their job better by having all the information at their fingertips. And so guru really needed to figure out a way that they could connect with cold prospects in a crowded market while still communicating the company’s value and offering and so Guru used Sendoso to send out cupcakes, gift cards and personalized gifts to cold leads that were not responding and followed up with personal thank you notes. And as a result, after using Sendoso their campaign achieved a far 5x response rate. A 3x pipeline ROI and a 40% increase in cold outbound meetings. So again, a huge example of integrating direct mail into a broader cold campaign approach.

Alrighty, so hopefully you guys had some great takeaways there are some real examples of people seeing direct ROI. You also saw how the traditional email marketing and digital advertising landscape has been saturated and why using new techniques like personalized gifting can help deliver results. And so it’s the summarization of today’s session. Some of the key takeaways here are One is you can use sales and marketing teams can use personalized gifting to build trust and deepen relationships. You can acquire more customers and drive top line revenue. You can amplify a company’s brand in a crowded marketplace. And lastly, you can increase customer lifetime value via customer retention and growth.

So hopefully this was a really helpful, timely presentation for you today. You want to learn more on Sendoso. So you can go to sendoso.com. Learn more about our resources section or request a demo. And if you want to connect more with me directly, find me on LinkedIn add me or email me. That’s kris@sendoso.com. Thank you so much for tuning in. Talk to you later. Bye