Sendoso's Marketing SVP Kacie Jenkins - Facing Challenges

Transcript

Exploring Measurement and Tracking in Revenue Teams
 
One of the things I'm immediately curious about, and you mentioned, like, measurement and tracking and deep funnel, and I think there's just a lot across what we're observing and hearing with our customers around, again, like, proving things.
 
And I feel like you have a really great perspective on this. I also love, how you mentioned, like you said, you know, revenue teams. And I think that I just wanted to highlight that too because I feel like we still are so stuck in the sales and marketing. And I love how you're using that, and I want us more people to start using that more and now.

Chapter
The Importance of Sales and Marketing Alignment
 
But I think with that, again, comes that measurement piece. So can you talk a little bit more about, like, how you were able to make that happen and hold the line and and how you're able to demonstrate the impact of the revenue team together?
 
I think it's the the, ability to pull your sales team closer, and I'm seeing a lot of marketing and sales teams come closer and closer together.
 
Our our sales team, we have a an AE junior who is super active on LinkedIn.
 
He's better than I am, and, and our our AEs are are quite often, added into DMs on LinkedIn, and they carry on a conversation there before it ever moves anywhere else. We got our whole leadership team involved in this effort for a reason. I wanted them to see firsthand that if they consistently hosted and engaged, and, and helped us build a community, that they were gonna start getting DMs. They were gonna have connections into accounts later on that we needed to multi multithread into.
 
I actually, use a tool called Meet Meet Alfred to automate LinkedIn connections for anyone who submits a a demo request and is a hand raiser, or takes other actions that are really high intent on our website. And it connects me every time, but it also connects our CEOs, and some of my team. And, we get a lot of connections this way. The first touch is automated, but, the next touches are all human, you know, and it's just us interacting. And the value of just that, of us having relationships with all of those people, and then connecting with people as we post and comment and engage has allowed us to break into deals that we never would have had a chance with.
 
And that's a pretty quick payout that you'll see as you're just building relationships.

Chapter
Understanding Brand Perception and Its Impact
 
I think, for me coming in and saying setting very clear expectations around this is where we are now, and our outbound motion is failing. And, you know, we're not getting enough inbound, pipeline. And here are here's the lift that I expect once we invest in brand for a couple of quarters, really helped our CFO and and CEOs understand what I was trying to do. And I didn't come in and then say, we need a new website. We need a new color palette. You know, we need everything to to just be rebranded. I said, we need to, invest in the perception of Sendoso.
 
I brought them proof that the perception of Sendoso within the communities we were targeting differed from our own assumptions about how we were being perceived. So I gathered information from CMO groups and from LinkedIn. We pulled a whole bunch of of data to show them, that the way we assumed people thought about us was actually not the way that they were thinking about us, and that needed to be addressed immediately in order for our sales teams and our BDRs and the rest of our work to be successful.
 
And then I think once you adjust your goal post to qualified pipeline, then you have your sales team qualifying that. You have a handshake on what good looks like. Everyone is very closely involved in that together.
 
And I also eliminated sales versus marketing credit on our pipeline. It's just inbound or outbound pipeline. We track the programs and the campaigns and the touch points that we can track that contribute to that, and we report on it together.
 
So that that has helped us a lot eliminate these weird time wasting battles of, you know, who emailed last or, you know, what is the first or last touch point. We're just looking at collectively what can we all do that moves the needle.
 
Yeah. How long did it take you to change that perception?
 
I would say it took us two to three quarters.
 
Okay.
 
Yeah. With really quarter. Yeah. Of, like, initiated, brand changes in terms of the messaging you're putting out. And was everything coming internally? Did you work with, like, some outside agency to help you with any of that messaging or branding, or was everything just kinda done internally in terms of how to figure out your pivot?

Chapter
Gathering Customer Feedback for Brand Strategy

 
A lot of it internal. A lot of us, I, we split and took a whole bunch of customer meetings in a row to try and just gather information and feedback as well.

And, you know, face to face is best, I think, if you can do it. And, and then we worked with a couple of outside, folks. We we still work with, Brandon, at growth sprints. He's been really helpful with us, around, how we think about our content strategy and connect it to all of our organic LinkedIn efforts, and also SEO, how we think about SEO, and, creating content that's actually valuable and interesting and and not just, you know, trying to hack it and shoot a bunch of crap out into the world.
 
We've done a pretty low lift on SEO and seen an incredible spike in the pipeline that we get from organic search.
 
So that's been really cool. And we also worked with Liam, at Storybook for for some of the storytelling effort around, you know, like, how are we how how do we actually impact these differences between how we're perceived and how we'd like to be perceived. But, you know, we're not we're we're a team of six, a marketing team of six. Right. So, you know, the way that we approach something like this is very scrappy. I'm not spending, weeks or months justifying and AB testing. We, like, kick stuff out, and we test it, and we get feedback, and and we will change it or we'll keep investing in it, and we like to learn quickly.

Chapter
Innovative Marketing Campaigns That Inspire

Is there a marketer or a marketing campaign, something you've seen out in the world that has really either inspired you or an example of someone or some company that's really doing it right?
 
I am glad you asked. This is one of my favorite things to talk about, is the marketers, and revenue teams out in the world who are really modeling, human first connection oriented and creative, marketing that actually, goes outside of the sort of generic transactional bounds, that a lot of us get stuck in when we're just thinking about, growth hacking and demand capture.
 
And I've been really excited by the things that, Sarah Reese, and Tingting at Orem and their team have been doing. We were, attendees of their event, inbound, but they had a whole campaign called outbound, inbound that was just so weird and quirky and cool, but also tied their all of the weird branding that they did. They personalized all of the the invitations to their event, which was at a firehouse with little pictures of people's faces that were, like, stuck on to little fire trucks. All of their emails are very human.
 
It's just like, you know, the way that y'all emailed me, they email their prospects and customers, and there's no bullshit. And it's, directed to the point, but also funny. And they they had sort of, like, a a fire, you know, everything's on fire. The world is burning, and everything is okay theme for all of this.
 
The results of that, and I've been following and checking in with Sarah because I love so much what they're doing. I just want it so badly to be successful. They're blowing their numbers out of the water, and they relocated a bunch of their budget from end of the line, you know, like demand capture to demand creation and brand work. And that's working for them as well, which gives me hope.
 
I'm I'm excited about what they're doing.
 
I have one more question to take us home on brand with our new series.
 
What's one way startups can scale smarter?

Chapter
Scaling Smarter: The Role of Data and Automation

 
Any topic.
 
Oh my. I mean, the first thing I'm gonna say is very boring. If you're trying to scale smarter, you need to address your data first. So you can't scale on top of data you don't trust. This is one of the most unsexy things I did when I started at Zendosso. We did not trust our data, and we had to fix that, and it took months.
 
So if you wanna scale, that's where I would first start. If you're thinking about AI and automation, which you should if you're trying to scale smarter, you need to address the data first. And then next, I would look at I am seeing more and more folks hiring, in the way that we have at Sendoso where we have a growth minded, systems minded, marketing leader who thinks about our data and our systems and our tools and automation, looks at all of our workflows with us, and he actually does this across sales, marketing, and CX, and looks for all of the opportunities where we could automate something, and actually improve the quality and efficiency of it.
 
And so, you you know, we're looking at our whole stock and looking at everything that we use and and trying to figure out ways where, we can automate pieces of it, but we're not doing that ever in a way that where we lose oversight, where we lower quality. We're doing it in ways where we're using data, in more efficient ways, and we're using our intent signals and our fit signals, and we're using, everything that we can possibly gather to, improve our workflows and to take manual labor and work and and the more, mundane work off the table.
 
If you're not doing that and you're not embracing AI, and I know this is a buzzy, you know, like, bullshit zone.
 
But we have a a tech stack that truly makes my life easier, and I have a team. I have six with three BDRs. I'm doing the work of a much larger team right now, and it's it's because of the way we've architected, our tools and our systems and our workflows.
 
No. That sounds great. Yeah. I think AI is probably here to stay.
 
I think it could be violently misused.
 
Yeah.
 
And so you gotta make sure you're doing it in the in the smart way.
 
But, yeah, teach your teams how to use it. Invest in the education, invest in the training. Our whole team's been trained on it. We have a company initiative around this, and I think it's really important if you're trying to scale. You're teaching each person on your team to think, how could I do this in a smarter, more efficient way? How could I use that data to do this, more effectively?

Chapter
Conclusion and Future Engagement

Well, this has been chock full of great information, Casey. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to come out. And thank you again, Ruby, for coming on. We're going strong. We're going strong. I think we have another one coming up.
 
I honestly feel like we need a part two, three, and four with Casey. There's so much we could dig more into. Yeah. So, again, thank you so much for all of the great Yeah. And rich insights. Casey, how if someone's listening and wants to learn more from you, how can they reach you?
 
This was a joy. Thanks for having me. If you would like if anyone would like to reach me, come find me on LinkedIn. I I really truly would love that.
 
I will accept you.
 
Surely I need to work on that.
 
Dog. So will your dog.
 
Well, reach out to Casey. Good luck if you wanna reach out to Ruby. Who knows how long you'll be waiting?
 
I'm just giving you a hard time, Ruby. And, this has been great. Thanks a lot, Casey. Thanks, Ruby.
 
Thank you. Thank you.