The Sendoso Marketing Journey. A conversation with Kris Rudeegraap, co-founder and CEO

On this episode, Kris Rudeegraap, CEO of Sendoso, talks about his journey from software sales - where he spotted a gap in the market - to being a company founder, and then the first CMO. 

He details Sendoso's early marketing strategies, including building a robust CRM database, focusing on field and event marketing, and creating educational content to establish their category.

Kris goes on to talk about the importance of data-backed content, SEO strategies, and creating content for different levels of the organization. And we discuss the challenges and benefits of category creation, and the value of event marketing for startups. 

Our conversation also covers the evolution of Sendoso's marketing team, from initial hires to scaling up. And, naturally, the effectiveness of gifting as a marketing tactic.

Note: This episode is not sponsored by Sendoso. Kris was invited on the show as a guest.

Resources:
Connect with Kris on LinkedIn
Read the HockeyStack report on Revenue Impact of Gifting

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Steve: 

Today I'm talking with Chris Rudeegrapp, co -CEO of Sendoso. Now Sendoso, it's a gifting automation platform used by B2B marketers. This is not a sponsored episode of the Marketing Mix. We're not here to pitch the product. The reason I invited Chris for the conversation is because he's a co -founder. So he has a founder story, which you know I love getting into. He was the first marketer and first CMO at the company that he co -founded. So there'll be a lot to talk about there.

And then, you know, I'm sure we will dig into the philosophy and the idea behind gifting in the sales process, because I think it's something that is a valuable tactic in the marketing toolbox. So, Chris, welcome to the Marketing Mix.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Thanks Steve, thanks for having me.

Steve: 

All right, fantastic. So let's kick off with the Founder journey. I'm always interested to hear how founders get started, the story behind a growth company. What led you to the idea? it a light bulb moment or was it sort of a slow evolution?

Kris Rudeegraap: 

it was more of a light bulb moment. So, I started the company about seven years ago and part of that, spent about a decade in software sales myself. So I was firsthand trying to, you know, prospect in a new accounts, build rapport with prospects, close deals. And I saw that it was becoming easier than ever to send out a gazillion emails. This was when those email automation tools or email sequencing tools started becoming popular, about 10 years ago. And so I thought, Hey, if emails, which is the main channel is going to be so easy to use. What else can I do to get, break through that noise and get in front of prospects? And so I started manually sending out gifts myself. I'd be on a call and hear like a dog bark and I'd send over a dog toy. There was a time where our marketing team would come to us and say, Hey, it's Friday. you got to start, write these notes and send out these gifts. and I was kind of like, why am I doing this? Why can't there'd be a service that does this for me. It works well. Why isn't there a platform and a logistics infrastructure to do it? And so I did some research. I was like, I'll just find some solution. We'll just pay them. And there really wasn't anything out there that meet the needs. So I said, hey, this is gonna be a huge problem over the next few decades and I wanna solve it.

Steve: 

Nice. And you know, I always feel like there's a couple of different types of founders, right? There's ones that just come up on some random idea or somebody says to them, Hey, have you ever thought of doing this? The other ones that are a lot more interesting are the, know, I had this problem, it drove me crazy. I got to do something about this, right? Because, you know, this whole idea of dog fooding, right? And you've got to, you've got to use your own product or service. Well, if it's based on a frustration you already had then you're halfway there. And now just to sort of set the stage here, so you're a co -founder, right? So did you come in as sort of the founding marketer and then you had a couple other co -founders that took on the other roles? How did that work?

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah, so my co -founder was actually another sales person. And so I came in, I took on kind of everything but sales in the beginning. So I was marketing, I was leading kind of finance, leading all of our product and engineering. And so, yeah, I had a really busy early start to Sendoso.

Steve: 

For sure that must have been interesting as well being a salesman at heart and having to sit back and let somebody else do over that as it did to themselves.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

I know it was interesting, but it was, it was useful because it allowed me to use some of my scale sales skills, like pitching investors. And that's very salesy, like, going and pitching candidates and trying to recruit them to the company, which was very salesy. So some of my early sales, skills actually translate well into other parts of, kind of critical components of being a founder.

Steve: 

Yeah, it's a good point because I think often the pitching is the part that people aren't really prepared for when they get into this, right? They got a good idea, they're excited about it.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah, or getting a no from an investor, which sounds like horrible, but coming from sales, I'm like, whatever. I'll, I got a million no’s in sales. I can take another one.

Steve: 

Right, exactly. Yeah, no, that makes sense. All right, so obviously we're to focus on the marketer part of that. And I think you said to me at one point, you were the first CMO. And I'm guessing that sort of tells me that it started off being a small part of what you're doing, and then it became a bigger and bigger part of it. So how did you initially go to market as a startup that very few people knew about?

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah, I think, you know, some of the things that we focused on early on, you know, one, my key focuses was building this really, really rich data, set for our CRM database and being very data obsessed in the beginning on our target market and how we have a really strong data set of who we want to go after. and so that was the critical part of marketing. I didn't want any of our early sales team to have to, think about - let me copy and paste this lead data. Let me figure out what this, you know, delivery Jess is. I wanted all that data to be there. So that was one of the core areas. Second thing I did that I think a lot of early founders kind of stay away from because it's a little bit ambiguous in terms of how you can show ROI is the field and event marketing. And for me, that was a really critical way to get in front of people and to kind of show up a bit bigger than we looked at.

And, you know, we'd go to a conference and be right next to Adobe or we'd go to a conference and, you know, be a booth away from like Salesforce or something. And it was like, you know, we'd bring our whole team and we'd actually have more people than like Adobe would at the booth, which was just a few of their sales reps. So it was a big way for us to kind of almost fake it till you make it in the early years showing up big. And that was really key component for us. And then probably the third thing we did was.

We created a ton of content, specifically kind of educating the market on our category and why this was critical. Data studies, customer stories, how -tos, buyer guides, maturity journeys, really tried to educate the market on what this gifting channel was and why it was different than just manually packing boxes.

Steve: 

Yeah, it's interesting because I find it interesting that you start with data because I think for most people, the first thing is you start doing stuff, right? Like, let's just generate something. I think content is often the first place to go. And then after a while, it's like, yeah, we ought to start taking the data seriously. So I like the fact you use that as the background.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah, I think it was from PTSD of previous startups where that was not the first thing we did. And a couple of years in, we're like, wow, our CRM database is crap or wow, I'm spending half my time as a salesperson copying and pasting lists. And so I wanted to automate and make sure that we could have this really robust kind of CRM and database.

Steve: 

Yeah. Yeah. And it probably turned out, although that wasn't your intent, your original intent, it probably helped you with the product early on because people thought, okay, this really is a, you know, one -stop shop or whatever it is. Like everything's in there. I don't have to have to do half of it myself. so let's, let's talk about the content part of it. because I think now, in some ways content is so overdone. Like everybody does it, right? It's a part of the standard playbook.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Exactly.

Steve: 

Any thoughts on maybe what worked particularly well for you early stage when you didn't have the resources and then right up to, what are you doing now in a content sense that you think is a little different?

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah. So I think a couple of things work for us from the content. One is data-backed stories and we still do that today. We just recently did a big study with like this company called hockey stack put together and we were kind of contributing some of our insights to it. So I think any time you can create data and showcase numbers is a lot better than just, you know, words on paper.

That was a key part of it is kind of the ROI and backing up what we were saying with data. The other thing that we did was just create a lot of kind of SEO -able content, knowing that we wanted that to pay off years in the future. And it did, and we still get a ton of our traffic from, you know, keywords and SEO. And I think as an early stage, you know, founder or first CMO, Some ofthem  are reluctant to SEO content because the delay in value or the delay in return on that feedback loop, might take six months, it might take a year, it might take two years to really start to see the momentum of that. So I was like, hey, this is a long haul, this is a marathon, not a sprint, so let's focus on some SEO early on and two years later we'll thank ourselves and that's exactly what happened.

Steve: 

Yep. So this is probably an unfair question because I know you're no longer the CMO, but you're involved in everything. I get the sense that the SEO world is changing. know, it used to be exactly that. You'd publish some great content over time. You would get the Google juice flowing and it would work for you. That seems to be a much tougher game to play now, both because there's so much content and I think because the way Google is indexing things has changed, the way they display it has changed.

If you were setting out now, do you think that would change your approach to content?

Kris Rudeegraap: 

you know, I think I would still invest in content for SEO today. If I was starting out fresh, I think it's a bet that you need to make, but it's probably not the only bet that you can rely on. So I think, you know, you need to do a little bit of everything in order to drive pipeline and drive revenue. And I think this should be a part of it. 

You know, another way to offset some of the time and effort into it, is having your team create content and having that as thought leadership that then can be easily shared in the LinkedIn and social channels. So you can get kind of a two for one. I've seen that work relatively well recently where you have, you know, sales reps or customer success managers creating content, then them using that in their own social channels to drive leads, but also to use that content on your website too. So I think that works a bit better in today's world than it did maybe eight years ago when we got started where SEO was a bit easier.

Steve: 

Yeah, and I think that works particularly well in startup mode, Because as you get bigger, it's tougher to empower people to put out their own content and become a thought leader and whether people are even feel comfortable doing it when they're part of a bigger entity. But early stages, everybody's sort of in it together, everybody knows what's going on. And so it really is easier to have everybody sort of pushing out their own content and then pulling it back together. So I think that's an interesting approach.

Steve: 

And I would imagine as you've scaled, you're trying to reach larger organizations. So you're less likely to be going directly in at the CMO level, right? It's going to be somebody else, director level, manager level, who actually pulls in the idea and maybe uses it as a sort of proof of concept and then it broadens out. So you need that content at different levels.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

For sure.

Exactly. But we do create content at times targeted towards CMOs. So I think that as part of your content strategy, you've got to think about what level your content's for. Is this going to be interesting for a CMO, for maybe a VP director, for a manager level, even for an IC? We also have a whole content strategy around creating content for our end users, which can be sales reps, SDRs. And in that case, it's showcasing like an interesting gift that has been sent out and the message along with it very tactical but is inspirational and can Drive like I now I got that idea now. I'm gonna go send something And that can be really useful for kind of the the end users

Steve: 

So that's helping with the adoption of your service once you've got it in there.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Exactly, helping with the adoption and also helping with some bottoms up groundswell where, know, for us, you know, we typically sell into marketing leadership, but a lot of times then they enable our product for sale, for account managers, for account executives, for sales development, business development reps. And so if we can get more of them raising their hands saying, hey, marketing team, we need to send gifts out to build pipeline. We need to book more meetings. We need to increase our win rates.

And then boom, now we're topic of discussion.

Steve: 

Right. And in any healthy organization, sales and marketing are already talking to each other, always talking to each other. I've always, you when I had corporate marketing roles, I would spend a lot of time listening to the sales people, right? And if they kept telling me, we need this, I would go and find out, you know, how we make that happen. So yeah, I like the idea of going in at multiple levels. You said something interesting back then about you haven't fully created or you never finished creating the category. So I think category creation. A lot of companies like to talk about a lot of startups. It's part of that pitch. And I think for most companies, they're not truly creating a category. Maybe they're creating a niche within a category. Having said that for Zendoso, I'm kind of thinking you were in the very early stages of that. So did you intentionally go out thinking, we're to have to create a new category here or did that start to happen organically?

Kris Rudeegraap: 

No, it was very intentional in the early days. think, when I started the company, I looked at, are we doing something in an existing category and that we want to tell that story, like we're a better mousetrap here, or do we wanna tell this story of, this is something that you're not doing yet and you need to do, or you need to do this in such a different way that we need to educate you. And it was the case that like no one had

gifting software when we started. So it was, we weren't like a line item on people's tech stack. And so because of that, we said, Hey, we need to educate and spend more resources, you know, around our category, around why this needs to be a critical component to your tech stack. Otherwise we might get lost in the noise. And so I think it was, it was also very helpful and motivating the team and, and driving more of an inspirational vision and mission, as well in the early years was to have this kind of category creation type mindset.

Steve: 

Yeah, I do think it's the idea of a mission. think it's really good, right? It's a way to bring everybody together. You're all you're going after this thing.

 I also think it's one of these things. It sounds great, right? As a founder or a CEO, whatever it's like, yeah, we're creating our own category. So there's some upsides to it, but it is also one of the hardest things to do in marketing, right? I mean, first of all, you truly do have to have a category that you are creating. And it is a long haul

I want to go back to the, think it was the second of the three things you said when you started out for marketing, which is the event and field marketing. Something close to my heart. always, I've always enjoyed doing it. I've always felt it's a, it's a big part of the marketing mix and it's always one of the first roles I've tried to fill. But I think for startups, it can be tough because it's, it appears to be expensive.

Right, to buy that booth space. And oftentimes you're you're spending that money six months before the event, right? To get a decent location. Then you're investing in the booth, then you're flying people out there and putting them up in a Vegas hotel for three days, which isn't cheap, right? It is a really big investment. So in those early stages, I guess, how did you justify that internally? It sounds like you were kind of a CFO as well, so maybe you didn't have to do that. And then how did you drive the value out of it? How did you, at the end of it, say, okay, This event was worthwhile because of X.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah, so I think part of the early bet was again on, yeah, we're going to drive some lead gen from this, but we're also going to build brand awareness and we're going to build this community awareness and we're going to build this category and that you can't cheap out on. And so that was, think, really critical for us. It also really helped in our partnership in the early days because we'd be at a booth and you know, a partner of ours or a prospective partner would be across the way. And it would give us some face time to say, let's go, you know, chat it up with this company. And they thought we were bigger than we were. was, you know, again, kind of the fake it to make it in the early days. 

So I think there was a lot of indirect benefits that I could, you know, as the CFO at the time mentally say this was worth all the extra upfront costs. But we did do, you know, they were.

Events have always been very ROI positive for us. We were, we'd and still do like incentivize the sales team or whoever's going to say, hey, how many leads are you going to get, commit to that? We need, we do the backwards math on how we, need a follow -up with that many. We do a lot of good pre -event outreach, post -event follow -ups and tying back to campaigns and tracking the results that way and making sure that.

we're closing the deals. And I think for a lot of these events, if you can close a handful of deals, it pays for itself. And so it's not like you need like hundred deals in order to make this work. It's like for us, most of the break -evens were like three deals. And so I think that was a key part of it. And then the other thing that, again, is an indirect benefit is it's another outreach to a prospect and pipeline. Hey, are you going to this conference coming up?

which then makes your prospect, hey, this company is legit. They're going to this event. I wish I could go, I'm not going, or I am going, let's meet there. So we can also benefit from deal acceleration and pipeline progression aside from just pure demand gen.

Steve: 

Now, I love the fact that you have it as part of the pipeline process, right? It's not just, yeah, we're going to go out there. We'll have a good time. We'll count the number of scans at the end of it and see if it's worthwhile. is actually, you give the sales folks a goal and you track it all the way through. Then presumably six months later, you can go back and say, yep, we got this amount of business from that particular event. That would get us into attribution. And I'm not going to go there because that's a whole other hour that we could spend on 

 So as you scaled your marketing team, so you were the first marketer. At some point you decided to call yourself the CMO. So that presumably means you've hired some people under you. what was the first couple of hires?

Were they a generalist, did you hire for specific roles and then how have you scaled the marketing team since then?

Kris Rudeegraap (26:44.364)

Yeah, the first three marketing hires, which reported into me and were a marketing ops data minded person goes back to my data strategy. She was extremely helpful in a lot of the hands on blocking and tackling of our data needs. The second was a kind of a field demand gen kind of generalist who could do a lot of the different ads, campaigns, SEO, a of a field demand gen. 

And then the third was content and kind of a mixture of content product marketing. But again, going back to that content education story, and she was awesome. And so those three were kind of our three first marketers.

They were with us for many, many years. I eventually then went and hired a CMO that they could all report into as my reporting list grew bigger and bigger as we scaled. And very happy that I did hire a true CMO, but in the early days, it was really fun being the CMO.

Steve: 

Yeah, for sure. it sounds as though, other than the data ops person, it sounds like the other two people you brought in were effectively generalists. I mean, they were generalists within a certain sphere, right? Because you said events and field and demand gen, so that's pretty general. And then content, I'm guessing it was somebody who could pull together a lot of different types of content.

Is that still how you hire marketing people or are you now sort of narrowing down saying, we need a video person. We need a, you know, a community person.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah, I think right now our strategy is a bit more specific. So, hey, we need a director of demand gen or we need a, you know, a head of director of growth marketing or so they're much more title based, much more senior. And I think that just evolved as the company has grown to hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions of revenue. We just need a different set of folks.

But I think, you know, I think coming from a generalist role in your career and moving into a specific role is helpful so that you get a broader range of what the other departments are doing.

Steve: 

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I'm a big fan of a generalist approach. Early on, 

It surprises me the number of times I talked to founders or CEOs of small companies and they sell me, well, I'll use the example I just mentioned. we're going to hire a video person for our marketing team. It's like, well, you know, do you have a content person? Well, no, no, but we need videos. We need videos, right? And it's like, yeah, you've really got to start off with somebody because in any other role, right? In a startup, you would find somebody who can wear a lot of hats. And yet sometimes there's this feeling about, I've got to getan SEO specialist or whatever. I'd much rather have somebody who can sort of turn their hand to different things and knows how to research it. marketing is always changing anyway, as we were talking about SEO early on. So you get somebody who is really good at this for the last five years, they're going to need another set of skills five years from now.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah. Well, the other thing I think our early team had too, which was good as they were really good at knowing what they're great at and really good at hiring like freelancers through Upwork. And I was a big proponent of saying, Hey, you have like unlimited Upwork budget use it. and that was a great way for them to, know, if they needed a, too many video credit, it wasn't like, no, we're, we're stuck. It was like, I'll post that to Upwork. I'll get a video person. They'll work for three weeks and then we're done. and I think that.

Steve (30:27.248)

That's a great idea.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

That mindset, knowing that you have the skill set and the conviction to go hire a one -off freelancer can just make you more effective instead of either having to figure out and learn on your own how to be a video editor or not do video because you're stuck. I think marketers that know how to tactically use Upwork or their own freelance network that they've developed over the years is a critical skill set.

Steve: 

Yeah, that's a great idea because that's what you're right. Your startup marketing team now typically is one or two people and then whatever else you need to bring in. actually just giving someone a, hey, here's your Upwork budget. I think that's a great approach. 

So now let's talk about, I said this wasn't a sponsored episode by Sendoso, but I do want to talk about gifting as a marketing tactic. So in general terms, just talk about why you think it's effective. Maybe you have some data you can share that talks about ROI that you've seen.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah. mean, I think the effectiveness is obvious because of the success of Sendoso and just the, you know, I think a lot of people psychologically know gifting works and they just don't have the resources or effort to do it manually themselves. So having a platform that automates the procurement, the delivery, the reporting is really critical, but getting into the weeds. If you're like justifying it, I think on our website and our blog, we have that revenue impact of gifting report that came out, like a month or so ago.

And some of the highlights are around boosting meeting rates by like 300 % by integrating in gifting into your outbound strategy, increasing win rates by about 180 % by adding outbound gifting into your strategy. There's also a big stat around second call rates, which I think for a lot of marketers that are thinking about MQLs to SQLs and S1s, and it's critical to kind of move that prospect through the process and using gifting can lead, saw in this report up to 631 % or 6X increase in second call rates. So that's, I think, critical. And this data study was about 400 million data points. So was pretty massive in terms of what it looked at. And so I was pretty happy. And this was just independently done, not by us, not paid for by us.

It was done by HockeyStack, which is an attribution software. We just are like drooling at the data and we, know, we're, we're willing to say, yeah, we're willing to stand behind it and help people execute on the data that they've seen across their, their customer base.

Steve: 

And that was data based on your company data that was run.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

No, this was data based on companies in their study that are customers of theirs that were doing this. This wasn't even, we've created some other surveys and studies, but this was a really relevant kind of more third party independent version.

Steve: 

All right, interesting. I'll put a link to that study in the show notes. I'm going to go read it myself because that sounds interesting. It's one of the things you mentioned, which I'm always curious on in terms of where this fits in the marketing mix, right? Because, you know, I always laugh when I get an email from somebody. It's like, yeah, sit through a 45 minute demo and we'll send you a $5 Starbucks gift card. like, you know, a $5 card is not going to get me to go do that.

And then I think, you know, you can get to the other extent where, you know, it's a big dollar purchase and again, they're giving you something small. So what have you experienced in terms of, you know, the, the best parts of the process to use gifting?

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah. So what our team does is a more consultative approach to understanding where are the leaky buckets in each individual prospects or customers pipeline. And so we'll look and say, Hey, it's, you know, we don't, we don't have enough top of funnel. need to book more meetings. And we say, great, here's how you can use gifting to do that. Or, Hey, we're seeing our demo show rates drop or they're only at 50%. We need to get that to 70%. What can you do? And so we can help with.

How do you get demo show rates up? Or, hey, our win rates aren't where we need to be. How can you help there? Or it could be post customer renewals or other areas or other initiatives as well. 

But we typically try to pinpoint where there's leaky buckets and then solve that with gifting. Historically, a lot of marketers think about this as top of funnel demand gen, meeting bookers, getting people in. But it...

We've seen a lot of success where marketers are enabling the sales team to use this kind of throughout that pipeline progression into close won and use it as a tool to, you know, second call meet, second call rates or build rapport, especially in longer sales cycles where, you know, sales reps don't want to be pesky and be like, Hey, just checking in like it's Friday. Where's the contract at? Instead you can offer value and say, Hey,

lunch on me today, looking forward to hearing back from you next week or following up after a demo and sending something. So a lot of these different parts of the buyer's journey can really create a differentiated buying experience. And if you're in a very competitive market where you have other competitors selling a similar solution, one of the ways to compete is on that experience and building rapport.

Steve: 

Yeah. And presumably that's one of the advantages of using a platform in that you have that variability, right? It could just be a coffee card. could be a physical gift you're mailing out to somebody. could be, you know, so you can look at those different parts of the buyer's journey, the different personas, and then decide to come at them from different angles. 

Any, you know, we always talk about do's and don'ts, but any don'ts, anything you've learned, you know, from doing this with so many customers of things people really should be careful

Kris Rudeegraap: 

You know, I think the, the, there's some people that don't think about the before and after the gift. and so it's like, I'm just going to close my eyes and send out, you know, a hundred gifts, and then I'm just going to get a hundred meetings. And I think you have to be very tactical, you know, going into that, you know, is there an email that comes before? Is there a phone call that comes after? And so it is, you know, especially in B2B it's multi -touch. You're, you're emailing, you're calling, you're doing social, you're seeing ads, you're showing up an event.

And, you know, and gifting is just one of those touch points in that. So I think that's critical. I think being smart about the message that comes along with the gift, is critical. 

The offering a gift for a meeting sometimes gets some bad reps. Sometimes like you said $5 for your time for a lot of companies actually works or we see some companies use it in ads like saying, hey, take a meeting, get a Yeti mug. So depending on the audience, it actually can work well to offer up an incentive and exchange for your time. But again, you have to be thoughtful. Who's your audience?

What type of gift is gonna move the needle? The $5 Starbucks card to book a meeting, no. But maybe you use that $5 Starbucks card for demo show rate. You book the meeting and you say, hey, looking forward to chatting later today, grab coffee on me before the meeting. And you get that spark of like, wow, that was nice. I'm looking forward to meeting this person too. And so I think different gifts have different value depending on where you place them in the buyer's journey.

Steve: 

Yeah, that's a good one. That would work on me. I must admit. Yes, I wouldn't sign up for the demo for a gift card, but if somebody sends it that morning, it's like, I guess I better talk to him now.

Good deal. got two more questions for you. So, know, things are always changing. Marketing is always changing. Where do you go? How do you keep up with trends? Do you have any resources you could share?

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Yeah. mean, I love, I think social LinkedIn has a lot of people posting about really interesting things that I follow along with. go to a lot of events, you know, this week there's SaaStr r next week there's inbound and dreamforce. feel like events still are a good place to find up and coming companies, read a lot of newsletters, and blog posts. so I'm constantly trying to stay up to date with like, what is the newest, latest and greatest Martech or sales deck.

Steve: 

Yeah, yeah, I agree. The newsletters these days, mean, to me, that's an untapped thing. There are so many good ones out there now

And then you can always dig in if there's something that grabs your attention, because there's just so much data out there now. So marketing mix means a lot of different things. I've brought it up a couple of times already. So one meaning for marketing mix for me is, we're talking through a screen here. I would much rather be doing this face to face over a drink. So I always like to ask my guests, if we were doing that, what would we be drinking?

Kris Rudeegraap: 

My favorite drink right now is ranch water, is a mixture of tequila and soda water with some lime. And I've been loving that. That's been like my drink of the summer.

Steve: 

I say that is a good summer drink.

 I think it's a terrible name from a marketing perspective. I would have come up with something much better, yeah, that's a good one for the summer. Absolutely.

 Well, Kris, hey, I appreciate you taking your time to share some of your thoughts with us. Hopefully we can do this face to face at some point. I'm not sure I'll be drinking a ranch water with you, but I'll be happily toasting you with something else. So very much appreciate your time. Thank you.

Kris Rudeegraap: 

Thanks, Steve.