In a world where human connection has become a priority, sending strategies have stepped up to help marketers meet the demand. The differences between the U.S. and international markets, however, present both a problem and opportunity for those looking to send personalized gifts internationally, and companies like Sendoso are working to bridge the two markets.
With help from a recent funding round and integrations with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sendoso is taking the next step in sending evolution – global expansion. The company has planted its seeds internationally with a new European headquarters and is working to build up its platform to facilitate sending strategies on a worldwide scale.
Demand Gen Report (DGR) sat down with Sendoso CEO Kris Rudeegraap to discuss the company’s ventures into the global B2B market. Below, he provides insights into Sendoso’s brand new Dublin headquarters, recent trends in global sending strategies and how Sendoso’s platform and strategy will adapt to better meet the needs of its global enterprise users.
Demand Gen Report: What are some of the sending trends that you’ve seen in the global market, and how have they evolved over the past year?
Kris Rudeegraap: Globally, everyone was hit with the same conundrum of Covid-19. Organizations had to figure out how to build more personal relationships and human connections, which is where leveraging a sending platform comes in.
Companies also must be precise due to Europe’s data protection and privacy laws, or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The spray-and-pray email campaigns of the past won’t work. By leveraging a sending platform, marketers can adopt a very personal, 1:1 approach that makes outreach for your sales and marketing more successful. With localization, there’s a different variety of offerings available in various regions, as people in the UK or in Germany might be receptive to a different gift card than a client in the U.S.
We’ve had to build a unique catalog around the global regions we’re entering, but overall, the end goal is building better relationships and leveraging that for sales, marketing, customer success and internal employee to employee relations, which has become very prominent worldwide.
DGR: Could you expand more on Sendoso’s plans for global expansion? What is your team seeking to accomplish?
Rudeegraap: We are already global in our offering today. We currently have logistics and supply chains in Europe and Asia, as well as North America. Our move to Europe is focused around two areas: R&D growth, such as hiring product engineers and expanding the team there and providing a local headquarters to support the growth of the customer base. Additionally, we want to continue investing in our merchant and gifting partners logistics in those regions. Dublin is a great area to do that from multiple perspectives — sales, marketing, customer success and engineering especially.
We want to support our global customers better and focus more of our efforts on expanding internationally. Best case scenario, we will see even greater adoption in Europe and Asia. We’ll see more focus on our supply chain, logistics and employee gifting in those regions. Although we started in the U.S., which was our first focus area, we’ve grown so fast and seen the need for sending platforms worldwide, and so we want to support that.
DGR: How can marketers manage new datasets from the global market? How does that factor into sending and SaaS strategies?
Rudeegraap: For GDPR and personally identifiable information purposes, there’s a need for data infrastructure with data server locations and steppers. We’re adding new merchants in European regions and expanding our 30,000-item catalog, which is a huge data set that’s constantly growing. There’s also data on the right thing to send to a specific person at the right time, which will only get better and better as we add in this global layer on top of it.
In terms of SaaS, we’ve seen that enterprise customers want to create highly customized campaigns with the flexibility to either decide what they want to send out and when. Whether it’s 1:1 or 1:many, enterprises want to have really strong brand control guidelines. For Sendoso, having our own logistic infrastructure and warehousing and fulfillment centers allows us to do very specific projects for our customers, so that the unboxing experience is exactly what they want and not reliant on a middleman. Where others in the industry are not owning full end-to-end capabilities and are relying on middle people to do the part of the shipping, a sending platform can help you deliver complete experiences.
DGR: How have Sendoso’s recent integrations with Microsoft impacted your global sending strategy and platform?
Rudeegraap: Microsoft is a global company, as well as Salesforce, Outreach and Salesloft, all of which have regional offices in Europe. All of that plays into our integrated sending strategy. Wherever we are, we want our customers to be able to send from within the same platforms that they’re currently using. Microsoft has great penetration globally, so it’s part of our expanding integration strategy.
We are also heavily investing in internal integrations. We saw a huge surge in HR and employee-to-employee gifting during Covid-19, and we’re making it even easier for employees to just send gifts to other employees either through our platform or integrations.
