A Q&A with Kris Rudeegraap, CoFounder Sendoso
For Kris Rudeegraap, Co-Founder & CEO Sendoso, a big part of your brand’s reputation comes from your company’s culture “it’s the brand that comes out in a lot of the demands and the marketing emails, the sales calls, the customer appreciation or customer obsession. All that has to start with the internal decision and company culture to make those things first and foremost important.”
We caught up with Kris for a spotlight Q&A.
Q: What is your primary source of news? Where do you go for updates on industry trends?
I love this app called Peepli. I’ve subscribed to probably around one hundred and fifty different blogs and news publications, and it puts it all into one easy-to-read feed. So it gives me a nice diversity of your typical marketing and sales-related content, but also more macro news trends and what I think is a more creative way to read through news than just one kind of specific genre of topics.
I do listen to podcasts. Probably my favorite podcast is called Snacks Daily, It’s like a 15 minute daily kind of news podcast. So it’s pretty digestible.
Q: Can you give us a bit of a background on your career journey and what ultimately led you to found Sendoso?
I spent about 10 years in software sales, mostly in San Francisco, and most recently was at a company called Top Desk. They want to become a unicorn company. I was one of the early employees there and one of my successful techniques there was setting up physical copy gift cards to prospects with handwritten notes, and it worked well. A lot of spreadsheets, a lot of like after work hours, packing boxes because it worked. It just took time to make it work.
So ultimately, I kind of had the epitome of like, why isn’t there a platform that allows you to click and send something as it is to send an email out? And so my co-founder and I originally created the concept to send out the Starbucks cards. That was kind of version zero. That expanded and snowballed into what Santoso is today, which is the leading sending platform.
Q: So transitioning from there into interconnectedness of company culture, brand and fire behavior, can you give us a little bit of a high-level view of what that means?
A big part of a brand comes from the company culture, and I think it’s the values of each team member that really go into what they’re doing in their jobs. And ultimately that creates the output of work every single day.
I think the company culture is a huge part of the brand experience itself. And it’s the brand that comes out in a lot of the demands and the marketing emails, the sales calls, the customer appreciation or customer obsession. All that has to start with the internal decision and company culture to make those things first and foremost important.
I think on top of all that, you’re trying to affect the end buyer behavior in the target market. Understanding those audiences and connecting with them. I think we’ve had a unique opportunity where our product and service delivers this. Wow, moments where you’re smiling when someone is opening up a pinata. And that also spills over into our company culture, which is very fun.
If you were to ask me a couple of words to describe our culture, I’d probably boil it down to fun. I think you can see that in our brand and our social content. And so I think there’s a lot of connection between brand culture and consumer behavior at the end of the day.
You can hear Kris’ panel session with Bevey Miner, Global CMO from J2 Global, Mark Kilens, VP of Content & Community from Drift, Genefa Murphy, CMO from Five9 and Lisa Kant, VP of Product Marketing from Zendesk by visiting our Spotlight on Marketing webpage.