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  • Aug 9 2019

Podcast: ‘Account Based Targeting’ with Ashley Kessler, Calabrio

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Ashley Kessler is Head of Marketing & Business Development, EMEA at Calabrio, an innovative work force optimisation platform that empowers organisations with customer experience intelligence.

Our host Alex Price sits down with Ashley to explore her combined EMEA marketing and business development role at Calabrio, whilst talking about their account based marketing approach to marketing which they refer to as ‘Account Based Targeting’.

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Full Transcript

Alex (00:07):

Hello, welcome back to the FINITE podcast. Today, I’m really looking forward to sitting down with Ashley Kessler. Ashley heads up marketing and business development in EMEA for Calabrio. Very enterprise, quite drawn out account based approach to marketing and Ashley oversees a team that has quite an interesting approach to account based marketing ABM, but also what she refers to as account based targeting, which is kind of their version of how they approach ABM. 

I first met Ashley when she spoke at one of our panel events here in London, another FINITE event. But yeah, I’m really looking forward to sitting down with her today and digging a little bit deeper into how she approaches account based marketing.

FINITE (00:48):

The FINITE community and podcast are kindly supported by 93x, the digital agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth B2B technology companies. Visit 93x.agency to find out about how they partner with marketing teams and B2B technology companies to drive digital growth.

Alex (01:10):

Hey Ashley, thanks for joining us.

Ashley (01:11):

Thanks very much for having me.

Alex (01:13):

So I’m looking forward to chatting to you about all kinds today, but we’re going to be focusing on this phrase ABT, account based targeting, which I gather is kind of the half brother of account based marketing. 

But first of all, before we dive into that, I thought it’d be good if you just gave our listeners a bit of background about how you’ve kind of ended up here and the roles you’ve done so far and how you’ve got to the role you’re in currently in terms of marketing.

About Ashley’s role as Head of Marketing and Business Development for Calabrio 

Ashley (01:37):

Absolutely. Yeah, sure thing. So I’ve been in the sort of B2B tech marketing space for seven years, starting in the States in product marketing roles and doing content writing, managing content strategy, as well as customer marketing programs. And I moved about 18 months ago over to London to head up just all marketing efforts in the EMEA region for Calabrio.

Alex (02:04):

What does day to day look like? I know you’ve got responsibilities to split kind of marketing and business development, and we’ll talk a bit more about how those two things work together and how they’re aligned, but what does the day to day look like? What’s a typical kind of team structure? I know they’re obviously big in the US but have a small operation in UK. Talk to me a bit about that.

Ashley (02:26):

Yeah, absolutely. So I’m running a team of three business development reps here. Our business development function sits within marketing and I mean, in a given week, I could be doing anything from live tweeting a webinar or running a trade show stand, meeting with partners, working on digital campaigns, meeting with a PR firm. It’s a little bit of everything, really nice and diverse.

Alex (02:51):

And so the BDRs that you work with, have they got like a marketing edge to them in a more traditional marketing sense? Or are they more outbound sales, traditional business development?

Ashley (03:04):

More traditional business development. I think it puts us in a unique situation where we’re able to include the business development reps in marketing campaigns. So we’re doing a big digital push on LinkedIn around this. They kind of understand the campaign, understand the background of it, are able to follow up with those leads and pass that on to sales in a more highly qualified way. And it’s nice that they straddle both worlds and I think it’s helped bring our teams closer together.

Alex (03:35):

So you’ve actually got sales function that’s different to business development? Okay, cool. Cause I guess it varies all these job descriptions that are used so widely across different companies, but I guess sometimes business development would be considered sales almost. So marketing would do marketing and then business development would pick up the phone or do the sales bit. So it sounds like you’ve achieved what everybody wants, which is sales and marketing alignment, right? Like the silo is broken.

Ashley (04:03):

Sure. Now I don’t know if that’s ever achievable, but at the moment it’s sort of working okay. We’re trekking along.

What is account based targeting? 

Alex (04:13):

So let’s talk a bit about this ABT framework that you’ve got. Obviously I think pretty much everyone listening will probably have an idea, everybody’s heard of account based marketing ABM. Something that really started as a way of growing existing accounts more in an enterprise space and has then transitioned into being more of a new business approach to marketing as in like winning new accounts. 

I remember talking to someone who oversees ABM at Fujitsu and she was an absolute APM purist and was like, it’s not used for new business at all. It’s just, we use it to grow accounts that you get a foot in the door for $10,000 order, and then you turn that into a million dollars or something. Whereas it’s obviously transitioned into account based marketing and this kind of sounds like maybe this is the direction that you’re heading with account based targeting ABT as you call it. Tell me a bit about what it is, how it works, the kind of overall framework.

Ashley (05:12):

For us, it really is about new business development. I’m going after new logos. I mean, for us, we changed the terminology. We shied away from account based marketing or ABM because I think the temptation is that it’s got marketing in the name, it’s a marketing program. And we really knew from the get go that this has to be a shared program, it has to be marketing and sales working together to sort of pursue these accounts. 

And I think it’s really about getting to the buyers before they’re starting to research and so that you can kind of become that authority and trusted advisor and guide that organisation through the purchasing process. You know, creating a need where there may not necessarily be one. And that’s why I think you really need that collaboration between the marketing and sales side marketing to really understand the audience and to understand the segment, have the content there, go after them with that, and then sales to be there to really engage on those on a one to one level, have those conversations.

Alex (06:22):

And just so listeners have some context, at the moment where you’re working on this, what’s the kind of… I guess ABM’s typically in a more enterprise space for kind of bigger sale values. Just so we’ve got a bit of perspective, what’s the kind of average length of the customer journey? Are we dealing with quite large?

Ashley (06:40):

It’s on, you know, big companies, big revenue, big employee size. And I think there’s, I’ve read anyway, arguments out there that ABM can speed up that sales cycle. That’s not something I’ve seen yet.

Alex (06:54):

It’s one of those things that everyone dangles as like one of the key points of ABM, right? Like speed up the sales cycle, but I’ve never, yeah, I’ve never quite seen it.

Ashley (07:01):

Because you’re really getting to them before they’re in a position to purchase. You’re kind of getting to them early. And so it’s you get in and then you really have to nurture that account before it’s going to really get into the pipeline.

Alex (07:14):

Okay. And as a kind of formalised framework, how did you go about creating it from the very beginning? What were the origins? Was it a conversation driven from C suite level? Is it something that the whole C suite are behind and understand? How does it fit into the bigger picture?

How to initiate an ABT approach

Ashley (07:31):

Yeah, as an organisation, we had to get that in front of the C suite, we had to request budget for it. Basically it became a company initiative, actually a company wide initiative. And we’re really moving toward a more named account approach to sales period, which is new for us, we haven’t done that before. And so that’s been, it’s been a shift. We’ll buy in order to secure the budget, to get the tech and do all the things that needed to happen to support the programme.

Alex (08:01):

Makes sense. And so really just trying to dig into it a bit more in terms of the nuances that make it different from ABM, obviously the marketing word was one that you didn’t feel like accurately represented what you were doing. 

And didn’t kind of put it in the right space, I guess even ABM doesn’t have an absolute Bible that you have to follow and everyone takes a slightly different approach, but are there things that you think are clear differences to ABT versus ABM? Or is it more about process and team structure and just how you perceive it almost in the organisation?

The differences between ABT and ABM

Ashley (08:34):

Yeah. I’m not sure if there’s really a clear difference. It’s probably just semantics for us in order to secure sales. I think really it’s, you have to take a look at your own team, your own sales team, the way that’s structured and create it from there. You have to work closely with them to select the accounts you’re going to go after you have to work closely with them to work through routing processes and things like that. 

My BDRs are all aligned to specific sales reps and they have specific territories of accounts and they work closely together. I really empowered them to define the rules of engagement. They kind of say amongst each other, this is how we’re going to split these out. This is how we’re going to go after this account, I’ll do this, you do that type of thing. 

I think everyone wants to work differently and it may change account to account really, depending on the industry or just how a particular account purchases, because everything’s a little bit different. I mean, sometimes we know that they’ll purchase direct. Sometimes we know they’ll purchase through a partner. And so we have to change our approach. That way we might reach out to the partner first to get us a foot in the door. So it really just depends on who it is at a particular account.

Alex (09:49):

You mentioned different industries which I find interesting. So I know a lot of our clients in the B2B tech sector have a solution that works for a whole load of different industries. They might be going after travel or automotive, finance, whatever it is. And they’ve got dedicated landing pages that talk about the benefits and how the solution really works for that sector. 

And I guess it’s really about demonstrating that you’ve made an impact in that sector and hopefully you’ve got case studies and that kind of thing, which is actually something at the time I thought of IBM, which was industry based marketing. And then I realised that IBM was already kind of taken as a three letter acronym. So it didn’t take off, but in terms of the channel, like we just touched on LinkedIn and paid ads through LinkedIn to really support that. 

Cause obviously taking this account based approach means that you need resource to generate product specs and white papers and one pagers and all kinds of different things to really support the outreach. And also the more kind of automated advertising stuff. Is there a lot of fuel that goes into that engine to keep all of that going? Or are you quite resourceful in terms of how you reuse assets and scale things effectively? 

Complimenting ABT with other inbound methods 

Ashley (10:56):

Yeah, I think we’re really kind of relying on what we’re doing just as a marketing team, from the inbound point of view. We just, our regular inbound stuff is just that, machines cranking away, and we’re pulling in assets and reports and case studies and things like that where we need to. 

We have had good luck actually with direct mail. Everyone says it’s having a thing. Yeah, it is. So we’ve had good luck with that. It’s a nice way to, people don’t expect it. And it’s, especially if you can personalise it and put the effort into personalising the direct mail, you know, people are at least more likely to pick up the phone or respond to an email and at least have a conversation if you’ve done something for them.

Alex (11:41):

I was getting a load of emails the other day. I’m trying to find the name of a company that has like an HR hiring platform in the US, who I won’t name. They were using this platform called thanks, thanks without the A so T H N K S. And as I understand it, it basically just allows you to send a prospect a small gift for free. So you can send them like a Starbucks coffee or, so in this case for me, it went really badly. Cause I was like, I’m busy, you’re kind of annoying me and like your Starbucks coffee has absolutely no relevance to what you’re actually trying to sell to me. 

It was just like almost like a superficial bribe. I don’t know, the thought was nice, but it wasn’t a groundbreaking gift that was going to transform my life. It was just kind of an automated follow up. Like every three hours I had another email being like your Starbucks coffee. I was like, you need to cool down. But it’s quite interesting how this more kind of personalised approach to reaching people in a very direct way. And when you compare it and potentially get some scale from it with demand based and similar things that you might be using, which we’ll talk a bit more about…

FINITE (12:54):

The finite community in podcast are kindly supported by 93x, the digital agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth B2B technology companies. Visit 93x.agency to find out about how they drive inbound growth for B2B tech companies.

How to nurture a healthy relationship between BDRs and Sales 

Alex (13:12):

I’m interested in when you’re working this way and with business development reps and an ABM type approach, what lead qualification looks like? And whether you really define a lead and I guess the very simplified traditional view is like lead comes in to some extent, it’s marked as marketing qualified, at some point it goes into the CRM for the sales team to pick up as, you know to qualify, and then marketing are every now and then checking in on sales and going like, did you follow up with that lead and why not? And you’ve had this sat there for two days.

Ashley (13:49):

What we consider our formal handover, we call MQO, and that is our business development rep will set a meeting for the sales rep to meet with the customer, either a discovery call or have that initial meeting. So we have sort of qualification criteria that they have to meet in order to set the meeting, you know BANT, two out of four of the BANT criteria, certain technologies that we need to be aware of that we need to integrate with what products, how many seats, like just sort of more technical things, are they procuring through a partner, et cetera. 

So that the sales manager has that going into the initial meeting. So from there, the sales rep should be able to say, yes, this is a viable opportunity and I’m going to keep it and nurture it. For now this we’re not, we don’t have what they’re looking for and they’ll close it back.

Alex (14:46):

Sorry, that’s following the initial kind of discovery type call?

Ashley (14:49):

Yeah that’s the process at this point.

Alex (14:52):

Okay, interesting. And is there like regular feedback? Does sales feedback come back into you guys and it’s like, these have all been really low quality, get me some better quality ones? Do you have that kind of open relationship?

Ashley (15:07):

Absolutely. Sales never, they never shy away from telling you when something’s a low quality lead right? Generally I like to say my team is pretty good about doing a pretty hefty qualification.

Alex (15:20):

Yeah. And you mentioned they’re paired with salespeople? Like literally they’re working with the same sales manager?

Ashley (15:25):

Yeah for our named accounts. And then we do have inbound stuff coming in off the side or other inbound campaigns.

Alex (15:32):

And that just goes straight to…

Ashley (15:33):

It goes kind of round robin.

Alex (15:36):

Interesting. So I guess you developed quite a good ratio with the sales team you’re working with. Are they all in the same office?

Ashley (15:44):

So my business development team is based out of our London office and then the sales reps come in kind of one, two, three days a week, depending on their travel schedule. They’re all over the UK.

Alex (15:56):

And do you think that sense of like relationship and being paired up, does that drive like them feeling like a team and being partners and sharing responsibilities?

Ashley (16:06):

I do think so and they kind of can brainstorm together about, I’ve talked to this guy, no bite, but who else do we know at the account? What else do we know? Maybe let’s go in, they kind of bounce ideas off each other.

Alex (16:21):

It’s that constant thinking about what works and what doesn’t, that’s so key right? To this constantly driving forward and optimising.

Ashley (16:27):

And they have these sort of shared spreadsheets that they all work from and they’ll input information, so the others can see it. And it’s been interesting to see that those relationships have really grown kind of organically. And it’s been interesting to see how they’re different from group to group.

Alex (16:45):

One of the last episodes we recorded the podcast, we were talking about skill sets a bit more and the need of soft skills and hard skills for marketing. I think it was an Econsultancy report, 93% or 96% said soft skills were just as important, if not more important than hard skills in marketing. Obviously all of the hard skills were like, yeah, we need to improve our data skills. 

And it was very kind of like the data era is here, but the soft skills were all in terms of lateral thinking and emotional intelligence and all the things that thankfully AI isn’t going to take from us because as humans, only we have them so far. It just feels like that’s the bit that’s so often overlooked. I guess when we talk about marketing generally, like people in processes so often, bits that people don’t think about right? But yeah, it’s interesting to hear the relationship side.

Ashley (17:40):

So many of the hard skills I think can be learned on the job. I mean, that’s what I’ve done in my career. I didn’t study marketing at school. I’ve done totally on the job training and you just pick it up and as you go.

Alex (17:54):

I guess leading on from like leads, definitions, there’s this bigger piece of attribution reporting. We talked a little bit about how this fits into the C suite and how people, you know, you’ve got this signed off in terms of budget. And it’s obviously an approach that everybody’s behind in the business. And I assume is working to some extent because I’m sure if it wasn’t working after a certain amount of time, it would be stopped. But what’s the kind of attribution model reporting. 

I know that you run like physical events too. And I mean, B2B attribution and tracking in a digital sense is I guess, there’s cookies and you can kind of keep a vague eye on things. But when you start to introduce events and direct and other things like trying to keep everything connected and all the dots join together can be a bit more complicated. Can you tell me a bit about how that works for you?

How to measure attribution with ABT

Ashley (18:44):

I think we’re really in our infancy in terms of multi touch attribution and tracking all that stuff. I think for us, it’s going to have to be very technology enabled. And so we’ve just, we did a pilot at the end of last year. So it’s not something we’re really actively reporting on right now. I know at least for me, anytime we do any sort of inbound campaign, whether it be an event or a webinar or anything, I’m always saying, what have we done to get that in front of our ABT accounts? Or how do we know how many ABT accounts are going to be at that event? 

I try and get the delegate list or at least the company list to say, let’s reach out, see if they’ll by the stand and have a conversation. We’ve had really good luck that way actually. Even just like scheduling coffee meetings in the hotel lobby or a sales rep that wasn’t even there to staff the stand, but they were, this person happened to be at an event and we got 20 minutes with them and got an opportunity out of it. 

So I think it’s being just mindful of everything that you’re doing. What can we do with the ABT accounts with this program? Cause I think there’s so much crossover there and so much opportunity for crossover. And even if it’s, you’ve got a new white paper, how can we use this in a one to one outreach? Or can we run a digital campaign to our ABT accounts on just this white paper? You know?

Alex (20:13):

And what’s the kind of volume in terms of one to one stuff, vaguely, like how many accounts are there? Does each BDR have a list of like in the tens or hundreds or like how extensive is the program?

Ashley (20:24):

Yeah, our full list right now is like 230 accounts. Each sales rep has 25 ABT accounts. And so a BDR has multiple sales reps that they’re supporting. So depending on that alignment, how many kind of accounts they’re going after.

Alex (20:44):

So I guess there’s a point at which you need technology, you need some degree of automation. Like obviously if, I guess there’s a sense of prioritisation. So the really high value accounts probably get more one to one time and kind of common sense approach, but what other kind of tools and technology are being used maybe to support like the reporting and attribution and analytics side of things? But then just more generally to like support automation? I guess actually on the reporting side, are you going into board meetings and saying like, this is how many target accounts we’ve contacted this month? Or what kind of metrics do you use? 

Ashley (21:23):

Yeah, mostly just reporting on the number of accounts we’ve had meetings with, and how much we’ve got in pipeline. You know, from opportunities that we’ve raised through the program. That’s the day to day I do keep track. So where I’m using Demandbase to run digital campaigns. So they used the domain at the company and the IP address and get ads in front of them. So I do track sort of impressions and things like that. 

And we’re able to track on an account by account basis, sort of what they’re looking at online and what they’ve seen on our website. If they’ve been to the site, just kind of tailor the one to one outreach. For one to one outreach, we’re using outreach.io, which I think it’s a great tool, really helps you add a lot of automation and efficiency to the program. You can see who’s looking at what and when it’s been forwarded and all that good stuff. 

So, I mean, really there’s a whole lot more that I think I could be doing in terms of reporting and analysis and things like that. And for me right now, it’s just a bandwidth issue.

Alex (22:26):

Of course. I mean no one likes that part of it, right? Like it’s one of those things that you kind of have to do. And obviously it’s important to be always optimising and looking back and improving. But I think the lighter weight that your board reports can be the better, I think for most people. Demandbase is such a, it’s such an interesting tool in terms of how powerful I think it can be. 

And I know from my perspective I’ve only just scratched the surface of what it can do. And I remember seeing quite an interesting, particularly like the intent data side of things, when people are showing intent around certain services and products, and it’s almost like predicting the future. I find it really fascinating, but I guess there’s a sense of maturity that’s needed before marketing teams start looking at this kind of approach? Like I guess if they’re in a truly, truly pure enterprise space where maybe they really only have like 50 clients they ever want to work with and they can go straight for kind of an ABM approach, but you still need all of the content. 

You still need elements of inbound to drive some degree of traction, I guess. Do you have any thoughts based on now or your past in different sizes of businesses where like, is there a point at which people maybe aren’t ready to be diving in with all these tools and technologies and advanced processes and actually they’re better just getting the basics sorted first?

Ashley (23:46):

I think you definitely need someone really smart and talented to be in charge of marketing automation. Someone that’s in your CRM and gets it and knows how to do workflows and all that stuff.

Using marketing automation with ABT

Alex (23:59):

Are you using marketing automation too? Through Demandbase or another?

Ashley (24:04):

Through Pardot and Salesforce. I mean, if we ever do get an inbound lead from an account, a named account, it would automatically get routed to the right BDR or sales rep. So we have those workflows in place. And I mean, that’s huge to me. I mean our marketing automation manager, half the emails she sends me I understand this much of it. I mean, I’m like, okay, I trust you, whatever you say, just go for it. Just tell me what to do.

Alex (24:31):

And now marketing. I think that the marketing automation job role is such an in demand one right now. I think like if people can think in that way with that logic and scale that adequately, then that’s a good place to be. I guess recently I was at a B2B marketing thing, like a technology focused marketing event. And there was a couple of people talking about, I guess like marketing operations teams and having people that are really just like underpinning marketing as an operation, but from a very technology led perspective. 

At certain points within tools like Pardot, you’re getting quite advanced with what it can do. HubSpot maybe arguably a little bit more user friendly, Pardot a step further, Marketo probably even more. So yeah, it’d be interesting to see how in like a few years time what the structure of a team looks like when there’s, you know, a marketing automation tool, ABM tool, CRM, there’s like minimum five, six, seven different things being used, tying them all together and keeping them clean and tidy and talking to each other. It makes my brain hurt sometimes just thinking about it.

Ashley (25:40):

Yes. Well, that’s the thing. I mean the Salesforce admin or the CRM admin has to be there or else your reports don’t look great. So if your sales reps aren’t putting an opportunity in the right way or aren’t including the industry or aren’t including whatever campaign it came from. If they’re not attributing it right, then your reporting won’t make any sense.

Alex (26:01):

Yeah. I mean, which sales reps have entered CRM data correctly?

Ashley (26:05):

Or entered CRM data at all. Yeah.

Alex (26:08):

It’s a challenge.

Ashley (26:10):

Which is why it’s nice to have the BD team sitting in marketing cause they kind of can police them and tell them what’s what.

Alex (26:16):

Bridges the gap. Yeah, I guess to wrap up, do you think ABM, ABT, do you think these things are kind of the future? Are there other things that you think like maybe on the horizon will to some extent take their place or are these kinds of like foundational, almost underpinnings that like now we have the data we can do one-to-one type stuff at scale, that this whole like way of thinking about marketing is here to stay?

Ashley (26:42):

You know, it’s obviously a buzz word. I think a lot of it has to do with just the way we consume content nowadays and the way we generally want to be marketed to usually at the consumer level. You know, we’re so much more okay nowadays when Amazon gives us suggestions on other things to buy and all that stuff. And I think now it’s just seeping into B2B and I think that’s what’s driving this. 

I think there’s still the core sort of marketing fundamentals that are there. It’s knowing your audience, knowing how to segment them, giving them valuable content and having the messaging foundation there and aligning with sales. And you have to align with sales and you should align with sales on all of your programs. It up levels it and it shows your impact. I think as a larger part of the business and can show your impact to the pipeline.

Alex (27:36):

Everybody wins, right?

Ashley (27:37):

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Alex (27:38):

Cool. Well, it’s been a pleasure talking. I’m sure we could keep going for a long time, but we’ll wrap up there. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Ashley (27:45):

Thanks very much for having me.

FINITE (27:47):

Thanks for listening. We’re super busy at FINITE building the best community possible for marketers working in the B2B technology sector to connect, share, and learn. Along with our podcast, we host a series of events here in London, so make sure you head to finite.community to subscribe and keep up to date with upcoming events.

And once you’re done listening, find more of our B2B marketing podcasts here!

The FINITE Podcast is sponsored by Clarity, a full-service digital marketing and communications agency. Through ideas, influence and impact, Clarity empowers visionary technology companies to change the world for the better.

Find the full transcript here:

Jodi (00:00)
Hi Chris, welcome to the finite podcast.
Kris Rudeegraap (00:03)
Thank you, Jenny. Thanks for having me.
Jodi (00:06)
It’s a pleasure to have you here today to talk to about a topic that is quite close to my heart as a community leader. We’re talking about community-led growth. Now, you’ve been doing this loads at Sendoso. It’s been one of your main key strategies that has really been pivotal to your success and your growth. I can’t wait to hear more about that, but I think as we always do, before we get started, I would love to hear more about your background and experience to date.
Kris Rudeegraap (00:35)
Yeah, of course. So I started Sindoso about 10 years ago. Prior to that, I spent about a decade in software sales myself. While I was at my last company, I was seeing… just the efficacy of email and seeing that response rates were kind of diminishing. And again, this was 10 years ago. I thought email was going to slowly die out as the spam hit it so hard. and so I thought about, Hey, what are some of the other channels that are less saturated and can still grab people’s attention? And that’s where really direct email and gifting came to mind. And so I was doing a lot of it very manually. I was in the office grabbing swag, packing boxes, or on a call here at dog. bar, go grab a dog toy from Amazon and ship it out to a prospect. and all those things worked really well. It was just a nightmare to manually track it manually, expense report, manually click on tracking links and follow up. So I dreamed of a platform that could do all this for me. That’s where Sendoza was born. we’re the leading global direct mail and gifting automation platform where we do all of the worldwide procurement fulfillment, all of the marketplace of gifts and mailers you want to send and then the software and data layer to bring it all together. And so over the years, I’m scaling that company from an idea to hundreds of millions in revenue, learned a lot and done a lot with community as part of a growth strategy over the years.
Jodi (02:00)
Yeah, absolutely. Really exciting to hear all about your gifting business and the thought process behind that. I mean, I’m sure it’s a lot more than a gifting business, but we’ll go into that in a bit. I did hear from you some really, really great results about what you’ve done with community and what it’s done for Sendoh. So I think community is so kind of a little bit abstract for marketers. They don’t really know how it can kind of impact the bottom line. So I thought, could you please share some really great key results that you can directly attribute to community?
Kris Rudeegraap (02:36)
Yeah, would love to. Maybe for the audience, I’ll take a step back to share a couple of different communities we have, and that will set the stage as we talk more in depth about them. the first community I was a super sender community, there’s about a thousand members in this, and this is a user community of active users, power users on our platform. This community, we engage through a Slack group, through a newsletter, through a sendy awards, a user conference, both virtual, we’ve done some in person, and then we have some AMA office hours through this community. The next group is our cab or our customer advisory board. This is kind of a dynamic community. Usually there’s a few dozen people that we engage quarterly to share product feedback, to get market intelligence from. And that community we typically pull from supercenters, but they could be executives that are not necessarily in our user community. I’ve then built a personal advisory group community. There’s over a hundred members here. This is mostly execs. and people that I’m sharing more details on the business, but a lot of them are our target ICP. But again, it’s a group of individuals that have opened their networks, opened their insights on. And then nurture our alumni. And this is probably 100 plus folks in this alumni community where I feel strongly that even after you leave, you could still be a valuable asset or you could still want to still, you Bleed Orange, as I like to say. And so I engage with monthly updates this alumni community as well. And so those are the kind of the different communities we have. A few stats. So our Supercenter community of Power Users, one of the areas that we wanted to do was we really want to focus on training and educating this community. And so we have this stat where any Supercenter who completes admin certification will spend 71 % more on our platform. And so that’s really a critical area where we try to, first we try to qualify people into this super center community and then we try to get them into certifications. So that’s a big one for us. The next one is. You know, we know that people switch companies often. And so we track all of our super senders through a tool called user gems and we’re tracking job changes. And then we go out and outreach to them when they’re at their new company, reminding them that they should continue to use Sendoso again. ⁓ and we have over a 60 % response rate from that list, which is huge compared to typical, like cold outreach, which is like, you know, in the. you know, few percent response rates. So really we re-engage our community after they switch jobs. And then the last stat for this ⁓ personal advisory group community, we’ve generated over 7 million in pipeline from this advisory community through warm intros. And that’s been a critical lever for us as we’ve continued to scale the business.
Jodi (05:31)
very interesting and some definite impact there. I was wondering, this is something that I don’t feel like is talked enough about in B2B is people moving jobs, you know, and your database is based on contacts and their associated companies and when they leave, you know, all you get is bounced emails and tracking them is quite a laborious process if you have thousands and thousands of data points, like…
Kris Rudeegraap (05:42)
Mm-hmm.
Jodi (05:56)
Do you automate that? How does that work from a practical standpoint?
Kris Rudeegraap (06:00)
Yeah, 100%. So the tool user gems we use, we will monitor all of our users through supersenders. And then when they switch jobs every month, user gems goes out and looks to make sure they’re at the same job. And if they’re not and they switch jobs, then user gems flags that creates a new profile in our Salesforce links back to the old record because so we can have some history of like how they use this before. And then it kicks off some automated engagement through this tool they have called GEMI, where it’ll actually then do the outreach for us. So even before we let any human into this, we might already have somebody to raise their hand and say, hey, thank you for welcoming me. Will you then use Cendoso to send them gifts celebrating their new role? And that is all very automated.
Jodi (06:56)
Very cool. Yeah, I thought so. That’s great tips and great tool recommendation, but we’re just to say we’re not paid. is is totally just organic recommendation. Yep. Nice Cool. So I suppose I’m thinking, you know, what was it about Sendoso that made you think community strategy was compatible?
Kris Rudeegraap (07:04)
Yeah, that’s just something that I love personally.
Jodi (07:19)
you know, is community for everyone or is there something unique about when you were like this decision making process when you were founding Sendoso that led you to this?
Kris Rudeegraap (07:29)
Yeah, you know, it’s a good question. I’d say, I mean, honestly, at first, I’d say community as a strategy wasn’t necessarily a strategy was almost more of like survival, where in the very early years, you’re obsessed with your customers, you want constant feedback. So you’re really trying to engage them very frequently. And that ended up driving a couple things. One was, you know, our best customers were already becoming advocates themselves. They were already shouting out that they loved us. And so that was already happening. Two, we really realized that… you know, some of the original channels, like I thought, Hey, I’m starting this company because email is dead. Well, what are their channels can we leverage? And so kind of the community engagement as a strategy was really critical for us. Because if we built relationships, even if they switch companies, it was much easier to engage with them than just do a cold email outreach. So we thought, Hey, let’s build these relationships. So we really optimized for the kind of the long-term when starting this. But I think. For us, we sell into a lot of marketers, sales, and CX roles. Those are kind of our three core kind of personas. And I think that certain ICPs tend to have better success with community. I think for us marketers, they enjoy talking to their peers, they enjoy sharing best practices, they enjoy learning. And so that’s really helped us build a… community based on our ICP. I could imagine maybe some ⁓ ICPs maybe are less interesting for like a community strategy. But I think also because we were a cool new tool years ago, we were a new category where marketers didn’t fully understand like how do I leverage direct mail automation? And so having this community with education and peers lent itself to people wanting to almost brag about it and join a community to share more about it.
Jodi (09:20)
Yeah, absolutely. definitely seems like education is a big piece there and it almost seems like a lot of the more mature communities that exist in B2B now started with a forum of customers talking to customers experience managers troubleshooting and figuring it all out together. So actually did the start of your community strategy really look like? You’ve mentioned kind of advocates and maybe wanting to encourage word of mouth, when did it start to become more kind of structured and strategic and maybe measured?
Kris Rudeegraap (09:57)
Yeah, mean, looking back on it, think very early it was scrappy. It was these small dinners. was these, you know, more of an informal Slack group to get going that then was formalized as we brought on like a customer marketer. So no grand vision or, you know, fancy tooling, I’d say day one. It was just getting smart people in a room and getting them to talk to each other. We did have some fun early stories. So one that comes to mind was we had an early community event where I gave everybody fake prop money, like the money that they use in like Hollywood. And then I acted as an auctioneer and I made people bid on the features that they wanted us to build the most. That was probably my, one of my favorite community moments because it just got everyone so excited and the limited money made them really think about the trade-offs of which feature on our roadmap they really cared about most. And so I think bringing in some creativity and fun. You know, again, continue to make this community interesting. And I think that you need to bring interesting content or interesting initiatives into the community.
Jodi (10:58)
I’m interested because you’ve you really made it clear that there is kind of a bubbling excitement for your product and that that is interesting to me because it it almost seems like maybe third-party communities might be more kind of trusted or seem more objective in their recommendations for like tools or you know brands products and things like that. How did you engage customers to be brand advocates? How did you encourage that bubbling enthusiasm without feeling too salesy or like you were pushing Sindoso too much, if that makes sense.
Kris Rudeegraap (11:39)
Yeah, I think a few other things we did. You know, we, ⁓ we oftentimes had these office hours or AMAs where it was just the community, in these like, ⁓ zoom meetings. There was, and at some points we would have a customer market and they’re just to, kind of moderate or just to kind of chime in and help. But for the most part, it was community led. So I was, you know, one of our customers standing up saying, Hey, I’ve got a great story. I’ve got a successful Sendoso campaign I’ve done. I want to share with you what I did, what I learned and what I’m doing. And so it was really intentional for us to have them come in and share their success as a community member versus us coming in and saying, hey, here’s what you can do with our platform or, let’s teach you something instead. It’s like, hey, let’s let a peer teach you something. And so I think that was really strong. Even our Sendy Awards was that on steroids where we would award people for having success on our platform. And then the award ceremony was them sharing what they got their award for and what campaign drove that award. And again, I think that just goes back to feeling more real and authentic than having like some Sendoso member pitch.
Jodi (12:51)
Yeah, that’s absolutely makes sense. It’s, I feel like so many communities can mistake thought leadership or just kind of content strategy for community strategy. And really the heart of community is facilitated, facilitating those peer to peer connections and really encouraging those conversations between your, your audiences. And I can see, so that’s how you kind of, you’re not sales and you’re not blasting a message out. You’re really.
Kris Rudeegraap (13:11)
Exactly.
Jodi (13:19)
Yeah, encouraging those conversations. Is there anything else you do to encourage those conversations? I guess, you know, bringing your customers to events and you mentioned you’ve got a Slack channel. Is there anything else that you do?
Kris Rudeegraap (13:31)
One thing that we launched last year that I think is interesting too is we wanted to bring more customer conversations to the top of the funnel or earlier in the sales process as a community strategy. we really realized that customers love talking to customers. And then we also realized that a lot of peers or prospects wanted to talk to customers as part of the buying cycle. And oftentimes those were like back channels or harder for prospects to find. so, you know, one we are trying to that more prospects into this community. We don’t want it to become too prospect focused because you won’t have the value add yourself if you’ve never used Sindo. So, but one tool we recently rolled out was a company called Slash Experts. And what I loved about that is it really created a portal where we could showcase a couple dozen of our customers and then anyone could come instantly book a meeting with them. And so it eliminated us. feeling like we’re gating and only allowing prospects or customers to speak to people we’ve like purely vet first or purely say, hey, you want to talk to a reference? Here’s one person. Instead we say, here’s a bunch of people. You pick who you want. And that’s opened up more conversations. And I think at the end of the day, it all goes back to more conversations. And if people are organically talking to each other about you, it just spurs more engagement. so we’re trying to, back to facilitating conversations.
Jodi (14:55)
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s really interesting. And you’re lucky that you have so many kind of power users. Just out of curiosity, from a practical standpoint, how do you incentivize those advocates to kind of give up their time and promote or talk about Sendoso to prospects?
Kris Rudeegraap (15:12)
Yeah. So some of them do it because they want to have peer to peer network. And it’s almost like something that is context switching for them. It’s getting out of their day to day to, you know, talk to somebody else that’s interesting peer and share their success. It’s almost like brag, you know, being able to brag. for some of them too, we offer up like a thank you, or we’ll give them some compensation for their time. but it’s mostly driven by people that are raised their hand and they just want to, you know, celebrate their successes, share what they’re doing. And I think that a of people are in that boat where, you know, maybe their day-to-day job is, you know, something that they want to break out of and, and, know, do something a little bit different. so speaking with a peer randomly about a cool tool they’re using in their tech stack, ⁓ is something that they are willing to raise their hand for.
Jodi (15:56)
Yeah, awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I guess you are a gifting platform as well, so I guess, you know, it’s about recognition and it’s about, you know, rewarding that kind of advocacy. So I’m sure you do that as well. On gifting, how does that come into this? it?
Kris Rudeegraap (16:02)
Yeah.
Jodi (16:18)
impact your community strategy at all? Do you send gifts to new members or ambassadors? I think you’ve mentioned it briefly. Do you want to go into that a little bit more?
Kris Rudeegraap (16:27)
100%. Yeah, I think one of the best ways to engage a community is to ⁓ reward good behavior or just to surprise and delight. Because I think that goes a long way too. And so we will, there’s welcome kits, there’s things around ⁓ holidays, there’s thank yous, there’s life moments. So we try to track. know, life moments of our community. And if, you know, if they’re having a kid, they’re getting married, those are celebratory life moments that we can gift them. A lot of times we’re gifting swag items because again, they want to wear the Sendo so logo proud, proudly and go out and showcase to the world that they’re a super center or that they love the Sendo. So brand. I think swag plays a big part in, you know, gear that they want to wear and merge. but like you said, I think there’s different reasons why, rewarding good behavior tends to drive more good behavior. But I think the life moments is something that. some companies don’t think about, you we think about it because we’re, you know, a gifting platform, but it goes a long way if somebody, you know, has a big life moment and you step up and, you know, send them a nice little gift and that really helps build that relationship.
Jodi (17:41)
Yeah, I’ve never thought about that before. guess in B2B particularly, there is such a kind of boundary between business and personal life. know, I mean, we’re starting to cross it even more as B2B marketers use kind of consumer driven platforms like YouTube or even TV advertising. how do you kind of, how do you feel?
Kris Rudeegraap (17:48)
Mm-hmm.
Jodi (18:07)
Audiences react when a business kind of knows their personal life events and how do you see that line kind of maybe fading away in the future?
Kris Rudeegraap (18:19)
Yeah, you know, I think, for what we’ve seen is that that line is becoming blurred, especially since COVID where more and more people were working from home. And also people spend the majority of their day at work or working. And so if you can bridge the gap between what they’re doing for work and what they’re doing at home and or make that feeling, make them feel like you care about more than just their work. I think that builds the connection. and it builds, you know, if you have similar interests, you can build connections. If you, know, can, ⁓ thank people and, you know, at more of an emotional level, because I think a lot of business is transactional, and community, can really find people that care deeply about your brand. so if you can, you know, again, connect more emotionally with them, it tends to build that stronger bond and that stronger relationship, which then means. you know, when we do follow up after they switch jobs, they want to rejoin the community, you know, they want to feel a part of it again. And part of that is the warm and, you know, fuzzy feeling they felt when, you know, we sent them a gift, congratulating them on, you know, a job promotion and something that was a little different than just a, you know, or sending them a, you know, baby onesie with their favorite sports team logo on it. Things like that go a long way, even if they’re small.
Jodi (19:42)
I guess that’s another way that community marketing is described. It is one to many and I guess all one to few and that means that you are really making people feel special and like they’re being heard and like you’re not just some big brand hidden behind a website and fancy graphics. You are people behind that brand and you really are having those kind of one-to-one conversations. Would you agree?
Kris Rudeegraap (20:09)
Exactly. 100%. Yeah. And we’ve also done some stuff too, where we’ve, you know, we see actions where community members are talking with other community members and we’re rewarding that behavior too and thanking them for participation. So I think a lot of different ways you can use gifting in your community strategy.
Jodi (20:27)
All right, well, that’s all we have time for today. So thank you so much, Chris, for coming on the finite podcast. It’s been a pleasure to hear about community marketing from your perspective.
Kris Rudeegraap (20:36)
Yeah, thanks for having me on. What a fun conversation.

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