GSD Podcast - Insights From a Customer-Focused CEO with Kris Rudeegraap
In this episode of the GSD Podcast, we gain valuable insights from Kris Rudeegraap, a customer-focused CEO who shares his experiences and strategies for building successful customer relationships. Kris is the CEO of Sendoso, a leading sending platform that helps businesses engage with customers through personalized and meaningful experiences. With his hands-on approach to customer interactions, Kris provides a unique perspective on how to prioritize customer success and create a customer-centric culture within an organization.
Key Takeaways:
1. Prioritizing Customer Engagement: Kris emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs and delivering exceptional experiences. By leveraging a variety of tools and channels, including in-app notifications, emails, and targeted ads, businesses can engage customers at various touchpoints throughout their journey.
2. Segmentation and Personalization: Sendoso implements a sophisticated segmentation strategy, tailoring campaigns and programs based on user personas and specific use cases. By catering to the unique needs of different customer segments, they can provide relevant and valuable content that drives engagement and adoption.
3. Education and Certification Programs: Sendoso is committed to educating its customers and empowering them to maximize the value of the platform. They offer a certification program that enables users to become certified experts, providing them with badges and certificates to showcase their skills. This initiative helps users enhance their knowledge and encourages deeper engagement with the platform.
4. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Lifecycle Marketing: Sendoso employs ABM and lifecycle marketing strategies to target and nurture customers. By customizing campaigns based on the user's role and use case, they effectively communicate the value of the product and provide educational resources tailored to specific needs.
5. Health Score and Customer Success Metrics: Kris discusses the importance of rethinking and refining the health score, which is a critical metric for measuring customer success. Sendoso combines user engagement data with customer feedback from CSAT and NPS surveys to evaluate and enhance customer health scores accurately.
Kris Rudeegraap's customer-centric approach and hands-on involvement in customer interactions provide valuable insights into building successful customer relationships. By prioritizing customer engagement, implementing segmentation and personalization, offering education and certification programs, and leveraging ABM and lifecycle marketing, businesses can create exceptional customer experiences. Additionally, reevaluating and refining metrics like the health score allows organizations to measure customer success more effectively.
Listen to the podcast here.
Transcript:
Jeff Kushmerek 00:27
And we are good to go Kris. So first of all, I'm super excited because I have an actual CEO on the podcast not saying that you know that there's a big difference between me being a CEO and you being a CEO because you're a CEO of a large companies, Sendoso. Kris Rudeegraap, thank you so much for for a reaching out. And then just we had a fantastic conversation that I was like, oh my god, like, I wish I was recording it. But then like, hey, what's what's what's definitely, let's record the next one. And go through it. So so welcome. Thanks for coming on.
Kris Rudeegraap 01:03
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show Jeff, appreciate it.
Jeff Kushmerek 01:06
So for the for the few people out there who don't know what's in Sendosa does? Let's give them the 32nd elevator pitch?
Kris Rudeegraap 01:14
Yeah, so we are a direct mail and gifting platform. So we help other companies build better relationships with their prospects and customers by way of sending him stuff. It could be swag, it could be a welcome kit for a new customer. It could be a milestone like if a customer graduates from onboarding or life moment to be if a customer has a baby and they're a New York Yankees fan. Maybe you send them a Yankees onesie? Yeah, so there's lots of different ways.
Jeff Kushmerek 01:38
I can't believe you use Yankees for the for me.
Kris Rudeegraap 01:40
I knew you were a Boston guy, so I figured I'd make it hurt.
Jeff Kushmerek 01:46
You don't have access to those m&ms that you get people's faces printed on, do you? faces printed on do.
Kris Rudeegraap 01:50
We could do quite about anything. In fact, Oreos are one that we have quite a bigger success with, we can print on Oreos, because there's a little bit more surface area. So that's, that's pretty cool.
Jeff Kushmerek 02:02
So on the list this the very shortlist I have here that is amazing. That is I just signed up a new customer. So they Oreos on the way right? Like, yeah, know, is a funny conversation we had before that. I don't like that term that much for CS leaders, but I love it for CEOs as well. Or customer focused, I should say. But in many different ways, too. So where do you How did that come from? From the like the gifting feel of it? You've always been this way or or just curious where that kind of that sort of motion came from?
Kris Rudeegraap 03:11
Yeah, so I mean, I spent a decade or more prior to starting the company in sales. And I think as a seller, you have to be very, you know, customer facing or prospect facing, you're always on calls, you're always doing demos, you're always meeting with people in real life. And so my hunger for meeting people in from a sales perspective, really transitioned into my hunger to try to really wow our customers and meet our customers more and learn from our customers. And, you know, I think at the very beginning, when you have a handful of beta customers or design partners all the way to a hundreds of customers and you know, 10s of 1000s of users. It's still equally important to be customer focused.
Jeff Kushmerek 03:53
Yeah, it's just, you're gonna keep saying Just talk to me like, well, what does that look like? And what do you do with that information when you go in and do that?
Kris Rudeegraap 04:23
Yeah. So you know, for me, you know, I feel like I am. I try to be the most advanced power user of Sendoso. I also have a unique sales background. And I've been obsessed with kind of CRM and how to, you know, look at data there and we also use catalyst and so you know, my goal with all that being that I have, like a really unique perspective on what is the successful customer look like? What successful engagement look like? What are nuances that maybe a CSM or an account manager might overlook and pattern recognition across years and years. to doing this and so what I find myself doing from time to time is I will practically audit account. So now we'll look for how they're using Sendoso. So what's the usage data? But also other areas? Like? How are we engaging with the right champions? How are we engaging with the executives at our customer? What is our, you know, what's an account? What's the healthy account plan look like. And I know we're doing that. And a lot of it is in spirit of helping the CX team, find areas that I could help. Also, for a lot of those, I have executive connections, and I don't want to just go into those accounts blind. So rather than going into those accounts, and looking dumb, I do an audit, which both helps me understand where there might be areas of opportunity, but also helps me really learn about that customer, their usage, their business users, etc. And so typically, it's a couple pages of a couple areas. And then, you know, oftentimes I can get in the weeds and find little leaky buckets, so we could solve for.
Jeff Kushmerek 05:57
Yeah, no, that's amazing. Hopefully, the team learns from those, and then they can apply to Yeah,
Kris Rudeegraap 06:05
For sure they have. And I think, you know, as we've just scaled fast and added hundreds and hundreds of employees, there's, you know, tribal knowledge or things that maybe someone didn't know about or forgot about or didn't get taught. And so I can come in there and chime in and say, Hey, here's something that you know, we done before that might be helpful for.
06:21
Yeah,
Jeff Kushmerek 06:22
That's awesome. That's great. What are some other sort of these customer assistance strategies that you'd like to sort of roll out?
Kris Rudeegraap 06:29
Yeah, so I mean, I have a CEO roadshow that I do that I think is super helpful. So I will meet with probably about 200 customers a year, I'll usually do about 100 of those in a short sprint of probably two month period, of which that is, my, my calendar is frightening, where I might have 12 meetings back to back 30 minutes of pretty much the same presentation and talk track where I'm sharing our roadmap, I'm sharing some of our vision, I'm asking questions, the same questions I'm in. So some of their responses and feedback are different. But I mean, it's kind of synonymous to some of my sales days where, you know, my demo pitch was scrapped, boom, boom, boom, roll up. Yeah, the discovery and learning is all different. And so it would be, you know, back to back to back 30 Minute Calls, followed by typically 30 minutes of follow up effort, thanking the customer, sending them a gift. And then also creating some notes that I can share back with the CSM and account team that they can follow up on. So I find that incredibly useful, I'll do some of those in person, some of those virtually. And then throughout the year, I'll scatter and more of those ad hoc Li, based on product launches based on field events based on conferences that I'll go to, and then I'll build meetings around it with customers. I find that to be super helpful. It's great.
Jeff Kushmerek 07:48
And I don't think we went over this before, do you have like sort of a standard customer advisory board or an executive board with the customers are in different levels of those?
Kris Rudeegraap 07:56
I'd say there's three things that we have. So one is a customer community. We call it a super center group. There's not 1000 users in this group. And then there's about 100 non customers. And this is an what I call it micro advisory group, I set up a while back to just have as this you know, sounding board where I might ask them for leadership questions, I might ask them for referrals for recruiting, I might ask them for their interest in talking on a panel. And my goal there is that it it outlasts the customer relationship, and is a more personal relationship that they'll carry on if they're at five years of different companies. I they could still be my advisor, which might differentiate from the our customer community or our customer advisory board where once they become once they change companies, if they're not a customer, yet they kind of fall out of that group. Yeah, times. And so it's a helpful way to have longer lasting relationships with people in the industry.
Jeff Kushmerek 09:40
No, that's great. You had mentioned the recruiting, which reminded me of this thing I might have it wrong, but we were talking about advocacy. Yeah, and it was a fight No, like when I go in to help companies. That is like the last thing we do. Hopefully we're gonna long enough to like hey, let's set up your your app. You see my typical is speeches like we want customers do not, you don't want to stop at renewals, we want to get to the point where they're advocates and press releases and, you know, taking calls with prospects and things like that. But do you see something like a your eighth employee? Was you got from from advocacy? Or what? Yeah, yeah.
Kris Rudeegraap 10:17
So are we really early on, wanted to invest in our kind of customer advocacy and really build a community, you know, we were in kind of inventing a new category while like, you know, giftings, not necessarily like, brand new using a platform like Sendoso and creating an evergreen strategy to integrate this into your, you know, customer programs or your marketing programs was nuanced, and using software to do so was. So the goal with this early on was we knew we wanted to really build a community of advocates that could spread the word that could be, you know, that can educate us on their needs, and how we can continue to build our roadmap. And, you know, so building that community from the beginning was helpful, we needed someone to do that. We also, very early wanted to build out a repertoire of customer case studies, customer references.
Jeff Kushmerek 11:13
And so all those made sense to bring in kind of a customer advocacy and customer marketing leader in the very early days, right, and you still have somebody who just focused on the advocacy, like that's their role. That's what they work on.
Kris Rudeegraap 11:25
Yeah, she's been on this for like, six years now. Yeah, and yet others now that have joined that team, from a community perspective from lifecycle marketing. But it's amazing to see how she's grown and how she's built, like best friends and more than just a vendor relationship. But people that, you know, one of the one of them I went to their wedding, actually, and she didn't. So there's ways that, you know, build more friendships than just vendor ships.
Jeff Kushmerek 11:37
Wow. And because most people do come use the term of the vendor relationships. And that's exactly I think, when people hear advocacy, that's what it is, it's like to make sure we don't ask that same person six times in a quarter for a call, right? Like, it's a lot different if you're going to weddings and whatnot. So yeah, totally. That's amazing. So the big topic I sort of wanted to get into for today was this concept of doing Account Based Marketing into your customers. And actually, just the data point, I was just listening to a podcast with Jay Nathan, I don't know if you know him from GDPR. And the he brought up this data point, always from brava data point from winning by design. And I think when you get to the there's some number, like 50 to 70 million revenue mark, that the most the high majority of your revenue starts coming in from your existing customers. This concept is so and then I remember we were talking about that as well. So the very dim bulb started going off in my head, like we should get into that a little bit. And yeah, so I'd love to hear in general, like your philosophy on account based marketing to your customers, like, when did you start this? You know, we'll get into that first. I have many questions, but I want to just start firing them off. Let's start chatting about.
Kris Rudeegraap 13:10
Yeah. So you know, I think part of Account Based Marketing, and why we got so, you know, obsessed with it is that, you know, about eight years ago or so, and I think the term got first coined. You know, we saw that there was a need to integrate in gifting and direct mail as part of an ABM strategy. And so because of that, we said, well, we need to be experts in ABM. And so we need to be so good at it, doing it ourselves and being able to teach our customers who are, you know, maybe newbies, in doing ABM, you need to be able to coach them and not just how to use gifting and Sentosa, but how to use how to do ABM so because of that, we dove in headfirst and are really experts across the board and that and I think some companies focus ABM on top of funnel and stop at the customer. And I think that's probably the most common mistake I see is okay, we've got named accounts. And we're going to target them and we're going to target as buying committee and then we're going to go and engage them and then we're sales and marketing are going to work together on making sure running ads against the same accounts at the sales reps are going after. And then we close the account and yay, we high five and then we move on to the next account do we want to do that to
Jeff Kushmerek 14:22
take their name out of the marketing?
Kris Rudeegraap 14:26
Now the way that I look at it is well once they become a customer now you have a perfect second set of named accounts, the named accounts are your customers. It's very similar. And so what else are you doing to run those same campaign to run similar or different programs to your customers in the same amount and I think that that's an area of opportunity for not only landing and expanding but for advocacy and retention in that you're running marketing programs to drive usage your your you run into some of the same you have issues when you're trying to sell into a new account where you're making sure you have, you know, four to eight people on the buying committee to sign off on that contract? Well, if they're a customer, and you only have one person as your single champion, you're going to be single threaded. So you need to do some of those same multi threading, buying group type of programs. And so, you know, there's a lot of similarities. It's just nuanced by, I think, some of some silos where customer success, you know, might not be, might be siloed, a little bit from the marketing team. And so we really tried to bring that together from the beginning. So we can educate how Kelly's marketing can continue indefinitely. And lifecycle marketing can kind of take over where maybe demand gen left off. So we do have different people doing it.
Jeff Kushmerek 15:50
That's the question was, yeah, what's what's the profile? Or is that is it a different group within CS as a part of CS marketing or regular marketing,
Kris Rudeegraap 15:58
It's actually part of our demand gen group. kind of inbound and ABM, focus demand gen. And then there's lifecycle focused and ABM focused on customers as well. And so they're going slightly differently. But some of the metrics look similar in terms of like the activity engagement metrics, and they're using some of the same tools. But at the end of the day, you know, the messaging it can be can be shared, but some of it can be different.
Jeff Kushmerek 16:30
Interesting. And would you put in again, this is all new to me, which is one of the reasons why I do this blog as I learnt so much. Yeah. Are you also pulling in, like usage statistics or using like your catalyst to then use for your demand gen team to be able to see certain users if they're engaged, and then your targeting now or I'm just, I'm just curious on that, like,
Kris Rudeegraap 16:52
yeah, 100%. So we use a mixture. So a lot of the data sits in our data warehouses, and that gets pushed out some of the different tools we use, we use a mix of catalyst as well as iterable. iterable is more used by our life cycle marketer to do more of the in app, notifications and nurture, as well as the email nurturing. And that is fully connected to our data warehouse that has all of the product usage data. And so more of the lifecycle programs and some of the ones we've run recently, as it relates to certain things within the product that we know that if you're using it, for example, have you set up like a Salesforce dashboard to track the success of Sendoso. So your likelihood to renew and expand is higher. So we'll, we'll run programs to educate that team attention and our customers on how to do it. You know, when we launched new products, there's education around those products and how they could use those new products or how they can expand into those new products. And so there's a lot of a lot of campaigns we do, and most all of it touches on usage and product data.
Jeff Kushmerek 18:01
How interesting is a certain profiles? Are you just starting to like executive enhancing targeting? But are you just sort of using ABM with exec types? Or is it is it people throughout the organization that could be core users or?
Kris Rudeegraap 18:17
Yeah we actually segment and run different programs and different campaigns against them. So there could there could be an existing user? Who's what we call a manager admin user. And then we segmented even further for what their use cases are they in CX, are they in sales? Are they in marketing? Are they in HR? So it's pretty segmented down. That could be an existing account. But we but that we don't have any communication with maybe their cmo yet. And so we're going to run some kind of ABM programs towards our customers that we want to drive some education into their executive leadership team. And so it's pretty complex. And segmented by use case, use case by persona. And by customer account and or user or non user tell.
Jeff Kushmerek 19:06
Yeah, well, and for people that are familiar with it, what would that look like to a user? Are they inside your app? Or is it following them like when they're on LinkedIn or an Amazon targeted ads or what does that
Kris Rudeegraap 19:18
so we will do a mixture of of all that we'll do in app notifications, we'll do emails, we'll do ads, retargeting our users and some of those retargeting our customers are more for expansion to so that we're driving more usage and driving more users to start using isn't so
Jeff Kushmerek 19:41
Interesting. I can imagine that it will also help when you're working within like a conglomerate. You know, we're a company of about companies right? My classic you know, the one that I have a lot of experiences when we sold into yum brands and I was working with Taco Bell and then we're selling into Kentucky Fried Chicken and those examples as well too. Yeah, that's great. Did anybody ever say just turn it off? I can't, I can't to hear it, or are they know, from you, or
Kris Rudeegraap 20:07
We've seen a handful of customers. And this is a handful out of 1000s, where they want to restrict communication to certain users and say, hey, please communicate everything through me. And we really, abide by what they want.
Jeff Kushmerek 21:15
Yeah, I understand. Well, not that I've definitely seen that behavior. Interesting when, The HR team was always like, No, we send out the communication, we don't want that. And that's also where I learned that. Like, they didn't like agile releases, let's like No, we only want to tell people what's changed once a year like this is our yearly update and everything like, well, we change our stuff, like every two weeks,
Kris Rudeegraap 21:45
We had that happen a couple of times too which baffled me, because I thought the customer would be so happy that we're adding new stuff. And one customer was like, hey, please, like give us a month's warning before you add something new.
Jeff Kushmerek 21:57
That was exactly what we got.
Kris Rudeegraap 21:59
Once warning, we're not we're rolling things out faster than that it's gonna be it's gonna be hard to to know. Yeah. You know, I think at the end of the day, there's some change management and certain companies, happy to sign up for more communication, happy to, you know, get news from us happy to join our community happy to join our, you know, customer education programs and our university programs.
Jeff Kushmerek 22:41
So, yeah, so with all of this in place, if you don't mind, and I can always stop the recording, what is the sort of Oregon reporting structure look like for the post sales team with all these sort of different initiatives in place?
Kris Rudeegraap 22:55
Yeah, so we have a chief customer officer, that then actually reports into a Chief Business Officer, that then reports into me, Business Officer looks after all of sales, all of marketing and all of CX with the goal that they are really all inclusive to the customer from day, one day, a million. And so we wanted to make sure that there was no silos of kind of post customer or marketing and sales being siloed. So that was critical there. And then account management rolls into our chief customer officer, customer education, rolls into our Chief Customer Officer customer success. Yep. Onboarding, rolls in there and are nuances. So customer marketing reports in in through marketing, and customer advocacy and lifecycle marketing reporting to our marketing leader, and then our solutions engineers who actually do pre sales and post sales, like integrations and technical conversations report through sales.
Jeff Kushmerek 24:02
Oh, okay. That's great. Yeah. The CCO does not matter. For me. As far as I concerned. I've seen success in both ways. But the only time I used to just putting it under this, post sales is when you need to change those behaviors. Right. Like, like you're now comped on retention instead of photo sales. But only when that's an issue anything. So exactly. So what are some new because you've been doing a lot of this, like from the jump. So what are some of the newer initiatives that you're thinking of going or just iterating on some of these things? Or you know, what didn't work? And now we're gonna try doing X, Y or Z.
Kris Rudeegraap 24:43
Yeah, I mean, a couple of things that come to mind. One is we're going to Engaging that and making that content freely available to anyone. Yeah. So I think that's interesting. I've seen it both sides where people are like protective of all of their, you know, customer related trainings and customer content. But for us we are, we still want to educate the market more. And if you're a prospect, and you want to learn some of the ways to use our platform better, and it might be a helpful tactic to drive pipeline,
Jeff Kushmerek 25:24
I am all for keeping it open in everything. Also great for SEO. But like before, I'm seeing the bad habits, I had to launch very one of the first customers sort of Portal discussion and documentation things back, I don't know, or let's just say mid 2000s. And in the dev team did not want that dock getting out there at all. And also people were like, Oh, they're, you know, very high executives, were wondering, like people might go into a forum and see some complaining going on, we're like, right? Well, that, then product can go in there and Dev can go in there, and we can see what's going on. You know, anyone don't need to. We've had podcasts on community. So I don't need to get into the benefits of community and everything. But like, there are lots of people who are, you know, very much gatekeepers of some of the things. And that's great to hear you're moving towards that model, because I think it'll be super successful. So yeah, yeah.
Kris Rudeegraap 26:20
Other things. We're doing certification program. Oh, nice. We're expanding that out. We had a lightweight version of that, but we're doubling down. And then we're doing it across a lot of the different user use cases. So before it was a very high level program where you could become a super sender, which is basically what we call our community. But now we want you to be like, certified, we want to have, you know, a badge and a certificate and run it. So Oh, yeah, certification isn't mandatory? Or is it is it definitely something that they can print off and put on their desk, but they they're not gated from using the product until the Yeah, not gated. So it's something that's optional, and something that we see as hopefully an opportunity for our users that can learn more and can benefit from that. So that's important. But we And so we're about six months into that. And there's some nuances in how we, how do we do customer success to self service. So that's a nuanced and then, you know, I think about a year ago, we turned on like a digital touch or, you know, customer success at scale strategy for a subset of our kind of at kind of lower SMB type of customers that didn't need as much hand holding. And so that's still something that we're evolving in terms of how do we automate more of the education, the engagement, and this is really where Account Based Marketing lifecycle marketing become critical, because there's less human to human engagement happening?
Jeff Kushmerek 27:39
Yeah, well, those two things will blend nicely the plg and the digital touch. Yeah, take some cycles, absolutely to get through, but you're already on the ball in terms of having a marketing machine that can, you know, get those signals that people need the message and those fun things. Oh, that was great. Um, any, you know, for moving to non CS and fun stuff, any anything else that you're working on for this angle of the customer side?
Kris Rudeegraap 28:58
Um, you know, we revised our health score recently. So that's something that I think is something that we were proud to spend, you know, a quarter or so on really rethinking? How do we think about health scores? So I think that was interesting,
Jeff Kushmerek 29:12
Is that a combo are so some of you using a CSAT, NPS type of thing? And then you're doing some other metrics as well, too. But a combo of user engagement on those surveys and things like that.
Kris Rudeegraap 29:26
Yeah, it's a combination, user engagement. to helping evolve our health score, and it's not just blocked by what CS wants.
Jeff Kushmerek 30:40
That's great. That's great. That's awesome. Oh, so Chris, that was amazing. Thanks for walking us through as I said, I was just so blown away that you're, you know, all the details of all these sort of customer interactions, because not every CEO is so hands on. And those matters. They don't tell you about every sales deal. Maybe But, but go into that. So what's the Oh, it's summertime, it's like, July when we're recording this and what any big summer plans a trout I know, you'd probably use a travel you might I don't mean off to customers or anything. But you know, any, any non work fun stuff. Are you thinking about?
Kris Rudeegraap 31:17
For sure. So I was I was just in Europe. So I was in France, and I was in Germany, and I was in Ireland, and I was in the UK. Then next month in August, going to Italy to for fun for kind of the kind of South area? Most Yeah, and then going to some of the Spanish islands like Majorca. Oh, yeah, that's fun. And then I will usually do a Yosemite backpacking trip once a year.
Jeff Kushmerek 31:56
That's on the list. I did my kids are old enough now that we did. We did a huge Sedona thing last year, and they're like, we're all set on the hiking for a while.
Kris Rudeegraap 32:09
I brought my wife along once, but it's like a four or five day pretty. Yeah, I can backpack everything you know. So I've done it for probably the past 15 years. I love it. Crazy enough. This year. I was supposed to go last weekend. But there's the roads are still closed with snow and the trails are still closed with snow. Yeah, hard to imagine.
Jeff Kushmerek 32:31
Can't imagine that.
Kris Rudeegraap 32:33
That part of the country is getting. So I have to push that back till next month. So I'm hoping that, you know, we have a warmer summer in that part of California. So
Jeff Kushmerek 32:42
That's great. Well, I'm jealous, especially the Europe stuff. Well, I'll get back over there soon. But my family like everybody about me is going over to Italy next year. Yeah, well, I mean, my youngest, but but, you know, one of those pre college, you know, go over and yeah, yeah, that's great. But, but listen, you're very generous with your time. I'm gonna stop the recording in one second. I'll put all your contact info where people can find you in there. And really appreciate you coming on and given a CEOs perspective on this crazy world of customer experience. So thank you.
Kris Rudeegraap 33:18
Yeah, thanks, Jeff, for having me.
Jeff Kushmerek 33:19
Hold on one second here.