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  • Nov 10 2025

Humanising B2B Brands to Stand Out in an AI Era with Deema Tamimi, VP Marketing at The Brief

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Humanisation in B2B marketing almost feels like a buzzword.

But the sentiment behind it is growing increasingly important in a sea of B2B sameness fuelled by AI.

In this episode, learn what breaks through the slop, and what B2B customers now want to see from brands: Not just photos of your team on your ‘About Us’ page, but human soul, artistry, and love.

Hear from Deema Tamimi, VP Marketing at The Brief, who recently undertook a rebranding project that was fuelled with humanity.

 

 

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:

We are humans, and there’s never been a time we’ve had to distinguish ourselves more, not from animals, but from ones and zeros.

Can you believe that? My guest today is Deema Tamimi, and we chat about the impact of human-centric marketing in a world full of AI, AI slop, agents, influencers, and even news presenters.

As Deema wisely says in this episode, it’s like the wild west out there. But we aim to shed a little more light on how to cut through in an AI era.

And from Deema’s perspective, that’s keeping humans front and center and not just putting pictures of your team on your about us page.

It’s about infusing a brand with that uniquely human sense of soul. You might finish this episode with more questions than answers, but that’s part of the fun.

Thanks so much for tuning in to another Finite Podcast episode. I truly hope you enjoy this one. Hi, Thank you for joining me on the Finite Podcast today.

Jodi, it’s great to be here. Thank you. It’s lovely to have you here. From our previous chats, I know that you have so many great insights, not just into B2B marketing channels or tactics, but kind of a great lens on the sector at large and how it’s evolved.

So I can’t wait for our audience to hear more about that. But before we do, as we always do, I will let you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself, your background in marketing, experience so far.

Yeah, I can see Poppy too. So, wow, I’ve been in marketing for a long time. I’m mostly in the tech sector, definitely dabbled in some non-tech stuff in the past.

And, you know, I have kind of an interesting background in that I started actually in the agency world.

I was actually a copywriter at an ad agency who was trying to get into more of sort of data driven marketing is what they called it back then.

So I have sort of that creative background working in in an agency and then really moving into sort of standard marketing for for technology companies.

And then really diving into growth. So growth was a, you know, there was a, there was a stage in marketing where, uh, if you could say that you were a growth hacker, it was very celebrated.

I went down that path and really built out my career in growth marketing and in growth product actually.

So very got, got into product as well. And now it’s interesting, um, because I’ve worked both on sort of the creative side and the brand side and also on the growth side.

Now I’m like leading marketing teams and bringing both of those things together. Um, and I’m now at the brief and I’ve been at the brief now for about six months and we just did a major launch and rebrand and, um, And we are working in the AI space, which seems almost impossible to not be working in the AI space these days.

And we are an AI agency for marketers. And it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of fun building up the team. It’s been a lot of fun launching a totally new brand and doing it in this time that is quite interesting.

We’re seeing a lot of very interesting things that I was doing back in the day coming back to being very important now in marketing and also just It’s a real learning time.

Like with this new AI world that we’re in, marketing is shifting and it’s happening so quickly. So it’s been a lot of fun, but it’s also been a bit of a crazy ride.

I’m sure you know that from people that you’re talking to in marketing all the time. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s so fun to get everyone’s different perspectives on it.

Yeah. And I’m sure we’ll get to hear more about the rebrand at The Brief and your team and how you run marketing there.

I’d love to dig into this a little bit further and just get your kind of perspective on how marketing has evolved and how you’re seeing things come full circle.

What’s been hot over the years and how has that changed, shifted in response to what we’re seeing now with AI?

Yeah, I keep saying it feels like it’s back to the future. It feels like we are, even though we are in this age of everything just rapidly changing things, marketers are having to sort of lean on some of the older things that we were doing in the past that became kind of, I guess, felt dated at the time.

And so it almost feels like the pendulum swinging a little bit. Like when I first started in marketing, it was a lot about brand and a lot about storytelling.

And then we went through this phase where it was all about the numbers and growth hacking and the mechanics and I think that became very overwhelming for marketers.

So this is actually nice that we’re starting to see a little bit of a shift. Many of us had to just sort of adapt and become really focused on growth marketing or growth hacking.

I definitely went down that path, as I noted. And in many ways, it was, you know, necessity. And, you know, many of us have kind of are able to do both that sort of like the quantitative part as well as that qualitative part.

but we had to lean really heavily into the quantitative and somewhat get away from the essence of marketing that we all kind of love and the reason why we came into it.

So one of the things we felt as we were like launching this new brand, The Brief, we really thought a lot about that essence of marketing and how can we, and how can into, by taking, by sort of offloading some of those mechanics that we don’t, most of us don’t love.

I’m sure there’s some people that love that space, but Most marketers go into marketing because of like the storytelling, the essence, the ideas, the creativity, not so much the like number crunching and the being in like 25 different tools to figure out what’s working and what’s not working.

And it did feel like, you know, I’d say like five years ago, it felt like we were at this like peak of burnout for marketers.

Just crazy. maybe even just two years ago, because AI is just going so fast right now. And now with AI, I think marketers are able to get back into a little bit more of the essence of marketing, the storytelling, the creativity.

And that’s actually super important because we’re seeing that our consumers and our customers are starting to not have as much trust in companies and kind of want to see something that feels real, something that feels like there’s a person behind it and so it’s this very interesting mix of ai enabling that in some ways, giving us more time to do that creativity.

And then we’re having to lean on things that, um, that help build trust because, and those are things like events, real, real life events, actually telling people about who’s behind the company.

That’s a new thing that like for a while, you know, a lot of companies had an about us page with the pictures of the people that started the company.

And then that kind of went out of fashion. It was like, who needs to know who those people are? And now it’s like, we’re starting, we have an about page with the people in the company that you might interface with or know because we want to make sure that people feel like we’re real.

So that it’s a very interesting thing where we’re using some of these older tactics in this new age to build trust.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a great summary and a great kind of story to tell where marketers were forced to be an analytics department.

And then now we’re we’re getting back to that creativity. But I think there’s an interesting kind of pressure point or almost paradox here with AI.

And you mentioned this a little bit and it’s changing audience expectations. I want to dig into that a little bit more because we’re seeing narratives around AI slop and platforms like LinkedIn is filtering for AI and trying to find real human written content.

But then you’ve also got brands like Mercedes and Fintechs on TV when I’m watching Great British Bake Off.

They’re using AI to make full entire ads. You’ve got a Channel 4, this is very UK centric, but Channel 4 just had a entire presentation done by an AI agent in their, in the news segment to see if people would notice.

And so it’s this interesting kind of contradiction between Does the audience want AI or do they not?

Do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, I have thought a lot about that. actually very interested to see how this will evolve. And I think a lot of it will come down to what customers and consumers are willing to accept or like.

And I think what we’re seeing right now is we’re very much in an experimentation phase. People are all over the board. We’re already seeing brands saying not going to do that.

Like, and to differentiate themselves by saying we are not going to use AI and we’re going to be, you know, our differentiation is going to be like full authenticity.

And there is sort of a pushback from customers and consumers saying, you know, we don’t want to see that.

But then at the same time, you know, there’s a couple of things at play here. Like the brands that choose not to are going to potentially from an efficiency standpoint fall behind.

And then also I think it’s getting better and better. And I kind of wonder where consumers will fall. Like, I think it will also be interesting to see if we start to see some standards around that where consumers maybe are okay with it.

As long as they know that it’s AI generated, as long as there’s some type of like thing that notes it.

And I think there have been some studies done though, that today, if people see that, like, you know, if this has been generated by AI on an ad, doesn’t actually create more trust, which makes it then really hard for brands to do that because it’s easier to just use the AI and not say that if it doesn’t help build trust.

But I think it’s too early to say. I could see that becoming people seeing like, okay, well now all brands are doing this.

So at least this brand is saying that it is AI generated and maybe then it actually becomes like a trust signal.

But I will be… I think there’s going to be a world where it’s kind of a spectrum of authentic to AI generated.

And I think when it’s like fully AI generated and very, very little human co-creation, I think that’ll be kind of like a niche and it will be a look and people will like just be like, yep, that’s 100% AI.

And that’ll be kind of the brand feel of that brand who chooses to do that. But I think more people will be in this sort of co-creation place.

And I think we’re getting closer more and more brands are getting better about co-creating with AI to create something amazing, but that has a human essence, that has a human touch to it.

Absolutely. I think you’re right. We’re in this early stage experimentation phase, and it’s going to be interesting to see where it goes for sure.

But I wonder if that is also part of it. I wonder if these AI ads and this kind of AI agent narrative is propelled by the intrigue and the novelty of it and actually not knowing where it will go.

I wonder if we, when we kind of get used to it, when this is normalized as part of our everyday lives, that’s when human touch and creativity will really start to shine.

I think right now, I think you’re very right. Like there is a novelty to it right now. And there’s also kind of a like, let’s try this. Let’s try that. experimenting. And I don’t think people are landing yet on what’s going to resonate.

And I think the AI slop thing is definitely an issue and people are definitely now trying to move away from that in everything.

I mean, you see AI slop in terms of like people presenting documents. You’re like, wow, that was straight from an AI, you know, and like without any sort of like human touch to it later on.

And so I think we’ll start to see that. And I think start brands will start to find a place that, you know, once it becomes less of a novelty, they’ll start to find a place where it is this co-creation and they know how to work with AI.

I mean, it’s like anything like working with a team, you have to get used to that. And then you get into this place of comfort, and a place that’s more solid.

And I think we’re completely in non-solid ground right now. And brands are as well. Yeah, absolutely. So do you have any advice for B2B marketers in particular?

We are a B2B technology marketing podcast. B2B tech marketers using AI to create content. Do you have any kind of advice of how to fill that content with with kind of trust signals or add that human touch or do you have any kind of more practical, practical tips for b2b content?

Yeah, there’s a couple of things. I mean, I think there’s the part that i was mentioning before, which is like the co-creation.

Rather than sort of put in a prompt, get a thing and go forward with it. It’s about like almost um treating ai as your um as your co-creator as a as a partner getting something to, to where you want it to look and feel.

In terms of trust signals, there’s some really interesting things that we’re starting to find, which is like going back to the back to the future.

You know, getting covered by press is much more a thing, like in terms of like how are finding companies and having like more of that.

I mean, this is sort of the same as but like that authority. But we’re seeing more of that need. Um, and like things like the about page where people then like know who you are, because one of the things we’re seeing with, um, a lot of B2B companies and a lot of is that people are spinning up companies very quickly because they can’t because AI enables you to build a website, get something up there very quickly.

And then you’re wondering, is this thing going to be around? Like I just put my credit card in there. So my advice to, um, to companies, it is show who you are, like show who the actual people behind the company is because people are not trusting the fact that there are so many things spinning up and then disappearing or spinning up and are not trustworthy.

And it’s easy to be not trustworthy if you don’t show your face, if you don’t show that there’s a person behind, there’s a team behind this.

And so it’s kind of an old school way of doing things, but it does help people believe in you as something that’s going to be around forever.

long-term and believe in you for putting in their credit card and trusting you. So it’s what you’d expect. It’s like the word of mouth. It’s the being covered by press.

It’s being covered by legitimate people that other people trust. Again, it’s building all these trust signals in whatever ways you possibly can.

Absolutely. And honing in on LinkedIn as well, really building out real life, human-centered professional profiles for your employees and We’ve been talking about a lot of this stuff on the podcast recently.

I feel like with AI search in particular, there’s so many new angles to go with and to cover and to make sure that you’ve got this cohesive voice that something like AI search can pick up on.

We’re trying all sorts of things and tracking and trying to see, but consumer behavior is changing.

Whether people will trust the AI more than they trust their, you know, initial way of finding things, it’s an unknown.

And that’s why I think you have to try a lot. I think we’re in the phase of just like trying all the things and seeing, but, um, but one thing that we try to do is like sort of make that call, like, would this, is this potentially going to have a negative impact?

It may not have a positive, but would it have a negative? And, um, we think that right now sort of showing people, showing people who we are, um, behind the curtain is can help with the trusting of the software that we’re bringing forward and the AI solutions that we’re bringing forward.

And then that falls into things like you’re talking about on LinkedIn and videos with your face on it.

And we’re starting to see, I mean, this has already been a trend for a while, but it seems to be even more important now.

People want to see someone with a face, you know, not just a, you know, animated video of what, things do.

They want to see someone speaking and who knows where AI will go with that. And then it’s going to be, you know, like you said, on channel four, not a real person.

And that’s an interesting direction that things could go into. But right now, I think people are still sort of looking for real faces, telling them the benefits of a product and they want to see that.

I think that’s really good insight. And yeah, we can only work with what we know now. So I’d love to hear, I guess, more about Those concrete things that you know are working for The Brief.

You mentioned you just did a rebrand. Congratulations on that and a new website and everything. So you’ve made this About Us page. You’re putting humans front and center.

Is there anything else that you’ve noticed that has done really well with that rebrand? And also maybe a bit about the kind of process of that rebrand and did you kind of think about these things as part of that?

Yeah, yeah, that’ll be fun because we had a lot of fun. I mean, I think marketers love brand and love brand storytelling. And we, you know, we actually talked a lot about how what we were seeing in the market was a lot of AI brands not really doing a lot of brand storytelling, not really going through the exercise of like a true kind of deep dive into what their brand means and how they want to connect with their audience.

In one example, I took photos of a bunch of billboards on the 101 in San Francisco, which is where a lot of tech companies put up their big advertisements.

And so many of them said AI, you know, it’s like, that’s the thing, of course, all of them said AI.

And so many of them looked identical, like pretty, just like not that exciting, just without a lot of like human touch.

It felt very robotic in many ways, what we were seeing. And, you know, the ones who didn’t stood out. And that was interesting. That was an interesting insight. And we’re starting to hear this now.

And I’m glad that we sort of felt this. We felt that Mark, we’re our audience is marketers. So we’re an AI agency for marketers. And we, as marketers, many of us like came to it with like how we feel.

And we were feeling like, gosh, I just want to see like a really well-crafted, you know, well-crafted brand that has like a story behind it.

we, so we did a lot of like thinking through that, thinking about how our marketers feeling today. And we’re feeling burnt out, burnt out, wanting to get back to that essence.

We talked a lot about the golden age of advertising when marketing the mechanics were not such a big part of being a marketer.

You got sort of like sit. I mean, there were some bad things from the golden age of advertising, but in terms of the like essence of marketing and telling the story, they really, that’s what their focus was on.

Even were really into like the print, print, print and print media. And that timeframe, there was a lot of really amazing posters and awesome creative work being done by designers at that time that had this kind of warmth an organicness to it because it was in print.

And so that was inspiring for us. We took that in. And I think if you look at our brand, it really embraces sort of that human, that organic, but bringing it into this new age of AI.

So it’s not it’s not we didn’t want it to be dated. We didn’t want it to look like a kind of like a snapshot of time from in the past.

But we wanted to honor that and bring that into the future and really just have a very highly crafted brand.

brand, which was in itself felt like that’s something that marketers are wanting to see because they are our audience.

Something that’s differentiated from like kind of what we’re seeing, which is like cut and paste. What I was seeing on the 101, which was very much these almost no brand brands and really no feel of connection to craft.

And so that was a lot of fun. It was quite a fun process. And then launching it was a big feat. We had, I think anybody who’s been through a rebrand knows that it’s very, very difficult.

And we made a maybe tough decision, I guess, or we made a decision that we would do it along with going out with new product offering, new pricing and packaging, entirely new website, obviously.

And so it was a lot. to do it once, but we’ve been really pleased with, you know, how it all came out. And we’re really excited to be able to, along with bringing out a new brand, it’s sort of meant to also match the aspirations that we have for the product, which is that it’s the full marketing flywheel.

Before we were really, really focused on the create portion of the marketing flywheel. And now it’s everything from, you know, the discovery and mood boarding all the way through from create into the space of learning and optimizing and having AI help you along that entire flywheel.

I think that story of where you got your inspiration is almost really inspiring in itself, mostly because it sounds like what you really wanted to get back to was like pure artistry.

And with that artistry comes like this almost peak art. peeking into someone’s soul like the soulfulness and that is almost the opposite of ai i know she does not have a soul is not human is this it is a robot is it is a model it’s numbers and ones and zeros so it’s almost like you you are really trying to reinvigorate that that piece of that piece of human humanity, that soul into, into the brand.

Is that kind of, don’t you agree with that? You captured it better than I did. Yes, that’s a, that’s exactly what we were trying to do. And it’s because, like I mentioned, that our, our audience is marketers and marketers are, are feeling very, very burnt out, burnt out in like constantly sitting in Tools.

I mean, just that alone, a number of tools that marketers have to use across that flywheel and like, and then new tools are constantly popping up and it starts to make you, one of the sort of themes that we had as we were thinking about is we’re starting to feel like we’re being made into machines and we’re not machines and we don’t want to be machines and we want to go back to the creativity.

That’s why we got into marketing and into the strategy. And instead we’re literally sitting in know a thousand tabs trying to just like make sense of what’s working and what’s not working.

And so we wanted to connect on that level of of humanness and that is that we don’t, we believe that it is, it is co-creation with AI, um, is meant to, and how we harness it and help people use ai is meant to sort of take the mechanical part away.

but not take the human part away. The human part is the partner to that. And so we wanted that to show up in the brand. We wanted to connect on that human part and the part that people want to continue to be able to bring into marketing.

And what we’re doing is helping you do that, but not have to do the mechanical part. Yeah, so you captured it beautifully. It really was a very, very intentional thing for this to feel human, to feel a little bit organic, and to have a little bit of a callback to this age when we weren’t so underneath so many tabs and tools and the mechanics of marketing that happened in this sort of growth marketing, growth hacking era.

I think it’s really interesting as well, because as you’ll know, with doing rebrands, the brand producers, the designers, they draw on kind of research from the sector, what’s working, what signals like authority or signals kind of resonance or familiarity within certain sectors.

And so we’ve kind of created this really cannibalized marketing formula where everything’s so kind of mathematical and written down like by the book.

But it sounds like what you’re saying is that we need to listen to this calling to just like absolutely puncture that and create things that come from the humans behind the brand and what that brand is trying to say and how it’s trying to stand out.

Because it’s not just AI that’s brought us to this very kind of cookie cutter place. It’s almost like you say, this growth hacking era where it was all kind of everything so measured and technical.

Yeah. Well, we’ve optimized ourselves prior to AI. We were optimizing ourselves into like, I mean, it’s no surprise that like everyone, it looks all the same because like I’m sure the numbers might say that.

But if you want to be a brand that stands out and a brand that people remember and a brand that people trust in our long term, and we know some of those brands in the world, right?

They aren’t doing it that way. They are sitting there and doing a lot of like human concepting and thinking through the essence and how they’re connecting with their customers.

And in many ways, AI now makes that possible for more companies to do that because some of those brands, those really big ones, have giant, giant budgets.

And so they can do that. And now I think this actually makes it possible for more marketers to be able to bring that creativity and then have and help them with the things that actually cost a lot of money, but are also not the part that we all got into marketing for.

We don’t particularly love that. the mechanics of it. So yeah, I think you got that right. Cool. I think that’s a really optimistic and positive and hopeful and energizing note to end on, where we can take that into our marketing, see AI as a tool, not a replacement, and really infuse that humanity into it, which I think we’ve even done from this conversation.

We’ve really just laid it all out on the table. So thank you so much. for doing that with me, Deema. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure for me too as well.

Thanks so much for having me.

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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