Accelerate 2021 was a 2-day virtual summit that featured 12 sales leaders and coaches, hailing from the hottest B2B companies. An event that brought together the top minds in sales whom everyone loves.

This is a blog series where we cover the speaker's speeches from Accelerate. Today, we’ll run through Kris Rudeegraap, CEO, Sendoso's talk on 'Mastering the Art of Revenue Impact.'

Transcript

David Youngblood

We have a very, very exciting kickoff to day two of accelerate, you know, someone who likely needs a little to no introduction. You know, Kris Rudeegraap, how I like to say it. And it's less than approved by Kris himself. So just so you know. But he's the co-founder and the CEO of a little company called Sendoso. Right. So, you've probably heard of them. If you haven't done the leading sending platform, Kris has actually made has had more than a decade of sales experience. And he spent time at companies like talk desk, Yap stone, and pakora. Right. So, during that time, we actually discovered that creating a meaningful engagement right through direct mail and gifting was actually an effective way to drive demand. So, increase and increase sales, right, which helped inspire the idea for Sendoso of itself. So, he's that he's actually a California native and a CSU alumnus. I love Him. And He currently resides there in the Bay Area, so wouldn't know more about him. Let's talk to him. And with him Well, with that, we'll bring Kris to the stage. Here we go. And believe he can join us now. Hello, Kris. Good morning.

Kris Rudeegraap

Good morning. Thank you for having me, David.

David Youngblood

Yeah, thanks for joining, you know, you're under no pressure. But you're Speaker One on day two of our inaugural event accelerate. And we have a little kind of, you know, sidebar slash maybe wager going on about day two versus day one speaker lineup. So, no pressure at all, truly. But with that, I'll turn it over to you. And today, obviously, we're talking about mastering the art of revenue impact, which is a very important topic that we're all painfully and we're thankfully aware of this time of year. So, in the year, and the fiscal, New year, new quotas, all that fun stuff. So, with that, I get I will truly shut up now and turn it over to you.

Kris Rudeegraap

Thank you so much excited to kick things off today. It's a great, fun-filled day with a lot of awesome speakers. So, I will kick things off, and jump into my presentation here. So let me look like I got to share my screen and get things started. All right. Perfect. So, we're talking about mastering the art of revenue impact. And specifically, I want to get into details on really the changing landscape of the sales development world. And so, with that, let's kick things off. And I will really quickly just give you a little bit more context. David, I appreciate your introduction. That was perfect. But I'll give you some context in terms of why I started Sendoso. So, two, so I started out Sendoso about five years ago, based on my personal needs. And I really spent a decade in sales prior to starting Sendoso. So, and like many of you, AES or SDRs, on this webinar, I was in your shoes, I had to prospect meetings, close deals, and break into new accounts. And I decided I wanted to get more creative with breaking through the noise. And so, I found myself starting to write handwritten notes, I grab swag and send it out, I'd find quirky gifts off of Amazon and send it out all things that were personalized the, to the prospect. And it worked really, really well. It was just manual and time-consuming. And so, I had this epiphany of, hey, why isn't there a platform or I can just click a button inside of Salesforce. And voila, things are sent and tracked and expensed. And that was my precipice for starting Sendoso And that's what gave me the inspiration to say hey, I'm going to start.

Sendoso helps other sales professionals, you know, breakthrough this noise and be more personal and fast forward a little bit. Sendoso is about 500 employees now we've raised about 160 million in funding 10s of 1000s of users we've helped sales marketers, customers, service folks, and HR individuals across the entire world send millions of packages. So really exciting time. wanted to give you a little fun fact about me personally so you can get to know me. So, my dog, I have a miniature golden doodle named Stella. She's my little best buddy. She's actually our chief marketing officer, so you actually might hear her barking today. And I also want to be a pro-croquet player. For anyone who's ever played croquet. It's a super fun sport that you can play on a little small little lawn. You know, when it's summertime you'll find me outside playing that game. And then lastly, I helped my Guy Fieri famous so if you ever watch The Triple D or drivers dives and dragons on Food Network more than a decade ago, I worked with him on a Myspace promotional program where we got a ton of votes for him as he was trying to be competing on America's Next Top food chef. So fun little fact, and one of my first entrepreneurial endeavors was a Myspace marketing company of all things. Alright, let's get into this. So, what are we talking about today, we first want to talk about the current buying landscape? And really get into some details on, you know, what's happening today. We also are going to jump into the future of sales development, I want to talk about some of the things that I'm seeing emerge for SDRs. We're going to talk about turning traditional into next-level outreach. And then lastly, we're gonna really focus on the revenue impact of personalization and talk more about how you can get good at personalizing. Alright, so first off, let's start off with where we are today. And so, first, I want to really get into that b2b buyers have, you know, tuned out, there's a lot of digital noise going on. And today's little level of interconnectedness is unprecedented. And it really creates unique, unpredictable b2b buying behavior. And so SDRs messaging could get lost in the sales funnel. And so, what are you doing to really stand out, so that you can get in front of your buyers? And really quickly, I want to take a step back, before we get into what's next, and really look at a couple of different avenues, one with email marketing, so email marketing emerged, you know, way back in the 90s. And you can see that back way back when, you know, Hotmail was popular, you know, there was stats that, you know, the open rates were huge and 400 emails through, were generating 13 million in revenue. Can you imagine that sending 14 million are sending 400 emails and generating that much revenue? So, it was a channel that was, you know, early on and exploded. And back in 2001, we saw that there were about 600 billion emails sent now there are over 300 trillion emails sent. So that's something to consider. The other thing is digital marketing and advertising. So that has also continued to evolve as well. And way back in the 90s, you saw click rates in the 50% plus rate. Now we're seeing hundreds of billions about 450 billion in ad spend with a quarter of a percent of click-through rates. So, times are changing what worked 10 years ago, doesn't mean it's going to work today. So, what are you doing to adapt and evolve? And I think that's really what I want to focus on today. The other thing that's important to consider is we are seeing a shift in b2b buying behavior. And over the next several years, digital actual digital interaction between buyers and prospects will break the traditional sales model. So, we're gonna see more and more digital selling. And with that, SDR outreach still deeds being broad, cold outreach, quantity over quality, and impersonal interactions. So how do we evolve the sales development landscape, because b2b Buying is increasingly unpredictable? There also, you can no longer use our edge can be impersonal, you have to personalize it. and relationship building has always been important.

But it's even more important today. And we believe that SDRs play a critical role in building the relationship very first in the top funnel. And that's one thing that will remain constant is really how SDRs can really create meaningful connections in the sales process, and ultimately, get creative to cut through the noise and capture people's attention. So, let's talk a little bit more about the future of sales development. And this is what really gets me excited. So, the sales development playbook that SDRs have been using has changed in order to increase response rates, book meetings, and make a revenue impact SDRs have to evolve their approach. And so different things are happening right now there's an emergence of more tools, there's an emergence of more competitors, there's an emergence of more noise. And so, with that, we have to really think about the individual and the prospect and with so what we're seeing is, it's time to evolve, you've got to understand how the changing landscape is happening, you also have to work on how you get connected to that prospect. And so, giving a significant part of the prospecting efforts in really creating that meaningful relationship. And so, what I want to do is talk about how you can really leverage sending to really think about out-of-the-box ways to create highly personalized engagement. And so, with sending and sending out gifts and direct mail and swag and handwritten notes, you can really think about how do you drive impact overactivity? And I think years and years ago Go, it was all about activity. And I still see some SDR leaders really focused on the more activity, the better. And really what we preach here at Sendoso, we really see some of the best SDR teams out there. They're focused on quality over quantity. And so really looking at how each touchpoint should matter, and how do you capture that attention. The other thing that is extremely important in today's world is getting creative. Creativity is a competitive advantage. And how do you establish that wow factor? When we're interviewing for SDRs? Here we actually interview how creative an SDR can be. There are questions that we ask, and we really look at thinking about how you get creative, it's one of those skills that people can learn. That's something that it's harder to automate creativity. And it's something that if you can get good at creativity, you can use that in your outreach. I even find myself looking at sales and seeing, hey, how do you time block for creativity? How are you learning to be better and get more creative? And so that's one of those areas where if I was an SDR, I would focus more of my time on getting better at being creative. The other thing to focus on too, is just the traditional approach, and how do we look at more of a human-first approach to personalization, and not just a persona approach? And so, I'll get into that in just a second. All right, so let's really talk about turning traditional into next-level outreach.

Kris Rudeegraap

So, what do I mean by that? I really mean that, how do we look at personalization and being thoughtful and turning traditional outreach. So, by considering who your prospect is and what they care about, you can really surprise and delight them. And so, with personalization, you got to think about who they are, what do they care about? What are they doing today? You know, I think that the pandemic was a great example where people all of a sudden, started working from home. So how do you personalize that? And how do you adapt to that, and so with, with that, you know, we're seeing that there are different ways that you can use gifting to break through this noise and be more personal, you can bolster cold outreach with E gifts that engage a prospect. The nice thing about the gifts is, are you can send them instantly to someone's email address.

And that provides you with a means to be able to create a really instant personal interaction, you can also use, you know, the ability to send them a gift choice where they can decide what they want to get, and really create a more personal impact. That way. You can follow up with physical gifts that impress using address confirmation to gather their address, and then handwritten notes are again, a time tried and true way for you to feel more personal when you send that out. If you're looking to look at more and more ways on how you can get personal and how you can drive personalization, I'd highly recommend checking out flip the script.co that Collin has an amazing series of a lot of information on really, how you do how should you think about personalization throughout the entire SDR experience. So again, that's flip the script.co. And I'd definitely recommend checking that out if you want to learn more and more on how to get personal and how to personalize. Alright, so the next thing I wanted to do is dive into more about how you can personalize with gifting. And I think this is really where my success and sales came from. This also is where you know, for those of you who are not yet integrating gifting into your outreach, these are some of the tips and tricks that I would share that are very quick and easy to implement. So, one is really thinking about things like E gifts. Again, you can send there are e-gifts that are worldwide. So, you can really send these to anyone in the world. There are direct options where you can send things like cupcakes and flowers and different things that are going to be really personalized to a location. You can think about branded items. So branded swag, boxes, mailers, handwritten notes. And then one of my favorites is highly personalized things from Amazon. And so, this is one of the things that worked very, very well, back when I was in sales about five years ago, because I would be on a call, I would hear a dog bark and I go and find something on Amazon that would reference you know that that conversation or something personal for that prospect. What we've done is we've innovated that one level up in terms of Sendoso and having integration with Amazon so that when you find that, you know, the creative, personalized item from Amazon, instead of sending from amazon it actually goes to our warehouse. It's repackaged with the handrail. It is noted and sent out all tracked through your sales tools like CRMs, like Salesforce, and also pulling from your account balance so you can track it and use that money that's allocated to you can spend against. So that's one of my favorite areas. And the nice thing about that is it as opposed to coming directly from Amazon, where it's coming in an Amazon box with a very unperson realized feeling, we completely re-personalize the gift. And in my opinion, the unboxing experience can be just as important as the gift itself at times. So, you really want to make sure you're focused on not just the gift inside the box. But what is the box itself when you open the box? What do you see and really being able to put time and effort into the entire experience is really going to drive even better results for you? Alright, so the next thing I want to talk about is how you create more of a repeatable process. So, when you're doing gifting in direct mail on your own, it can feel very weird, and without a sending platform like Sendoso. So, it can feel like you're putting in a lot of effort. And it can actually be very timely, timing consuming. And so, as an SDR you really want to make sure you can be efficient, strategic, effective, and also very repeatable. And so, this is where integrating a tool like Sendoso, so into your sales engagement process can really be something that allows you to be more effective, and ultimately not have to think about when to send, but focus your time on what to send, and what's the note that should be associated with this. So you so really what, what our team does, and what we've seen other really, you know, modern forward-thinking companies do is you really think about the buying experience from start to finish from, you know, top of the funnel, whether it's from marketing, driving inbound leads, or whether it's SDRs, and then to AES and into CSMs and account managers.

But ultimately, what are the different touchpoints in an outbound sales engagement strategy? So, number 12345 thing? What are those different steps? And where can you insert gifting to be a part of that process? And so, then you always know that you know, step two is going to be this gift. And whether it's an E gift, whether it's a branded item, whether it's a personalized Amazon 10, you'll always have that top of mind so that you can make sure that you're constantly using this, and it can be repeatable. There are also ways that you can automate and trigger things. So this is something that, again, we use when prospects are engaging with content on our website, for example, will trigger off an E gift or will trigger off a physical gift as just a way to engage with that prospect in a unique, more creative, more personal way than just having some cold outreach, saying, hey, Sal, you downloaded something. So again, how do you integrate this into all aspects of your buying experience and everywhere, where you're going to have a touch point. And so, with that, you know, humanizing the approach is extremely important. So, you should be hyper-relevant to the buyer, and multi-channel. So again, we'll get into this a little bit later, but you need to be able to be multi-channel for everything. So, I'm not preaching, you should only send gifts out, I'm preaching that you should focus on, when is the right time to send a gift, an email, a phone, call a LinkedIn, etc. As those all help you set that meeting or close that prospect into a customer. I mentioned this throughout the presentation. But integrations are super important because it enables SDRs to personalize at a scale where they're at it. So, we have integrations into CRMs sales, engagement platforms, ABM platforms, and marketing automation platforms. And so, this is helpful because as an SDR, you want to spend as much time as you can on the tools you already know. And so, if we can live inside of Salesforce, and you can do actions like sending gifts out of Salesforce or HUBZone, etc. It really allows you to cut down on time for the manual processes, and really allows you to spend more time getting creative. And that's one of the areas where I see with tools these days that help you automate you, you tend to say, Hey, I'm going to automate so I'm going to send I can, I can send so much more out or I can again, I can prospect way more accounts, but I think a better approach to think about it. Okay, well, you're able to automate some of these manual things like you can automate the box packing or you can automate the email sequencing. So that gives you more time. Maybe not necessarily to prospect into so many more accounts, but to get creative to get better at those personal touchpoints within that outreach. sequences. One thing to note too on ABM platforms that I think are really crucial is these ABM platforms that start to share with you intent data and other insights, being able to leverage that so that you can say, hey, someone's driving some intent or engaging with one of our ads or is searching for something relevant to our company or our competitors. And so, let's use that as a trigger as a mechanism to go reach out to that prospect. And then marketing automation, you know, sales and marketing need to play well together, they need to have alignment. And there are marketing automation platforms like Marketo, for example, where you know, some of the very top of funnel email nurtures are going to be automated. But what sophisticated SDR teams can do is really look at that data, look at those insights, and figure out that engagement level to then turn someone that might be into a more nurture campaign, and turn them into a more of a personalized outreach and, and then adding them into your, your sequence. So, and really, using all these different tools is going to help you be more successful in setting up meetings. Alright, so I mentioned this earlier, but I wanted to just go through a very important part of sending and gifting.

And this is kind of one of those myths, I think some people say, hey, if you can just, you know, send out a cool, you know, a box of cookies with a handwritten note or some swag, you know, the person just gonna respond, I'm gonna get a gazillion meetings. That's not necessarily true. And what you really need to make sure you do is what's going to happen after the delivery of the item. And this is really crucial. And sometimes a step that's less thought out of in advance. So, I mentioned this earlier, you really have to think about each step of the sequence in advance 12356789, however many you have. So once the package arrives, you know, at the customer's office, at their desk at their home, what are you gonna do next. And so, this is really where you can use an orchestration tool, or sales engagement tool to come in. And then hey, as soon as that package arrives, and I get a notification from some notes, so for example, I'm going to call them, and I'm going to, and if there's, I'm going to leave a voicemail, if not, then I'm going to send a very personalized email referencing that package. So, you're bringing it back to something that, you know, they've opened up this box, likely they see this. And so, this is something that is going to allow them to remember, hey, that's right, I did receive that package, I should probably follow up. And then it's useful to see how are they engaging with other content on your website? Or, you know, what is that next step action. So again, I really preach that you need to have a sequence and very thoughtful steps, you can't just spray and pray anymore. Alright, so did a lot of talking in terms of theoretical examples, I wanted to share with you three or four specific examples of how either Sendoso, so or some of our top customers are using Sendoso. So, and just to share the impact that it's happening, and it's happening, and the results, so you can kind of understand some of the results and what to expect. So, the first example I wanted to use is how Sendoso. So, we are using it every day, as you can imagine. And so, an example from last year we launched a work from a home campaign where SDRs could send relevant either Sendoso choice for an E gift, they could ask for the confirmation address, or they could send an address to prospects. And this was something where we gave it was a cookie, it was a pinata, and it was an E gift card. And we really like the SDRs choose which one of those they wanted. And we also looked at things that were for something that a family could also enjoy. So, like cookies, and you have kids, for example, it's something where when you're at home, it's an easy thing to enjoy with the family. And after we analyze the results, we saw that 20% of meetings were set with an 81% attendance rate, we saw that 76% of those meetings received a gift converted to opportunities. And I think the most important thing is for every dollar we spent we created $500 and a pipeline. And this is one of the more interesting data points that I like to go a little bit more in-depth on. Specifically, because gifting and direct mail custom money, mom as opposed to maybe phone and email and even social you can get away with you know, spending zero, you know, extra dollars on it, other than the time of day takes. So some people might be hesitant to say how am I going to allocate more money into sending gifts and what and how much should I spend and saying hey, you know, sending a, you know, a $30 pinata with a no, like that's expensive, but if you compare it to the impact of the pipeline, then you can see in this example, every $1 We spent to generate $500 in pipeline And then you can when you break it down into that metric you can compare to other paid mediums to like ads, how many for every dollar and ads, how much pipeline are you generating. Or if you look at other paid mediums you can see that so I think that helps level the playing field and compare apples to apples. The next example I wanted to share with you is from a publicly-traded cybersecurity company, they were using our platform to send targeted cold leads, he guesses.

And so really, their goal was to send out these visa and food delivery gifts to prospects with a note from the SDR about using the funds to support local shops and local restaurants. And so, they can either use the local e-gift we had or the Visa gift card to spend at a local restaurant. And I think that ties back to a greater cause. It also allows the SDRs to think about the messaging as I mentioned before, it's not just the gift, it's also the message. And when you can have a pre-created message that can resonate with the prospects, he makes it that much easier. And that's really what we're thinking about playbooks coming come in. And you know, if you're a sales development leader on this call or an enablement leader, it's really how do you make gifting easier for your SDR team, and it's coming up with kind of campaign ish type of stands like this one where the gift itself was more impactful because it was related to a cause. And in terms of just some quick metrics here, this program resulted in 53 opportunities created and over a million dollars in revenue from this, it also created a lot of goodwill too, of course, gave back to some local businesses and restaurants which is amazing. The next example I wanted to use is from Chili Piper. For those of you who don't know they're a really great service that helps you with meeting bookings, we use it here. And calendar bookings our SDR team uses it both from an inbound and an outbound and also for lead routing from a perspective of booking meetings for the AE team. And so, Chili Piper has been a customer for a while now and they wanted to figure out how can they open the door for new prospects. And really, what they came up with was this genius idea and if you can see in a little picture there are their little hot sauces, which is super relevant since they're called Chili Piper and they wanted to have some messaging around spicing up your office and with that, they were able to increase meeting show rates by 33% by using this in the sales process prospect and I think the thing that I wanted to bring to attention here was really the creativeness of the messaging associated with the gift item associated with the brand and so sometimes the creativity can come in what you send sometimes coming up with a creative message around you know, the item itself and how it relates back to the brand can also drive up the response rates from using direct mail and gifting so again, I come back to this time and time again is how do you get creative it's not just about closing your eyes clicking a button and you know sending out some cookies or a gift. It's how do you get creative with the message or the item itself?

Alright, so the next one I wanted to talk about is from Gong and Gong is an amazing tool again, another customer of ours and we use Gong as well for our meeting intelligence. And so, Gong enabled their SDRs to build pipelines with Sendoso. So, the demand gen team partnered with the SDR team to break into new target accounts. And so really what they focus on is they have a list of target accounts. And this was working with the SDR with the director of demand gen in this case it was Russell Benz, and he had these lists of target accounts and said, Hey SDRs we're gonna send out these mini gongs with a handwritten note with no ask and really having the SDRs follow up immediately after with an outreach sequence. And so, the goal here was just to have some fun with it and send something out. In the case of the handwritten message, there was no ask or CTA on that. You might think that strange Hey, you're just gonna send something out without a CTA but it played into the sequence really well because the email follows up which happened immediately after was relating to that gone and so that allowed the SDR to have more of a warm first outreach because they were able to reference something that was already on that prospect DESC The cool thing about the mini Gong too is it's something that had some longevity and was able to sit on people's desks and have some fun with that. And the result for this was over 400 opportunities created in this campaign alone. Correct. The last one I wanted to talk about was a company called League. They bolstered their cold outreach with EGUs.

And so direct items, specifically succulents. And so, they were wanting to keep conversation. They wanted to keep meeting rates while keeping the conversation alive throughout the sales process. So, you set that you booked the meeting. And now there's this time in between the demo and the deal close. And so, they use this as a way to send out succulents during that kind of time. And they saw two things happen. One is it created an increase in cold outbound meetings booked. So, they saw an increase there. But more importantly, they saw a 25% increase in closed one deals that included some doses. So, they looked at deals that the account executives didn't send anything and deals that did, and they saw an increase there. I think this goes back to this personal human approach to sales, where during the sales process, you might have a tendency to say, hey, checking in, you know, are you ready to buy, maybe not in those words, but you're you might use the kind of a less than ideal strategy, where you're, you're really just kind of almost nagging the prospect to get their attention to move the deal along with this approach, and the league saw that they were able to actually kind of give and get where they sent out this gift, just to stay top of mind. And again, almost from a psychological benefit, really drive that prospect to continue to engage over that long sales cycle process. Alright, so the last thing I wanted to get into is just the revenue, impact of personalization, and really just talking about, again, the impact needs to be measurable. So, this is where you know, as an SDR or revenue organization, you need to be able to track the results back into your CRM or to you to your other tools, as well, because it's all about tracking the data. And so, you know, tools like Sendoso will help with that too, because we're pushing data back into your sales, engagement platforms, and your CRMs. And so, you don't have to manually track the success of these programs, it's automatically done for you. Here are some of their areas, though, where you can impact revenue, which is, you know, increasing response rates and open rates, you can book more meetings, you can reengage stalled opportunities. You can accelerate the deals through the cycle, and then you can hit revenue targets. All right, so that is what I wanted to share with you today. I wanted to leave some time left. So, David, do you want to jump back on with me and we can answer some questions? Can't hear you, David?

David Youngblood

Check. Check. One, two, can you hear me now?

Kris Rudeegraap

Good to go.

David Youngblood

It wouldn't be a virtual summit without a technical blurb blooper. So, I just want to say, Thanks, Kris. That was That was awesome. Truly, definitely, a lot of key takeaways and new ways to think about what's old is new again, right. It's in terms of differentiation and taking a personalized approach and taking personalization even a step further. What's funny, is that you mentioned before in preparation for the session here is his presentation made me hungry, right? With all those sweet things at the beginning. I didn't know that you have a spicy and savory on the back end as well. So now I'm like starving, but uh, just for funny reference. That you're speaking my language and proof that I'm not lying. I'm gonna share your screen really quick. And this is a picture or two pictures from our wedding. Okay. And my wife and my wedding back in 2009. My Groom's Cake was a Tabasco bottle. Right? That's all it was no hot sauce. Right. And then our wedding favors were some special blend recipes that we got the taste test and curated with the manufacturer. Some Youngblood hot sauce, so everybody got Youngblood hot sauce says take-home wedding favorites from our wedding.

Kris Rudeegraap

I love that. That's super creative.

David Youngblood

Yeah, so pretty, pretty cool. We definitely do have some questions. So, the good news here is we got some that come in so one from Martin is there. Is there any industry metric or benchmark to see if direct mail is working? Like how you measure validate verify success for that. What does that look like?

Kris Rudeegraap

Yeah, great question. So, I would, the thing that I would say is we have a resources section on our website where we share a lot of different industry data, we released a state of the sending report earlier this year that talks about different benchmarks that you can look at. So, I'd say check out our resources section for the exact data. But we are constantly sharing kind of anonymized data across the entire user base, especially now that we have, you know, 10s of 1000s of people sending in millions and millions of things being sent, we have a really interesting data set that we can share, both from an industry perspective, as well, from a use case perspective too.

David Youngblood

Cool, awesome. also jumping into the next one here. So, you know, how do you think about ROI, when you add gifting as a part of your prospecting workflow, right? Is there a framework guideline, or a calculator for that?

Kris Rudeegraap

Yeah. So, I think I, you know, alluded to this a little bit during the presentation, which is that how for every dollar you spend, how much pipeline that generates, so I think you can look at it from an ROI perspective, that way. You can also look at ROI on gifting in terms of, you know, the ability for you to how much are you spending to acquire customers? And what kind of your CAC and some of the more traditional, go-to-market metrics, where you're trying to understand how much it costs to acquire a customer, and you can add that into the mix. There's also potentially ROI on how you look at you leveraging a platform like Sendoso, or where you can do more gifting than you could on your own because of just the and also you can, you know, when I was in sales, I found myself spending, you know, hours of my day, at times packing boxes or trying to, you know, gotten source gifts and, and that time should have been spent on selling. And so, I think there's this kind of hidden cost of sales rep time. And how do you make sure that sales reps', SDRs are more effective, more efficient, and using their time more wisely?

David Youngblood

Yeah, no, absolutely. We're definitely all about efficiency here. And making it easy for the user. Right? Go their efforts, I want to bring it a personal question. Curious, how cool is it? Or how beneficial would it be to be a close personal friend or family member of Kris's around the holidays? Because you're so bad at gifting? I'm pretty sure. You probably get pretty well. Is that being that a safe assumption?

Kris Rudeegraap

Very safe assumption. Gift. I'm obsessed with gifting.

David Youngblood

Awesome. Awesome. All right, I'm adding you to my inner circle, the top five on my Myspace five. So, we're gonna be tight like that. I've got another question here from Tom. So how can leverage gifting without sounding like bribery? Right? How can you do it without seeming like you're scheming you're or cheesy? Right? And many times, what's added here is that reps struggle, leaning into gifting of prospects because they feel like it's bribing them to take a meeting. Right? So how do you what's your best practice?

Kris Rudeegraap

Yeah. And I think that you know, it's all in the messaging. It's all in the follow up to, as I alluded to earlier, and that, you know, if you're, if you're saying, hey, take a meeting with me, and I'll give you $50 to Amazon, you know, that might not come across the right way. But in the some of the examples I share with you is saying, Hey, here's a, you know, here's a gift card to 4 local business, we're doing a program around supporting local businesses, or the gong example, where there's actually no call to action was like, hey, thought you'd like this, you know, little mini gong on your desk that you can hit when you, you know, close a deal, right, and following up later, and then in the email thereafter, you're kind of related back to that gift item. So, I think it's all around thinking about, what are you going to do before? What are you going to do after the gift to eliminate some of the bribery? And how do you personalize it, you know, if you are seeing that, hey, this person just got a promotion, and you're referencing that, hey, here's a, you know, some champagne to celebrate your promotion, you know, I and then you kind of use that as just another touchpoint? I think oftentimes, salespeople, every time they have interaction, they feel like they need a call to action that's very strong to get that meeting. But then sometimes you if you know, you're going to be reaching out, you know, over a, you know, dozen-plus steps. Some of those can have very soft CTAs or just kind of paying it forward and building rapport. And I think gifting can play a good part in that. So, you say you're using is just a way to build that relationship.

David Youngblood

Gotcha. Awesome. So, unfortunately, are coming up on time. We do have a couple more questions. So just food for thought. And as an FYI, Kris will be tagging you and a follow-up with those questions on LinkedIn. So, you can just ask them, you know, firstly, if you want to, if not wisdom as best we can as well for the audience members but thank you again for coming on and kicking off day two of Accelerate 2021 here with outplay. And, you know, feel free to stick around and join in some of the sessions to do some of the chat and q&a If you want to, I'm not going to let you have that kind of time. But if you happen to, we certainly encourage you to participate as well. And audience for those of you out there in TV land. As a reminder, feel free to continuously use and utilize chat, Q&A within sessions as well as chat in the feed for the main event. And then here between sessions on the about a three-and-a-half-minute break.

Now that would be coming up feel free to join us at the booth. We've got some special treats for you there today. Some folks broadcasting live are ready to interact and engage with you and address any other questions you might have. Or if you just want to chat, you can join us there too. So, with that, we'll end this with a poll and transition to the next phase. All right, thanks again, Kris.