Maximize Prospect Engagement with the Sendoso and Gong Integration

If you’ve heard the phrase “Do more with less,” raise your hand. 🙋

Marketers have been tasked with generating a pipeline that converts, filling the lead funnel, creating engaging content, launching campaigns - the list goes on. At the same time, budgets are flat or shrinking, and time spent on any one project is at a premium.

So, how can you effectively accomplish all these goals while being efficient with time and money? We have one word for you: automation.

You might be thinking, “Sendoso, you’re all about the personal touch! Isn’t automation the complete opposite of that?” We’re here to tell you that you can have your automation and build personal relationships, too. We think of it as helping you send the right gift to the right person at the right time.als

By integrating the tools you already have at your fingertips with Sendoso, you can build (and scale!) outreach programs that are personalized and effective without adding any additional workflows to your marketing or sales process. 

We’ve created this playbook to help you maximize our Gong integration. Real Sendoso customers have proven these strategies, so we know they work. Get ready to supercharge your marketing and sales processes and impress leadership with your team’s success.

Sendoso + Gong

Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that allows you to capture customer interactions then delivers insights at scale, empowering teams to make decisions based on data instead of opinions. Using Sendoso with Gong, you can trigger sends based on when and how a prospect engages - ensuring you’re sending the right gift to the right person at the right time. Using this integration, you can:

• Automatically trigger gift sends when a prospect books a meeting
• Create an email in your sequence to send unresponsive prospects a gift of their choice
• Easily track all of your activity within the Deal/Contact timeline
• Send everything within Gong, so you don’t have to leave your workflow

Follow these steps to create programs to connect with the right person at the right time, with the right message and gift.

If you need help setting up an automated gifting campaign using Sendoso + Gong, click here for setup instructions.

Email Messaging Basics

Before we dive in to how to craft your gifting campaign emails, let's look at the foundation for your email programs.

Understanding Your Audience

Understanding your audience and segmenting your messaging to provide the most tailored emails possible is key to success. 

While there are many ways to segment your audience, here’s what we’ve used to generate 18-26% topline sequence reply rates:

First, figure out if the prospect is an above-the-line (ATL) buyer or a below-the-line (BTL) buyer. This concept from Skip Miller essentially states that ATL buyers are your decision makers (typically your VP+ prospects) while BTL buyers are more of a user-buyer (typically Director-level and below). 

ATL buyers focus on the return on the investments they are making - they typically won’t actually be utilizing your product firsthand. BTL buyers, on the other hand, are focused on the features and benefits of your product and they are interested in how your product will make their lives and their team's lives easier. 

ATL Buyers → Focus on ROI

BTL Buyers → Focus on features & benefits

Second, if you leverage an intent data tool, their level of intent can be helpful when determining your messaging. For prospects showing high levels of intent, you can assume they are looking into your product and your competition - differentiation is important here. For prospects showing lower levels of intent, education is crucial - share information about what your product does and how it can potentially benefit them. 

‍High Intent → Focus on Differentiation

Low Intent → Focus on Education

Finally, segment your audience based on their role or their industry - whichever aligns to your product offering the most. For example, if you sell to both sales and marketing leaders but your value proposition is different for both, having a separate sequence for both personas will provide the most tailored and effective messaging. 

From the moment a prospect opens an email, you have 3 seconds until they decide to read it or not. If they do decide to read your email, they will only take about 11 seconds to skim it. Therefore, it’s very important to have short and simplified messaging that’s very easy to scan and understand with lots of white space and a clear call to action. 

Positioning a Gift in Cold Emails

It’s best practice to not try and trade a gift for someone’s time but, rather, use it as a relationship building tool to capture attention. Avoid wording like, “In exchange for your time, I’d like to send you...". Instead, separate your company’s value proposition and the send offer within your email. 

Here’s an example:

A PS increases reply rates by 38% and is a great way to separate the ask for time from the gift offer.

For some, this may seem contradictory - “Well, won’t they take the gift and run if the gift isn’t directly attached to the ask for time?” The law of reciprocity comes into play here - even though you are separating the ask from the offer, it’s unlikely that a recipient will take the gift without reciprocating. 

Build Your Gifting Strategy

After you’ve identified the prospect scenarios you want to include in your campaigns track and have set up your trigger, it’s time to think about your gifting campaigns. Personalization is key, and there are a few things to consider when building your plan.

Choosing the right gift

First and foremost, we know that one size doesn’t fit all. In any of your gifting campaigns, it’s important to offer your recipient a few gifts to choose from, in a range that touches on different interests or needs. For this, a Sendoso Choice campaign is the way to go.

We recommend using eGifts for a follow up after a meeting is booked or a reminder, and a physical gift for when a prospect has gone silent.

Use Cases

Gifting is a strategy you can incorporate into many aspects of your business, but for the purposes of this playbook we worked with Gong experts to identify the most common and impactful use cases for this integration.

First-Touch Door Opener

Sometimes the best way to generate a response from a prospect is to ask a question rather than asking for time out of the gate. 

In this example, you can see that the messaging is catered to a Sales Development manager who is focused on helping their team break into target accounts and hit goals. Rather than asking for time, we simply want to generate a response to gauge interest and we offer a low-value eGift to incentivize a reply. 

One of four things can happen with this approach:

1. They respond and say “yes” and book a meeting
2. They don’t respond and continue in the flow
3. They respond and say “no” with an objection that you now have a chance to overcome
4. They respond and say “no” for a legitimate reason and you can now focus your efforts elsewhere

Manual Personalized Door Opener 

For high-value target accounts or getting the attention of a critical decision maker, a more highly personalized, manual approach can be effective. But you can use Sendoso directly in your Gong email composer, so no need to leave your workflow!

In this example, the first two lines of the email are personalization - this is intentional as the preview text will most likely pique their interest enough for them to open the email. Then, the second two lines are the relevance - these lines detail who the writer is, what their product offers, and the ask for time. 

Boost Meeting Attendance

Getting ghosted on demos? Send a meeting reminder email the day of the scheduled demo with an eGift for a coffee to enjoy during the meeting to encourage attendance and build rapport. 

The team at Sendoso started sending these emails and now has a 91% meeting hold rate. 

The email should have a proposed agenda and remind the prospect of the meeting occurring that day with a kind offer for coffee to enjoy during the meeting. This sets the tone for the relationship and makes the prospect more excited to attend the call. 

Action: Re-Engage Unresponsive Prospects

Sometimes, you’re having a great conversation with a prospect - a couple of emails going back and forth, maybe a completed qualification/discovery call. They seem excited about your product, and it feels like they’re primed to start sales conversations.

Then, suddenly, nothing.

Emails go unanswered, voicemails are not returned, and LinkedIn messages are ignored. Instead of the typical (and sometimes downright cringey) “Have you been eaten by an alligator?” email, try something a little different. 

Acknowledging that you understand your prospect is likely super busy, or the possibility that the decision has been made to go with another vendor, is a low-pressure way to try and illicit a response. Offering to send the gift no matter their decision is a great way to add a touch of class and give a great impression of your brand - which will stick with the prospect when they’re back on the market.

Analyze Your Results

Once you’ve implemented your campaigns using Gong and Sendoso, you’ll want to track and analyze your results to determine your success. You can look at the data in a few different ways.

Gift acceptance: Are your gifts being accepted or going unnoticed? A high acceptance rate means that your prospects are at least reading your emails and are interested enough to redeem their gift offer. Periodically looking at what gifts are accepted the most can help determine which items are the best choices for your campaigns.

‍Meetings booked: Compare the number of meetings booked from these campaigns to your typical benchmark. Is it higher or lower? This is a good indicator of effective messaging.

Meetings booked to show rate: Are your prospects attending the meetings they’ve booked with you? Compare your benchmark show rate to those of your campaigns. If it’s missing the mark, you may consider changing your messaging or the signals you’re targeting.

‍Opportunity Win Rate: How are your campaigns influencing won deals? Tracking the progress of your account lists through the sales cycle is another helpful indicator of your timing, messaging, and gift resonating with your prospects.

Send It!

In the ever-evolving landscape of sales and marketing, integrating Sendoso with Gong offers a revolutionary approach to personalization and efficiency. By leveraging real-time insights and automated gifting, businesses can forge stronger relationships with prospects at pivotal moments.

This playbook not only showcases the power of this integration but provides actionable strategies that drive engagement and conversions. Embrace this powerful combination to enhance your outreach and see tangible results in your marketing efforts and sales pipeline.