PODCAST 66: Improve your Sales Conversion Rate Integrating Direct Marketing w/ Kris Rudeegraap

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Kris Rudeegraap, who is the CEO and co-founder of Sendoso.

We’ll dive deep into the origins behind the business, the developments in event and in account based marketing, why direct mail and sending physical objects improves conversion rates through your sales cycle, and a lot of different conversations about how to grow and expand an early stage company as the co-founder and CEO.

If you missed episode 65, check it out here: PODCAST 65. The Framework to Deliver Exceptional Customer Success w/ Kim Rose

What You’ll Learn

  • The origin of Sendoso
  • Developments in event and account based marketing
  • Improving your conversion rates
  • How to grow and expand in an early stage company

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Show Agenda and Timestamps

  1. Show Introduction [00:09]
  2. About Sendoso [3:13]
  3. The Evolution of Sales [18:28]
  4. Why Everyone Should Be Using Direct Mail [26:29]
  5. Sam’s Corner [45:18]

Show Introduction

Sam Jacobs: Welcome back to the Sales Hacker podcast. Today we’ve got a very special show. This is a live recording that we did with Kris Rudeegraap, who is the CEO and co-founder of Sendoso. We talked about the origins behind the business, the developments in event and account based marketing, why direct mail and sending physical objects improves conversion rates through your sales cycle, and a lot of different conversations about how to grow and expand an early stage company as the co-founder and CEO. Kris also has a background in sales, so it’s really interesting conversation.

We’d like to thank our sponsors. Conga is the leading end-to-end digital document transformation suite. With Conga, you can simplify documents, automate contracts, and execute e-signatures so you can focus on accelerating sales cycles and closing business faster.

Our second sponsor is Outreach, the leading sales engagement platform that enables sales reps to humanize their communications at scale, from automating the soul-sucking manual work that eats up selling time to providing action-oriented tips on what communications are working best. Outreach has your back.

About Kris Rudeegraap and Sendoso

Sam Jacobs: Kris, we know that you’re the CEO and co-founder. Tell us about Sendoso–what is the company, what do they do, and what do you do.

Kris Rudeegraap: We’re a sending platform that helps other companies send out direct mail gifts, handwritten notes, personalized swag gifts, really anything you can think of that you want to send to somebody else.

It all started when I was an account executive at Talkdesk. It’s kind of a unique story of being a sales person turned CEO. While at Talkdesk, I was manually writing handwritten notes. We had like a swag closet that I would go and grab stuff and send it as thank you gifts.

It got to a point where marketing would ask, “Hey, why are you in the office late packing boxes?” So then marketing would be like, “Hey, can we help?” But then marketing ended up asking me to fill out a spreadsheet with the names and addresses that I wanted to send people stuff.

They thought they could scale it out for me, but it really just delayed the process, which made my realtime strategy of sending things to people even worse. So, I really saw a need for a platform to support that.

The first thing I thought that was how can I build a Salesforce app that would allow you to send something out. And at first it was just Starbucks gift cards–this was like the first concept of it is, what can I send that can be impactful, but I can actually just build as a weekend project.

It just kind of caught on and snowballed into thinking, “Okay, I’m trying to manually send out this swag and all this other stuff. And I’ve got this little Salesforce app that you can click and send,” and the light bulb went off to marry the two, quit my company and start it up.

The Evolution of Sales

Sam Jacobs: You have frontline experience as a sales executive. You are now running a company that sells to salespeople and marketing people. What do you see across the landscape of the evolution?

Kris Rudeegraap:

    1. People are finding more tools to use and these tools working together better.
    2. Data is becoming easier to find.
    3. Targeting customers is becoming easier.
    4. “Salespeople are also becoming “mini-marketers” where they’re having to think more creatively, or doing things differently than maybe they would have before.”

Why Everyone Should Be Using Direct Mail

Sam Jacobs: You’ve probably spent some time defining your ideal customer profile–should everybody be using direct mail? How do you think about narrowing it so that people can understand if they’re the right candidate to be integrating this into their strategy? And, I’m also curious, how the rise of account based marketing has impacted your business and your perspectives on ABM?

Kris Rudeegraap: Almost everybody could think about how they could incorporate direct mail. It’s the demand gen marketers, it’s the field marketing, it’s the programs, it’s the event marketers. We work across all these different groups.

In addition to that, we’re seeing SDR managers, VPs of sales being ICPs for us. The customer success org and customer marketing org is starting to figure out how they can use this to build better relationships with their existing customers.

There’s a lot of other use cases where maybe they’ve been doing direct mail, but now we’re offering this more integrated approach, and also bringing in a lot more options than what historically might have been just printed postcards and some things in envelopes.

Sam’s Corner

Sam Jacobs: Hey, everybody, this is Sam’s corner. I hope you liked part one of our live recording of our interview with Kris Rudeegraap, the co-founder and CEO of Sendoso.

If you’re thinking about what to take away from it besides maybe thinking about some kind of platform like Sendoso to integrate into the outreach that you’re doing and the meeting generation and demand generation that you’re working on. Just think about what it represents that direct mail and sending physical objects has come back into the sales sequence, into the way that we’re reaching out to people.

The other thing that’s come back is cold calling, is phone calls, so you just have to remember the things that worked a while ago are probably going to work less and less well everyday that everybody adopts them.

What We Learned

  • The origin of Sendoso
  • Developments in event and account based marketing
  • Improving your conversion rates
  • How to grow and expand in an early stage company

Don’t miss episode 67

Once again, let’s thank our sponsors. Conga is the leading end-to-end digital document transformation suite. With Conga you can simplify documents, automate contracts, and execute esignatures. Our second sponsor is Outreach. Outreach is the leading sales engagement platform.

If you want to reach out to me with feedback, you can reach me on LinkedIn.

Thanks so much for listening, I’ll talk to you next time.

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