MachiningCloud Expert advice: How to supercharge your revenue with gifting

KEY POINTS

• Successful corporate gifts don’t need to be expensive to offer revenue value.
• MachiningCloud VP of Sales and Marketing Matthew Nicholson used Sendoso at more than one company and shares his expert insight.
• Nicholson shares three recommendations for getting the post out of a gifting strategy.

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It's amazing what a box of cookies can do.

The saying “Time is money” has probably never been truer than it is today. It’s essential for businesses to be as efficient as possible in today’s breakneck-paced world, but they also pay an opportunity cost when they can’t close sales fast enough. That is, the longer the sales cycle, the higher the cost when a prospect takes their money elsewhere.

Let too many opportunities slip by, and pretty soon you’ll be out of business.

So what if you could win back time for the cost of a cookie?

That’s the magic of Sendoso and what strategic corporate gifting can do.

Expert sales and marketing system design

The challenge for any company is developing a system that enables salespeople and marketers to operate efficiently and effectively. There are many digital tools out there, but it takes real expertise to understand how to pull them together into a coherent strategy.

And for that, we’re turning to long-time Sendoso user Matthew Nicholson, vice president of sales and marketing at MachiningCloud, an online e-commerce store for machining tools.

Nicholson has spent more than a decade in the industry. He’s worked in various executive marketing and sales roles at Google and TapClicks, among others.

In short, he knows his way around the tech world, understanding not only what tools to use but how to get them to work together to achieve exponential growth.

When Nicholson started his current role at MachiningCloud, the firm had no tools, systems in place. Despite not having a fully developed marketing/sales function at the time, the firm still earned a modest $1 million per year in revenue.

“When I came to MachiningCloud, I came to a business that had nothing,” says Nicholson. “It was a blank canvas.” Some might see this as a challenge, but Nicholson saw this as an opportunity to build a powerful marketing and sales machine from the ground up.

How did Nicholson do it?

He combined three key ingredients with tremendous success and achieved exponential growth in a short amount of time.

1. Focus on generating ROI

For Nicholson, getting a solid return on investment in all your activities should be a top priority. That means spending money in areas that will truly pay off, in either the short or the long run. Sure, you need a budget, but marketing and sales teams need some flexibility in terms of how they use the budget.

“Some companies are very cheap,” says Nicholson when talking about spending limits for marketing collateral and sales incentives. “They set their employees’ [spending] limit to $300, which limits what they can do. But the return on investment outweighs the funding for user accounts on Sendoso.”

A powerful case in point: Nicholson used Sendoso to send a prospective high-value client to a steak dinner in Las Vegas. In just two weeks, the customer closed a $6 million deal. That’s incredible ROI all for the price of dinner.

By focusing on the results—and its value to the business—Nicholson was able to make fast strides toward something that had been in the works for quite a while.

2. Look for small marketing changes with big payoffs

Marketing and sales executives often like to think about the big picture. It’s common for new executives to come in, develop a new direction, and make sweeping changes that move the company in that new direction.

But those big changes don’t always move the needle.

In fact, it’s sometimes better to focus on the small things you can change, which can quickly add up to big results. Nicholson shortened his sales cycle with an inexpensive gifting fix.

One metric Nicholson was working on was reducing response times. When he started, MachiningCloud’s leads generally responded to an engagement within 3.6 days. But when he implemented an incentive program that includes both small gifts like coffees and big gifts like bottles of whiskey, the average response time fell dramatically to 2.3 days. Nicholson believes he can get that even lower over time.

Why is this important? Basically, the sooner MachiningCloud can generate a response, the sooner they can close a deal. And in MachiningCloud’s B2B industrial tools industry, where the average sales cycle is more than 140 days, every little bit counts.

3. Prioritize your account-based marketing investments

As we mentioned above, Nicholson started his job with a completely blank slate. The firm didn’t have any sales tools, a customer relationship management system, account-based marketing tools, or really anything. But he also didn’t have carte blanche to just go out and start spending.

“I knew right away that I wanted Sendoso before I wanted Salesforce, believe it or not,” says Nicholson. “If we weren’t going to spend the money on Salesforce right away, I knew I needed Sendoso, because I needed to engage our customers. I needed to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.”

In this case, Nicholson knew from previous experiences that he could use Sendoso to make an instant impact on revenues. But more importantly, he understood that this investment wasn’t just about bringing in new customers; it was also about reengaging existing customers who had fallen out of the sales funnel.

“It’s amazing what a box of cookies can do.”

How corporate gifts add up revenue

Ultimately, the success or failure of any strategy is in the metrics. Did things improve, stay the same, or get worse?

In MachiningCloud’s case, all the small changes Nicholson put in place have had a significant effect on the firm’s overall performance. Where they were pulling in $1 million/year in revenue in the past, MachiningCloud has now cracked $3 million per month, putting them in an excellent position to break revenue goals this year.

Are you ready to supercharge your business? Sendoso is here to help! Simply schedule a demo to see the impact sending can have on your revenues.

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