Sales reps hate Q4.

There’s Thanksgiving and out-of-office autoresponders. Christmas and vacations. New Year's and budget planning sessions. Between October and December, closed (won) deals dry up.

Even sending platform Sendoso, which you might expect to thrive during the gift-giving season, isn't immune to holiday slowdown. Although they enjoy a “pop” of top-of-funnel interest, they never convert in-quarter. Like other companies, their lower-funnel deals grind to a halt.

But Arianna Young, Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Sendoso, wasn’t content to lose three months to sluggish growth. She resolved to design a campaign to combat the seasonal slump.

Sendoso’s sales team had a lot of deals in the pipeline, but Arianna recognized that they weren’t all the same.

Some were low ICP fit accounts in the awareness funnel stage. They would close eventually… but not before the end of the quarter. 

Others were high-fit accounts in the decision or purchase stages.

Buyers at those accounts were familiar with Sendoso’s product category, likely to recognize their brand, and currently in-market for a solution.

“They were the most likely to convert in-quarter and contribute to closed (won) revenue,” Arianna explains.

By targeting high-intent, high-fit accounts, she believed Sendoso could overcome the slump and speed up growth.

1. Identify target accounts and contacts

Arianna searched Sendoso’s pipeline for deals in the decision or purchase stage.

Next, she filtered by ICP fit, prioritizing strong- and moderate-fit accounts. She used both firmographic (company characteristics) and technographic (use of technology) data to evaluate accounts.

That gave her a list of accounts (Acme Corp, Wayne Enterprises) but not contacts (Wile E. Coyote, Bruce Wayne).

To work out who to target, she overlaid persona data on account contacts. The combined data revealed each account’s most likely decision-makers and key influencers.

2. Design the messaging and the send

Cutting through is always difficult — especially so in Q4. Consumer brands pump out campaigns to cash in on Christmas, and B2B brands boost their marketing spend to counteract the dip.

Arianna knew a mediocre campaign wouldn’t work, so she worked with Sendoso’s brand team to craft engaging seasonal messaging. At the start of Q4, this meant Halloween. They designed targeted emails for account decision-makers.

Here's what the outbound email looked like:

After the meeting had happened, they followed up with this email:

And, of course, the message arrived with a gift. It being Halloween, Arianna selected a Bloody Mary cocktail kit and some horror-themed cookies.

“It was interesting. It was different,” Arianna says. “We got to highlight products from our marketplace and send something that would cut through the noise.”

3. Execute

Planning done, Arianna pushed the campaign live.

Alongside direct emails and gifting, she ran a ton of complementary tactics. Using a segment in 6sense, she delivered targeted ads and messaging across:

• On-site chat: Sendoso’s chatbot echoed campaign messaging and allowed buyers to ask follow-up questions.

• Display ads: Creative explored the campaign’s pain points and challenges.

  

• Sales enablement: Arianna equipped reps with follow-up content, so the campaign continued through the entire sales cycle.

Wherever buyers looked, they saw “one cohesive message” from Sendoso.

All the while, Arianna studied buyer engagement. Using 6sense, she consolidated first-party (email opens, content downloads, chatbot messages) and third-party engagement data (display ad clicks, review site searches).

It differentiated the super-engaged buyers and disinterested prospects. She doubled down on the former, selecting buyers with the highest engagement and sending them premium gifts like the Bloody Mary cocktail kit.