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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, the Santa Claus of sales comes back on the show.
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That s Chris Rudogrop from Sendoso.
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Also, we talk about customer experience and how it has the power to close a deal, but it can also kill it.
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And we get into the trending words in sales like ABM, breaking down what they actually mean and what to do and know about it.
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Glad you re here.
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So Chris, you know a lot of my colleagues commiserate about the state of customer experience right now.
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And this could be either retail, where you re going into a restaurant or a grocery store, or it could be B2B.
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And I don t think one is so much better than the other.
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I think business to business, probably a little bit.
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But it seems to me like there is a whole lot more emphasis right now, and will be for the next couple of years, on what kind of experience are you as a vendor giving your customers?
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So can you talk about that a little bit, some trends, if you know of any, and just your opinion as it relates to Sendoso and your clients about how important customer experience is?
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Is it becoming more important, less important, about the same?
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Why don t you pontificate a little bit there?
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So my thoughts, I think it s extremely important.
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I think a couple of trends that I see, one is I think when you re a consumer and kind of in the consumer world, businesses really think about what is that buying experience?
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What is that consumer experience?
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And I think we re seeing more.
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B2B companies and companies that are having sales and marketing teams want to recreate a better experience and really holistically think about all the different touch points and all the different ways that a buyer is going to interact with the company.
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Because of that, I think it s becoming a competitive advantage too, where if you ve got a commoditized product or you ve got a similar product to a competitor,
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can you win them over by having a better experience?
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And I think the answer is yes.
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You can also win them over by having a salesperson who has a better job at building that relationship.
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I also feel, Chris, I d love your comments on this.
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Not only can you, as your product itself in the center point can get commoditized or feature function balanced, right?
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So your competitors all come up with same, similar feature functionality, whatever that is.
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Not only can you win on experience, you can lose on experience.
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And this is the part where I think people shift their energy the wrong way.
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They put their energy, even the sales team tries to find the feature function or the one product attribute that they think they can win on and it s too close.
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So they still lose and they re like, what am I doing?
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And then they blame product.
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or they blame our delivery, right?
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Yep.
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And I think that s more of a, you can lose as much as you can win.
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Yeah, I would agree.
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I think the other thing too with the customer experience is, especially for salespeople,
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It doesn t have to end when the deal is signed.
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And I think the best salespeople do a good job of coming back in 30, 60, six months later, you know, whatever it may be, uh, you come back in and you build that, you know, customer for life and, or, Hey, that customer might, uh, move companies.
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And if you built that good rapport and you built a good experience, so much easier to hit them up at their new company to say, Hey, buy us again.
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And.
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So I think that s a really good way.
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And Sendoza becomes a good part of that, or just sending gifts in general is, you know, hey, six month anniversary, I m going to send you something or, you know, knowing that the prospect mentioned to you that, you know, an upcoming trip or something, you know, you can chime in or they mentioned a dog and like six months later, you could
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you know, send a little dog toy and be like, blah, blah, blah.
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So there s definitely easy ways to chime back in and even be more genuine and build that relationships even longer.
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You re Chris, you re kind of like the Santa Claus of sales.
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I m thinking about this.
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I think the headquarters to the North pole.
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I m not kidding.
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I just pictured all your people are like the elves.
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You re the Santa Claus of sales.
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You re just like making all this so fun to work there.
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Like if you watch the movie elf.
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Yeah.
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It s such a fun, happy, optimistic place, isn t it?
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I love that idea.
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I think I m going to steal that, steal that idea.
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That s fine.
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Beautiful.
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Send me some Sendozo gift.
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And Brian, for our business, people call us.
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Your clients and my clients call us and say, hey, I ve got this situation.
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It s in the 11th hour.
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What do we do?
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If Chris gets that call, he s like, send him something.
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Absolutely.
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For us, we re lamenting, and we re sweating.
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Like, oh, how do we give good advice?
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Just send him some stuff.
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Oh, let s get let s make up a customized shaker eight ball that has the same answer.
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The same answer for all three.
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Yeah, you shake it up and it says, you know, it says, call Bill.
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That s the ultimate.
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Call Bill and Brian.
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We should do that.
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We should send ASC magic eight balls out, shouldn t we?
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That s funny.
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That s great.
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Another topic that s interesting.
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Now, this is kind of a SASE topic.
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SASE as in SaaS Software as a Service.
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We talk about gifting and kind of ongoing marketing and selling to an account-specific environment, also known as ABM, account-based marketing.
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Can you first define that in your own?
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Because there are some varied definitions of that.
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So in your world, what is ABM?
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And then how does gifting apply to ABM?
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The way that I like to explain it is, ABM is really like fishing with a spear instead of fishing with a net.
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You re really targeted in terms of the accounts that you re trying to go after, and you re putting more emphasis on a specific account, everything that you need to do to get that account closed.
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And so I think with that, it s how do you build the named account list?
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How do you enrich that?
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How do you run campaigns or how do you align the sales and marketing team to go after that account?
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How do you find the buying committee so there s more people involved in that account that are going to make that decision?
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And then how do you ultimately create a good experience for that account, whether it s through
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ABM ads that are very targeted or, you know, direct mail and gifting.
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And so I think where Sudosa comes in is one, you re typically investing more in that account because you ve recognized that it s an important named account.
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So you have more budget to spend to get that account.
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You also are able to get more creative because you re not doing a spray and pray net fishing.
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I ll take any deal I can get, but you re really researching and spending time on that account.
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So.
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I do think that while ABM is a newer term that maybe marketing is using more frequently now, I think salespeople, the best ones, kind of were always doing account-based marketing in some fashion where they always had their list of accounts they wanted to go after.
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Now there s just a term and more budget being spent on tools to make it that much easier.
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Yeah, I would say also for you, if you re listening to this, and if you have been through a business planning process with Bill and me, you ll see a section on our personal business plan for ASP listeners that talks about conquest account list.
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You can call it whatever you want, target account list.
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It s a mission-critical thing, in my opinion, for salespeople to have a list of companies, I think, even by name.
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I agree.
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Even if you can by the person by name.
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I agree.
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That s what Chris is talking about.
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Yeah.
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Right?
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And I ve just had one of these situations where
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newish client, helping them kind of create sales process from scratch.
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And when I got into this, so who are you looking for?
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It was like they did this kind of broad, well, basically, anyone, any small to medium sized business that has some risk of IT security or whatever it was.
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I m like, that doesn t help me at all.
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Like, I need names of people.
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Then they gave names of people.
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Guess where that land?
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That led to, you know, a sit down connection episode where I like just connect them directly to the people because they got specific.
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So agree with that, Chris, you good on that, like very specific targeted list.
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Exactly.
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And I think it s, uh, it just helps align, you know, sales and marketing.
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So everyone s going after the same accounts and it also helps with, uh, overall just where you re focusing your energy, which I think is important in sales, uh, because you could focus on a lot of different accounts or a lot of different contacts.
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And so if you can narrow in your list, um, and, uh, go after it, your chance of winning is going to be better.
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So whenever we have a guest on, we ask the guest to give us a little something.
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And so Chris, you have a couple of weeks ago, we made the offer that if you wanted to be a part of one of your global conventions, but now you ve got a different offer.
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So tell us about this one.
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Yeah.
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So we d love to invite anyone that wants to request a demo and check out Sendoso, and we will send you free lunch.
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So we ll give you a you know, a door dash a gift do breezy gift, you know Whole Foods II if you you name it we ll send it to you favorite spot There s hundreds of you gifts in this offer
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But yeah, have lunch on us and check out more about Sendosa by going to Sendosa.com and request a demo.
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He walks his talk.
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He walks his talk.
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He is not a hypocrite at all.
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Not that we thought he was.
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You know, I know you spend a lot of money listening to the ASP, right?
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Oh, wait.
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No, they don t.
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It s free.
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It s been free for 15 years.
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It s staying free.
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And we re always trying to give.
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So we re going to go from free to even giving you
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So you re getting an infinite return on your money by listening to ASP.
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Because Chris is going to buy you lunch if you take a demo with Sendoso.
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And based on the episodes that we ve done so far, I think you d be crazy not to.
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Just check it out.
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Just check it out.
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Yeah.
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And as Chris said, and you can tell how he is, he s just like our ASP listeners.
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He s not going to overpush.
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He s going to do the right thing.
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And that s it.
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And even if you don t sign up for Sendoso, there s so many rich ideas here.
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that we can all put into play to create better experiences.
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We got to do this now.
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We do all have got to do this because, um, without it, like you said, um, you know, the commoditization of product and feature function, you know, parody is going to eat us alive.
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It s really great.
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So people can reach you, Chris, at chris.sendoso.com, correct?
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Correct.
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Chris with a K, too.
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K-R-I-S.
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Yeah, K-R-I-S.
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That s sendoso.com.
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And Chris, we ve really enjoyed these last few episodes.
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And I think you ve given our audience a lot to think about when it comes to prospect experience and customer experience and how we can separate.
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And we re all unique.
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And yet, sometimes we show up the same way as everybody else.
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So we re not really bringing much uniqueness.
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And that s what you ve really helped us discover, I think, the last couple episodes.
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But yeah, thanks so much for letting me be on the show.
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It was fun sharing my thoughts and my background.
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Good.
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It s awesome, man.
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And congrats on the Series C. Yeah.
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You re going to, I m sure, become a Series D, E, and F. And have us on your yacht, will you, when you go public?
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We ll have some cigars.
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We ll record a podcast on the yacht.
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Beautiful.
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All right.
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That s a date.
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All right, man.
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Thanks, Chris.
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Thank you.