Transcript:

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:01]:
Exit. Exit, exit. All right. Kris Knight. We've crossed paths, I'm sure, multiple times over the years. I think the first time that I heard about Sendoso was I was working with G. Guillaume at drift. He wasn't at drift yet.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:26]:
He was vp of growth at segment. It must have been at segment.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:00:29]:
Yep, exactly. It was that segment.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:31]:
He did this presentation and he had this crazy, like, automation that he built that was like a direct mail play where it was like, send an executive a coffee or something, but it was.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:00:40]:
Actually a real in person coffee. Like, while you're on the chat asking what your Starbucks order was. And then we would go and use a third party delivery service to actually go grab the Starbucks and try to deliver it while they're on chat.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:52]:
It's unbelievable. I remember that presentation. I remember everybody being like, this guy's nuts. This is an amazing, amazing play.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:00:58]:
Yeah, I love that guy. He's just an awesome brainstorming genius with growth ideas.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:05]:
Yes, he is. He will give you more ideas than you can handle. I love G. You started Sendoso almost eight years ago, but what I think is interesting now to look back at your story, is the role that you had before becoming CEO was. You're a senior AE at Talk desk.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:01:22]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:22]:
I don't want to replay the whole Sendoso founding story, but this is a crazy eight years going from an AE, carrying a quota, doing inside sales, to running a company. Can you share a little bit about that journey? And then let's eventually get to Sendoso today. How many employees? What does the company look like? And we'll go from there.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:01:44]:
So, like you saw, it's been about a decade in software sales before starting the company. And I had always known that I had this itch to want to start a company, but you needed that really painful problem to solve in order for me to really want to jump in. And so while I was in sales, it was just kind of obvious to me at the time that email was becoming very spammy and very hard to get into people's inboxes. This was eight years ago, ironically. And so I said, hey, why don't I start writing handwritten notes and sending out gifts or hearing a dog on a call barking and sending out, like, a, an Amazon chew toy? And it worked so well. It was just, I was operating like a mini mail room in our office. And so I said, hey, there's got to be a platform that click and send a button or sequence out gifts and mailers. And there wasn't.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:02:31]:
So I was like, let me start it. And I think that's how crazy entrepreneurs are. It's, you don't know what you don't know, so you just jump in.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:39]:
That seems like a crazy lift to go. Think about given that you weren't a software developer, the product that you wanted to build was not there. Obviously software was a key component of that. But like, at the end of the day, it's that last mile physically delivering the box. You know, I remember I had my first kid when I was at drift and somebody sent me a direct mail, the best direct mail campaign I ever got was they sent me diapers. Fantastic. You need those, you need them. They're expensive.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:10]:
I had a newborn and so it was like they weren't out of size yet. That was like the best one. So what crazy thing was going on in your head to think like, yeah, we're going to solve this problem. And what was the hardest part about solving that initial, like actually sending out gifts?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:03:24]:
It was a mix of solve the problem first. I'd been in early stage startups for the better half of the last decade, so I had seen it play out in front of me. So I kind of had an insider look. I'm like, okay, here's how we built the software. Maybe I wasn't building it myself, but I was saying, here's how we do it. Here's the team that is early stage building. So I kind of understood like how the chart develops. And in sales, my strategy was I was super confident and hey, I'm going to close this deal no matter what.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:03:51]:
And so I took that kind of sales mindset to say I can go figure out how to build software, I can go figure out how to raise money, I can go figure out how to get customers. And honestly, some of my sales skills worked really well for me in starting the company because one, I knew what I wanted to build because I was going to be the end user. So I was like, well, if I wanted to use this software, let me just draw it out and then let me go on upwork, finding an engineer to say, hey, here's what I want to build. Here's the screens on what it could look like. Please build it for me. And that actually worked out. Luckily, I've heard a lot of horror stories, but mine was the success story there. And then I'm like, I know how to sell, so I'm going to go sell customers day zero to get them on the platform.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:04:29]:
I'm going to go sell VC's to why they should invest in me. And then I gotta go sell people on why they should join me on.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:35]:
This crazy journey and fill me in on Sendoso today. We're recording this in. I'm like, what day is it? We're recording this May 2024.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:04:45]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:46]:
How do you talk about the company today? Stage size, what you do, stage c in funding.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:04:52]:
We've got kind of mid two hundred s of employees. Our northstar, by the end of this year we're shooting towards 100 million in revenue. I think we'll get there early next year. We're a couple months away from profitability, which is an exciting metric for us given the last couple of years we've seen about give or take 10 million sends and about 100 million spent on our platform. That's been a really interesting data set to look at and I think we're just getting started.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:21]:
And then you've obviously had to ride the roller coaster of the last couple years in Saasden. As a CEO in SaaS right now, how do you talk about the market? So I'm starting a new company. I started a media company and not really in SaaS, but our customers are in SaaS. Either the b two b marketers, the b two b marketers that would pay for subscriptions to our community, listen to our podcast, subscribe to our content, but then also sponsors. We've been talking to Sandoso about doing a sponsorship. We have lots of the top SaaS companies are sponsoring. Anecdotally to me, I feel like within the last three or four months, like we're actually hiring more people right now to scale our business and create content. Because I don't know if it's because we're riding this trend of community and influencer marketing, but we have an overwhelming amount of demand from companies like you all in this space who want to do stuff.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:12]:
I'm reading that as a sign that like demand is back. People are playing a little bit more offense again. But what's your perspective as a CEO?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:06:19]:
Yeah, I agree there. I think people are going back in. CFO's are loosening budgets over the last half a year. I'd say the last three, four quarters we're seeing a big uptick in spend on our platform, which is a good sign because a lot of marketing and sales budgets are loosening up to spend on our platform. So I think we've did the hard work the last end of 22 and into 23 of kind of resetting, reorgang, re strategizing on some more efficient growth across a lot of the SAS tech space and now metrics are looking good again. And the economy and some of the other macro factors are giving people a bit more confidence as well. And I think all that's boding well for the software SaaS smart tech space, too.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:01]:
I hope so. I don't think we're going to get back to the 2021 craziness, but it seems like we're going to make some thoughtful, rational decisions and spending lots of money on budget should kind of feel a little bit uncomfortable again, where like, all right, I'm going to do this, but like, I got to make this work out. And I think that's a healthy behavior versus just like, yeah, I don't know, we'll just write a check and hopefully this works out and it doesn't matter.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:07:28]:
Exactly. And I think there's also, for a minute there was a big like, halt everything, let's focus on profits or reduce burn. But then there's that catch 22 where you still need to grow. And so I think we're seeing that come back even more wherever people got their metrics in order and now they're like, let's grow again.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:43]:
Where are you seeing growth from a business standpoint? You're the CEO. So not that everything is marketing, but just as a growth channel, what seems to be working for you all right now at this stage, right, you said you got 200 employees. You're closing in on $100 million in revenue. You've kind of gone through all of the early stage startup growth tactics at this point. What's working to grow right now?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:08:05]:
Yeah. So we're kind of coming back to some of those tactics and rethinking them. So one of the ways that we're seeing growth is through kind of some more automated programmatic outbound. So rethinking our sdr.org using clay.com and a myriad of service integrated and connected to that, kind of rethinking how we orchestrate outbound from a more marketing programmatic, data driven approach. So I think that's a big change from, call it 2021, we probably had ten times as many sdrs. Now we're seeing more effective outbounding and better results than we would have in terms of the burn needed to support that many headcount. So that's one area I'm excited about, community. I mean, I'm kind of preaching the choir here, but we're investing more in these communities with thought leaders, with peer groups, and trying to be invest there, which is interesting.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:08:56]:
We also invest a lot in our own community. So we have a super sender community of power users. I have like an advisor community that has a really interesting story behind that. There's our success influencer program that we have that's building community. So that's a big one. And then I think micro field events that are more fun, different than 10,000 people in a Las Vegas conference hall are working well for us, too. I'll shut up. We can dive into which ones you care about most.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:25]:
You mentioned the overall macro trend of, like, just, it's still going to be outbound, but it's got to be more thoughtful.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:09:33]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:34]:
And I see questions in our exit five communities, like some from maybe early stage companies, and they're like, how would you go about getting your first customers? Man, it always kind of comes down to, like, email. Like, that's how I would do it. I would. I would do a lot of research on, first of all, I'd have a clearly defined ICP. I'd have a clearly defined problem that we solve. I would do a ton of research and find a way to reach out to Kris. Oh, I sell to SaaS CEO's.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:09:59]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:00]:
I'm going to find a really highly targeted way to reach out to Kris directly and give him, like, the why you, why now? And here's how we can help. And the hard part is, like, that's a hard thing to automate. I totally believe in AI, and I do think AI is going to be changing the game. Kip, who's the CMO of HubSpot, a friend of mine and somebody I've talked to regularly about marketing, I heard him say on his podcast the other day that, like, the next five years in marketing are going to change more than the last 25 have because of AI. And I totally believe that. But I still don't think that the things you mentioned, it's interesting to hear $100 million company go back to basics and do those small things. I do think that's how it's going to be. You're going to win.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:39]:
The days of spray and pray are not going to work because it's just everybody can do that now. We can all just write shitty emails and shitty content and send it out and it's just not going to work anymore.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:10:48]:
Exactly. But I think some of these more automated, personalized orchestration, bringing in intent data, bringing in other signals and thinking about it from a more holistic, almost like more of a marketing mindset than just, hey, you need a person that's going to go look through lists, they're going to copy and paste data that are going to write manual things. You're almost doing a better job bringing in specialized expertise than just throwing humans to run tasks.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:16]:
You mentioned this to me that you have AI ified your tech stack, which is interesting. I think a lot of companies are looking to do this now and really take AI seriously as a strategy. It seems like that's something you've done. You mentioned AI outbound, AI content, an AI executive sponsorship program. Let's talk about how you as a SaaS CEO are thinking about AI and bringing it into the company.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:11:42]:
For me, it was really exciting time where I can see a lot of interesting technology out there and then we can go implement it and I can learn from it. So I love sharing back. So on the AI outbound, that's really where we switched from this very like tons of humans doing very manual tasks outbounding to how do we centralize that around more of a growth ops function and use clay.com to do really interesting orchestration at scale and using AI to craft some of the messaging, to normalize some of the data, to use more of the web scraping and a lot of these different things that would have been very manual human tasks. Also seeing with our webinar and event strategy where Goldcast has a really interesting content lab where you can use AI to remix and take out really interesting content snippets and then use that as part of your content strategy. So I think that's really cool.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:35]:
What is clay.com dot?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:12:37]:
Yeah, clay.com is the orchestration tool that we use that connects tons of different data sources, that connects into sequencing, that will write emails, that will use AI to normalize or clean up data. We'll dynamically generate images that we can insert into email, dynamically find and write personalized content based on more vague topical points. It's a really cool tool that has helped us scale that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:03]:
And you mentioned Goldcast content lab. We use them for all of our virtual events and webinars. And I think that's something that's really useful because this is something that you're already doing, already going to record this conversation and then to get those timestamps and clips and notable moments back to you as opposed to in the past I've had to hire a video team and have full time in house video people like cut the clips and I think that's a perfect use case to AI. How do you know what's worth sharing with your team versus being a distraction? Sometimes I feel like check this out. Chat GBT 40. Check this out. I can get this translated. We should think about this.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:39]:
And it's like, how do you balance between, like, sharing new technology and new ideas versus, like, being a distraction? Because in some case, it's your job to push the team and to, like, have them think about new ways to do things. But at the same time, like, you can just throw 100 things at them. They're like, man, we got so much other stuff to do.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:13:54]:
It's a great point. I mean, first and foremost, I'll take demos with all these new companies, or I'll even take free trials and sign up and play around with them a little bit. So there's a bit of me learning first to make sure it's just not like a shiny website. And I'm like, oh, this is cool. Go check it out. But I'll actually get in the weeds and that cuts out like 90% of the crap. And then if I'm like, hey, this could actually be really good, then I'll say, here's a cool idea. Here's something.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:14:17]:
Tend not to push it on, like, go do this, but a more of like an informative, you should check this out. And then I cross my fingers and hope that they actually want to check it out, if not, no harm. But my goal is really just to be kind of a collaborator with a lot of my different.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:34]:
I think that technology piece is such a important part of marketing and really just revenue in general today. We mentioned Guillaume earlier, but, like, he's somebody that I learned a lot from working together, where I come from, much more of like, the copywriting, storytelling, brand positioning, background. He's much more, he's the growth hacker. But what I saw him do, and I've seen other people do this. Tom Wentworth, who's the CMO of a company called Recorded Futures, a friend of mine. He's somebody that's always trying new things, always trying new products. I see this with Kip, like signing up for new products all the time. I feel like you can create it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:09]:
There are such few advantages that you can create in your career. Being an early adopter is one of them. And being super curious and like, signing up for tools and technology, trying to bring new things into play. And so I'm saying this on this podcast because I do think for the people that are listening, don't let all the noise about technology and AI this and that. Don't let that blind you. There actually is an opportunity. And how can you be the curious early adopter and be like, yeah, we're going to try this thing and bring this in. And this is the CEO of $100 million company telling me he still signs up for new tools and takes demos and trials.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:41]:
Don't you see that that can be an advantage for you to be an earlier adopter with tools and tech, right?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:15:46]:
Yeah, exactly. Great point.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:49]:
What else is interesting to you about AI? How is AI gonna play with what you all do with direct mail and gifting and outbound? What role is it gonna play?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:15:58]:
I'm really bullish on AI and gifting our direct mail. I think AI has a really unique place where you can use it to increase conversions for us and increase productivity. And so I think AI is really good at analyzing, like, gazillions of data points, writing and messaging, providing recommendation engines. And so for us, plugging in the tens of millions of gifts sent, the hundreds of thousands of senders, we have this really interesting data set of what works. And so our end goal is like, how do we help our customers drive conversion or productivity by way of like, what's the right message to send? What's the right gift to send, what's the right time to send it, who's the right person to send to, and what's the right delivery channel? And so all of those things play into how we can leverage AI and a really strong data foundation, which was one of the reasons why we picked up and acquired Alice not too long ago, was because of our future vision of this core data foundation to really build this AI engines.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:56]:
Let's talk about a specific example for people. Let's give the marketers that listen to maybe an actual campaign example of where AI would sit and what doing this without AI would look like and versus what it could look like.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:17:08]:
So I'll go down that kind of message, gift time, person delivery channel, so we could find the right gift for you through our smart send feature. You can just plug in your email address and we'll come back and say, hey, we know Dave likes XYZ. And so that shortens the time that could have spent 15 minutes researching or zero minutes sending the wrong gift to, wow. Instantly getting suggestions. You could also plug in if you don't want to put in a specific email, you could say, hey, what are people in Boston like versus Florida? And so there's that kind of recommendation more on like a Persona basis.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:41]:
That's juicy. That's for the off the record converse.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:17:43]:
I'm actually thinking about doing a LinkedIn live weekly where I just like, plug in some of these recommendations and just like, see what it spins up live and send out gifts live.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:51]:
So I think you should bring that in and bring in the election cycle into that layer on politics, and then get really spicy with what people.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:17:59]:
And then we can write the message and craft that through a feature we call pen pal, where it can use AI to write the message based on the person, the gift, the value prop. And so again, saving someone 15 minutes or saving them a better written message that converts more than a crappy written message. We're also on the right time going to be pulling in first and third party data around, hey, send this because of this data happening in your CRM or this data happening in the intent world, et cetera. And then we're innovating right now on a really interesting smart delivery feature that we'll be releasing where we can say, hey, don't send to Kris, he's not in the office. Send to his home, and here's his home address. Or, hey, we know that Dave goes in the office because of XYZ. Send it to his office and surprise him. So there's a really interesting data set, too, around suggested engine for delivery.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:18:47]:
Choose.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:48]:
How would you get all that? Where does that data come from?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:18:51]:
There's a mixture of proprietary data, a bunch of data available that is available for consumers that were matched to business profiles.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:59]:
How would somebody know if I work from home or go to an office?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:19:02]:
Yeah, so there's a mixture of IP data that we can pull from your IP and where you're sitting. Interesting data that we can pull from content that you're posting about. Or maybe you're talking on a podcast and mentioning this. Or there's a video where we can see you're at home, or we can check that you don't even have an office, or your office is so far away from where your LinkedIn location is. Or we know that your office address is this and your home address is this.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:28]:
This is all data that lives in send that you have.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:19:31]:
This is a mixture of data that. Some data we have, some data that's in other data providers. There's like about 500 data providers out there. A lot of this is not necessarily new for consumers. It's applying some of this really interesting data set that's more consumer ties into the business. B two B world interesting. And at the end of the day, all that AI just drives more conversions, because if you get an interesting gift, some diapers at your house, at the right time, at the right message.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:58]:
Let me tell you something, Kris. You know what the worst thing people send is? I've never had an opportunity to talk about this. Any one of those boxes that has all of the freaking like zigzag stuffing in it. People will send me a mug, and inside of that box in the mug, there is so much trash and nonsense. I instantly hate the brand that sent me the mug because it becomes more of a nuisance on the other side. If you want me to love you. I forget what I did, who sent me this, but I spoke at somebody's event and they sent me 24 cookies. Oh my God, we crushed those cookies in like five days.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:31]:
Yeah, that's how you do it. Anyway, this is a soapbox for a different podcast. But I do think that stuff matters. Make the packaging easy, but that's not on you, that's also on us.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:20:40]:
We help suggest these things to our customers. We help with really thinking about the whole experience.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:45]:
You don't own the actual products, right? Like, don't. Aren't you working with companies that create the products?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:20:50]:
Yeah, so we work with companies that create the products, but we're not necessarily manufacturer, but we do do logistics and warehousing and fulfillment. So we are helpful in some of that as well. But yeah, a lot of it goes into our global marketplace, our global fulfillment network that we can influence.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:05]:
So does everybody that uses Sendoso. Is it to send gifts specifically or like what I use Sendoso to? Like I have 500 exit, five hoodies. I want to store those somewhere and.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:21:16]:
Yeah, exactly. So we do storage and shipping of swag. You could send 10,000 hoodies or one hoodie at a time. You can send unlimited swag, either swag on demand, one off, or we can source and procure tens of thousands of swag items. There's really infinite gifts that we have in our marketplace that you could send someone macaroon cookies if they're in Paris or Dunkin donuts if you're in Boston. You can send direct mail, flatmail, printed booklets. Maybe you have a really interesting book that you released and you want to send that with a page highlighted in it. We've sent oculuses.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:21:51]:
The list goes on. It's really infinite. There's experience you can send.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:54]:
That's an interesting thing to sell then as a service, as a product, because the use case is different. How do people think about the ROI is different? If I'm using this for sales, then it's pretty easy to measure. I sent Dave some cookies. He booked a meeting and he bought cookies for the win. But there's also a whole use case for just the logistics part with I'm sure you have so many customers that are using your product for customer marketing or surprise and delight, or even large teams that need it for fulfillment. Do they think about the ROI of a platform like this differently?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:22:31]:
They do, yeah. So some of those examples, they might have the customer welcome kits or things like that. They might think of the ROI as less of like, hey, I'm trying to drive an instant conversion that I can track, but more so I can outsource all of the sourcing procurement logistics effort. So I just click a button or I set up a complete automation. Anytime something equals close one in Salesforce, automatically send this and you can kind of set it, forget it. We also have huge economies of scale, kind of like Costco in effect, where we can say, hey, we'll buy that hoodie for you cheaper than you could buy it yourself and we can ship it cheaper than you could ship it yourself. And you don't have to spend any hours of your payday shipping it or your employees. Director of demandgen or director of customer marketing.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:23:12]:
There's a lot of different productivity, time, saving, cost savings, Roi.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:17]:
So you just look at it differently. Like, instead of having to hire someone and manage this whole process, here's what we spent. Do you create swag for people you have?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:23:24]:
Oh, yeah, for sure. We will rely on a lot of partners, but we'll provide a lot of suggestions. We have a whole campaign services team that will kind of be almost like agency esque and pitching ideas or validating your ideas. And we'll go out and procure all the items and source it. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:42]:
I worked at drift and I worked for this guy, David Cancel, who's amazing, founder and CEO, and he was unbelievable at marketing. And the reason this topic is interesting to me is because I think that in marketing we often look for like the hacky stuff, the optimization stuff. We started a podcast called seeking Wisdom from like day one. We got a first, like listener email. He's like, send that person. We talked about a book. We talked about Ogilvy on advertising. On this podcast episode, some woman writes in and it's like, I love that episode.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:11]:
He's like, send her the book. And I'm like, really? Yep. Spend the $20, send her the book. Send her the book. She takes a picture, she posts on LinkedIn. Like there's something about, especially in this digital era, in the AI era, it's like physical goods, physical gifts, whether it's a handwritten note or cookies or a book. He showed me that those interactions, the brand affinity and connection that you can create when doing stuff. And so I think it's easy to look at something like Sendoso and say like oh yeah, yeah I get it, you send gifts to prospects.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:39]:
But like I actually think theres a whole marketing and brand building affinity play here. You have to work for someone who understands this and is willing to spend on it to do it because otherwise its like, well we spent $30 to send Kris a hoodie. Whats the value of that? One of the greatest brands to ever do this was mailchimp and they would do random things. They would do custom knitted hats for your cat or something. People would take pictures of that and post it on social. And I think these opportunities are so underrated and undervalued even if you can only send out to ten people because you have a small budget. I love that.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:25:15]:
It's amazing what like the psychology of gifting or the tangible nature of opening up a box and the surprise of that and delight with that. And like you said, the brand affinity, the building of a community, the social, it's like I think everyone got overly focused on like results, attribution, demand Gen. Every dollar equals $10 and some of the indirect ability to build brand and community is paying off for those companies that did have executive leadership saying let's do this. I think it's huge.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:47]:
We need to figure out how Syndoso becomes the exclusive swag provider for exit five.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:25:53]:
Let's do it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:54]:
Because I wrote a book two years ago and I got all these books, extra copies that came to my house from it, from the publisher. Even sending those out, a friend would be like, yo, send me a copy of the book and I'm like, okay. You actually have no idea how much effort that is to like package an individual book, get their address, go to the post office, pay for shipping on each one of those. It's a nightmare.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:26:14]:
Yeah, that's where you just load it up in our platform, you click a button, you could ask them for their fill in their address so you don't have to worry about that if you don't have it. We've even done some fun things where it's like we'll highlight like page eight and then have a handwritten note go along with it saying like, I think you'd like this. And like you said, a click of a button in automation, a CSV upload if you want to go that route. But it's so much easier to click a button than it is to like run to the post office and find a box and, and it saves you money. We have such economies of scale that like our shipping rates are way better than you'd ever be able to get.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:45]:
Yeah, I think the book sold for like 12.99 or something and it was like 8.95 to ship it to somebody and I'm like, God forbid it was someone from outside the US, I'd be like, oh, I'm not shipping them, you're not getting this book. We talked about the surprise and delight type of gifting. Where do you think the best point in the sales funnel is to deploy? This is it before the meeting to get a meeting after the meeting. Do you have any best practices around that?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:27:13]:
I think about this case by case and that's where our sales team really becomes consultants for new prospects. Well, where is the specific company? Company Acme cos. Where is the biggest pain? Are they booking a lot of meetings but have a 50% show rate? Well let's solve that. Or hey, there's a huge gap in top of funnel pipeline, they're not getting enough meetings, let's focus on that. Or hey, their sales cycle has been getting longer and longer, how do we shorten that? And so I think about it as this, like, it's not like a one size fits all, close your eyes and shoot out a gazillion gifts. It's how do you figure out where in the cycle you're optimizing for? How do we make that easy to drive results for you? So I know it's not the perfect answer, but I think it's a better answer for marketers or salespeople to think about. Where can we look at metrics that we want to improve on in business?

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:00]:
What else is interesting to you, Kris, that we should talk about with this engaged audience of marketing folks hungry to get better?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:28:08]:
One area that I really like is this. What we're dubbing internally is like growth Ops. What I think about is kind of a rev ops mindset taking action. So really I'm excited for this team that's focused around orchestrating a lot of our outbound, finding talent that's more obsessed with APIs and automations and data and how they can stitch those together and then also managing some of the AI centrally in one team versus trying to think that everyone can just pick up these really robust, complex tools overnight, which again that is one of the catch 22s is some of these AI tools are not easy to pick up on. And so having a centralized growth ops.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:50]:
Team, I think it's going to be a whole new job function. I mean I got to listen to other people's podcasts and read other people's stuff. I open up chat GPT, and I feel like there's a million ways and I'm using it like one way. So growth Ops is different than revenue Ops. Revenue Ops is more defense.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:29:09]:
I think it's more defense. It's more system focused, maybe data focused, but mostly behind the scenes and less like taking action. Now, I'm generalizing because there's probably some rev ops people listening saying like, f you. I do all that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:23]:
Yeah, they're going to hate me. Sean Lane, if you're listening to this, I'm sorry, man. I love you.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:29:27]:
No, but I love the function. My goal is just to try to, like, rephrase it so that we think about, hey, how do you use that expertise and then apply it to outbound? Because I don't know. There's not as many rev ops people going out there and like owning all of the outbound and trying to drive pipeline. They might be stitching the systems together, pulling in data, but then maybe there's an SDR doing the legwork. This is more of a big data, big systems, big automations approach.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:53]:
I'm director of marketing Dave at a $12 million ARR B two B SaaS company. Hey, we want to do x, Y, and Z. This team is like my partner. It's like an enablement role so we can go do cool stuff.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:30:05]:
I think it's bridging the gap between where demandgen and Rev ops meet, but also centralizing that across. We use this to help drive automation with our partner engagements, with our customer expansion and customer upsells. So I think it's a team that's going to be able to utilize all these somewhat complex, tricky tools to drive way more exponential value than just like one plus one equals two. It's like some of the new modern tech is going to be one plus one equals ten if you get it right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:37]:
What's an example of what growth Ops is doing inside of Sendoso right now?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:30:42]:
Yeah, so I think it's our whole clay and outbound approach has been built centrally, where it's been managed from more of a marketing centralized function than maybe a sales development group sitting under sales. That team is savvy enough to know about APIs, about connecting data around, waterfalling multiple data sources around, integrating that into the multiple martech systems around, pushing data into Snowflake if we need to. It's kind of like, gee, if we go back to what he did back in the day, it's kind of thinking about this growth function, which I think is some teams have it, some teams don't. It's somewhat more popularized and kind of maybe b two c, where you have to fight fires with one to gazillion skin. I think b, two b for a while was able to do more, like, human to human combat. Let's just throw more heads at it. And I think this new team is able to drive exponential results and really create a killer cactal FTV. Because you're not inflating it with so many heads, you're able to do way more with tools and data.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:45]:
That makes sense. I also feel like when you carve out, it's almost like the whole role of, like, honestly, like, Martech and sales. Like we talked about earlier, there's so many tools and technology to have a team and people that are responsible for, like, knowing the ins and outs. I'm really good with ideas and strategy, but I'm often not good at knowing what's possible. And so, like, when I worked with G as an example, I'd be like, oh, here's an idea. We could do this and this, and here's how I'm going to do it. He's like, no, I wish I could do his accent.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:32:14]:
Yeah, I know.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:15]:
He'd be like, no, you moron. Like, we can actually automate it with this and this and this. And so give me the copy. Give me this and that created an amazing partnership versus, like, me trying to figure out everything with, like, Google Docs. And Zapier is v one, but v two is Zapier custom GPTs. Figuring out all these agents, like, just so many ways to do something. But I think having that carved out as a dedicated team is interesting. It puts everybody in a better position.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:40]:
Yeah.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:32:41]:
And I think it allows us to go find and hunt for talent that wants to think differently, that wants to find the modern tools. It also is a forcing function for us to say, hey, go do it differently. Don't run the playbook of 2010. Go reinvent a new playbook. And kind of excited for, like you said, the next five years are going to be a huge unlock and a huge transformative years for marketing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:03]:
Everybody talks about intent signals. What are some of the intent signals that people might not be using yet that you think could be interesting?

Kris Rudeegraap [00:33:14]:
Warms up the reason for you reaching out and provides that much more personalization. There's a lot of the web intent, first party intent. There's a lot of this third party. Someone searched on forbes.com for an article, and you got that. But a couple of the ones we've been exploring and having some success with, especially now with AI, and that you can use AI to really take on summaries or use API calls to gather tons of audio and video content. So one is podcasts, and there's a tool called listenotes that's interesting because you can go and leverage like we just talked for the last 45 minutes or whatever. And there's some interesting tidbits in here that you wouldn't want to like for every prospect listed for 45 minutes, perhaps. But if you could pull out four things really quickly and use that in prospecting into me, Kris, or you, Dave, that's like super valuable.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:34:02]:
So I think there's a lot of intent data that was locked in interesting podcasts, interesting video webinars that will now be instantly available through AI tech to pull out the snippets and then very easily transform that into email personalization. So I think that's really interesting. There's still a lot of interesting intent locked up in partners. And I think some of the tools like Crossbeam and reveal have really interesting data sets that if you can use that wisely and at scale for intent, it's going to help with your both acquisition, leveraging partners as well as cross selling.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:40]:
All right, Kris, I'll give you the mic for the final thing, something I didn't ask you or we should have talked about before we wrap up.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:34:46]:
I think we had a great conversation. I mean, what other things that are burning to me maybe is just I love getting involved and meeting new people. So if people want to reach out to me, chrisindoso.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, join the conversation there. But a big networker. Hopefully I can get out to your event, too. I was reading up on that in Vermont that looks kick ass. So I know you sold out pretty quickly, so maybe I'll sneak in a ticket or something if we can.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:08]:
I have some reserve. We did sell it out, but I pulled the CEO card and I got a couple reserved and it comes with a turkey sandwich, so I love turkey. Lucky you. All right, man. Well, nice to meet you. Thank you for hanging out on the podcast. First time we've covered the topic of gifting and direct mail, and I think there's a lot of people listening that are trying to do creative things out there. And I think that's what's exciting about marketing right now is there is the world is your oyster.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:34]:
There's more tools than ever at your disposal. But what are you going to do that stands out? How are you going to be different? And I think that's something that we want to help people do through this podcast. So I appreciate you coming on. Check out Kris on LinkedIn. We'll link to him. Check out Sendoso. And thanks for hanging out with us on the exit five podcast.

Kris Rudeegraap [00:35:49]:
You bet. Thanks for having me, Dave. Exit.