One Campaign Generated 400+ New Opportunities

Busting the myths of enterprise sales to influence $33M in pipeline

Gong enables revenue leaders to adapt their strategies using real-time insights from sales conversations. As the Senior Manager of Account-Based Marketing at Gong, Laura Vitaro was looking for creative ways to generate pipeline among enterprise accounts.

She decided to leverage direct mail to send a unique gift that would capture the attention of key decision-makers at top accounts. Laura knew that piñatas would create a memorable unboxing experience, and also liked that they were available in Sendoso Direct, which enables fast and accessible sends.

Ahead of the 2020 holiday season, Laura added reindeer piñatas to the SDRs’ Sendoso Direct offerings. She knew that the piñatas would inspire fun messaging, so she crowdsourced ideas from the SDR team — putting full trust into the SDRs’ creative skills and knowledge of their target audience. Just as she suspected, one of Gong’s stellar SDRs came through with the perfect idea.

The messaging highlighted that a piñata is like customer-facing interactions, where the real value is inside. Gong helps crack open those interactions to help you understand what’s really going on, so that you can make impactful, data-driven business decisions.

All follow-up messaging was completely personalized to the prospect’s business, with a few additional piñata puns sprinkled throughout.

The campaign was so successful that Laura launched it again for Valentine’s Day, this time with pink unicorn piñatas.

And in Q2 of 2021, Laura worked with the sales team to formalize the program. Ahead of this iteration of the campaign, SDRs and AEs paired up to identify their target contacts using recommendations from the marketing team and Demandbase. The marketing team then provided SDRs with a heavily customizable Outreach sequence based on what was working in past piñata campaigns.

“We’re now on Project Piñata 3.0 with SDRs begging for additional piñatas to send via Sendoso.” said Laura. “With each batch, we’ve seen improved conversion rates since we’re applying new learnings with each iteration.”

The latest piñata campaign generated a more than 14% conversion rate in the enterprise and strategic segments — but some individual SDRs had even greater success, booking up to 40% of the piñatas they sent. Overall, “Project Piñata” has sourced $5.5M in pipeline and influenced nearly $33M in pipeline landing Laura the 2021 Sendie Award winner in the Sending Trailblazer category.

We’ve found that the piñatas not only provide that ‘surprise and delight’ moment, but they help us break down the vendor/buyer dynamic and invest in these really human relationships with key prospects for the long term.

-Laura Vitaro

An added bonus of the campaign was that it underscored two of Gong’s core values. Firstly, “Win as a Team,” as the messaging for the piñata and Outreach sequence came from SDRs who knew what resonated with this audience. Additionally, the Gong team continued to iterate on what was working in the field and what wasn’t — adding additional Outreach touchpoints and adjusting the messaging based on SDR feedback.

The second core value that the team employed was their operating principle of “Challenge Conventional Wisdom” by not relying on traditional gifts for enterprise decision-makers, such as golf, whiskey, or sales collateral.

“We’re myth-busting that enterprise sales has to be boring by proving that CROs at the largest organizations in the world love unicorn piñatas,” explained Laura. “We’ve had multiple enterprise prospects — who were totally cold — send photos of their kids playing with the piñatas! The challenges of the last year highlighted even more that we are all human, and a piñata can help brighten anyone’s day — including executives.”

“It’s not what you sell; it’s how you sell it.”

Gong enables revenue leaders to adapt their strategies using real-time insights from sales conversations. Russell Banzon, VP of Marketing, leads the revenue marketing team, driving events, content, marketing operations, digital, and account-based programs.

Gong’s top operating principle is to create raving fans and Russell says that “starts by grabbing the attention of prospective customers.” In 2019, faced with increasing revenue targets, Gong’s marketing and sales teams needed a new way to generate pipeline and scale as they continue to grow. As a three-time Sendoso user, Russell knew the value of direct mail, gifting, and swag. He scaled the platform, creating more touches the team could use to cut through the noise and gain the attention of buyers.

Shortly after implementing Sendoso, an SDR used the platform to spark dialogue with an SVP at a Fortune 500 company. They used the Amazon integration to send the prospect a personalized gift. The SDR’s efforts created a true surprise and delight moment and even prompted the prospect to take a meeting and post about it on social media. That was all it took for Sendoso to spread like wildfire throughout the company.

“You think of a gong and you immediately feel joy.”

Prior to launching Sendoso, SDRs would spend weeks trying to book an initial meeting with prospects. To improve lead-to-opportunity creation, the team launched a “mini gong” direct mail campaign, not only to break into critical accounts but also to create brand awareness and embed themselves within prospects’ company culture.

“A gong is a sign of victory. As a salesperson, you think of a gong and you immediately feel joy. You immediately feel your fondest memory out in the field, closing deals,” said Russell.

The marketing team partnered with the sales development team to build an account list targeting senior-level contacts. Sendoso’s project management team sourced items for the bundle: mini gongs, purple crinkle paper, a custom box, and branded custom tape—all meant to elevate each recipient’s unboxing experience. The package also included a handwritten note with the message to share the mini gong with an all-star sales performer.

Using Sendoso’s Salesforce integration, reps were notified when the package was delivered and coordinated follow-up cadences in Outreach with the message, “I saw the gong landed, who did you give it to?” to further the conversation and schedule a meeting.

In today’s climate, it’s not what you sell it’s how you sell it. When thinking about door opening campaigns, we like to differentiate Gong in a crowded market. And Sendoso allows us to cut through all of the SaaS noise.

Russell also wanted to tackle the historical problem of people not showing to meetings. One hour before the scheduled meeting, sales reps send $5 coffee eGift cards, increasing show rates by 50%.

One campaign yielded tens of millions in influenced pipeline

The mini gong bundle and subsequent Outreach sequences influenced more than 400 new opportunities and influenced tens of millions in pipeline.

When we asked Russell what he attributes to the campaign’s success he said, “not only did the campaign give our prospects a tangible piece of our brand but it also linked our value propositions with a creative message that immediately brought joy and got people excited to talk to us.”