The Gift of Giving: How Swag Can Create an Impact on Your Attendees

Alex Olley: Swag can be used really intelligently. I think it could be used so well for events as we've seen. It can be great for your customer marketing, it can be great for your employees and your people, your partners. There's a lot of places for swag.

The thing I see where it's done badly is where let's say you give swag to an SDR, for example, to do outreach, and it's got your logo all over it. It doesn't really mean that much to the prospect. If you use it wisely in the right senses, like the ones I just described, it can be really powerful.

Intro: Great events create great brands, and it takes a village to put on an event that engages, excites and connects audiences to your brand. And we're that village. I'm Alyssa. I'm Paulina. And I'm Rachel. And you're listening to great  events, the podcast for all people interested in events and marketing.

Felicia Asiedu: Hi everyone. What's going on in this big wide world of events? My name is Felicia and welcome to this week's host takeover of the episode of Great Events. So today we're going to have a fun one, I think who doesn't love a bit of gifting. I'd like to introduce to everyone, Alex Olley, who is the co-founder and chief revenue officer at Reachdesk. Alex, welcome.

Alex Olley: Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited about this one.

Felicia Asiedu: Cool. So before we get started on the topic, Alex, why don't you give our listeners 30 seconds of your background, what you did before and what you do now at Reachdesk?

Alex Olley: Sure. I'll briefly mention I was a lawyer for a couple of years, but I'm not anymore. I'm glad to be out of that. But I've spent the past, gone over a decade working in SaaS. I think I joined my first, so I joined my first startup, let's say it was back in 2010. I've mainly been in in SaaS ever since.

But previously before Reachdesk, actually I've been running account based marketing campaigns alongside sales. It was actually a Scandinavian company called Gilic. I think it's important to mention this because where Reachdesk started, we actually weren't getting the responses. The pipeline pacing that we wanted.

And I remember going, actually remember going to our, my CRO and the CEO and saying, I think we should be using gifting and that direct mail in our like, outreach. And they, I think it was like this minute silence, and then they just burst that and laugh, laughing at me, what are you on about? Anyway we tried it and it went really well.

We used it for BDR outreach, we used it. It was really powerful for events, which I'm sure we'll speak about today how do we get more people to attend events, virtual events, follow ups after events. We've actually used it in everything, but the problem was it really killed us every time we tried to do it.

People backing boxes and getting wet, queuing up in post office queues and we couldn't track the ROI and everything. That to Reachdesk, and that was nearly five years ago now, so ever.

Felicia Asiedu: Brilliant. You started up your business, it sounds in a very similar way to our CEO who was a lawyer. Had an issue. He was running events for his law firm, found it really taxing, spreadsheets, manual processes, and he just found a better way to do things. So it sounds like you've had a really similar start to Cvent where you've seen a problem and you've gone into tackle it.

So I think that's why we work so well together and I'll just tell our listeners out there, we do actually work with each desk to do our gifting, which has been a real godsend for our marketing teams and our sales teams who have pretty much got gifting at their fingertips now. So it's a little bit different from what we were doing before, but I came from the days similar to what you just explained of packing those boxes of direct marketing campaigns.

I think I'd sent people everything from padlocks that they could use on their gym lockers to, I sent some people a shoe once and I said, if you come and meet with us, I'll give you the other shoe

Alex Olley: Oh, love that.

Felicia Asiedu: Hey, bit of marketing for you. But do you think that people are still really up for and open to gifting or you getting, you're like, you just explained, I get the laugh, that, oh God, we're going to do gifting. Where do you think that is now with people? Are they, is it, revised itself and coming forth, or?

Alex Olley: Yeah. Oh. Yeah so I think we've seen the spend of just, let's just put corporate gifting in one big bucket, like B2B gifting. That's gone up by billions over the past three years. I think the estimated spend next year is going to go up by another 3 billion or something crazy globally. So like we're seeing companies use it more and more, and us, alongside our competitors, we've all grown exponentially over the past five years.

So it's on the rise. I think it's really about how you use it. It's the bigger question. It's not whether or not it's useful or whether we should be doing it. It's really about how.

Felicia Asiedu: And that I'm, when I'm talking, corporate gifting, I was thinking, from that marketing perspective of giving somebody a gift for something, but there's that world of swag. Now swag is much more, you've not really done much. You just happen to see me at a trade show, and so you're swiping off my stand really.

How do these things work together? Do you do swag as well in its traditional sense, or are they different?

Alex Olley: I put them all in one bucket, to be honest with you. Swag can be used really intelligently. I think it could be used so well for events as we've seen. It can be great for your customer marketing, it can be great for your employees and your people, your partners. There's a lot of places for swag.

The thing I see where it's done badly is where let's say you give swag to an SDR, for example, to do outreach, and it's got your logo all over it. It doesn’t really mean that much to a prospect. If you use it wisely in the right senses, like the ones I just described, it can be really powerful.

Felicia Asiedu: And so give, have you ever seen a really good use of swag at an event maybe?

Alex Olley: Ah, I mean I've seen loads actually one, one that springs to mind, I saw one of our customers do recently. And actually I remember meeting them about three years ago, and I was just wandering around this event, and I had this huge swag store, and I remember at the entrance to the event, I got given this like a ticket, something said something that you can spend a hundred dollars at our swag store.

So I went to store and and they had lorry loads. It was like hoodies and chargers and everything under the sun. It was literally like a store.

And actually what they've done is they've consolidated that now and they've using swag really intelligently, where all they bring with them now is this big wheel that they spin.

And you can win whatever is on the wheel. It's like one this wheels you spin as little ticker. And based on what, where it lands that then you scan a QR code and it get sent to your home. But all of it's like sustainable. It's reusable. It's things that you would use in your every day swag.

To me I think where companies get it wrong, and sorry if I'm offending anyone here, they sound like stress balls or things that just like people maybe don't really want. When you think about swag, think about things that perhaps you want to use every day. A couple of the three things I use constantly when I go traveling, I have a wireless charger, power bank. It goes on the back of my phone. I've used that for years. I use bamboo sustainable that sits on my desk. It's also charged my phone. Obviously not charged my phone. But I use things like like really good Yeti mugs all the time. When I take my dog for a walk, I take it with me. Those are the things I think are important and can be valuable.I don't like the stress balls but I think I made that fairly clear.

Felicia Asiedu: I don't give Alex any stress balls. Everybody. He's stressed out about stress balls. Okay. I agree with you. I think, I've got good example of something I got years ago that I still have and it looked really not great at the time, but it's this thing that you plug in into your phone and it's a fan and it's been really hot recently and I found it and I'm like, oh, thank God, I can just sit there with my fan phone thing, which like I say, at the time of getting it, I was like, oh, am I really ever going to use this? It's now in my bag. It's a permanent fixture in my bag. Love it. So I think when you tap into those things, we always talk about personalization, about getting to know your audience, what kinds of things they would like, and then meeting them where they are.

But in terms of meeting them where they are, you just mentioned about sending things to people's homes and sustainability. Now, if you are bringing truckloads of swag to an event and people aren't really using it, I don't think that's so sustainable, but at least it was one shipment to one event. How are we mapping against sending loads of different things to different people's homes? Are we still seeing that sustainable? What do you think?

Alex Olley: Yeah. Oh, there, there are a couple of things about sustainability. I think one is that, how, how far is something traveling? So I think before, let's take that swag store example. They would literally drive stuff all around the place. It was really messy. It was just a lot of stuff they didn't need to take.

The way I think about it now is send people things that they want. So if we're sending something to someone's home, for example, they've, you have to get their address. So if I want to send you something, I would obviously use Reachdesk, say, Hey, send something. You'd click on it, enter your address and. That reduces wastage automatically.

If I send you something you don't want, you don't send it yourself or you would donate it to charity or the equivalent value, something like that. So that automatically reduces wastage on, on, on items. It's a big thing that we've seen. So I think the sending to people's homes is big because people are only receiving things they want now and that's quite a big thing.

The thing that I see that we don't love, Is sending stuff across borders, and so the way we think about it's, we try and localize everything. So we've got warehouses in the UK, in Europe, in Australia, in North America, in Canada, for example, local providers for our marketplace, we're really trying to limit the distance that things are being sent.

That's what puts a significant carbon footprint also. You don't want stuff getting lost in customs if you're running events and that kind of thing. That's not nice. And so we're trying reduce things down by localization strategy are.

Felicia Asiedu: Yeah, I particularly laugh. I love hearing what you just said about localization and local shipments. I laughed when you mentioned customs because I will share a little story with you and our listeners. So we went to a big old show back in May called IMEX. It happens in Frankfurt, the Europe version.

And so we shipped a load of our swag from the uk, poor us. We should have done something local like you just mentioned. We shipped it out thought it's going to be amazing. We've got all this stuff. Where did it get stuck Alex? In customs on the UK side. They didn't even make it to Germany. And we spent time in panic and got upset.

We're not going to have any swag. The stands going to look really minimalistic. But here's what happened. People came to us and they said, you've got no swag, well done for making that really good choice. And they were like, you look like a genius bar. Like you've really got minimalistic. And I then had to go and do a session on sustainability and I was like, do you know it was an accident? But it's given me something to think about how we fulfill the needs of people when it comes to swag. Did we need to ship from the uk? Probably not. Could we QR code it, like you said, and then send it to people after the event? And that way, because that event's very Europe, like everyone comes together.

So that would've meant that maybe for you to partnered with Reachdesk, because we should have, as you're already a partner, and said, look, we've got this trade show. How can we work together to make sure that people that come and visit us get something that they would like? And is that the kind of consultation you would do with a client like ours if we'd have reached out to you? What, how do you work with customers, your customers, to help them figure out what to do?

Alex Olley: Oh, but look, firstly let's get you in touch with the account manager and you speak to them. Cause they, they've got more ideas than I have. But yes, like we help our customers all the time because we kinda obsess over this when we go to an event ourselves, we think about that. How do we take as few things as possible?

How do we ship people things to people's homes afterwards? Also, when you go to a conference, you don't really want to carry it tote bag of stuff around all the time, and a lot of it gets ditched, which is really sad to see. But yeah, we'll think about what are your sustainability initiatives? Who do you want to be sending to? Do you want to be using that as like lead or demand capture? So do you want to be taking someone's information and that example of that wheel actually I gave I'm just keep referring back to it, but actually the QR code, once you sent it, it then linked to Chili Piper. Cause we've got integration with Chili Piper, then you can book a meeting as well. So it's not just like sending stuff to people. You're actually getting those prospects into your funnel too. And so you can think about those together. And so we wouldn't just consult with you about, Hey, what do you want to send?

We're trying to think about the workflow too, and what are you trying to achieve with that? Are you trying to just build brand awareness? Is that okay? Is it customer marketing? Is it you want to, is this event for like actually demand generation, you're trying to book more meetings. That often is what changes the workflow and the approach.

Felicia Asiedu: As a marketer, I'm absolutely fueled by data, as I'm sure you are too. And I think we used to see events as a bit of a black hole. You couldn't track them and whatnot. But companies like us, like Cvent, we are here to change that and make it much more data focused, ROI driven. How do people utilize a company like yours to become more sort of track? Do you track how many things you're giving or what kind of data can you surface for people?

Alex Olley: Yeah, this is, this was the first, I'd say, three years of Reachdesk is trying to solve this because we started by integrating the Salesforce and what that did is allowed you to attach, ascend, enroll someone into a Salesforce campaign, for example. And then see what's happening there.

What we realized was that was only visible from our customer side. So we built a product called Reachdesk IQ, which essentially allows us to take in Salesforce data, look at those that sending as well. Let's say you've got an account based trust and you've got these top 20 accounts and you're sending to them, we'd be able to see how many opportunities did that create?

What are the things that were working, what's the optimum value, for example, of a gift? Let's take gift cards as an example. We did this in one of our customers who they send thousands of gift cards a month, and we were testing everything from $5, $10, 15, 20 as that, just one single Touch point before a meeting is booked.

So if someone would book a meeting, they'd then send them a Starbucks for example. And we were trying to help them understand the optimum value of the gift card. And actually we found it $7. It wasn't 20, it wasn't five. The one to get people to attend meetings was $7. So we found that and then reached Reachdesk IQ was really evolved out of that.

So we were starting to look into more insights. We Insights tab and it can tell you what the ROI of your pipeline creation through gifting. And we're about to release something really exciting actually, which is, which is going to help market go deeper. I'm not allowed to say what its, but you are, you're going to be able to really drill down and then fit your existing models in.

So you can say, I think I want to apply this to gifting. And here's what it's actually doing for us. And that's really getting us to the granular level of not just that, what to send, what value, it's going to like when to send and what the impact of that is. And I think that's where we reached today and it's giving marketers want a lot more confidence that the spend that they're putting into this channel is really working and just not in, not just in the silo, but like how is it complimenting everything else with.

Felicia Asiedu: Fantastic. I'm very excited to hear when that's coming out. We'll probably blog about it when we see it. I'm hoping it's maybe something AI driven cause everybody's talking about these days, but I'm sure I love it. Sure. I shrug shoulders. Great. So I'm going to move into the types of organizations that you work with.

Is it just across the board? Absolutely. Every single type of business or, what kinds of companies are coming to Reachdesk to work with you?

Alex Olley: Look, firstly we work with just businesses. We're not consumer facing. But we started by really focusing on tech software, SaaS.

I think that's because that was my background. A lot of our background is where we started it. That was the problem ourselves, SaaS, sales and marketers. But that started to evolve.

We've demand from some of the largest companies in the world that aren't B2B tech. And so we're starting to see more companies from manufacturing, logistics, services, businesses starting to use this. And so that's really starting to widen, which is, it's exciting. Cause obviously as marketers we love our TAM and our ICP to grow and to diversify.

And so it's, we're starting to become a bit more agnostic in that sense. And there's a lot much wider reach for us.

Felicia Asiedu: And is there a difference in how you work with those different types of industries? A difference is, are you teaching them that they should be digitizing their gifting strategies or are they coming to you saying, look, this is something I need and I found you, are you more educating the market? How's that going?

Alex Olley: Yeah, so we built a maturity model because we saw there was a big discrepancy between companies that are already doing it. They might have used an existing provider. Our category is very early, so it's quite unlikely that was actually the least likely one. The two common ones where one we've had to work at is, the first one being you've never done direct mail gifting before, ever.

And you just need to understand like, how do I get stuff to people's homes, for example, it's like I just want to be able to send stuff. I want to get people our own people, our customers, and our prospects, and we just want to get it to their homes. That was the big problem they wanted to fix because when Covid hit, obviously, you can't send to people's offices anymore.

And so with us, you can send to people wherever they're, and so that was a big one. But what we're seeing is we have to help them a lot, educate them on the tactics. Cause this is very strategic. It's not just, let's just do a big campaign and send everyone something. It's that there are what I call moments that matter.

There are different touch points that work really well. So we've built this playbook so that you can identify the challenges you have. It might be that we're booking those meetings, but they're not showing up, or we can't get responses as high as we want, so we need to get that into our SDR outreach.

Or deals are getting stuck and we want to be able to solve that. Or customers who come on board we want to be able to like, reward them or not necessarily incentivize them, but show them that we care. We want to be able stuff. And so these moments, give our customers a playbook, but that took a lot of educating.

And I think that's where the market, particularly in Europe is right now. There's a lot of education. US is a bit further ahead. And then you have customers on the other side who are, we're already doing it and we really understand the pain of doing it. Now we need to scale it and that's where you don't need to teach them about when to use it, those moments as much, but more.

They might be expanding globally and they need us to be able to do it in North America, in the UK, Europe, maybe Australia too, and have one single provider to automate it, to allow you to manage all your budgets. And then to be able to track everything. And so those are the two that we tend to see. One's like a lot of education get you started, the others help you scale.

Felicia Asiedu: Okay. And you mentioned, pandemic there, don't want to harp on about the pandemic, but did you see that kind of like uptick when everybody, we were all disparate, we weren't in centralized offices anymore. And then from there in that, have you seen it remain that people are maybe gifting and rewarding staff that are still, not quite where they were before?

Alex Olley: Yeah. Hey look, first it was very scary because for us, the name is on the tin Reachdesk, right? We used to literally we built it to send to people's offices and it would land on your desk and there'd be a follow up strategy. And then everyone started working at home and we were like, what we going to do about this?

And within about a week, we built address confirmation. But there's a bit of skepticism there. Do we want to be sending stuff to people's homes? How would that be perceived? And thankfully we had all of our customers were like, Hey let's give it a go. And it worked unbelievably well. They were like mind blown.

And so the early adopters there were the ones that really benefited. But since then, it's just grown and grown. We're seeing send volumes go up and up. So there are a couple of reasons for that. One. I think the digital fatigue is still there. We're trying to do more, particularly when we're under pressure. That's what we do as marketers. We try and do more, we serve more ads, send more emails, typically is the thing that we get drawn into. And so having a physical touchpoint within your ABM, your demand gen strategy, for example, can be hugely beneficial because it's proven to really enhance response rates.

But you mentioned people as well. We saw over half our customers were sending to their own people, Hey, what's going on? And they were like, yeah, we're onboarding new starters, anniversaries, birthdays, like big moments, like they get married and we want to be able to use it for that. But it's so painful for us to do.

So we actually built a Reachdesk for people, which integrates into your HRS. You can start to automate these things when you, when someone signs their offer letter, for example, it sends to you like a welcome pack with a letter from the CEO and they can just, before that was a whole team doing that. Now it's just, it happens in the background.

So the people side of things exciting. Because you can get very, you can get very deep in terms of what you're doing. Cause you're, make it very, you can type to your values, you can type to them as an individual. Hey, I know you're getting married, so I'm going to send you this. The people side of things is also very exciting.

So now we're working with GoTo market teams as well as people teams.

Felicia Asiedu: That's so cool. Yeah, you've given me a lot of proof of thought in terms of our own internal business. And then I guess finally I'll touch on the international sort of nature of Reachdesk. Are you, how is that work? And, gifting I think is always challenging. I think. I, early on in my marketing career, we were being asked, what are we going to send out for clients at Christmas?

And inevitably, because we are British based and I've always been in Britain and we'd send a bottle of wine and it was just it was such a standard and kind of lazy thing to do to send some decent alcohol. Whereas, now there's a difference in what people will accept actually as gifts and what they.

And if you're working in Dubai or somewhere, is it, you're not really going to send champagne necessarily. So how does that work? Do you have the same kind of international reach for Reachdesk? Where people can choose locally and things that would work for them across, doesn't matter where they are.

Alex Olley: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yes, we do. We built this huge marketplace. We realized the very beginning, Because we, I think we were born in London and then we actually HQ in the US almost immediately after, like within six months. Every thought I was mad, you're going to move the company to the US immediately.

I was like, we need to serve global companies. And so we wanted to be the market leader there. So we built this marketplace, which was localized. You've got hundreds and hundreds of options for the UK, same for France, but Germany. Cause I think we understood the cultural differences, particularly within Europe.

It's a bit easier in the US actually, state by state doesn't vary massively, but you send someone a bottle of wine in Spain, or more importantly in France and it's not French wine, you might, it might actually impact the perception they have of you. And so what we did is we said, look, let's allow people to send locally. You can choose the item. Let's say I know you, you like wine, you just mentioned it, but let's say you don't. I've got lots of wine, actually. I fancy something else you can choose. And so you just enter the country and you can see all the options for that country you're in. And you can choose something. I prefer to have chocolates, I want flowers.

I want something completely different. All I wanted to be able to donate it to charity. So giving people the choice, I think is what's been really important. So we enable you to send locally, to choose locally and that again, it reduces that wastage. It gives people the chance to choose what they want. At the end of the day, if they don't want anything, they can just donate it to a good cause and so everyone wins.

Felicia Asiedu: Brilliant. I think takeaways for me from listening to you would be, I'm marketer at heart, like I say, but I do run events now. I work for one of largest event tech companies in the world. And so we get to run lots and lots of events. And I know lots of people listening are event planners, at their core.

And I think when I'm listening to you, I'm thinking there are these perfect partnerships that perform, between you and an organization and internally within that organization's marketing team and events team. So they are working literally hand in hand with their sales teams who all have access to similar tools and can collaborate and ensure that yeah, maybe they don't pick up the swag on the day at the event.

But there's something that triggers for, sales and marketing to work together to ensure that the right people are getting the right swag at the right time on those, what did you call them, memorable moments. Moments that matter, I'm going to, it does matter. And I just think that kind of those partnerships are super, super important and the visibility of it rather than, I know historically the events team has typically gone out and just done their events.

And they've provided what they need to provide and that's that. And the marketing team does something else for Christmas time the sales team were asking, can I buy my guy box of chocolates? So it's all just been very disconnected. And maybe working with a company like yours helps to join it back up together,

Alex Olley: Yeah, we've seen this. We've seen this time and time again. It's amazing. I remember one of our first customers, I said, why? Why did you buy? Reach out, ask them afterwards. Said, cause we sales asking, send stuff.

Felicia Asiedu: Yeah.

Alex Olley: Like now you've got this. And they said, we're already working together. Marketing and sales were getting really creative on campaigns. So saying, look, we've got these top 20 prospects. Let's divide like we think we should do this, but sales, we want your buy-in. And they were starting to work together. And so marketing was starting, and this is one of our first evolutions to the product is marketing were able to set budgets, give options to sales, and then sales would actually do the sending, but they'd send personalized notes or they'd engrave the prospect's logo and name on the bottle of gin that they're sending, for example. And so we saw this weird sort of unintentional consequence of bringing these teams together of better sales and marketing alignment.

And people love it cause you get very creative. So we've seen that a lot and it's grown and grown. I think companies that can embrace that just in general all the time, they're the ones that are going to win.

Felicia Asiedu: Brilliant. Thank you Alex. I'm just going to ask you, are there any links or resources that we could share with our listeners, places people could go?

Alex Olley: Yes. One thing we've actually, that springs to mind that we've launched recently I, I try and keep our team on the cutting edge of what's going on in the world of B2B sales and marketing. And so we try a lot of things and someone doesn't work. Someone does work. So we released a thing recently called Reachdesk Unwrapped, which is all these things, the trials and tribulations, let's say all things we've tried, things that work, that don't work.

We're unwrapping everything that we've seen and sharing it with like things that, how to hire great salespeople, how to run really great events how to get started with account based marketing. Not just about gifting, but about go to market in general. So if you go to Reachdesks.com, go under resources, I think it's all in there.

Reachdesk Unwrapped and so we're starting to share everything that we've seen, which I just saw was like a big request. Cause a lot of our customers are asking us, how do I personalize SDR outreach? How do I nail my virtual event, for example? So we tested it and we decided to share it. So that's quite a valuable resource for people.

Felicia Asiedu: That's brilliant. We're definitely going to drop that into our web page when we get this posted up so that people can go there and take a look and just sharing that information I think is super helpful. We know that lots of events, people value round tables where they can share what's worked, what hasn't worked.

So that's a really lovely resource for you to share with our listeners. So on that note, I'd like to say thank you very much, Alex, for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure. I've learned lots of talking to my account manager to do. Thank you so much to our listeners for joining us. If you do have additional things to share with us or questions, send us a DM on LinkedIn or send us a note at greatevents@cvent.com and thanks for tuning into Great Events today. See you next time.