Lead Generation Episodes

Kris Rudeegraap—co-founder and co-CEO of Sendoso—joins me to talk about what happens when email stops working and you have to find another edge. Kris was a top seller who got 90% response rates in the early 2010s using mail merge. Then email sequencing tools flooded the market and response rates tanked. So he started sending handwritten notes, dog toys, and swag from the marketing closet—and booking more meetings than anyone else.

That curiosity—hearing a dog bark on a call and sending a dog toy—became the foundation of Sendoso, now the largest direct mail and gifting platform in the world. We cover the psychology of reciprocity, why the open rate of a FedEx box is 100%, and why dimensional mail is the channel that never stopped delivering.

The Kansas City ribs story is one you won't forget: a prospect broke a rib skiing, so the Sendoso team sent a rack of BBQ ribs to his office. He shared the story with his whole company, and they got the deal.
Kris's motto—"people buy from pe…

Sales and marketing alignment isn't a nice-to-have — it's the engine that drives predictable revenue. In this episode of the Thoughts on Selling podcast, I talk with Javier Lozano Jr., a fractional CMO and CRO who helps founder-led tech companies build the infrastructure where sales and marketing actually work together. Javier brings a rare perspective: he's lived on both sides of the revenue equation, and he's seen firsthand what happens when these teams are aligned on revenue goals versus when they're tossing leads over the fence and pointing fingers.

We get into some meaty territory — why customer success is really a marketing function (because those customer stories become your best sales enablement), how AI is already transforming the way smart teams analyze sales conversations and sharpen their messaging, and why the feedback loop between sales, marketing, and operations is a closed system that breaks when any piece gets out of sync. Javier shares a metric he calls HIRO pipel…