Mark Appel, the CMO of Sendcloud, brings 35 years of experience to his role, having started his career in sales at Apple before moving into marketing. He discusses his “flip the funnel” strategy, why a CMO’s most important job is to be the voice of the customer, and why events are only one part of a complex revenue mix.
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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Flip the Funnel: Start at the Bottom.
The most effective way to build a predictable revenue engine is to start with in-market, bottom-of-the-funnel audiences (the low-hanging fruit) and slowly build your way to the top. - A CMO’s Role is to Be the Voice of the Customer.
The leader’s most important job is to bring “outside-in thinking” to a tech-focused company that may naturally think “inside-out” (features, not needs). - Events Are Part of a Mix, Not a Silo.
It’s impossible to calculate the full ROI of an event in isolation. As a rule of thumb, a successful event should be responsible for 50% of its cost in pipeline and revenue within a year.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Sendcloud.
I’m Mark Appel, the CMO for Sendcloud. I started my 35-year career in sales management at Apple. About halfway through my career, I made the step into marketing. I worked as a CMO for Exact Software for about eight years, and after a role at cm.com, I joined Sendcloud about one and a half years ago.
Tell us more about what Sendcloud does.
Sendcloud is an e-commerce shipping platform. Our customers are merchants who sell to consumers. We have about 30,000 merchants on our platform, and once they connect their webshop to Sendcloud, they are able to send their parcels all over the world.
What is your main marketing focus right now?
We have a few key areas of focus. First is building the brand and establishing thought leadership in the e-commerce shipping space. At the same time, we need to build the pipeline for the sales organisation and help customer success engage with our existing customers. It’s about driving growth in the eight different countries we serve, but also ensuring customers stick with us, which helps reduce churn and expand our existing base.
How do you define success in marketing?
In the end, it’s about growing the company’s revenue. We split this into two parts: adding new business by acquiring new customers and expanding our existing customer base, which is about net revenue retention.
For new business, success is measured by building the pipeline. For our existing customers, success is helping the customer success team show the value of the platform to drive deeper adoption of its capabilities.
What is the biggest challenge that marketers are facing today?
It’s such a complex playing field. It’s a lot about technology and AI, but there is also a lot of creativity involved. To come up with a campaign that truly resonates, you need many different types of people. This makes it complex because as a CMO, you need to have a pretty broad scope and manage all those different skill sets.
Thinking about your recent strategies, which one would you say was the most successful?
The most important thing we are implementing is a full-funnel marketing strategy, but we do it by flipping the funnel.
With this, I mean we start at the bottom of the funnel with in-market audiences. This is the low-hanging fruit. When I joined, I restructured the marketing team into customer journey teams and put all our priority and attention on the bottom of the funnel, making sure we were engaging merchants who were ready to buy. This is what drives the engine to build a pipeline. Slowly but surely, we are now building our story up towards the middle and, more recently, the top of the funnel with brand campaigns.
How do you engage with these individuals at the bottom of the funnel?
We reach out to merchants mainly online. We try to explain how our platform can help them optimise their logistics and provide the best possible shipping experience to their own customers. We do this by talking about the platform’s benefits, but also about thematic things like improving operational efficiency, enhancing the consumer experience, and extending their business.
Are you also attending trade shows or running your own events?
Yes, we do. There are a couple of key events where we make sure we have a booth, including a big one here in the Netherlands and some international shows in France, where we are doubling down.
We also run our own annual customer event in the Netherlands. This year, we had about 400 attendees, and we were able to explain our innovations and the new things on our product roadmap.
Has that proven successful for creating a new pipeline?
Yes, although an event itself is always in the mix with other initiatives and activities that we do. If I have to calculate the ROI only based on such an event, that is impossible. It’s always in combination with other tactics and campaigns.
How do you calculate the ROI on an event, even as part of a mix?
As a rule of thumb, I think that we should be able to get at least 50% of what an event costs back in pipeline and, in the end, revenue within a year. If we spend 100k on an event, I do not expect that we will earn all 100k back, but I do expect to see 50% of it.
Was this a successful year for Sendcloud from a marketing perspective?
Yes, for sure. We are consistently overperforming in terms of building the pipeline and helping to generate additional revenue.
What is your number one goal going into 2026?
I want to show exactly the same performance, but with at least 10% growth coming just from improvements within the marketing engine itself. On top of that, we have key initiatives like migrating our website to a new CMS, doubling down on our organic media channels, and further rolling out our brand-building campaign. The combination of these should lead to incremental growth.
What would you say is the biggest advantage that CMOs have today that they may not have had in the past?
In general, it’s the number of tools available. There are so many tools that help us practise marketing in the best way possible. That is a gift, but it’s also a pitfall. It was completely different 10 or 15 years ago when the number of tools was limited, and it was way more difficult to connect data points and get good insights.
If you could define the role of a CMO in one word, what would that word be and why?
It’s about customers.
Every time in our own leadership meetings, I am always the one asking, “Hey, are we thinking about this on behalf of the customer?” I’m really trying to inject outside-in thinking. Especially in software companies, there’s a lot of technology involved, and people tend to think “inside-out”—focusing on great features and functions. We need to be focused on our customers and what their needs are, because that should define what we focus on. Really, that outside-in thinking and customer-centricity.
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