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  • Dec 1 2020

Podcast: The importance of search in the B2B customer experience with John Watton, CMO at Yext

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John Watton is an experienced B2B tech marketer, and currently CMO at Yext, a technology company that transforms the way brands offer search to their customers.

Search is an ever more important part of great customer experiences, enabling customers to find what they want quickly and easily, and so FINITE podcast host Alex sat down with John to explore how search can play it’s part in supporting modern B2B marketing.

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

Full Transcript 

Alex (00:07):

Hello everybody and welcome back to the FINITE podcast. My episode today is with John Watton. John is the chief marketing officer at Yext, and we’re going to be talking all about search, the importance of search in B2B customer experience. John has a pretty impressive track record, with senior marketing roles across the B2B technology space, and is now leading marketing at a very interesting business in the search space. So I hope you enjoy.

FINITE (00:32):

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

Alex (00:54):

Hi John, thanks for joining me today.

John (00:56):

Thanks for having me, it’s good to be here.

Alex (00:58):

I’m looking forward to talking. The area of search in B2B is one that I think is on everyone’s radar it’s in a growing area. But I think before we dive into that as a topic, as we always do, I’ll let you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your extensive B2B tech background and experience and a little bit about what you’re doing at the moment.

John’s background in B2B tech through Microsoft, Oracle and more

John (01:17):

Great, no problem. So yeah, I mean I’ve always been in B2B tech. Unfortunately or fortunately that’s been a long time now, so actually originally in sort of salesy more technical sales roles. And then for the last 20 plus years in marketing and, I’ve worked in the range of what would be called software businesses? I don’t know if we call a software business a software business anymore, I lose track. But yeah on the software side, rather than physical devices and a range of companies. 

So I’ve worked in the tech giants, I’ve worked in Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, also Adobe latterly. I’ve worked in some startup situations and I’m currently a VP of marketing in Europe for Yext and we’re a search experience focused business. And I guess we can talk a bit more about that. But yeah, big and small, doing either global roles or regional roles and always in B2B marketing.

Alex (02:24):

You’ve got a pretty good roster there with SAP, Oracle, Adobe, Microsoft, not much else left of the big four. Tell us a bit about the current role and kind of day to day and what the marketing team and structure and stuff looks like at Yext.

The marketing function at Yext as a global brand 

John (02:38):

Yeah, sure. Of course. So I guess in the scheme of all of what I said, Yext are a fairly small business, but we’re about 1300 employees globally and we’re actually listed on the New York stock exchange. So we’re publicly traded. So our sort of market cap is about 2 billion. 

So yeah, we’re a midsize company. For a lot of people that’s quite a big company, for the Microsofts of the world we’re just a rounding error on some of their product lines. And really we’re a high growth business outside of all that. We’re growing at a fair click, over the last few years and, the role as marketer is really to be at the heart of that. 

And the challenge is two-fold, it’s telling your story in a way that’s compelling and engages the right people to get into a conversation and build a commercial relationship with you. And it’s about doing that in a way that can scale. So high growth, building that in the region and being fairly small, I guess on the software scale. 

You can’t really separate Europe and global, you’re very much part of a global team. So a lot of what I’m doing is working as part of the marketing leadership team sitting globally, and helping with the overall marketing strategy in terms of what we’re trying to do. How we’re organised locally, it’s very simple. 

I have three teams, one that covers Northern Europe based in London, one that covers Southern Europe based in Paris. And one of that’s based in Berlin covering central Europe. And if you’ve ever been in companies like ours, the regional marketing teams and companies of this size, we wear all hats. 

So we cover the gamut of marketing strategies and tactics. So we do everything from the awareness, PR, brand, advertising down to more of the high touch account-based marketing stuff and everything in between.

Alex (04:51):

Cool, interesting. Let’s dive into the topic and search in itself. So I think it’s a pretty fascinating area. As someone that works in and around web development projects and also SEO and other things, I think search comes up in lots of different areas, but when we talk about search, what are we talking about? And maybe also just tell a bit about the Yext product landscape and how that fits into it.

About the landscape of search and Yext as a search product 

John (05:16):

Well, first of all we’re a company fully footed in tackling some issues around search, and the product portfolio we have sits under the banner of the search experience cloud. And I guess if I give our viewpoint on some of the issues and challenges with search, it will kind of map nicely to what we have to offer. 

So I don’t suggest talking about the products, but the sort of issues that we’ve come to solve. And we’re a brand that is fairly modest. So our challenge is, as I said, getting people to know that brand. Some people know us, but not enough people know us. And those people who know us probably know where we’ve come from. 

I guess we started in helping location-based businesses get themselves found in location based search. So we have a strong pedigree in restaurants, retail, operations, you know, stores, those sorts of things where the challenge of search was really the kind of near me type challenge. I need a whatever near me, restaurants, where’s my nearest this, where’s my nearest that, and that’s kind of a core part of our business. But it really set the tone for how search is changing. 

First of all search, as you probably know being involved in it, has kind of evolved. It used to be a discovery thing. I’m looking for a list of things. Of course, when it started out, it was purely about trying to help you get to all of the websites that address a certain domain. 

Fast forward to today and it’s about delivering an answer. So when you go into Google, you’re not looking… when you ask a simple question, right? Not a B2B question, but when you ask a simple question, like what’s the capital of France? You don’t expect a list of tourist sites and Parisian sites, and then to go out and find it’s Paris. You get the answer Paris now in a Google snippet. 

So search first of all, has moved to being very much around delivering answers. And so the challenge for brands, whether they’re consumer or B2B brands is delivering that answer to the consumer at the point of request. And to get to that answer, consumer questions are getting more complex. So over 50% of queries now contain four or more words. So people are, they’re not asking for capital France or shoe shops. They’re asking for where can I buy a size six brown brogue of this make near me? 

We’re asking quite complex questions. So the nature of search has changed from being very simple, to being very complex, and then from discovery lists to being answers. And then I think just the definition of search, we’re all visualising, because the way I’m describing it, is a desktop Google search, right? So in our minds, when I’m saying all these things, we’re typing into the Google search bar. 

The way in which people search now varies. For example, back in the Google world, I probably more often than not, search in Google maps now, because if I’m looking for a business, I want to see everything, I want to see where it’s based. So, you know, it might be a partner to Yext or another technology company. I won’t look at it, I won’t do a Google search click on the website, I’ll go into Google maps, and then I see where they are, where the website is, all their information, and everything else around. So you’ve got the maps. 

People are obviously finding answers to their questions in review sites. And the more and more it’s not just in typed text, it’s in search assistance. So people are asking Siri, Alexa, Google assistant, they’re asking all of these devices questions. So coming back to brands and B2B brands, when your prospect, customer, consumer is looking for you, they are looking in so many more places than just in the Google search bar. 

So search for us is everything across that. Just the nature of it’s changing and of course as you get more into voice assistance and these complex context-based queries, you need to be able to pass natural language. So the best search capabilities now are natural language powered. So it’s a very complex, very challenging subject. 

And fundamentally what we do at Yext is provide a platform that allows brands to answer questions wherever they may be asked and deliver those answers, not just a bunch of blue links. And I think specifically over the last six months with COVID, is more and more consumers are turning to brand’s websites. 

So this kind of activity more and more is being carried out on a brand’s website and consumers are expecting a similar search experience on the website just as they get in Google search. And it just hasn’t been addressed by many brands and that’s another area we help with. 

So we have capabilities to help people in search, in map based products, in location based searches, in voice assistance, but also on their own websites as well. So it’s really fascinating. What we do know is that no matter what the stage of the buying cycle or the customer journey, consumers and individuals are turning to search as a way to help fuel their journey. 

Alex (11:04):

Yeah. We should talk a bit more about that. I was going to ask you one question before we do though, which was how much in terms of your own marketing for Yext, how much are you trying to effectively define a new category to some extent? Versus it sounds like you’ve got a relatively educational buyer journey where people probably are aware of a problem that they’ve got, but they don’t really even know there’s a solution out there. 

I guess in the grand scheme of things, you’re not a Microsoft, but you’re not a small business either. So, it’s interesting because I think a lot of people listening, a lot of B2B tech companies are sometimes at a bit of a crossroad of do we define ourselves into a category that people are already in? They know that there’s a box for it and people are familiar with or defining a new category is not easy by any means. So where do you think Yext sits?

Defining a new category in the market 

John (11:51):

It’s a great question because that’s exactly where we are. And like a lot of B2B tech companies, our instant sort of knee jerk reaction is to create a new category and get excited about it. But you know, no one knows.

Alex (12:05):

It would be pretty hard to do.

John (12:06):

Yeah. It’s really hard to do. So I think firstly, what we do is we come back to two things. One, you’re quite right, very often a customer has a challenge, but they don’t know we’re the answer. So of course, what we would do there is understand those use cases and map those use cases and talk to those customers around those use cases and how we solve the problem. 

We try not to jump straight to the technology, although it’s often hard as technology companies not to talk about tech. But talking about those issues. And I think as a marketer, what we try to do is illustrate that through other examples. So, you know, it’s purely about companies like yours have solved this exact problem that you’re now facing. So we wouldn’t jump in and say, what about this new social experience category. But we would sort of bring them into our world. 

I think it’s also true that customers like to see that there is some kind of vision and some kind of path forward, that there’s a bigger thing. But they probably want to solve a specific problem right now. So we have a portfolio of products, but there’s probably just one thing that we do that they really want help with, but they like to see that there is kind of a route forward, and there is a path that fits in their strategy. So that’s the first thing. 

The other thing, to be honest in a lot of these sorts of topics like we’re talking about, people don’t realise they have a problem, right? They don’t really have the issue. Site search is a great one, right? So a lot of people don’t think they have a site search problem. 

And in a world where consumers have fleeting loyalty, are pretty impatient, the expectations are pretty high. If they come to your site and can’t get the information they want, they leave pretty quickly. Now I’ve heard some people say, well that’s why we have amazing site navigation. Okay, that’s fine. But that is ultimately trying to build out a finite number of paths through your website. 

And there are more and more wider and almost infinite questions consumers ask, and especially the last six months, right? If you optimize your site for a certain set of customer journeys, which is totally valid, then you’re going to be thrown a curve ball when people come to your site and say, what are your COVID 19 policies? What’s your company attitude to this, this, and this. And if you can’t move quickly, then they’ll just go somewhere else. 

So what we find is that when it comes to search on site, a lot of organisations don’t see it as an issue and we have to raise to them some of the issues and challenges they had. Broadly it’s two things: missed revenue opportunity and increased support costs. 

So I don’t know if any brands that you deal with in your personal life, you’ve had to try and connect with over the last six months, but obviously their call centres are working at limited capacity. And so it’s difficult to get through, you’re waiting and you can’t get the answer you want, and it’s not on the site. And ultimately if you go on to a support call, it’s quite costly for that brand to support that call. So there’s a lot of incurred cost as well, as well as customer satisfaction and lost revenue opportunity as well.

Alex (15:26):

It makes sense. The importance of search, I think is so often downplayed on the B2B side. I think even in the B2B tech space, we regularly come across a lot of people that believe that, I guess even from a research discovery perspective, we do business over handshakes offline, or our pipeline is generated through events and conferences. And I know from other work that we come across so many businesses that are sat on a search goldmine and they don’t even realise it’s there.

John (15:56):

Yeah. Back to your point, I mean, you made a great point about category creation. I mean, search gives you amazing insight to actually what people are looking for right now, you know, in your category. And I’ve only ever worked in B2B and we’ve used it exclusively to say, we want to create this category because we want to create a differentiated position in the market. That’s totally fine. 

We’re trying to stand out and have a different story to tell, something that’s very differentiated. But to bring people into our world, there are just basic things that people want and they’re searching for right now. So, if we can capture that interest, bring them into our world in a language that relates the issues they have and then take them on a journey, then that’s gold dust.

Alex (16:42):

Yeah. I think we see that so often as there’s so much opportunity for organic search possibilities, that don’t properly align with what the business does. They might be slightly tangential or slightly off topic, but once you get people there, then it’s about how do you educate them that actually you’ve got to a solution which is maybe slightly different, or isn’t quite exactly what they’re looking for, but actually can add value more in a different way. 

I think that the most recent research I saw from Google was that, and I don’t know how they worked this out, but 70 something percent of B2B research begins with a non-branded Google search or something. And I think personally, I think that number is going to keep increasing, particularly with younger generations who, when they’re looking for information or tasked with research, the most natural thing to do now is just sit down in front of a computer and ask a question. So I think as time goes on, it will be interesting to see all the data of search increasing over time.

Balancing digital and offline marketing 

John (17:34):

And that’s been my experience working in B2B marketing over the last 20 years, it’s been this gradual march towards digitisation and nothing is off the table. I’m not saying anything that has been done is, cause there’s always this kind of email is dead, direct mail is dead, probably fax, I think fax is dead. I think we’re fair to say that fax is dead unless you and I want to sort of start up a revolution in fax marketing. 

But you know, we use direct mail. We just did one actually the other week. We sent out a hundred direct mail items to a select group of individuals who actually won some awards. And we got a handful of responses, which on something that’s fairly low effort, 2%, 3% response is pretty good. With a direct communication saying, yeah let’s talk, which is more than you get through sending a hundred emails. 

So nothing is off the table, but it’s more about that mix. So obviously the last six months we’ve shifted the dial over to almost exclusively digital and looking at virtual events and things like that. But you know, the dial will come back then we’ll have a mix again. 

So I’m not saying the handshakes and the face-to-face is never going to come back, but it’s going to be in a different mix. And I think these moments that we’ve had have just really sort of put the focus back on B2B, because ultimately what we’re trying to do is find engaging ways to connect with our audiences in the places where they are. And more and more they are in digital places, they don’t necessarily go to find their information. 

I mean, I remember when CIOs would go to a trade fair to find out about the latest technology. Now, some still do for different reasons, but you know, most are going to be now finding out through other sources probably digitally. And so, it’s about that mix. And I think for marketers as well, it’s about ROI. 

And the exciting thing I think that we have had in the last five to 10 years is the data that’s underpinning all of this to allow us to make those decisions. Whereas I’ve got to be honest, probably what 10 plus years ago, it was a little gut feel. We kind of felt this was the right thing to do. We got some good feedback, some good anecdotal feedback. Let’s continue doing that. And now we have the data to drive those decisions.

Alex (20:01):

Yeah. So in B2B, I think particularly towards the enterprise end of the scale, journeys can often be pretty lengthy and considered and complex. You talked about maybe falling into the trap of defining very clear customer journeys through your website based on three main personas, and what happens if you get served a curveball. At the same time I guess that journey, HubSpot will probably have you believe that it’s step by step and it’s awareness and then consideration, decision, it’s all nice and linear and nice and simple. 

But the reality is that that decision-making unit is full of maybe, I don’t know, 10 people who are all coming to the site, looking for something different at different stages in the journey. And sometimes you move backwards before you move forwards, and it’s not that simple. So how can search play a role in those kinds of journeys.

Using search at different stages of the buyer journey 

John (20:44):

Consider this, on your homepage of your website, put a search bar that can answer any question that anyone wants to ask about your business.

Alex (20:53):

That’s really interesting. Cause I looked at your site and if anyone wants to check it out, they can go to Yext.com. And it’s fair to say search is a pretty central part of the website, more important than the menu, which is tucked in a hamburger and obviously aligns with everything you’ve been saying. I’m assuming it works for you and you practice what you preach, but do you learn from that? How effective is it?

John (21:15):

So rather than letting people have a, almost like little game of trying to work out where they need to get their information, working out your kind of encoding, your kind of hierarchy of content, just let them ask whatever they want. So there’s just answering any question, allowing that to be done in the context based way. 

So listen, it’s no criticism of any particular brand, but it just hasn’t been a frontier that people have considered and most site search absolutely sucks. It’s like going back to the nineties and I bet most people when they go to a brand website outside of e-commerce, which people have optimised for transaction, but informational, you’re back into some kind of embedded Google capability where you get a bunch of blue links and you go, okay, what do I do now? 

And what our engine does, and of course we’ve put it on our site, it’s NLP and AI powered. So it’s context-based so it understands the context of things like best and cheapest, fastest, and the context of that next to the word. So we’ve got quite a complex natural language processing engine behind the scenes. 

So the goal, as I said, of giving an answer, not just a bunch of blue links and say, you figure it out, you click on it. So continuing what people are seeing in Google, providing a Google-like experience can say that on the website. The other thing you get is an insight as to what questions people are asking. So that is just really amazing if you tweak that and we have customers who have changed their merchandising because they’re understanding what products people are asking for. 

People are asking for the fastest, cheapest, whatever, and they’re giving them products out of stock, which obviously is bad business. So you have products that are in stock. And the biggest signal of intent that you can get is someone asking your business a question. It’s like the strongest, you know, we’ve been trying to do that through behaviour. 

We’ve been trying to do that through interpreting people’s personas, matching IP addresses. Of course, all of those things become more challenging with GDPR. But if they’re asking you a specific question, you get to see the intent of that individual with the context of it. So yes, it’s been very successful for us. And of course, it’s very successful for our customers as well.

Alex (23:41):

Are you using that data to kind of redefine your own, I guess it feeds back into your own kind of content marketing and you know, what content to produce based off the back of what people are looking for?

John (23:50):

I love it because what I love is, we’re getting that data and insight and then we’re using it to power creativity. As the language we use. And I don’t know, as a marketer, it’s like, we shouldn’t care how we want to talk, we should care how our customers want to talk to us and then use their language in response.

So if their language is very, in our opinion a few years behind, that’s always the gap, right? I mean, tech companies are always like five years ahead of the customers on those sort of curves. Super smart, intelligent product based people who have built something totally amazing. But can’t explain it in terms that the consumer, the late majority.

Alex (24:34):

Yeah, well it’s the oldest trick in the salesman’s book, right? Isn’t it to kind of mirror the customer’s language. And you’re doing that from a marketing perspective in terms of really optimising around what they’re really looking for. And particularly when, I guess every B2B business is just producing so much more content and content really is the fuel in the engine of most B2B marketing these days across all the channels.

Using natural language processing in search 

John (24:55):

Yeah. I mean I’ve seen B2B tech customers who produce a shed load of content. So lots of white papers and guides and all that sort of thing. It’s been very popular in B2B tech marketing, which is fine, thought leadership content. Putting that repository underneath this search bar and just letting people go crazy, finding what they need and getting the right answer rather than digging around in some kind of a long list of publications. So, and again, that gives them strong attendance as to what content is being consumed or is of interest. 

I think the other kind of frontier that I would comment on is, as I mentioned earlier, consumers are turning more and more to brands, going directly to brands to get their answers. And what this does is give brands the opportunity to take back or take ownership of their facts, their information, be the source of their official answers. 

I think one of the failings that we’re seeing of search engines is that they’re optimised for ads, not for answers, right? So they’re totally optimized to maximize ad revenue for the advertisers on those platforms, versus brands connecting with their customers. 

So, the idea, if I do a search I’m not picking on them but for the fastest Dell laptop for business, Dell’s results don’t come top. You get a whole bunch of other people and this is not a subjective thing to say currently which is the fastest one that you do? And it’s not cheapest, it’s not best, it’s not value for money. It’s just fastest. And Dell actually have to bid to get to the top with their paid ad. 

To own their brand keyword and I don’t know where they appear on the organic search, but this is typical, right? Because these engines optimise ads, not answers and consumers want answers, but what they’re getting served is things are optimised to maximise revenue for them. So if brands can satisfy those answers on their sites, then that’s a strong way for them to have the opportunity to own their accurate and official information.

Alex (27:15):

I noticed on your own search, which I loved the look of the results page and the product. You’ve got a ‘ask a question box’ that appears at the bottom, which made me think like how much is search a marketing tool in itself? I don’t know what kind of results you get through that and whether you actually generate marketing qualified leads through that box. 

But if someone looks for something, doesn’t find it, there’s a really nice clean way of them actually just asking you a question directly. Do you think search is, almost like maybe lead generation tool is a bit extreme, but a marketing tool in itself of some form?

Search can be a lucrative marketing tool 

John (27:45):

Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve had that conversation with B2B tech customers. That’s absolutely what they want to do. They want to put that into the marketing automation scoring engine as well. So they want to be able to score those questions and put it into their nurtures or whatever they may have. 

So it becomes a tool that, again with that intent, you can use that intent to ultimately deliver them more value, get them quicker to the answer they want, but yeah, hopefully kind of progress that relationship as well. And it all works because what makes the Google search so smart and what makes our stuff so smart on the onsite thing is the thing we have in common, which is it’s based on a knowledge graph approach, organising data.

 That’s what Google did about eight years ago, they introduced the knowledge graph, which is just super good at relating attributes and entities together to deliver back that answer. And we do the same on the site. And that’s really the thing that makes the difference is having this knowledge graph behind the scene that you can easily edit and update, as questions are coming in. 

It’s not about indexing content and pre tagging at all, it’s just about setting up relationships and then letting the questions define the answers. And then you can modify the knowledge graph as you kind of move on.

Alex (29:14):

Interesting. So pretty much every business now has a pretty extensive footprint across, you know, you touched on some of them at the start, but I know with our own things, like the number of review sites you have to keep track of and customer service channels and profiles and listings, and all of these things. How big a part of that is search and the kind of Yext offering in terms of keeping track?

John (29:34):

Yeah. That’s exactly what Yext are able to do is we provide a platform that allows you to manage all of your content that is first of all, updated in various listings in map based products, in review sites, manage all those reviews in one place. 

So you get effectively a kind of a workstation that allows you to manage all that one place. And a big part of our history is founded on that challenge for brands who were updating all of these different channels and doing it individually and doing that for hundreds of entities. 

So if you’re a retailer or a restaurant or whatever, it was just a complete nightmare. So that’s a key part of what we do and search is part of that. So we’re helping manage that across, as I mentioned, appearing in the organic search, in listings based tools and reviews tools, in location-based tools and AI systems and then on your website, you can do it all in one place.

 So that’s the basic concept that we are continuing a consistency of information across all those channels. And that’s the challenge for a lot of brands right now is the situation changes with the COVID every week, every day, every hour. And you may have different policies, procedures, opening hours, you may have offices opening and closing, those policies changing. It’s impossible to manage all that manually. So that’s what we help brands to do.

Alex (31:12):

Interesting. It’s such a fascinating area, search. I feel like we could dive into for ages. I’d probably start geeking out talking to some of your engineers and others.

John (31:20):

I think you need to talk to the engineer. Yeah.

Alex (31:24):

I was going to ask you a few final questions, in terms of your own marketing, I’m sure you’ve got enough to be doing it at a top level without being inside tools and tech yourself, but aside from obviously Yext itself, are there any MarTech tools, technology, innovations that you’ve had your eye on or find exciting?

John (31:42):

Yeah, well my favourite tool actually is Marketo. For two reasons, we use it at Yext, which is fantastic, but I was actually on the Beta program way back when I was their first non US customer. So I had a small part in their journey and I was delighted to be part of that. So I’ve been staying very close to the company and delighted that we’re using it at Yext.

Alex (32:08):

When you were at Adobe, that was pre Marketo?

John (32:13):

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I was on the Marketo Beta program, whatever it was 10 years ago, maybe? When they were 30 or 40 people. So that’s the tool I have fondness for. And I’m just blown away by how sophisticated we can get to help manage our marketing using these tools. I mean, we’re a smallish team. We can punch far above our weight. 

As I say, my journey has been over a few decades now. And in the past you have to have huge budgets and huge teams to do the sorts of things you can do today with tools like Marketo. So I just love what that continues to do for us and helps us build relevant conversations with customers and prospects and not irrelevant interruptions.

Alex (32:59):

What would you say your biggest challenge is right now as VP marketing?

John (33:04):

Yeah, I think it’s building a category, being a small business, building a category. We have to sort of tread the right path. But what I love is that we’re getting almost real-time data and insight to allow us to sort of course correct. So we don’t throw things out and wait a month, we’re seeing almost on a daily basis. So the challenge really is building that category and scaling the company quickly.

Alex (33:29):

And looking ahead, I mean, it’s obviously been a bit of a weird year so far for pretty much everyone in and around marketing, but is there anything exciting on the horizon within the world of B2B marketing that you’re looking at?

John (33:40):

Yeah. I’ve always said, when it comes to tech, most of the tech that we need is out there. It’s about kind of leveraging it. I think it’s an amazing time to be in B2B marketing. And what I love about it is it’s always a learning environment. So there’s always something new and it’s not a stale profession, you know, no one’s written the playbook in terms of what we’re doing.

So what I love is that we have the opportunity to write that wherever we are. So I guess I’m excited by the future of B2B marketing, who knows what it is going to be, but you know, all I know is that what we’re doing today is not what we were doing three years ago. And it won’t be what we’ll be doing in three years time. And I think that’s why it’s such an exciting profession to be in. So I’m hopeful for the future just for that, but what it will be, who knows?

Alex (34:32):

Let’s see. Well it’s been a pleasure talking. I think I’m going to go away and keep thinking about search because I just think it’s such a fascinating area and hopefully other B2B marketers will be encouraged to do the same, but I’m really grateful for you giving up your time and sharing some insights. So thanks again.

John (34:46):

Thanks Alex.

FINITE (34:48):

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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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