How can you use account based marketing to acquire and retain your target audience?
How can you use account based marketing to acquire and retain your target audience?
In this /Founders Focus episode, Kris Rudeegraap, co-founder & CEO of Sendoso, shares how you can design and refine your ABM strategy.
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Scott Case 0:00
Welcome to Founders Focus, podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co-founder of Upside. And we created Founders Focus to share free resources and actionable advice. Together, we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by the awesome team at Upside.
Scott Case 0:20
Today, I'm joined by Kris Rudeegraap, who is the co-founder and CEO of Sendoso. And we're going to talk about account based marketing and customer experience. But first, I'd love to just have Kris introduce himself and tell us a little bit about how you ended up starting this company and what your journey has been like.
Kris Rudeegraap 0:40
Thank you so much, Scott. So as you mentioned, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Sendoso. So I started the company about four and a half years ago. Prior to that, I spent about 10 years in software sales in San Francisco. And I was really in the driver's seat in the trenches as a salesperson, trying to connect with more prospects and break through the spammy digital noise that everyone gets a million emails. And so I found myself doing more sending out handwritten notes, I'd go grab swag and box it up, or I'd find a quirky gift off of Amazon and ship it out. And it worked so well, it was just, you know, I found myself spending hours packing boxes and looking at tracking links. And I just dreamed up this idea of like, why isn't there a platform that makes it easier to click and send stuff out? And did a little homework and research, saw that it was a multi 100 billion dollar opportunity, but it was just all offline and siloed and not modernized with software and technology yet. So that gave me the inspiration to get going. And, you know, the rest is history. We have now raised about 60 million in funding, have about 400 employees, 10s of 1000s of users, millions of sends on our platform. And it's been a fun fun last few years.
Scott Case 1:53
That's amazing. So staying with the theme of starting the company, before we dive into account based marketing. Are you a solo founder? Do you have a co-founder?
Kris Rudeegraap 2:02
Yeah, so co-founder, although unique in the sense that both myself and my co-founder are both on the business side. So we're both ex-salespeople. So kind of unique in that we didn't actually have, you know, one of us was an awesome coder that could just start coding in the garage, so to speak. And so we actually have a unique founding story that I went out into Upwork and found our first engineering hire, which was a $5,000 project for MVP kind of point one, you could say, and that's where it all started. And then we just continued to scale out from there. But, it goes to show you that you don't need to be a technical co-founder, and if there's a will there's a way and we made it happen.
Scott Case 2:50
Yeah, it's funny, I love that. And in particular, because I think that, even technologies that maybe were in the early stages when you started the company, but I often talk to founders, I'm like why don't you try to build the whole thing in airtable, like, you can do a lot with that and you can get pretty far along with creating some things and a few landing pages. And like you don't have to go so far into building things out because you learn a lot faster. So actually, I think you had an advantage because you didn't go to build, you built the littlest thing you could to find out whether you were in the right mode. So that's really smart.
Kris Rudeegraap 3:28
And we went immediately to start talking to customers, which I think is key too, because sometimes you get in the let's build for years mode and let's never talk to customers. And so we're kind of the extreme opposite where we were selling this day zero.
Scott Case 3:42
Well, your salespeople, so if you're not selling something, then you're not breathing, which is a real problem, which I totally appreciate. So, as a salesperson, you were, I assume, you were doing enterprise sales, because that would be the only ones that would make a lot of sense to send packages to. So when you look at, because it's kind of like a meta problem, right, you're selling to people who are selling. So tell me a little bit about who your kind of target customer is and how did you discover who that person was?
Kris Rudeegraap 4:22
Yeah. So originally, I wanted to build this for me, so I thought sales people, and ultimately, like the VPs and directors of sales and sales development, we're going to be our end customers. So that's really where we got started with our target outreach. We quickly realized that marketing in this case held a lot of the budget and had a lot of control over some of the swag closet and some of the other areas that were things that you could send. So it was a very marketing and sales aligned play. So we ended up reaching out to both parties – sales and or marketing leadership – to figure out who's kind of the champion and then who's going to bring in the other person and then we went and sold that way.
Kris Rudeegraap 5:00
We've since even moved to sell into customer success and HR was a huge vertical for us, our huge use case for us during COVID as well, you know, sending gifts to employees and driving employee engagement and performance and recognition has been a huge uptick for us as well, too.
Kris Rudeegraap 5:20
To your first question on selling, like company size, so we mostly sell into mid market enterprises, although we have a good offering for SMBs. And it's really that you could send someone a $5 Starbucks card, it doesn't cost you much, but you could still get some good value out of that. So it's not like people are necessarily sending $2,000 Pelotons out and you have to have a huge $100,000 plus ACB to make this work. It's really the creativity of what you send and the message that resonates it, and really that human to human connection of sending something that someone else is gonna be like, Oh, thank you and respond and you can grab their attention.
Scott Case 6:01
So as a tool from a sales perspective, how much of it is just getting the person. How much of the goal is getting the attention? So if I'm a, you know, sort of a mid size company selling to other businesses, how much of it is just getting the person on the phone? Like, where are the leverage points that you see Sendoso making a particular impact?
Kris Rudeegraap 6:28
Yeah, so we definitely impact really like top of funnel getting people into a meeting. And I think that's kind of the obvious use case at times, because it's very black and white. But we do see a lot of companies use us throughout the sales cycle to really build rapport during that kind of sales process that might be multiple months of kind of quiet period, and how do you build the relationship versus just like, hey, just checking in email, which can get old quick. Or, you know, thank yous or other life events. And then going into the customers lifecycle – How do you welcome new customers and recognize them? Maybe your customer just got married, you want to send them a celebratory bottle of champagne, or some of those things that really connect the person to the person versus a company or a vendor relationship.
Scott Case 7:20
So one of the things and maybe you could give a quick primer on kind of account based marketing and the typical life cycle, and obviously, you can play a role, you know Sendoso can play a role in parts of that, but what's that typical lifecycle and even just how would you define account based marketing?
Kris Rudeegraap 7:40
I think about account based marketing, as you know, historically, maybe the analogy is, you know, you'd fish with the net and you'd go and sell to anyone and everyone. And account based marketing is more fishing with a spear, so you're going after people that you really want to go after. Now, that being said, there's a lot more to it. There's the data element of account based marketing, there's opening up a larger buying committee because the deals can get bigger if you really target multiple buyers, there's multiple channels like how are you using email, video, Sendoso, LinkedIn, social, all these other channels, too. So I think there's a mix of things. But I think the biggest kind of high level overview is going after selective target accounts versus selling to anyone and everyone.
Scott Case 8:30
So you mentioned, for your own business, you've picked the target account, and part of what you're trying to determine is, who is your champion going to be between, let's say, somebody in the marketing team and somebody in the sales organization? How do you go about finding that out?
Kris Rudeegraap 8:49
Yeah, so we have an outbound sales development team that will do their own research. We have data providers that will provide us with data sources, so we can figure out based on titles, and then it's just going out there and kind of jumping on calls, sending emails and sending direct mail gifts to get their attention so that you can have a conversation. Titles typically have been the best way for us to understand at a high level who someone is, but we really want to get on the phone with them and set up a meeting to understand what their goals are, what their pain points are, how do we understand and discover ways that we can help them, which is something that you really have to do in a meeting format.
Scott Case 9:37
So one of the things that the pandemic did, was it sent us all home. And we've seen two big problems. One is there is no office to send anything to, and two is there's no phone number to call. So how have you worked past that and maybe how have you advised your customers to work past that?
Kris Rudeegraap 10:01
Yeah. So like week one of the pandemic, way back in the end of February, beginning of March, we released an address confirmation feature, where the recipient could reroute the package that was intended for their office to their home. And so that was probably the biggest overnight improvement where people were now being able to send things to their home and that became kind of the norm. People were fine with that. And so that was one key area.
Kris Rudeegraap 10:27
We also saw that there was just a different assortment of things that people were sending, and digital gifting took off for us, too. So sending someone a doordash or UberEats gift card and a nice message that came along with that really resonated with somebody or you realize someone has some kids and you send them something that can benefit the family. Or we've got virtual experiences, you could do a wine tasting experience or a cheese making class. So these virtual experiences that you could do at home were also pretty impactful. So I think it was really getting creative and coping with the situation that everyone was feeling. And sending things that were useful. But yeah, there was definitely a quick mix of more digital gifts that happened. And then the address confirmation functionality was also a big, impactful feature.
Scott Case 11:20
And how about just getting people on the phone? Like, how are you doing that? Used to be you call the main number, and maybe you get routed to somebody, even when we all live by cell phones, there's usually some person that you could call. How have you guided or seen that change?
Kris Rudeegraap 11:33
Yeah, so we still do have access to some data providers that are providing cell phone numbers, which can be helpful, obviously, at times, especially if they pick up the call. And outside of that, I think it's leveraging things like Sendoso email to get people to reply, maybe getting their reply and getting an email with their phone in their signature block. And other ways that you can get creative with grabbing their attention. So yeah, definitely the calling the office kind of playbook kind of got killed overnight, but you then have to adapt in terms of how do you call their sell or how do you figure out ways to get other ways to get into the account. And I think that's where we actually saw a big spike because of that, too. Also, because people weren't doing in person meetings or Field Sales Reps weren't going and knocking on doors, so they had to figure out other ways to kind of find connections and break through.
Scott Case 12:31
So as we transition out of, at least in the United States, the pandemic and people are getting out more and doing things differently. Is there anything that you see from an account based marketing standpoint that you think is going to have another transition, some big reset or some big change that you're anticipating over the next six to 12 months?
Kris Rudeegraap 12:54
I would say again, it's just more about really understanding where everyone's at a given period of time and understanding how this transition is going to work and what are the nuances. I think there'll be nuances with the data providers, where is this person at home or are they at work or are they at home indefinitely or did they go back to the office? So now, how do you understand that? The events, which is a pretty popular mix especially in b2b, it's, you know, you're hosting a physical event, but now you have to have like a hybrid virtual component to offset that. So there's just gonna be again, kind of this, you know, the next normal work we're calling it, you know, what's the playbook for that? And, marketing, sales, cx teams are gonna have to get creative again and thinking about, okay, what are the nuances that we have to adapt? And I think, probably, adapting is the biggest maybe word that I would say over the last year and a half in terms of like, how people have to adapt and be agile?
Scott Case 13:55
Absolutely. So I'm going to transition to the future – even more future. Where do you think Sendoso will be in five years? What do you think the big opportunities will be over that period of time? And what are your kind of big ideas for how you transform your business or extend it or do things differently?
Kris Rudeegraap 14:15
Yeah, so I think we're still in our infancy. I think in five years, we'll be more of a household name. And any company that is having customers prospects, employees, literally every company would want to use us Sendoso, so I see that we'll be more household name, it'll be as ubiquitous as having a CRM or an email tool. It's like, Oh, you use Gmail, cool. You use Sendoso, cool. You use Salesforce, cool. So it'll be something that is just another form of communication where building that human connection in a more personalized fashion. And, every day we talk to customers and they had no idea this even exists, or they had no idea how they can automate and operationalize something that, you know, it's pretty tough. You know, we've got global warehouses, huge supply chains, tons of software and integrations. So it's a hard problem to solve from the physical components of moving something from point A to point B. And harder to do yourself.
Scott Case 15:14
That's huge. I mean, you can do it yourself as a test. But once you want to go to scale, it's a whole different problem. It sounds like you want to be part of Marchitecture stack as one of the key elements. That's awesome.
Scott Case 15:27
Well, I'm going to ask my selfish question now, which is, okay, you've got warehouses all over the world, you got people all over the place. What are your plans for business travel for you and your team over the next six to 12? months?
Kris Rudeegraap 15:41
Yeah, so we're trying to get back into that as soon as we can. We want to be cautious to not be pushy with customers and prospects. But at the same time, I think there's this general sense that everyone kind of wants to get back out there. I've already doing a little bit of it, but more internally, in terms of business travel already. And now it's just getting back to meeting with prospects and customers person face to face. I think the local arena will pick up pretty quick. So you know, in the Bay Area, it's like, hey, let's go grab coffee and I'm already doing that now. And I think by the summertime, I'll be flying out across the country again, meeting with folks. So I think it'll come back pretty quick with a vengeance, and people are itching to get back in person to business meetings.
Scott Case 16:31
That's awesome. When you think about your clients, is it a reluctance on their part or is it just where they are in having an office where you could meet or willingness to meet? Like, what's the barrier there that's maybe holding you back?
Kris Rudeegraap 16:48
Yeah. So I would say it's some of those things, whether it's the reluctance and wanting to make sure that they have some kind of policy in place, I know HR teams are taking as much of approach as they can on this people teams to feel like they can empower their employees to do what they want to do but also be cautious with local and federal laws. So it's coming up to where local and federal laws are not going to be a question anymore. It's like everyone can engage with anyone, anytime, that will make it a lot easier for HR and people leaders to say, hey, you can go do what you want now, get back out there. And then that basically opens up the doors, and I think we're, it feels like days away from that in terms of just kind of opening that back up. And then, I don't think not having an office would really be a problem. If you want to meet, there's easy ways to go meet in coffee shops and stuff too. I also think that you know, while some companies said, Hey, we're going full remote, I think we'll see a boomerang too where they're like, Oh, just kidding, we're going to do a hybrid where we're going to let people come back to an office or WeWorks or something. That human connection working in the office is just hard to replace.
Scott Case 18:02
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on Founders Focus, Kris. Really, really appreciate it.
Scott Case 18:06
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Founders Focus. We love getting feedback. So if you've got a topic for us that you want us to discuss or you've got a founder you want to hear from, hit me up on LinkedIn at T Scott Case, or you can always grab one on one time with me at foundersfocus.com. Stay awesome.