The Power of Leveraging Automation with Sendoso

Main Takeaways:

This conversation between Sendoso’s SVP of Marketing, Kacie Jenkins, and Director of Marketing Ops at Magaya Corp, Alfred Murgado, highlights the power of leveraging automation tools like Sendoso to maintain personalization and human connection at scale, thereby enhancing customer engagement and improving business outcomes.

During this conversation, they discussed:

• Efficiency Through Automation: Alfred emphasizes the value Sendoso brings in automating previously manual tasks, such as sending gifts for customer renewals or contract renewals. This automation allows for more consistent and timely gestures of appreciation, enhancing customer relationships.
• Personalization at Scale: Despite initial skepticism, Alfred argues that automation does not detract from personalization but enhances it by ensuring that gestures like gift-giving occur precisely at the right moments. This timely personalization is seen as more genuine than belated manual efforts.
• Impact on Business Metrics: Alfred shares tangible business benefits from using Sendoso, such as shortened sales cycles (reduced from 60-90 days to 45 days) and increased contract renewals, highlighting the effectiveness of automated, thoughtful customer engagement.
• Reimagining Direct Mail: Alfred challenges the notion that direct mail is outdated, pointing out its increased impact in an era where digital communication dominates. He suggests that tangible gifts can significantly impact decision-makers and customer retention by showing care and attention.
• Integration Across the Customer Journey: Kacie and Alfred discuss how Sendoso is integrated at various customer journey stages, making engagement efforts feel effortless for the company but meaningful for the recipient. This approach is contrasted with traditional marketing investments that may yield diminishing returns.
• Human Touch in Automation: The conversation underscores that automation, when thoughtfully implemented, does not strip away the human element but rather ensures that human touches are delivered more effectively and consistently.

Broader Marketing Implications: The dialogue suggests a need for marketing teams to explore more authentic, human-centric engagement strategies like those enabled by Sendoso, rather than relying solely on conventional methods like paid search, which may become less effective over time.

Full Transcript:

Kacie Jenkins: Alfred, you are so good. You and your team have really figured out how to do more with less. That sounds very cheesy, but I feel like you are one of the best examples of actually putting this into practice and automating it so that you’re moving away from manual, inefficient work. I’d love to hear some of the tricks that you’ve kind of Adopted with the team and some of the stuff you just told me about earlier.

Alfred Murgado: Sure thing. So, the biggest value in Sendoso that we saw from the get was the magic of being able to automate everything. And now, as we’ve seen, the common thread with marketing has been “do more with less”, like you mentioned. So, for example, we were taking a look at customer renewals. We have that data inside of Salesforce, which is our CRM.

Alfred Murgado: We were able to go ahead and trigger automatic sends. And then we have, for the first year, for five years, ten, fifteen, twenty years. And before all that used to be manual one-to-one sends. That’s not the beauty of Sendoso. The beauty of Sendoso is that having a platform that can automatically detect those fields, and then send the gift out on your behalf.

Alfred Murgado: And We’ve done it on a couple of different use cases. So, for example, on the customer side, we’ve done it for renewals. We’ve done it for contract renewals, where we’ve seen an increase in renewals, which has been fantastic. We’ve also used it for pipeline acceleration because, as we all know, salespeople do exactly what it is that we tell them.

Alfred Murgado: Breaking the fourth wall in there. We would give them a budget to go ahead and do these one-to-one sends inside of Sendoso – They weren’t doing them. At the end of the month, the budget was completely untouched, and then afterward, it’s like, “Hey, go ahead and use up your budget,” and then it’s just a mad dash. It’s not really effective.

Alfred Murgado: It’s not thoughtful. It’s not thoughtful, and that’s what you want. You want a human connection. So, through the magic of Sendoso, we were able to go ahead and automate that. So we have Proposify. Proposify sends out our proposals, and then once the status changes and the person has viewed the proposal, we have an automation built in where it sends them a gift card for $25 for Starbucks.

Alfred Murgado: “Hey, you’re reviewing your proposal. How about having some coffee on us?” That’s beautiful. And that has reduced the sales cycle incredibly. Our sales cycle, on average, was anywhere from 60 to 90 days. We’re now down to 45 days for the sales cycle, and that’s just something as it, you can view it as, well, it’s a gift card.

Alfred Murgado: That’s not really a big difference, blah, blah, blah. Yes, it’s a huge difference. You’re making a connection with a person and you’re seeing that the person is on top of your proposal. It seems like it’s being done on the back end, but it’s all being done by the Sendoso platform.

Kacie Jenkins: We talk a lot about how the way to make a gesture or connection actually resonated to really think through right person, right time, right gift, right message, right, all of those things need to be thoughtfully done.

Kacie Jenkins: Right? And I think a lot of people feel like automating those things could somehow detract from, you know, the personalization. It’s interesting to me that you’re actually making it more personalized because it’s at the exact right time. It’s not like when you remember later. What are your thoughts on this?

Alfred Murgado: Yeah, so it’s funny that you mentioned that because initially, we did have some pushback. Because the idea was, well if this is all being done automated, where is that human connection? No, on the contrary, you’re having more of a human connection because when you’re renewing these customers, say that a contract renewal is coming up, you’re sending it out along with their contract renewal.

Alfred Murgado: When you’re having an anniversary, you’re sending it out when their actual anniversary is going out. And on top of that, it’s funny because someone told me, well, we need handwritten cards. I said, Sendoso does that. Sendoso does handwritten cards. Well, it’s not coming out from the CSMs, mind you. We have about 2,400 customers and only five CSMs.

Alfred Murgado: So if you did the math there, it’s about 400 or so per CSM. I said, are you really going to have a CSM write 400 handwritten notes? It’s not the best use of their time. It is not the best use of their time. And on top of that, the customer, are they going to look at their penmanship? Are they going to try to match to say, no, this is not written by my CSM?

Alfred Murgado: No, but on the contrary, we get emails, tons of emails all the time saying, thank you so much for taking the time to write this handwritten note. And Sendoso does all of that without having to add additional headcount. And that’s the beauty of it. You can do so much more with less.

Kacie Jenkins: What do you think about people who think about direct mail as sort of an antiquated, like a one-to-one, you know, like I’m just gonna Something that SDRs just do, you know, manually and sends for in exchange for a meeting.

Kacie Jenkins: Something that we talk about a lot is the power of scaling this. And maintaining the personalization. But in order to scale it in a way that feels good, you have to make it not feel transactional. So you’re not, you know, trying to barter or trade something for the interaction. How do you all handle that?

Alfred Murgado: Going back to the point that you made about direct mail, that’s been my biggest pet peeve. Because I still believe that direct mail is one of the most efficient ways to get to decision-makers, to get to people. And I’ll explain why. Think of the shift that has happened in our world. 20 years ago, you would get 1 to 2, maybe 5 emails inside of your inbox, but you would get 50 letters.

Alfred Murgado: Nowadays, you have 50 emails inside of your inbox and maybe 1 to 2 letters. wouldn’t it make more of an impact if someone actually received a tangible gift from a company that they’re doing business with? That it shows that they took the time, the care, and the attention to program this so that you can actually have this tangible gift.

Alfred Murgado: For me, that’s much more impactful. And it really has shown, not only in the sales cycle like we showed, but also with customer retention, with customer renewals. It just makes a difference because it shows that the person who handles the account cares

Kacie Jenkins: Yeah, I just received a Valentine from a very nice a partner that we work with, and I honestly squealed. Most mail is so sad.

Alfred Murgado: It really is. It’s just bill collectors in my case.

Kacie Jenkins: Yeah, I’m kind of like the DMV telling me to register my car because I have it forever. But yeah, I think it, you know, it’s meaningful to receive something that feels like it was specifically thought of for you. And I think your team has done just an incredible job of thinking through every stage of your customer journey and how you might integrate those moments in a way that’s not going to require you to

Kacie Jenkins: constantly carry that weight and think about it manually and figure it out and do all the steps and it feels effortless for you, but then it feels very meaningful on the other side. I’m just super inspired by it – I wish we could spread this across more marketing teams because everyone is putting their budget in

Kacie Jenkins: these sort of old bets that they’ve been making and it’s like, okay, well, you know paid search won’t fail me – that’s something everyone does even though the cost is going up and up for less and less return and less of those convert at least in my case. And then there are these ways that are so much more authentically human, in my opinion, that people miss out on because they don’t understand how to incorporate that into what they’re already doing as a team.

Alfred Murgado: People still have, and right now Taylor Swift is playing, so it’s destiny that we’re having this, you know, she has graced us with her presence. But one of the things that I always say is- Humans or people buy from people. You can say that you’re buying a piece of software But at the end of the day what’s gonna give you that heads up when it comes to the competition?

Alfred Murgado: It’s you taking the time to send something to the person that will make a difference that will show that they’re just not one more number, the goal for the quarter, you know, and again, all of these meaningful touches you can do without having your sales team go off and spend, a huge portion of their day.

Alfred Murgado: In the beginning with Magaya, we were working with four different vendors, we had a million Excel spreadsheets, we had no visibility in terms of what was renewing, what was actually being attributed to marketing, and all of that went away. And then that’s the power of Sendoso, being able to have these human touches be automated.

Alfred Murgado: And just because it’s automated doesn’t mean that it’s not empathetic, that it’s not human. It just means that you’re able to do more without having to spend more time.

Kacie Jenkins: Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. You’re very welcome. You’re my favorite person now that I have met. I’m so excited that we got to meet in person.

Alfred Murgado: Yes. Oh, it was fantastic meeting you, Kacie. It really was.