How Gainsight developed scalable, repeatable, and profitable B2B direct mail campaigns.

Sendoso is sort of like a Swiss Army knife for us. We're able to do so many things with one tool.

One marketing tool. Dozens of opportunities. And in the case of Gainsight’s field marketing team, those opportunities are adding up to big money.

About $5.5M in outbound-sourced pipeline has been influenced by Sendoso touches. It’s just one of the many Gainsight campaigns featuring the leading Sending Platform. The versatility of the corporate gifting platform is why Gainsight is able to meet so many of its marketing needs.

The Swiss Army knife of marketing solutions

“We love all of the sources that Sendoso brings to the experience. Everything from your curation team, to all of the tips and tricks,” explained Emily Wilkes, director of field and partner marketing at Gainsight.

It’s why Wilkes compared Sendoso to a Swiss Army knife.

“Even with the support from our customer service manager, all of the capabilities to create curated packages—it’s amazing.”

Wilkes helped bring Sendoso to Gainsight when she joined the customer success and product experience platform in 2020. She wanted a corporate gifting solution for her field marketing tech stack. But Sendoso ended up being so much more. Now Gainsight uses Sendoso to resolve myriad pain points across multiple teams.

It’s why Gainsight was awarded the 2022 Sendie Award for Best in Show & Strategy.

Marketing direct mail collaboration builds pipeline

Demand generation and field marketing work hand in hand to leverage Sendoso strategically to build pipeline. In fact, Gainsight’s leading direct mail program holds the company record for the highest meeting-to-closed-won conversion rate at 31%.

So how did they do it?

The overall goal for Gainsight was to increase opportunity production. Plus, the team needed Sendoso to meet growing pipeline targets. Now there are two programs helping to do both.

Enabling SDRs with direct mail

The New Hire Gift Program

Don’t let the name fool you. The New Hire Gift Program isn’t for employees being hired at Gainsight.

The program targets prospects who accept new positions at companies within Gainsight’s ICP, particularly employees who step into director-level positions or higher within top-graded accounts.

Before using Sendoso, sales development representatives (SDRs) struggled to quickly follow up with prospects who changed jobs or were promoted. SDR outreach was limited to LinkedIn and lacked a multichannel approach.

It took experts from the operations team, marketing team, and Sendoso to improve the process.

• Operations developed a scalable way to identify new hires and add them to Salesforce.
• Marketing-led SDR enablement.

SDRs learned how to send their contacts personalized, high-quality corporate gifts through Sendoso and a mix of integrations (Marketo, Salesforce, and Outreach). The combination enables SDRs to trigger direct mail while tracking influenced pipeline, multitouch attribution, and response rates.

The training itself was surprisingly straightforward according to Julie Ritchie, senior director of demand generation, who estimated it took only 20 minutes.

“Giving our sales team the autonomy to send personalized gifts to the right person at the right time has led to the most effective door openers and opportunity accelerators,” added Ritchie.

Marketing Content Specialist Kate Meacham, who works with the SDRs, loves how easy it is to curate direct mail gifts and track what’s available via Sendoso.

“SDRs always ask me if specific items are in inventory, and it’s so easy for me to double-check. I love the visibility,” explained Meacham.

Direct mail produces cold outreach results

Since the program launched, Gainsight has sent more than 500 corporate gifts to prospects. The program has influenced 39 opportunities as of September 2022 totaling more than $5.5M in outbound-sourced pipeline.

When Gainsight secures a meeting through the New Hire Gift Program, there’s a one in three chance that it will convert to closed-won business over the next two years, according to Ritchie.

She attributes the success to timing. The time between when a person changes jobs and when they receive a gift is less than one month. By executing quickly, Gainsight has been able to congratulate someone on their new job within their first 30 days. It’s a creative way to spark a timely conversation.

The success of the New Hire Program feeds directly into Gainsight’s second successful direct mail strategy, which helps account executives (AEs) build relationships with buyers.

Enabling AEs with direct mail

Always On Program

“Relationship selling is critical to the success at Gainsight,” explained field marketing manager Kristen Keller. “Data shows when AEs have a text messaging relationship with their buyer, deals progress easier and faster.”

It’s why the Gainsight team created the Always On Program.

AEs can choose from a variety of corporate gifts to use at any point in the sales cycle or customer lifecycle. The options include branded merchandise or swag stored in the Sendoso Fulfillment Center, Sendoso Direct gifts, or custom-built boxes.

“The options let AEs surprise and delight buyers based on their personal interests,” explained Keller.

Gainsight gave each AE a $120 per month budget to spend as they see fit. It’s funded by field marketing. AEs offer up everything from champagne to AirPods to charity donations through Sendoso.

“The beauty of this always-on program is the AE autonomy,” added Keller. “The AE can utilize it for both deal acceleration or net-new deals, wherever the need is stronger in that particular month.”

One of Gainsight’s more popular sends is a high-end gift set that highlights the company’s five core values. Wilkes calls it the crème de la crème of gift sets. The Values in Action gift set includes:

• The Giving Tree book
• Fuji instant camera and film
• Bluetooth karaoke microphone
• The Customer Success Economy book
• Gainsight-branded Yeti water bottle

“This is what I’m talking about when it comes to deal acceleration,” explained Wilkes. “We focus on really providing that best-in-class experience.”

The evergreen program leverages integrations between Sendoso and Salesforce. It enables Gainsight to track pipeline influenced, multitouch attribution, and response rates. The reporting allows marketing visibility into which gifts are the highest performing. The analytics help marketing make data-driven recommendations and further optimize the program.

Account executives influence pipeline with gifting

To date, approximately 228 gifts have been sent through the program. It has generated more than $2M in influenced pipeline.

“Sendoso has played a large part in helping our organization continue to accelerate its growth by driving opportunities and engagement from prospects,” said Keller.

Now the team is in talks to create a similar program for the SDRs.

The brilliant outreach ideas keep coming for the Gainsight team. Their other successes include:

• Secret Sauce package: TRUFF Hot Sauce along with a branded insert reading “We’re fired up about the opportunity to work together” and providing the definition of Gainsight’s secret sauce.
• Queen’s Gambit gift set: Gainsight took the word “strategy” to a new level at the height of the Netflix show’s popularity by doing a virtual field event with chess master Garry Kasparov. It focused on how the skills needed to build a chess strategy are the same skills needed to get buy-in in the boardroom. The company used Sendoso to send attendees a chessboard, Kasparov’s signed book, and inserts about the event.

“When we send something in the mail before an event we see like little to no drop-off,” explained Wilkes. “Hardly anyone doesn’t show up to one of our field events.”

The success is leading to more collaboration with and adoption by other teams. Even the corporate events team is using Sendoso now. For Wilkes, it’s just the beginning of even bigger campaigns to come.

“We’re excited to take Sendoso to the next level. We’re really proud of what we’ve done. It’s perfect but I think there’s much more to come from us. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.”