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1-2-3: Sendoso 'Sendfluencer' Case Study

1-2-3: Sendoso 'Sendfluencer' Case Study

1 Idea, 2 Resources, And 3 Collaborators For This Week.

Jared Robin
January 20, 2024

Happy Saturday!

The Collab has hit 3k subscribers!

Thank you to everyone for reading and being a part of the journey.

Collaborative Growth, the collaboration between brands and individuals is something so powerful to explore.

Demand creation can be next level when done right.

We've seen what Michael Jordan accomplished collaborating with Nike.

Both himself personally, and the brand both benefited GREATLY.

It set the stage in the B2C world.

The B2B world is figuring out its path right now.

Collaborators (creators, influencers, fractionals, advisors, etc) are partnering with brands to run collaborative GTM motions.

For today’s issue, I sat down to interview Katie Penner, Head of Sender Relations for Sendoso to explore their recent ‘Sendfluencer’ collaborative growth campaign on LinkedIn.

Let’s dive into today’s issue…

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The Big Idea

Sendoso B2B 'Sendfluencer' Case Study

Jared: I'm joined by Katie Penner, the Head of Sender Relations at Sendoso. What are your responsibilities as a Head of Sender Relations?

Katie: It's a good question. So essentially my job is pretty wild. There are a lot of different hats, but I primarily take care of our brand. So a lot of social media, content creation, things like that to kind of get us on the social map. And then also I am running our Sendfluencer program, which we're going to talk about today.

Jared: First, what does Sendoso do for anyone who might not know?

Katie: Yeah, so we're a direct mail platform. We make it easy for you to send just about anything to anyone, anywhere with the click of a button all while tracking ROI & bringing in automation. Super simple.

Jared: Tell us about your recent ‘Sendfluencer’ campaign I’ve been seeing all over LinkedIn.

Katie: So we know that brands are working with influencers and implementing influencer marketing. I’ve personally been reached out to by companies who wanted me to do paid posts for them. And in my experience, a lot of these reachouts were incredibly, was, you know, something along the lines of, hey, Katie, we will pay you x to post this script.

Katie: And they didn't care if I used their platform. It seemed pretty inorganic, so I never took them up on any of those. I knew that I wanted to dive into influencer marketing for Sendoso, but I knew that it had to be more collaborative. We're very intentional and thoughtful and we believe in transcending those transactional boundaries. So how could we do this in a way that matched our brand and what we're trying to convey and teach people? So we had to think about a different way to set this program up. We had to connect with the right people that matched our brand values and that had a ‘give first’ attitude.

Jared: What were your goals for this program and how are you measuring success?

Katie: Our goals:

1. There's a brand element where you want your impressions to go up and engagements on social, all of those things.

2. But then we also started attaching an ‘S1’ number to this. We wanted to bring in demos and to prove pipeline and revenue.

Jared: So S1 is pipeline-related?

Katie: Yeah. So S1 is a qualified opportunity. We didn't want just Sendfluencers to bring us anyone and everyone. We wanted people who were qualified to be introduced to us by these influencers to enter into our pipeline and be qualified opportunities.

Jared: This is your version of an influencer program to drive pipeline. What types of people were you looking for?

Katie: Yeah. So first thing, obviously they had to be a give-first person who is very giving. Of course, that makes sense. Second, we needed to make sure that all of these people were actively using our platform now. When we bring a Sendfluencer on board, we're going to not only give them a free account, but we're also going to load it with money every month so that they can actively be gifting. And then the third thing was that we were never going to be given scripts. So we worked with each Sendfluencer individually to figure out how often you want to post. Are you interested in blog writing? Or is it just straight LinkedIn posts, videos, and text? Like, what is your thing? Once we figured that out, we worked out payment on an individual basis because everyone's different.

Katie: Everyone's expectations are different, rightfully so. And, yeah, so if it's one post a month, they get to decide what they share. So they could be featuring a feature of ours that stood out to them, or just telling a gifting story based on who they've sent to. So it's natural and organic. And we're not being quiet about this program either. We did the orange tiles on LinkedIn. We want it to be very transparent that we're partnering with these people. Our hope and our expectations are that since we're not scripting anything, you can tell that it's not something that's coming out of our mouths versus the creative geniuses that we're working with.

Jared: How'd you pick people? I know you mentioned some qualities, but there are 80 million salespeople on LinkedIn. How'd you narrow that down to the right people and the right personality traits?

Katie: We wanted to make this as accessible as possible, so we didn't want to just reach out to people that had massive followings. So we created a Sendfluencer landing page and invited anyone and everyone to join the waitlist. And then from there, we had a list of a lot of people (over 50 people on the first day signed up). And these are people that were following the page already. Of course, we wanted them to be somewhat engaged in what we were already doing or have some sort of interest already in. And then from there, we were able to kind of cherry-pick who aligned with our values, et cetera.

Jared: I love that you used the term partner and made it feel organic, but let's get down to the numbers. What were the results?

Katie: “We are trending towards 30% increases month over month in engagement, followers, and visits to our LinkedIn company page”

Katie: We're also reposting every single Sendfluencer post. It's also giving us great content for paid ads, which is interesting. Instead of pushing just these social tiles or whatever as paid ads, we're now promoting people's posts, which is resulting in some cool things.

Katie: I can't give exact numbers when it comes to the total pipeline sourced, but I will tell you that it's pretty impressive.

I can share one cool example of organic benefit from this:

There was this one company that’s CEO posted on LinkedIn and said, hey, I'm looking for a gifting platform.

Who do you all recommend? I need to sign before the end of the year.

Our Sendfluencers jumped on that post, and tagged us immediately we were able to jump on it and that deal was closed in eleven days (much shorter than our typical sales cycle of 90+ days). So it just kind of goes to show the power of because there's that stat about hey, the first person who reaches out typically gets the deal. It's allowing us to reach these prospects a lot faster because we have this extension of our team that's very active on social and can tag us in for things like that. So that was a really cool win. I mean, eleven days is so short and so quick and it wouldn't have been possible without their help.

Katie plans on recruiting a new batch of Sendfluencers on a monthly cadence to expand reach.

2 Resources

I. Justin Welsh’s Creator MBA

The Creator MBA is Justin’s newest product drop and delivers a complete blueprint for starting, building, and sustaining a profitable Internet business. I’ve bought and loved the past products he’s launched. Lots of learnings for collaborators. 50% discount this weekend (not an affiliate, purchaser myself).

II. At Davos, businesses look to move from talk to action on AI

Artificial intelligence was once again the biggest topic at the World Economic Forum, but this year's conversation was much more focused on tangible action.

3 Collaborators

I. Lauren Surman

In addition to running her recruiting firm LWL Consulting, Lauren is a Sendfluencer for Sendoso but also regularly works with many brands on her weekly LinkedIn Lives. She’s collaborated as a brand ambassador for Sendoso, Betterleap, and Text Blaze. She’s got an incredibly engaged network and is incredible to work with. (follow her on LinkedIn)

II. Tim Davidson

Tim is the founder of B2B Rizz, an ABM and LinkedIn ads consulting firm for B2B SaaS. After 10 years of digital marketing experience working with 50+ companies driving revenue and pipeline through ABM and LinkedIn ads, he went out on my own. He is also a semi-funny B2B marketing & sales content creator with HockeyStack, an advisor with Testbox, and a Sendfluencer with Sendoso. (follow him on LinkedIn)

III. Dale Zwisinski & Adam Jay

Dale & Adam co-founded and co-run Revenue Reimagined, a fractional CRO agency helping founders scale their businesses. They also are building a media arm and are collaborating with brands like Sendoso for the Sendfluencer campaign. I’m impressed with how they’ve leaned into collaborative growth (follow them on LinkedIn).

1 Action to help the Collab Grow

Reply to this email and let us know what you’d like to see more. And a big thank you to all who made it to this point.

Until next week,

Jared

P.S. Looking to promote yourself to 3k SaaS Founders & GTM Leaders? (reply for rates)

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