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  • Aug 10 2020

Podcast: From enterprise to self serve SaaS with Gustaf Stenlund, VP of Growth at Nudge

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Gustaf Stenlund is VP Growth at Nudge, a smart content dashboard product. Nudge have been on an interesting transition from an enterprise proposition and lengthy sales journey, to a SaaS based self serve model allowing any business to onboard onto the Nudge platform. 

Gustaf sat down with FINITE podcast host Alex to explore how this has impacted marketing and growth for Nudge.

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

Full Transcript

Alex (00:07):

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another FINITE podcast episode. Today’s episode is with Gustaf Stenlund. Gustaf is the VP of Growth at the content platform called Nudge. You can check it out at, giveitanudge.com. Nudge helps marketers to track and measure the effectiveness of content. They’ve recently been on an interesting journey from more of an enterprise offering and marketing and sales approach to transitioning towards a more self-serve bottoms up SaaS model, whereby anybody can get started on the platform. We could start to talk about what that’s meant for business as a whole, but also how they’ve approached marketing and some of the learnings there and the work that they’re doing to make that effective. So I hope you enjoy this episode.

FINITE (00:54):

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 team and B2B technology companies to drive digital growth.

Alex (01:17):

Hey Gustaf, thanks for joining me.

Gustaf (01:18):

Hey Alex, thanks very much for having me.

Alex (01:20):

I’m looking forward to talking, or hearing a lot about what you’ve been working on at Nudge and this journey you’ve been on more recently in terms of your shift of, I guess, wider business model, but also how you’ve been doing marketing and diving into this kind of transition period you’ve been through. But as we always do, why don’t we start with a bit of background and tell us a little bit about the role you’re doing now and how you ended up here and all that kind of good stuff.

About Gustaf Stenlund and Nudge 

Gustaf (01:44):

Cool. Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m originally from Sweden, but I’ve lived in the UK for nearly six years now. That’s gone quick. My background is very much in marketing. I started off in B2C, but during the past four years been working in B2B specifically in the ad/content tech space. I’d say it’s probably worth noting though, that B2B is now more like B2C than ever. I think consumers just want convenient, positive buying experiences from businesses that align with their values and proves trustworthy. So that’s something that I’ve taken from B2C to B2B. And I’m trying to replicate.

Today though, I’m the VP of Growth at Nudge. Nudge is a content platform that shows the impact of content. So, we essentially enable marketers to improve their content and distribution through measurement and insights. And this is a known problem in the industry. Only 3.4% of marketers say their content is effective. I mean, that’s crazy and I think that needs to change. So data really helps here. It gives you an early feedback loop on how content is received. And so Nudge just gives you that feedback loop essentially, so you can iterate, improve and demonstrate success. So that’s my background and that’s what I do today.

Alex (03:15):

Cool. Interesting. And I think that that transition from, we had a few marketers on the podcast that have gone from the B2C to B2B side. I think I’m always smiling to myself at how few marketers have actually kind of formally studied marketing. I don’t know whether you did in terms of education or not?

Gustaf (03:29):

I did, yeah. I did economics with a specialisation in marketing.

Alex (03:36):

I’m always interested in the education side of things because there’s just so much out there. Do you think that specialisation in marketing helps you get into marketing as a career? Gave you a good foundation?

Gustaf (03:48):

Absolutely. It’s a way to get your foot in first of all. Especially in today’s landscape where there’s a lot of recruiters, they tend to create filters on the back of those things that, by the people hiring or looking for, they’re saying this is the background we’re looking for and that ultimately excludes people who would be good at marketing anyway. So it’s very much a foot in and it gets you ready for terminology and thinking about certain things in more of a marketing mind frame I’d say, but most of what I’ve learnt is on the job.

Alex (04:35):

Yeah. I think that weird filters apply with the B2C to B2B transition too, in that there’s a lot of jobs out there that are like, you have to have experience in B2B marketing, and as you point out, I think that the key difference now is that there’s more people involved in the B2B decision making unit and things are a bit more drawn out and lengthier and considered and complicates in that respect. But ultimately a lot of the things that you’ve picked up from B2C, I think as you say, can be applied. So how did you find that transition and how did you get the first B2B opportunity?

Transitioning from B2C to B2B marketing

Gustaf (05:07):

Well, it’s funny because as you’re saying, it’s not just that you’re boxed into B2C. I was in education before, when I first started, and the job opportunities that show up and that are not truly fitted to you, are marketing within education. So it’s not just that you have to then try and go outside of that box and then another box. But essentially, I tried to look at the market, what is it that I want to actually do longer term, and then just started to talk to as many conferences as I could that I thought could be a good fit for me and then went that way. And eventually things worked out.

Alex (05:51):

Yeah, cool. Let’s talk a little bit about content and the wider landscape before we dive into everything you’ve been doing at Nudge. You talked a bit about how Nudge fits in and what nudge does and how it enables marketers to build that case around content, figure out what’s working. I think we’ve been on a bit of a transition of, a long time ago content being a bit more on the periphery, but the phrase content is king has been around for a long time now. And I think it’s definitely true and probably even truer at the moment when events and all the kind of impersonal stuff that a lot of B2B tech companies use to drive pipeline, aren’t happening. All efforts are focused on website content and SEO. I think it’s a channel that seems to be rising a lot for lots of clients. So, it’s very much at the heart of B2B marketing now. What’s your lay of the landscape?

Looking at the B2B marketing landscape 

Gustaf (06:39):

No, absolutely. It’s definitely something we’ve seen as well in the last five, ten years. Like today, there are so many different content formats it’s really cheap and easy to produce, and those are reasons for why the uptake has been so great. But I think one of the main reasons for why content has moved to the centre of the marketing mix is simply because it works. It’s a proven concept now. You know, when we look at our data, we know that content on average earns 48 seconds of attention, which is more than the average TV commercial,. It has 107%, I believe, higher brand recall than TV. So it’s proven. And also like in terms of driving conversion, I think it drives it 1 to 3%. So all of these things also ultimately mean that the uptick in the adoption of the particular format will be greater.

It’s definitely true that now with COVID, it’s definitely forced a lot of that digital transformation to happen a lot more quickly, but it’s also interesting because a lot of the budgets that were supposedly to be spent on sports this year, sport was supposed to have a really big boom. There were lots of budgets and they have obviously had to transition elsewhere. The sports companies who are content companies (a lot of them are finding that out very quickly) have had to come up with other ways of doing this. There are some very interesting news cases out there now where, you know, FIFA for example, have had pro footballers play FIFA against each other. They’ve created tournaments and that’s a form of content like, all of this has boomed on the back of the current landscape as well. But that’s just a very recent thing, obviously.

Alex (08:32):

Interesting. And I think you mentioned earlier, was it 3.4% or something of marketers feel like that content is effective and also how easy it is and low cost is to produce content now. And I think more than ever, it’s about quality over quantity. I know in B2B, I think that’s definitely true, but I guess that the barrier to entry to producing content is lower than it’s ever been, but at the same time, making content that’s effective is arguably harder than it’s ever been.

Gustaf (08:57):

Absolutely. That’s the tricky part. It’s easy to get started with, but how do you do it well and how do you do it better than the guy next to you? That’s ultimately what you want to be able to do. So that’s also what we’re trying to help our clients to do. To get that feedback loop. What is it that’s working, what isn’t and start building a model that works for you. A model that works for you is not going to work for everyone else because you have the different products, you’ve got a different audience, so you have to take your time and figure that out as well.

Alex (09:37):

Yeah. So let’s talk a bit about your own journey at Nudge, because obviously you’ve been on a bit of a journey of transition from, I guess, more of a kind of bottoms up strategy, or at least targeting a more enterprise approach to sales and marketing into heading toward more of a self service platform where any small business could onboard. And obviously there’s a lot of change that comes with that in terms of how you do your own marketing and approach things, but obviously wider business implications as well. Why don’t you just kind of set the scene, tell us a bit about how it was before and some of the more traditional models of how you were doing sales and marketing in that enterprise space and what really was kind of driving the shift.

Moving from a traditional marketing model to a bottom up strategy at Nudge

Gustaf (10:18):

Yeah, absolutely. So we had a traditional model. We’ve worked mainly with enterprise clients in the past, helping them measure optimised, large scale, branded content campaigns. Meaning content that lives on a publisher site, it could be influencer content, it could be social campaigns. And that was more of a traditional top down model. So the buyer might not necessarily be the user. Adoption requires a longer sales cycle and implementation. And from a marketing point of view, we have had a more traditional model to drive leads further. So you have the context form on the side. So you can request a demo to have a call with us and go over the platform in detail and discuss what sort of needs you have.

What we realised is to grow Nudge quickly and make the impact we want to do, we want to make in the industry, things needed scale. And I think this came at a certain level of maturity, both from the market. So we’ve been talking a little bit about how the content space has matured from a market point of view as well, but it’s also matured internally in terms of our platform is ready to scale now. We know that we’ve got traction in enterprise space. It works really well, and we were confident in that. So how can we now take this and, and help more marketers?

So we’ve essentially taken a bottom up strategy where the platform essentially sells itself now. So we’ve taken the core product of Nudge and made it available to more marketers. So all you need to go and do now if you want to get started, is go to the website, look at all the information, hit get started, and get yourself signed up. There are some really interesting examples out there of companies that have done that really well.

Dropbox, I’m sure most of you are familiar with, the well known cloud storage platform, is a great example of a company that did that really well. They’ve built a community of 500 million plus users. I think 12 million of those are paying customers and their platform was very much designed, not for IT, but for the user. And they didn’t have a platform that was in a walled garden type of situation. It was more an open ecosystem. And I really liked that. Like, I think that really helps. And what happened was, from their standpoint, their user driven approach, it capitalised a lot of integrations across a multitude of SaaS applications that also, you know, helped really push them to become a really successful company in this space. And that’s because of the model they chose.

Canva is another really good example. And it’s a more recent one. They’ve really nailed the bottoms up adoption model. For those of you unfamiliar with Canva, it’s an easy to use online design platform. Again, all you need to do there is go to the site, hit sign up, add your credit card details, and off you go, you’re ready to design. I mean, I’m a buyer for a reason. I really love that platform. I use everyday basically, but they’ve got this really neat content strategy where they’ve mapped up all of their template designs, they’ve got the business card designs and the Facebook posts to cover against two types of landing pages, essentially.

Say one is for people looking for design templates. Let’s say you’re looking for just business card templates, well, that’s the landing page you’re going get. With a simple call to action showing how to get started. The second is around people looking to create. So it’s a small distinction there between looking for templates and just looking for a simple way to create that. And they’ve done that as well. So they’ve got landing page specifically for that. And again, you land on that. You’re good to go. And they’ve done this really well because they also recently capitalised on soon backgrounds becoming a big thing in the last few months, but essentially the bottom line is one search result, you’ll find yourself signing up to that platform. And now you’re a paying customer. And I really like that. That’s a model.

Alex (14:42):

Do they have a free trial model? Or I guess, it’s the idea that you get in there at least cheap if not free. And then the rest of the scaling of that account or prospect happens afterwards. And that’s kind of a similar model to what you’re adopting.

Gustaf (14:56):

Yeah, exactly. So they’ve got, I believe, a 30 day free trial and then it just runs over.

Alex(15:03):

I think you need to be at a certain level of product market fit and have confidence in what you’ve got to be able to do that. It’s interesting because you see some companies that are.. I guess sometimes you transition the other way, they’ve got a SaaS product that’s like $30 a month or something, and they don’t feel like they can actually scale that. So they had more towards enterprise space and they build out more of a kind of account management type offering and it’s thousands a month instead of $50 a month or whatever. But then you’ve also got examples of heading in the other direction. I think it’s, yeah, there’s a lot of nuance and detail, I think which defines, which might be the best route depending on the product and the personas and those kinds of things. But it’s interesting to see, I guess, heading in both directions.

There was a stat that I saw yesterday actually, which just as you were talking, kind of reminded me, which was that I think I saw that Zoom through which we’re talking now, I think over 50% of their hundred thousand dollars a year accounts began with one person signing up for an account or a free account or something. So similar concept, I guess, of like one person in an enterprise organisation wishing to adopt soon, giving it a go and suddenly, I don’t know, six months a year later, that company is spending a hundred thousand dollars a year with Zoom. And again, if you’ve got a great product that does what it says and is effective and delivers the impact, then it will sell itself. Right?

Gustaf (16:27):

Yeah. That’s the beauty of it. And what I really like when it comes to the bottom soft approach, like within seconds, you provision users and track their usage along with their purchasing patterns to gain a full picture of who they are. And that means that you’re piled with a lot more data as well, because you can, on the back of that increase use of value, you can reduce adoption friction, expand across their organisations. As you said with Zoom.

Alex (16:59):

We talk a lot about sales and marketing alignment. And I guess this is almost like a sales and marketing and product alignment in that this is closely in line with the product itself, right? Because you need those insights from the product team and data to come out of the product itself. Has it driven a more unified approach to how different teams work together? And because I imagine that this isn’t just a business decision, this has impacted the product itself as well.

Using product insights across multiple teams 

Gustaf (17:25):

I think if you’re a growth marketer and you work for a SaaS platform that’s looking to scale quickly, you have to work across multiple teams to be able to do that successfully because all of that data will impact, as you said, a lot of different aspects of the business so that it informs product roadmap. For example, it helps, you know, soar out things on a customer service level, but also how do you speak to your audience from a marketing point of view? What sort of services, what sort of features do your audience use when they’re actually a paying customer? Those are the things that you also want to look at and then, you know, reverse engineer back to the type of messaging you might have and things like that. So like how do you know what people like, you might not have known that before you got that greater adoption as much. So it really helps inform the full circle of things within your business, which is exciting to me.

Transparency in a self-serve sales approach 

Alex (18:22):

Yeah. And I think that’s something that a lot of marketers I talk to miss out on is just even a simple conversation with sales or products or account management or whatever it is, can feed back into the top of marketing messages quite effectively and define content strategy. And there’s so much that it can, it can help to shape. I know that, myself as well, when I look at SaaS products and some of them, whether it’s the, I guess the cheaper end, but as you move more towards the enterprise end there’s a lot less transparency around pricing and how much things cost typically, I know that can be quite a frustrating experience for, I definitely find that frustrating myself when you, you do actually have more of an immediate need and you just want to try something.

And I think a lot of SaaS products, it is about the experience to some extent. It’s not just about what it does with the value adds. And maybe this is me a bit more personally, too, but I think if I’m going to pay money to use something, I like to know what the interface is like, how easy it is to use and part of the decision making processes, how is it to actually log into and interact with, and having to be forced through like a two week long? We’ll schedule a call for next week, then we’ll set up a custom demo. Then it can take months.

Sometimes that’s really off putting, I think for me in a lot of situations, and I can understand why some companies go along that route, but it can feel like a really rigid guided, you know, you end up with a STR, who’s got like a script that they just can’t deviate from. And every phone call has to happen in the right order. And every bit of information they need, you can kind of hear them like typing into Salesforce, as they’re asking you the questions. It just feels robotic and too structured and inorganic and kind of just frustrating. I guess that this approach counteracts that right? And it just gives a much more open, transparent access to the product itself. Much more immediately.

Gustaf (20:05):

Yeah. I mean, we speak a lot about transparency to our customers on a daily basis. Like it’s important to have that transparency into your marketing investments. So we find it equally important that buyers of our product have that same transparency into what our product would cost and to how it will work. Obviously that’s something you want to know upfront. We’ve got a pricing calculator on our pricing page where you can just go and slide it across and you see, this is roughly what you’ll be spending, this is your estimate monthly bill, because the way the pricing works for self service, we, we just priced it at 2 cents per cost per view. So any impression that comes to your content will cost 2 cents. So, you know, you might have 10,000 views on your content one month and then you’ll have zero the next, because you don’t have anything to track. Well, that’s gonna, that’s gonna show up on your bill. You’re not gonna pay anything that month. So we’re very much into that idea that you get what you pay for. And it’s completely transparent that way.

Alex (21:12):

I guess, one concern when I’ve talked to other markets about this and the reason for not letting people just kind of self onboard is that they’re sometimes worried about competitors just getting into that product and having a look around. And I’m sure you can see random Gmail addresses and, you know, sometimes it’s hard to know exactly who’s inside the product. Is that a concern at all?

Gustaf (21:31):

I mean, I think it might be a concern for some, but it’s not something that worries us particularly. The main reason for that is because if clients can access Nudge, we just have to presume that it’s something that competitors can too. And the way I think of it is I think it’s just the price you pay for the potential of exponential growth. I just think that’s something that comes with the territory.

Alex (21:56):

A cost and a risk you have to accept.

Gustaf (21:58):

Yeah.

Shifts in the overall approach to marketing

Alex (21:58):

Yeah. And that makes sense. So how has this kind of shifted the overall approach to marketing you’ve got your website? We’ve talked a bit about the price and cost kits you’ve got and some of that kind of messaging stuff that you’ve done. Are there other areas that in terms of how you’ve approached marketing generally, or channels that you’ve used, that you’ve had to shift your approach to them as a result of this transition?

Gustaf (22:18):

Well, obviously it’s impacted everything. So now we need to address the time difference part of the content marketing audience. It’s very different. Like I’d say in general, when it comes to B2B marketing in my own belief, I tend to make bigger changes rather than small changes, you know, AB split test them a lot. Like, especially when it comes to selling premium rate products that have longer sales cycles, you know, instead of making changes to the homepage, like big changes to the signup page, everything that could impact the conversion.

And I think this particular change has been very similar. It’s been a very similar story in that we’ve had to make a lot of changes quickly, you know, to make it relevant to the people we want to attract. So that’s everything from messaging to the advertising that we’re putting out. And I’d say a very big difference has been now we’re looking to increase the lead flow, you know, quite significantly on the awareness stage. So it’s very important to obviously get a lot of people in upper funnel and then have them trickle through. And, you know, you want to get the quality right of that as well. It takes time. But I think that’s where you have to focus.

One way of doing that for us is we have a newsletter that we put up on a weekly basis. And that’s something that’s a lot of marketers really like in this space, we’ve got a couple of thousand on there. Now we want to make that a newsletter four hundred thousand. We don’t want to only have it. You know, some, we don’t want it to be a resource only for enterprise marketers. We want to be for anyone in content. So that’s one way to get them in early, you know, interact with them a lot. And just over time gain their trust, have them try the platform, that type of thing. So it’s, it’s definitely gotten a lot more focused in that regard.

Getting feedback from customers 

Alex (24:07):

Makes sense. I think one key area of this is in terms of kind of figuring out what works and messaging is, is the research side of things in terms of talking to existing customers, talking to potential new ones. I know when we spoke before you mentioned that you’ve been doing both the qualitative side and the quantitative side, I think this is something that people just don’t do enough and I’m not sure what the reasons I think some people are just kind of scared to ask. Sometimes I think sometimes it feels like quite a big, big effort to do, but that kind of feedback is it’s usually valuable. So tell us a bit about what you’ve been doing on that front.

Gustaf (24:39):

Yeah. It’s incredibly valuable. So yeah, it’s exactly what you said. I contacted a bunch of marketers, you know, freelancers startups, midsize to enterprise, did a bunch of interviews with them directly to learn from them. First of all, do they understand what we do by looking at their website for the first time? What sort of questions do they ask? How are they surfing the sites? What features did they deem the most important? All of those things are incredibly important resources as myself as a marketer. Like I can use all of that as firepower. I did a questionnaire on the back of that to like fill in some of the gaps and get more quantifiable data around, what specific features did they actually like, like, not just having seen it for the first time, but when they actually sit down and think about it and yeah, I sat down and analysed all of that mapped out.

And on the back of that, we’re now changing all of our messaging across the sites. We learned that we had to adjust the structure of the site for information to flow more neatly and for it to make more sense from a user perspective as well, but that doesn’t just impact the site. It’s also everything we do marketing wise. I think it’s important to note, as you said though, like it doesn’t just end there. It’s definitely not going to be last time I do that because once these changes have been made, which I know we’ll be rolling out in the next few days, I’m lining up the next number of interviews to see what else we can do. So it’s an ongoing process and it’s one that’s not going to stop anytime soon. And I think it’s important for marketers to do that.

Optimising demand for a traditional marketing model alongside a self serve model

Alex (26:18):

Yeah, definitely. I guess one thing which is probably worth asking is have you had people from the enterprise space that haven’t wanted to actually use self-serve or people that have still got in touch and said, actually, can we have a demo or can we request a cool or that they might actually prefer the more old school route for whatever reason in an enterprise environment where maybe they have to go through procurement and security. And it’s more almost like driven by RFPs and different things. Has that ever happened?

Gustaf (26:45):

I mean, that certainly happens. Yeah. So it’s definitely, it’s really important to have both for us, especially when you have the client like that. I’d say in general, they do want that because as I was saying before, the buyer’s not necessarily the user and there’s a lot of intricacies there, so they might have one person on the call first and then they don’t like the team who’ll be running it. So they might include the team who’ll be implementing the tool.

Like, so all of that, if you’re an enterprise, that root is still a lot of the time preferred because you want answers directly over a call. You might have certain pressing needs that are more complex than the average content marketer. So that still very much happens, but we also see the other way around where, enterprise, they do get a little bit frustrated sometimes with the fact that they can’t just jump on it and use it to play around with the platform. So it’s definitely something that’s helping us getting enterprises onboard earlier in the cycle.

Like for us, if enterprise jump on and they’re able to do that without having to deal with legal in the same way, for example, that taking a lot of time and they’re kind of re realising that actually this is something we want to use. The platform has sold itself and we don’t need to spend time talking to them, well not all in the same way, because they’ve already made up their mind. So yeah, there are definitely two ways there.

Evolving growth opportunities within a self serve model

Alex (28:19):

And so are you thinking more about that in terms of once someone’s in the platform having to segment, who’s kind of a growth opportunity? Because I guess previously once you hand it over the lead to sales and the more enterprise traditional route that was to some extent it was job done. Obviously there’s the communication to do from a marketing angle with those existing clients, but it’s then in the hands of sales to move forwards and account managers or customer success, or however you structure things. Whereas now it’s like, even if someone’s just signed up self service, the job’s not finished of marketing.

There’s a, there’s a growth opportunity there, which I guess straddles both marketing and sales, but what kind of extra work is happening in terms of nurturing other things to kind of grow those people that are self serving?

Gustaf (29:02):

Yeah. So it comes back to looking at all the data, like how can we reduce friction? What kind of features are people actually spending time using? Ultimately it’s our job to see what accounts have the potential to scale up to that enterprise level. We usually say that if you’re hitting around 150,000 impressions to your content per month, you were ready to take that step because you’re already spending the entrance fee for enterprise anyways. So you should make the most of it. You know, there are many ways of lending these accounts up, but ultimately if clients are getting value from the platform, it should hopefully scale naturally.

You know, if there’s a need for them and they’re getting more value out of their own content, hopefully that’s something that they realise that it’s a natural progression. I think it’s also something that obviously we’re doing from an automated marketing setups point of view. So lots of emails educating our clients as they use the tool too. If there are new product launches or feature launches and stuff like that. We also want them to know if things are changing within their platform or within their accounts, like say they have content that’s not doing as well as others. They’ll get an email saying this is something you should take a look at, go into the platform, nudging them along very much similar to what the name is. That’s the name for a reason nudging their own work.

CRM tools for data collection

Alex (30:30):

In terms of the data side from the product, do you feed that back into like CRM? How do you tie everything together? Cause obviously you talked about people using a particular feature and so you’ve got data coming from all the different sources?

Gustaf (30:40):

There’s a bunch of different tools that we’re using to track usage. We even have like, so we can actually see how actual users use the platform. How do they use it?

Alex (30:56):

Like Hot Jar or one of those tools?

Gustaf (30:56):

Yeah, exactly. So like how do they run in, do they run into particular issues? What, what might they be? So we also, that helps inform everything from the knowledge base. So like what sort of questions might they have? We have information around what makes them annoyed. Like we surface, is this a tool you’d, you’d recommend to your friends? And then you can like add extra context around why, why not and stuff like that. So there’s a bunch of different data sources that we’re currently looking at to figure that out, to make it a smoother process overall, and to gain that extra traction and having them use us more like that’s the, that’s the end game, just getting more value overall.

Alex (31:40):

Yeah. It’s nice to see that alignment between everything you’re doing and the product and everything just kind of feels like everything ties together quite nicely and feeds itself. And it’s quite cyclical in nature in how you learn and, and feed that back into marketing. But everything else that in terms of the product itself too, you talked about making things kind of more frictionless and kind of speeding up that sales journey a bit. Have you seen the sales journey come down as a result of everything you’ve been doing in terms of its length?

Creating a shorter sales journey through your website

Gustaf (32:10):

Absolutely. So with enterprise, as I’m sure you’re familiar with, you know, it can take months to get sales through. That’s not our main journey on the site anymore, but it’s still there, but like with the introduction of self serve and if we do our job really well, obviously it will be set to shorten that sales cycle from months to weeks, maybe even days.

But what’s important to note is on our side, we need to make sure that everything’s crystal clear in terms of what the use will get from when they sign up. That that process is easy to follow, that there are simple ways to get help in case they need it. And just that the platform is in fact, delivering value to our customers, both short term and long term and all of those things help drastically decrease sales, uptake, the adoption. And I think the main KPI to look at there, just to know if it’s working, is, are we spending less time with clients as in chatting to them directly, but see the overall value go up? Well, then we know it’s working.

Alex (33:11):

Yeah. Interesting. That’s very cool to hear about everything you’ve been doing. I think it sounds like you’re, you’re still doing a lot and you’re still learning and still gathering lots of insights and moving pretty quickly on all that stuff, which is, which is cool. I guess if anyone wants to check it out, it’s giveitanudge.com is the website address to have a look at Nudge. But I think, yeah, there’s some really good insights you’ve shared there. I think even if you are in a more kind of enterprise space, there’s a lot of learnings there around alignment and I guess the research side of things and insights that you can use to feed back into marketing that still apply either way.

Gustaf (33:42):

Absolutely.

Alex (33:42):

So, yeah. Thank you so much for sharing and giving up your time and I’m sure it’s an episode that people will be really keen to listen to. So thanks. Good stuff.

Gustaf (33:50):

Thanks very much, Alex. And thanks for having me.

FINITE (33:53):

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 online discussions, 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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