Kevin Kerner: 0:00Hey everyone, this is Kevin Kerner with Tech Marketing Rewired. If you think gifting is just a gimmick, this episode might change your mind. I sat down with Katie Penner, who's head of sender relations at Sendoso, and we got into why human-first marketing isn't just fluff it's outperforming traditional channels. We talked about how gifting can drive a four-times ROI when it's done right, the difference between transactional junk and thoughtful engagement, and why personalization at scale is finally possible thanks to AI and tools like Clay. You know I know many of my tech marketing friends love Sendozo and they're amazing people and platform, so I'm really excited to get this one out there. So let's get to it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. Welcome to the show, katie.

‍Katie Penner: 0:46

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to chat today.

Kevin Kerner: 0:49

So tell me a little bit about yourself, and what does Sender Relations mean in practice at Sendoso.

Katie Penner: 0:53

Yeah, so my name is Katie Penner and I live in Houston, Texas.

Katie Penner: 1:00

I have two kids so definitely not competing with Kevin, you guys don't know. And yeah, outside of work, I love cooking and hanging out with my kids. Really, that is what you know takes up most of my days. Head of Cinder Relations is a title that we kind of created for my roles For those that don't know me or you know my journey at Cindo, so I actually started here as a SDR in 2021.

Katie Penner: 1:23

And I, you know, solved for gaps that I noticed throughout my career here, which led me to kind of being promoted pretty consistently, ping ponging between sales development roles and marketing roles. And once Casey Jenkins, our SVP of marketing, joined Sendoso, she saw that I was building a personal brand for myself on LinkedIn. I was really connecting with the community, putting our brand at the forefront of what I was creating and, you know, really kind of opening the world up, the Sendoso world up to you know, putting a face to the Sendoso name, and we saw how effective that was and Casey said, hey, you need to come work for me. And so at this point in my career today, I own all of our organic social. I also own our outbound BDR team. I own our relationship and our plays and our strategy behind clay and kind of all of the automated outbound that we're doing there among some other little sprinkles of things. But you know, community and outbound are my two main pillars of my job today.

Kevin Kerner: 2:19

Yeah, that's awesome. I think I don't know if you I didn't mention this to you, but I started my career as an SDR years and years ago Like this would have been way before Sendoso and gifting. There's something about being an SDR, I think that you understand like the pulse of the customer. But, it's so good because you have to like be in front of them, on the phone with them. It's just, you're as close to the customer as you get.

Katie Penner: 2:48

Yeah, I think it's the best foundation that you can, because you deal with every single objection, learn about every integration intimately because you need to speak to it. You learn how to convince naysayers that they should take a meeting, which is a very valuable skill that definitely translates into marketing at a higher level today. So, yeah, I wouldn't change it for the world. I think it's. I think it's the best way that I could have started here.

Kevin Kerner: 3:03

Yeah, that's great. I wish we would have had it back then, sendoso back then, because it really would have come in handy.

Katie Penner: 3:08

That's for sure.

Kevin Kerner: 3:09

OK, so I wanted to start by getting your take on. You know this corporate gifting has been around for a while and but it seems like at least with our customers there's a there's a curiosity in it If they're not using it, if they use it a few times, maybe there's kind of a resurgence. What do you think is driving the renewed interest in gifting?

Katie Penner: 3:27

Yeah. So I think it all comes back to the state of marketing that we are seeing today. Marketers are expected to do more with less, right, we hear that constantly. But if we actually look at the data, marketers are seeing diminishing returns on traditional channels. So they're having to figure out you know what is going on. How do I you know kind of work with my budget right?

Katie Penner: 3:49

64% of marketers today, cmos, don't feel like they can hit their revenue targets with the budgets that they have, so they're having to get creative. They're having to look at today's buyers. Today's buyers 71% of them actually expect these personalized reactions or interactions, and then 76% of them are getting really frustrated without it. I think marketers today are asking themselves how do we infuse that human first marketing back into our strategy? And so I think that a lot of that is why we see marketers coming back and looking at the direct mail channel, because, ultimately, gifting is a really great way to connect with your buyers on a personal, deeper level, and they see that with the data right of what people are getting back from their gifting campaigns. To give you a little bit of an idea of the ROI right of gifting For every dollar spent, the ROI is four with Sendop. So I think that that kind of explains. You know the shift and you know the general consensus of opinion on gifting today.

Kevin Kerner: 4:49

Yeah, that's cool. I want to get into some of the cooler integrations and systems that drive all this huge ROI. But just, I mean, one of the big elephants in the room for our customers is sometimes how do you track ROI? How do you actually measure the ROI of gifting? Have you seen any unique ways where people actually can track the end result of spending money on gifting versus maybe or maybe with integrated channels?

Katie Penner: 5:10

Yeah, absolutely so. At Sendosa, we actually build out ROI dashboards for all of our customers so you can see exactly what you're spending on what kinds of gifts, what's landing with what kind of audiences. You know all of those things so you can track by campaign and know exactly how much you're spending, what is performing and what's not. Obviously, integrations make this a lot easier. So if you're integrating with, let's say, salesforce, hubspot, right, it's really easy to track the. You know not just what's closing and what is influencing pipeline, but also deal progression. So we actually had a test run or a study run by an independent company and they found that gifting actually speeds up deal cycles by 29% as well. So we are able to track all of that within platform and with our integrations today.

Kevin Kerner: 5:56

Yes, Okay, so I want to talk about the process and what it looks like best case, particularly the processes that as it works with this integrated marketing ecosystem that we now have. You know you've got tools like HubSpot and Salesforce, and you mentioned Clay and Gong. What's the process looking like best case and maybe also talk through how that process is using other technologies to make it work?

Katie Penner: 6:15

Yeah, absolutely. So I think I'll start by talking about the traditional integration, right, which is going to be your Salesforce or your HubSpot, and then we'll get into kind of the more new age integrations and plugins, apis, with tools like Clay. So to start, right, let's say that you're using Salesforce, right? I think that is probably the most popular CRM today, right? So if you're using Salesforce, you can tell, you know, you have different stages of a deal, right? So let's say it's pre-demo, post-initial demo, right, and then you move to stage three, four, five and then to a close, right, so we can actually integrate with your Salesforce to be able to say, you know, you tell us, hey, we see a drop-off from stage two to stage three. We want to trigger. You know, maybe it's a plant to an additional stakeholder to loop them in with a note card that says, hey, wanted to plant the idea of looping you into my conversation with Kevin about how gifting can reinvigorate your ABM strategy, right? Whatever, right. And so that is automatically triggered, the kind of you know workforce around. That is very simple, right, you identify the signal, you create the trigger and then you complete the action.

Katie Penner: 7:17

Where I see the traditional kind of integration working the best is again at stages like pre-demo, where you're sending personalized gifts to your prospects to capture attention and earn the right to a conversation that will hopefully lead to a meeting. And I think that this is really important, kevin, because I think that another aspect of gifting that people don't really get is that they think that it's highly transactional. Of gifting that people don't really get is that they think that it's highly transactional, and people that are using gifting very transactionally typically do not see the same results as someone that is using it as a relationship builder to build, you know, someone that wants to talk to your team, that has a positive view of your team, right, and so I want to highlight that that this is like pre-demo it is earning the right to even have a conversation and get to the point where you can ask for time. Right, so that may look yeah, so it may look something like hey, you're attending Adobe Summit next week. Those events are really exhausting. Grab an extra coffee on me while you're there without an ask, right. We just hope that that will start a conversation now.

Katie Penner: 8:15

Post-demo, Right, and he's on a phone call and instead of talking about the weather, right, maybe you ask them what they're doing this weekend and that can get you some really cool insights into. You know what kind of person they are. Or you know, if you're setting up an automatic trigger, then we're talking about. You know, maybe it's a persona, maybe for field marketers, you're saying, hey, you like to travel a lot, I'm going to send you an ostrich pillowcase to make your plane travel easier, right? So there's all these ways that we can activate these motions throughout the funnel.

Katie Penner: 8:42

Then, going into the more new age, chef, right with clay. So we actually have an API called SmartSend, which is a really awesome tool that will scrape the internet for information about your prospects and find some interest. So, for example, for me, it knows that I, you know, love the Astros, right? So it will go and find an Astros related gift within our catalog and automatically plug that into Play Outbound. So the way that we are positioning it typically is putting it as a PS and saying you know, hey, ps Katie saw that you're really into the Astros, wanted to send this Astros hot your way, right? So there's really really fun ways to plug and play gifting that feel humanized and personalized, but you're able to do these things at scale, so it's really exciting stuff.

Kevin Kerner: 9:27

Yeah, I love it. I'm sorry, you're an Astros fan though.

Katie Penner: 9:31

I'm honestly not, it's just for some reason. Well, that came to my mind. I am not a sports person at all, so I kind of cringed internally when that was, for some reason in the brain. I a sports person at all, so I kind of cringed internally when that was for some reason in the brain.

Kevin Kerner: 9:42

I'm not an astro. Yeah, you mentioned that. Like some of these use cases, I think the human touch of things I know you guys talk a lot about the human part of gifting. I think that's really important because it can be so transactional and cold and, especially with a lot of these triggers that are going on, how do you keep it from being just a, you know, just a seem like a kitschy or maybe thing to do for customers?

Katie Penner: 10:03

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing that I kind of preach to our customers when it comes to, you know, automating these efforts is make sure that it's relevant, right, because at this point we're not going one to one, we're going, you know, one to few, one to many, right. So it's important to attach it to a relevant trigger or you know some sort of indicator. So, for example, if we're sending out an automated campaign to people who are attending an event, right, we go back to the coffee, example, pre event, right, that can feel really personalized.

Katie Penner: 10:32

Everyone that goes to events gets exhausted at some point, right, they are draining, so that is a common experience that's going to probably resonate with someone that's traveling to said event Right, traveling to said event, right. So, like, how can you use different things, like a common experience or a common role where you know a field marketer is constantly traveling, that sort of thing? Or how can you relate a gift to the message that you're trying to, you know, convey? So, for example, if we're trying to expand that sphere of influence, you wanted to plant the idea of connecting and find time to dig into your XYZ strategy with this person that you know, right. Like all of those things, I think, really help to create a more personalized experience at scale.

Kevin Kerner: 11:11

If you and I think for many people that haven't done it before, it's it's and this is what's so great about working with the Centoso curation team is they're really good at like coming up with the use cases. But I think for marketing, for marketers, just getting started it's a little daunting, like you just don't know where to start. What's the what's a simple first step that a marketer can take tomorrow to get this type of stuff going.

Katie Penner: 11:32

Yeah, so that's a great question. So we have actually, you know, compiled all of this kind of brain bank of gifting ideas and different you know triggers and stages and whatnot. So if you are curious about how you can implement triggered gifting into your strategy with the tools that you have today, visit Sendosocom slash playbooks. We have created playbooks for all of our different integrations, with actual different plays that you can run with the copy that we have seen our customers have success with. It is all public. It is not gated at all. You can check that out. I think it's a really awesome resource for everyone that's curious about it.

Kevin Kerner: 12:07

So you're in Sender Relations. You see all these. You see a lot of these things. What's your, what are your favorite parts of the playbook, Like? What are the ones that you like the best?

Katie Penner: 12:14

Oh gosh, I think my personal favorite has to be especially with my business development backgrounds and owning a BDR team now, I love finding creative ways to break through the inbox. Top of funnel that is my passion. I think it is so fun to make people feel cared about in such a non-personalized B2B world that we're experiencing right now. So everything top of funnel is definitely like. Meeting setters are my personal favorite.

Kevin Kerner: 12:42

It's just like a it's a great door opener.

Katie Penner: 12:44

Right, well, and it sets a tone right. It sets a tone for higher relationship moving forward and it really gives you an advantage above your competitors because you were the one that, upfront, not just cared and wanted to solve for the you know business issues that they are having today, but also cared for them as a human being, which I think so many people are missing today.

Kevin Kerner: 13:06

I want to talk about the future a little. What do you think that the future looks like for gifting over the next couple of years, especially with AI?

Katie Penner: 13:12

My gosh. I mean, the possibilities are pretty endless, right. I think that AI and our tool will start to, you know, recognize you can upload a list and then perhaps it'll recognize what stage these people are at, what their titles are, automatically. You know, surface playbooks for these people. I think that clay and tools like that I mean there's probably already the possibility to pull in people's addresses and to automatically have things land at their houses without the need for address confirmation information. Yeah, I think that those are like the biggest kind of probably near term things with with gifting is curated playbooks at the tip of your fingers with, you know, anticipated ROI right in front of you before you even launch the campaign based on the success that you've seen, I think is probably going to be the biggest thing that I'm looking forward to.

Kevin Kerner: 13:59

I'm really excited about the use of agents and all this stuff and the ability for the AI to go out and figure stuff out. It's like, hey, this person has an opportunity for gifting and then the agent goes out, figures out the gift.

Katie Penner: 14:10

Saying like, hey, this AE hasn't talked to this account in X days. At this stage we need to trigger a gift and have it land tomorrow. Here's what we suggest. That would be awesome Because I think, just like marketers, sellers are also being bogged down. They're smaller teams. They're dealing with, you know, more deals. I mean, I certainly know that we're dealing with that. We have a smaller team. So having those signals triggered to them, right, and those alerts saying like, hey, this is kind of, you know, going uncontacted, let's make sure that we don't drop the ball on this one. And let's let's reengage with a thoughtful gift and, you know, pulling transcripts from Gong, that you know surface interest and things like that and remind them of those things. There's just really cool possibilities for this product and for gifting in general. So really, really excited where the world of AI and you know, kind of infusing that with human first takes us.

Kevin Kerner: 15:00

Yeah, love it. Okay. I just want to ask you three wrap up questions here that I ask on just about all of these. So what's one marketing trend you're most excited about? Oh goodness.

Katie Penner: 15:09

I think, obviously the trend of marketers looking into human-first gifting and how they can humanize their marketing and better connect with their audience. I think that's really exciting, obviously for personal reasons, but also because I just think it's the right way to market, so I'd have to say the shift towards human-first marketing.

Kevin Kerner: 15:27

What's one outdated marketing tactic. People should stop using Gosh. That's a toughie.

Katie Penner: 15:32

There's a lot, I feel like gating. I feel like is kind of gated today. There was a world back a few years ago where we would gate every single resource that we had, and we're realizing today that you close is the way to go right. We've learned over the past year or two years that sharing information and education publicly is the way to build trust within a community. So I would definitely say gating is way outdated in my opinion.

Kevin Kerner: 16:08

And then you're quite active on LinkedIn and you know I follow you for thought leadership and those type of things. But who do you follow? Who would you suggest people follow for thought leadership, inspiration, just new tactics, gosh great question.

Katie Penner: 16:20

So one of my favorites from early on in my career this was someone that mentored me back when I was in SDR and really helped push me to become a better leader, a better person, a better public speaker was Jen Allen Knuth. She is fantastic. I would also suggest following Casey Jenkins. She just and I know that that sounds self-serving- yeah, she's great.

Katie Penner: 16:39

She just started posting and she truly has taken a non-marketer and infused, I think, in me what is most important about marketing. We have a tiny, tiny marketing team, but we punch way above our weight class, and Casey is the one who was brilliantly sharing that online. She deserves far more followers than I, so please go follow her. She is awesome.

Kevin Kerner: 16:59

Yeah, I think I think, with the small team that you guys have and what you pull off, it's, it's really incredible and you guys are super active. The severance thing, by the way, is really awesome. Yeah, I know that's getting a lot of play, but it's really cool what you guys put together.

Katie Penner: 17:10

Yeah.

Katie Penner: 17:11

So that was. That was really fun. We we started these kinds of campaigns actually with inspo from B2C. So it started around the holiday time when we did our elf campaign. And I am my favorite brand in the world when it comes to marketing efforts and different cool things that they do is Chewycom.

Katie Penner: 17:30

I'm really just impressed with the whole brand story of Chewy and you know how, what they came from, who they are now, but anyways, chewy does this thing every year called Chewy Clause, where you can submit your dog online, you can write a note to Santa and Chewy will randomly send gifts out to dogs. And so I went to Casey and I was like, hey, we should do this, but for B2B marketers to find a way to do that, yeah. And so we were able to take that kind of blueprint from the Sindoso elves campaign and duplicate it, edit it a little bit into what is now today, the severance campaign. So you know we didn't have to reinvent the wheel. We were able to go live with it in just one and a half weeks, but the elves campaign is already millions in pipeline. So I mean it's just goes to show that like doing these human first things, focusing on people's feelings relating to them will end up in the right place.

Kevin Kerner: 18:20

So that pattern interrupt is great, because those are pattern interrupt campaigns too. You don't. You just don't expect them.

Katie Penner: 18:25

I love that. I love that you bring that up, because one of the things that I do and then I'll stop but one of the things that I do is I keep a bank of all of the things that I see in everyday life that inspire me and I put them into a chat GBT of marketing inspo and then, anytime I need creative ideas, I say take all of this that I've fed you and give me ideas similar to this for Sendoso, and it's a really cool way to get some inspo based on what has inspired you in real life.

Kevin Kerner: 18:53

So I at least- Well, this has been great, Katie. I know people want to connect with you more. I know you have an active LinkedIn channel, but how do people get a hold of you if they want to contact you?

Katie Penner: 19:02

Yeah, so LinkedIn is going to be the best way. For sure, search up Katie Penner. You can't miss me. There's a big, you know gifting box right by my name, so definitely connect with me there. If you have any questions about gifting, want to learn more, want to hop on a call, email me at katiepenner at Sendosacom.

Kevin Kerner: 19:17

That's great. Thanks so much, Katie.