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  • Jul 7 2025

Podcast: The Marketing Priorities of a Global Enterprise in 2025 with Rebecca Stone, SVP, Revenue Marketing at Cisco

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Get an inside scoop into the marketing priorities of global enterprise, Cisco. Their fearless leader, Rebecca Stone, comes on the podcast to discuss her approach to data, and their ambitious project to integrate all internal data sources into a unified platform for every team. 

We also discuss Rebecca’s unique approach to team structure, where a unique matrix ensures a high level of productivity all of the time. 

Listen below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Or watch on YouTube

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

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

Find the full transcript here:

Hi, Rebecca. Welcome to the Finite Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to have you today to talk at a more strategic level about your experience at Cisco, coming in as their Senior Vice President of Global Revenue Marketing and learning some key lessons from that experience.

But before we dive into the topic, I’d love to hear a bit more about your personal background, how you got into marketing, a bit more about your marketing career and how you landed at Cisco.

Sure. Thanks for asking. I just, from a background perspective, I am a mom of two wonderful daughters who are 12 and almost eight.

So I’m right in that sweet spot of having kids who still like to hang out with mom. Um, and, uh, and we live in the Bay area, uh, have lived here for most of my career.

Uh, and, um, and really when it comes to marketing, it is the thing that I have always done. I knew in college that I wanted to be a marketer. I was actually a comms major at UC Santa Barbara, go gauchos.

And, um, and really, really just loved the blending of art and science that is marketing because there is, especially now with all of the marketing technology that exists, there’s, there’s so much math and analytics that are involved and, and data that is involved, but there still is a little bit of that special secret sauce that, uh, that you don’t really, can’t really put your finger on, can’t do any math around.

Um, that is part of, the marketing messaging and the art of marketing that I just love. Yeah, awesome. Do you think that balance between art and science has shifted more to science over your time as a marketer?

I think that there’s always been science involved in terms of how you target your audience, how you segment your audience.

And that has always been a science. But the data that you have to make those decisions is is just more prevalent now.

And you’re able to do it in a way that, um, that feels like you are getting more of a precise outcome maybe than you have in the past.

Okay. Awesome. Yeah, I totally agree. Um, so looking at your current role, could you tell us more about your time at Cisco and your team that you lead and your main strategy?

Yeah. So I have been running the revenue marketing team reporting into our CMO, Carrie Palin. for about nine months now. That revenue marketing team involves three different distinct groups within my organization.

Three core groups are the integrated marketing team and the planning team around creating an actual campaign plan.

The second team is our MarTech and digital technology team, and that includes our social media, our digital advertising, and our dot-com sites, as well as the full MarTech stack for the business.

And the last is our virtual demand center, which is what we call our sales development, our sales lead generation team and qualification team.

And so when you think about it, it really is stitching a campaign plan to a digital customer journey, to the team that qualifies those leads when they come in from one of those digital channels.

Awesome. Sounds like a very integrated team, especially having a sales function alongside those. Um, and cool names as well. I might ask, I might add. Um, so we’re going to be talking about your journey at Cisco and how you’ve come into this complex, large organization, um, and made an impact really.

I really wanna unravel the key insights that you learned, the biggest challenges that you’ve faced along the way and how it’s led you to where you are now and successes with that.

So starting at the beginning, I’d love to know about when you first came at Cisco, what met you, what your first observations were and your first instincts.

Yeah, so I’ve been at Cisco for about six years. Like I said, I’ve been in my current role for about nine months. Prior to that, I was leading, I was CMO of the Meraki business unit, which was a business unit that was acquired by Cisco.

And I did that for about two years. And then from there, I moved into the broader business unit that Meraki was under, the networking business unit.

That networking business unit accounts for for roughly 60% of Cisco’s revenue. We were really responsible for that core business, that legacy business that has been the core driver of Cisco for 40 plus years.

In both of those roles, there was some work that needed to be done to modernize the way that the marketing was running.

you talked a little bit about that digital journey and the analytics and the math. That’s one of the key things that we’ve been really focused on for the last five years is trying to drive a better outcome and focus data driven approach to the things that we are doing.

And that involved reimagining the tech stack for Meraki. And then we merged the Meraki tech stack into the larger, what was then known as customer solutions, marketing, uh, business tech stack and process across the entire networking business.

And then now we’re doing it again at the, um, at the full Cisco level. So it’s, it’s been a six year journey of helping to manage, um, that digital journey, the idea of a revenue driven marketing focused operations team, uh, as well as the messaging around that and the focus on, um, on how we do that through, um, through the channels that we’re, we’re working through.

All right. Awesome. So it’s really being data centric and aligning your tech stack with that goal. And you’ve done that in multiple functions. Um, we’re still working on it.

We’re still working on it in the current role. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done where we’re working on, um, consolidating right now we have.

I think eight different, uh, automation platforms that we are trying to work through consolidating.

Uh, and that doesn’t even, uh, you know, that’s just the core consolidated, you know, consolidation of the automation.

There’s lots of other texts that is overlapping that we’re really trying to work to simplify the process so that it’s easier for marketers to run campaigns and to get the data out of those campaigns.

Um, One of the core foundations for that is a new marketing data lake where all of the data from all of these different automation platforms, technology platforms are going to be pumped into so that we really have a core one standard set of data that everyone across the organization is pulling from.

That’s one of the things from an analytics perspective that we talked about a little bit earlier that I’m most excited about working on.

Yeah, awesome. So I can imagine there are plenty of challenges that come with that from a more practical level.

Looking into the future a little bit, like how do you see your entire organization relying on this platform, both from like, are you building your own tech platform for this?

Is it going to be, is it bespoke? Are you using a vendor to platformatize? Yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a combination where we’re definitely using a few vendors for both the data storage as well as the visualization of that data.

And it will depend on how the data is being used for some of our teams that data is being used to understand the customer better.

For some of our teams, the look is really to be able to understand that journey and how individuals are moving from channel to channel and within those channels so that we can optimize them.

It just depends on how the data is being used. We want to have the same data set that everybody can pull from, but then give everyone the flexibility to pull the data in the way that they need to.

My head of marketing ops really does call it the democratization of the data so that we have more access, which allows, hopefully, for more insights.

I think from a future perspective, in addition to how the team is working and using that data, I’m also very excited about the use of AI within some of the things that we are doing.

We’ve been using big data models for quite some time. Our analytics team is actually starting to layer AI data models on top of those big data LLMs and, sorry, big data models and then LLMs on top of that so that we can really start to see things in a completely different way and in a transformational way than we have done before.

That’s on top of then being able to use that data in tools that drive more of a customized focus via.

the optimizations that we’re able to get from the data as well as the tools having AI in them as well.

Yeah, I was actually going to ask about AI. I know data overload is something that the marketers, B2B marketers particularly, have been talking about for a while.

We are not starved of data anymore. Organizations have millions of data points. And how do you filter those, especially when lots of teams are using it?

How does each team interact? pull the right data, be able to like streamline the data to actually find key insights, which, which fuel the art as we said at the beginning.

But, um, do you, so is AI, is it kind of going to be like a chat gbt for your data set where someone from say customer marketing comes in and asks like, what do our customers like best about this product?

And then the AI is going to pull from the data. Well, I think there will be a combination of things that we’ll use the data for.

One of them is exactly what you said. For our average field marketer who doesn’t have the analytic skills of a data analyst, let’s say, or data scientist, we need to make that easier.

That is where the LLMs come in. I just need to know about X company and what products they’re using and When was the last renewal date and when was the last time that they interacted with us?

You can use an LLM on top of the data that we have in order to deliver in a more conversational way that information to your average marketer.

There’s thousands of marketers within Cisco and so not everyone is going to have the skill set to go deep.

But then we have those AI models that are really for our data scientists where they are diving deep into the data and trying to put connections together.

One of the examples of that is every organization has a hard time getting every single salesperson to attach the right contact to an opportunity.

We are exploring using AI models in order to actually do that for the salesperson so that we can understand just by mere fact of the number of conversations that they’ve had over email with a particular person, specific words that they might be looking for in that email, like we can tell them, Hey, this person is, is, um, might be the right contact to attach to the opportunity.

And we do that in a, in a privacy safe way so that we’re only looking at specific words rather than a whole email where we’re looking to pull them out.

You know, we’re, making sure that those interactions are done in a in a way that um doesn’t like i said doesn’t um reveal the individual.

It’s much more an anonymous way to be able to attach the human to the opportunity. The importance of that though and and being able to do that together is to actually understand what’s working and what’s not working so that we can refine our time and be a little bit easier um i think the third way that we’re thinking about using ai is actually in the interactions with the customers.

Even though we have our virtual demand center, our virtual demand center is global, we don’t have every language in the world covered.

We don’t have every language in the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week covered. And so how do we help deliver information to our customers at a time when someone who speaks that language or speaks that language in the right timeframe that the customer is looking for it?

to be delivered is delivered. And that’s where we might use an AI bot or some sort of example of AI interactions through chat on our website to deliver information in a conversational way can help with that kind of use case.

And so I think there’s multiple ways that we’re thinking about using AI in order to both and simplify as well as provide a better experience for our customers.

Interesting. Yeah, that reminds me of this very controversial tube ad that was on the London Underground recently that probably made it to your LinkedIn, even though you’re in the US.

It was this ad saying, don’t hire humans. And it was advertising AI BDRs. And I think from an inbound perspective, everyone’s very normalized to AI responding to chat, like in a chat bot, even sales inbound.

How do you see AI interacting with outbound sales and outbound customers? Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I’m quite ready to make that leap yet, but I think the inbounding and seeing how the inbounding goes is probably our first step in Because I think what we’ll learn from that is what are the most common questions?

Where are the areas where we do need a human to interact and we don’t have enough data in order for us to be able to provide things?

Then maybe an outbounding experience could be tried. I see a world in where it’s possible. I just don’t think that we as an organization have done enough of that foundational work yet in order to be able to try it.

But You never know. I mean, I think it’s a brave new world that we’re moving into. And there’s lots of new possibilities that are opening up every day that even six months ago, I said probably wasn’t going to be possible for a while.

So I’m excited to see how it goes. Yeah, definitely. I think it is interesting because all marketers and sales agents want to be tech enabled and but all the advice that I see for BDRs, not like I’m a sales person, but all the advice I see is like make these really hyper bespoke outreach emails that talk about the customer’s challenges and like a really human in a way.

So it will be interesting to see if that tide turns. We’ll have to see. All right. So we’ve talked a lot about tech and tech enablement. It’s a huge, huge undertaking to transform the entire database of an organization and enable every single team.

So we could talk about that some more, but I did have some more questions about your wider marketing strategy.

I’ve heard that you have an approach of maintaining agility with your marketing leadership. And I wondered if you could talk more about that. Yeah, I think, you know, we talked a little bit about the technology piece.

I have a real belief in the three core foundations of people, process, and technology. And from a process perspective specifically, with an organization the size of Cisco’s marketing team and the matrixed way that that organization operates, it’s really important to be able to think about new approaches and new ways to organize yourself And so about two years ago, we started on a journey to move towards an agile marketing motion.

You know, a lot of big organizations around the world are using an agile process for their marketing.

And Cisco has not historically. We’ve been more focused on a traditional waterfall approach. And for those who may not be familiar with what’s the difference between waterfall and agile marketing, Waterfall is very much the idea that, Hey, you move from one thing to the next thing, to the next thing in a very aligned motion.

Um, and, and that works great up to a point when you are, have so many different irons in the fire that, um, that you start to move more and more slowly.

It’s like, think about like, if there’s water rushing through that waterfall and then all of a this wood and like debris starts to pile up, you start to get a dam instead of water free flowing.

And, and so the, the idea of agile is that you’re actually running all of your projects and all of your processes and all of the work that you’re doing concurrently.

So rather than, Hey, I, I write copy and then that copy gets sent to design. And then that design gets sent to a copywriter. And then that copywriter sends it to the production team to, um, to put it in an email or on the website and you do each one of those things at the same time, or at different times, you’re actually doing each of those things at the same time.

So the copywriter and the copy editor are working on things concurrently to write and edit at the same time.

The designer and the production people are working on things at the same time so that they are designing almost in production rather than as a static piece that then gets handed off to production.

each one of those pieces and processes, by pulling them in and working where you can parallel to each other instead of almost horizontal to each other, is significantly cuts down the time to delivery.

And so we have really been in the full motion for about nine months. And in that nine months, we’ve started to see a pretty dramatic decrease in time to market.

So webinars that used to take two months to get out the door are now taking two weeks. Emails are dropped from three to four weeks of production time to less than a week.

And you have to imagine, I mean, this is a big organization with hundreds of webinars and emails and blog posts at the same time.

So getting those out faster and faster is actually better for us in terms of how quickly we can support all of the different parts of the organization that we need to.

And it allows us to better react to changes that we’re not anticipating, whether they be industry changes or a product line moves up their timeline or moves back their timeline.

We’re better able to adapt to those things because we have this motion in place. Is it perfect? No, there’s lots of things that we’re still working through.

It’s a big mindset shift for people. It’s not just about, like I said, the process piece. It is a people piece and a change management piece and a re-education and a re-architecture piece as well.

That is a very, very heavy lift. But like I said, we are seeing the results in how quickly things are coming to market and how much the team is working more in a unified way rather than in the silos of each of the parts of the organization that they work in today.

Wow, yeah, I think that’s a really fascinating approach. You hit the nail on the head. These huge complex enterprise organizations are always said to be slow and clunky.

And this is a very streamlined, efficient, I’m imagining this like multi-helix, like beehive where everyone’s just like always, always going at the same time.

I’m just wondering about the actual pragmatic processes that you had to put in place in order to make this happen.

could you outline a few of those? Um, I did not call out at the beginning. I called out my three core, um, parts of the marketing team, but I do have a few others that are in the team.

One is our content team. And the second is our, uh, our programs and, and, uh, project management organization. It, if we did not have a strong project management organ organization that, um, that really was filled with individuals who are either experts in this agile motion or becoming experts in this agile motion, we would not be successful.

They are the lifeblood of the work that we are doing and are really the architects behind us being able to do any of this in the way that we are and the way that we have been successful, particularly in the last six months.

So I just want to make sure to shout out that team and my deep gratitude for the work that they do in a fairly thankless way, to be honest with you, every day, because they’re the ones who are cracking the whip and saying, hey, we really, you know, this deadline is this deadline.

How do we speed things up? How do we make things go faster? How do we force you guys to work together in a different way and to think differently?

If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be able to do it. I think on top of that, I talked a little bit about management. We have really focused in two areas on change management.

One is what I alluded to a little bit earlier in terms of education. There are a lot of people who come into marketing who don’t have that traditional marketing background, to be honest with you.

They haven’t gone to school for it. Sometimes they come from sales and sales engineering. Sometimes they come from product. And they know a little bit about it from the organization that they’ve worked in.

But they haven’t gone to school for it and learned the discipline that is marketing. And so we have created a few programs. It’s an 18-month program that our entire team goes through.

to really focus on the true discipline of marketing and the aspects of marketing that you would learn if you were in a college course and getting a degree on it.

And so that’s one area. Every single person, regardless of training, has to go through that and understand how we as an organization think about marketing and the best skills and best practices for that.

The second thing that I talked about is just pure change management for change management’s sake. How do we, communicate to our team members in a more consistent way about things that are important?

How do we provide ways for them to learn? Because oftentimes what happens is, you know, leadership sends out one announcement and you tend to, you’re like, well, everybody’s read the announcement, so we’re good to go.

But you don’t have the chance to ask questions if you’re just sending out an email announcement. You don’t have the chance to really think through it.

What about the people who are out on PTO or leave for the week that that email went out? They miss it. What about the new people who come in after the email that you sent out?

It is a constant refreshing of basic skills. And so our change management team is really focused on thinking through that.

How do we make sure that everybody is educated, not necessarily on the pure scope of marketing, but how do we make sure that they’re educated on just artwork?

organization and how our organization is set up and some of the things that we’re announcing as changes or some of the things that are coming or learning skills that other people are using.

I think AI is a great example of that. We’ve had a couple of trainings recently on how to use our internal AI tools. It’s called Bridge IT. We don’t use ChatGPT. It’s an internal Cisco tool called Bridge IT.

And how do you use Bridge IT for some of the AI work that you’re doing in a way that’s successful, you know?

And, and so I think those are the two areas that I would, I would really point out to you as our key focus from that people, people perspective.

Yeah. Awesome. That sounds much more attainable now that you’ve laid it out step-by-step such a, yeah, another huge undertaking, but you’ve got these team leaders that are, are, goal oriented and able to push the right buttons with their team.

And you’ve got these teams who have not only uniformity of skills, marketing skills, but uniformity of expectations, I guess, which is the most important thing.

And I think that that’s the point of agile is, you know, when you think about a traditional way that a marketing team works, there’s a lot of process within each project where there’s a lot of process within each team that but there’s not a lot of process for how those teams work across.

And the idea of agile is to put that wrapper around the entire process and make it much more structured from an entire process end to end perspective.

And then that allows for more freedom actually within the process itself to be adaptive because you have the overall process rather than, oh, like, The copywriting is just a process.

The design is just a process, you know, going back to that example that I used a little bit earlier.

Yeah, definitely. Do you have any specific examples of ways in which this agile marketing has made your marketing more agile?

Any kind of campaign optimization or strategy optimization, anything like that? Yeah, I think one of the ways is just the overall how we approach the customer journey.

In the past, we have looked at when a new product launches, everything needs to be new. You need to create new blog posts, you need to create new web pages, you need to create new emails.

We’re actually now looking at how do you optimize the existing pages that you have? If Cisco already has 150 or 200 Wi-Fi pages, why are we creating two more rather than cutting down the number of pages that we have today?

and making sure that those are updated. So making sure that the process and the programs are simpler. The other thing that I think is happening is just that there’s a lot more thought and creativity going into some of the campaigns that we’re running because we have more of an open opportunity to do things in a different way.

And so I think that that is, I really love the creative ways that people are working together. Hey, I know- this thing that’s happening over in product that could be kind of cool as a marketing tool, you know, let’s use this feature, this new feature in this product in a different way than we thought to use it before.

Let’s do a demo in a different way. You know, um, how do we use new programs and new channels in a way that we’ve never done it before?

I think that is the creativity that I’m seeing is really kind of exciting and renewed because, There’s less focus on, I just got to get this thing out the door.

It’s more, what are the right things and when can we get them out the door? That has changed for us. Yeah, awesome. And I think that’s a great note to end on.

Back to the art and science of marketing, science enabling art and art enabling science. So thank you so much, Rebecca, for coming on. It’s been a fascinating chat. And I hope to- Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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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