How Invoca Hit a 50% Redemption-to-Meeting Rate During B2B's Slowest Season

It’s mid-November. The calendar is barren. Meetings are starting to get pushed to “sometime in January.” Prospects are out of office, and pipeline is slowing to a crawl.

Somewhere, in a conference room or on a Zoom, a marketing team is explaining the quarter to an executive team with the oldest excuse on the B2B calendar: the holidays hit. It’s just going to be slow.

Everyone nods.
Everyone accepts it.
Nobody questions.

Why? Everyone knows Q4 is when the pipeline takes PTO.

Suzzette Giron, ABM Sr. Manager at Invoca, stopped accepting it. “If we know that this is a hurdle that we’re going to experience every single year — what can we do?”

That question sparked a holiday direct mail campaign that became the top performer — for pipeline and ROI — for Invoca’s marketing team for 3 years running.

The most recent run, holiday 2025: a 7x ROI and a 23% year-over-year increase in influenced opportunities.

During the two months when nobody books meetings.

This is the story of how Invoca turned the worst season on the sales calendar into its most reliable pipeline engine — and why the person behind it will tell you the secret was never the gift.

Who is Invoca?

Invoca is an AI-powered revenue execution platform that connects marketing, commerce, and contact center teams to orchestrate seamless buyer journeys and turn every interaction into measurable, profitable growth.

In plain English: when a customer calls a business, Invoca’s AI listens, understands what happened on that call, and turns it into data marketing teams can act on.

But here’s the detail that shapes everything about this story: Invoca sells to marketers — specifically, digital marketers at B2C brands.

Invoca’s buyers are the most digitally saturated audience in business. These are the people who build the ads, the emails, the retargeting campaigns. They know every trick because they invented half of them. Their inboxes aren’t just full — they’re full of outreach they can reverse-engineer on sight.

If anyone has earned digital fatigue, it's them.

Which is exactly why a physical package showing up on their desk works. You can’t A/B test your way past someone’s front door.

The marketer who raised her hand

When Suzzette joined Invoca’s demand generation team, direct mail was already happening — egifts to drive event attendance, physical sends to follow up after. But it was small. And nobody owned it.

Suzzette had run direct mail programs before, so she volunteered: "Bring me your campaigns; bounce your ideas off me."

While she doesn’t execute every send — teams across demand gen, customer expansion, and events run their own — Suzzette serves as the in-house expert they build with.

Ask her why direct mail, and you won’t get a channel-metrics answer. You’ll get a worldview.

“We’re not selling to a company. We’re selling to a human being. And we’re not selling to robots … yet.”

Direct mail, in her telling, is the channel that taps what makes people people: reciprocity, the surprise of something physical in a digital-everything world, the signal that someone paid actual attention.

Suzzette’s worldview was about to collide with the deadest two months on the sales calendar.

A hole in the calendar you can see coming

Every year, the same story. November and December arrive, and with them the out-of-office replies, the frozen calendars, the meetings that dissolve into next quarter.

And every year, the same conversation with leadership: Why are there no meetings? Why is there no pipeline?

The explanation was true — people really were out of the office. But true isn’t the same as acceptable. As Suzzette puts it, you can’t keep walking into executive meetings saying “the holidays hit” and expect that to land forever.

So the team reframed the problem.

The holiday slowdown isn’t weather-related. It’s not random.

It shows up on the same two pages of the calendar every year, making it the most predictable obstacle in B2B.

Good news: Predictable problems can be planned for.

Suzzette’s goal was modest, yet specific: don’t surrender November and December. Stay relevant, keep booking meetings, keep opening pipeline … all while everyone else waits for January.

Buried inside the problem was the unlock. The holidays kill calendars, but they’re also the one time of year when receiving a gift feels completely natural. People are less hesitant to accept one. It’s timely. It’s expected. It is, after all, the season.

The obstacle and the opening were the same two months.

Anatomy of the send

The holiday campaign runs on a simple division of labor: marketing opens the door, sales walks through it.

Start with the email.

It doesn’t come from an SDR or a named rep. It comes from the Invoca marketing team, and for contacts who aren’t yet in pipeline, that’s deliberate. No relationship exists yet, so a gift from “the team” reads as goodwill; the same gift from a stranger’s name reads as an angle.

The email points to a landing page built on the Marketo–Sendoso integration, offering 4 gift options and a simple form fill.

The star of the most recent campaign: a Solo Stove.

It’s a perfect case study in gift selection. Seasonally right (something warm for winter). And aspirationally spot on (the thing people genuinely want but won’t buy for themselves).

Then there’s the message that came with it: “Happy holidays, [first name]. Here’s a little spark to warm up your season — wishing you cozy moments and bright beginnings ahead.”

Notice what’s missing?

Invoca. No product mention, no value prop, no CTA. During the holidays, the gift is the message. The selling comes later … and from someone else.

For contacts already in pipeline, the play inverts: sales owns the send. Reps who hold the relationship pick the gift themselves and personalize it with everything they know about the contact.

The two-day rule

The follow-up? Well, that’s where most gifting campaigns quietly die.

Invoca’s rule is strict. The moment someone redeems a gift — not when it ships, not when it lands, the moment they fill out the form — an SDR gets pinged and follows up immediately.

Why the urgency? Because redemption is a peak-attention moment that decays fast. Wait even 48 hours, and the person has mentally moved on. They filled out a form; they don’t even have the gift yet.

And the follow-up is a phone call, not an email.

The call opens itself: You just redeemed a gift from Invoca. Are you familiar with us? It’s the rare cold call that isn’t cold.

Objections and hang-ups drop. The conversation starts with goodwill instead of interruption.

The gift’s actual delivery, days later, becomes a second built-in touchpoint — a reason to reach out again to anyone who didn’t book the first time.

Two natural conversation starters per contact, during the season when nobody takes meetings. That’s the machine.

The numbers, in order

Start where the campaign starts: someone redeems a gift.

Half of them book a meeting. Invoca’s redemption-to-meeting rate on the holiday campaign hit 50% — far beyond what any of their other channels produce.

Then 80% of those meetings convert to opportunities.

To be clear about what those numbers are: sequential stage rates, each measured from the prior stage, not percentages of the whole list. But as a funnel, it’s remarkably efficient. Most of the leak occurs in the funnel between “showed interest” and “took the meeting.” This campaign’s leak is the smallest exactly where funnels usually bleed.

Zoom out to the campaign level: the 2025 holiday run delivered a 7x ROI and a 23% year-over-year increase in influenced opportunities.

And it wasn’t a fluke year.

The holiday campaign has been the top performer for Invoca’s marketing team — on both pipeline and ROI — three years running.

Aside: A bit more on the 23% stat — the campaign didn’t just repeat its success. Instead, it grew it, in a motion most teams would be content to simply rerun. Suzzette’s standard: “If we’re going to continue running it every year, it has to be even better than the last year.”

None of this made the holidays easy. Suzzette is careful on that point. The season is still a hard time to generate pipeline. What the campaign gave them is a way over the hump.

If it works in December, it works in June

One great campaign is a win. Invoca turned it into a method.

The logic: the holiday campaign didn’t work because of December. It worked because of timing — a moment when outreach feels natural rather than intrusive. And December doesn’t own those moments. The calendar is full of them, if you know where to look.

So the team mapped it. They combed the calendar for days with a genuine hook for their audience. Along the way, they found their second-best campaign of last year, hiding on June 30: Social Media Day.

For a company selling to digital marketers at B2C brands, it’s almost too on the nose. A day celebrating social media marketers, aimed at social media marketers. It landed right before the July 4th long weekend — the summer’s version of the holiday slowdown, with vacations starting to thin the calendars — so the team launched in early June to get ahead of it.

Same playbook as December:

Pick the timely moment.
Send the gift.
Follow up fast.

And it came with a bonus layer of relevance. Invoca had just released new integrations with social media advertising platforms, which made the outreach feel less like a campaign and more like a conversation the audience was already having.

Suzzette’s rule for these campaigns is looser than you’d expect: the gift doesn’t need to match the holiday. The holiday just needs to make the outreach timely.

The same muscle now powers Invoca’s event motion, too — direct mail invitations to get target accounts through the door at regional summits.

Holiday. Social Media Day. Events. Different moments, one method: find the window when a human being is glad to hear from you, and show up in it … physically.

The part that’s about to get easier

For all its polish, the machine still has one manual gear: the handoff. Today, when someone redeems a gift, getting the SDR pinged and moving means Slack messages and human vigilance.

That’s about to change. Invoca has started testing the Sendoso MCP — the connection that lets their AI agents work with Sendoso directly.

Suzzette already sends every seller a weekly AI-built report: which accounts to prioritize, based on intent data, journey stage, and real-world triggers like funding rounds and new hires. Her ask of the AI used to be modest — just remind reps that direct mail exists as a touchpoint.

With the MCP, the report can go further: suggest a specific gift for a specific contact, push redeemed contacts straight into sales cadences — maybe even send with one click, no Sendoso login required.

No results to report yet. When Suzzette shared this story, the test was a week old. But listen to how she talks about the ceiling: “I don’t even know what’s going to be the limit. There’s truly no limit, literally.”

If manual work was ever the blocker, Suzzette says, it won’t be a blocker for anybody now.

The succulent on her desk

There’s a plant in Suzzette’s office that explains everything.

7 or 8 years ago, at a previous company, she implemented Sendoso for the first time, the first platform she ever purchased. When the implementation wrapped, the Sendoso team sent her a succulent. The card read something like: "We can’t wait to build success from this new partnership.”

"If I still remember the pun from the succulent that I still have, I want that same impact on my prospects and customers. Always."

Almost a decade of impact, from one plant and one pun.

That's the whole thesis, sitting in a pot. The ROI and the conversion rates? That's just the evidence. The mechanism is simpler: a small physical thing, a human message, and a memory that outlasts every email she's received since.

It’s why every message Suzzette sends now includes a pun. It’s why the holiday email didn’t mention Invoca. And it’s why, when sellers tell her direct mail feels cheesy, her answer is a question: wouldn’t you be surprised and happy to get a gift?

Her advice for anyone still hesitating comes in two parts.

First, for sellers: Don’t be scared. You can tap the human aspect and still hit your professional goals; they’re not in tension.

Second, for marketers: Test everything. The gift, the messaging, the sender, the landing page. There are no stupid ideas, and your audience will surprise you.

Because here’s what Invoca’s 3 years of holiday campaigns actually prove: the dead zones on your calendar are only dead if you treat them that way. The same weeks that empty everyone else’s pipeline can fill yours … if you show up like a human, in the one place your buyers aren’t drowning — the mailbox is always open.