A 5X Increase in Response Rates

“Sendoso helps us start a relationship and stand out.”

Guru is an intelligent company wiki that helps teams organize information and access it anywhere. In a world where buyers are bombarded with outreach, Guru was looking for a way to stand out in front of target customers while staying true to their company values. Guru’s Senior Manager of Demand Generation, Julia Bersin found an ideal partner in Sendoso. “One of our company values is ‘Give first,’” Julia said. “Sendoso helps us start a relationship and stand out by giving something to our prospects and customers, instead of asking for something from them.”

“Sendoso helps us stand out amongst the other vendors who are constantly reaching out to companies trying to get meetings.”

Driving 40% of cold, outbound meetings

Julia started to scale sends with Sendoso right before the pandemic hit. Prospects were sent boxes of cupcakes to their offices. This was a breakthrough moment for the sales team to see how gifting could make an impact. “People that weren’t responding to us before suddenly started getting back to us,” Julia said. Today, gifting is a driver for about 40% of Guru’s cold outbound meetings.

Once the pandemic hit and remote work became the norm, Julia and the team pivoted to digital gifts. To encourage meetings set, they offered prospects the choice between lunch on Guru or the option to donate to charity. Recipients were delighted, and shared enthusiastic feedback such as, “You are so thoughtful! You absolutely did not need to do that! I will definitely be using this UberEats gift card next week! Thank you, thank you!” By leading with empathy, Julia and her team were able to build relationships and generate meetings—even during a challenging time.

“Sendoso has been an irreplaceable lever for us in terms of driving top of funnel engagement.”

Sweetening deals with cupcakes

One of Julia’s favorite marketing campaigns to date was that first cupcake campaign in early 2020. Over the course of two months, the team sent boxes of cupcakes to over 300 cold prospects with a personalized note from an ADR. The campaign garnered an incredible 5X response rate compared to their previous outreach without a gift.

“Gifting really touches everyone in a way that an email just can’t. Receiving a gift feels both personal and human, fostering immediate rapport between the gifter and recipient. Plus, who doesn’t like cupcakes?”

Playbook for sending success at scale

One of Julia’s main focuses has been building a Sendoso playbook for the ADR team. “It has had a hugely positive impact on our response rate,” Julia said about the project. Designed for Guru’s biggest senders, ADRs, the playbook explains best practices and shares suggested flows for cold outbound messaging and deal acceleration. Julia has also designed automated cadences that include coffee gift cards for lower-touch sends and personalized gifts for higher-touch sends.

Even for the smaller sends like coffee gift cards, Julia encourages the team to write personalized notes for each recipient. It’s this attention to detail that makes every gift sent by Guru feel personal—while the Sendoso platform enables the team to do this at scale.

Julia’s playbook encourages ADRs to send more personalized gifts at their discretion, and the team uses Sendoso’s Address Confirmation feature to ensure gifts get sent to the right address. For example, one sales rep recently sent a prospect a Georgetown University hat after realizing they both had attended the school. The recipient was blown away by his thoughtfulness. “This level of hyper-personalization is really effective for us, helping us set meetings and grow relationships over time,” said Julia.

“Sendoso is absolutely a must-have for anyone leveraging gifting.”

Building relationships with current customers

Guru’s Customer Experience Team, responsible for customer onboarding, engagement and success, also uses Sendoso to fortify current relationships. They have a “build-your-own-swag-box” option, which allows the CX team to hand select custom swag items for their customer and make the onboarding experience feel more personalized and fun.

Julia and the team are also using Sendoso’s HubSpot integration to automatically send a ‘thank you’ gift to customers for completing a Tech Validate survey. Additionally, when a customer submits a G2 review, her team has experimented with different tiers of rewards, including Amazon gift cards for the first 100 reviews. It’s a small way of saying thank you to a customer for their time that lives up to Guru’s company value of giving.

“Gifting with Sendoso is another way to remind our customers how important they are to us.”

Looking ahead, the future looks sweet

Heading into the new year, Julia and her team are excited to explore new use cases and automations with Sendoso. Guru is in the process of integrating Sendoso with Outreach after the company switched over to it in recent months, and Julia is excited to explore all of the new possibilities that come with that shift. She also sees a lot of opportunities within customer engagement and is looking forward to helping the team build out a more formalized playbook. Learning from successful cupcake sends in the past, Guru’s future is certainly looking sweet.

Also are you able to add a line in this article, https://sendoso.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/7273156729243-Connecting-HubSpot-to-Sendoso, that says “Chrome extension is optional and not required for the HubSpot integration to function.”

‍