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  • Mar 6 2020

Podcast: Psychology of Marketing with Steve Mann, CMO, ThetaRay

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Since the start of the FINITE podcast in 2019, we’ve had inspiring B2B marketing practitioners across the technology industry discuss truly exciting topics and share their pearls of wisdom. From sales & marketing alignment and enablement, to ABM, personalisation, and the value of marketing theory.

For this episode of FINITE, we sat down with Steve Mann, CMO at ThetaRay and dived into the psychology of marketing. Given todays focus on technology and digital, the more emotional and psychological side of marketing can be overlooked, but certainly should not be. In this episode Alex and Steve discuss gamification for B2B marketing, building a marketing team, and marketing to the emotional part of us in the B2B space.

The psychology of marketing is the act of crafting marketing messages and strategies that talk both to the rational, logical, conscious part of our brains as well as the emotional, non-conscious, intuitive components of our brain.

Steve Mann, CMO, ThetaRay

Listen to the podcast below:

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Full Transcript:

About Steve Mann and ThetaRay

Alex (01:40):

Hi Steve. Thanks for joining me. I’m looking forward to talking with you. Lots of interesting stuff around the psychology of marketing, I’m sure. But to begin with, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself, what you’ve been up to, your marketing career.

Steve (01:52):

Certainly, and I’ll tell you a little bit about myself personally because I think the two are intrinsically intertwined. So I’m the Chief Marketing Officer for ThetaRay. ThetaRay is an Israeli based AI, big data, analytics platform. Currently we focus on financial crime detection and the AI that we use is completely different. It’s called artificial intuition. And since I’m so interested in the psychology of marketing, we’ll talk about that as well. I’ve been the CMO of two other FinTech’s prior to this in the capital markets and AML space. And prior to that, I was CMO at LexisNexis which is a lot of fun really, marketing to attorneys which can be strange at times, but giving them the tools that they need to actually attorney. I was a senior marketing executive at SAP. I’ve been a software engineer, a VC, a product marketing manager, and I’m the father of triplets, 12 and a half year old girls. And so they’re in that puberty stage where you just kinda wanna lock them in their room for five years. But yeah, so it’s a busy, it’s a busy day for me.

Alex (03:10):

Cool. So tell us a bit about what your day to day looks like in the marketing world. Once you’ve taken care of the triplets. Marketing function, how big is it? Who’s involved?

Steve (03:19):

Okay. Well we have a small team right now. I’ve been with ThetaRay for six months, so this is a build year for me. My focus is on recruiting and retaining, you know, senior director, VP level individuals that have deep expertise in growth marketing and integrated marketing relative to media and communications. Traditionally the financial institutions that we market to are, it’s a confined market, right? It’s a bounded market and because it’s a bounded market, it gives us the opportunity to market high and market low. And by market low, I mean, you know, pretty much account based marketing, it’s a small enough market where actually account based marketing is essential. You can’t really talk to, there are just so many financial crime professionals in the world. There are so many financial institutions in the world. Sure. So ‘one day in the life’ thing is really building out with the sales force, those ABM strategies where we can truly move somebody from being a blocker to an influencer or giving a business decision maker, the tools to convince an economic decision maker no matter what the path needs to be. The majority of my day, although you know, everybody loves the strategy thing. You know, if you look at the actual definition of strategy, it also means logistics and tactics and really getting your hands dirty. So, and that’s something as a CMO I really enjoy. So I do a lot of writing every day, talk to my sales team every day, go out to visit customers, all the time because I can’t, we can’t, write we can’t position a message without really understanding what resonates with our customers. And I find that many, many marketeers, believe it or not, neglect that very critical element of talking to customers.

Alex (05:12):

Yeah. And I guess a big part of that is coming back from sales feeding back into marketing what they’re hearing, I imagine with them all, this is what sounds like a very enterprise account base kind of sales process. There’s a lot of conversation, a lot of feedback loops that keep coming back. So that sales and marketing alignment piece is pretty key.

Steve (05:28):

Yeah, we sell a very sophisticated product that’s really enterprise grade and we use something called the ‘Rule of 25’. We believe that at a minimum you have to be engaged with 25 different individuals in the buying centers that we focus on in order to actually accelerate or effectuate a deal.

Alex (05:49):

That’s high even for enterprise generally, I think. Right?

Steve (05:52):

I would agree. The one thing that I would say is in today’s enterprise sales, you are typically looking at at least three buying centers. And so that kind of equates to that 25 if you think about a buying center being a discreet department or a discrete set of influencers or users, and so you need to be able to sell whether or not it’s an, if they have multiple budgets, you have to pull those budgets together. They typically have multiple business needs that are at many times divergent. And so that’s why an enterprise sale, you know, if you’re lucky, takes nine months.

Alex (06:23):

Is that your average?

Steve (06:24):

I think ours is actually a little bit faster simply because we, I’d like to think are very good at what we do. But if you look at the average enterprise sales cycles, they will move anywhere from nine to 18 months. I’ve seen two year sales cycles that are not only painful for the provider, but also very painful for the prospect.

Defining the psychology of marketing

Alex (06:43):

I can imagine. Yeah. So let’s talk a bit about the psychology of marketing. I guess, should we start with a definition? What does it mean to you when you, when you talk about psychology and marketing? Yeah. What are you thinking?

Steve (06:53):

So the psychology of marketing is the act of crafting marketing messages and strategies that talk both to the rational, logical, conscious part of our brains as well as the emotional, non-conscious, intuitive components of our brain. Many, I believe that many marketeers think of marketing in a unidimensional way that they consider marketing to the rational components of the brain to be what they’re here to do. Whether it’s giving them the pricing of a particular product or talking about the speeds and feeds of a particular widget. It’s very product focused, as opposed to being individual focus. You know, even in B2B, you know, typically the same actions are the same techniques that you would use in a B2C setting are applicable in B2B. It’s just that you’re spending somebody else’s money.

Right. Okay. So from a practical example, what psychology of marketing is or what it does? One of my favorite people is a gentleman by the name of Antonio Rangel. Antonio is a behavioral economist and it’s really fascinating. He went to the UK, which where you’re from, maybe you are part of his study? All right. It depends on how much you drink. Do you care to go down that rabbit hole, right now? So on a supermarket shelf he took five French wines and five German wines and you match them on price and dryness and alternating days. He played other French music or German music. On the days that French music was played, 72% of the wine purchased was French. On the days that German music was played, 77% of the wine purchase was German. Now typically you wouldn’t think that the music playing around you would have any impact on your purchase decisions. But obviously it did. There was a nonconscious emotional element to the purchase decision that was brought on by the music.

Another example, I love banana Republic. They’re my favourite clothes. I feel like, you know, they get me. So when I walk into banana Republic and say I want to buy a pair of jeans, I’ll go into the fitting room and try them on because I don’t want to try them on in the middle of the store. And so I go into the fitting room and I try them on and I look at myself in the mirror and then I, you know, look the price and the price seems reasonable for what I want to buy. It’s the color that I want. But then I look at myself in the mirror, I say, ‘Damn Steve, you look good in this!’. There is that combination of rational, the price and the color versus the emotional. How I feel about myself when I actually try them on. So what I’m saying in a, in a specifically, in a B2B context, most marketers, they market to the price and colour. They don’t market to the damn. You look good.

B2C marketing strategies for B2B marketing

Alex (09:56):

Yeah. So in terms of application in a B2B space, because I think in B2B general as you pointed out, but even more in tech, software, and SAS, we get so wrapped up in ‘the product does this’ and ‘this is a feature’ and as we say product marketing. How do we then apply that in a way that I guess people are behind. But I think for a lot of tech companies when CMOs are reporting back into founders and CEOs and the rest of the C suite, we’re in a world that’s so driven by performance and data and numbers that sometimes being bolder about brand and telling stories and those kind of things and further down the list of priorities, almost, for a marketing function. And my belief is that the marketer with a spreadsheet is always going to beat the marketer with a big, bold idea. Are there any practical tips for kind of starting to apply some of this in a way that is tangible for your typical for B2B tech company?

Steve (10:46):

Well, let’s take all that in in two ways. I’m a bold idea type of guy. I always have. I’m very much at home on the creative aspect, creative side. Not that I’m a designer or anything, but let me think of big ideas and then let me work with my team to execute them. That being said, you’re right. Most CEOs, most executive teams, most boards, they’re looking at the numbers and so to be a CMO worth anything, you need to develop competencies in both. I may like one more than the other, but to be a valuable CMO, you absolutely need to do both.

Now, coming back, more directly to your question about, okay, so how do you actually use this stuff in a B2B setting? Well, first of all, we’ll talk about content and then we’ll talk about gamification, but before that we kind of have to lay the groundwork, right? You think about what happens internally in our brains, we have a neurochemical called dopamine. Dopamine makes us strive, we want, we desire. Whereas endorphins give us pleasure, you know. At the end of the day, we’re designed to be happy. If you think about our world, we’ve been building a world that is remarkably oriented to giving us pleasure. So, if I am able to create content that evokes emotion, right, or I develop content that is targeted at say somebody who does cognitive shifting, which is the act of being able to flexibly move from one idea to another. That content is going to be more compelling and it’s going to be absorbed at a much better rate and much more quickly. If I can: Are you logically and are you emotionally to that individual.

Gamification

Gamification directly utilizes that notion of striving behavior and that notion of pleasure. Let’s say I’m in an online community. In an online community, I’ve developed a series of missions and based on these missions I get points. Works in a game, it works in a B2B community. Every time I complete a mission such as writing a blog post, I get 20 points. The reason why this works though is because then I’m going to be given another mission, but it’s surprising to me. I don’t know what the next mission is, so I’m striving to get to that next mission. Number one, because I want to be the best. I want to build my reputation and it’s a surprise to me and it’s one of the surprises that drives me. That’s the dopamine side and the endorphin side. I get pleasure from completing these missions. My wife is a SEDUKU addict, right? You name it, you know, four by four, six by six, nine by nine. So you know, it doesn’t matter the type, but when she completes something, it’s this act of being surprised going on to the next one that she’s not quite sure what it’s going to be, that drives her from a striving perspective. From a pleasure perspective, she gets a real kick out of it. She’s an addict. And seriously, in the best sense of the word, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about dopamine and how it impacts behaviour. A lack of dopamine causes Parkinson’s disease. The treatment is L-DOPA, which is a precursor to creating dopamine in the brain. Individuals that are treated for Parkinson’s and they get L-DOPA. One of the unfortunate side effects is compulsive gambling. That is a striving behavior. That’s addiction. This is also addiction. We want to get our customers addicted to us, whether it’s on the brand side, the product side, or the loyalty side.

We want to get our customers addicted to us, whether it’s on the brand side, the product side, or the loyalty side.

Steve Mann, CMO, ThetaRay

Alex (14:22):

So to some extent, its almost like it resonates more with the product, once someone’s using the product itself, I can kind of visualize how you can gamify elements of a product. But if we work our way back up the kind of journey into just the pure kind of marketing and sales process, what ideas do you have for actually gamifying elements of that?

Utilising emotions for B2B marketing

Steve (14:40):

Okay, so in this instance it doesn’t always have to be gamification. Gamification is a, is a very solid example of it. But let’s think about our targets at ThataRay. At ThataRay we created something called artificial intuition, which is right up my alley because it’s direct impact on the brain and replicating human decision making. In fact, what we do is we replicate human decision making, but on the intuitive level. If you think about your intuition, let’s say Alex, you’re standing on a Hill and you see me walking towards you and you’re trying to decide, ‘Gee, is that Steve or not?’ You’re not going to measure the RGB colors of my eyes. You’re not going to measure the distance and centimeters between my nose and my ears. You’re going to look at the way I move. You’re going to be looking at the shape of my hair or lack thereof. You’re going to be looking at my overall gestalt. You’re not looking at data points. You’re looking at relationships. Sure. Our technology works the same way. It replicates artificial intuition.

My marketing is meant to do that as well by utilizing the emotions that drive my customers. Like fear, because they, these guys are compliance professionals. They’re financial crime professionals. If they don’t catch something, then it puts their banks at legal, regulatory or financial peril. There was a CEO of an Estonian branch of Danske bank who a few weeks ago was found deceased. And whether or it was suicide or a Russian oligarch,we don’t know, but it’s, there’s some really high stakes to not catching financial crime, to not catching money laundering, very much driven by fear.

So my job as a marketer and to market ThetaRay is to tell them how to, we can ameliorate that fear, how we can find the bad actor, how we can help them stop narco trafficking, or terrorist financing. These are all behaviors that not only just drive fear, but they drive anger and resentment and anxiety to the degree that I can help a buyer ameliorate those feelings. Feel safe, be safe, help secure the world, I’m more likely, to drive a purchase of ThetaWay. Because of that, this notion of secure in the world, it’s not logical, right? It doesn’t have a real logical element. It’s completely emotional.

Alex (17:03):

Interesting. How much of this is we talked just before we started about people that Simon Sinek and his approach to The Power of ‘Why’ and starting with ‘why’ and not ‘what’ or ‘how’. How much of that overlaps with this? Is this building the brand for ThetaRay is also a big part of the decision making process about who you are. It’s about your mission statement is about your beliefs. It’s about who you are as a business is as people. All things I think are often overlooked in B2B generally, as again, we’re too focused on the product. Is that part of the equation for you?

Steve (17:31):

Yes. In a word. It’s funny. I get calls for executive recruiters all the time and they say to me things like, ‘Hey Steve, are you a brand marketer or a product marketer or demand guy?’ My answer is, yes. You can’t do one without the other. You can’t drive demand without having a great positioning and messaging foundation. You can’t build a brand without getting out there with your demand efforts or your positioning. You can’t have great positioning if you can’t communicate it via your brand efforts. So if somebody says to me that ‘Steve, that’s only B2C’, I’m like, are you kidding me? This is completely it. It’s part and parcel of B2B marketing.

Alex (18:21):

Business to human, there’s just more humans involved in the decision making, right? And it, it’s a unifying process.

Building marketing teams

Steve (18:26):

It’s an interwoven process. If you try to tease one out from the other, it doesn’t work. That’s why my teams are always integrated. You know, I’ll take an agile marketing approach or I’ll put a product marketer with a demand guy. I’ll put a brander with a positioning and messaging guy and I’ll give them projects and tasks that say the brand guy will say: ‘Well, I don’t know anything about demand.’ Well number one, you’re going to learn. Number two, you’re going to take your experience and branding and meld that with the demand generation efforts to deliver a superior product.

Alex (19:01):

So as you start to build out your marketing team and this, this kind of building year, how do you think that will look for you in terms of generalist versus specialist? And I know you mentioned before we started, content was always going to be big investment. I think broadly in B2B is always going to be important. I’m always interested in the kind of Google’s T shape model of someone that’s got some deep specialisms but then some broad. Which kind of played into what you’ve just described of pairing different teams together. I guess, I almost want to cry sometimes when I see some job descriptions that just have everything under the sun listed on them from like Salesforce experts to web developer to designer. I think it’s hard. Theres more and more expected of a marketer these days, than ever. So looking ahead, how do you see the marketing team starting to grow with that in mind?

Steve (19:41):

Right, so layer one, my first hires are marketing generalists. Since at that point you don’t have a lot of resources. You need people who are facile in a lot of different areas. Level two, which I’m beginning to recruit for now are those folks with specific competencies. I need killer content marketers. It goes a level deeper in the sense that not only content marketer, but a content marketer that knows the financial crime space. So that’s a very specialized person, right? I need a digital marker because again, I’m a young company and part of my brand efforts is to establish a strong content slash digital footprint. Right? And then the third level is regionalization. Okay, I’ve got great generalists, I’ve got great content, I’ve got great digital aspects. Now I need specifics around supporting EMEA, APAC, North America, right? And underlying this are the typical broader marketing activities such as events, which I’m not always a big fan of, but there’s a a requirement to be seen.

Ethics behind the psychology of marketing

Alex (20:45):

Makes sense. Yeah. I guess coming back, the psychology aspect and you know, you talked in your first example about almost getting inside people’s minds with the music playing in the supermarket. In this day and age where, you know, we see Mark Zuckerberg being dragged in front of committees and people asking questions around data and ethics. And my belief is that a lot of these basic principles of marketing existed long before digital existed and they’re almost natural, to the point that it’s just a natural human thing to do. But are there ethical questions about getting, you know, really sitting down and thinking, okay, how are we going to get into a part of people’s minds that they don’t even know that we’re exploring?

Steve (21:22):

So it’s an interesting question. And the reason that it’s interesting is because I would posit that marketing, for lack of a better term, marketing is marketing. Whether you’re marketing to the cognitive and rational component in somebody or you’re marketing to the more emotional or non-conscious, you’re marketing to the whole person. And if you think about it, any marketing is meant to influence, right? Whether it’s just that marketing to the left side of the brain or marketing to the right side of the brain. It’s all meant to influence. It’s all meant to direct. So for somebody to argue that, wow, this non-conscious marketing is unethical, well if that’s the case then all marketing is unethical. So I fundamentally disagree with that notion.

Framework to influence the rational and the emotional in B2B marketing

Alex (22:07):

Yeah, that makes sense. Are there any other kind of frameworks or principles or things that you think are worth exploring or can be applied? I guess we’ve talked about fear being one, and theres things like scarcity, uncertainty. I think like social proof is one that I know for us on the agency side working with lots of tech companies are often like defining a new category or new to the marketplace. There’s a lot of credibility and question marks, particularly when we’re dealing with security. For you guys, are there things that you think you can formally apply very much or that people can go and read about that you think are particularly relevant for this?

Steve (22:40):

Before I answer that question, let’s define ‘framework’ because it’s an often used term.

Alex (22:45):

It is, and maybe it’s too often used. I guess things which give people a benchmark against which to measure, is this falling into the right category? Are we ticking the boxes of, I guess almost like a research driven or something that’s backed up by some degree of science and research?

Steve (23:01):

Well, there’s a lot of academic data, a lot of academic research on the ability, the effectiveness of marketing of influence based on using a mix of strategies that either tact that either approach and influence, rational, emotional or both. I would recommend reading Gerald’s Zaltman’s book ‘How Customers Think’. Because his book really delves into both the emotional as well as the logical elements and it has a more. It has a practical side as well, which is, ‘Okay, so how do I market to both of those elements?’ So I use Gerald’s book as almost a Bible. When I first started here with regards to frameworks, I would use the same frameworks that I would use in a ‘standard marketing’ approach, right. You would be doing AB testing. Right? You’re going to be quantifying your demand funnel, you’re going to be looking at the ratios, and pipeline linkage in that funnel and you’re going to use those, whether or not you’re using the type of strategies I prefer to employ, versus the ones that I think are more like a marketing cul-de-sac. It has a common set of analytics.

Alex (24:14):

Okay. Do you think looking ahead, we’ll see the rise of I guess like almost dedicated neuro-marketing budgets or neuromarketing technology. Like you know, there’s I guess still coming from an academic world, but you know, you can scan people’s brains now, right? And see how they respond to a website. There’s all kinds of things which are probably not accessible for most companies or it’s just so far down the list of priorities, that they’re not explored. But is that something you think you might explore or that we’ll see more of in marketing generally over the next five, 10 years? Cause I imagine that that kind of technology is going to become more accessible and lower cost. And I’m sure soon we can just buy, you know, of Amazon and plug it into our brains and see what people are thinking.

The future of marketing

Strong marketers will think not only in terms of their positioning and messaging, they’ll think in terms of emotional influence.

Steve Mann, CMO, ThetaRay

Steve (24:49):

Well you’re talking about augmented intelligence, which I think is quite a ways off. But to answer your question, I don’t think that there’ll be dedicated budgets for say neuro marketing or neuro digital marketing. What I do think will happen, is in the same way that digital marketing is now just marketing, neuro digital marketing or neuro marketing will just become marketing. Strong marketers will think not only in terms of their positioning and messaging, they’ll think in terms of emotional influence. They’ll think in terms of how do I ameliorate anxiety or fear or how do I generate lust or passion? Because if you think about passion, for instance, as a emotion that you’d want to address, the lighter side of passion is desire. I really want to do good. How can I do good? I want to complete this project. I want to be recognized for it. That’s passion. So it’s easy or easier to address passion when you think of it in this notion of: ‘How can I build or support the desire? How can I sponsor my customer to be successful? And, you could do that through branding, hopefully.

Alex (26:04):

I guess some of this is like if you think about the start of any marketing strategy you’re defining user personas and thinking about what drives people. What are their challenges and their pain points? And I guess to some extent it’s everybody starting with it, or at least considering it, but probably falls by the wayside quite easily. And it’s not something that people keep as a key vein through their marketing as much as it needs to.

Steve (26:25):

That’s a very good point. So when you’re doing persona definition, right, you are indeed identifying, you know, drivers, whether or not they are business, personal, logical or emotional. I absolutely agree with you 100%. I also agree with you that thinking through the influence path to particular persona, it’s not always, or many times it’s not complete. It doesn’t have that vein of personally addressing the personal issues that an individual has. At least what I’ve seen. People build out these persona definitions but then don’t necessarily use them or don’t to your point, don’t necessarily use them to their fullest extent and I think that’s where people fall short.

Alex (27:08):

I think. Yeah. Kind of almost measuring the success of a piece of content against one of these pain points and making people feel more comfortable. Or one of these fears or concerns they have is probably the way to approach it. But I was going to ask, about, if we think about the size of the decision making and then you talked about like 25 people potentially or they may be split into three different kind of buying centers. That’s potentially a lot of different people with lots of different drivers. Right? Some personal, some work-focused. Some people might want the next promotion, some people might want it something on their CV so they can move on to the next job. Prioritization must be hard right? To then think about or is the answer just kind of sorry it’s a lot of work, but you’ve got to go after all of them. Or obviously in that buying unit there’s going to be some people that have more weight than others in the decision making. I think prioritization generally for marketers is just a massive challenge these days with so much to do. How do you approach that? Is there any, any tips or advice?

Account based marketing

Speaker 3 (28:00):

Well this is a partnership between sales and marketing. That’s how you answer that question. And it’s related to account based marketing, right? Because in any account based marketing effort you’re going to be looking at, well who do I actually need to target in this, you know, one-to-one marketing campaign? Which blockers do I have to convert? Which economic decision makers do I have to push over the finish line? Which business decision maker or user seem to have power in a room or in any sort of evaluation dynamic? And so, you can’t do that unless you have a deep partnership between sales and marketing, number one. To build that complete account review account strategy. Number two, really sit down and identify which individuals are gonna move the needle and then develop the content, the strategies, the tactics that are actually going to help you move the needle. I do that all the time here at ThetaRay because as I mentioned earlier, that’s our market.

Sales and marketing partnership

Alex (28:59):

Sure. So you spend a lot of time talking with sales. Is it easy? Are they based in the same office?

Steve (29:04):

No, it’s never easy talking to sales. If you think about it, there’s a lot of education that needs to happen. Both on the sales and the marketing side. You know, I’ve been around for too long so I have an understanding of that. I’ve carried a bag, I’ve been a presales guy and I’ve been a marketeer. But if I have somebody coming purely from the marketing side of the house, they’ve been trained, this is what they know. The one thing that’s typically missing in that training is the partnership with sales. And vice versa with sales. If I’m carrying a bag and I have a quarterly perspective on my world, it’s difficult for me to take a step back and say, okay, looking at this particular deal, what does the partnership between sales and marketing look like? That’ll help me accelerate my deal. That will improve my close rates. I mean because most organizations are so used to, you know, broad brush, big marketing strategies that address, you know, thousands potentially of a segment. Right. Although I would like to keep my segment to you know, the 5,000-7,000 line. But if you’re throwing out to 25,000 yeah that’s a problem. But that’s the way sales guys think. The more the better. It’s not about quality, it’s more about quantity. The less the better, the less the better.

Alex (30:21):

Yeah. But that can be hard to get a sales team on board with that. Right. And as you say, it’s an educational piece. Do you have like service level agreements between marketing sales or you’re literally writing down and saying like these are expectations and number of leads.

Steve (30:32):

The SLA’s have to be jointly created, right? Number one. Number two, you have to do the same thing for a lead scoring model, you have to be revisiting both the SLA as well as the lead scoring model every 90 days. And as a CMO, it’s incumbent upon me to actually educate not just the sales force but the entire company as to what they can be doing in terms of marketing. So for example, I typically create a curriculum, marketing 101 or Steve’s version of marketing 101 is branding, right? And the goal of that branding, of that education is to teach the organization how a brand has true economic value and that brand is the act of creating an emotional connection, right? Like I want my customers to put a tattoo on their arms that says ThetaRay right? It’s that level of commitment, that level of loyalty. Then 102 is demand generation and what does that look like and how does that interact and intersect with branding? And then 103 is going to be on positioning and messaging the product marketing components.

Alex (31:33):

Awesome. Steven its been a pleasure talking. I feel like we could keep talking for many hours, but I’m gonna wrap up there. Thank you so much for your time and for joining me.

Steve (31:39):

My pleasure.

Thanks for listening. We are 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 had 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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