In this episode of B2B Brand180, Linda interviews Kris Rudeegraap, co-founder and CEO of Sendoso, a leading direct mail and gifting platform. Chris discusses his extensive experience in sales and how Sendoso helps businesses streamline their direct mail and gifting processes. He shares valuable insights and examples on the benefits of personalized gifts in sales and marketing, detailed case studies, and how both small and large companies can leverage Sendoso to enhance their strategies and build stronger customer relationships.
01:40 Use Cases for Direct Mail and Gifting
02:51 ROI and Case Studies
04:43 Small Companies and Gifting Strategies
05:53 Integrating Gifting into ABM Strategies
10:12 The Psychology of Gifting
11:18 Surprising Lessons and Customer Behavior
Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rudeegraap/
Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/
Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/
Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/
Linda Fanaras:
Welcome to the B2B Brand 180 podcast where we will share new marketing strategies and techniques to grow your brand. Today, I’m excited to introduce Chris Rudegrop, and he is the co founder and CEO of Sendoso, and it’s a leading direct mail and gifting platform. Chris has more than 10, two decades, sorry, I almost told you said 10 decades of go to. Market experience as a seller, a sales leader and CEO. So I’m super happy to have you here today. Chris, I’d love for you to share a little bit more about you and your company and we can take it from there.
Kris Rudeegraap:
Perfect. Thanks for having me on Linda. Absolutely. I started to know. So about eight years ago, prior to that, spent about a over a decade in software sales myself. And while I was in sales, I really saw that email was becoming a bit more of a spammy channel and felt less personal. So as a seller, I started to write in handwritten notes and sending them out. I’d go grab swag from our marketing closet and pack up boxes or I’d be on a call and hear a dog bark and send over a dog toy to a prospect and it all worked really, really well. It was just a nightmare to track, to manually go to the post office, to expense report everything. And so I dreamed up of an all in one solution. IE Sendozo that allowed sales teams, marketing teams, et cetera, to all in one be able to execute on direct mail and gifting integrated into your tech stack and software systems, global fulfillment and just making it that much easier.
Linda Fanaras:
That sounds awesome. That sounds great. So I’m sure I mean, I know some companies don’t even use, you know, direct mail platforms or gifting platforms at all, and they may not even technically know what they are exactly and how it can help their business. So can you share with the audience? Like maybe an example of how a firm may use your platform, how it could really help them elevate their sales opportunity. Yeah. I’d love to chat a little bit about that.
Kris Rudeegraap:
Yeah. Some different use cases. So, marketing might have a list of target accounts that are trying to run demand gen programs on, and they might send out a mailer in the mail, inviting them to connect. Sales teams might be prepping for a field event and wanting to send something out, inviting someone to a conference. Or field marketer might have a webinar coming up and they want to try to convert people that attended the webinar into followup pipeline. And so they might send a thank you gift after that webinar or an SDR might be booking a demo or a meeting with the prospect and want to make sure that person shows up on the demo. And so they send them a, a gift card the morning of that demo. So we like to think about ourselves as like a. Swiss army knife that you can use for a lot of different scenarios. And so marketing and sales teams, customer success teams will think about leaky buckets or KPIs they’re trying to influence and then insert in gifting and direct mail instead of maybe just an email that would have been used in the past.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah. So can you talk a little bit on ROI? Do you have any case studies that you may be able to share on maybe how a company has used the gifting platform, how it has really helped them? Because I think as a salesperson, as an example, they get very busy doing their day to day job, nevermind being able to try to think about sending out a gift card or even a thank you note. So having this automated or having this set up, Can you share some insight on case studies that could help our audience really understand how valuable it can be?
Kris Rudeegraap:
I’ll talk to this in kind of two ways. One is there’s the ROI of just being able to do more direct mail and gifting at scale and doing it through an outsourced service like ourselves. A lot of companies that might be already listening, already doing some mailers in house are like, Oh, I wish I could use this. I pack boxes in my spare time or I know our sales team’s expense reporting thing. So there’s the ROI of us doing it more cost effective than you could ever do it yourself. Or we have the Costco economies of scale. So we can buy these gifts and these mailers and postage way cheaper than you can and pass along those costs. But so those are, those are the bucket of people who are already doing this manually. If you’re not doing it at all and you need to be convinced on why to do it, We’ve got a lot of great case studies on our website. A few that come to mind, you know, gone they were sending out these pinatas and they were able to source over 33 million in a pipeline from this campaign. A gain site was sending out this book that the CEO wrote generate about 6 million in pipeline. And saw a 30 percent increase in close one rates for deals in pipe that they send this book to guru was sending out cupcakes and that response rates by five X. And then Burkata was sending out Yeti mugs and they did the math and solve for every dollar they spent on Yeti mugs. They generated 4 in ROI. So a huge successful campaign that’s been running for years.
Linda Fanaras:
Awesome. Awesome. So how would a small company that maybe doesn’t have a large budget engage in a platform like yours or use the gifting platform to help them?
Kris Rudeegraap:
it could be a small company and just need to. Execute as if you are a big company and you still want to use direct mail and gifting, but you don’t have to worry about having the extra people in house and staff to to pack the boxes, do the supply chain. So it’s actually works even better for small companies. And we have starter plans that make sense for smaller companies to get going. And, you know, I don’t necessarily advocate that you need to go send someone an iPad to grab their attention as a gift. It could be as easy as a 5 Starbucks gift card to say thank you or to grab their attention or Could be something a minimal gift. That’s the creativity or the personalization. You know, if you know, the dog bark example is a good example. Or you can send a to dog toy from our platform for, you know, sub$10 and with a personal handwritten note that says, Hey, you know, great chatting with you, or here’s for your dog that barked during our call. And you just yeah. Build that personal rapport. And I, you know, I, I, I tend to. Believe in that people buy from people. And so if you can build that rapport, you’re more likely to close that deal.
Linda Fanaras:
So how do you recommend B2B companies actually integrated into their account based marketing strategy because there are so many pieces to that for some of these larger companies where you’re targeting these high value clients, what would you recommend on a strategy
Kris Rudeegraap:
And just to, for the listeners in the audience that are like, Ooh, account based marketing. What’s that? You know, I’ll, I’ll take a quick stab at that and then I’ll go into a little bit more into the, the, the actual answer. The way that I like to think about a company’s marketing or ABM is it’s spear phishing versus net phishing. Marketing and sales are trying to go after together. They’re aligning around and they’re running campaigns as well as outreach to book meetings and close those deals. Typically you also have a bit larger of a buying committee in these target accounts and you’re focused more on an account model than just a lead model. Right. And so once you’re running that for all those purposes, it’s useful to be more personal because you have a targeted list and so you could run small events. And target those accounts and send a gift or a mailer inviting someone to one of those smaller events. Or you could build custom landing pages on your site targeting these ABM accounts. And on that landing page could be a call to action to download some content and also get a gift card as part of that experience. Furthermore, you might have a sales rep and a sales development rep or a business development rep in a pod model trying to outbound to one of these targeted accounts. And both of those folks can use the gifting and mailers to grab the attention of these high target, high value potential customers.
Linda Fanaras:
Right. So you, you’re obviously you’re doing a lot of personalization with And you’re really tying in, you know, maybe a want with the potential customer that you’re really targeting here. So how does that compare with maybe. Just an overall direct marketing strategy. do they integrate it in their current strategy? Does it, does it replace their existing strategy? Have you had any, do you have any insight around that?
Kris Rudeegraap:
Yeah, I think this is a complimentary to existing marketing programs. I think in today’s world. There’s so much noise and there’s so much competition that you have to use every opportunity you can and every touch point to get in front of that buyer and break through that noise. And so if you are just using email, but your competitors using email and direct mail, then your competitor has a higher likelihood of grabbing that attention of that prospect. So I’m a firm believer in leveraging as many channels as you can. Using email, using direct mail, using phone calls, using social, using digital advertising, using field events. Really, all the different opportunities you can to try to grab the attention because that’s really today what you’re trying to do in sales and marketing is grab the attention of buyers, educate them on the problem that you’re solving and then converting them into pipeline and customers.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah. So it’s a multi touch point. What would you recommend? Have you ever had anybody come to you? That’s maybe a super small business. They’d like to give this a shot. Have you had any success with, you know, sometimes we have real. You know, like starter companies consultants, so on, that may be looking for strategies to help them actually grow. And because you’re personalized, it seems like there might have, you know, may have some legs. So I’d love you to talk a little bit about that.
Kris Rudeegraap:
Yeah. For, for small small businesses or small companies, you know, we you know, we give you the tools that you can act as if you were a super large company that has a sourcing team that has a team that’s going to be packing boxes, a team that’s going to be. Okay. tracking things and procuring things. And you can get the same bulk discounts as you would as if you’re a large company because of our economies of scale. And so I think it’s it’s great for small companies that want to use our platform to, to gift out or to either prospects or even engage their existing customers and reward them for being clients.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah. So if I hear you correctly, basically, I think it’s an opportunity they could use this as a one off or they can use it as part of a larger integrated campaign to, to drive appointments or whatever the case may be, connections, sales speak about the emotional connection with, you know, gift giving versus maybe a cold call or a, you know, email cadence or something along that line. So I’d love to get your insight.
Kris Rudeegraap:
I think there’s a bit of, there’s a couple of things that come into play here. One is there’s, there’s a psychology of reciprocity. I mean, getting something and you feel more compelled to respond. And I think that in today’s world, if you get a personalized gift, you’re thankful that they spent the time sending you something personalized. And so you’re more likely to respond to that. So I think there’s a, the kind of the law or psychology of reciprocity. The second thing is just the tangible nature of opening up a box and the connection you have to that physical. Tangible asset. And I think that’s something that is just also kind of a bit of psychology too, of that people are more compelled to reply or engage with something that is sitting on their desk or sitting in their doorstep or sitting in a room. Right. The third thing I think is just the fact that there’s scarcity and mm-hmm and you get, you know, thousands of emails and ads thrown at you every day, but you only get a few of these gifts or mailers. And so because they’re more scarce, you have more of a reason to pay attention to’em more often. And so there’s a bit of emotional. Connection to that as well.
Linda Fanaras:
So I guess my final question to you is what would you say the most surprising lesson is that you’ve learned about customer behavior through this? You’re, you know, your company’s journey and how can these businesses that are out there actually leverage that expertise and knowledge that you have.
Kris Rudeegraap:
I think one of the most surprising things is it’s, it’s the amount of raving fans and raving customers you can get from just sending something simple. It doesn’t have to be expensive. And people just. Feel more feel more gratitude towards you when you’re sending them something during the sales cycle or as when they join you as a customer and seeing all the social media posts from our customers or the followup emails where someone said something simple, it could be a box of cookies but that timed right, just really make someone’s day. I think you know, the surprise and delight that gifting and direct mail has can really make or break a customer relationship.
Linda Fanaras:
That’s great. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate all your insight. Well, I’d love for you to share with the audience how they can get in touch with you, how they can learn about your product and any other information that you’d like to share.
Kris Rudeegraap:
Yeah. If you want to follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn search for me, add me. We’d love to chat there. If you have any personal questions for me, you can email me, it’s Chris, K R I S at Sendozo. com. Or if you’re curious about Sendozo, check out our website.
Linda Fanaras:
Awesome. Thank you so much.
