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Kris Rudeegraap, CEO and Co-Founder of Sendoso, shares why gifting and direct mail outperform email in crowded inboxes, and how agency owners can build a gifting strategy that drives real pipeline.
Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
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Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone today I'm joined by Chris rudigrat. Chris is the CEO and co founder of sendoso, which is the leading gifting and direct mail platform for B to B sales and marketing teams. He spent a decade in sales before building sendoso, pioneering this shift from like email only outreach to more omnichannel strategies. And sendoso Now powers campaigns for 1000s of companies with AI driven gift recommendations and global fulfillment. I wanted to have Chris on because a lot of agency owners rely incredibly heavily on email outreach, but inboxes are more saturated than ever, and I think physical mailboxes are an untapped channel that can dramatically improve conversion rates. In this episode, we discuss why gifting outperforms email in crowded inboxes. Building a gifting strategy that drives real pipeline, how AI personalizes gifts using conversation data and more. Lead Gen is the hardest part of running an agency. For most it's unpredictable, it's slow and it's usually expensive. Gia flips that. It's the all in one growth platform that turns your existing relationships and client work into a steady pipeline. Jia automates lead gen follow up and content, and it's all from the work you're already doing. You can check it out and get some free bonuses at get gia.ai/dynamic agency. And now. Chris rudigraph, it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward what made you realize that email saturation was an unsolved problem, not a tactical one?
Kris Rudeegraap 1:50
Yeah, so going back to my story, I started sales about 10 years ago, and before that, I spent about 10 years in sales myself, and kind of, I'd say, in 2013 2014 I was looking for new tactics to break into accounts. And I kind of, kind of invented a mail merge product of myself. So I was probably super early on in, you know, taking spreadsheets, mail merging them, before these email sequencing tools existed, and I said, Hey, mail merge is going to be a great tactic to book more means. Because prior to that, in like 2010 ish, I was like random, sending out one email at a time. And so after creating this mail merge product, I then started to see Yes, where tout app outreach sales loft pop up in kind of 2014 2015 time they became popular. And then I was like, email is dead. You know, anyone can send out a gazillion emails. And so I said, what else is out there besides sending out emails to break into new accounts and prospect and build relationships? And so that's where I manually started testing direct mail and gifting, and it worked so well that I said, Hey, this is going to be a new tactic. Now. Fast forward 10 years later, to today. I think email is more saturated than ever. I think AI, SDRs, AI, email bots are making it even more noisy, but it still has, it still is a critical channel. And the way that I look at it is you need to have an omni channel approach when you're in sales or marketing, and so you can't rely only on email. You got to do email, you got to do cold calls, you got to do gifting, you got to do a person, you got to do social you've got to do everything. And so layering on more channels just increases your chances of conversion.
Chris DuBois 3:44
Yeah, I had read, or maybe I heard it somewhere. Someone had said, the line the inbox is full, but the mailbox is empty, yeah? And it was like, Oh, that's true. Like, I open literally every letter that can, even if it's junk mail and I'm holding it knowing it's junk mail. I might let my kids open it, but, like, we're still opening it, just in case. Like, I think it's fascinating from like, holding something like physical 100%
Kris Rudeegraap 4:11
you also think about the open rate of a FedEx box in your doorstep. That is not that's like 100% Yeah, you're like, what is in this box? There's just a sense of curiosity. And you know, I think that bodes well into why gifting works, right?
Chris DuBois 4:30
Well. And I think, yeah, people will, some people will steal packages off porches, but nobody's ever been in my inbox trying to take a nail from it.
Kris Rudeegraap 4:39
So that's another great way to think about it. Yeah,
Chris DuBois 4:44
yeah. That is So walk me through, like, was there any, like, a specific gift or something that you said that changed your your mind on how this could work?
Kris Rudeegraap 4:55
Well for me, really early on sending out Starbucks gift card. It was actually the aha moment that was like, kind of a product v1 for us. And at the time, it was like, Hey, I just want to let me buy you a cup of coffee virtually, you know. Or, hey, you know, read this case study, and coffee's on me, and those types of things would work really, really well for me. It then moved into, you know, I was packing swag from our swag closet and sending out cool swag. Work really well. And then, how do we automate that onto the sonoso platform? And then it became, how do you get more personal? How do you you're a dog, bark on a call and send a dog toy? Or, how do you see someone that is from, you know, Boston, and you know that they're a football fan and send them, you know, some cool you know, maybe it's a beanie, knowing that it's cold out to the Pats. Or, you know, even further, is how AI can help make this even better. So we have a smart set feature that will go out and do a ton of research or release a feature that sits on top of Gong. So if we're chit chatting on the call, maybe talking about just getting back from a ski trip. Now our suggestion engine is going to look at that data too. And so it's, you know, taking this memory of all these personal things and using that to gift you like the best thing possible, right?
Chris DuBois 6:21
It's like when Alexa is always listening to what you're saying. They're getting served those ads, except here you're actually gonna get something
Kris Rudeegraap 6:28
valuable in the mail. How people are gonna be on, like, Gong calls, being like golf club? Scott Cameron, Titleist one,
Chris DuBois 6:36
yeah, yeah. I could use a new Lamborghini. Exactly. So you just got me thinking about like, kind of different, and this is probably jumping like well ahead into our conversation. Let's just go deep fast, using like tactics for almost like ABM style, right? Like Chet Holmes, the Ultimate Sales Machine, right? He just doubling sales every year by sending gifts, just to be top of mind with these people, yes. So we have like, that style approach compare it to take just like having a list of your target accounts and sending out like a small gift in order to try getting them on the phone. Probably very different tactics that you're using for each of those. So if you want to pick one like, let's start there and just start talking through, like, how would you approach it?
Kris Rudeegraap 7:24
Yeah, I mean, I think the there's a couple different ways to approach it. I think one on, on the marketing side, marketing is trying to run these air cover programs, trying to break into these target accounts, you know, or accounts that are showing intent through, coming to their website, engaging with ads. How do they increase the likelihood of those like top of funnel accounts to convert farther into hopefully book a demo and talk to sales? So I think there's that approach. There's also the approach of enabling sales reps to have budget and spend on gifts at the right time, and knowing that, hey, I can, you know, send a gift right after I get off this call that someone mentioned needing a lamb, you know, needing new golf clubs, and I'm going to send up some golf balls. And that builds relationships into closing that deal, and likely competing on more of the buyer journey level. Because I think in today's worlds, a lot of sellers, you know, they get the meeting, and then they're like, cool. Now I got to win this deal, which is even harder, and you're competing against maybe another service that has a similar product, similar price. What do you do differently? And I think gifting can come in there and be more of a middle, lower funnel option as well.
Chris DuBois 8:36
Yeah, definitely. Because, yeah, I mean, you're everything I'm doing with agencies is around, how do we stand out? How do we differentiate? Ourselves and like, take some of the actions you take could actually be what what separates you from the pack? Exactly? Yeah, that's great, because are you seeing any difference with, like, small, thoughtful gifts versus bigger, more, like, shareable type gifts like I almost want to say memorable, but I think those small, thoughtful ones are often memorable as well.
Kris Rudeegraap 9:05
Yeah, you know, I'd say that there's some misconception that you need to be spending a ton of money in gifting to make an impact. There was a campaign recently where someone was sending an empty pizza box with a message around, hungry for a new solution. And that was like, you know, setting cardboard. So I think it's more about, you know, being different pattern Disrupt. Now, if you are personalized and you know someone likes, you know, go back to golf, for example, and send someone some title as Pro V ones. You know, it's 50 bucks. It's a little expensive, but it's gonna hit home, and people are going to people that the recipient wants that gift. So I think you can go expensive, or you can get creative, or to your point on the shareables. Hey, if you're you know your prospects in the office, sitting at a desk, maybe send some cupcakes and cookies, something that they can share and now, hey, who sent us? This? Oh, it was Chris at sandoso. Oh, what did they do? Oh, blah, blah, blah, and now you're becoming more top of mind amongst more people. So I think there's a lot of different options to look at, the different situations that you're trying to accomplish.
Chris DuBois 10:16
Yeah, I know one of the, probably one of the questions that I would get hit the most if I was trying to tell my clients to do sending, would be like, Well, what budget? Yeah, should I even be considering here? I guess, is there, like, a minimum budget you're looking at, like, this kind of,
Kris Rudeegraap 10:33
I mean, I think there's some backwards math that we try to help customers with in terms of, Okay, how many, you know what? What What kind of revenue goals, how many target accounts, how many contacts? And we can do some math that way, if you want to back into and we have some calculators to think about that, or just think about comparisons to other channel spend. Hey, maybe you spend X amount on ads, maybe you want to spend Y amount on on gifting and or maybe move it, move it to a test budget first, hey, we're going to spend, you know, 100 grand this year on gifting, and we're going to see the results, and then we're going to, you know, pivot accordingly. So I think some marketers and agencies want to do more testing, but also some want to go big because they know it works.
Chris DuBois 11:22
I think that that testing piece is probably the across all marketing, with the agencies that I've, I've talked to and stuff, is the critical piece is often missing, yeah, where it's like, they like, Yeah, well, let's try this out. But then the trying is just like, yeah, we sent a couple gifts and, like, that was it, versus, like, a hypothesis. We're sending 100 we want to see at least 20 or returning this call. And like, is that something else you guys are helping with with 100% Yeah.
Kris Rudeegraap 11:49
And we, we like to approach it as like, how do we come up with a strategy versus a single one off send or campaign? Because, to your point, if you're just thinking about this as a small one off test. You might not put the same effort into it, or it might not be something that's evergreen, and you're spending almost the amount of effort to do one as it is, thinking about this holistically over the course of the year, doing 1020 of these different campaigns. So oftentimes we try to think about this holistically as a strategy and a channel, than just, like a one off tactic, so that you don't have some false positives in your data. And I think that comes true to other channels. You're not just going to be like, Oh, I'm gonna put like $10 in one ad click, and then if someone clicks, I'm going to, like, go big or, Hey, we're gonna do a field event, and I'm only gonna send like one person instead of five people to the booth because I just want to test to see if one person can talk to anybody. It's like, No, you're it's a channel that you need to invest in and nurture and build on. Yep.
Chris DuBois 12:52
So I feel like I'm all over the place here, but it's like, it's an interesting topic where we can just pull a bunch of information, get people excited about this with let's talk like the when gifts might feel too gimmicky, yeah, I guess, like, there are a lot of people who would take the pizza box example, yeah, you just brought up. It's like some companies would not send a empty pizza box because they actually fear that when I give someone this box, they're gonna open it and say, like, come on, who you just sent this? Like, this is just, like some cheap gimmick to get me on the phone, versus, like an actual gift that you're you're sending to them. How do you strike the bit? Like is, I don't, I don't even know what the actual question is here. It's like, I'm sure both work. Otherwise people wouldn't be exactly doing it. So, like, Where's, where's the line? How do you kind of walk that for your business to figure it out?
Kris Rudeegraap 13:43
Yeah, I mean, I think you've got to think about who your target buyers are. You know, what is? What's their personality type? It also could be different types of buyers. It could be like if maybe the C suite, you think about something different than to the specialist or the coordinator or the director. So I think you can even think about it within the persona as well of what to send. I also think about it as like you want to try different things and see what works, too. You might run a campaign and realize pizza box campaign was awesome and did well. Or, you know, hey, maybe it crashed. And the other, you know, sending out golf balls campaign did a lot better. So I think there's just, like, testing messaging in ads or graphics, or testing, you know, content and your content strategy you've got to test, you know, your gifting strategy as well. And different things might work better for different people. But I think that, you know, I think there for a while, a lot of lot of marketers, a lot of you know, sales leaders, were reluctant to change off of yesterday's playbook. But I think now, more than ever, people are realizing that they need to do something different.
Chris DuBois 14:58
What what a like sample size would? You be looking at for tests.
Kris Rudeegraap 15:02
I mean, you can test down to 10 people, or we see some companies are testing with 10,000 people, but I don't think it's, you know, I'd say again, it's more of the like, the strategy of like, Hey, we're going to incorporate this into all of our programs, all of our campaigns, we're going to put meaningful program spend behind it, and then you can start to play around with like the different campaigns you're running. Sometimes there's a cost advantage to doing more. Hey, if we order 100 of these kits, it's better than if we just send one, but sometimes it does make a difference.
Chris DuBois 15:41
Yeah. I'm wondering too, like, as far as kind of incorporating it as just, like a piece of the buyer journey, right? So, like, we're we're going to bring someone in, maybe we start with, like, top of the funnel, yeah, and one test, see if we can get some people, like, just interested in stuff, then they consume content, do all the other steps, versus people who are already paying attention. Maybe we have some way to retarget them, get them to sign up for something where we can then hit a middle of the funnel or bottom of the funnel and just see that. I mean, the obviously, the gifts would probably change, yeah, exactly each of those. But it's also like the the intent behind it is going to be little different. So your budget spend is different. Like, this is a you're getting my brain going 100%
Kris Rudeegraap 16:22
Yeah, you can think about differently as, like, what do you want to spend to book a meeting, versus get someone to show up to a demo, versus accelerating a deal that is at the finish line, versus, you know, a customer welcome kit and nurturing a customer advocate into or expanding a customer thereafter. Or it could be, hey, we have you want to send a gift to drive someone to our webinar or to our, you know, user conference, and so there's different things there. Or maybe you realize that there's, you know, if you have five contacts in the buyer committee for a deal, it's 80% more likely to close. So what are you doing to get those that fifth one, that fourth one there? Maybe you're using gifting to engage them. Or, you know, maybe you're seeing that your content strategy, you're trying to drive more content downloads of a data study that you know works really well. Or ads, we see some of our best customers are including gifts in their ads, saying, hey, you know, download this, click on this ad, read this case study, get, you know, a $50 Starbucks card. Or, hey, request a demo and get this, you know, new iPad. You know, it's like different things like that. Can create incentives too, yeah, and
Chris DuBois 17:38
you're getting my brain working on different levels here, where I'm just thinking, just thinking about like, even for the idea of like, get, how do we get that fifth person into the meeting? And stuff like, even sending like, like, party favors, right? As, like, Hey, we're going to close this deal. So like, you're sending these ads, like, hey, after we close the deal in this meeting, you guys can all pull out your stream, like, just something silly, but like, the fact that you sent them something is makes them probably more more likely to actually show up to the meetings, and
Kris Rudeegraap 18:07
exactly, and I think that's where, like, I love to see kind of the the thought and creativity come from our customers, from agencies, where they have these cool, creative ideas, and they're like, ooh, but now what? And it's like, boom, we'll just go do everything for you. We'll go out and source it, get into the warehouses, or find you a partner that can drop ship it and run it through our platform, automate it through CRM or marketing automation, send you all the Slack message once it's delivered, or kick off the next step in the sequence. So all those things eliminate all of the heavy lifting so that you can turn a creative genius idea into action, like instantly, right?
Chris DuBois 18:47
So I have one client that is using and they'll love hearing this on the podcast. They're using some cold email like cold outreach for to reach out to their ICP, and in that message, they're offering a free sweatshirt to anyone. And it's like, whatever university you want to like, well, you can choose a sweatshirt. We're going to give you a free sweatshirt for this call. Yeah. And then people are showing up on the call, and the ones who are like, real good fit clients don't even bring up the sweatshirt. They're like, hey, like, this is exactly what we need. And versus the ones who bring up the sweatshirt first. Actually, the sales team has started just saying, like, Oh, are you here for the sweatshirt? If they say yes, it's like, All right, we're just gonna ask you a handful of questions to kind of learn more about the industry and stuff. So like, you're still getting some value from the call. But I guess that's probably and like, so they found a great way to work within the system. But I think a lot of worry for some people who might be doing gifting would be like, What if people are just trying to take the gifts and like, they're not actually great fits. I'm not going to get anything from this. Is it so worth me actually running this campaign? I mean,
Kris Rudeegraap 19:52
I think you got to look at the data. And for most customers that do that, like, oh, they spent, you know, 5000 bucks. And there was 1000 of that that was maybe bad, bad fits, but the other 4000 spend generated, you know, 3 million in pipeline, like, Oh, wow. Was that worth it? You know, of course, it was. Who cares? I think you can think about that with other things, like, when you get ad clicks, it's like, Oh, I'm not. Every person clicking an ad becomes a customer. So am I going to not run ads? Or, you know, I think it's just part of the, you know, behavior of running campaigns, and that some of the target audience is not going to be the perfect fit or deliver at the end of the day, there is ways that you could get more aggressive in that offer where it's like, you know, some fine print saying you need to be XYZ to qualify, or if you're running it through like a targeted offer, like an ad saying, hey, you know, you get this sweatshirt if you, you know, talk to us. Well. You're, you're already pre vetting that by maybe running LinkedIn ads. So you're, you they're already within your audience. Maybe they're not ready to buy yet, but you've already pre vetted that they're the right company, size, right industry, right this. They didn't come with the need to buy your solution today, but hey, now they know about you, and in a year or maybe next month, they switch jobs. So it's all longer term awareness building, and I bet that having a sweatshirt is better remember reminder than someone clicking on mad.
Chris DuBois 21:26
So, right? Well, with 95 five rule, like, a large percentage is not in market right now, so, like, you should be making that play to just make yourself more memorable 100% when, when looking at it, I'm I'm assuming the reason there would be hesitation is just because it's a lot of people haven't done gifting yet, and there is, like, more effort involved there, versus turning on an ad and letting that run, there's
Kris Rudeegraap 21:52
more effort and there's more unknowns. And I think people revert back to what's easy, what's what I've done before, so that I can remove some of the questions and guesses. But again, that's where you know you test or you jump into gifting, and you're like, holy, you know, why did I not do this? 10 years ago, five years ago, last month, yesterday. But again, it's kind of the fear of unknown is just like a almost a human psychology problem.
Chris DuBois 22:20
Yeah, I'm gonna have to run a campaign after this. Well, actually, let's use that as a semi segue here. Say, say, I do want to start a gifting campaign. We can even use sendoso as as my, my vendor and stuff to help, like, walk me through. What does this look like from start to finish? Yeah.
Kris Rudeegraap 22:38
So typically, there's gonna be like, what's the goal of campaign? Is it, you know, booking meetings? Is it trying to do deal acceleration, getting people to an event, blah, blah, blah? There's probably 40 or 50 things that we could talk through of like, what kind of conversion or what kind of outcome are you looking for? Once we identify that, then you can decide, is this like a one to many type of gift that you want to send. And is it like a kitted item, or is this something that you want to open up to be one to one and hyper personalized to the individual? So it's kind of like what should be sent, and then it's a bit of configuration. Hey, what's what CRM campaign should be synced to? What integration Do you want to trigger this? Or do you want this to be enabled for the seller to send individually, or is this a marketing driven campaign? So there's a few configurations. There some budget tracking, and then, you know, go and either if it's on demand and items we already have, you could get started, like, in 10 minutes, or if there's some procurement and you want to more of a custom kit, maybe there's some printed collateral or some swag printed. Then again, there's maybe a couple week lag there in terms of the procurement or the manufacturing. And then once it's ready, it's, you know, let's get this thing sent out. Are you going to use some of our AI to suggest what to send, or the mailing address of where to send to, or the message? Are you going to use your own crafted messaging? So there's kind of an AI copilot, agent, Assistant, if you need that, and then just start seeing the results. Yeah.
Chris DuBois 24:09
So you guys do have some products on hand, high assumption.
Kris Rudeegraap 24:14
There's 10s of 1000s of items available on demand. There's print, there's curated items around the world that you could click and send today. There's digital gift cards you could send, digital experiences printed on printed on demand, collateral that you could send with no inventory, instantly. And yeah, we also have a really cool Amazon integration where we can suggest, hey, we know that Chris is in, you know, San Francisco and loves golf. Send him golf balls, but send him ones with his alma mater on it, and all that just done through Amazon the back end. But we also have the flexibility to have warehouses around the world. So if you want to come up with a more creative campaign, you know, some recent ones we had someone. Build like a recipe kit with some cooking items and a little booklet and a custom box. There was a payments company that did a build your own Lego kit that looked like a payment terminal, and you got, like the Legos, the build on it. So you can get highly creative. It just delays the, you know, the project by a couple weeks. But if you're planning in advance, like and you have an extra couple weeks a month, then why not get super creative?
Chris DuBois 25:27
Yeah, but the ones that are on hand, I guess my assumption is because those are the ones that you've seen successful results from it, and, like a lot of people, can benefit from getting whatever these are. So I
Kris Rudeegraap 25:39
was just curious, and the fact that a lot of those might be like perishables, like you want to send macaroons to a client in Paris, or you want to send some milk bar cookies to a prospect in New York. So some of these are more perishable on demand items, or some of these are kind of more crafted boutique, you know, type of items that you could just send one off, versus kidding together.
Chris DuBois 26:10
All right, and so let's just go. Do you have, like, a framework, I guess, for knowing when to send the right gift?
Kris Rudeegraap 26:18
Yeah, so I think there's either a triggered event based on, you know, hey, you're trying to, you know, book. You try to get people to show up to meetings more well, then it's, you know, trigger it based the morning on the gift. Or, hey, you you know that you need to, you know, get the buying committee size up. And you can see, like, each week, let's run a campaign and automatically send if there's, you know, not enough people in the buying committee. Or, you want to kick off an ABM program, and you're trying to drive people do an exact dinner, let's send some gifts to invite people to the dinner. So there's some of those type of campaigns. There's then we can automate through your marketing automation platform, like a tool like clay, where you're trying to orchestrate gifting at scale based on some signal. And so you could do signal based gifting like, this person got a promotion, this person job change. You know, this person got funding. So different things like that could be reasons to signal a gift as well.
Chris DuBois 27:18
I'm guessing, like attribution is always a, I don't know, like a hot talking point in the marketing world. I think what's interesting about gifting is that you, if someone has received the gift from you, it will come up at some point in the sales process. So, like, you will know that that was part of this process you ever track to see if that was, like, the what brought them in, or what actually got, like, right? Like, what actual attribution it had on the, yeah, the call. So we,
Kris Rudeegraap 27:51
we track kind of attribution ROI in a couple different ways. One is, you know, we'll push data back into our customer systems to help them with their attribution model. Some companies will have their own custom models. Some will look in kind of a W or first touch, last touch, weighted average. So we'll try to help our customers with the data they need to run those models internally. We also have, like the out of the box, kind of HubSpot, Salesforce campaign attribution reports. We could show attribution down to the gift itself, like if it's a digital gift and clicked and redeemed, or if it was a physical gift and there was kind of a short URL or QR code and you wanted to track that conversion data. So there's lots of ways that we try to help our customers look at the the attribution of it. Yeah.
Chris DuBois 28:40
So All right, let's, uh, shift gears again, back into towards the AI side of this, because that's, I think, whatever the the hottest talking point for everybody, 100% so Okay, so one you got you said you had Gong connected to this, like your tool can be listening into the conversations to understand exactly what gift or make recommendations based off those, how many, I guess, first, how many campaigns have have you used that so far and like, what have the
Kris Rudeegraap 29:10
results have been? Yeah, I mean, relatively new launch, but we've seen people love that in terms of how it builds out this, like interest graph of their recipients, customers, prospects, and seeing even better send recommendations. Prior to that, a couple years ago, we launched our smart send AI feature agent that would suggest based on more third party available data, things that we could scrape off of social media, you know, and different things that were mentioned more publicly or on podcasts or in other avenues as well. That was still highly effective, but now that was all third party, and now we're pulling in first party data, which is your call conversations, your emails and other first party data that could be really interesting too.
Chris DuBois 29:57
Yeah, I'm sure once you couple all of that as well. Yes, oh, he seems like he had a falling out with his alma mater. Exactly.
Kris Rudeegraap 30:06
Sometimes the best gift is what not to send to or we might use our recommendation engine to say don't send alcohol, because they explicitly said that you don't drink anymore. And so having the recommendation of what to send versus what not to send is critical. And then, you know, we've got an AI to draft, what the handwritten note should be accompanying that gift, the mailing address you should send to, whether it's home or office, we will provide that through AI, the signals of when to send. So all that creates this really unique agent that is smart, kind of enabled to help you. You know, land better conversions.
Chris DuBois 30:46
I think what's interesting too, for like, for you guys specifically, is like, being able to own that data of like, sentiment analysis, yes, right to know, like, Hey, we got all of these positive results from this gift. Here's what we knew about these gifts beforehand. And so like we you can almost create a formula of like, A plus B equals C 1000.
Kris Rudeegraap 31:06
And we can now regional gifting preferences, Persona based preferences, industry based preferences, and start to see patterns when we also have a recipient choice feature where people will opt into one thing over other things that they don't want. And so that creates an interesting feedback loop. And then, because we connect and do their CRM and other systems, we can then see what are the gifts that are driving the most conversion for you, and most ROI so that's really interesting.
Chris DuBois 31:34
Yeah, that's crazy, and it's only gonna get better. Only gonna get let's, uh, yeah, let's, let's break this down to like, the 8020 Yep, what? What's that first domino you think everyone should knock down to make everything else in their kind of gifting journey easier?
Kris Rudeegraap 31:51
I mean, more first thing is to just go out there and commit to gifting as another channel, and not just a one off tactic. Or, I bet that there's a lot of listeners being like, Oh, we don't think about it as a always on evergreen channel. But if you go ask some of your sales reps, they're probably manually gifting out without tracking or without sophisticated strategies. Or, hey, maybe marketing has to do a manual program once in a while, they're packing up boxes to send things out, and so you don't realize it, but a lot of gifting is happening invisibly or untransparently, and so I think number one is just really to go and make it more front and center as a strategy.
Chris DuBois 32:32
Yeah, think a little commitment there probably goes a long way, exactly. So I've got two final questions as we wind down here with the first being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?
Kris Rudeegraap 32:46
I'm big on any Malcolm Gladwell book, tipping point, blink. I think just the psychology like I love marketing psychology books, and so I think Malcolm Gladwell makes you think differently. So any of his books, if you've already read tipping point, he feels like he comes out with a new book every couple years. So go read any Malcolm Gladwell book. Awesome.
Chris DuBois 33:08
You listen to his podcast as well. Yeah, I'm a big Malcolm Gladwell fan. Yeah, yeah, he's got some good stuff. Last question is, where can people find you?
Kris Rudeegraap 33:17
Yeah, people find me. On LinkedIn. Follow me. I post a lot of interesting content. Email me if you want to chat more. One on one, it's Chris kris@sendoso.com and then if you're curious about some of the stuff we talked about today, you can go find a bunch more on sendoso.com Awesome.
Chris DuBois 33:32
We will get all that linked up in the show notes, Chris, thanks for
Kris Rudeegraap 33:36
joining great conversation. Love the topics you
Chris DuBois 33:43
that's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward.
Speaker 1 34:02
You you.
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