Drive Deeper Connections and ROI with Sendoso AI
Cody Farmer, GM, PLG at Sendoso takes us on a tour of Sendoso AI and how it aggregates data about the recipient to give senders tailored gift recommendations.
[MUSIC]
Hello everyone and welcome to Go to Market AI,
the future of your Go to Market tech stack.
I'm your host, Thera McConnell.
These days, it seems like every company has AI,
but on this show, we want to go a level deeper so you can see
firsthand how businesses are actually applying AI to solve your business
challenges.
We're going to go deep into the use cases and showing you live demos of
the latest and greatest in AI technology.
So that said, today I'm joined by Cody Farmer,
Product Manager at Sindoso.
Cody, welcome to the show.
>> Hi Sarah, nice to meet you.
>> Yeah, thank you so much for joining.
I will start this by saying we are Sindoso customers.
I've used Sindoso for many years,
but I have not seen your AI functionality yet,
so I'm really excited for this show today.
But before we jump into the demo,
Cody, can you just tell us a little bit about who Sindoso is,
what you guys do and who you're helping?
>> Yeah, I mean, Sindoso as a concept is something that businesses have been
doing for years.
Sending swag to employees, sending swag to customers,
sending gifts to customers on certain occasions, things like that.
What we've really done is turned that process into something that's
automatable, it's scalable,
and you can basically just plug it into existing processes or
other tools that you're already using today.
So we're really helping out marketing teams, sales teams, customer success.
We started to help out HR teams a little bit too with
some employee engagement rewards as well.
>> That's cool. That is great.
So Cody, obviously the main part of the show is the demo,
and so people come here to see.
So with that being said,
I would love to jump into a demo here of Sindoso and
see your guys' AI functionality and just see what you guys are all about.
>> Yeah. One of the things that I mentioned was helping to scale out the
process of gifting.
A lot of what we're looking to accomplish here is how can we scale this out,
make it super personalized and scalable.
So the first feature we're going to show is actually just our entry point
into using AI in Sindoso.
A lot of our customers, we really need to help answer three questions.
Who do we send to, when do we send it, and what do we say when we send it?
A lot of our value prop is really around like,
do something catchy with the gift to grab attention,
but the main value needs to be what your brand is selling.
Otherwise, you're just not really accomplishing the goal that you're looking
for.
So when we started working on this feature,
we started out with like,
generated AI messaging tool and it's like,
well, that's exactly what every single company calls their generated AI
messaging tool.
So we actually used AI to name this feature as well.
We are calling it punpal.
So often our customer success team gets questions like,
hey, we're running a Cinco to myo campaign.
What is like a cool message that you could send alongside that?
So what punpal tries to do is basically just generate AI powered puns to
include in your messages.
And it reads in the product name of what you're sending,
and you can provide it context to make it spit out a more targeted pun.
But if you just click get a pun,
it's going to give you something that is pretty generic based on the gift that
you're sending.
So this one is Pete's.
We've got Pete's coffee and one of our coffee reminders for eGifts.
It'll just rotate through the brands and give you a suggestion based on that.
And you could just.
Well, I feel like I generated like dad jokes.
So like legitimately, yes.
And I've always choked.
I've worked this in Dosel for a long time and I always tell people,
I'm an expert at automating cupcakes and I'm an expert at generating puns.
Just like this is really just the encompassing of what I do in my head.
When I talk to a customer of Sindoso.
Totally. But I feel like, I mean, we just got into this demo.
But when I think pun pound, the fact that you use AI to name your AI generation
I think it's just like you've got full AI, like you guys are lean fully into it
Is being creative, especially like I'm in marketing.
I'm supposed to be creative.
But like our sales team is using Sindoso every day.
It's hard to be creative or think of like something unique and personalized and
different.
And you hear all the time, generative AI is going to help you do that.
But people are like, yeah, but how is it going to help me do that?
So seeing here that a rep or someone could use this orchestra success,
we manage to be more creative,
especially when you're sending multiple of these at scale is so useful.
Totally. Yeah.
And you and for the context part of it, you can plug in literally anything you
know, like,
I just learned you live in Arkansas.
So if I'm like, are you used to live in Arkansas?
But what is it?
Do something that is Arkansas related?
I could do that like Starbucks to someone in Arkansas.
It's gonna throw the ways it will do upon the information that, you know,
this one is like adding a latte love to your Arkansas adventures.
So yeah, it basically just uses whatever it can to help guide the message.
And a lot of times all the context a sales person might have is where is this
person located?
Totally.
That might be it.
And, you know, if you can use that, any type of personalization is relevant.
So that's really what we're trying to accomplish with this.
What I have been personally amazed by is I initially thought of this as like,
well, it's pun pal.
It's a really fun feature.
I'm not sure exactly if this is going to take off with Sindoso's largest
enterprise
customers, right?
Yeah, because it's like, yeah, it's puns.
Maybe they don't want to do that immediately when we roll this.
The biggest users were our enterprise customers who just were looking for
scalable ways to do creative messaging based.
Totally.
Yeah.
So really any context you can plug in, you do that.
And the other thing I was shocked by is like a lot of folks have a lot of faith
in what
this thing says.
And sometimes it's just literally they could get a pun, they copy this pun and
they
paste it and they send it.
I promise you they don't even look at the message and it's that fast.
It's amazing to me how targeted and good it has actually become over time as
well.
People can edit that, I'm assuming.
So you say create a pun pun.
Funpal is going to give it to you.
Obviously you have the flexibility as a user to edit that.
But to your point, like if it gets good enough and it's learning enough, you
might not have to, but you can't.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And I always advise people like add more context, like make your message more
targeted for your brand.
But some people are just like, Hey, I like the message with punpal,
decorated for me and they just blast off with it.
Cool.
So Unpal is really the first thing.
And another feature that we have been working on is gift suggestions.
And we started work on this a while ago and really AI just helped make this
better.
So what this does is basically you can give us a recipient.
And if you have interests that you know that they like, you can add those in as
well.
But if you don't have any context, it will look up what it can about the person
and give some suggested sends based off of that.
So yeah, the initial use case for this was really like salespeople who are
sending to someone
and maybe they learned what college they went to so they could come in and put
in what college
over time it started to expand.
It's getting a little bit smarter.
And the addition of AI has helped out a ton from that perspective.
And right now it's still functioning off of like a relational database and not
necessarily AI all together.
We're training it right now to like be able to shop our marketplace, be able to
shop Amazon as
well because we have an Amazon integration so we can basically surface Amazon's
entire marketplace
and just suggest gifts for your recipient based off of that.
That's really cool.
Especially that one of the gifts was called bug bite thing suction tool at the
very top,
which as someone who lived in Arkansas and hiked in the outdoors,
that's a pretty good gift idea for someone who's outdoorsy.
Yeah, I really like so I think gift recommendation is really cool.
Our good market team uses sendo so for a lot of different things, including
customer success
and our SDR team and our marketing team uses it.
But I know we have struggled in the past with like, what do you send people
that's unique and
fun and like some reps are really, really good at it just because it's
something that,
you know, they maybe have a little more creativity and this, something they
enjoy doing.
Then we have other reps who are just like, I don't, I, I put a wall like I can
't think of anything
cool. So to have AI help you say based on what we know about them, even just
like,
slimming down the options like sendoso, I know your guys is inventory and your
marketplace is
so, so expansive, which is fantastic. But having something to help you narrow
down that marketplace
is really beneficial. I know for like our reps and our marketing team, we're
thinking about
campaigns. Yeah, 100%. I think one of the big objectives that and things that
we've observed
with our customers is like, they don't necessarily want to shop our marketplace
So if we're not standard e-commerce, you're not going to Amazon to order your
bug bite
suction tool in general. So the more guided we can give you just direct
suggestions.
And the end state is like, how can we tie it all together? How can we give you
a generated
message that's related to the GIF and make it as simple as just clicking a
button and sending it.
And that's, that's the end goal of using AI at sendoso. We're just taking steps
in that
direction over time. Awesome. Yeah. Oh, and one more thing that I want to talk
about is
we're in early stage on what we're calling like our send signal tool. So this
helps us with like
what to send and what to say when you send it, but it's not necessarily
answering like,
when do I send a GIF? So another tool that we're working on is the ability to
just suggest when
it's time to send somebody a GIF based on what we learned from other tools. So
that's awesome.
So just in like, and saying like based on what we've learned about like your
deal cycles and when
people engage, like this is the most timely, that is, that's really cool to me
because I think as
like, I manage our budget from a marketing perspective and a go to market team
and one of our biggest
fears is like wasted spend. Like, I think we've heard before things that AI can
help is like
wasted marketing spend, but I feel like this is a really tangible thing where
you're like,
okay, if I know based on learnings and data that send also can ingest and say
like, now is the
right time to send this, then I'm more confident going to my executive team and
saying, I need X
amount of dollars for these really targeted things. And I know that they're
going to work. Like,
I know based on data and AI is helping me understand like these are going to be
sent at the right
time. So it's not just sending someone who's totally cold has no interest, a
free gift. And
they're like, Hey, thanks for this. I have no interest in your. Yeah. Yeah,
exactly. It's really
just like trying to make us as efficient as possible, get the highest
engagement rate that you can get
when you send gifts. And overall, just improving, you know, your deal cycle and
generation as well.
That's awesome. Yeah. So really, it's AI is helping to know so out a lot from
like the three
main questions that we look to answer. We've done a lot of like market
awareness to drive like
gifting as a real strategy as part of your marketing efforts. A lot of people
already knew it, but
they didn't know tools existed to help them with that. And now it's just making
that process as
simple as possible using AI. That's really cool. I know I've struggled before
from like thinking of
cool marketing direct mail for campaigns. And I feel like I'm already excited
about getting off
this call and now going into send us so and trying to figure out like being
able to use these AI
tools in the future and figure out within send us so based on our user and our
buyer and the things
that we know have it suggest things because I definitely know having worked at
qualified for
many years, like you sort of hit a wall creativity and you've used up what you
think are all your
good ideas sometimes and I've heard a lot about AI being able to help with that
creativity.
I however know I can just go into chat GPT and put stuff in there. I'm like, oh
, I'm not really
if the prompts not very good. The answer is not very good. And I like that send
us was taking out
that part of it. Like you guys have all that data. You know all of these things
. I don't have to do
as much of the prompting and you can help with the creativity side that I've
been struggling with.
So that's awesome. Yeah, definitely. And from like a development perspective,
it's
super interesting because the hard work isn't developing. The hard part is
figuring out
like how to manipulate it to give the best answer. And that's just different
than almost
everything else that you would develop in product. So only we've been hearing
about that a lot on
the show, which is like prompting. And we were learning about AI throughout
this whole series is
like people know that AI is useful and they know they can use it. But if you
can't,
your your outputs are only as good as your prompts. And we were learning that
like
human variability and prompting is not the best. And so it's great that send us
who is trying to
work through that and you guys are thinking about building that into your
product. So it takes out,
I guess that variability of human not being able to prompt very well to get AI
to tell them
the right things to send, how to send it, what to say and the timing of it.
Yeah, absolutely. That's that's basically what I'm trying to answer on a day to
day basis right now.
Awesome. Well, Cody, anything else from a demo perspective you want to show?
Otherwise,
we can jump into our lightning round Q&A section. Oh, I think that about covers
it.
Maybe more to come, but this is where we're at right now. Awesome. Well, I
think this was
fantastic. I know I'm excited about using this. So I hope that our viewers are
also
getting some fun ideas that they can use from a direct male perspective. So
with that being said,
Cody, the last and final part of our show is our lightning round Q&A. So a
couple questions for you.
The first one is how long has Sandoso been building AI into your product?
We've been thinking about it for years. Like from the gift suggestion
perspective, we've been trying
to basically accomplish this for a while. It got a lot easier recently. I will
say that like the
expansions that the overall market has made has made it a lot easier for us to
build into it.
I would say from a go to market and being able to actually really execute
things easily, we've
been building for about five months on the things that you see today. That's
really cool. I,
we've heard this answer a few times and it is really interesting to think of
our people.
Like we've been thinking about this for a long time. Like we knew there was a
lot of power that
we could build in using AI, but advancements in the market have now made it so
much easier for
you like Sandoso to actually build this into the product at a very, very rapid
pace.
Because like five times what you just showed is incredible. Like there's
already some AI
functionality there and to only be building it for five months is that's so
fast.
Yeah, I can remember two and a half years ago, we were working on like a
weighted database to try
to suggest gifts. And now there are softwares out there that you could
basically just have AI
train the weights in your database and like what's it to suggest within minutes
. It's something
that would have taken a data science team months to figure out previously. That
's amazing.
Pooty, everything that you just showed today, what is generally available to
your customers right now?
So you can start playing with pun-pal immediately. And I definitely suggest you
do it if you happen.
Like it's, it's actually just fun to sit there and generate puns. Even if you
don't use it,
it's still fun to click the button, put in your favorite celebrity, like
whatever you want to do.
The prompt is very good at creating pretty creative messaging.
Yeah, that's awesome. I'm like, I feel like our reps could use that and put it
into like emails.
Like I think there's like things they could use to your point, even not with
the sense to like
work into their messaging because also pun-pal's just such a good name.
It actually, I love the name so much. It's like the funnest thing I've ever
gotten to product
market from a product perspective because if I'm able to make the market say
the term pun-pal,
that is so funny. That's it. Like I was like, I dropped career highlight where
we're good.
I'm retiring afterwards. I just love it. But yeah, so pun-pal, available now,
you can start using it.
The gift suggestions is it in a beta state. So you have to talk to your
Sundoso customer success manager if that's something you want to use.
And there will be continuous improvement happening to both of these things.
Obviously. Okay. Awesome. And now speaking of generally available to customers,
who are some current customers that are benefiting from Sundoso AI from pun-pal
that might be in
your beta program for the sending, who are some of those customers?
Yeah. So what's super interesting is Sundoso did launch a product led growth
initiative this year.
And what we've seen a lot of is, we penetrated new markets. We're working with
like individual
real estate agents who are already doing gifting. We're talking to insurance
agents as well. We're
already doing it as well. We've seen a large adoption. And this is something
that we're
we're using as a user acquisition tool because pun-pal is really marketable and
really fun to use.
So we've seen a lot of adoption from new industries that we weren't previously
seeing adoption from.
So it's helped from that perspective. But it has also helped our existing
customers.
And we've, you know, we've got numerous customers that are using these products
today
from patient pop, and a plan, you know, cradle point, qualified uses, Sundoso
as well.
But yeah, we've got a lot of folks using these features.
I love that you guys were able to take something that was AI specific and use
that to get into
a PLG motion. I feel like PLG motion is such a like hot topic right now and
hard to get into
that market. And the fact that you guys not only got into that market, but are
using something
that's like generative AI that is so popular and to get into PLG that's really
cool.
Yeah, I think from a from an overall strategy perspective, like if we can build
a really strong
gift suggestion engine that tells people what to say when they send a gift also
, then that
becomes a much larger use case than what Sundoso traditionally works with.
So any steps we can take in that direction are super helpful. Obviously, right
now,
we are very much building things for our customers is what I would say.
Same. So to that point, AI roadmap looking ahead, we're a Sundoso, you kind of
touched on some
things that are in beta, but where are you guys looking to take AI and Sundoso
in the future?
Really, at the end of the day, we're just trying to become the most intelligent
sending platform that we can be. So it's figuring out how to tell people when
is the
best time to send to get engagement, figuring out how to, I mean, like the
employee engagement
thing is a big one for us too, because, you know, we've already got customers
who
their managers want to send them a gift. They know things about their employee.
And if we can capture that and then tell them like, Hey, it's your employee's
birthday,
you should send them something from this category. That's like the dream for us
is like just making
those questions as easy as possible to answer. And I don't know the exact path
that we'll take
to get there, but I do know that that is the direction that we're going. And I
know that
what is out there from an AI perspective is going to help us get there for sure
Yeah, that totally makes sense. And you mentioned it during your demo.
It'll be a slow evolution over time, but there will be small steps to get you
to
sending the exact right thing at the exact right time at the exact right
messaging. That's
just going to happen overnight. Like you guys will do a lot of different
advancements. And as AI
obviously is going to keep advancing, it'll be cool to see where Sundoso can
take all of this,
because it looks based on this, you're talking about like a go-to-market team
and even your
from a people perspective, an HR perspective, there's so many different use
cases I think that
gifting can be used across. And when it's powered by AI, I think there's a lot
of cool,
powerful things that can happen there. Totally. And I think overall, like the
AI abilities that
are out there expand far beyond what we are doing today and what anybody's
doing so far. So there's
a lot of unanswered questions out there. And as I've learned things every day,
I'm thinking of new
ways that we could potentially apply it to help our customers out. Awesome. And
now last question
of the lightning round is what other AI powered products is your go-to-market
team using and loving?
Yeah, I'd say we use Gong. We've got a couple, we use some of the data
collection tools as well
that basically run the person and try to learn as much as you can as quickly as
possible.
We also use qualified, qualified to AR. So definitely an important part of our
tech stack too.
But yeah, from the, and we use Sindoso also from the good market perspective.
Yeah.
Best power users of Sindoso. We are definitely power users of Sindoso and we
generate a lot of
puns as well. Yeah, that is, I will say as a customer of Sindoso, I've received
some really
good gifts from Sindoso. So I know you guys are power users of it and you're
using it fantastic.
We've heard Gong a lot on the show. I know they have some really great AI
functionality as well.
So that is super helpful. Cody, thank you so much for joining us today. I
really love seeing the
back in Sindoso and how you guys are thinking about AI. I know I am immediately
going to get off
this call and go talk to my go-to-market team and start brainstorming ways that
our
SDR team can really start utilizing these functions as they come out and as
they get out of beta.
And you guys are rolling out more amazing AI functionalities. So thank you so
much for joining
us today. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. And I'm a big fan of qualified, big
fan of using AI.
So definitely some overlap here and it was a great conversation. I'm looking
forward to
when we go wine tasting in Arkansas. Yeah, no, no, no, no, I promise you're not
. Thanks, Cody.