How an Onion Mug Got Me a Meeting

Many of us in sales have been in the conundrum of how to creatively cut through the noise of a C-level executive’s inbox. I was in my first week at Sendoso and found myself in just this situation. I had one piece of truly personal intel from LinkedIn that stuck out to me–they hated onions (me too, actually, but I digress). Luckily, I had an awesome resource at my disposal–Amazon supercharged with the power of Sendoso.

I had seen a shoutout by one of their prospects on social media that the organization was sending out gift bundles with a printed haiku the last line of which read, “Caffeine always helps”. I knew I had to put that statement to the test!

1) Send through Salesforce.com

I brought up the Salesforce record and used the Sendoso widget to search for onion paraphernalia through our Amazon integration. Then I saw it–an onion coffee mug–this is how I would get through.

I purchased the item using my Sendoso account balance and typed out a quick message for our fulfillment team to include as a handwritten note in the package saying, “Here’s to testing your theory whether ‘caffeine always helps’.”

2) Preface gift delivery with an email

Knowing that it would take a few days to ship, I sent them an email commending them for the awesome swag bundles his team was sending and requesting time for us to discuss. I also made sure to include a quick P.S. line alerting him a package was en route. I did not immediately hear back, but I wasn’t worried since the best was yet to come.

3) Follow with an added touch

Once I got the notification that my package had arrived I immediately sent a $5 coffee e-Gift to go along with the mug. It was a One-Two combo they simply could not resist. They wrote back, we scheduled a time, and a calendar invitation was sent faster than you could say SQL.

While the idea may seem unorthodox–the method– setting the stage for personalized direct mail, sending the gift, and sending timely follow-up afterwards using traditional outreach has been highly effective for our team at Sendoso, and for our client and partner organizations.

P.S. I’d be happy to chat about your lifecycle engagement strategy, enabling personalized client gifting, and any ideas on how you creatively leverage the direct mail channel. Contact me here.

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