B2B Gifting Tactics to Unlock & Accelerate Opportunities
B2B marketers are grappling with a harsh reality: their digital efforts are increasingly falling flat.
The endless stream of automated emails and look-alike ads has trained buyers to tune them out, making genuine connection feel nearly impossible.
In a search for what still works, some marketers are shifting focus from digital volume to tangible impact. Their instrument of choice is the strategic physical gift. It's a tactic with proven power, capable of doubling win rates and achieving engagement levels near 70%.
On the Attributed Podcast, Kacie Jenkins, former SVP of Marketing at Sendoso, delivered her masterclass on this emerging field.
This article breaks down Kacie's core takeaways, covering the frameworks for deploying high-ROI gifting campaigns, the psychology behind a gift that truly resonates, and the hard metrics that prove its impact on your bottom line.
Or listen to the full conversation here.
Why Your Best Channel Might Be the Mailbox
The modern B2B professional is overstimulated and exhausted.
We're all getting inundated with 11 sales emails a day, thousands of ads... we're exhausted just from staring at the computer.
This digital fatigue has created a human deficit, leaving people craving genuine connections. Kacie's solution is to redefine the purpose of marketing itself as building relationships and leaving people with a positive feeling after they interact with you or your brand.
The goal here is to make every touchpoint, from an email to a package on a doorstep, feel like a thoughtful gift.
Gifting is the fundamental underpinning of what all good marketing should feel like.
Going From Swag Closet to Strategy
For some companies, the initial foray into physical marketing can be chaotic.
Kacie refers to this common starting point as the "swag closet" stage, a manual, disorganized process where marketing or HR teams become an ad-hoc fulfillment service.
This often happens on a whim, such as a sales leader ordering a batch of branded hoodies for a last-minute event, leaving the marketing team to manage inventory and distribution without a plan.
This approach lacks budget controls, trackable ROI, and strategic oversight, quickly becoming an unscalable burden, because it pulls skilled teams away from their strategic priorities to spend valuable time packing boxes and managing spreadsheets.
The evolution from swag to strategy happens when gifting is woven into the fabric of the entire customer lifecycle.
Kacie emphasized that a modern gifting strategy isn't siloed within a single department. This means using gifts to:
Warm up cold accounts in an ABM campaign.
Reward beta testers for their valuable feedback.
Celebrate customer milestones like anniversaries and successful onboarding.
Deepen relationships with advisory board members to make them feel special and appreciated.
By centralizing this through a platform, companies gain visibility and control, transforming gifting from a series of random acts into a cohesive, measurable program.
The New Playbook is Combining the Digital and Physical
Kacie is adamant that physical gifting doesn't replace digital marketing; it amplifies it.
I am a huge fan of combining digital with physical touchpoints, we use everything in one big beautiful symphony.
A 6-Step B2B Gifting Playbook
For marketers looking to penetrate new accounts or territories, Kacie explained her proven framework:
Warm-Up with digital: Begin with hyper-personalized ads and consistent, valuable organic social media engagement to build familiarity and resonance.
Identify engagement: Use intent data and tracking tools to spot areas of engagement, signaling that a target account is warming up.
Connect socially: Before sending anything, build a rapport. Connect with key contacts on LinkedIn and engage with their content to establish a human connection.
Deploy the gift: With the relationship warmed, send a thoughtful, relevant gift. This acts as a powerful pattern interrupt.
Follow up with value: Once you track that the gift has landed, your follow-up is no longer cold. It’s a warm conversation starter: What did you think? This is a chance to add more value, not immediately pitch.
Elevate to an experience: Take the relationship offline (or to a more exclusive online setting). Invite them to a dinner, a virtual tasting, or a small industry roundtable.
Gift Smarter, Not Harder
Effective gifting is not about what you spend, but how you think.
Dispelling the myth of high costs, Kacie notes the average gift is about $50. A clever, timely gift like sending wrapping paper to a prospect swamped by the holidays has more impact than any generic luxury item ever could.
This approach hinges on avoiding what Kacie calls the biggest mistake: treating the gift as a transaction.
Me sending someone something that's like, 'Hey, can I trade you this for an hour of your time?' instantly cheapens the interaction.
The goal is to make a genuine, no-strings-attached gesture. True impact comes from personalizing the gift to show you've listened and that you care.
How a Thoughtful Gift Can 2x Your Win Rate
For any CFO or skeptical executive, the ultimate question is ROI, and Kacie came with compelling data to prove that gifting is far more than a nice-to-have expense.
Compared to digital-only campaigns, strategic gifting delivers powerful results. It pushes engagement to 68% and increases win rates on nurtured leads to 26%. The impact on revenue is direct: deals close 30% faster, grow 13% larger in size, and win rates are consistently doubled.
The full picture of ROI, however, lies in what Kacie calls "relationship depth indicators". These are tangible improvements like higher meeting acceptance rates and a sharp decrease in stalled deals.
Gifting also empowers sales teams to connect with multiple stakeholders and, most critically, turns happy customers into active brand champions.
A Final Word
In a market saturated with digital noise, the path to building stronger business relationships and accelerating opportunities is about connecting more thoughtfully.
As Kacie outlined, strategic gifting offers a powerful, measurable, and surprisingly cost-effective way to create memorable moments that stand out, with data showing it has the power to double a company's win rates.
By moving beyond transactions and investing in genuine, human-centric gestures, marketers can build the trust and loyalty that ultimately drive lasting growth.
About the speaker
Kacie Jenkins is the former SVP of Marketing at Sendoso. A true believer in the power of gifting, she was a dedicated customer and power-user of the platform during her time scaling enterprise marketing at Fastly. She brings over a decade of experience in building communities and creating resonant brand experiences for B2B and B2C audiences.
