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  • Mar 2 2026

Hyper-Personalisation, AI Ethics, and the Future of B2B Marketing with Dario Debarbieri, CMO at HCL Software

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In this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Jodi sits down with the brilliant Dario Debarbieri, CMO at HCL Software. With a career at the intersection of marketing and AI, Dario offers a candid look at the Intelligence Economy and what it means for the modern B2B marketer.

We explore a world where artificial intelligence interacts with audiences in real-time, reading the sentiment of minute digital movements to deliver personalized content in exactly the right context. Dario explains why the traditional 4 Ps of strategy may now matter less than your data quality, and why marketers must evolve from artists into engineers to survive.

Key topics covered in this episode include:

The Intelligence Economy: Why data is the new oil and how to use the right tools to extract and refine it.

Marketers as Engineers: How the role of the marketer is shifting toward technical precision and data science.

Context is King: Moving beyond simple demographics to understand the situational context of your buyer.

The Ethics of AI: Navigating the fine line between helpful personalization and creepy intrusion (e.g., following a customer to their Alexa at bedtime).

Listen below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Or watch on YouTube

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 (00:01)
Hi everyone, and thanks for tuning into another finite podcast. To be honest, I don’t really know where to start with introducing this episode for you. The subject is complex to say the least, and it feels like the only way to effectively communicate its key ideas is through our guests’ descriptive conversation. We explore a future age of marketing where automation and personalization collide. A world where artificial intelligence interacts with your audience in real time.

reading the sentiment of minute digital movements to deliver personalized content in exactly the right context. It’s a world where marketers are engineers and where the traditional four P’s of strategy matter less than your data quality. Today we explore how to read the mind of your audience, one-to-one and at scale, and a future where hyper-personalization sets companies apart until it inevitably becomes the norm.

All this and more with Dario Debarbieri, an incredible strategist and technologist who has been sitting at the intersection of marketing and AI for decades at IBM, becoming the vice president of digital channels before becoming CMO at HCL Software. It’s such an inspiring episode. I really hope you enjoy.

Jodi (01:13)
Hi Dario, thank you so much for joining me on the finite podcast today.

It’s so exciting to have you here. been thinking about this topic for a while now, ever since you mentioned it, and it’s been on my mind, the way that marketers can use automation to really transform their lead generation and email campaigns and pretty much every single touch point with an audience. I’m excited to hear you explain more about that.

and how you’re thinking about personalization and automation. But before we do that, I would love to hear more about your background, where you have forged your path in the marketing world and your kind of special, special touch in marketing.

Dario Debarbieri (01:58)
Okay, cool. So Jodi, long, long time back, I was lucky enough to be able to apply my marketing knowledge and background in technology. And that started back in 1997 for a very large IT corporation and was lucky enough that back in 2003, they launched this AI division.

which gave marketers kind of the first playground of combining marketing and AI tools to what came a few years later back in 2010 or around 2010, the combination of MarTech and AI started to be developed at that company. And I was lucky enough to be there and see firsthand what meant AI.

Jodi (02:52)
you

Dario Debarbieri (02:53)
in terms of marketing, what is the impact of AI to marketing and marketing and its performance and then analytics, data and everything that.

you know, now we see because we’re dealing with it in the present. But back then it was basically a laboratory of AI and Martech, which was absolutely amazing. I spent my last literally 16 years of my career doing AI and marketing. And it’s a fascinating space, right? It basically touches every single space of both technology and Martech.

And I think even in the future, we’re going to see much, much more coming seamlessly, right? Because today we’re dealing with a huge amount of complexity because everything is coming together, right? But I think that in not such a long time from now, we will see the full benefits of marketing AI and hopefully what we’ll see is the true, real hyper-personalization coming up.

Jodi (04:00)
Absolutely. It’s so interesting how AI has only really blown up in the past, what, three, four, five years just because of chat GBT, but it’s been a thing since the 70s and it’s been integrated with the internet since the early 2000s. And yeah, it’s interesting that there’s been this big bubble, as we all know. I’m really interested in what AI and marketing looked like when you first started. Can you give us an example of…

of some kind of marketing tool that was AI powered that you worked on.

Dario Debarbieri (04:33)
Yeah. So back in the days, was called I will mention the company name IBM called it IBM Watson Marketing. It was a division that combined all the market platform they had with basically the Watson AI. And the first shapes and forms of that were applied to campaigns

where you could follow an entire funnel from beginning to end and start building predictive components out of certain behaviors, right? It will showcase.

For example, back in the days, the first versions were if you purchase this product, these may be related products that you are interested on based on other customers behavior, based on historic purchases and based on personal preferences. Back in the day, those were absolutely amazing models. what they were lacking was the

what

I believe is going to happen soon or has to happen soon, which is the proximity in the companies between the data scientists, the marketers, and the chief digital officers. I think that those three, they, at some point, we may see how they all come together in different reporting lines because marketing is as good as data.

And data is good when you can use it and put it to work, right? Otherwise, sometimes, you know, I call it is the new data is the new oil. You may have a massive oil field, but if you don’t have the technology to extract the oil and then to refine the oil is useless, right? It’s just sitting there.

And if you have the infrastructure but you don’t have the oil, then you just have infrastructure. You just need to put them together. You need to combine the oil with the extraction tools and then the distillation tools so you can actually make a product out of it. I think that marketing today has come to being the same. So our oil cannot be buried. We need to extract it and make it.

be meaningful and so, you if you think about it, all these customer data that companies have for years and years and years and even industry available data that sometimes is used, sometimes is not used and platforms that actually give you access to data.

They’re all sitting in silos. They’re sitting almost in a disorganized way that marketers actually go there when there is a specific requirement, right? we need to talk to group A and group B and send this promotion. And that’s it. And it’s with better tools. We’re doing things the same way we did in the 80s and 90s. But now with AI, you can change all that if the data quality of what you have, so if the oil is good,

and you put it together, now AI has this amazing power to basically make it available to you, kind of, it’s the extraction platform that actually will put it in front of you in an organized way. So imagine the oil is the data, the extraction platform is your AI tool that pulls it together, and then it’s just available to you, and then what you do with it, so your distillation plant,

is

basically your intelligence, right? It’s what you want it to be. You can cut audiences in any shape and form. You can start playing with scenarios. You can start defining and doing A-B testing. Even you do campaigns because you have the data. And so now your distillation process is basically how good is the marketing team that is using that oil and that extraction platform.

right, to make it be meaningful, right? What kind of campaigns you make or you can even ask to this platform for ideas. You can actually start exploring, right, and say, what happened if I mix audience A and B? What happens? You what can happen if I have this product and I sell it to this audience? And it will give you ideas. It will actually now with all the technology available, once you have an idea in place, you have satellite.

AI tools that can actually help you create, do the creative, do the videos, put the content together, and you have marketing platforms like HCL Unica that actually puts it all together so when you launch campaigns you’re doing it on the back of intelligence. And the AI assistant can actually even predict

your performance before you run campaigns. All of that is just what’s actually popping up in terms of.

massive conversion of the way we used to run campaigns to now basically having AI or machine and humans actually building these campaigns together, right? So that’s where we are now and that’s where we come from. in the early stages, it was more simple, right? The challenge was the data.

the oil was extremely disorganized and nobody thought of data as a high quality value item, right? It was not an asset. It was just a database that you needed to send an email to your customers for Christmas, right? I’m exaggerating, but of course, banks have been using data properly for many, many years, right? Because they need it. But for the most part, data was just something that was sitting there and it was not seen as something you can monetize.

and monetize in a way that you can actually reach down to a single individual with so much knowledge that you can make a conversion, right, just because you’re smart about the way you use that oil, right, or the data. Now we have that. And so that’s what’s absolutely amazing of what we have in our hands these days, right, from just

access to data to now knowledge data that allows you to go as hyper personalized as you want. Long answer, but I wanted to talk about the present.

Jodi (11:03)
Fascinating. No, no, no, really great.

Absolutely. There’s so many thoughts that pop into my head. I think as you were speaking, I was just thinking about the changing role of the marketer. And it’s interesting that you say that market is almost synonymous with engineers in a way or analysts in a way. And it contrasts against other conversations I have where marketers are

at giving the human touch and they’re still the creative ones and they’re the artists of it now because I think Cisco, I was talking to the revenue chief CMO there and she was saying how they are kind of creating this big data, what did you call it? Like a gas silo or something and they are using AI to do the extraction. So they’ve got like a kind of proprietary tool that sits

over their data and you just type like, what’s this segment thinking about this at the moment and what can I do to target them? And that’s how they’re using it. So yeah, I’m wondering your thoughts on the kind of the changing role of marketing and how you see marketers really fitting into this.

Dario Debarbieri (12:19)
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think the human aspect of marketing will not go away because the creativity and the human understanding of humans will continue to be important for any company, right? Because at the end of the day, that last touch that you put on your campaigns,

most times what makes a huge difference is the human component. So that said.

that individual cannot rely anymore on just a good slogan or on a good idea or on a new brand, right? Because if you only have that, you will be exposed to data intelligence. So it’s true that marketing as a profession, you know, and hopefully back early from university, will realize that they need to train marketers, like you said, ⁓

more like engineers and a little less like the four piece. The four piece continued to be relevant in our industry. But what was never exposed in such an obvious way during the thinking of the four piece was.

the new world of data and AI, right? Which has and will make marketers to have to become incredibly more technical.

to actually apply the right tools for the right times, right? So not all AI is cut the same way. You know, there will be professionalization of those who use creative tools for AI. It will not be the same as someone who uses, let’s say, predictive ⁓ AI or machine learning models to recommend actions based on a behavioral pattern or sentiment.

right? Those are two different individuals within marketing that will use two completely different AI tools. so specialization within AI will also happen. It will not be the case that, you know, maybe because

It’s of interest for me. And I love technology and I love marketing that I may know a lot of AI tools and I can use all AI tools almost to the point to be dangerous with every single one of them. And I could probably do by myself with 15 AI tools and my knowledge to put a good, extraordinary campaign based on AI and humans. But the reality is that in maybe one or two

years, if I want to do a really good AI-based video, I will not be able to compete with someone who specialized only on AI video production, or someone who specializes on hyper-personalization.

data using AI and predictive models. And so there will be specializations within our industry of people that’s gonna go really, really deep, which means all of us will need to become significantly more technical. We will need to know the tools. If you go back to our early days, I remember that back in the 90s, to me, knowing how to use really well Adobe was like being one step ahead of anyone else.

Thanks.

because you had the tools to do design and add like nobody else, right? And everybody wanted to have that. That was like our new software, cool technology of the days, right? And so if you had that, which most agencies obviously had, but not the customers, you would be one step ahead. I think that what’s happening today is exactly the same, but significantly more technical, right? Now you have to have the tools

to actually do things better. And there are so many tools that are coming that they will create some sort of a specialization. Now, the reason why I said before that the chief digital officer and the data scientists, which many marketing teams do have, right? I have on my team data scientists, but it’s not true for every organization. If you don’t have the combination of digital officers and

⁓

data scientists and you build a more technical marketing organization, most likely you will be left behind, right? You will create a gap between the industry and yourself. Because when you see, you know, now more practically, when you go to your phone and you see an absolutely gorgeous campaign that has your name, and by the way, it happens to be linked

with the trip that you just booked to the Caribbean and they offer you the rental of kitesurfing equipment is because they know you. And you are much closer to the clique than you were ever before. Because it’s just right there. It’s really available to you. The only way to do that

Jodi (17:11)
you

Dario Debarbieri (17:19)
today is if you know technology, if you understand AI, and if you use it. You can be very smart and do a lot of things manually still. But if you have, you know, like big large banks in the US or in Asia or in Europe, and you have to do million of communications per day, you will be left behind.

You need this, right? You need to evolve. And if you want to reach to those audiences at such massive volumes, then you have to change. And you have to understand that the combination of data, AI, and martech platforms is the only way.

Jodi (18:02)
Yeah, so you have to be very strategic about what you choose to automate and these really hyper-personalised, real-time personalisation about, you know…

moments in time when people are most kind of ready to purchase or ready to make any decisions. That’s kind of where you might want to personalize as opposed to, you know, a big brand activation campaign that might require a bit more artistry. Absolutely. I keep going back in my head to how you mentioned like, yes, the four P’s are important, but you’re right. Like they’ve been completely disrupted by this phenomenon.

price, example, dynamic pricing has been around for a while and it’s not going anywhere. Like how do marketers then strategize price if it can be personalized according to market demand and environmental and global shifts? And even positioning, do you ever think we could get to a point where positioning itself can be

personalized on a one-to-one level at scale.

Dario Debarbieri (19:11)
Yeah, so think about where we are, right? think, you know, just last year…

You know, we were brainstorming on a campaign and, you know, I came up with this coin of, know, what I think we are is now we are in the intelligence economy. Right. And the reason why this is the intelligence economy is because everything needs to be based on some form of intelligence. need to know something before you do something. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark. Right. Like we used to put

back in the days, billboards in a highway, just expecting that they will work. ⁓ And yeah, they work, but you just don’t know how, but they work. Things have changed, so now we have the data to prove it. And so when you think about getting to a level of understanding of what’s happening, now you need to understand to deliver hyper-personalization, pricing, offers, all of that, you need to understand

the situational context of every single interaction. You need to understand the history, you need to understand the context of now before you can actually satisfy a need, right, or make a conversion. So this kind of new intelligence economy is like forcing us to say, okay, what do I know and what do I need to know Jody?

So I can have Jodi buy this thing that I sell, right? And.

Today, it’s a little bit of a manual task and challenge to get Jody, right? Because Jody posts on Instagram, Jody posts on LinkedIn, Jody has a profile on the web, Jody has a work profile, and maybe whatever history Jody posted ever, right? So with that, you just have a just a little glimpse of Jody, right? You can make a lot of assumptions of Jody, but.

You really don’t know where Jodie is now, right? So knowing where Jodie is now is the tough part, right? Because that’s a lot of guessing. Jodie can be now in the office. Jodie can be now having a coffee. Jodie can be now in a conference room talking to somebody. I don’t know what is Jodie, right? All I know about Jodie is when you post something, when you do an action that will actually let me know that you’re a

about to do something, you’re purchasing an air ticket, you’re buying something for your house, you are on Amazon buying something for you. Those are the triggers that actually allow me to know a little bit more about Jodi now. So what is the challenge of hyper-personalization? Is that timeframe.

in which I don’t know where you are if you’re not on your phone, if you’re not on social, if you’re not anywhere. If you’re sitting in the office having an interview, right? That’s the moment that I don’t know, Jody. So how do we deal with that today? The way we deal with that today is once you select your group,

And once you select the actions or what you want that group to do is you start trying to identify those moments where they will give you those marks. Jodie is green. Now she’s back online. She’s doing this. So when Jodie is doing this, it has to now be relevant to what I need Jodie to buy. Because if you are on Amazon,

buying a pair of shoes and what I sell is software, it’s not a relevant point in time. I just know you’re there, but I cannot put an ad on Jody on software because it will be idiotic, right? I will be wasting my money at that point of reference. So the challenge we have, which we don’t have a solution for, or like a plug and play solution, I would say, is when

Can I get the alert that Jodi is in the context? It’s in the room, let’s say, where I can sell to Jodi what I need. So for us to do that is the combination of everything about what I know about Jodi. And these are the things that we’re working on. Everything that I know or I need to know about Jodi. And then when there are Martech events coming up in the place where you live,

the moment your name comes up in a registration form, then that’s when I get Jodi, right? That’s when I need to start putting Jodi on social media and everything, because I know now she’s ready for that conversation, right? Obviously, when you’re searching, if you’re searching keywords, obviously that will give me a lot of knowledge about what you are doing, which comes to one of the questions you had, which is how freaky is, right? Or what is…

What is accepted or not accepted in terms of hyper-personalization when we start to go to the freak side, the one that we are all scared about? The contextual aspect of Jodi registering to a tech event or the contextual aspect of Jodi going on a Google search or a chat GPT search on what is the best AI martech technology?

almost gives us permission. It’s not a real permission, but it almost gives you permission to talk to Jodie because Jodie in a way somewhere in her brain and this will need to be studied at some point. In her brain, she is open to get information and knowledge because she’s looking for it. So she’s almost expecting that somebody will reach to her, right?

When you say best beach in Brazil to go in February, you almost wanting, right, that the best beach or the best hotel or the best car company in that city actually has a banner there, right? So you can see, wow, the Hilton is great. The cars are very cheap and it has ocean view. Clicked.

You don’t mind that Hilton actually reached out to you. So is that an invasion of privacy or is it just the perfect time because you are in the room? I think that dilemma will stay with us for a long time because these bots are going to be more and more more efficient. And the moment you leave the page, you’re to go to your phone and say, Jodi.

come back to where you started, right? Hilton has a great promotion for you. That may be a challenge, right? That may be questionable if from your interaction on the web, you have to have it on your phone, right? What is right and what is wrong? I don’t think we know that now because it’s also gonna be another challenge which is not every single individual is the same. So my level of acceptance of that kind of invasion

is much higher than Jody’s because I do want them to follow me until I get the best price. But some people may say, no, it’s freaky. I want to choose my own option. It’s fine that Hilton is promoting there, but I’m going to look for something else, right? Which is totally acceptable. And maybe they will be bothered with the next message on the phone or WhatsApp or whatever with that extra offer, extra step. So hyper personalization to me means two things. One is

We as marketers, we just need to know. We need to know. We need to know who is Jody, where is Jody, and where is the right time to contact Jody. And then, as marketers, our own ethics will define how far I go, and the company ethics, and the company culture. And what I think, there are no manuals or books written yet, is on how companies, and how deep, and how far companies.

I’m going to go because most CEO boards, they’re not even having this discussion. They’re just letting the marketing guy do their job. And as long as they don’t mess it up, then they don’t talk about it. But they should. Because if I am an ethical person and I do ethical marketing and somebody is not doing ethical marketing, I’m almost playing with unfair competition. Because I will reach to Jodi all the way to the website and I will not go on the WhatsApp.

But maybe maybe my peers in the industry may follow you to bed. Right. When you say, Alexa, put some meditation music so I go to sleep. And before she does that, Alexa says, Jodie, remember the Hilton Hotel that you were looking for today? It just gave you a 10 percent off. Is that right or wrong? I don’t know. For that, you may be OK for Jodie may know absolutely not be OK. Right. So.

What is right and what is wrong in terms of the ethical hyper-personalization flow of a marketer today? I think needs to be defined. We have the tools. Now we have the data, which needs, has a long way to go because data is heavily disorganized in many, companies and the culture of data is not there.

Just think about a seller. A seller puts an opportunity in the system only if they don’t feel that they will be chased on that opportunity and pipeline the next day. If they feel that they’re going to be pressured on that, they don’t even put the opportunity in the pipeline. So they hide it. So that’s poor quality data already there because your marketing campaign did deliver on the lead, but the seller doesn’t put it on the system, right? Because they don’t want to explain whether they’re going to close that deal or not. data evolution.

needs to happen. Ethical behavior needs to be explained and we need some guardrails. I don’t know if those guardrails are company guardrails, industry guardrails, or even law guardrails. I don’t know. GDPR came to do a lot of goodness and greatness for our industry. Do we need a new GDPR that has the ethical answer to

Jodi (29:05)
you

you

Dario Debarbieri (29:25)
How much hyper-personalization can you give? And then the last one is obviously using the right tools at the right time to get Jody in the moment, to get Jody in the room, right? So that personalization is understanding the context, the situational context of the interactions of Jody, right? Sorry for the long answer. I’m going everywhere, but.

Jodi (29:51)
That’s a great answer. Keep it flowing, absolutely. There’s so much to pick out from there. You definitely answered my question around, we’ve talked about in marketing for a long time about the 95-5 rule and how I had someone on who said demand generation is a fake tactic. You can’t push people to buy. They either want to or they don’t. It’s interesting because how do you get

data and AI to understand the mindset of the individual, of Dario, in order to personalize at those right moments. And I think you’re right, the simple answer is showing intent. And it’s interesting how you add so much flavor to this because it’s not just like, do they search B2B CMS into Google anymore?

it’s, you know, have they bought a flight, you know, and they need a hotel. It’s much more nuanced, intense signals that can be intelligently, you know, automated to help marketers like get them at the right time. So yeah, it really helped me understand, you know, how you do really understand that kind of mindset of the buyer and overcome that kind of.

95-5 barrier and how you can actually convince people that they need you and you are at the right place at the right time in those moments and those head spaces. So I feel like I’m noticing personalization at scale quite a lot lately. Like I’ll visit a website, I might buy something on Amazon or something and I’ll get an email in my promotions folder from a company being like, hey, remember us?

And it’s almost got this kind of novelty to it that feels like you’re being listened to, that you’re being understood. Maybe I will pay more attention to that brand. If competition rises and everyone’s using personalization at scale and it’s not even creepy anymore because it’s just so accepted, do you feel like people could almost…

switch off to it like they would, I don’t know, a bus stop ad these days.

Dario Debarbieri (32:06)
100%. I think that’s exactly what’s going to happen, Jody. think humans are very, very smart, right? So you will, in a way, clean the clutter automatically, right? Because now the goodness of all this is that now you know you have access to all the data. You have access to knowledge, and you have access to understand and compare what is it that you want, right? In the past, remember, there were maybe two

companies that were, you know, these soda companies. So your choice was one or the other. And depending on which campaign was more appealing to you, you will go one or the other, right? Today, we do five clicks below that, which is, okay, I want soda. Is soda good for me? How much soda should I get? Right? Which…

Is the flavor that different if it’s cold? You go deeper and deeper and deeper. now, yeah, you can see a huge amount of billboards of one versus the other, and one can be funnier than the other. But that will not change your sense of, I cannot drink so much sugar. Right?

Maybe one glass every once in a while is fine. And that’s it, right? So because we become more and more educated. Now when we’re looking for things that we need and they start to become more complex in a way.

Right. So your purchases become a little more elaborated. Right. So I’m making this up like creams, right. Body creams. know, 20, 30 years ago, that was just body cream. Right. There was brand one, brand two. What was inside? Who knew? Right. Now you’re looking very deep into, you know, what the cream actually does for you. What are the components? What? And so.

When you’re searching and we’re looking, you are already hyper-personalizing yourself. You’re almost telling the world what is it that you need, or what is it that you want, or what is it that you don’t in something. marketers do have a true opportunity because buyers have become so smart that now

when they’re asking the right questions on their search, or when they’re asking the right questions and interactions on your bot or anywhere, they’re almost telling you what they want. Now, we still have a gap today of being able to read that interaction at that level, because we are not yet using so much of a few tools that are on the side of

sentiment, which is sentiment analysis and facial recognition and analysis, because there are some limitations to how much you can do face recognition and so on, right, which I think is fine. But when we start mixing sentiment with words and search and intention, I think that almost good martech tools will literally tell you what you need.

will literally tell you, if you think about probably the best example of today, without being at that level of mass intelligence, which we may see in a couple of years from now, when you go to Amazon now, you know, and you’re searching for something, the amount of products that are related with intelligence on what you’re looking for, based on how you prompt your search, they’re quite amazing, right? They’re really amazing.

So just imagine that apply to almost everything we do, right? So if we’re having this discussion and we send this discussion to ChatGPT and our last question is, well, what would be the best martech platform according to everything we said? It may not give you a perfect answer, but it will get you really, really close to what are the top three options based on what.

do a discussion we’re having, and we’ll tell you what limitations there are, what things you can do, what things you can’t do. So I think we’re reaching a point of intelligence where a huge amount of variables are coming together. But there are some that still have some time to be exploited, like sentiment and many other things that.

you know, they’re a little bit harder to crack. At least now. The tools exist, but I think they’re a little bit harder to crack. So for example, Jodie likes certain cream. She likes certain components. And she was convinced that certain brand is the one she needs. But Jodie did not go to the dermatologist in the last five years. And suddenly she developed something that is

allergic to X component. If your medical history is not linked to your search, you may be using a product that you are allergic to. And the marketing or the marketer behind that, not knowing that, may actually give you the incorrect recommendation. Because the machine doesn’t know your health status. Right? So when I say data is the new oil,

is because in those oil fields, the amount of data that needs to exist to really, really get us is so big. It’s so big and it’s so complex that it will take us some time to get there, not because of lack of availability, but because of the ethical issue. Would you like your hospital to share your information when you’re buying creams?

That’s a question you may need to answer at some point, right? That nobody can steal or should steal from you, right? That should not be, that should be optional. That should not be that, in my view, right, as an ethical marketer. I will not like my hospital to share my data for as good as it is for me when I’m health products. I don’t want that. I want to be asked if, you know, for that particular purchase, I can or cannot use that, right?

So obviously this is an example, it’s not real, right? But I’m sure that there will be many instances where we will be exposed to that level of hyper-personalization that will open up ethical questions on can I access this data or not to give them the answer, right? And to the point of, you know, that you asked me is are we gonna be able to clean through the clutter? The answer is 100%, I think we will.

I think we will be because we will continue to buy based on who we are. Right. Taste cannot be replaced with AI. Right. If you like green, you like green period. Even if they tell you that the color white in your insurance car will lower your insurance cost, you will not buy the white car. Right. You will buy green and you will pay an extra few bucks on insurance because you just like it. AI cannot predict that. AI may say she’s crazy.

I told her that she would save money if she buys wine. I don’t understand Jodi’s behavior, but it will keep learning. And at some point, we’ll understand that humans sometimes are unpredictable because we have taste. And so are we going to end up doing what we want at the end of the day? Yeah, I think so. I think we will continue that way. But we will have more tools to make better and better informed decisions. And I think marketers are

Jodi (38:59)
You

Dario Debarbieri (39:26)
big scale will be much better at what they do because they will get us a little more, right, at the right time. I think it comes down to just that, really.

Jodi (39:37)
Absolutely. Yeah, taste and now that you mention it with soda, pure biological survival instincts. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, like, mass exodus from social media. All of the Gen Zers are like, I’m going on a social media cleanse. I’m detoxifying my life. And it’s because we want the best for ourselves and we want to be healthy and it’s addictive.

per an algorithm as social media can be that thinks it’s got us in its hooks and can keep us on the apps for hours, we still have this immense survival instinct slash willpower that says this isn’t good for me. So it’s interesting to see that tension and it’s interesting to hear you explain the human condition through these ethical dilemmas of data. So it’s a really inspiring, thank you so much, Dario.

I think that’s about all we have time for today. But I’d love to have you back on. It’s been such an inspiring conversation. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.

Dario Debarbieri (40:34)
I did. did, Jody. Thank you so much. Yes. Yes. I love these conversations. you know, just just to say hopefully the next one is, you know, there is an intersection coming between AI, quantum and fusion energy, right, which will literally change everything that we know as we know it today, which will affect marketing and beyond. Right. So what’s happening? I think we are ⁓ in an amazingly interesting time.

for marketers and ⁓ AI because it’s one of those few professions where we’re touching people, we want to touch people’s emotions, and we want people to actually buy what we want. So the question that that raises is, is a good marketer with good tools better than a salesman?

Jodi (41:19)
That’s a great question to end on, Dario, and one that I know our listeners can definitely think about.

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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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