From Startup to Industry Leader: Kris Rudeegraap's Sendoso Journey

From Startup to Industry Leader: Kris Rudeegraap's Sendoso Journey

pharosIQ: Welcome, welcome to this week's episode of pharosIQ’s podcast, the podcast for B2B marketers that is anything but boring. This week we are really pumped to have pharosIQ from Sendozo on. pharosIQ has been with Sendozo since the start, correct? Yeah, I was founder, CEO since day one. You're coming up on what, almost 10 years?

Kris: Yeah, about a little under about nine, but it feels like, I don't know, two decades.

pharosIQ: It's been, it almost has been, like 2016, 17, 18 and 2019 to 22 and then 2023 and 24 almost feel like three completely separate go to market decades, if you will.

Kris: I 100 percent agree and just the roller coaster of all those, nuances of COVID and work from home and then this recession period and tech and yeah, what a whirlwind.

pharosIQ: and it's like how many times can you rebuild your playbook? Exactly. Because. And I think that's been the most astounding thing for just leaders or across the board, right? Like just the need to have to almost rethink everything while still, the old adage, like doing that while still making sure the plane is still flying.

Yep. You're getting it. So while jumping in, I'm sure most of us, again, it's been nine years have heard in some sense about Sendozo, but for those who may haven't, or those who need an update or a refresh, tell us about it.

Kris: Yeah. So those direct mail and corporate gifting platform used by marketing teams, sales teams, customer success teams as a way to break through the noise and build better relationships.

Our thesis since day one is people buy from people and you got to build better relationships and there's lots of channels out there to engage with prospects and customers. Some are busier and noisier than others, but one that I found was super useful when I started the company. Was sending out gifts and it was just really manual.

And so we created a platform to make it automated, do all the sourcing, all the logistics integrate into your tech stack so they can be automated and reporting all in one platform.

pharosIQ: So are you finding, like to your point, there's been an up and down. Are you finding. Yeah, deliverability of direct mail to be up in recent years.

How, what are those numbers look like? I'm sure you track them quite anally.

Kris: Yeah. Yeah. So we we've seen a surge every year is our best year, every quarter is our biggest quarter in terms of volume. I think through COVID, we saw some interesting shifts from what was traditionally just a surprise and delight sending to people's offices.

And then, Now more of like an address confirmation opt in we're now seeing people doing a surprising the light to people's homes. So really an interesting time to send gifts when you may or may not have people addresses and how you can use our technology to get those addresses. Or or doing digital gifts and digital experiences, which still work really well too.

pharosIQ: How was the whole, how, how was the sourcing of the home addresses coming along? Is that done manually? Do you have tech that does that? Is it scraping? And, that's fascinating.

Kris: Yeah, a bit of both. So there's some tech, there's some data there's and I think some of that data was actually already, invented for consumers.

It just wasn't or B2C companies, but B2B companies didn't really have to worry about consumer data, but now we've created some really interesting data sets on connecting the business users with the consumer and where they live and this and that. Yeah, and I think the average household gets a couple of pieces of mail a day, so it's not I bet the average household gets a couple of hundred emails a day or more.

I just get Amazon boxes, lots and lots

pharosIQ: of Amazon boxes, people, when your college age kids start getting access to the Amazon account too, and stuff just randomly pops up. It's bad news. That's interesting. So I guess one would. One would say you guys were probably at the forefront of creating a category.

Yep. What were the unique, what were slash are the unique challenges of like category creation? Because it's talked about a lot on LinkedIn, but I don't think a lot of folks have the experience to be able to really speak to it.

Kris: Yeah. I think one of the big things is investing in a lot of education and thought leadership and community.

So on the education side, we did a lot of, and still do a lot of like webinars, office hours and ways to like, understand and help people realize how to use gifting and direct mail in kind of their marketing and sales and customer success strategies. So we have an awesome customer education team that spans from the buying journey all the way through the customer journey.

And I think that's critical because You can sell a customer the dream, but then you need to make sure they actually affect, effectively put in place the strategy. And so there's a lot of education in our Sonoso University. So I think education is one pillar. Second is doing a lot in community.

We have a supercenter community of customers that we connect. We have, I have an advisor community. We have the Sendfluencer community. So there's I think the community front really brings people together around this common concept of direct mail gifting and sharing ideas and collaborating.

I think that's critical. And I think there's also a lot of, in investing in certain channels, knowing that it's a bit of brand awareness and it goes against a lot of maybe demand gen. Type of, early days where you're like, I only got so many dollars. I need to track every dollar.

But, we went to a lot of conferences in the early years. We sponsored a lot of events. We did a lot of more brand marketing really just to get the name out or to get the name next to someone else's name. I remember we were at a conference in really early years. It was an early dreamforce conference and we had a booth next to Marketo.

And we brought our entire company at the time. It was like, I don't know, 15 of us, but we had way more people than Marketo did at the time at their booth. And people were like, Oh, what's this? And also this looks interesting. And so you just gotta fake it till you make it in the early years to make yourself look big.

Yeah. I think

pharosIQ: it's, that it's fascinating. And so it's if you do it. It's a home run. Yeah, it's harder to do. You not only have to sell someone on first you have to sell them on the concept of like, why this works, then you have to sell them on why it works with you. And then you usually have to really hand hold them to get it to work.

Yes,

Kris: exactly. That's I think a part that some people don't put enough effort into is how to get it to work. And you over invest in sales and marketing and under invest in customer success and customer education. And then they flop because, they bought the shiny object, but they don't know how to use it.

So totally agree. Or it doesn't, or it just doesn't

pharosIQ: get used. Yeah. How many plat, I've run a lot of selling orgs and you roll out the thing that everybody wants, and then it's good. And the training is great. And everybody's cooking. And then, 3 months later, it's just you look up your stats and adoption is 12%.

Because you have to. Especially with new things, new categories, you have to not just you have to sell the vision, right? This is what you here's a creative idea. Here's this, here's that versus just hammering through.

Kris: Yeah, we even had a team of what we call strategists, which was like a, they were above and beyond just our customer success team and our account management team in the early years.

And their whole goals was almost just being subject matter experts and almost like a, an agency ask inside of our company strategizing with our clients on how to get the most value, because this was the first year, the first month, the first quarter that they've actually been able to do direct mail gifting at scale in a strategic way.

I think some companies understand the concept of we're doing it very manually. Like myself, when I started the company and my last company, I was like packing boxes on Friday. I remember marketing would always be like, all right, it's 1 PM on Friday, getting the marketing swag closet room and pack boxes.

And the whole sales team was like it was not fun, but it worked. But give me the inspiration to start Sedosa. So I'm glad I thought it was there.

pharosIQ: Great. It's a killer story. Just be like, ah. Even just how just sending someone something is just, there's so much stuff that goes in.

I, I was, I used it, years ago when I was bigger and had more budgets for stuff, but yeah. I found that it was great for like internal stuff, right? Yeah.

Kris: , we have huge portion of our business for internal spiffs, for internal swag, for new hire kits, for surprising employees for their birthdays or anniversaries or weddings or babies.

It works really well for that. And especially when everyone went remote or a lot of people went remote, it wasn't easy to go drop something on someone's desk anymore. Yeah. And you didn't want to go from your house, box up a gift or order it, ship it to you. Yeah, we've seen a lot of use cases for internal employee gifting and swag.

pharosIQ: Yeah. I use it a lot. Just. Even as simple as like sending the email that asked people what shirt size they are. Yeah. The amount of time invested by humans on who wears what shirt can be astounding in so many ways.

Kris: Yeah. Or the amount, we have a big digital gift card program, and we see tons of companies being like, Hey, here's a And you can pick between Uber Eats or DoorDash or Grubhub.

And, people love it. Everyone's got to eat, Hey, I was already going to order DoorDash. Now my boss just gave me, free 25 bucks for lunch. Like I love that.

pharosIQ: Food is food wins. Food usually plays fairly well. I've always thought food wins. Exactly. Food and booze, like a really solid t shirt, right?

Like not like it has to be. Nice and comfy and nice , all like that. Those are the two most socks

Kris: are this the number one apparel for us? That we see? People love sending socks and people love receiving socks.

pharosIQ: Interesting. See I don't, I probably a bit biased in that I don't wear socks a lot.

Kris: I

pharosIQ: usually wear slides and if I'm wearing shoes, I'll mostly wear them without socks, but as I'm, but generationally, I think like I'm of the no show socks generation. The young kids these days are all wearing the show socks again. Exactly. Yeah. It's a new it's, I'm definitely not the target market for that anymore.

There's actually like a tick tock I saw that said you can tell how old somebody is by what type of socks they wear, right? Like you can generally totally agree.

Kris: Yeah.

pharosIQ: We spoke earlier on, just the ups and downs of the past, let's call it eight years, say, eight to 10 years.

It's been crazy, like you've been doing this a while. You've seen a lot of ups and downs. What do you think is what's next for outbound? There's a lot of people I think guesstimating right now. And I think there's not a lot of great, like true predictions happening.

What do you think?

Kris: Yeah, I think my two of my biggest predictions for outbound over the next five years, one is the transformation of a very manual SDR driven process to a more demand gen oriented data driven centralized process. And I think tools like clay. Have emerged that are really interesting that are really making it easier to orchestrate outbound and more scale and integrate an AI to remove some of the manual steps that SDRs used to do, copy and pasting data checking against CRM going to social channels to do research. So I think what used to spend an hour is now a minute but all that has to be orchestrated it through ways that are better fit for maybe a growth team or an outbound operations team than maybe a 20 something.

I think SDRs will still always play a role, but more will be more tactical and, leveraging intent data and really high valued data to go after accounts or ultimately be more on the inbound receiving side, it's almost like outbound inbound where. The orchestration is done to drive responses and then all the responses go into a SDR team that is, actioning these responses.

So I find outbound orchestration to be really interesting. We're going all in, we pivoted our. Outbound team, which was really human heavy, manual process heavy to a very automated streamlined, AI and automation driven. So I think that's the biggest change I see. And then I think the other side to that is just data intent data and how you're targeting.

I think that is critical that I think the years are done of spray and pray to a random like ICP list. It, you have to have intent and reason to make that outbound work. There's

pharosIQ: three, like on the intent side, I see three buckets, right? You have what would, what, what most of the industry calls intent, which is your legacy website engagement tracking.

It's true, the bomb boros and the sick, that stuff, right? And I think, like that legacy intent is falling a little bit down. It's falling down a bit, right? Because I don't think that. I just don't think the, the, it lived up to the expectations of identifying in market buyers, right?

I think there's triggers, which is a lot of what that clay outflow is, right? This person's hiring this many people, this company, right? Company has a new CTO. This company said this in their 10k like scraping publicly available knowledge using AI to identify potential trigger points that usually indicate a propensity to be a fit for you.

Exactly. That's a lot of what That's a lot of what people are calling signals now, even though I think again, I think it's more of a trigger, right? Where a signal is true. Like I'm entering the journey, right? Like you're signaling in some way that I'm entering the journey.

And for me, those are like, it's usually rooted in some sort of content consumption, but it's not just topical, but it's actually like what type of content, right? Reading a white paper that says like 10. 10 trends and gifting, right? It's very different than reading, a comparison report or review site that compares send.

Oh, so and your competitors, right? Those 2 engagements are very interestingly different. And I've been really laser focusing on trying to identify which of those signals are really like, hey. I think we're, I think we're entering the market and we should start getting them into our sales and go to market flow.

Kris: Yeah, I think that's an interesting way of bucketing them and I actually think it's probably wise for companies to bucket and maybe report back on the differences and how they're performing and trying to track it better than, Like just calling them all intent, it's all, it's better to segment your intent by, like you said, the signals, the triggers, the true content consumption entering the buying journey.

So I think the savvier, ops teams will figure out how to report back on attribution based on, more of a segmented intent bucket,

pharosIQ: and I think it's the first step is collecting the data. The second step is the operationalizing, right? Strategy, so much of LinkedIn is tactic, right?

Kris: I know

pharosIQ: Tactic and strategy. And so little is execution, right? Like you could have, you could identify, you could, Clay could build you the sexiest list of accounts to go reach out to in the world that have, Get them to your marketing team, right? Or you can't get them to your selling org, and you can't hit them with the right road, the right, overall execution and quality strategy, then you're going to be, ice skating uphill.

And I think that's where we're, that's where we lose a bit, there's little focus on execution because it's really the hardest thing to impact because it just comes down to practice and reps and really finite detail monitoring. Exactly. At one point, I'm sure Sendoza was like a lot of companies, and you had ABM all around your site, and you were all about ABM, and it was, and I'm seeing a lot of shift of that happening, right?

I'm seeing a lot of shift across the market, where ABM is falling off sites, and not as many, Not as many webinars about it. Not as many conference talks about it, right? What do you think about the current state of ABM? Has it changed? Is it changing? Is it still around? How does that look?

Kris: Yeah, I think I agree with you on your first point for sure that I think at a point maybe like four, four or five years ago, we had like ABM in our hero image on our website. It was like, use Sedoso for ABM. But I think. I think there's a couple things happening. One is I think there's been a realization that lots of people have already bought into ABM or we're already doing it.

It's not like a new shiny object anymore that people are like, Ooh, they mentioned ABM. I need to learn more about it. It's Oh, I've heard that thousand times already, so I don't need to hear it again. So I think there's a bit of saturation on that topic. I think there's also maybe a maturity of companies realizing that they've already done a lot of ABM initiatives and have shifted to an account model versus this lead spray and pray model.

And so then. They're looking for what's next after that. And I think probably as of recently, maybe in the last six to nine months, I think AI has taken over as the bud or buzzword on websites versus AVM too, for a lot of MarTech companies. And so people have shifted from saying, Hey, we can help you with ABM to, Hey, what's, this is how AI is going to help you.

And I think that's shifted. I think ABM, I think the premise of ABM of targeting lists targeting, high value account lists, going after them in a lot of different ways, leveraging data to figure out which of those accounts are, triggers, signals, intent. Focusing in on building experiences for these accounts.

I think that will always be a thing. And for me, coming from a sales background, I was always doing a ABS, account based sales, which was like, I always had a target list. I always was trying to swarm and find the buying committee. I was always trying to, work with marketing on how they could market to my top accounts that I knew were in market.

So I think yeah, it feels like it's a natural thing that everyone will just continue to do, but not be as interested in content and webinars about it.

pharosIQ: I used to get in trouble all the time, like at conferences or wet cause I used to say they said, I've been doing ABM for 20 years. Yeah, I just called it sales.

All the marketers would be like, boo. And I'm like, come on, right? Let's come on really guys relax here. So no it's, I, the interesting thing about AI is, and I saw somebody just finally post about this yesterday on LinkedIn. Who's going to be the vendor. Who's not AI, right?

When everybody, everybody's AI, right? There's going to be somebody who steps up and says we're going to be human, right? Or we're, we're going to antithesis of what AI could be, and I haven't seen it yet, but I'm fascinated to see who, because even in go to market, right?

I feel On the data side of the fence. Yes. That is that type of logic can be really done well to really refine the account, identify the breaking all of that. But I'm still personally not in the mindset that. outbound AI is going to hit, right? And my reasoning is twofold.

One, everybody's generally using the same LLM or some fraction of it, right? Because building your own is just significantly too expensive and labor intensive, right? So like if everybody's using the same premise, general LLM data going into it, then you're going to have 17 outbound emails that speak, write, act, and look the same, right?

So which will become redundant for the buyer, and then they'll just become noise and that. I also think at some point, Google, Microsoft, and the big email, the big engines will start identifying AI based outbound. Yeah, I agree there. I don't necessarily think blocking it but Probably pushing it into an AI folder, like Gmail where they have the promotions folder, no one ever goes to, so like I, so I think that's in a sense, having, I think a really great. Like outbound, like SDR will become one of the higher paid positions in the selling, right?

Kris: I agree. And I think it'll be a different SDR than of years past. I think it'll be a, an SDR that knows how to look at data and signals.

No has knows how to stitch together, these these data sources maybe has an AI or some kind of prompt engineering expertise or API expertise. I think it'll be a. A different type of person that will be very high paid. And I think actually it could live in under marketing instead of living under sales too.

Yeah. It's yeah. I've

pharosIQ: always like the best outbound folks have a, they've always had a unique sense of timing, right? Messaging wasn't always better. But they fit I found the best ones have the feel for like, when an account is heating up and when they should just attack the shit out of it. Now.

tools like clay are helping to automate that skill set a bit but there's still just a weird organic feel on when it's time to attack and when it's time to not and when it's time to you know that will be a that will be a role on the outbound side that'll be like a career, right?

Yeah. I set, I create opportunities. Somebody else closes them, right? I don't want to become an AE. I don't want to scale. I just want to do this. And I want to, I want you to pay me a shit ton for it. Exactly. I

Kris: a hundred percent see that over the next few years unfold as companies try to untangle what they've built the last, 15 years off of the kind of Salesforce predictable sales model and move to that new model you just described, and I think that's going to take.

A few years to operationalize internally and convince the executives that, grew up with a different playbook era to, to rehash this new playbook. But

pharosIQ: I still think also, I think like the Salesforce model still works, right? I'm never going to be one who's MQLs are dead. It's the difference is why it will It works for a true SAS company.

And by true SAS, LTV to CAC ratio high, a, like a SAS platform to once it's in, like the amount of labor that goes into ripping it out and replacing it is so substantial that, I'm, ERPs, sales, but, there's a reason why.

The predictable model works for them and likely still will. And I think what happened a bit in, in the surge of 2021 ish, is investors, executives, a lot of people started convincing, like they started. Getting confused like subscription versus stickiness confused. And if you're, you can have a subscription, but if you're not sticky that predictable rebel revenue model won't hit because most of the time profitability comes in year two and year three of the LTV.

Yeah, you don't make it to it. Yeah, the leaky

Kris: bucket. It's a pain to fix the leaky bucket while putting more water in the top of it.

pharosIQ: Yeah. So that's where I think. A lot of companies will be like, are just going to be like, Hey, business as usual, right? Cause this is what we do, but don't want, I don't have the stickiness per se, we'll have to get a little creative about the volumes there.

Kris: Yeah. Or just get creative about tactics of what are the signals and intent they're using to make to drive more conversion. What other channels like gifting and direct mail, are they layering on top to drive more conversion? So I think it'll, could be the same models, but just what are the other tools or levers they can use to improve, meet number of meetings said, or accelerated deals.

pharosIQ: We've reached that point of the call where we do your standard beat a boring question. Like interesting perspective of a CEO. We haven't had one on yet, tell us about a campaign you or your team have run over the many years, right? That was creative, different, unboring, right?

How did it go? How did it work? Love to hear.

Kris: Yeah. So my favorite campaign, this was probably maybe six years ago, so it's been a while, but it was a spam campaign. Which is ironic because we in our messaging talk about, Hey, stop spamming and start building relationships with gifting and direct mail.

But what we did is we reached out to tons of customers, friends, employees, and said, Hey, spam your friends. But then it was literally sending a can of spam in the mail. And then when the person got the spam can in the mail, They also got a little postcard that says scan this QR code and you can go and spam your friends.

And so it was a funny campaign because we just saw this kind of go viral where people were just spamming everybody with cans of spam. I think we must have sent out, 10, 000 cans of spam. It was insane. We had to like order pallets back to our warehouse of more spam campaigns. It was ironic because it was spammy, but I know we generated more than 10 million in pipeline.

It was the most successful campaign ever. We. And it was fun and silly, but I think it was unique and different and not boring, it was a change of pace for marketers. Those are my favorite,

pharosIQ: right? Something where someone like, somebody like a stingy old corporate organization would have went Oh, I don't think we're going to do that.

Kris: Yeah.

pharosIQ: So those are a solid and I think that I love the virality of it, right? I don't think that works without send it to your friends, right?

Kris: Exactly.

pharosIQ: And

Kris: it was a good play on words where people understood like, what spamming your friends or your or spamming a colleague, ex colleagues was, but playing on a good word where we're actually sending a can of spam too.

So I think the puns worked well the messaging and then like you said the virality made it really work So we would have just sent out, 300 cans and been done with It probably would have been a mediocre but layering on this you get it And then you can thwart it along and spam someone else worked really

pharosIQ: It's two things that humans love doing to their friends like messing with them and helping them Yeah, exactly, to I've always like I tell my sellers all the time.

I'm don't you don't underestimate how powerful the words up. Can you help me are people just think about you're walking down the street. Somebody walks up and says hey, I don't know. I'm not from here. Can you help me? And yeah, exactly. I'm not even from Philadelphia originally.

I'm just here a lot for work, whatever. And I'm always like, Oh, I can try. I don't know I don't really know where I'm at. I usually use my phone a lot, but I can try to help you because you just have that incessant need as humans to want to help somebody who apparently needs help. So like that and making it and sending funny stuff or kind of black, it's definitely a strong number two.

pharosIQ, it's been awesome. It's been really great chatting. Sometimes these these things go really fast and, we're, it did and we're still flowing and I'm sure we could probably talk for a ton more time. We will let you go back to, driving that gifting journey and mission, right?

And really that keep, where can people find you easiest and Sendozo.

Kris: Sendoso. com. Add me on LinkedIn or even send me an email, chris. kris. sendoso. com. Love chatting, love meeting people, love talking shop.

pharosIQ: Awesome. Cool. Thank you all for joining us again today. It was fantastic having pharosIQ.

Find us on your local podcast. Give us a five star, give us a subscription, give us a thumbs up, whatever it is that you do on that platform that makes me show up in more places for other B2B marketers, so we can have great chats like this and expand the audience.

So thank you all for joining. Till next time, pharosIQ, appreciate it. Good luck in the rest of two and 24. All right, bud. Thanks pharosIQ. Bye bye.