Name: Registration to Revenue—Critical Touchpoints
Uploaded: 2025-10-22T18:01:05.539Z
Duration: 48 min 28 s
Description: Registration to Revenue—Critical Touchpoints

Transcript for "Registration to Revenue—Critical Touchpoints": Alright. My test. Can everyone hear me? Oh, hello, everyone. Um, I'm Brandon. I'm part of the growth marketing team here at Goldcast. Thank you for joining us today. Um, we're gonna get I'm gonna give it a couple of couple of minutes to let everyone join here. I know they're trickling in here, um, but, yeah, feel free to drop where you guys are attending from and all that. We'd love to see where you guys are tuning in. We have a very special guest today. Happy to kind of introduce him shortly here. I know it's shortly coming up on Halloween season, so, you know, orange is a great color, and just a fun fact, our special guest really, really loves pumpkin spice latte, and because of him, I tried it for the first time this year, I can say I'm a fan. So that's a little fun fact about me. Um, let me just share this slide here. Uh, it's a pretty slide. It's probably the best picture of me that you can see. I use that's the photo I take at my wedding, so I just use it for anytime I have to use a good photo. So, yeah, I just kind of want to quickly go through some housekeeping here. Um, this is our third episode of our AI Revenue Playbook. Um, this is supposed to be kind of a very quick, uh, into the weeds tactical demonstration of the workflows that we're currently using as well as our partner here and how we're able to really create meaningful touchpoints, especially activating our BDR and AE team, as well as, you know, obviously, at the end of the day, creating revenue. So that's the whole point. Um, we've had two episodes before this. The first one was with Kelly, our CMO. She highlighted the workflow with, um, Clay, and the second one was with Cindy, our director of growth marketing. So if you guys want to tune into that, we have the on demand recording available, and, yeah, we just want this to be as interactive as possible. If you have any questions during it, any spicy questions that you want to put, um, our guests on the on the hot seat or myself, please feel free to drop it in the q and a in the comment section over there on the right, and then we can easily answer your question at the end. So that's that, and as always, this is recorded. So if you have to drop, no problem. You can access the recording right after the webinar. So just want to quickly introduce our agenda here, and I'll bring up our guest. Um, we want to quickly go over these three points here, and we want to really hone in on the value and the the science behind this marketing plan tactic here. So this is a quick little overview of our agenda, and with that, I want to invite our special guest. Um, you guys probably know him, and his name is Austin Sandmeier from Sendoso. So, yeah, I know you guys aren't on camera, but I hope you guys are giving a big round of applause. And, Austin, can you join me on stage? Hi, everyone. There we go. I made it. Excited. Hey, Austin. Can you give us, like, a quick little introduction about yourself, Sendoso, and the the whole. spiel? Yeah. For sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Austin Sammeier. I am the director of growth and GTM engineering strategy over here at Sendoso. Sendoso is swag and direct mail management platform for all of your needs. So think anything that can be sent through the mail is things that we help all of our customers do, uh, help increase pipeline, help increase customer retention, all kinds of fun stuff. We'll talk about it today a little bit. Um, I have been with Sodoso for coming up on three years. It'll be three years in Halloween. Joined on Halloween. Very spooky. It was one of those situations where I was like, I don't know if anybody's gonna wear their Halloween costume. It's my first day. Should I do it? TVDR. I did I I did not wear my costume. I had one on the side, though, just in case. Um, this year, I'm gonna wear my costume. Um, but super excited to chat with you guys today. I as I mentioned, I'm tuning in from Salt Lake, uh, but I've lived in many of the places that you guys are mentioning in the chat, which is exciting, but excited to connect. Awesome. Awesome. I know, Austin, I met you for the first time in Vegas when Sendoso was hosting their internal event. That was almost, like, two and a half, maybe three years ago, so a little shortly know. after you started there. Yeah. Um, I can fully this is I can fully testify that Sendoso has been a big part of my marketing experience, especially also on the sales side too. You know, obviously, people love gifts. It's a great way to connect, really make that soft introduction. So, um, yeah, I am I am a walking customer testimonial of of that sense. I I love the. science behind it. Um, and, yeah, just the team over there is great, how they operate, why they do things the way they do. It's just something that I wanted to unpack today in this session here. So, um, I have this q and a for later, but you introduced your title, and I. kinda wanna address my curiosity and maybe some people too. Um, the go to market engineering strategy, like, what does that look like for you and your team over there, and is there anything fun that you're currently working on on that side? Yeah. Yeah. I like to say that it's super fun, and I get to play with all the fun toys. It's kind of my, like, answer. Um, but yeah. So my title is kind of weird, wild, and long, um, but it's been like an evolution of what marketing has been doing and what kind of operations and go to market has been doing. Uh, so my title is director of growth. It's been, you know, growth for a long time. I've had that. And in my head, growth is so, like, wide, and it's often, like, campaign and demand gen. Really, at the end of the day, like, my end bread and butter is how do I improve pipeline? How do I get more close one revenue? How do I think through doing different channels and running experiments to do that? That's kind of the growth aspect of that. Then the second half, GTM engineering strategy is really about, like, our systems. How do we make our systems operate smoother? How do we make them, uh, like, remove redundancy, improve using an AI from our top of funnel, from our marketing aspect, all the way through that funnel, and then into the customer life cycle motion, and how do we use AI to infuse better relations, better things so that we can allow our humans to do more better awesome human things. Like, that's kind of the end of the day what I'm really focused on with my GTM engineering strategy is, like, how do we optimize our tech stack and the processes and the operations that are being done so that we can make sure that we're providing the best human experience possible by allowing you know, getting the tech out of the way and realizing our humans be humans because I'm gonna say this probably 500 times between now and the end of this conversation, but I believe that, like, the best marketing is humans speaking to other humans and interacting with each other. And so the faster we can get to that, the better we'll be. Yeah, yeah, I love it. I want to break that down a little bit later, Yeah. you know, a few other talking points, so I'm glad that's a really great segue. Um, I kinda wanna share this slide here just to kinda paint paint what I'm experiencing as a growth marketer, but also, you know, as what I'm hearing from other marketers in the industry. Right? Yep. We we've established the channel. The webinars are a great channel for all parts of the customer journey in that sense. Um, you know, whether you're trending in the right direction, we're we're at a 35 to 45% show rate, you know, your book meetings book rate are there, you know, all the close sixty day closings, whatever it is in your situation, we know that everyone is running it and now it's getting a little bit noisy. So, like, the main problem that we I was experiencing is, like, how do we maximize this entire prospect experience of this? And I say prospect, but this also relates to customers as well. So. how do you differentiate? How do you break the noise of over, you know, 300 marketing emails coming into your inbox inviting you to x amount of webinars, speaking at webinars, you know, Zoom fatigue is real. And at the end of the day, we realize that registration is not commitment. You know, registration is not I'm interested. Right? It's just I'm interested at what you potentially said and what you might say, but not in your product in that space. So we kinda that's what I was evaluating, and I realized we needed a pattern interruption. What we were doing essentially isn't necessarily the best because everyone is doing it. Right? And as a marketer, like, a very small nuance, a very small act can really break the pattern and make people kind of step back and feel something in a type of way. So with that, I have this slide here. This kinda came into fruition, and you can challenge me on my thoughts here, and Yeah. this is how I view the whole event life cycle. Right? Yeah. The live event is if they're attending, that is the highest point of engagement. They're most interested. We have their attention. They're here. And, again, thank you for joining us. So that's where we are right now. I was thinking, like, there's a lot that we can do pre event and even post event. Right? Everyone does their standard post event, you know, follow-up, whether it's automated, whether it's generic, so that's a different conversation there. But we. kind of wanted to think of it as, like, a three pronged approach. Right? When it's pre event, we wanna build excitement. Right, if you just send those email reminders, there's a certain level of mundane excitement that they get there. But how do we engage with these folks in the right way, in a not so in your face way that we can really build excitement for the event, but also build rapport? So we kind of approach it in a three way possible, so we want to make sure that we're building pre event excitement. Obviously, we want the event to hold value, and then we want the live event to hold value as well. So we kind of wanted to elevate all three of these experiences, and that's kind of the MO behind how we're able to leverage gifting and automating through Sendoso and all that to kind of elevate that whole experience, but also provide our BDRs the access to have a conversation. Right? So that's kind of how we've elevated our approach, that is our play, and I'll dive into our play a little bit later. But I definitely, like, want to hone in here, like, people don't remember, and I'm gonna I'm sad to say this because. we're doing a webinar right now, but people are not gonna remember what we've talked about on this webinar. And at the end of the day, like, that's just that's just the reality of it. Right? But people. do remember how we made them feel throughout that entire experience. Right? They'll remember small little snippets. So I'm kinda curious on your end when you're hosting these virtual or in person, what are some ways that your team is activating on these, you know, big kind of three pronged pre event, live event, and. even post event? Yeah. I mean, I think, like, for us, we try to activate the right channel at the right time, which is like, oh my gosh. That's so amazing. Better easier said than done. Uh, but, yeah, so easier said than done. So we try to activate, you know, pre, during, and post. Uh, Uh, and I think, like, this can be ran across your live events, can be ran across your virtual events of, like, how do you engage people? I think, like, your your graphic there was, like, that is how I feel all the time. I register for her webinar. I'm like, yeah. That's exciting. Completely forget about it until, like, one minute alert comes in my inbox. I'm like, oh, yeah. I should have I remember that now. Uh, that is, like, my excitement level as I think about me registering for webinars. Um, and so for us, when we kinda think about it, we obviously you know, we have a pipeline, we have a funnel, we do an ABM sort of strategy here as well. Uh, and so we, you know, who do we really want at this event? And, like, what is the purpose of the event and what are we kinda thinking through? So we try to take, like, take a step back as every marketer says a billion times a day. Take a step back. What do we wanna look at? And we kinda look at what is the purpose of this event? Where is it gonna fit in the funnel? Where is it going to action? Who do we want there? Uh, and I think, like, there's been a really fun way that we've been playing with kinda different motions is, like, we've we've always ran kind of like the classic, you know, a webinar strategy events with, like, different ones around hot topics of the quarter or whatever is gonna be on, you know, our prospects mind at that point. We've also been running some, like, more intimate, like, networking slash problem solving, um, virtual events, which is kind of like a if you were to take, like, a dinner, um, or like a breakfast, uh, and thrown in a virtual event because we don't get to always be at every event we wanna be at in person. So we've been kind of doing some, like, in person smaller groups where we kinda do pre curation of who's gonna be at those ones. And so I was very focused on, like, ABM accounts and who's gonna talk to who and where they're gonna want, like, getting them into the right room so that they can chat about whatever. Uh, I think, like, one thing we'd need to go down that channel of, like, smaller events is, like, we're really there to just help facilitate conversation and go them direction that they wanna go because I think, like, the best outcomes for us is that they think about Sendoso and they think about marketing and they think about how to solve problems and that they got us in the room with, you know, Brandon who's, you know, had this problem and solved it this way, and I got to talk to him about that. Uh, so we've been doing a lot of that from a virtual perspective. But then when we think about our larger, like, classic event webinar type shows, uh, it's like, who do we wanna invite? Why do we wanna invite them? Are they in that right element of the funnel? So thinking our ABM strategy and thinking who's already engaged with that account or who's not engaged and should be engaged with that account. And then we do, Yeah. uh, like, the classic stuff, like the invites, the, uh, uh, you know, the digital ads targeting the accounts, those types of things. And then we obviously use gifting. So we use a bunch of different gifting to invite people. Uh, there is a range of gifting, and I want everybody on this call to know, like, if you don't walk away with anything and you just think, like, gifting and direct mail, I want you to walk away with, like, it does not matter how many dollars you spend on a person. Uh, you can send them a $1 postcard that is awesome or a, you know, a thousand dollar champagne that is, you know, I don't know, hand done in some country. Uh, but what matters is how you make them feel. Like, I know executives that get thousand dollar bottles of champagne, and if you were to ask them where any of them came from or what they had to do, they have no idea. They don't care. If but then you ask them about, you know, a book that you see on, uh, their thing and it was sent to them by someone, they're like, oh, yeah. That that salesperson sent me this because this chapter was talking about how AI is changing the way sales is being done, um, or something. It's like, wow. Okay. You you actually care about that, but that book was, like, $10, uh, and they sent it through the mail. So, like, in that manner, we do a lot of, like, postcard invite process. Um, so really on the beginning level, cheap side of, like, how do we invite them in a way that's kind of, like, outside the box and outside the digital fatigue channels? So using direct mail and postcards and inviting is very common for us in the premotion. Yeah. Yeah. I I remember I saw that from you guys, the little post event, little postcard. Yeah. I was like, Yep. why? I need to steal that. Like, it's such a small, like, low investment in terms of cost. But for. me, like, a small thing like that really makes a big impression, and I remember that. And I'm assuming this is just how people operate. Right? And at the end of the day, you're you're you're you're trying to break the noise. It's a great pattern interruption, and I just think it's gonna be really. effective. Right? It's awesome. Whether, It's like also, it I I was hoping I know we chatted about this, like, a couple days ago where we were like, oh, I have a postcard. I did have a postcard. My seven month old decided to rip it earlier. So I don't have my postcard anymore, um, but I did I did have one of our postcard. examples. So I'll throw a postcard example in on the chat here of, like, uh, one of the this was what was my seven month old decided to rip. But, uh, to give you guys an idea of, like, you know, you can do this pre. You can do it post. I think it's nearly impossible to have it land perfectly live, but, like, uh, you can do whatever you want. You know? And it's kind of all about how do you what is the engagement? Like, what are you doing with that? Uh, because it's a different channel. It's a physical channel, which is honestly super fun in my opinion. Yeah. I think I think I wanna, like, double down on what you said a little bit earlier too, Yeah. and that kinda introduced me to this next poll question. Um, I want to open this up right now. If you go to the polls tab right next to the chat bar, you can see it and kind of just, um, respond accordingly. But I think Austin, you mentioned something that was that I feel like I wanted to echo here. When people think direct mail and when people think, you know, webinars to a certain degree, they think it's really expensive, whatever, on both sides. Right? And it could be, Yeah. and there are, you know, teams, companies doing that, but you don't. necessarily have to do that. Like, Yeah. you can like, the postcard, I'm I'm assuming it's gonna be a couple dollars. Right? And then you. guys have this really, really intuitive tool, Smartlist, where you don't even need to confirm their address to a certain degree. You can send it to their office building. So quick plug on that, it's a great tool. It automates a lot of the workflow that someone like myself would have to go dig for, ask, get approval from the recipient on that side, but it also adds the element of surprise and delight. Yeah. So if you're kind of like thinking like, oh, I don't have Sendoso, oh, I don't have Goldcast, or whatever other solutions you have, You don't necessarily need us that to start. This is, at the end of the day, the science behind it. Right? And that's what we're trying to engage. Um, I see Ben in the comments there. That's funny. Yeah. I love it. But Yeah. yeah. I mean, Just think, just yeah. The biggest thing on that is, like, it's a play and test and do stuff. I think, like, both of our titles have growth in it, and I think growth comes out of this world of experimentation in the world. And it's just like, go and try it. Go and do it. Before I got Sendoso, I was, like, mailing postcards and mailing form letters out of my old office and my old company and trying and seeing what happened. Uh, and it's, like, it's it's affordable. Uh, obviously, like, when you start doing more and more, it's awesome to have platforms like Goldcast and Sendoso to kind of break through and get that, you know, streamlined and operational. And I think, like, the biggest things that you start to unlock that are really hard beforehand is, like, tracking, analytics, reporting, those types of things. You sent a postcard. Does anybody else at your company know that that postcard was sent? If you have a tool, you know, it's it's logged in. It's properly put in the right places. Yeah. Yeah. That you you kinda nailed it. Like, at starters, if you need to prove it out, like, you're gonna you're gonna be working out of a Google Sheet. And. that's kinda where, you know, at scale, like, something like Goldcast or even Sendoso can help with in terms of tracking, auto syncing, you know, webhooks, all of that to really make that process trackable and stream more streamlineable. So you don't need the big tools to start. You can get scrappy. That's a lot of the ABM world right now anyway. So. that's kind of my, you know, call to action there or exhortation. Like, you don't need us to start. We're a good tool to really prove it out and really scale at that at that level. 100%. So let me pull up my next slide here, and I I kind of want to go into the workflow that, you know, we've been executing recently. And I had this chat with Austin a few days ago, and I'm actually stealing his slides. So would love for him to kind of, you know, really double down on this so he can take credit for it. And this is something that this is something that a lot of the best b two b orgs, you need the best marketing and sales alignment. And the handoff is important, the strategy is important, and the execution is important. So, Yep. yeah, also, can you just kinda, like, quickly. dive through this and how to do that? Yeah. Happy to walk through this. This is really I mean, I think everybody every marketer probably saying here has had if you've been in multiple different orgs, you've had different sales teams, different sales leaders, you know, different AE team, BDR teams, and so you've forgotten to experience a lot of different fun stuff. And I think, like, if I were to look back at all the times that I've worked hand in hand with sales and marketing teams in alignment, really, really strong go to market performance teams are really, really strong aligned teams on what they're doing, why they're doing it, and what they're not doing. And so this really walks through kind of how we kind of think about handoffs and move in and how we can help. I think one thing that has been become more and more advanced in the past, I don't even know, x number of years, put your number in that you prefer, is marketing going deeper and deeper into that sales funnel. I think previously, it was like marketing, you know, very high level top of funnel, generate some awareness, generate some, you know, MQL, throw it over the fence to a BDR that lived on the sales team or, you know, whatever AE team you might have. And that was it. That was like, all done. Good luck. Uh, and then sales was, like, trying to figure out the nurturing, how to keep them alive Alright. you know, making sure that opportunity becomes a thing. What I've seen a lot more is, like, the full integration of that, the sales and marketing motion working from the beginning all the way through to the closed one. And then in my world, it's really customer marketing's kicking off there, uh, and moving them into continued customer excitement and customer happiness, expansion, all those fun things. And so this kind of aligns of, like, how we plan together and talk about events and how we think about the roles and the people that are gonna attend and who's gonna be there and why they're going to be there. And then running that into coordination with the sales team and, you know, which prospects are attending, uh, you know, which ones are the hot leads, which ones do we have information on, which one has attended something previously that we should know or haven't known. So let's look in Salesforce and pull that type of information. And then always with the follow ups, everybody knows following up is a critical, uh, so making sure that we have really strong follow ups, which is pretty classic, and then making sure that there's a value add as you follow through with that conversation. So a lot of times, like, I think one of the challenges that us marketers and anybody in this world that does events and virtual events and direct mail and just as they think about marketing is oftentimes they think of they, like, get stuck in running the rat race. And unfortunately, we all do this. We, like, start executing on this, that, this, that, this, that thing. And then what happens is all of these this and that things become their own little thing. It's like this is its little thing and then this is its little thing where they're really not connected. And so you, like, become to have a bunch of one hit wonders that happen all across. And you're like, why are these not connecting? Why is this not flowing? And so trying to figure out, like, what is the follow through? Where do they go next? Like, what should be their next step? Um, I use this analogy all the time. It's like, uh, when a it's like a classic one with your prospects. You're you're dating your prospects. Oftentimes, you ask them, you know, you're meeting them a couple of times, you chat with them, and, like, you're asking for the next step. You're asking for the next step. And, like, my general recommendation for my team is always ask for the next step, but, like, know that, you know, you're gonna potentially be rejected and you have time in the future. There's more times to ask for next steps in the future. Uh, and, like, I think making sure that, you know, like, what the next step looks like, Uh, next steps when you're dating, next steps when you're kinda figuring out what to do with your alignment on the sales and account and who should we be talking to. I think they're very similar. And so making sure that you add value and add to the follow through and put them into the next step of where they should be going or helping them in the direction or asking them if they wanna go in that direction, um, has been super helpful. One thing that we've, like, started to internalize, Brandon, I would love to hear your take on it. But, like, we've started to internalize, like, we sell the buying committees. Many on you many of you, I'm sure, here also sell the buying committees, is trying to align with their champion of, like, where are we in this relationship? Like, asking the where are we now type question of, like, you know, you love us. Do you think the rest of the people that need to love us love us, or are we not there yet? Like, that's fine if we're not there yet. And, like, having a real conversation, um, with that person because, uh, humans speaking to humans, I would rather us be really real and really raw with who likes us and who hates us at a company versus, like, I don't know where we are with this. Yeah. I mean, that's the feedback that I've gotten from our sales team too. And, honestly, it really helps when one of our biggest growth, I wanna say lead generator, is when we've had a former customer. And it really helps when your product can sell itself in that sense where they would immediately consider you if they need you. Right? Like, I know, like, you we spoke about this not too long ago, like, brand equals. demand. So being. able to do that is a really big key play for us. But at the end of the day, like, that person is not usually, there's many people needing to be involved. So it's kind of having to win them over, engage them, having those honest conversations of, like, do you like us or, like, what's, Mhmm. like, what what's your take on us? Like, let's let's. any reservations that you may have, like, we want to navigate that, you know, accordingly. Yeah. So I definitely feel that, but it definitely helps when you have a champion or somebody who really likes your product and sees the value of it being that person for you. And, Yeah. you know, if you need to leverage, like, direct mail to kind of butter up the other buyer committee, like, that's. a really great play there. But we just kind of like to lean in on the value of the product and, like, how we can really serve. Yep. their team holistically. And at the end of the day, it comes down to numbers. Right? Like, how is our solution? Like, are they getting an ROI on it? So that's kind of the feedback that I've gotten from our sales team, and just the. product in itself, like, takes you to lets you have that conversation at least. So. I know that's. the same case for you guys. Yeah. 100%. And I think, like, having those we are a massive champion tracking. Uh, we use user gems. They are, like, our bread and butter we follow, and we make friends with so many people. And, like, Sandeza has been around for a really long time. Uh, so, like, most people have an opinion of Sendoso, whether it's good, whether it's great. I hope it's good, but, like, most people have an opinion at this point. Uh, and so, uh, we lean aggressively on our champions and our users, uh, to give super great feedback. And Chris, uh, our our co CEO, he does amazing, you know, conversations and calls all the time with customers and with, uh, people that didn't buy Sendoso. Why didn't you buy Sendoso? It's fine. Like, we would rather know why you didn't buy Sendoso so we can help either you find the right place or figure something out in the future. Uh, or, you know, you are a super excited customer. Why do you like us? Like, what do you even like about us? Because we have a preconception of what you might like, but I would love to hear from your words. Yeah. For. sure. I think that kinda, um, it kinda I'm kinda curious here with with your audience here, and I'm gonna open. up my next poll question, um, as I I segue into it. Um, I think the reason why I wanted, um, us to kind of cover the the marketing and sales alignment was just to establish the foundations of, like, Yep. why this work for our team. And I'm a true believer that it only works when your teams are aligned here. So I kinda open my next poll question. As you guys, uh, respond to that, I'll move us forward to our next slide here of, like, what we actually did. Right? So we hosted this large virtual quarterly event a few months ago called Summer Camp. So this is actual live proof, and I wanna give a full credit to our BDR team who were on the floor in the booths during the live event, pre event, and post event on executing. So you can see here this this is not Photoshop. I just blocked out a few names here, but this is a real screenshot of the actual engagement and conversations our BDRs were having around this event. So just to give you some context, the reason this worked, and I I testify to the science behind it, our BDRs were able to engage with the prospects pre event, whether it's building familiarity, connection, and also building excitement for the event. Now Now once they were able to join the event, that's where they were able to personally connect with them while they were at their hottest. Obviously, we are not trying to distract them from the event. We want them to get the most value out of that as well, but it's a nice little touch where they can get excited about, you know, our product because they're inside of it, but also just the topic in and of itself of why they're interested in, so the relevant talking points. So that kind of prospect slash customer experience and journey really allows us familiarity and strong sense of, you know, no stranger danger in a sense, and, like, don't bother me. So that's kind of the experience behind it, and we were able to see some pretty hefty results on there. Like, I think we were able to generate a little bit over, like, $22,000,000 in pipeline from this event alone. So that's where direct mail kind of comes in. We were able to send out a little gift before the event to make that connection point. Right? Like, hey. Thanks for joining us during the lunchtime. Coffee on us. Get a pumpkin spice latte on us or get lunch on us. Something like that that's definitely scalable, that's not gonna break your bank, and if you have a tool like Sendoso, you can scale, right, and track that. So it's very easy. I know the leadership is gonna come at you, like, where did the money go and how much do we bring in? So at the end of the day, a tool like Sendoso is gonna help us track this in our CRM. Therefore, we can easily prove out the ROI on top of the life cycle of the event ROI as well. So So that's kind of how we focus it, um, enabling our BDRs to get excited about these prospects that we're converting slash engaging, but not making it a, hey. I saw I saw you signed up for a webinar. Take a demo with us. Right? It's that doesn't work. It's never gonna work, and if you do that and it works for you, I'm very surprised. Like, you can prove me wrong, but it doesn't really work. So that's kind of the philosophy behind it. Um, this only works because we were able to align with our sales team before the event game plan and make sure that what we're going in, like, we're ultimately providing value to our prospects. Right? Whether it's the event, whether it's the touch points before and after, and then, obviously, if they are and we qualify them, then we obviously want to have a conversation with them. So this is a play that I highly encourage you guys if you're on the marketing team to kind of get into the the the habit. I wanna say build that muscle of working with your sales team there. And for us, we've seen really good success, and this is kind of a workflow that we've adopted internally, and we're doing it for, honestly, every event there. I love that. That's awesome. Awesome. I know I know you guys have a full on team as well. Like, how are you guys it doesn't have to be even webinars. It. 100%. could be, very similar. events, too. so, pre event, how's, kind of target accounts, team taking our marketing? and nurturing forms. Uh, We sometimes do raffles. We sometimes do engagements to bring people in. Um, obviously, like ABM target accounts that we really need to bring in the door or have a first conversation. I think, like, I I think this isn't a controversial take at all, but, like, for me, ABM is, like, how fast can I get this account to a yes or a no? I just want them to give me a yes or a no, and then so I can stop spending more money on them. If they're a no, Yes. that's great. That's fine. I don't care. Like, I would rather get to a yes or a no. Um, and then, you know, no is a nurture and a whole bunch of other love on the back end, but, like, a yes is great. Uh, and so how do I get there as fast as possible? And so we do gifting to help move that as fast as possible. And so gifting, uh, during pre event, during live events, uh, we do a ton of egress. We do a ton of raffles and giveaways as well. Uh, and then post event following up. So you don't have to like, I think one thing that's, like, a misconception often is, like, you're doing gifting for the event, whether it's event or virtual or whatever. You have to do it for everybody, and that is that is just not the case. Like, you do not need to follow-up with everybody and give everybody a gift. Like, you can do it for segmented target accounts. You could do it for your ABM. You could do it for tier one, but not tier two. Maybe tier one gets certain gift. Tier two gets a different gift. Tier three gets nothing. You can do whatever you want, Um, but really, like, mix it up and match it up, um, to, you know, what your spend is, what makes sense, what type of ROI looks good, uh, and how what you think will get the engagement. And, like, our entire CX team and our entire, like, marketing and sales team is happy to chat through, like, what is hot? What is good? What has been performing well? What are seeing results? What audience you have? Like, well, some of the really interesting stuff that we have is, like, we have obviously, if you're familiar with Sendoso, we have required to, We've acquired Alice and Postal recently. Uh, and so we have the by far the largest gifting dataset. And so we know, you know, who likes what, what people like what, where you know, what geo of this world, like, what they like to give, what they like to get, what they receive more, what they accept more. So we use a lot of that and marry that data to, like, what should we send this person based off who they are, where they are, what they do, all those types of things. And so we do a lot of the pre live event and post for virtual events, for in person events. We often also do it for we do some, like, PDF downloads for some content that we do that's, like, super impactful, and we do that for some of our target accounts as well. Uh, so, like, the way that we try to think about is, like, how do we try to break digital fatigue by coming through a different channel? Yeah. I think that's that's always the my initial rooting foundation. I'm like, is this gonna break the pattern? Is this. gonna get their attention? Right? Like, obviously, we want to get a response, get a meeting and all that. But at the end of the day, for specifically our target accounts and if we're doing an ABM initiative, like, I think the core is, like, engagement. Like, is this gonna. get their attention or whatever it may be? Anything that comes after that is something that. we wanna measure lower down the funnel. But whenever whenever I think of a gift, whenever I think of emotion, I try to think, like, is this gonna make them pause and reflect and possibly consider something? Right? Yeah. So. I think that's, like, the whole my whole demeanor around it. Um, we're seeing great success. Obviously, like, I'm not the one sometimes I am, but mostly our team out there on the field is the one engaging in those conversations. And we do give it up we do give them the liberty to make that call on their own. Right? If a BDR is talking with a prospect and they think they need this to get them over the hump or whatever it is to get that little pattern break, we give them the full autonomy to make that self decision on that front. Obviously, I love that. partner with them, but that's that. So. I love that. I also wanna say, like, when you're thinking about channels and you're thinking about, like, I'm I I think, you know, Brandon and I are both saying in this webinar that, like, don't only do virtual events and only do gifting. Like, these are elements of building an integrated plan that gets you engagement and gets you out of the noise. Uh, and so, like, when you're thinking about planning, if you're thinking about I'm not there yet, but if you're thinking about next year planning and stuff like that, uh, think about how you, you know, divide your budget, where you put your resources. And, like, you know, the average CPL for, like, a LinkedIn is, you know, 60 to a 120, typically. Yeah. That's a that is a great gift. Again, I said cost doesn't really matter. Like, you can do a much cheaper gift than $60 and get a bunch of great emotion, emotion, reaction, feeling out of it. So kind of think through, like, where should I spend my money? I'm not saying go turn off LinkedIn. I'm saying work with LinkedIn and try to figure out where else you can use some money and see where you have it. We have some amazing customers that have crazy cost per leads through Sendoso in comparison of their other channels and they are continually trying to move budget around. But it's it's like play the game that makes sense for your audience and where they are and how to get the reaction that you're hoping for. Yeah. I think that's, like, the biggest takeaway too that we just kinda as a marketer, you kinda have to market marketing, and that's the story around it. Like, webinars is. not gonna be your only channel that drives your revenue. Gifting is not gonna be the only channel. So it's kinda on you to use these tools and programs and curate like this, like almost surrounding your prospects and customers to that degree and kind of creating. that ecosystem around it. Right? So it's a great tool. It's a great channel. Like, we've seen really strong cost per lead in leveraging webinars in in tandem with direct mail gifting, Yep. but we can't, like, attribute all of our credit to that. Like, they've had a some sense of brand awareness, whether it's through LinkedIn ads, paid ads, and all that. So you kinda have to do a full ecosystem around it and tell the full story. It's very easy to say, like, this webinar drove x amount of pipeline, and I know I'm guilty of that. I said that literally. ten minutes ago. But we, like, we understand all if. there's a bigger. move. here. Yeah. So, I I have to answer Cindy's question. I would love anybody in the chat to also answer. Um, but coolest gift anyone's received, one of my favorite gifts. It's not like, wow. This was super cool, but I will say it's pretty awesome. Uh, is this was more, uh, a account that was trying to sell to Sendoso, and I had been, you know, inactive pretty much for the most part from them. Uh, and they, uh, knew that I had a new child join our family. And so they sent us a gift card to buy an apple tree to plant in our yard. And so I have this amazing, awesome apple tree that is a great memory of this amazing salesperson that, you know, there was, like, a memory for my new child as they grow, that the tree will grow with them, and it had this great message around it. It was super cool. It's, like, super impactful, uh, like and it does and, like, a lot of time, gifting doesn't need to be that impactful and it doesn't need to be that expensive, um, but it really comes down to just connecting to the human. Like, at the end of the day, we're all really just humans, and so whatever you can kinda do to make make you feel like you're a human and you're interacting with other humans, that matters. That's, like, the best gift. Okay. I have one, but now when yours is such like a a sentimental one where, like, it's gonna be there on, honestly, permanently. And, like, Yeah. every year when when it fruits, you're gonna be like, Yeah. oh, I remember this person. Right? It's think for me, really, one that I thoroughly enjoy, awesome. like, somebody from like, send me a Sendoso package of just meat, and I was like, Love. that. I get. to share this with my family, and, like, it was such a great meal. And I'm like, Yes. it's like they all remember it, and they remind me. Like, do you remember when you got that that gift from somebody and they sent you meat and we had, like, the meat party? And I was like, grilling. party? I was like, wow. What a great gift. Right? So it's. like they're, like, constantly reminding me about it, and it was just like it was my, favorite. This is I did previously, similar to that meet motion, was we did a virtual event, uh, then we tied gifting in with it. We sent, like it was a small, like, invite only virtual event for CIHROs in the hospitality space. And so we invited a bunch of people, and it was a chocolate tasting. Uh, so we sent like, each one of the people that attended got, like, a box that had all of these really fun cool chocolates. And so, like, just imagine you are on this cool virtual event and you have this person talking and they are, like, tasting chocolate and you see, like, their four year old run through and their seven year old running through and they're, like, grabbing the. chocolate. They're tasting the chocolate. It was like, honestly, this was probably, like, 05/05 oh, it's 2025. So, like, seven years ago. Um, and it still is, like, one of the most resonating things that, like you know, we had these incredible CHROs of competing companies here with their families eating chocolate and, like, what a memory that's being made, but, like, it's so cool. Yeah. I I love that. Ah, yeah. So I think just this is a very prime example of, like, how people like Austin and myself, and I'm sure you guys do remember these small little moments, whether it's a great gift like that apple tree or or whether it's like a little postcard after an event. Like, these are the things that we remember. And not to, Yep. like, down on me again, like, we're not gonna necessarily remember the speaker in terms of what they talked about of that, but we remember these moments just because that's how we operate. So I I think that's a really good segue into this this next part here. Like, I definitely wanna showcase, like, what we're able to do with all the hard work. Right? When whenever you're creating a virtual event, a field event, you put so much work into that event. It takes weeks of planning with multiple people, and most of the time after, you're already working on the next event. Right? You kind of burn a lot of the work there, and you you don't really maximize and get the full squeeze out of these events. So we at Goldcast do also a lot of virtual events. But for us, we also have this tool called ContentLab, quick plug there. In the docs section, you can go there and do a free trial there. But this is a prime example of what we ran and the event that the BDRs ran for our summer camp a couple of months ago. So it was a, I wanna say, a four hour long virtual summit there, a lot of sessions, a lot of great speakers. And most of the time, if you missed it, are you gonna go back and try to sift through four hours of content? Probably not. Right? And, awesome, you're not you're nodding your head no. I'm also a no. Even if it's our event too, I'm probably a no. So in that sense, like, what ContentLab is able to do is using our agentic feature, you're able to snip up content pieces of whether it's short form, one minute, five minute, or even whatever, however long you want to do. Get the key insights of the key moments, and you're able to leverage this. So we obviously use this for our evergreen nurture and continuously feed this, but we also use these short little clips for our outbound motion, whether it's enabling our BDRs to be like, hey. I saw that you missed this. Here's our the key three highlight moments from this hour long. And most of the time, they're more likely to watch a forty five second clip than an hour long recap of the entire session. So that's something that we do, like, we focus on, we prioritize. We wanna make this as digestible as possible, and, you know, the attention span is short. Like like that chart we showed earlier, like, post event, that excitement drops significantly. Right? So in order to maximize where they are in that current journey, this is a great way to leverage that. So, again, it's a there's a fourteen day 100 clip free trial. You can actually put one of your long form videos inside, and it you can create 10 clips on the spot, and it'll show you, like, what was the key moments. So quick little plug there on that, and I know we have about six minutes left, um, so I definitely want to highlight and break into I have a few questions prepared. I know there's a lot, so Austin, I'm gonna put you on the hot seat if if that's okay. Completely fine by me. Alright. Let me let me, um, go through it. So there's a couple of technical questions, but. I kinda wanna start with this, and I'll bring it up to the screen here if I can. Uh, this is from Taylor. Any tactics for building excitement activating registrants before the event that you guys are executing on? Yeah. So we've done a few, uh, specifically around, like, target accounts. Uh, so we've done it where, like, you can unlock different gifts as more people register, and then we kind of, like, uh, unlock different style of gifts or, you know, they can use referral codes to unlock higher end gifts or whatever. That's been super popular for people that are, like, more general top of funnel type kind of motion. Uh, we've also done it where we send, like, the first 25 people to register, get a special thing that we'll use during the event. Um, so kind of like they register, you give them something in between that time frame, uh, and then, like, they have a, you know, gift in person. We did that with, like, kind of similar to we did, like, a summer school thing, like, a year ago. And so we did the same situation kind of where we sent, like, a little notebook that had, like, notes and, like, an apple and, like, all kinds of things in it. Um, and so that was super fun. Like, everybody when we looked back at the attendance of who attended and came to the actual event, the people that received the items attended significantly higher than the people that didn't receive those items. Um, and so that was one of the ways to, like, ensure, uh, like, attendance or helping encourage attendance. Uh, so that worked really well for us. Um, I think there is, like, so many interesting tactics. I think, like, you can use gifting. Other tactics that are not gifting, I would say, is, like, uh, incorporating, like, if it's, uh, to give you an example of, like, previously, I was selling, like, HR software to, like, CHROs and hospitality and other verticals. Uh, we would have them register for a webinar, and then we would either bring in, like, a CHRO peer or someone. We would do, like, a curated peer invite process beforehand. We're like, We know you register for this webinar coming up. I wanted to see if you wanted to actually chat with the people that are going to be on the webinar beforehand. Like, here's a you know what? We wanna grab fifteen. minutes with them. Um, and it's kinda like, you know, like networking before. It's kind of like one of our hacks that we've done a couple of times. Uh, and that's been super exciting and awesome. I you like, we've done it virtually, and then I've also done it in person a ton. So one of the, like, my in person tricks is, like, running sidecar events and trying to get the keynote people or the people that are doing, you know, really cool thought leadership stuff at the event to, like, can you come over and do, like, a ten, twenty minute, like, thirty minute coffee chat with people and, like, you know, eight to 10 round table people? People love it. Uh, and, like, usually people are like, yes. They're happy to unless you're gonna try to try and get, like, Ryan Reynolds or someone. Uh, but, like, you can usually get the other people around there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That that was a gem. I'm gonna clip that. That's a clip. That's a good one. I real I I love it. I know that's what, honestly, people want regardless. Yeah. They're not gonna, like, ask you for it. So, like, it's kind of like your way of being, like, hospitable and kind of orchestrating that environment for them. Exactly. Like, uh, a couple years ago, uh, we did a side event and, like, Tim Davidson was speaking on digital ads and how to get the best ROI and the best bang for your buck. We asked him to come and do a coffee chat with some people at, like, a table and, like, chat. And, like, the people that were there got so much out of it. Like, they attended a session and, like, you know what? That line forms, and then you never get to actually chat with the person. And then, like, they came and they got to have a coffee chat and, like, actually diagnose problems and cool do cool things. So, uh, take take feel free to steal my place. Happy to. Yeah. I definitely will. Um, this is my next question. I know we we briefly discussed about. Sendoso Smart Send, and this is candidly something that we're not utilizing, but I need I need Austin you to put me on that list so that we can utilize it. Sounds good. this. is a great question from Danielle. Like, you know, there's a lot of people who are still working from home, but sometimes they go into the office. Yep. So how does, um, you know, Sendoso Smart Send kind of navigate this process? Yeah. So there's a few different ways that you can navigate the process. The most basic one that we've had for years has been allowing them to confirm their address where they want it sent. So we launched this during COVID as everybody decided to be in many different places. Um, and so we launched that then, and it was you can go and be wherever you want and you can confirm your address. A couple, uh, September, we actually launched a brand new feature called smart delivery, where we use AI and auto generation to identify where is the best most likely address for the person. And you can decide to send it to that, or you can decide if it doesn't hit a confidence variable that we wanna send it to an office. Or if you don't want either of those, Yep. you wanna have them then confirm their address. So we can do an automatic surprise and delight, or you can do an automatic surprise and delight to their office. Or if needed of those hit, uh, you can do in, like, an address confirmation, which I explained earlier. So that's kind of. the way to get people where they are. I do recommend, like, address confirmations in many instances or using smart delivery if you're gonna do a surprise and delight motion just because I'm here in Salt Lake City, but I often find myself in Minnesota. I often find myself in Florida and many other places, and sometimes I would like it there versus here. But, uh, so there's kind of a lot of different interesting ways to think about it. Yeah. I like how you guys bake in, like, certain levels that I wanna say checkpoints to make sure that if a doesn't work, b is there, and at, uh, worst case scenario, the c confirmation of, like, actually getting their confirmation is there. So. Yeah. that obviously was my initial. Like, how does that work? So that kind. of addresses that. Um, I know we're at time here. I I definitely want to highlight this one question, and then I have a quick little announcement at the end. Um, We briefly talked about this, and this is from Stacy. Like, are we gifting to every attendee or registrants or just those that we are specifically targeting? I would love to kind of hear your take on that. Yeah. I typically say that you're probably just gifting to people that you're targeting. Um, there are instances and elements on where you might wanna get for every attendee or every registrant. It's not as common. Uh, we see a lot of our customers really targeting toward their ABM tier one accounts or the ABM tier two accounts depending on what the emotion is or to, you know, their customers that they want to have in their cab depending if they're doing a customer emotion. So I would say the typical process is most people will do a specifically targeted gifting, but it's not uncommon or unheard of to have every attendee to to receive a gift. Yeah. I also think that's kinda what we we're currently operating on as well. We we let the whoever the the contact or lead owner or the account owner is make that decision based on their discernment level. And then. it's obviously, we work hand in hand in tandem on that part, but, you know, there are certain accounts that for example, like tier one, tier two, whatever it is, we kinda have that motion running. So Yep. it's really up to you. If you have the budget to kinda spread it across, fair game. But if you really wanna kinda tailor that custom experience, like, that's also great too. So that's also on our end. Let me close this out. Um, I have one last poll question. This is more just for me to kinda follow-up with, you know, you guys here or, actually, we just launched it. So feel free to go in the polls. Um, you know, it's you know, what's what will be most helpful for you right now? So there's five answers there. If you don't wanna answer, if you're it's totally fine, but this is just kinda context for me and our team here. Um, with that, I kinda wanted to do a little quick little plug here. We have our next upcoming virtual event called Marketer's Got Talent. If you don't know what it is, it's a little play on awards from America's Got Talent. Um, so these three here, um, if you know them, lovely. If you don't, just wanna give a quick plug. It's Jess Cook, Devin Reed, and Ari. They're gonna be our three judges, just like America's Got Talent, and we're hosting three really talented leading b two b marketers who are going to use our agentic video editor and having a showdown of the content and clips they're able to create from it. So, yeah, we'd love for you guys to join us. It's gonna be a fun event. There's gonna be giveaways, raffles. Um, we definitely want to showcase the power and the time that we're able to save your team, but also how this is gonna fuel your content engine and really drive that evergreen pipeline. So, yeah, rumor has it, I don't know if we have a golden buzzer, that would be really fun to make confetti's fly and all that, but you can click that link, that little hover bar that's rotating, and, yeah, I know we're over time, two minutes here. Uh, I just want to give a really big thank you to Austin for joining me here today. Um, there's a lot of just he's one of the most authentic marketers that you can see. And just from the the people that I've gone to work with internally and externally, like, I I I think people often forget, like, the human side and the science behind it. So I think it's always good and a refresher to me to kinda speak with Austin and really pick his brain on this kind of stuff and have this kind of session. So thank you everyone, for. attending. Access the recording. Austin just dropped his LinkedIn, so please connect with him there. Thanks, everyone. This is gonna be awesome. I can't wait for marketers got talent. I'm registering right now. Awesome. Thanks, everyone.