Skip to content
  • Some additional information in one line
  • Apr 5 2019

Podcast: Exploring culture as a part of marketing with Hannah Voss, Fluidly

featured-image

In this episode of the FINITE B2B marketing in technology podcast, we sit down with Hannah Voss.

Hannah transitioned from B2C marketing at Post Office before joining Fluidly as Growth Marketing Manager, an intelligent AI cashflow forecasting software helping small businesses to better manage their finances.

Our host Alex Price sits down with Hannah to hear about how Fluidly have worked on their company culture as a team, how this forms a part of marketing and potentially even becomes a strategic competitive advantage within Fluidly’s marketing strategy.

This episode covers: 

Listen to the full episode here: 

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

Full Transcript 

Alex (00:07):

Hello everybody and welcome back to the FINITE podcast. Today I’m going to be sitting down with Hannah Voss. Hannah leads growth marketing at Fluidly. 

Fluidly is a super cool fast growing FinTech business that’s really transforming the way that small businesses manage their cash flow forecasting and finances more widely with a really cool product that integrates with your accounting package and just gives you a lot of insights and automation that helps manage lots of different elements of finances. 

We’re actually a Fluidly customer ourselves, I think we’re one of the first actual Fluidly paying customers and Fluidly have actually since become a client of ours too at the agency. So I’m really looking forward to sitting down with Hannah, hearing about her experiences so far. She’s actually transitioned from B2C into B2B marketing. And if you were at one of our last FINITE events, we were talking about that as a subject and Hannah was on the panel. 

But I’m looking forward to digging into culture today with Hannah and really talking a bit about how culture feeds into marketing, how culture could maybe be a competitive advantage within marketing and some of the recent exercises and the journey that they’ve been on recently as a business to define what’s important to them and think about their values and think about their culture as they continue to grow. 

So they raised a series A funding round in November last year. I think a fair number of people have joined the business since then. And obviously culture is one of those things that is really key to the business generally, but I’m really excited to hear Hannah’s perspective on how it feeds into marketing. So I hope you enjoy.

FINITE (01:35):

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 (01:55):

Hi Hannah, thanks for joining us.

Hannah (01:56):

Hi, thanks for having me.

Alex (01:58):

No worries. So we’re going to be talking today about culture and how that drives a part of B2B marketing, which is a fascinating subject. You lead growth marketing at Fluidly. Do you want to start by telling us a bit about what Fluidly is? And then we can talk a bit about how you’ve ended up leading the B2B marketing side of things there?

About Fluidly and its marketing function 

Hannah (02:16):

Yeah, absolutely. So Fluidly is a B2B SaaS company. We act as an intelligence layer for small businesses. So we provide them with automated cash flow forecasting and credit control, which helps them to make better financial decisions and help them control their finances more easily.

Alex (02:33):

Cool. So lots of AI and clever technology is being used to help businesses predict the future.

Hannah (02:38):

Yeah, absolutely. We use machine learning to kind of do all the heavy lifting with the data. Say the cash flow forecast is produced pretty much instantly, which is kind of a big improvement on the way that most people do it using an Excel spreadsheet and lots of number-crunching.

Alex (02:51):

Which is actually where we were before we were a fluidly customer. I think we were one of your first actual signups through the platform itself. First paying customers I think. I remember Luke giving us a call when we signed up, but we love it, it’s a very powerful tool. And I know it’s definitely transformed our cashflow forecasting, which is great. 

So you’ve had a really interesting background in transitioning to where you are now, leading the growth marketing side of things at Fluidly. Tell us a bit about where you were before, and I know you at one of our last FINITE events, you were talking about how you transitioned from B2C in to B2B. Kind of what you’ve taken with you from that. But yeah, it’d be great for the listeners to understand.

Hannah’s transition from B2C to B2B 

Hannah (03:27):

Yeah, absolutely. So I had only worked on the B2C side before I joined Fluidly. I started my career at a health and fitness startup called Pay As You Gym. It’s an e-commerce site that sells gym day passes, say that you don’t have to buy gym memberships if you’re traveling, or if you just don’t go to the gym very often. I started out there working in paid search and set up all their AdWords accounts. From there I moved into a much more general role. 

So I did a lot of SEO, email marketing, and getting involved in the content marketing side of things. After Pay As You Gym I moved over to AXA Insurance where I worked on their home and motor insurance. Again, an SEO role that was kind of new to them at the time. They’d never really concentrated on organic search too much. 

So there was a lot of kind of getting the basics right and doing technical things on the website, as well as starting to produce content that would bring in kind of relevant qualified traffic to them. And then after that, I worked for the post office in their head office, that was on the financial side as well. So I worked a lot on their travel money and mortgages. And that again was in kind of an SEO content role with also some web project management in there as well.

Alex (04:35):

Interesting. So you actually started quite specialist rather than general, and then actually kind of become more general over time, but you’ve got some deep specialisms in different areas of SEO and content and paid search.

Hannah (04:45):

Yeah, absolutely. At Pay As You Gym, because it was a small start up, my role changed. I was there for two years and my role changed a lot over that time, depending on what the particular needs of the business were. 

So yeah, I started in a very very specialist area and then broadened out to become much more general. And then as the kind of SEO need became more pressing in the business and I kind of specialised in SEO along with kind of basically everything else along the way.

Alex (05:08):

Interesting. And now I guess you are managing a bit of everything at Fluidly, been a super exciting journey so far, recently raised series A, when was it? In November of last year, which is exciting. And you mentioned that you think was it eight, 10 people have joined the last three months or about? So the growth trajectory is obviously, you’re flying along and everything seems to be going in the right direction. 

And this is a great opportunity to talk about culture. So something I’ve always been fascinated by in marketing, we talked before this about how I’ve always looked at different companies that have a really strong culture and how that really feeds into marketing eventually. 

Obviously the short-term view is that having a strong culture just helps you attract more talent to the business, but actually with a longer term view and thinking more holistically, having a strong culture surely attracts the right businesses and customers to you as well and helps you ultimately win more work and scale the business in a, I guess in an indirect way. 

I’m looking forward to diving into a bit more because I know that as you’re growing, you’ve been investing a lot of time and energy and thought into how you create a culture that kind of helps support the growth but also takes people with you. And I think as you grow a bigger business I guess you have to think a bit more actively about how the culture works. But then yeah, I’m looking forward to hearing how you think that’s going to really feed into the bigger kind of marketing picture and marketing strategy. 

So I guess setting the scene at a top level, when we talk about culture in this context, what do we actually mean? Because I think it’s a word that gets thrown around a lot and there’s lots of different ways of approaching it and all kinds of different workshops and values and missions and visions and whys and hows and whats and everything else. What’s your take on that?

What is company culture and is it owned by the marketing team? 

Hannah (06:49):

Yeah. So I completely agree that there’s a thousand different words or ways to understand culture. I think for us at Fluidly at the moment, it’s a lot based around the norms than the beliefs of the team and that shades the way that we should behave internally and also externally. So it’s not just between team members, but also how we as a business kind of present ourselves to the world and how we interact with customers and how we make decisions.

Alex (07:15):

Okay, interesting. And so I guess there’s then, as a sub section of this, is culture something that’s actually owned by and the responsibility of the marketing team? To some extent, obviously in any business the leadership, the CEO founders are always heavily involved in, even if they don’t actively try, are kind of setting the college to some extent, by the way they act, and it trickles down across the business. But do you think it’s something that is the responsibility of marketing to look after as such?

Hannah (07:48):

So I think Fluidly, when we’ve spent kind of a lot of time thinking about this for the last six months and we’ve grown from six months ago, we were kind of 15 people and we’re now 30, so we’ve moved from a position where culture was something that was kind of tacitly understood, to something, to a place where culture needs to be kind of explicitly said. 

And as we’ve been going along that journey, and we’ve done a lot of work talking to the team about how they feel the culture is and what they’d like the culture to be. One thing we’ve got from that is that we work in a place where everybody is really interested in building the culture and everyone’s willing to work hard at building the culture because everybody believes it’s really important to building a successful business.

Alex (08:27):

Do you think that’s part of working in a tech startup almost? Cause I guess you could argue that in a lot of much bigger established businesses, there’s plenty of people who maybe just don’t care that much about culture. Their job is a nine to five, you know, it ticks the basic boxes for them, but do they care that much?

The importance of culture as a start up 

Hannah (08:43):

Yeah, definitely. And I think joining a startup shows that you’re more likely to be that type of person that doesn’t just want to come nine to five. And I think it is also more difficult when you’ve got a business that’s hundreds or thousands of people too, for all of them to kind of build the culture individually and understand the culture and feel the culture to be true. But because we realise that it’s something that everybody’s invested in working hard at, then that’s something that everybody takes responsibility for. 

Everybody understands the culture and everybody works hard to make sure that we embody the culture. And that, as we grow, is one of the reasons I hope that we’ll continue to have such a strong culture because the individuals within the company are taking responsibility. And I think the part that marketing can play in it is tying the culture back to the brand and also articulating the culture in a way that everybody feels to be true.

Alex (09:37):

Yeah, interesting. We can talk a bit more about that, but I know that you’ve recently been through some exercises to help define what your culture is, to some extent? And really think in a reflective way as a group, as a team, what do we value? What’s important to us at work? So tell us a bit about those kinds of exercises and how you plan those out and what you went through on the day or days?

How to actively form a culture through group exercises 

Hannah (09:58):

Yeah. Well, before we even started the work, there was a sense that everybody knew what the culture was.

Alex (10:07):

Which is a great place to start I think.

Hannah (10:09):

Even though it had never been said out loud or written down anywhere and we wanted to test that out and make sure that we hadn’t got that completely wrong. So we did the initial ideas gathering session with the whole team where we did a few exercises, some kind of more serious and reflective, some were a bit more lighthearted. 

We did an exercise that was called more like X than Y, where you picked two brands or two people and then you rate the sentence. Fluidly is more like X than Y. So it could be something like Fluidly is more like Coca-Cola than Pepsi or anything.

Alex (10:42):

So you can do people or brands, famous people, objects.

Hannah (10:48):

And we came back with some really good things and that was a good way of first getting down how people saw the brand. And then we went through and discussed why we’d pick those things and what it was about particular things that we’d written down. So then we had a list of words with how to describe what we see our culture as. And from there we split that out into, thankfully the words all kind of made some distinct territories. So we then had our five territories.

Alex (11:16):

Do you do a lot of post-it note grouping?

Hannah (11:17):

Alot of post-it note grouping. Love a good post-it note.

Alex (11:17):

And did you do this offsite? You left the office and had a refreshed view? Or how did you structure it?

Hannah (11:28):

It was an offsite, but it was an offsite that’s onsite. So in our office building, but on a different floor.

Alex (11:33):

Okay. So just about enough to get out the office. Cool. And was that the bulk of the day? Was there other stuff that fed into it either before or after to kind of wrap it up afterwards?

Hannah (11:46):

Then at a later session after we’d established those territories, then we did some work on articulating them a bit more clearly. And from there we kind of took it to sort of the C team and marketing and firmed up how we saw the territories.

Alex (12:03):

And so was the C-suite and such involved in that earlier territories exercise as well?

Hannah (12:08):

Yeah it was everybody in the team.

Alex (12:08):

Then it was more just about distilling it down and turning it into something tangible almost? That you could have in five slides in a deck.

Hannah (12:18):

Yeah. And then more recently we’ve played that back to the team, and then worked on actually bringing the values to life as such by volunteering stories about how we think the values.

Alex (12:29):

Okay. So this is fascinating for me, because I think when you’ve got your culture and your values defined to some extent, it’s so easy for them to then just slightly disappear, or you stick them on the wall in one of your meeting rooms and that’s kind of it. And so this bringing them to life bit, I think is fascinating. So talk a bit more about how you’ve done that, and any initiatives you’re thinking you might be planning to do.

Hannah (12:52):

Yeah. So when we kind of played the values back to the team, then we did an exercise where people thought of different examples of ways that they’d seen the values embodied at work.

Alex (13:02):

By other people in the business?

Hannah (13:04):

By other people in the business, or an interaction between someone in the business and the customer, or just in the way a decision was made or in the way that we articulated something externally or internally, or the way that we recruited. And we came up with all these stories. 

So one of mine, for example, one of our values is about stepping up and not leaving people in the lurch. And as a one person marketing team, a lot of my job revolves around carrying really heavy boxes of notebooks around the office that we give out as slag. And when I have to do that, I never have to ask for any volunteers to help carry the boxes. People look around and they see what needs doing and who needs help. And then they just jump in and step up for people.

So it was things like that and some of them were more serious and some of them are more light hearted. And from there it kind of colours them and brings them back from big, inspirational words down into actual interactions day to day.

Alex (13:56):

Okay. That makes sense. So is that something you envisage you’ll keep doing on a monthly basis? Something you’ll reflect on, who’s lived up to values and like stories you can tell that reflect those values.

Hannah (14:07):

I think so. I mean, we’re growing really quickly at the moment, so I think it’s natural that the culture will develop and change slightly over time. But I think that stories is a good way to bring it back to each team member and for them to think about individuals, to avoid it becoming just words on the wall, as you say, that people don’t really relate to.

How culture is maintained as a company grows

Alex (14:28):

That makes sense. Yeah. So I guess you just mentioned the fact that you’re growing so fast and we talked about how many people have joined recently. Do you think it’s more difficult to actually control the culture or maintain a culture across everybody asked as you go? 

And I think obviously if we look at businesses of any size as they get to thousands of employees or more globally with any kind of serious pace of growth it’s hard to keep track of all of that and keep it all tied together. Do you feel like just going from 15 to 20 to 25 people, I mean, obviously you’ve been through this exercise recently, so maybe reading between the lines you felt the need to actually get it on paper a bit more? 

Because I think I know when we were a smaller team, it felt like everybody was kind of wrapped around the same thing. And there was just this sense of what was important quite naturally. And then as we grow and people get busier and people spread out a bit more, you lose that kind of sense of connectivity and everyone being tied together. Is that kind of how you felt things as they’ve progressed?

Hannah (15:29):

I think going back to what I was saying earlier about the team being invested in the culture and taking it seriously and wanting to work at it. I think that helps us out a lot because we don’t have to work hard to get people kind of interested in the culture, the interest is there already. 

But that said, as we grow, as with a lot of things, I think you need to be more clear about processes and company documents. And rather than things just being understood between a group of people, I think it’s more important, the more people you have coming in that you need to be able to communicate that to them in a quick and easy way that’s the same for every person, so that people don’t get a slightly different version of events depending on who told them.

Alex (16:08):

And it’s about on boarding, right? When people join to begin with, it’s about really making clear what those values are and trying to, with any new person joining business that first few week period is such a critical one, that will really define the rest of their journey with you. So getting that worked in early on is important. Okay, cool that’s really interesting. 

So I guess now understanding the journey that you’ve been through and how you’ve got to defining what you have so far, then it’s really about how do you work that into marketing? Like, does it become part of your content strategy? Does it govern how you service customers? 

Do you define whole marketing campaigns around those values? I’m really interested to, I guess we’ve talked about how culture is indirectly something that’s attractive to new customers potentially, but in a more direct way, how does it start to feed into what you actively do as a marketing team?

How culture affects a marketing strategy 

Hannah (17:03):

I think it really informs a lot of our decisions because it allows us to be really authentic as a marketing department and everything that we put out can reflect the values and be another way to show customers or potential recruits or anyone that this is who we are, and this is what we’re doing, and this is how we’re going to do it. 

So I think having that clarity makes it actually easier in some ways, because in terms of take, for example, content strategy, our values can inform how we write about things, what we write about. One of our values is around being straightforward. So that obviously can inform content in that we wouldn’t write something that was really inaccessible to people. We would always want to make things clear and straightforward. 

So in all sorts of different ways, it kind of informs the marketing department and their activity.

Alex (17:52):

Interesting. Yeah, because I think there’s just so many ways that you can then start to work, particularly on the content side of things that you’ve talked about. You’ve been telling stories about how people, that’s a great piece of blog content too right? 

And I guess really feeds back into how people perceive the brand. And the authenticity side of things you mentioned is really interesting too. 

Obviously we’re in this Simon Sinek age of talking about why you do what you do rather than the how or the what, and you know, there’s that emotional more human side of decision-making that’s really important. How do you see this feeding into the authenticity side of things in a bit more detail?

Hannah (18:28):

I suppose it’s so we can show our customers what we’re about and the people who, the customers relate to that and also agree with what our kind of view of the world. They’ll see that we’re kind of a good option for them. And we want to attract people who see that machine intelligence and human intelligence can come together to create things that are kind of bigger than the sum of the parts. 

And if we show that through our values, but also through everything we put out, then the people who relate to that and see that and see us will naturally gravitate towards us.

Alex (19:02):

Interesting, yeah. That makes sense. And I guess if you look at a marketing funnel almost as the top, which is just about acquisition and getting people to your site and explaining what the product does and then there’s this decision-making stage of content and this layer of content, which is actually about almost putting Fluidly and some other products side-by-side and comparing them, does it integrate with Xero and all these things that probably all tick similar boxes and it’s quite hard to differentiate. But what’s key in that decision making stage, is then that you can stand out based on your culture, which is really, really interesting. 

I think something that’s so often overlooked. So I think it would be great to talk about that, how it can form a part competitive advantage within marketing. And there was an article that I shared with you from Forbes, I’m just going to read a quote from it. I thought it was quite cool. 

It said “the C-suite is thinking too short term or too small, which is where marketing comes in. We think big for a living. Culture changes and bean bags, overhauling internal communications, creating mentorship programs, offering better training for new technology, launching platforms for employee advocacy, giving employees a voice in the brand conversation, it’s empowerment and support. It’s bringing the best out of each employee, which in turn brings the best out of the brand.” 

I thought that was such a powerful kind of almost manifesto for how culture can be almost central to marketing. We talked about how, you know, there’s elements of culture that can just support decision-making and help drive new business. But then I guess, is there a place for culture being like the leader of marketing? Like, is it almost like everything becomes wrapped around the fact that you are a great place to work for? 

You know, you win loads of awards for it, people love working for you, people are really behind this mission and actually it’s almost like the product itself and the product specs and the integrations are just second or third tier in that in comparison. Do you think that resonates at all?

Hannah (20:53):

Yeah, I definitely do. I think it’s definitely something that we want to show the passion and the vision for the future. And we almost want to have a great product, but at the same time, we want people to understand that our mission is bigger and better than that. And will carry on going beyond and breaking new frontiers in terms of business finance. So definitely I would say…

Alex (21:20):

In terms of ambition…

Hannah (21:21):

Yeah, and I think the other thing as well, and the other way in which culture can act as a competitive advantage is that the culture that we’ve developed and the values we’ve set, I think the team genuinely believe that it will help us to make better decisions and to grow faster and to do the right thing and build the best products based on the culture that we have and the way that we work internally.

The importance of authenticity in marketing 

Alex (21:42):

Interesting. We talked a bit before about how, I guess in B2B marketing generally, there’s often a real lack of that emotional side of decision-making and we all forget that just because we’re a SaaS based tech startup or something that there’s not a human being sat on the other end of the computer or reading your recent blog post or something.

And I think for us as an agency, I reflect on it a lot when occasionally a client will come in and say, oh yeah, we read your meet the team interview with someone, and it really makes you think that people do. Sometimes you become a bit detached and you kind of think are people are actually reading this, is it important? 

And particularly, I think for you guys in a more tech focused world, it’s about the future of the product and how it works and how it connects and all of the things it actually does. And it’s so easy to get distracted by what it does and how it works and the AI and all the wizzy stuff. 

But then this Simon Sinek view of the why over the what or the how. What do you think about the emotional side of decision-making? We look at decision making and it plays a part in B2B marketing generally, but also for you guys at Fluidly. And I assume that based on discussion that culture’s going to be a part of that in terms of values.

Hannah (22:51):

Yeah, definitely. I think at the end of the day it’s humans within businesses that you’re marketing to and humans respond to things that are real and that ring true. And we all like genuine relationships, not just people paying lip service to things. I think that is maybe best illustrated through our customer support, which is we care as another one of our values. 

And I think showing genuine care, not just saying that we do, but also embodying it through the interactions that we have with people and showing people. We get a lot of feedback on the fact that we’ve got our phone number very readily accessible on our website so that people can phone us if they want to talk about a problem. 

And so many tech companies don’t have that and you can’t get in touch with them, but for us, we want to make sure that we’re kind of accessible and that people, if they’ve got a problem or they’ve got a concern then they can get in touch with us really easily. So I think it’s things like that show genuine commitment to the values, will have the biggest impact on people.

Alex (23:48):

Interesting. And I guess you’re talking there about people actually getting in touch if they’re already a customer, or also when they’re thinking about buying, but a bit of a segue, I guess do you see the customer service side of things as falling somewhat under the marketing’s responsibility? 

And a big part of, obviously for you, retention is a metric that I assume you’re measuring, customer lifetime value and making sure that people stay engaged with the product and keep using it. So that’s something that I gather from your perspective, marketing wise, it’s on your agenda and it’s not just getting new people through the door.

Hannah (24:22):

Definitely. I work really closely with the customer success team at Fluidly. And again, it’s as much about presenting a sort of united front where people don’t have the sense of having got through the door and then left alone. 

But the handoff between the acquisition side and the retention side is kind of seamless, but also reflects our values the whole way through and so people are getting a sense of our culture all the way through the customer journey. It’s not just something that marketing is doing off on their own. And then actually when you get to using the product or if you need help or support, then it is impacting there as well.

Alex (24:56):

Yeah. And that’s fair enough, I guess, to nearly finish up that storytelling side that we’ve touched on, we’ve talked about the emotional side of decision making and how powerful that can be. Culture’s a part of that, but also just telling the story of how you were founded and growth. 

And I think with a lot of any startup, I guess you naturally have good foundations for that story because you’ve come from nothing to something quite quickly almost. 

Do you spend time thinking about how you tell that story and paint that picture of growth? Because I think that can be a really effective way of just taking people with you both internally in terms of the team, but also clients who are probably often attracted to people that are successful.

Telling a growth story as a way to be authentic 

Hannah (25:37):

Yeah. I think the Fluidly story is one that we don’t have to put too much work into making resonate with small business owners as our audience because Caroline Plumb our CEO was a small business owner. The reason she started Fluidly was because she was so fed up with having cashflow problems in the business. 

And wondering whether she’s going to be able to make payroll or worrying about what was going to come up in the financial future. And there was no kind of easy solution to that pain point. So I think having Caroline who’s really been through that experience that so many of our customers relate to makes it really authentic and really real for people.

Alex (26:15):

Yeah. Literally been there, done it, felt the pain. That’s pretty powerful, definitely authentic on the end of the authentic scale. That’s really interesting. Well, I think it has been an absolute pleasure chatting through stuff. I think it’s one of those areas that I don’t think many marketing teams I’ve met have actually reflected on that much in terms of how culture and values feed into the bigger marketing picture. 

So it’s really interesting to hear about how you’re driving it forward and I’m looking forward to seeing Fluidly continue to grow and thrive and keep on booming. So thanks a lot for joining us and giving up your time.

Hannah (26:49):

Great. Thanks very much for having me.

Alex (26:53):

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.

Previous Episodes

1 / 1

Enjoy our most recent B2B marketing podcast episodes: