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  • Dec 2 2025

Mastering B2B Podcasts with Anne Feuss, President & Co-Founder at Pod People

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This week, we get meta, discussing the strategy and execution behind high-impact B2B podcasts. Jodi speaks with Anne Feuss, Co-founder of PodPeople, an agency that produces top-ranking shows for clients like Google and HBO.

Anne offers actionable insights on how B2B brands can stand out in a noisy market. We cover key topics, including:

  • Finding the right host and hook to make technical content compelling.

  • The essential move from audio-only to video-first podcasting.

  • Tying content efforts to commercial impact and pipeline growth.

Learn the current trends B2B audiences demand and how to evolve your content strategy from basic to best-in-class.

 

 

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)
Today on the podcast, we’re getting a little bit meta. A podcast about podcasts. What could be better? Excuse the rhymes, I’m just a little excited. Today we’re talking to the amazing Anne Fuss, president and co-founder at PodPeople, a leading agency that produces top-ranking B2B and B2C podcasts. We cover a lot of in this episode, how to start a podcast, what separates dry shows from award winners.

and trends in podcasting at the moment to help you understand what B2B audiences want to see. is an energizing guest, naturally, with some high-level insights that will make you want to up your content game. So whether you’re dabbling in the world of podcasts or just wanting to get inspired, this episode is for you.

Jodi (00:50)
Hi, Anne. Welcome to the FINITE Podcast.

Anne Feuss (00:54)
Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Jodi (00:56)
It’s a pleasure to have you here. I think today is gonna be a really fun episode because we’re kind of getting a little bit meta. We’re talking about podcasting and kind of B2B owned content on the podcast. So I know you’re an expert in that and I guess to start off, we’ll hear more about you, your background in ⁓ podcasting and B2B content and where you are now.

Anne Feuss (01:03)
haha

Yeah, awesome. Well, again, thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited. I always love to chat podcasting, even though it’s my day job. My background. So I started out actually, my first introduction to really working in podcasting was when I was at the New York Times. That’s about 10 years ago now. I’m dating myself, but I got the opportunity to be involved in the creation of The Daily. My boss actually was the person who sort of pitched it. It was part of a larger media buy.

And the client BMW had some leftover discretionary funds and someone was like, let’s just make a podcast out of it. And I think what the times did really well in its nasancy of podcasting was identifying the right host, right? People know the daily because of Michael Barbaro. And that was something I saw from the start. Like he just brought the room alive. When people listened to him, they were so engaged with him as a person that the content really spoke for itself. So I was, I really fell in love with podcasting then.

And then when I moved out to LA, I was still with the Times and I met my co-founder Rachel, who had this great idea and she was like, I’m creating a talent network. I see this big disconnect between brands that want to get into podcasting and the actual folks who make the podcast. So she created this huge talent network of producers, editors, sound designers, engineers all over the globe. And so we basically took that and started doing full service podcast production for brands.

and really making sure that we brought the right people onto each project, right? It wasn’t just another generic producer. If we were doing a podcast about finance, we brought in a finance expert. If we were doing a podcast for HBO around a specific content vertical, like we were doing the Gilded Age podcast, we’d bring someone who’s really familiar with the material and that period of time so that they can really speak to the content itself. that was sort of the beginnings of pod people, and that was about seven or eight years ago. And so…

Ever since, we’ve constantly been evolving. We started as purely audio only. Now we’re very much in the video space. But that’s sort of us in a nutshell, yeah. And we’ve grown a lot. We’ve got a huge internal team. But again, we’ve continued to grow and build that talent network. And that’s what’s really been, I’d say, our differentiator. And why we’ve been able to reach and work with so many different brands is that we love to focus on who is the right people, who’s going to tell your story. How can we make sure that your story is going to break through?

and you do that with the right people in front of the camera and also behind it, in front of the mic and also behind it.

Jodi (03:40)
Great. That’s such a good summary and some real kind of hitting on some fundamentals of great content and what makes a good podcast there. I’m definitely going to get a lot of learnings out of this, I’m sure. So you talked a little bit about kind of clients at PodPeople, HBO and things like that. Do you want to give us a little bit of a flavor of the more B2B side of things and kind of B2B brands that you work with?

Anne Feuss (04:02)
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things from the start was when we were starting this company, we really wanted to not pigeonhole ourselves. And for the purposes of our business model, we thought it was really important that we sort of straddle two different lanes. On the one hand, we do a lot of work, like I mentioned, with entertainment clients. We do podcasts for Netflix and HBO, Spotify, but our bread and butter from the beginning has always been our B2B brand. we’ve been fortunate enough to

you know, our first client was Twitter and then followed by Samsung. So we were really able to pump our personal Rolodex to get some big brand names from the start. And it’s only grown from there. So some of our favorite work is we do a lot of work with SoFi. We’re doing a huge project with Google. We do a lot in the finance space and specifically now the AI space. We have a ton of VCs and private equity firms. And I think they take a page out of A16Z’s book of like, you you can be

a finance company, but you really want to be a content company first, right? You want to be able to get your message out there. And that’s the beauty of podcasting in the first place. we’ve been really focused in that sector. And that’s sort of where we’ve driving that side of the business, right? Into more of the AI space because anyone can talk about AI, right? But how do you make it compelling? And actually one of our podcasts, No Priers, is the number one in the AI space.

And a lot of that, again, is because of the hosts, because they care about the subject matter. They’re so passionate about it. So we just do all the behind the scenes stuff to make it look and sound pretty.

Jodi (05:32)
Absolutely. I think it’s amazing when you kind of list the kind of sectors and different clients that you have the range.

Who would have thought that a fintech company needed to be content first and content driven? I know in the past year with finite at least, get people knocking down my inbox every day, pitching guests and different ideas. And there’s just this huge energy and motivation and budgets towards this kind of…

Anne Feuss (06:01)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Jodi (06:04)
b2b content that’s almost removed from the sales journey directly. I want to know why you think this is, what has encouraged this turn and what’s propelling this movement.

Anne Feuss (06:19)
Yeah, well, I would say we see that as well, right? The cold pitching has increased tenfold just in the past year. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it’s become an essential part of every PR agency strategy, know, as PR changes itself. And at the end of the day, know, decision makers, they don’t want ads, they want insight. And so…

you know, when you want to elevate your executive presence, you want to make yourself stand out, you know, with trust and authority in this space as a brand, what better way to do that than to be able to talk about it, right? And to talk about it in a compelling way. We’re seeing attention spans get shorter and shorter, but we’re actually finding from the research side of things that people are willing to give their longest attention span in the content space to a podcast, not a TV show, not…

a YouTube clip or whatnot, it’s listening to a podcast actually. And so we find that you can have real connection with people behind the mic. It’s not just an ad, it’s not spray and play. So getting company leaders out there to give a strong POV, you can drive high intent, high value audiences as well. You can focus on CMOs, CIOs, CFOs.

So it’s a really great way to position your brand in a thoughtful, meaningful experience. not just having your own podcast, but again, that executive presence is really important. Also, you want your executives to be able to not just go on podcasts, but speak at conferences and just have more of sort of the in the age of like the micro celebrity executive, I would say. so

If your executive is in front and center, they don’t need to have a TikTok, but they need some form of brand presence, right? You want to feel personally engaged with them. And think podcasting is the number one way to do that.

Jodi (08:06)
I completely agree. It feels kind of intimate making podcasts as well. It really, I feel like I have a connection to the listeners and I would hope that they felt that with me. So I guess if you’re owning this content and building these kind of parasocial relationships that are so important for that kind of brand reputation and impact, yeah.

Anne Feuss (08:11)
Mm-hmm.

I love that you said parasocial relationships because that’s what we touch on too. In the podcast I listen to, I genuinely feel like I’m friends with the host and that’s what you want. Like I have such an affinity because I like the host, you know. When they crack a joke, I laugh and I feel like I’m part of that conversation and it ingratiates me towards a brand or a host or you know, overall what they’re speaking about. So again, like you said, the intimacy of the platform is really powerful.

Jodi (08:58)
Awesome. So we know that we love podcasts here. We know why it works. You’ve explained so well how it ⁓ elevates a brand present and a content strategy and increasingly PR strategies. Let’s talk about kind of tactical ways that listeners who are all B2B technology marketers can get involved with podcasts.

Is this something that you need to invest in straight away, book studios, get a mic, secure loads of budget, can this be sort of, can you do it lightly? Can you kind of use your mic on your headphone, talk to your friend, to your kind of networking POs and things like that? How would you recommend going about it?

Anne Feuss (09:43)
I think that’s a great question, right? Because you’ve sort of got the two buckets. You’ve got the independent podcasters and then you’ve got the actual brands, right, who have budget to put behind it. One of the great things about podcasting is that anyone can have a podcast. One of the great and also one of the bad things about podcasting, Anyone can have a podcast in a positive light and anyone can have a podcast and you’re like, okay, everyone has a podcast. But it’s important to break through the noise. I think if you’re going to start a podcast, you need a strong POV. Everything we do at PodPeople,

we address with a marketing lens, right? We look at, so you don’t want to be another finance podcast per se. What does the current ecosystem look like for finance podcasts? Who’s charting and why? Why are they standing out versus someone else? And is there a white space you can fill? I think the most important things that people should think about when they want to start a podcast, it doesn’t necessarily need to be, am I getting the nicest microphone, right? Do I have the best headphones? Is my background great? Is the content good?

And do I care about it, right? Because at the end of the day, I really believe that your content starts and ends with your host caring, you know? A lot of times brands come to us and they go, do we need a celebrity host? You absolutely don’t need a celebrity host. You need an engaging, charismatic host who cares about the material. So that would be the first place to start, right? Hop on Riverside, throw on your AirPods, and just have a place to start where you’re having real meaningful conversations.

It’s a free space, right? You upload your RSS feed, you have a hosting platform. That’s what’s so great about it, right? It is so accessible. So I would say the number one thing to think about with that accessibility comes the responsibility of putting out interesting content. So what’s your hook? Why are you different? What are you saying that doesn’t already exist out there? And how are you educating your audiences? That’s the biggest thing.

Jodi (11:30)
And it ties into kind of the fundamentals of content in general really is understanding what’s out there and understanding how to penetrate it to stand out.

⁓ I can’t tell you how many times I am looking for articles on B2B marketing and B2B technology to get inspired. And it’s the same old, same old five ways to elevate your SEO strategy or just something like that. So it’s really about finding your niche, getting your host that is passionate and you can kind of feel that passion through the microphone and carving out those opportunities in your sectors.

Anne Feuss (11:54)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jodi (12:08)
I do have a question that just jumped to mind just then. Say, for example, you mentioned a finance brand or fintech and they’re looking to create a podcast. They’ve already got their great host. They’re looking for a hook. They’re in a sector that is typically quite dry or, I don’t know, difficult to stand out in. They’re talking about some kind of regulation or

Anne Feuss (12:16)
Mm-hmm.

Jodi (12:35)
they’re selling regulative software or something. How do you add kind of a more entertaining spin to that to turn that kind of more dry brand into an amazing podcast?

Anne Feuss (12:38)
Great.

That is a great question. And that’s where a really good producer comes in. That’s why brands come to us in the first place or come to, you know, well, they come to us. Because here’s the thing, a lot of clients and a lot of brands will say, we have a POV, right? We know what we want to talk about, but how do we make it compelling? So that’s where you need really good creative production to think about those things. Let’s say you’re talking about regulations.

What can people learn from this? You’ve got your great host. Now they’ve got the content they’re going to talk about. How can you make that stuff interesting? How can you maybe gamify it? Or how could you do a recurring segment? Who are you bringing on? Is anyone really interesting? I think it starts and ends with story. If you have a compelling story, people are telling a story. There’s a reason why, diary of a CEO and how I built this, people just want to hear stories. They’ll learn something.

but it needs to be tied to emotion, right? So that’s where having the compelling host who can bring out story, you know, even if it is on something really boring, but how do you bring that out? So I would say really focusing on the story element and also focusing on what can I learn in an interesting way. Because at the end of the day, people want actionable takeaways and they want learnings. They want to say, I listened to this podcast and I actually heard this really interesting stat. That’s what you want people to take away with. And that’s why also with podcasting,

Now it’s not just the long form that matters, but you have so much content that can come out of it, right? You use this as your content engine. You have a 30 minute recording and you can turn it into 20 pieces of social content, right? That you can propagate across your socials and your LinkedIn and your website, your O &O. I sort of on a tangent there, but so it’s really important that not only you’re crafting that story,

you’re getting the right guests and you’re also, you know, basically repurposing that content over and over.

Jodi (14:35)
I totally agree about stories. The best performing content across all of the channels and platforms and brands that I’ve been involved in. Anecdotes do so well. Thousands and thousands of views. You look at thought leaders in the B2B space, say Rory Sutherland. He will never tell you an answer straight. He will tell you about a time he went to a restaurant and looked at a menu and noticed something interesting and turn it into this amazing lesson.

Anne Feuss (14:46)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jodi (15:03)
So I totally get it. It’s just about kind of carving out those stories and finding those interesting stories in the more, some would say, financial, deep financial spaces and stuff. So great. Thank you for that.

Anne Feuss (15:10)
Yes.

Right.

Of course, it’s not dry. You just haven’t found the right hook yet.

Jodi (15:19)
Absolutely. Thank you, positive. I love that. So let’s talk trends. We’ve had podcasting for a long time now, and I’m sure you’ve noticed these big kind of waves of different kind of takes on podcasting and how different people are utilizing it, any kind of format trends or…

Anne Feuss (15:22)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jodi (15:43)
Yeah, audio trends. What’s happening in podcasting at the moment?

Anne Feuss (15:48)
Well, I’ve actually touched on a lot of it, so I can bring it back. So the number one thing was the great transition from audio to video podcasts. know, again, 10 years ago or even longer when Serial came out, it was audio first. It was an audio journey. You think about where podcasting sort of blew up in terms of our habits and our consumption. It was our commute, right? This was the pre-COVID era. People were commuting. They wanted to find something to listen to. I was taking the subway. I wanted to find something to listen to.

Jodi (15:52)
Yeah.

Anne Feuss (16:17)
Then I genuinely think that COVID sort of kicked off the time that people got more involved in their screens in general. This is just my personal theory, but I think that’s when the wave of video podcasting really started to take off and get ingrained in people. It’s also a much, it resonates a lot more with younger generations. Like a lot of Gen Z is watching, consuming their podcasts on YouTube, right? Older millennials and Gen X and even boomers, they’re more…

They have more an affinity towards audio first, but in general, just the whole direction has gone to video. that, I believe, comes back to the, were at home, you were searching for connection. Not only do you want to hear them, you want to see them, right? You want to feel like you’re in the room with them, not just hear them. So video first podcasting has become so important, and even more so than to my next point, which is the short form derivative content that comes out of it, that resonates a lot more when you have the video.

Back in the old days, we used to do audiograms, which in hindsight are so unappealing, right? It’s just a static image, maybe a little bit of a graphic and then voiceover, right? Being able to see someone talk, being able to see them impassioned about what they’re talking about, again, really resonates. So the video-first podcasting, the short-form derivative content, right? Taking that long form, turning it into short-form. I think about something like SNL, right?

The viewership has continued to decline, but it’s only risen on social media, right? Like I feel like I consume a whole episode of SNL just by the clips online. So when we think about is podcasting a success, we don’t just think about what are my download numbers of the actual long form, but how many people are consuming the short form content? And do we consider that consuming the actual episode? Because more than half of people who listen to podcasts are only consuming it through the short form. So those are the two biggest differentiators.

I also think interactive and community-driven formats have only risen. Things like live tapings, Q &As, roundtables. I keep going back to Diary of a CEO because it’s such a popular podcast, but I love when he does the roundtables because it introduces you to a lot more folks. One of the podcasts we make is Dr. Mary Claire Havers. She’s a great menopause doctor. She’s a wonderful podcast, but she has basically done her podcast tour lately. She went on Diary of a CEO. ⁓

And she really blew up from that. I mean, it really helped not just her podcast, but it helped all the other women that went on it because it was a women’s health special or whatnot. And all those other women got more notoriety. So I love these big round tables. I think they’re really interesting when done correctly. And then I mentioned this earlier, but executive as creator, right? The leaders who become the face and voice of their brand, think podcasting only serves to ⁓ help elevate that. So

That’s also something that we’ve seen in recent years, right? And it’s not just podcasting, right? It’s just an overall shift in marketing in general is how do we elevate this executive and make them interesting and fun.

Jodi (19:06)
There’s a lot of action points that I’m sure our listeners can take from that. I mean, how easy is it to use an AI tool and put a long form piece of content into it and get loads of clips with transcriptions and captions and upload them all? Absolutely. Round Tables is interesting. And I think that hones in on the kind of reputation building aspect of podcasts that we were talking about before. They somehow feel a bit more…

Anne Feuss (19:19)
Mm-hmm.

Jodi (19:33)
elevated and ⁓ kind of serious and giving a lot of weight and credibility to the speakers on this kind of panel. That’s super interesting as well. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s next really. But all of this has kind of made me think of the indoor, the ultimate purpose of the content and that is to

You know, not only to elevate the brand and build the reputation of brands, but to drive revenue, some commercial impact. Are you kind of in the business of tying attribution from podcasts to kind of business impact? Or how do you go about that? And how do you think about that or communicate with clients on that?

Anne Feuss (20:14)
That is the question, right? Because that’s the first thing people ask us is what are the results and how do we see them, right? I always say podcasting is not a direct response medium, right? You’re not gonna click on a link and go buy something. We obviously look at things like what are your download numbers? What are your impressions? What are your social views, right? We look at it from a larger, I guess, PR lens almost of what has this done for the brand. On the one hand side,

We talk about executive presence. That’s a huge part of it. So anecdotally, we see a lot of our executives and thought leaders are being asked to speak at more conferences, being asked to go on other podcasts. Like their presence is being uplifted. So we track that in the PR sense, the traditional PR sense. We’re also thinking about just in general, you know, what is the impact on the brand, right? A lot of our B2B brands, again, we’re not driving them to just go buy a product.

We’re driving the conversation around it. So again, from a PR lens, how are we tracking conversation? How is this infiltrating the zeitgeist? It’s a bit more complex, right? But one of the most successful things I’ve seen specifically on our VC, our finance podcast, is they are actually using this for pipeline. They’re using this to build relationships. A lot of times people will have guests on that could potentially be a customer or an investor.

And a way in to having that conversation is inviting them on your podcast, right? Like, I want this potential investor or this could be a huge client. I want to bring them on my podcast to learn more about them, right? It’s not a, want to sell them. I want them to learn about my brand and in trade, I want to learn about them. I want them to educate my listeners. So I actually think that’s an amazing use of the podcast space is not just that, you know, you’re elevating the executive presence, but you’re also

thinking about this as a way to grow your network, right? And your potential customers. And we see a lot of, when we look at our case studies, you know, the VC folks, they have a new round of funding and a lot of it was driven by the podcast. We work with a cybersecurity company that drove millions of revenue from this really beautiful cybersecurity podcast that we created for Rubrik called To Catch a Thief. Highly recommend people listen to that. It’s really, really compelling.

⁓ So we’re just seeing it across a lot of our clients that yes, it’ll drive revenue, but I think more than that, it’s driving their presence, right? It’s driving them within the zeitgeist. It’s driving how people talk about them and just the conversation around that brand in general. So yeah, that’s sort of it in a nutshell.

Jodi (22:39)
Absolutely.

Great summary. Yeah, I think the way that you communicate impact to your clients is part of the reason why they trust you to kind of bridge that gap between the unknown kind of listenership and correlative revenue increases and spikes and things like that. ⁓ And proving value can’t always be one for one, like for like, but.

Anne Feuss (22:57)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jodi (23:02)
Absolutely, it’s the same with PR. You can measure brand growth in that way. Brand searches ⁓ share a voice, but yeah, not quite directly. Great.

Anne Feuss (23:07)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

I think it’s interesting.

have worked with clients that are B2C and it’s something, I think the beauty space actually is one of the most trackable when it comes to podcasting, just as an exception to everything I just talked about. something that we can track there is we’ll do like use the podcast promo code to buy this lip gloss or whatnot. We actually can see some conversion there. So there are different tactics based on your goals, but the majority of our clients are B2B, not B2C at all.

Jodi (23:38)
Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. mean, maybe there’s something that we can take from that, like use this code to get a free trial of this software or I don’t know, you could get a bit more creative with that for sure.

Anne Feuss (23:38)
I felt like I had to say that.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we use the codes in general in podcasting to sort of track and like, where are people going after this? They don’t necessarily need to buy something, but where are they going? Which is interesting.

Jodi (24:01)
Absolutely,

chuck a UTM tag on there and you can track links from descriptions and all sorts, Cool, so…

Anne Feuss (24:05)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Exactly.

Jodi (24:12)
You mentioned this at the beginning of the episode, ⁓ AI and how it’s kind of changing the landscape and having this impact on everything we can possibly think of. I haven’t had an episode of the Finite Podcast in the past year that hasn’t mentioned it. So we have to talk about it. I’d love to hear your opinion on how AI is shaping branded content. Particularly, you know, this…

in all the headlines brand in the US who’s making 3000 episodes of a podcast per day. How do you respond to that kind of content creation?

Anne Feuss (24:43)
Yeah, that’s…

think because we’re first and foremost a creative agency, right? And so I think the whole creative community gets really angsty when you bring up AI as a replacement for creative, right? A lot of our writers come from the TV and film world, so it’s so top of mind for us. At the same time, AI has been critical to helping expedite some of our workflows. So we see AI as a wonderful tool in terms of technology that helps make us

helps the quality, right? I mean, we can do everything by hand. We could do hand transcription, but we also use a great tool called Descript that’s AI enabled. I think Descript’s owned by OpenAI. So the AI assisted pre and post production can be really helpful. Now we’ll always have that human element. We have wonderful in-house sound designers and they need that ear, right? They need the ear to be able to.

to really understand a human conversation. don’t think AI is there yet. I don’t think it’ll get there for quite some time. But things like, you know, research and prep docs, that type of workflow, absolutely we use AI for our first draft, right? We use it for transcripts, like I said. We don’t use it for rough edits. I know a lot of production companies are doing that to save money.

⁓ Again, we still use human editors and I think it’ll be a while before AI can replace that. It’s the creative lens. We’re using it to help enhance our creative workflow, right? Save time in certain spaces, but people want human voices like we talked about before. People want real conversation. They want human story. We’re not, I hate the idea of AI voices and AI hosts just because again, it takes the human out of it. It takes the reason people go and listen to a podcast versus read an article, right?

So again, I think we’re going to continue to see it in terms of like assisting workflow. And I think we’ll continue to see resistance in terms of all other things creative. And again, I don’t think that content is good. The stuff that’s, know, AI voices, unless it’s gimmicky, you know, for a reason outside of all the stuff we’ve talked about today.

Jodi (26:44)
I would agree if you’re studying for a test and you want like maybe a quirky way to listen to your notes, maybe turn it into a podcast. That could be maybe interesting, but if you’re sitting on the bus, you’ve got your 40 minute commute and you just want some good content to bring you inspire your day, then I really, I agree. don’t think it’s quite there, but watch the space. We’ll see. Who knows.

Anne Feuss (26:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, exactly.

Jodi (27:11)
Cool, well that’s all the questions I had for you today, Anne, and I think that was enough. I’ve gotten so much out of this episode. We’ve covered so much. I’m gonna have to write notes myself or listen back to this and take loads of lessons, and I’m sure our listeners will have as well if they’re embarking on a podcast themselves, if they’re going on other people’s, and absolutely. So thank you so much for coming on, Anne.

Anne Feuss (27:22)
Yeah

Of course, and I would just encourage if anyone has just any questions about podcasting, feel free to email us. It’s hello at podpeople.com. We have folks, you know, who their whole job is to just help our community and help people when they’re starting out. So give, you know, free advice. We just, we want the best for people. We, we love this medium. We feel so passionate about it. So we just want to be able to help other people create great content as well. So thanks so much Jodi for having me on. This was so lovely. And ⁓ yeah, hope you guys.

I hope you guys tune in and reach out.

Jodi (28:06)
Amazing. Thanks. ⁓

Anne Feuss (28:08)
them.

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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