How to build a corporate gifting pilot program

Starting from the ground up can be a challenge for any B2B marketing team. From marketing to sales, leaders must navigate obstacles and adjust their strategy to feed revenue.

Of course, that can come with growing pains.

However, Bazaarvoice is paving the way for businesses to streamline their outreach campaigns with glowing success.

And their leaders are spilling the tea!

Bazaarvoice connects clients and their customers by facilitating the creation of user-generated content (UGC). Companies can then leverage the content across multiple marketing platforms.

The company has experienced incredible growth in just a few short months. Now their leaders are sharing how they scaled a pilot program to drive $1.7 million in pipeline.

A hint?

They worked hand in hand with Sendoso.

See Why Sendoso Works

Starting small with B2B account-based marketingStarting small with B2B account-based marketing

Leaders wanted to start small and test the effectiveness of their initial outreach campaign.

They needed a tool to develop a manageable gifting program that also quantified the results.

Enter Sendoso.

The leading Sending Platform™ automates the corporate gifting process. Bazaarvoice sales development representatives (SDRs) used eGift cards to open a line of communication with prospects.

They had a pilot team in North America and another in the Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa (AMEA) region.

SDRs treated prospects to Starbucks and Uber Eats eGifts or the UK equivalent for the AMEA region.

Once a meeting was booked, Bazaarvoice gave account executives the option to distribute eGifts to clients. Alternatively, they could send a small number of physical gifts via Sendoso to test the relationship.

The initial pilot program ran for eight weeks.

Scaling a corporate gifting pilot program

Bazaarvoice managers quickly learned this method was a hit! Not just among prospects but within their own selling teams.

“Other sellers started talking about it and how awesome it was,” said Jennifer Leaver, senior global account-based marketing (ABM) manager. “They were able to set meetings the same day as sending the gift card.”

And they had more than just word of mouth to prove the campaign was a success. They could rely on data provided by Sendoso to show an increase in the booked meeting rate.

Now it was time to streamline and scale.

Bazaarvoice opened up training to all of its employees who wanted to use Sendoso. It offered quarterly training for anyone who wanted to add corporate gifting to their outreach approach.

Expanding gifting strategies to VoxBoxes

They also applied Sendoso to its VoxBox campaigns. In that project, sales team members send a box of complimentary items for a prospect to sample.

It gives prospects a taste of what the Bazaarvoice can do for their brand.

Before Sendoso, the Bazaarvoice team manually sourced, packed, and shipped the VoxBoxes. It proved to be time consuming, clunky, and hard to track.

Sendoso automated their efforts, taking the burden off employees.

“Sendoso allows us to run our VoxBox-based campaigns much more easily,” said Caitlin Burge, database marketing manager. “It also gives us easy ways to enable sales with door openers that they can incorporate into their outreach cadences.”

Bazaarvoice delivered 450 VoxBoxes in just 40 days.

The team used Sendoso’s Salesforce integration to track the results.

Leaders were able to use data to prove the need for a full-scale sales campaign. Less than four months after its initial test run, Bazaarvoice did just that, with overwhelming success.

Leaders report their VoxBox campaigns now often see up to 5× ROI.

Using this information, company leaders can now scale future campaigns with predictable results.

Scaling direct mail marketing with predictable results

Before onboarding with Sendoso, the company only tracked their outreach efforts using spreadsheets.

Sendoso now allows the Bazaarvoice marketing teams to quantify their work. In a field where providing data can be difficult, they have firm key performance indicators to prove their campaigns work.

“We have the ability to pull information into Salesforce really quickly and easily into dashboards and say ‘Look, this is working,’” said Burge. “It gives us the ability to also say, ‘We want to keep doing this and here is why we should have funding for it.’”

Using Sendoso, they can also track the conversion rate from pipeline to revenue.

Bazaarvoice leaders report direct mail has been one of their biggest drivers for marketing-sourced attribution for account-based marketing.

They say that knowing their manual process worked, but also realizing they needed the right tools to streamline and scale their efforts, was the magic combo.

“We could see [Sendoso] was driving significant pipeline and revenue across the board,” said Leaver.

Today, Bazaarvoice uses the Sendoso curation team to assemble a variety of impactful gifts.

It takes the burden off sellers to assemble a gift for their prospect. Now they can simply search an Airtable list for the perfect item, and Sendoso takes care of the rest.

“Sendoso gives [sales] real-time alerts where things are being claimed and when things are being shipped and delivered,” said Leaver. “They can follow up more proactively.”

Overall, the company has amassed $1.7 million in pipeline and about 400,000 marketing-sourced bookings.