It took social distancing to remind us…
But we all realize how important the personal touches are in every facet of our lives. So, how do we make sure to keep it personally in a socially distanced world? In our show today, I caught up with Dan Frohnen, CMO at Sendoso, a company specializing in getting personalized items on the desks of anyone. Who better to help us navigate the new landscape for the personal touch?
Why Send in the First Place?
Dan: We are a sending platform. What that means is that we help teams send direct mail gifts and swag to their customers and prospects. And it’s never been more of a timely tactic and part of your marketing mix.
With no events and no business travel, there aren’t very many ways to get in front of your audiences in that tactile, personal way, and that’s what people are really resonating with right now. And companies are leveraging us for this. I think everyone who works in technology knows we are fundamentally just fortunate because we’re set up to work remotely. But we need to think about different ways to engage now that events are off the table.
How to Get Something on Someone’s Desk When They’re Stuck at Home
Dan: In b2b, it’s, it’s easy to get someone’s business address, right? There are not as many privacy concerns there and, and most people just have that almost like oil, right? It just flowed into your CRM. The biggest challenge for us and our customers going into this whole new reality was how do you land something on someone’s desk if they’re at home?
The first week that we were in the shelter-in-place world, the marketing team on my end built a hack around sending customers to a landing page to verify. We started talking to our product team and the exec team. And we said, we need to have to have this feature yesterday if we’re going to really properly serve our customers and prospects who really need us.
So the first thing that we did about two weeks into this was launch a work-from-home address confirmation feature. When you’re ready to send something, you can actually push out an email describing what you’re trying to send and then give the recipient the option to either say go ahead and send it to the office or send it to my home. I was talking to someone on Forbes the other day and we were talking about sustainability. I don’t think it’s much more sustainable than for someone to say they either want this or they don’t.
The COVID-19 Marketing Mix
Dan: The things that have remained in the marketing mix from all the marketers that I’ve talked to are the tactics that are going to drive the engagement that’s going to get a deal done right. So, digital is intact. Data is intact. We’re, we’re actually seeing more and more interest in direct mail and gifting as a result. There’s only so many personal touchpoints when you can’t get to an event to shake hands, so the go-to marketing mix right now is content, digital, SDR, outbound and sending.
We’re constantly listening to our social audiences to know how much feedback we are getting. How many likes and shares are we getting? As we’re publishing this stuff? How much web traffic are we getting as a result of it so we can see spikes? We’re also listening to our SDRs constantly. They’re the ones on the front lines that are talking about these things in our thought leadership. We want to hear from them like Hey, is this resonating? Is this helpful? Are you making people mad? Or are you actually helping them and resonating?
And the answer is resonating. So we continue to do more. By doing that holistically measuring, whether it’s CSAT, pipeline, sales velocity and the sentiment there, we’ve we’ve come up with a good system for constantly checking back in with all those data points and making sure that we’re not saying anything, that’s just off the mark.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to times of crisis, we can either give up or step up. And this crisis, marked by social distance and, for some, isolation, is the perfect opportunity to step up in getting personal. We need people, not process, to get us through these uncharted waters. So, whether it is just by sending a highly personalized gift, I hope everyone out there asks themselves one question? How can I add a personal touch today?
This is a #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
