In this episode of Marketing B2B Tech, Kris Rudeegraap, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Sendoso, shares how his experience in software sales led him to create a platform simplifying personalized gifting and direct mail. With global fulfillment centers and a robust marketplace, Sendoso helps marketers connect with prospects more effectively by leveraging personalization.
Kris highlights Sendoso’s competitive advantages, including enterprise-grade features, data capabilities, and successful campaigns for many brands. He underscores the importance of multi-channel marketing, creative strategies, networking, and long-term brand growth, showcasing how gifting can transform B2B outreach.
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About Sendoso
Sendoso is a direct marketing automation platform that helps businesses enhance their engagement strategies through personalized gifting. By combining digital and physical sending options, Sendoso enables companies to create meaningful connections with customers, prospects, and employees. With intelligent analytics and tailored campaign solutions, Sendoso supports revenue growth, customer retention, and team recognition initiatives, making it a valuable tool for relationship-driven marketing.
About Kris Rudeepraap
Kris Rudeegraap, a key figure at Sendoso with more than a decade of go-to-market experience, has crafted solutions that resonate with 33,000 B2B tech enthusiasts globally. His insights into the future of marketing are both innovative and client-focused.
Time Stamps
[00:00:36] – Kris’s Career Journey and the making of Sendoso.
[00:01:40] – Understanding Sendoso: Corporate Gifting and Direct Mail
[00:03:25] – How Sendoso Simplifies Gifting for Marketers
[00:04:44] – Positioning Sendoso Against Competitors
[00:07:34] – Value Perception: Gifts vs. Bribery
[00:09:38] – Customer Segmentation: Enterprise vs. Smaller Businesses
[00:10:21] – Successful Campaigns: Creative Gifting Examples
[00:12:49] – International Gifting: Overcoming Geographic Challenges
[00:14:27] – The Role of Marketers in Gifting Strategies
[00:15:57] – Future of Marketing: Trends and Technology
[00:19:19] – Final Thoughts: Networking and Career Advice
[00:20:55] – Conclusion and Contact Information
Quotes
“Your network is your net worth. So, don’t be scared to go meet with another person.” – Kris Rudeepraap, Co-CEO and Co-Founder
Follow Kris:
Kris Rudeegraap on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rudeegraap/
Sendoso website: https://www.sendoso.com/
Sendoso on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sendoso/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Kris Rudeegraap at Sendoso
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Kris Rudeegraap
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Kris Rudeegraap. Kris is the co-CEO at Sendoso. Welcome to the podcast, Kris. Thank you for having me. So Kris, tell me a little bit about your career and also why, you know, you’ve decided to really build your career at Sendoso.
Kris: Yeah, of course, Mike. So before starting Sendoso, I spent about a decade in software sales, mostly in individual contributor roles and some sales leadership roles. But I really saw firsthand about a decade ago, email becoming more saturated. There was a tools coming out, making it easier than ever to create sequences and spam your audience. And so I thought, hey, there needs to be some other channels that you can use besides cold calling and social email, which were kind of the three go-tos. And so I started experimenting with sending out handwritten notes or going into our swag closet, packing up boxes in the afternoon, shipping it out, or being on a call and hearing a dog bark and thinking about, hey, maybe I’ll go on Amazon, find a crate, a little dog toy and send it out to a prospect. It worked awesome, got me results I needed, but was terribly manual and annoying to go to the post office, to click on tracking links, to create expense reports. And so that really led me to say, hey, there needs to be a better solution for this. Email’s only going to get more spammy. And this was a decade ago. I think that’s still the case. And so I came up with Sedoso. And for those listeners that don’t know what Sedoso is, so we are a corporate gifting and direct mail platform. So we make it really easy to send stuff out, whether it’s a bottle of wine, 10,000 Yeti mugs with your logo on it, a handwritten note, anything you could think of. We provide all of the logistics, the sourcing, the procurement, and integrations into your tech stack so that you can click a button inside Salesforce or set up a nomination in HubSpot and things get sent out and tracked and reported on.
Mike: So, I mean, I’m really excited to talk about Sendoso. But before we do, there’s another thing I kind of skipped over at the start. You’re a co-CEO. So how does that work? I mean, there’s two of you. Presumably, you’ve got to agree all the time, or do you disagree?
Kris: Yeah, so this is something that, you know, I promoted our He came in about a year and a half ago as our chief business officer, promoted him to do a co-CEO role. There’s so much you have to do as a CEO. And dividing and conquering on areas of ownership is really helpful as you scale and get to the size that we are. It’s also helpful to have somebody that you can go and talk to critical decisions on. Now, you’re right. In some cases, there’s disagreements. But I think having a healthy debate is really helpful for critical decisions versus one person just being like, yeah, let’s do it like that. So I found it being super helpful. It also frees up my time to focus on certain things and frees up his time to certain things that would otherwise maybe not even make it onto the to-do list. So I’m a big fan of it. I think co-founders in early days when you’re pre-seed or Series A, I think sometimes act as co-CEOs at times where you divide and conquer. Hey, you focus on this. I’ll focus on this and we’ll make our own decisions. But once you scale the co-founder relationship, I think can’t work the same. You need to have more bifurcated roles. And so I brought that back.
Mike: That’s fascinating. Now, let’s go back and look at Sendoso because, I mean, people listening to the podcast are going to be marketers, you know, they’re going to be really interested. So you described it really simply, you know, you’re taking away the pain, I guess, about sending physical things to prospects. I mean, How do you do that? What do you do to make it easy for your customers?
Kris: Yeah, so one is we operate global fulfillment centers and global marketplaces. So it makes it very easy to pack boxes, ship things out, send something from point A to point B. We take care of all the sourcing and procurement, so you don’t have to go find suppliers, you don’t have to go search for things, making sure they meet standard requirements. We also make it really easy to set up budgeting and reporting. so that you can see all of the results integrated into your tech stack so data flows in and out, which makes it really easy. And ultimately, aside from making it easier, we make it so that you can do more of it. And I think a lot of marketers are in agreeance that, hey, direct mail works. Gifting is a channel that works. I just don’t have either the bandwidth to do more of it, or I don’t have the time or the skill set to do it. And so we can say, hey, we’ll do all that. We help you figure out what’s the right thing to send to the right person at the right time with the right message.
Mike: That’s interesting that there are a couple of other companies in the space as well. So how would you position yourself versus some of the competitors?
Kris: Where do you Yeah, there’s a handful of areas. So I think one is in our infrastructure layer. So we are really one of the only companies that operate these global warehouses versus just P backing on other three PLS. So that’s an important factor. We also have the largest marketplace, so selection is a reason why people want to look at us. The enterprise, we focus there. So whether that’s security, budgeting features, permission sets, enterprise reporting, branding controls, I think the enterprise-grade feature set. Services is also something that we excel at too. Implementation, we have a campaign services team that will dive into helping you take action and what almost agency-like. And I think the last thing, which is a big topic in recent years, is the data and AI. Because we are, you know, five to 10 times bigger than any of our competitors, we have so much more data. We have hundreds of millions of dollars spent and tens of millions of gifts spent. So, you know, 10x larger, and that gives us 10x more data to help then feedback into our engine to help our customers say, hey, what’s the right thing that we should send? Or what’s the right message we should write? Or what’s the right time we should send something? And I think the data layer is critical nowadays.
Mike: So that’s interesting. You’re almost saying that there’s two challenges. One is physically sending stuff, which is practically difficult. I know we’ve tried it. But also you’re saying that making the decisions is hard. So, you know, why is that? Are people looking for the right value? Or are they looking for, you know, trying to work out what would make an impression? Or is it just there’s so much stuff you can send, there’s too much
Kris: Yeah, I think it’s that. There’s a lot of choice. And there’s also the personalization is key. So how do you personalize? And we have a smart send feature that will personalize for you. And that could be in the framework that I look at is you can personalize around the person. So, hey, Kris likes golf. Kris has a dog. Kris lives in San Francisco. So I can send something personally to him that would get him to grab his attention and reply. You can also personalize based on the signal. Hey, Kris just changed jobs. I’m going to send him a bottle of champagne to congratulate him. So that’s personalized around the signal. And then you can personalize around the action. Like, I want Kris to come to our executive golf event that we’re hosting. I’m going to send Kris some branded golf balls, driving him to our event. And so those things take some kind of time and effort to think about. We can shortcut that almost to zero time. There’s also then time to say, hey, if I want to source golf balls, I got to go find a vendor. I got to go brand it. Nope, that’s just a couple clicks of a button or our campaign service team does it behind the scenes for you. So yeah, I think that’s kind of the way to look at it.
Mike: And I mean, one of the things, you know, I’m interested, obviously, you’re not talking about necessarily super high value gifts here. But do you have any issues with customers who may be a feeling that, you know, sending out too much that that is a, you know, a gift of some value could be seen in some way as bribery? I mean, do you do you see that issue from any customers?
Kris: Really? I think people, depending on if they use it right, see it as a gesture of goodwill. They also see this as thank yous. I think there’s, in some cases, misconceptions around the case that it’s bribery, being that if you’re sending someone a very expensive thing and expecting a result. But the overall thing that I look at is, hey, you’re just using it as a communication medium. You’re using it as a reason to break the ice or break into a new account with grabbing attention. And so whether you’re sending something that’s $5 or $500, I think there’s ways to make it feel like it’s a part of the buying experience or the customer experience.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, that sounds very sensible. I’m actually quite interested now to ask, you know, you talk about that $5 to $500 range. I mean, where does the majority of the gifting sit? Is it at the lower end or do you see a lot of people at the high end?
Kris: It honestly depends on our customer and usually depends on their ACV or their segmentation of their customer base. If I looked at the entire customers, probably the average I think is around $40. But we have some customers that are very transactional, selling software or product services that are a few thousand dollars. And you could send things that are just a couple bucks. We have some fun, creative ways that you can send a treasure map with a note that says, looking for this golden solution, blah, blah, blah, or an empty pizza box that says, hungry for a new solution, or fake aspirin pills that say, hey, does your current solution give you a headache? Or you can go on the high end in a box that opens up and plays a video or a really nice bottle of wine and some custom branded high end wine glasses. You know, it doesn’t have to be expensive. It has to grab their attention. And it could be the creativeness that grabs their attention, not the price tag.
Mike: That’s interesting. And what about your customers yourself? I mean, do you tend to work mainly with enterprise? You talked about your focus on enterprise. But do you also have customers in the smaller sector of the industry? Or is it just prohibitive in terms of the cost of running a platform for a customer?
Kris: So again, we work across all segments. I think we’ve built ourselves for the enterprise, but then it lends itself to be able to have a motion where smaller size businesses that have 10, 50 employees, startups, etc. can use it. We sell really into any marketer, sales leaders, CX leaders. B2B is a big focus, but we have financial services, professional services, hospitality, sports and entertainment. If you think about it, gifting and direct mail at its core is just a communication medium. It’s another way to send a message, to grab someone’s attention, to thank somebody. And so it really can be applicable in any situation. And we have pricing plans to meet that based on the needs of, you know, a very small company to a Fortune 100 company.
Mike: That sounds good. I’m interested, you know, you’ve talked about a wide range of gifts, a wide range of values, a wide range of different reasons to send something. Are there some great campaigns that you can talk about where people have done something either very creative or they’ve been really clever about targeting that have worked really well for your customers?
Kris: Man, I could go on for hours on that. And we actually have some cool case studies and success stories on our website. But some that come to mind, some of our top customers. Gainsight, they send out this customer success book that’s generated like 6 million in influence outbound pipeline recently. So that was a really easy send for them. Gong had tremendous success with these piñatas that they sent out that influenced over 30 million in pipeline. And they’re just these little piñatas they send out with a fun note. Verkada has sent millions of dollars in mugs, specifically Yeti mugs, which has been a very specific tactic they’ve used. And they’ve done a really good job of looking at, for every dollar they spend on a Yeti mug, it generates $4 in ROI. And I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it because you can compare that to a dollar spending on ads, a dollar spending on a trade show, and really decide where you want to toggle up and down your spend on these different channels.
Mike: That’s amazing. I mean, there’s such a mix of things. I think, you know, it really is down to getting the right thing for your customers, isn’t it? Rather than necessarily being a magic answer. Totally.
Kris: And it could be many things. You know, if you think about the entire customer journey from the first time they interact with you, when you’re trying to book that meeting all the way through the sales pipeline and through many years of being a customer. You want to be able to send different things at different stages, whether that’s printed collateral, whether that’s customer welcome kits, whether that’s meeting makers to book a meeting. So you really want to think about this holistically throughout the entire customer journey.
Mike: That sounds fascinating. I think, you know, one of the things I’m also interested in I can guess how you might market the company, but how do you go about promoting Sendoso?
Kris: Yeah, so you know, we are typical kind of B2B type of company where we focus on inbound marketing and then traditional channels of content, digital ads, web marketing, etc. Outbound, we have a fantastic outbound motion. that we reinvented with AI recently as well. We have a strong partner channel. And then there’s a lot of marketing tactics we use within those different strategies. We use that both on the inbound side to drive higher conversion on trials, on inbound demo requests, even on content. We’ll offer up a nice little value saying, hey, thanks for downloading this case study. Here’s a coffee gift card to enjoy while reading it. And again, not a hard call to action to reply, but just building goodwill so that there’s a name and some appreciation reciprocity. And then obviously in outbound, we do that as well and in partner and channel too.
Mike: Yeah. And presumably, I mean, one of the things, you know, you as an international business, but also your customers could do is reach multiple countries. I mean, you mentioned having your own fulfillment centers in different geographies, but I know, for example, you can’t buy a Starbucks gift card and then send that to another country because they just don’t work. Precisely.
Kris: I’m presuming that’s also an issue. Well, it’s also a benefit of our platform is the internationalization, the localization, so that you can run these either global programs or campaigns or have synergies where there’s a gift card one region you’re using, maybe a gift card in a different one, but it’s all through the same platform. Or you’re sending, you know, macaroons from a local bakery in France, and you’re sending these cake pops in Florida. And all that can be tracked the same way, enabled the same way, budgeted the same way. But you as the marketer doesn’t have to frantically source these different partners. Or when you’re enabling sales teams, you don’t have to go out and spend a lot of different effort training. You can just use our platform. Or better yet, we have the recommendation engine so we can say, hey, we know this person’s in France, send them the macaroons because we know they like that.
Mike: Absolutely, makes a lot of sense. I’m interested, you mentioned a lot about marketers. Presumably you’ve got marketers predominantly sending these gifts. Do you think that’s a reflection of some of the research that’s been done recently showing that customers are actually spending less time with salespeople and more time doing research themselves and therefore more time interacting with marketing materials?
Kris: I’ll look at that in two different ways. One is we work with marketers a lot because marketers usually control the budget, want branding controls, and historically have owned more of the channel of direct mail and gifting. That being said, a lot of marketers will enable the sales team and it’s a benefit of our platform to say, hey, you sales reps get $1,000 a month and here’s some controls and go for it. And sales teams can go and click and send things as they see fit. I think it’s a very nice alignment play where marketing can align and enable sales. But to your point, I strongly agree that more of the funnel and more of your audience is researching your products and services without you knowing it or without the assistance of sales. And so we see our solution playing into that where you can see intent data, you can de-anonymize website visitors and send them content in collateral. But we’re also tapping into that trend too by investing more in the communities, whether that’s these different Slack-based communities where we know our advocates are in, sharing thoughts on Sendoso or even on our website, enabling product tours and other things to enable the buyer to research more before talking to the sales rep.
Mike: That’s interesting. I mean, you’re investing a lot in technology. So, I mean, how do you see, I mean, I guess, generally, marketing changing going forward? And then particularly, how do you see Sendoso’s role changing as the world evolves?
Kris: Yeah, so I think there’s new playbooks, specifically, new channels that are less saturated, like gifting. So I think we’re going to continue to see a surge in people using this as other channels get more saturated. I think email and ads with the rise of AI are even more spammy. So I think it’s going to be more obvious that people are going to respond to less email. So you need to do other things to get in touch with them. I also think that there’s a lot of changes in marketing and new marketing leaders are thinking about what’s the new playbook for 2025 that is going to work, that tactics we used two years ago didn’t work. and marketers are going to have to recruit different types of people. We’re trying to stay ahead of this curve by using and leveraging AI in our platform to make it easier to use, to make it more automated, to make it integrate with more other data tools and integrate with your technology stack. But I think at the end of the day, marketing is still how do you grab the attention of a prospect and help them solve a problem they either know they exist or don’t know exists yet. And the key there is grab the attention. And I think gifting and direct mail is a creative channel that shouldn’t definitely be an attention grabber just because of the uniqueness. And there’s some built-in channel fatigue prevention because you spend money on it. You can’t go send every one of your 10,000 prospects a $500 iPad because you’d go out of business. You’d be broke. So inherently, you have to be more selective. And then also inherently, your recipients are receiving less of it. So it stands out more.
Mike: So it’s that idea of cost is almost presenting saturation.
Kris: It prevents saturation, exactly, which I think has been for and the creativity. There’s so many examples we have of like, you know, even sending up an empty pizza box with a hungry for a solution. There’s just so many different unique ways that you can make someone smile or get creative. And we see so many of our customers, customers post on social being like, thank you so much for sending me this or wow, that was a super creative gift that I got or wow, this video mailer like really grabbed my attention, which is like, Not too many people will screenshot an email or an ad they see and be like, this was the best I’ve ever gotten. I love this email. Thank you for sending it to me.
Mike: Yeah, I can’t say I’ve seen many screenshots on LinkedIn of marketing that I know.
Kris: But again, I will preface, I know I talk and smack on email and ads. I think they all have to be done together. B2B is multi-channel, multi-touch, grab the attention at the right time with the right channel and the right message. And they all work together. So I’m not advocating to stop email, to stop ads, to stop events, to stop community. What I am advocating for is think about the mix of it. If you’re not doing gifting and direct mail yet, you’re missing out or your competitors are, or if you’re oversaturating and all your eggs are in the email basket, maybe think about putting more eggs in some of these other baskets.
Mike: Yeah, I think that’s wise advice. I guess if I was to play the devil’s advocate here, the one thing I know that some people who’ve tried gifting, particularly if they’ve tried it themselves to do it in-house, is with a much more remote world, it’s hard sometimes to know where to send the gift. Which office is the person working at or are they working at home? Is there anything Sendoso can do to help with that?
Kris: Yeah, so there’s a couple of ways that we look at. One is if you have their email address, you can opt them into an address confirmation feature we have. And so then they can confirm their address, making sure it gets to them. So that’s a very low hanging fruit because almost everyone has the email address. We also have suggested address data providers that you can use to get mailing address data, and then we’re coming out with a feature of beta called smart delivery that will actually optimize and tell you, hey, they’re working remote, hey, they’re in the office, hey, you should send it here. So make that even easier.
Mike: Sounds exciting. I mean, hopefully people listening are now thinking of different gifts that they can send their prospects. I really appreciate your insight, Kris. I mean, we have a couple of questions we’d love to ask people before they go. So in terms of those quick questions, you know, the first one, what’s the best bit of marketing advice you’ve ever had?
Kris: Yeah, so really early on, I was given some advice to invest in our category education and invest in channels that have long term more brand awareness benefits than just short term lead gen. And that’s been something we’ve been doing since day one. It’s paid off eight years later, focusing early on on events, content, podcasts, and evangelism and educating the market and not feeling like you have to immediately be like, how many leaves we book from this? So I think take the chance on the long shot bet.
Mike: Awesome. The other question we ask is if you’re talking to someone who’s new into the industry, perhaps a graduate looking to start their marketing career, what advice would you give them to help them have a more successful career?
Kris: Yeah, my short and sweet advice, and I give this to a lot of folks, is it’s not what you know, but who you know. And so you maybe just spent the last four years at an amazing university learning business marketing, or you’re a couple of years into a career, Make sure you’re networking. Go reach out to a random CMO and say, hey, can you be my mentor? Or go ping somebody and say, can we grab coffee? I love that you worked at X company. It’s really interesting to me. And build that network. Another thing I like to say is your network is your net worth. And so don’t be scared to go meet with another person. Even if you have no agenda other than just hopefully it was an interesting conversation.
Mike: Amazing advice. So hopefully people will take advantage of that and build their networks early in their career. I wish I’d built a network earlier on. I certainly see the benefits. Kris, I really appreciate all your time. You know, I feel like I’ve had a whistle stop education, not just around Sendoso, but around the benefits of corporate gifting as well. If people are interested to learn more about Sendoso, or want to contact you with some questions, what’s the best place to contact you?
Kris: Yeah, they can go to sendoso.com, S-E-N-D-O-S-O.com. Email me directly if you want. That’s Kris with a K, K-R-I-S, at sendoso.com. Or look me up on LinkedIn and add me, follow my content. And hey, if you want to network one-on-one, grab coffee in the Bay Area, shoot me a note. Love to meet with people. Love to network.
Mike: That’s awesome. I’ll definitely drop you a note next time I’m in the Bay Area. Thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Kris: Yeah, thanks for having me on, Mike.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
