The Use Case Podcast – Storytelling about Reachdesk with Temy Mancusi-Ungaro

Music:   Welcome to RecruitingDaily Use Case Podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better, as we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech. That’s what we do. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

William Tincup:   Ladies and gentlemen. This is William Tincup and you’re listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today, we have [Temy-Un 00:   00:   33] from Reachdesk, and we’ll be learning about the use case, the business case for why his prospects, those customers choose Reachdesk. And so, sometimes people think about the business case, or the cost benefit analysis or the use case, but essentially, it’s why do people pick Reachdesk? And so, we’ll be learning all about that. Temy, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and Reachdesk?

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Sure. Hi William, pleasure to be here. My name is Temy Mancusi-Ungaro and I’m the CEO of Reachdesk. Reachdesk is the leading global data driven gifting platform, that helps businesses deliver moments that matter at scale to their prospects, customers, employees. And what our does is, we enable businesses to give better, easier and faster. And as you mentioned, track the outcomes of those gifts and ultimately proving to businesses that being generous is good for the bottom line.

William Tincup:   I love that. And especially with employees, the last two years, we’ve been through hell, right? So.

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah.

William Tincup:   Gifting and rewarding people, etc., especially during… You should always be doing it. So I mean, even if we weren’t in COVID, pre-COVID, we should have been doing this and doing this aggressively with employees. But what have you seen in the last two? So, just take us through just how companies have kind of rethought gifting in a remote environment.

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah, no, I mean, you’re absolutely right. I always say that gifting has been around for over 3000 years. I mean, gifting is one of the oldest things that people have done, but the recent COVID changed the way we worked. And I think as a result, gifting has started to play a more prominent place in people’s employee and business strategies than ever before. I think we’ve seen companies and there’s been individual research that companies have started to increase their budgets as a result of the pandemic. And what’s amazing is because of some of the results they’re seeing, 70% of those companies are expecting to either maintain or increase their frequency of that gifting going forward. And-

William Tincup:   [inaudible 00:   02:   59].

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah.

William Tincup:   Go ahead. No, no, no, that’s fantastic.

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah. And I mean, I think we’ve all been through this and COVID has changed the way that we do business. I think the growth from working from home and the hybrid working has just meant that a lot of the perks that employees relied upon that they would get through the office, have now been removed. I think employers, that we as employers, have had fewer opportunities to connect with our workers. And so, we’re looking for unique ways to reach out to them. I think the Great Resignation has really raised the bar in terms of what employees are looking for from their employers. And we’re trying to now connect, Reachdesk itself is trying to connect with workers all over the world remotely and trying to find new ways to do that when we can’t use the office.

William Tincup:   So, first we’ll deal with trends and gifting and kind of unpack that for the audience, like just things that you’ve seen that just now, we’ll just kind of talk about what’s working for your clients. What do you see as those trends? And again, macro, micro. Just, what do you see that works?

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah. I mean, I think, it’s funny because fundamentally, what works now is what’s always worked. What a gift… Giving a gift is about building a personal connection. It’s about either recognizing someone for an accomplishment or recognizing an anniversary, those are two very common ways that people are using gifting, but it’s really about personalizing and ensuring that you’re recognizing the person behind it. And so, the gift is important, but it’s as much the message that you put with the gift and the timing on when the gift gets there. And so, we’ve started to see… We used to… An example is, at the office when someone had their birthday, you used to always send a card around and you used to be able to bring in a cake.

Well, we can’t do that anymore. So, businesses are really struggling with how do you solve for that moment and how you really recognized and show the employee that they’re appreciated, we can no longer do in the office. And so, one way is how do you create a scalable campaign? And so that whenever someone’s birthday comes up, you’re ahead of it, has seven days ahead, you’re looking to the vendor and you’re finding the right product to send. You’re getting that to their door. So when their birthday arrives, you’re getting that wow factor.

William Tincup:   Does some of your clients like giving choice to their employees? As an analyst, I had a company reach out to me at one point last year, wanted me to join them on a virtual analyst call. And, they sent me a link and it was, I could picked the things that I wanted. They didn’t make the assumption that they knew what I wanted, but they basically put me into a place and said, “Okay, just pick something you like.” And I mean, first of all, I found it fascinating. Because normally, I’m shipped stuff and it’s probably the same stuff that was shipped to everybody else. But, I like the personalization part. I like being able to pick things or pick something that was important to me. Have you seen… I mean, first of all, is that weird?

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   No. No. I mean, I think you nailed it. I think the more appropriate the gift is to the recipient, the more impactful it is. And so, letting people pick things they want is important for being able to make sure that it’s something that is used and something that’s recognized. Redemption rates and gifts is super important, in terms of being effective.

William Tincup:   I love that. So- Go ahead. No, finish it.

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   And yeah, no. And I mean, this is a place where software can come into play, where you no longer have to be presumptuous about what you’re going to send to either an employee, or a prospect or a customer. We have the ability to create these landing pages, what’s great about a landing page, it’s not just a note, but you can put your own branding in there, your own messaging in there, and then you can showcase a variety of products. So we did this for the holidays, for our customers. You probably provide a food option, you provide an alcohol option, you provide a physical option, you provide a branded option, and then the person can ultimately pick what resonates with them and what they’ll actually use, which is, I think what we’re all trying to getting after, is what’s the gift that really matters to them.

William Tincup:   I love that. I had such a good experience with that and I’ve told people about it. It’s just like, it was personal, it something that I wanted. And I told them that, “It was just kind of a really special way of going about it.” You had mentioned in kind of the beginning, you mentioned kind of a phrase that I really fell in love with is, “Moments that matter.” Take us into that. When you say that to your prospects and customers, how do you then get their heads wrapped around what are moments that matter?

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah. No, thank you. We built Reachdesk to be software to help gift, not just one time, not just at one point in the customer life cycle, but throughout the entire customer life cycle, and now the employee life cycle. And so, if you think about the employee gift, I mentioned the birthday, like that’s definitely an important moment during the employee’s life cycle, but it starts so much sooner than that. There’s moments all along the employee journey from recruiting, how do you attract the employee? How do you make the most of that first moment when you’re going to reach out to either customer or an employee, I mean the prospect or employee and how do you catch their attention? So, that’s a moment that you have to capitalize on.

And as you continue to build that relationship, if you’re in an interview, you’re trying to talk about your company, how do you get your company’s identity out there? That’s another… A gift is a great way. Sending a branded gift is a great way to kind of get your company’s logo and what that gift is, what that says about your company is another way to share and make that moment. And as the employee starts with you, there’s another moment as well. So these moments, then you have the anniversary, then you have the birthday, then you have important milestones in a company’s life cycle. These are all different moments. And so, its how do you basically solidify that moment? How do you make something that’s important? And how do you, we say matter, as in matter for the relationship, but also matter in terms of getting a result that you’re looking for?

William Tincup:   It’s interesting, because it reminds me of things that worked in the 70s. Like my dad was a plant supervisor for Weyerhaeuser, and so he only ran sales, marketing, distribution, manufacturing, everything. And so, all the sales people that were selling stuff into that particular plant, they knew his birthday, they knew all of our… The kids birthdays, they knew it was their anniversary. Like, they knew everything and stuff would just show up at the house, bottles of scotch, this, that, and the other. Like, just stuff would just show up and it was just fascinating.

And, there was a period where we got away from that. We just forgot these lessons. And it seemed like this is kind of a, we’re now getting back to like, “Hey, these people have lives, they have partners, they have kids, they have all these things, we should celebrate that.”

Temy Mancusi-Un...:   Yeah, no, I mean, I completely agree. And I think, the digitization of everything, and email and you Zoom calls, its just become a lot of noise, and we’re all moving and moving. And so, Reachdesk was built with the belief that we need to kind of go back to some of those roots and provide a gift. And again, it’s the right way to do business, but we’ve also seen great results. And that, you send a gift, you get 30 times the response rate as a gift, you’ll get off of an email. We see that when gifts are given, the show rates for the… If you’re pitching, if you’re having a call, you’re trying to set up a call with a customer, if you preempt that with a gift, the show rates on those meetings will increase.

If you send the gift after a meeting, the speed to which you get to the next stage of that deal will increase. As I said, something that we’ve been doing forever, we just kind of forgot about it. It got a lot harder. How do you get the right gift? The supply chain, all that made it more difficult. And so, Reachdesk is really just is trying to simplify that, and then suddenly giving people visibility that they… We always knew it worked, but we never knew how well it worked and that’s what Reachdesk does.

William Tincup:   So when you talk to on the HR side, the employer side, Reachdesk, where do they want it connected to? What’s gifting connected to from their perspective?

Temy Mancusi-Un...:   You mean like systems-wise?

William Tincup:   Yes. I’m sorry. Yes, like systems-wise.

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah. So I mean, I think there’s a lot of gifting, again, stuff that we used to do in the office that we now have to do remotely. And, those system are stored in everyone’s HRIS system. So, who are your employees? What’s their start date, what’s their birth date? Where are they located? Ours has what’s your T-shirt size. And so, that’s where the information is taken out of. And then, you can basically load it into the Reachdesk system. And so, you can take a list of your employees and what’s great about the software is all you need is your email address.

And what we’ll actually do is we’ll send an email out to them and we’ll let them know they have the gift available to them, at which point they can fill in their address information.

I mean, one thing that’s been so hard, so, so hard with this, with the pandemic, is where are all my employees? I have an employee right now who was in New York last week, is in South Carolina this week and will be in Peru next week. And so, I don’t know where to ship him a gift to recognize his birthday. And so with software, we can send out an email, we can say, “Where do you want this gift?” They can fill in the information, and then we handle the full logistics end-to-end. Basically knowing where it goes, making sure it gets there, and then alerting me once it’s arrived.

William Tincup:   Oh, that’s wonderful. And that’s globally, or is it [inaudible 00:   13:   22]?

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Globally.

William Tincup:   Globally.

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   No, no. I mean, Reachdesk is unique in that we have a global network. So we’re working with businesses to send to APAC, to send to across Europe. We had to deal with UK, UK versus EU with the whole Brexit. How do you manage all the logistics with border control? U.S., Canada, we’re able to gift everywhere.

William Tincup:   Oh, I love that. I love that. So take us into, we’ll do some of the buy side for just a second, the demo. When your sales team shows Reachdesk to the folks on the employer side for the first time, what do they fall in love with?

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah. I mean, I think first just how easy it is. For Reachdesk, all you have to do is you load a budget into the system, we can connect directly into your system. So if you have Salesforce, or Outreach or any of these systems, you can just connect immediately. At which point, we’ll be able to suck in all your contacts. And then again, sending an email, you basically set up a campaign. So you would determine, let’s say on the employee side, you’re going to do a birthday campaign, so you can create a template. What does the message say? What’s the gift? What should be the note within the package? And then, you can basically just load in a list of email addresses and that can immediately be sent out to everyone on that list.

That’s all you have to do, we handle all the logistics of finding the right vendor and getting it to you. Alerting to you when it’s arrived. And so, you no longer have to go find the cupcake. How are you going to find a cupcake vendor that can deliver in the UK? How can you find one that’s going to do in Australia? How you find one that’s going to do it in New York? All that is taken off your plate, all you have to do is just tell us who you want to gift to.

William Tincup:   I love it. An example of a program, not the company, by the way, not the company or brand, but a program that one of your Reachdesk customers has used that just dazzled you, just like this is spectacular, the way that they rolled this thing out.

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah.

William Tincup:   Give us a couple of those.

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah. So we had one who had, I think we all have customers who tend to go silent on us. So, they were very active with us and suddenly go dark. And this customer put together a campaign, where they sent out a gift with their customers brands on it, and basically said, “Hey, we’d love to hear from you.” And as a result, they were able to get a hundred percent, a hundred percent response rate on that gift, because it was personalized. And of that, they were able to recover another 30% of those customers back and get them reengaged.

And so, this is a whole pool of customers that you thought was lost, that now you’ve reengaged through basically, personalization and creating that connection again and turning them back into actual customers.

William Tincup:   That is fantastic. Because that’s like, and if we were talking about sales on that side, these are prospects that just went dormant, that they were just there, they’re in salesforce.com and just kind of sitting there in the pipeline, taking up space. And the same thing happens with employees, they go quiet and if we don’t celebrate those moments that matter, they stay quiet. Have you seen yet, have you seen one of your customers use Reachdesk for candidates on the recruiting side?

Temy Mancusi-Un...:   At Reachdesk, we use Reachdesk for candidates, so.

William Tincup:   The secret sauce, all righty. Now, we’re getting somewhere. This is awesome. Now, you got to tell us, you can’t just put that out there, then not tell us. How do you use it?

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   No, I mean, that’s one of the best parts about being a product that you can use. And so, everyone is having issues. How do you track the attention of candidates, who are getting a ton of different during reach outs, and we have found that an E-Gift Card is an effective way to basically say, “Hey, I would love to talk to you, here’s a Starbucks card, grab a coffee and let’s just chat.” That makes you stand out from the crowd. The other part is that you get into the cycle, again, trying to share more and more about who you are as a company. We’ve been using, what we really like to do is we like to celebrate, as you get further in the pipeline sending you a gift or sending you appreciation. I’ll tell you, I’ve hired execs on using gifts.

And, you know how much recruiting agencies costs these days and how hard is to even get into one. And using gifts, you can basically… I reached out to a candidate, we had a great conversation, something in that message resonated with me that I remembered. I remember him having a lot of noise in the background. He had all these kids, so I sent him a box of brownies to his house. I said, “You have a bunch of kids, it’s crazy in the holidays, here’s a gift.” The conversations then progressed. We met, we went out dinner. I learned that he had a real affinity for a sports team. And so, I basically was able to gift something around that sports team to kind of show that I cared and listened. And even other great stuff around like books that we talked about, I could send them an Amazon link with a link to the book and basically say, “Hey, this is what we talked about.”

And our relationship, I mean, we got so close so quickly and I really credit gifts as part of that.

William Tincup:   Oh, every recruiter listening to this call is taking notes. This is awesome. Your favorite buying question. So people that maybe haven’t embraced gifting in the past, and maybe it’s kind of a foreign concept too, you’re going to get a lot of the what’s the ROI, those types of questions and those are fine. What are some of the questions that you just love when a prospect’s talking to you that they’re bringing these questions up you love? You’re like, “Okay, they get it.”

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah. I mean, I think it’s… I mean, ROI is a big one for us, so where can I use it and what can I expect? I think the three things that have been always really difficult for businesses around gifting, is what to give, when to give it, who to give it to, and then what is it going to do for my business? And so, those are the questions that we love to get into. We love to basically make people change their minds around gifting. We don’t see gifting as a tip for tat. I think the idea of, “Hey, book a meeting with me and you get a $25 gift card,” like that’s not the way that we think is effective gifting. We think gifting is kind of a measure of providing the charity first and putting yourself out there. And then, creating the relationship from which you can then do business against. Yeah.

William Tincup:   I love that. What are some of the questions that drive you crazy?

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Questions that drive me crazy.

William Tincup:   It’s an odd question, but you know what I’m saying? Like in the sales process, you’re talking to somebody and they ask you… I always talk to HR people about like, “Listen, don’t talk about cost.” You’re going to eventually get to a proposal, you’re going to eventually talk about money, you’re going to talk about your budget. You’re going to do these things. Like eventually, you’re going to get there, but you don’t have to get there in the first conversation. So, what are some of those things that just, if you could eliminate, you’d love to eliminate?

Temy Mancusi-Un...:   Yeah. I mean, I think why should I do it? I think, again, it’s like people forget that this is something that we’ve been doing for just so long. I mean, the idea that a business that you don’t want to create a personal relationship before you create business, is just foreign to us. For us, it’s about the people. It’s about investing in the people, it’s about recognizing who’s on the other line. We have a value that says, “Treat people like people.” And, just remember kind of the human element and everything. That for us, is kind of the most fun. And so, I think just trying to… When people kind of wonder why they should gift, it’s like you gift your friends, you gift to your family, you don’t ever ask, why am I giving a gift around a holiday? It’s just something you do and if you don’t do it, why aren’t you doing it?

William Tincup:   Yeah. Last question is for HR leaders when they’re thinking about their employees, and maybe even recruiting leaders thinking about candidates. How should they think about, how should they frame a budget? How should they think about budget?

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Yeah. So I think, you don’t have to… You can start any way you want and at Reachdesk, we have all different ways to gift. You can start with a $5 gift card, you can start with a $20 cupcake. You could even do, if you wanted to create a branded T-shirt for $10, you can do that. So it doesn’t really matter what you start with, it’s just starting. And then, if you’re fortunate enough to have a tool like Reachdesk, you can then measure, ultimately the impact. And, we actually have had businesses that have started with a $5 gift card. They then moved to a $10 gift card. They then found that, try a $15, find a… You can find what’s right for you. And I can tell you just from what we’ve seen with so many campaigns, the ROI is there. So it’s about basically starting, and then we measure what matters, measure the end impact on it, and then go from there. It’s not something you have to get right the first time, it’s something you can keep getting better at.

William Tincup:   I love it. Love it. Great answer. And I love that you took us into recruiting, took us into what y’all do for your candidates. It’s just awesome. And I can’t wait for recruiters to listen to this and go, “Wait a minute, I’m going to do this.” Thank you so much for your time, Temy. I appreciate you.

Temy Mancusi-Un…:   Of course, appreciate William

William Tincup:   And thanks for our everyone listening to the Use Case Podcast. Until next time.