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  • May 18 2020

Podcast: Implementing marketing automation with Dominik Elmiger, Head of Marketing at Ably

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Dominik Elmiger is Head of Marketing at Ably, a product providing APIs and components for developers to build powerful, reliable, and scalable realtime apps.

Dominik has lots of experience implementing marketing automation solutions into different businesses, including HubSpot, Pardot and Marketo. FINITE podcast host Alex Price talked with Dominik about how to approach a marketing automation implementation project, and some of the pitfalls and war stories to try and avoid!

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Full Transcript

Alex (00:07):

Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the FINITE podcast. Today I’m going to be recording an episode with Dominik Elmiger. Dominik’s the Head of Marketing at a B2B tech company called Ably. And we’re going to be digging really into marketing automation. Dominik’s got a lot of experience with marketing automation products, a whole different number of them working in all kinds of different B2B technology businesses. And we’re really going to dive into the implementation process. 

So this is an episode that’s relevant for anyone that’s kind of at the beginning of their marketing automation journey and thinking about how to go about implementing marketing automation as a project, everything from doing the initial analysis to building the business case, to then actually going about the project or anyone that might be interested in migrating from one system to another. 

Dominik’s been through it a few times before and has all the war stories to go with it. So I’m hoping that this will be a really useful episode for anybody that’s considering some marketing automation work over the coming months. I hope you enjoy.

FINITE (01:04):

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

Alex (01:25):

Hi Dominik, thanks for joining me today.

Dominik (01:27):

Hey Alex, glad to be here.

Alex (01:30):

I’m looking forward to talking with you. I know we’ve got an interesting discussion lined up all around marketing automation, all of your experience implementing it, but as we always do, why don’t we start with a bit of background and intro to yourself, how you got into marketing, your current role, background, all those kinds of things for our listeners?

About Dominik and his current role at Ably 

Dominik (01:47):

Yeah, yeah. Would love to, well, I’ve been in marketing for a while and predominantly worked for tech companies, SaaS businesses. I initially started off working in paid advertising and became a specialist in PPC and social advertising. And I really loved that. I really thrived in that and I was quite a data driven, analytical marketeer. And at the time I worked for not in tech, I actually worked for a big travel website, but I came to the stage where I thought, well, I really love my job, but I started to see that there is two roles in marketing. 

You either become that specialist or you have more of a generalist profile. And I just didn’t see myself, you know, ending up in PPC for the rest of my marketing career. So I really tried to get into a, more of a generalist role having exposure across the entire marketing mix, exploring different channels. 

So I had the chance to work for a company where I did just that like a lot of emailed marketing, quite rudimentary at the time. But we try to do clever things and, and be a little bit more sophisticated. That’s a few years back now, but looking at clever segmentation and personalisation and be really creative and I got a feel how technology often restricted me with what I wanted to achieve, but that was kind of quite an interesting position to be in. 

Where do you start, do you think of technology first and then go away and think what you can actually do with technology or do you come up with ideas first and then try to match the technology to that? So I think it was then when I really got a keen interest in automation marketing platforms and CRMs, and I strive to be a marketeer that can run omni channel experiences. And I probably have to admit where I’m far from doing a good job, but, so I think this is a vision and you should always strive to be a better marketeer. 

So, I previously worked for Stack Overflow, worked for a big market research platform, a company called Vision Critical Global, a Canadian based company. And more recently I started, heading up the marketing team in a startup, Ably. We provide real time API integrations, mainly to developers and enterprise accountants. So really exciting. 

And all my roles, although bigger companies and smaller companies, all these three, four roles included an element of marketing automation and looking at CRM. And I think I got quite good in understanding sort of the strategic side of it, but then actually also, was part of implementations, migrations of the systems. And I had a bit of a glimpse how big these projects and sometimes overwhelming they can be. Yeah.

Alex (04:57):

Yeah. Makes sense. And tell us a bit about the marketing team generally. Is it just yourself now at Ably? Have you got other people working with you on the marketing side?

Dominik (05:05):

No. I mean the beauty of working for a startup, it tends to be quite broad, which is amazing, which is cool. It’s also sometimes a bit of a risk because, you diversify yourself a bit too much, but I have the product marketing function underneath me. We have a compliance marketeer then content, but then also the SDR function. So the inside sales function, and I think this is a really, I mean, a hot topic in marketing. 

Where does this function traditionally more on the sales leads, having this in the marketing team is really, really interesting. So with that comes a UX as well and a bit of access to a front end developer resources. Never enough though.

Alex (05:54):

Yeah, that’s always the way. So we’re going to dig marketing automation, I guess we’re calling this implementing marketing automation. I guess it’s kind of hopefully the coming together of all of your experience implementing a number of different marketing automation tools into a number of different businesses and some of the war stories you’ve got on the ups and downs and the learnings and the good bits and the bad bits. 

I think almost like maybe 10 years ago, so many of the discussions we were having your own around website projects. And there were some marketers that have been through lots of design development projects and they probably have similar quirks in terms of planning migrations and training and all the things that catch people out. And my observation is always that technology is one side of things, but people and processes are the two most important bits. 

And it’s very easy to click subscribe on HubSpot, but whether you’re going to get the most out of it is a completely different question. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to talking through the detail with you. I guess we’re going to approach it in a pretty sequential way and think about where people should start. And I guess a number of our listeners probably within the business they work for probably are using some form of marketing automation, whether or not they’re using it as well as they could, or they’d like to be is again a different question. 

I guess some of the earlier stage startups or scale ups are probably not quite there, but once and automation is almost definitely on their radar. So I think there’s going to be things which are useful hopefully for everybody. But I guess that kind of leads to the first question, which is really where to begin.

Where to begin in marketing automation 

Dominik (07:22):

Yeah. And before we start, I think you’re hitting the nail on their heads with yeah, it’s very easy to just get going with whatever it is. Marketo or part of the HubSpot, but actually the big piece is internal communications. You know, how you actually sell this idea to get MarTech on board internally. I think that’s a big, big challenge for marketers. 

And especially in smaller companies, in smaller startup companies, because ultimately it’s a big investment, it’s a big investment not monetary, but then also the amount of resources you actually pump into this project, it can be extremely overwhelming. And you know, when I started to become a bit more interested in automation, marketing automation, I did a lot of research and there’s not really a playbook. 

There’s not really like a, Hey here’s best practice stuff. And if you implement this system, this is what you have to do, and this is how you roll out. And this is how you set up a scoring system and the lead nurture system. And there’s really no manual because it’s so extremely customised to the individual needs of that business. And I think this is a really nice segue into as a marketeer you actually have to understand how your organisation works today and the best way to start is you just have to take and dedicate some time to understand what technology do you have in place today. 

How does that all work often in smaller companies? It’s a little bit patched together with a lot of different systems. So my more recent experience, I think I counted up to about 16, 17 systems looking at how a lead goes through the entire system. It touches on so many different systems and I’m just thinking of GDPR implementations. So just understanding what have you got today and really understanding who owns the system, how are different data sets synced across into different systems? 

We often see quite a lot of fragmented databases, but we have customer data in one list. We have product information in another one. So it’s a really big exercise to actually just understand how your current ecosystem looks like. And once you have gained that understanding and insight, and depending on how big the company is and how many legacy systems you have, this might be quite a big exercise in the first place, but the next step is really to map this out. And yes we do have tools, digital tools to help you with that. 

But I sometimes revert back to good old post-its in a meeting room and really try to map out and visualise that lead flow. And what I mean by lead flow is where are the entry points on the websites? How contacts are being created in these systems, where do you have the lead generation forms, the account signups? And after that, what happens next? So it’s really for you to understand how does a contact go through the different systems? Which integrations, what data sets are synced across into different systems? So that’s a really crucial bit of understanding you have to undergo in the first place.

Alex (10:48):

When you say entry points you’re talking about anything from contact forms, but I guess gated content and email signups, and kind of any, any point on the site that might capture data? 

Dominik (10:56):

Yeah. And that, I mean, in more modern times, we also have live chats, other ways, how we create data and it can be from many different ways. It may just be from an offline event, a dataset uploaded directly into a CRM. And what does that mean for the other systems, if it doesn’t come through the website, and just understanding where are the entry points and it may not always be the website. It may just be an offline part as well.

Alex (11:25):

Yeah, it makes sense. And so visualising that, I guess, literally just any kind of design tool you could use to kind of put together a flow and a map of how that would look. 

Dominik (11:33):

Yeah. I mean, I’m a big fan of drawer.io, which is a free extension from Google, but then you can also use a paid tool Gliffy, which is brilliant, but, you know, pen and paper will do as well.

Alex (11:47):

Yep. Makes sense. And so I guess then it’s, as I mentioned earlier, this is as much about the people side of things as it is just about the technology side of things. And you know, you mentioned at the start that you’ve got the kind of SDR role underneath you. 

So it sounds like you’ve kind of by definition, got a degree of marketing and sales alignment, which everybody is after, but I guess you still need to consult pretty widely with not just marketing and their requirements and people that might have been in the business before you, and being involved in past decision making and other people in the C suite, but also sales functions and other functions kind of in and around you.

Understanding how marketing automation works with the different roles in a company

Dominik (12:24):

And it’s quite an interesting exercise. It may be a bit challenging when you’re just starting a new business because you may not have all these relationships with these people, but actually, maybe that’s a good starting point to actually understand other people’s jobs and responsibilities and what they’re looking for and how they can be successful, how technology enables them as well. 

So, more recently I did this exercise internally and again, it’s not really something you think about that, right. You know, you think of well, it’s probably sales and it’s probably marketing and well, perhaps you have a customer success function, but it has wider impact. So an exercise will be that you dedicate some time with individual stakeholders to ask them, what do you need from a system? How do you currently work? What’s not working? How could it be improved? 

And doing this exercise, it ranged from an SDR who works obviously very, very differently and has different requirements all the way up to a C-Suite persona who was more interested in dashboards and reporting and pipeline velocity than we have, you know, partner and alliances teams. And they’re interested in completely different metrics and information from this.

But even product developers who are not typically in marketing, they are crucial stakeholders because when we think about the voice of the customer and or customer insights, they will be very, very keen to understand a little bit more, what are customers saying? What are the common pain points in prospecting calls? So if you actually have a conversation, Hey, would that be beneficial if you had access to some of the top 10 questions, prospects ask in sales conversations. 

So, suddenly that sparks a bit of excitement then in these stakeholders. You know, that’s perhaps not something naturally a relationship with marketing, but that’s obviously a valuable insight I’d get from these systems. And this is when I refer to having these datasets in fragmented databases where different stakeholders, we don’t have one source of truth and it makes it extremely difficult to have that customer insight.

Alex (14:48):

That makes sense. I guess, a fascinating part of this for me is the business case side in terms of, it’s very easy for you as a marketer to come in and realise that you need this as a system, you need marketing automation, you know from past experiences required. What about when, I guess, you need to take others that are not so familiar with requirements along on that journey, what does that look like? And I guess what are the tips for kind of putting together a business case that gets you through that process? 

Communicating the importance of marketing automation to non-marketers 

Dominik (15:15):

And that’s definitely something I personally experienced and I felt it was quite painful. Understanding that the decision makers are not always marketeers, my background is I consider myself quite a technical marketeer and sometimes I struggled to actually sell my vision, you know, I’m good at understanding why I need it, you know, to, to be successful in my role. 

I’m good in setting up a nurture stream and scoring, but the bigger vision is sometimes quite difficult to position, especially the decision makers higher up and these could be in coming from an ops department or finance of course. They look at such a project and see a big, big expense and not direct revenue coming in from these systems. So it’s actually really important that you work on this business case. 

And what I realised it’s really powerful if from very early on, you have an executive sponsor preferably someone in the C-Suite, you know, whether this is the CMO or a senior leader. And through these requirements gathering across different stakeholders, you can actually also get a lot of sponsors on board and the advocates for this project. So I think what’s important for these key stakeholders is to visualise what you currently do and what you could be doing with the right tech in place. 

And I mean, the stuff that always worked is having that centralised source of truth, where you capture, and it’s a bit of a buzzword, it’s a bit cheesy, but you capture that voice of the customer in one centralised system. And every CMO, CEO will see value in this, right? So it’s getting the message across, what if we do nothing? These are all the things we won’t be able to do.

Alex (17:15):

And within that, I guess I saw some numbers recently from Econsultancy, which I think, I can’t remember what it was, but I think it was like in the 60% that said marketing functions that didn’t have insights into certain, or they didn’t have defined budgets, or they weren’t privy to information around revenue targets. 

And for me, I just don’t understand how a marketing function can do what they need to do, unless they have a degree of insight around some of those numbers that really matter, because ultimately to build that business case, you need to some extent kind of just work backwards from revenue ultimately. 

So I’m interested, like how much, how much does that play a part? And obviously it’s hard to say, like, if we get HubSpot, we’re going to make X amount more revenue, it’s not straight forward, but have you, in previous roles, do you feel like you’ve had access to enough data to kind of put those cases together?

Measuring ROI of marketing automation 

Dominik (18:02):

Yeah. I mean, it’s a real struggle for the marketeer to have that centralised database and in smaller businesses, it’s probably a bit easier because we talk about smaller volumes perhaps, and, you know, it’s smaller teams and you can just go across to the sales person and say, Hey, you know, what were the last 10 conversations you had? 

And that’s probably the blockers and the spanners, the decision makers throwing the works. Well, why do we need anything else? Because we’d get everything today, what we need, but then of course, we’re not building this system for today. We’re actually building something which gets us through the next two, three years. Right? So this is a bit more of a long term strategy. 

And I think getting that push back in terms of your investment. I think you can nicely tweak this pivot to the message in using that customer insights and also creating a more personalised and contextualised experience on the website and going through these systems and ultimately it’s about increasing customer experience. And that experience starts from the first touch point to conversations the customer success person has.

Alex (19:18):

I guess we’re jumping ahead a little bit potentially, but I’m interested in when these projects have been a success and they’ve bedded in for six months a year. I guess usually it’s the case that once these kinds of projects are underway and they’re in place that the pressure gets removed, but do you feel like there’s a need to keep going back to the C-Suite and project sponsors and really demonstrating where you’ve made an impact? 

And I guess if they’re always going to be looking at the right numbers and the numbers that matter? But I guess there’s a sense of almost like a sense of closure by saying thank you for sponsoring this project, this is the impact it’s making.

Demonstrating the impact of marketing automation to the C-Suite 

Dominik (19:50):

Sometimes you can wait for the thank you a long time, but what I enjoy doing is using the initial stakeholders or sponsors and, because they suddenly have a bit more of an interest in collaborating with marketing because they get truly valuable insights and then insight enables them to do something meaningful. And these meaningful projects will end up being a presentation in an all hands in front of the entire company. And then I’ll make sure that we have a little note, hey sponsored by marketing. 

So it all comes back to how we then use the data or how we increase to being a bit more sophisticated with our marketing tactics. So now I think indirectly that is a nice way of portraying the value of these projects.

Alex (20:37):

Definitely. And I guess there’s always going to be, again, coming back to people and process, and we’ll talk a bit more about training and all the things that have to happen once a new system like this comes into play, but there’s always going to be a serious amount of time and energy that goes into implementing a project like this. And it’s going to need web developers potentially to hook things up to the website, and it’s going to need potentially CRM experts to kind of tweak how all the data flows between different systems. 

And obviously all the marketing and sales team are going to have to do a fair bit of work. So is that something that you feel you need to focus on in the business case? In terms of saying, you know, this is hard to put a number on it cost wise, but you know, this is the amount of time that needs to go into this project over the next, however many months.

Dominik (21:21):

It is really not a project marketing can own themselves. It is a collaboration. And I mean, it has a massive impact on how the business operates and in terms of resources I think being very, very clear from early on what the requirements are from the marketing department towards other stakeholders. And I mean, you say it, right? 

But you need access to more resources in front end development because there will be some tweaks on the website or actually setting up the whole firing up the system, some back end tweaks and a lot of the customer information, regardless what CRM you use or whether you have a customised product system. 

We also need to think of API integrations between these different systems and some of the off the shelf automation systems do these really well. And they are really open to communicate with the third party systems, but that’s usually not the skill set of a marketeer. So you do rely on some engineering support. So that’s definitely something you have to do from very early on, portray which resources and how much you actually need.

Alex (22:37):

And then that leads on to the cost of these platforms themselves and marketing automation products are not cheap and there’s a cost associated with all of them. And I know that over the years, we’ve worked with HubSpot and Pardot and Marketo and Eloqua, and they probably all got more or less, go up in cost in that order. 

I’m not sure how Marketo and Eloqua compare, but what’s the kind of process there? And obviously that’s a pretty key part to the business case overall, but I assume you probably, as you’ve moved companies, you probably got some contacts at HubSpot who you can keep going back to and picking up the conversation with potentially.

Dealing with the increasing cost of marketing automation softwares

Dominik (23:12):

Yeah. I mean, they probably know they keep a keen eye. They’re quite interested in when you move companies.

Alex (23:19):

There’s no escaping HubSpot right?

Dominik (23:24):

So I think what’s quite scary is you have the cost off the system itself, right? But some of the invisible costs is, you bring a lot of disruption to the business. You need a project owner, but this is a person within the marketing team or someone else, right? But at this stage, you have to decide whether the implementation or migration of these systems can be done internally or does it cause too much disruption or even skills, you know, you may not have the internal skills. 

Do you need an agency that helps you with the migration? There are some accredited agencies, for example, on the HubSpot side right? So they work with partner agencies, but then it’s even like, it’s silly really annoying tasks. One example is translating a country drop down of 250 countries into 10 languages. Seems really simple but it unknowingly takes like four hours to do something like that, right? 

So you always need a bit of someone at hand that you can just pass on these time consuming, easy tasks where you don’t necessarily want to pay an expensive contractor to do that. So, again going back to the resources, you may want to have someone who can deal with that, but pricing is actually dangerous. 

I find when you actually reach out to the vendors after, you know, you get going off with your business case, you start to have some conversations with whatever HubSpot, Marketo products, you name it. What is difficult is how much you actually pay today versus how much you pay into for years. And these automation platforms are notoriously bad in displaying how much you will pay based on growth of your database. 

So it’s actually going into these sales conversations with the account executives from these vendors, you have to be very, very clear and say, give me a two/three years plan, how much I’m going to pay based on these factors. 

So the actual, well I have to go back to HubSpot where they have a nice looking pricing page, where you have a little lever based on the size of your contact database, and you can have a look into your CRM. And how many contacts do you have today? If you have 10 thousand, okay, great. What is your forecast? How are you going to scale over the next three years? 

And make sure that you understand how much you would actually pay for these systems when your contact records triple, quadruple. And these are really scary costs to look at. And again, you sometimes don’t really take this into account. 

There is, of course also on boarding fees, make sure that you’re aware of the vendor is placing a fee on just dedicating you some of their resources. You know, a customer success manager. Do you know how much that is going to be? I think when we talked about lead flow earlier, I think it’s also extremely important because a lot of these systems are priced based on database volume. 

So you actually need to have and think about a database strategy, database hygiene. Do you purge data? Is it a good point to audit the amount of records you have? You know, is it necessary that you upload everything into an automation platform? You basically just pay for that. Right? So I think this is also something you have to consider.

Alex (26:53):

Yeah. And timelines are an interesting side of it in that when you speak to HubSpot, they’ll tell you that they can onboard you in a week, two weeks they’ll have someone there to help. And within a few clicks, you’ll be up and running and nice and easy. But the reality is that as we’ve talked about this as a potentially huge project, spanning almost all parts of the business in some cases, what have your experiences been of timelines generally?

Sticking to timelines in marketing automation integration 

Dominik (27:15):

Brutal, brutal. My last company, the most senior marketing guy went to the board and said, Oh, we need a new system. We actually migrated away from Marketo and implemented Pardot. So he basically said into this round that we’ll be migrating the system within three weeks. And when he told me that I was just like, you did what?

I think switching on the systems is done very, very quickly. It can be done, you know, fairly efficiently, but there’s so much more to this, right? I mean, you know what, ultimately it took us, I think about six months in my previous company, because it’s not just about the system. It’s all that foundational work of, Hey, we have a new system in place. 

The current lead flow, can it actually be replicated within that system? And some of these automation systems are extremely customisable. So you can actually really have a detailed custom lead flow and the system will cater for that. And you know, I’m thinking of a Marketo instance where they do this really, really well, but often you have a bit of a system you have to squeeze into the existing ecosystem. 

And especially if you migrate away, if it’s not your first project, but you migrate systems, you just can’t continue working how you previously did it because there are different quirks, there’s different features. 

And I mean, one more story is Pardot has this weird thing where you have limited automation rules, whereas in Marketo, that was unlimited. So we were going in and because we felt rushed, we committed to three weeks migration implementation, although that was insane. So we were busy recreating that lead flow and suddenly we exhausted all of our automation rules. 

And it was one of these when we talked about pricing, be very clear what you need and you have to ask these sales guys, okay. You know, where does the price go up? What is included? What is an add on? He ended up spending another three thousand dollars by just having additional 50 automation rules. I mean, it just blocks you, right? I mean, it’s all stuff you didn’t really calculate. And it’s these things you take away with you, and then we can talk in a podcast about it, but then it’s a painful experience. 

At Stack Overflow I was very early on implementing HubSpot, I think week two, they had it and I came on board, so it was a very exciting time to build all of this out. We realised that HubSpot is really good at charging you for add-ons. 

For example, we didn’t have a reporting add on and they have like a premium feature for advertising. And everyone was talking about how we can do these cool things with HubSpot. And then I had to basically go back to the senior stakeholders and say, yeah, we can do this, but it comes at a price because the license you guys purchased doesn’t actually include these things. 

In the last company we had, we were on the standard HubSpot license, but we talked about how we want to personalise the experience and guess what, that’s actually only possible on the enterprise package. So that is just, you’re not making friends with the CFO if you have to go back after two weeks and say, hey I need a little bit more cash for this.

Alex (30:49):

Yeah, yeah. It’s hard. It’s just a whole list of questions you’ve got to ask in advance. Because these things just come out of the woodwork as you’re going, and it’s tough. And I think I kind of personally think it could be made a lot clearer by the companies, the marketing automation tools themselves and they could do a lot more to aid that process. But maybe they’re moving that way. 

I know that as you say, HubSpot has the little slider that you can kind of drag up and down, but that’s only one part of the picture.

Dominik (31:15):

The way I did it, I listed all the requirements in a spreadsheet and I’ve got the three, four vendors at the top and I have to put a lot of research into this. Can I do this with this system? Yes. You know, maybe I need to validate this with an account executive, but it’s these little things that are extremely annoying, time consuming, but ever so crucial.

Alex (31:39):

Yeah. Yeah. So let’s talk about training. Because I think it’s obviously a key part to making sure that these systems bed in. Is training something that you, obviously HubSpot has got endless online material and courses. And I think that’s one area that it actually does quite well in terms of its online certifications and training. None of them are short of documentation. 

Is this something that you start the right people kind of doing the learning, even whilst you’re still kind of in the planning phase? And I guess, ideally you don’t want to launch a system and then everyone starts training. It’s kind of like a work stream it has to happen alongside the work.

Training employees on marketing automation 

Dominik (32:12):

Yeah. It’s very important that you think of training prior to the migration, right? So thinking of that lead flow, you would, by now have probably optimised it, changed it, sometimes you’re forced to change it with different, you know, features from platforms. So it’s not going to happen overnight. 

And adoption is a process that’ll take weeks, especially for a sales department that is used to work in a certain way. Not always enjoying working with these systems. I heard a lot of salespeople complaining about Salesforce and it’s too admin heavy. And then you just come in with new processes and new training. 

So again, this is something you have to seed very early on and have these sessions repetitively. So training videos, work group sessions, but then it’s also, I hate to say a bit of micromanagement initially to enforce the change if necessary. I mean, some of these systems are really great because you can restrict the systems, you can restrict the data entry points. 

So I’m probably thinking more of a CRM solution where you kind of force adoption and by just have mandatory fields or things like that. So a very, very crucial adoption, the least what you want is to have a brand new system and no one wants to use it because it’s too clunky, complicated, no one understands it. That’s also a big part of having a successful migration.

Alex (33:45):

Absolutely. And then I guess finally that bit of getting everybody working side by side and the shared visibility of all of the numbers that matter. And we talked a bit about sales and marketing alignment and, you know, sales are saying to marketing, where am I leads? And marketing are saying to sales like what’s the quality of that lead? 

And I guess when you’re sat side by side, as you said, that’s quite easy to do, but I guess a lot of the point of these platforms and marketing automation products is that it should give everybody more shared visibility and make reporting easier across the whole business. Has that been your experience?

How marketing automation can impact reporting across a whole business 

Dominik (34:15):

I mean, there’s a lot of good examples. If I’m honest with you, there’s a lot of amazing examples where I found myself sitting in a meeting room with sales and there was an engaging discussion and challenging for marketing, but talking about a lead scoring threshold. And it’s those conversations, which, I mean, they’re not always nice to have, but these are the discussions which I consider this project to be successful because it really forces you to sit in one meeting room. 

And if you get to that point where sales is actively engaged and contributes towards refining and improving the system, I mean, that’s a really powerful statement to engage sales team with marketing, right? Same on the customer success side, I would argue. Where we did a lot of customer marketing activities. And I think that was obviously all trickling down into the individual CS reps, whether it was just having better data, better documented data hygiene. 

And I think it’s painful in the beginning, but ultimately everyone reaps benefits from it. But it’s reporting C-suites or just tactically a CS going into a QBR session and just looking back, okay, what was the last conversation I had with this person, with this key account? You know, what’s going on within the account with contacts and making that data actionable and insightful. So I think these are the really nice examples.

Alex (35:44):

Yeah, definitely. I think that’s the key, there’s so much non-actionable data out there that you can just get lost in. And I know I’m the same way. I lost in a Google Analytics account for days, but when I actually asked myself what I’m going to do with some of the insights in there, it’s again a different question. So yeah, I definitely agree with that. That’s been a really good overview. 

I always love recording these episodes cause I just think when we dive deep into something, it’s a really nice way of giving people, wherever they are on the journey, whether they’re already using something or whether they’re about to migrate to a different platform, but some nice clear tips and things they can take away and actually reflect on and think about. Hopefully not have to go through the same war stories that you’ve been through with peer review and support. 

So thank you for sharing your time. It’s been really, really good.

Dominik (36:31):

Thanks for having me. Yeah. Pleasure. Thank you very much, Alex.

Alex (36:33):

Thanks Dominik.

FINITE (36:35):

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

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

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

Find the full transcript here:

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

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