Less Budget, More Pipeline: How Pelago Moved Upmarket with Sendoso Direct Mail

Two BDRs. A shrinking budget. And a target list of enterprises with 25,000+ employees.

On paper, that math shouldn’t work. Moving upmarket usually means spending more, not less — more headcount, more tooling, more air cover.

Pelago was doing the opposite. The team was winding down an outside agency, trimming spend, and still expected to grow pipeline. Every marketer knows that squeeze: cut costs, hit the number anyway (aka, do more with less!).

Here’s the part that shouldn’t add up but does. In the last year, Sendoso influenced 22% of Pelago’s closed-won pipeline. And in 2025, 16% of Pelago's total pipeline was sourced via Sendoso gifting campaigns. 

Not with a bigger team, but with a smarter one … and a single platform doing the work that a separate agency and a separate tool used to be split between them.

This is the story of how a lean go-to-market team punched above its weight — and why, in an inbox everyone ignores, the smartest move was to show up in the mailbox instead.

Who is Pelago?

Pelago provides specialty substance use care — personalized, virtual-first support for tobacco, alcohol, opioid, cannabis, and stimulant use. It sells primarily through employers and health plans, helping them reduce healthcare costs while supporting their people.

It's rooted in clinical research

 A chief scientific officer and a dedicated research team built the program to be clinically validated, not thrown at the wall to see what sticks. That rigor matters here for one reason: it’s the same standard Pelago’s marketing team holds itself to. Prove it works, then scale it.

But the part that shapes everything about how Pelago goes to market is the business model. There are really two sales. First, land the employer or health plan. Then — and only then — comes the harder one: getting members to actually enroll and engage. Because Pelago bills on utilization, a signed contract isn’t revenue. A member showing up is.

That’s the detail that makes the rest of this story so powerful. When every dollar depends on the right enterprises signing and their people engaging, generic outreach doesn’t cut it.

Personalization isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the business model.

The before: cut costs, still grow

Tara Howell, Senior Channel Marketing Manager at Pelago, joined a team that was already an Alyce customer — the corporate gifting platform Sendoso later acquired. Her boss had used Alyce for years and brought it in: a known quantity, working fine.

However … then two things happened simultaneously.

First, the team was winding down an outside agency that ran its ABM direct mail — a separate fee, a separate workflow, one more thing to manage at exactly the moment the budget was tightening.

Second, Sendoso acquired Alyce. For Pelago, the timing turned out to be a gift. As they migrated over, they didn’t just keep what Alyce did — they picked up the one thing Alyce never had: direct mail, built in. The capability they’d been paying an agency for was suddenly part of the platform they already knew.

The agency wound down, but the direct-mail program didn’t. It just moved in-house, onto one platform, run by a team that no longer had to coordinate across an outside vendor to send something.

What they actually do with it

Here’s what consolidation looked like in practice:

One platform.
One warehouse.
One team.

… that could …

Source a gift.
Pair it with content.
And get it out the door without standing up its own logistics.

All of that, run by two people.

Two BDRs in a 130-person org, with direct mail as their primary play. The only reason that math works is that they’re not doing the heavy lifting. Pelago brings the targeting and the timing. Sendoso brings the warehouse, the inventory, and the send.

As Liam Millan, Strategic Business Development Manager, shared, "Getting Sendoso up and running has been a total game-changer."

The play that works: content plus a gift, three times a year.

Pelago runs three signature campaigns — a holiday send, a Dry January push, and a summer pipeline-acceleration campaign timed to the buying cycle.

The summer one is the clearest example of the whole method. Working with Sendoso’s campaign team, Pelago built a popsicle kit and paired it with a printed ROI report that landed at the same time. Not a link. Not a QR code. A physical report, in a box, with something cold and summery next to it.

That pairing is the point.

Note: This campaign helped close a deal with one of the nation's five largest school districts.

A gift gets the box opened; the content gives the recipient a reason to take the meeting. It’s the inbox-vs-mailbox idea made literal — the report that would’ve been one more ignored attachment shows up somewhere it can’t be scrolled past (or mass deleted).

Different tiers, different sends

The high-touch kits — popsicles and the like — go to tier-one accounts, partners, and consultants. For higher-volume outreach, the BDRs lean on something simpler and reliably effective: cookies. A box of cookies opens doors, especially with new partners, where the goal is simply to start a first conversation.

How a send actually gets targeted

Marketing tees up the campaigns and hands them to the BDRs. The BDRs work with sellers to decide who gets what — an opportunity in flight, a deal that’s gone quiet, or a net-new account worth a knock.

Sendoso handles the unglamorous part: SmartDelivery’s address finder delivers the gift to a real person at a real address, without the back-and-forth of asking for a mailing address.

Why any of this matters for moving upmarket

Pelago deliberately dropped the motion of chasing smaller accounts and now targets enterprises with 25,000+ employees. Personalization is what made that credible — you don’t break into a 25,000-person enterprise with a generic email, you do it by sending something that proves you paid attention.

As Tara put it, “Everyone's inbox is full. What sets the Sendoso partnership apart is the effort behind each gift — taking the time to think through what a buyer actually needs and picking something that reflects that. It turns outreach into a curated experience that brings a moment of joy to buyers, instead of one more email to ignore."

The quiet win nobody planned for

Here’s the part Pelago didn’t buy Sendoso for … and ended up loving anyway.

The research team conducts studies to validate that the program works. With that comes compensating participants for their time. And before Sendoso, paying them meant someone manually sending gift cards, one at a time — a slow, thankless chore that scaled poorly and ate up hours nobody had to spare.

Once the research team got onto the platform, the whole task collapsed into a few clicks: automated digital gift links sent at scale, with no manual handling.

It’s a small thing. It’s also the tell. When a tool you bought for one team quietly fixes a problem on another, that’s the difference between a point solution and a platform.

Less budget, more pipeline

Step back, and the arc is simple. Pelago …

• Cut an agency.
• Folded direct mail into a platform it already used.
• Pointed a two-person team at enterprise accounts it had no business winning on headcount alone.

And came out the other side with Sendoso influencing 22% of closed-won pipeline. Additionally, in 2025, 16% of Pelago's total pipeline was sourced via Sendoso gifting campaigns.

As one partner shared via email, “Hi, I hope you are doing well! I wanted to let you know I received the cookies in the mail and wanted to extend my gratitude for taking the time to send those. Very thoughtful — and delicious if I may add. Thank you both, and looking forward to a fruitful 2026!”

The takeaway for any team facing a tighter budget: doing more with less doesn't mean doing less. It means routing the work through fewer tools and making every send count — enough that a two-person team can hold its own against far larger ones.

Pelago moved upmarket without spending more. The difference was reaching buyers somewhere their inboxes couldn't bury — and proving the outreach was personal.