Our Top Go-To-Market Bets in 2024

We’re doubling down on personalized, thoughtful interactions at Sendoso — and we’re experimenting with smart ways to use fit and intent signals to automate and scale those interactions across the customer journey.  

I recently shared 3 of our top GTM bets for 2024 in the Wynter Games:

• Unique, personalized events
• Programmatic, AI-enhanced outbound
• LinkedIn for demand creation AND capture

Our ultimate goal is to generate high quality pipeline (qualified opportunities), which we classify as “best fit” buyers who have indicated that they want to talk to us and have booked a meeting. 

Sidenote: we’ve pivoted away from old-school, volume-goaled lead generation where anyone who downloads an ebook gets tossed over to sales. That approach erodes trust and leads to low conversion rates.

What about MQLs?

We don’t track MQLs as pipeline. We view MQLs as the bucket of learners who are interested and at an earlier stage in the buying cycle — we need to educate these folks and demonstrate value so we’ll be top of mind when they’re ready to buy. 

So how are our big bets performing? Let’s take a look.

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1. Unique, Personalized Events

Events are one of our top performing 2024 bets. We’ve moved away from the ‘gauntlet-of-booths’ style event activation to more intimate hosted events in regions where we have a concentration of customers and prospects.

How it works

We bring curated groups of well-matched people together to network and learn from one another. The main guidelines are:

• Community-first

We’re partnering with digital communities to bring community members together in person. For example, we’re hosting a series of curated CMO breakfasts with Matt Heinz and the (amazing) CMO Coffee Talk group, bringing local CMOs together to engage and talk shop over the breakfast table.

• Authentic

We’re hosting a series of “Real Retreats” across the U.S. This is an event we dreamed about and we knew marketers deserved, so we brought it to life. Real Retreats give marketers a peaceful place to step away from the hustle and bustle of bigger conferences and engage with other marketers in a non-abrasive, no-sales environment with relaxation options like a massage, cuddles with therapy dogs, brunch and spicy “real talk” panels. 

• Scalable and repeatable

Partnering with brands and communities that share our values helps to amplify the reach of events and the content that comes out of them, but partnership also makes the lift lighter for everyone. We share the logistical load and replicate the same event template multiple times. It’s something we can set and repeat. 

How we measure success

We measure event success in terms of three KPIs:

• Awareness: did we see a lift in organic engagement/WOM/traffic?
• Opportunities: How many meetings were booked before/during/after the event?
• Conversion rates and deal velocity/size: what size are the deals catalyzed or influenced by events, and how quickly do they close

How it’s going

Not surprisingly, creating a more personalized environment fosters much more meaningful connections than chasing people around with a booth scanner. We’re seeing over 1000% ROI on our targeted events in Q1. 

The Real Retreats are one of our most successful, higher ACV pipeline-generating initiatives in 2024 and we’re investing even more here next quarter.

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2. Programmatic, AI-enhanced outbound

This is a controversial topic as GTM teams rethink the SDR function and how it contributes to demand conversion. We believe that personalized, thoughtful human connection doesn’t have to be manual or 1:1. 

How it works

I initially bet against outbound — we were generating zero pipeline that way and the process was manual and costly. Shifting to programmatic, highly personalized outbound was a game changer. Because we’ve automated the motion, one SDR can operate at the scale of many SDRs without sacrificing quality. Worth noting: outbound won’t work without a strong brand. 

We’re using AI-enhanced workflows to automate highly personalized outreach triggered on fit and intent signals. 

I’ll go into the weeds a bit here because I know there’s interest in how we do this. Skip ahead if you don’t want to dive deep!

1. Decide on the strategy for the campaign you want to run — your target list and the fit/intent signals you’re using to trigger your outreach will dictate the type of AI-enhanced personalization and messaging.
2. Source and enrich your lead lists. Clay aggregates 50+ data providers.
3. Start training your Clay table with prompts that ask Clay to look for certain variables (Clay is a data manipulation tool. It’ll pull the info you need for your personalization variables from your data enrichment providers). some text
   1. For example: Hyper-personalize automated outreach based on Champify contact data or 6sense signals
4. Clay puts all of the info together to personalize messaging for your play with GPT prompts. Your outreach sequence is developed based on the variables you’ve pulled. At Sendoso, we bake in personalized gift options like a gift card to the best Yelp-rated restaurant in their neighborhood.
5. Push to your unified inbox (like Instantly/Smart Lead) — you may want to consider using a new domain if you’re testing this at scale.
6. Test the campaign with a small batch and tweak your GPT prompts to improve quality/tone.
7. The play and related email outreach sequences are automated from here. To repeat it, just put new leads into it.
8. Wait for a response and reply! Make sure your SFDC tracking is set up to report on meetings booked, etc.

How we measure success

We look at open rates, meetings booked, qualified pipeline created, and conversion rates/deal velocity and size. 

How it’s going

We set a stretch goal of $1m in new business pipeline in Q1, which was a big jump given that we’d only been running this experiment for a couple of months and outbound pipeline was previously at $0. We’re on track to hit that goal, and the ACV and conversion rates for outbound-generated pipeline are higher than projected. 

We’re getting love notes back from people who are delighted by the personalization, which I have never seen before with outbound. We’re booking so many high quality meetings that we’re continuing to scale this motion and apply it to customer expansion.

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3. LinkedIn for demand creation and capture

We’re betting on brand awareness to ensure that our brand easily comes to mind for our buyers when they’re in market. A lot of people have heard of Sendoso, but not all of them know what problems we solve or when they should think of us. We use Linkedin to create context and clarity about what we do, the problems we solve, and when to think of our solution. 

How it works

We’ve invested pretty heavily in organic LinkedIn engagement. We’ve created a Sendfluencer program with like-minded operators and thought leaders. Our leadership team is engaged here and we’re layering advertising on top to retarget and engage with folks at target accounts who are maybe not seeing us much because they haven’t followed or visited us yet but would benefit or find value in our content. Our sales team is also using Linkedin to share helpful content and build real connections, so we have a multi-pronged approach to show up everywhere for target accounts.

People want to engage with people vs with corporations and brands. We do use our Sendoso LinkedIn page to share content and to amplify our team’s efforts, but where we’re seeing the most traction is with our team and Sendfluencers posting, engaging, commenting, and actually connecting with people in a way that’s non-transactional and authentic. 

How we measure it 

We use HockeyStack to give us a richer picture of all of the touchpoints in a deal cycle. We’re looking at organic social impact/influence on deals, traffic from Linkedin, inbound opportunities, and ad performance. 

How it’s going

LinkedIn touchpoints show up in more and more of our deals. We’re getting more inbound DMs from people saying, “I was just thinking about this” or “I’m exploring a gifting tool, this is interesting” or “I liked your post yesterday. Can we chat?” The number of demo requests from people saying that they’ve heard about us on LinkedIn or through word-of-mouth has increased. We’re just getting started with thought leader ads, so much more to come on this front.

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To learn more about how Sendoso is leveraging AI, click here.