B2B Doesn't Have to Be Boring with Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist at Gong

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You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. All right, we're back with another episode of the podcast. My guest on this episode is my friend Udi Ledergore. He's currently the Chief Evangelist at Gong and former CMO. On his journey from marketer number one at Gong to cmo, he led the creation of the revenue intelligence category, pioneered an iconic human centric brand, and led Gong's marketing efforts from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue. On this episode we talk about some of his lessons, learnings and favorite campaigns from the Gong days. Plus, we take a dive into his.

New book, Courageous Marketing and talk about.

Why B2B doesn't have to be boring. Amen. And how to sell that concept to your boss. Here's my conversation with Udi.

Let's talk about my book. Oh, let me get a copy. So I can hold it up like a cheesy.

This guy, he sent me a calendar invite to promote his book on LinkedIn, but he comes on the podcast and says, do you know what we're talking about today?

Well, I meant more specifically, like, look, I don't know if you've skimmed through the book, but there's like 12 chapters with lots of stories and topics.

No, we're good. I do this for a living. We're going to just jump around.

I know. Yeah, I know.

So, first of all, just fill people in with your backstory and history. I think most people will know you from. From Gong, but can you just kind of recap your. Your run at Gong and then also, like, talk about what stage and size and everything Gong is at now? It just has context.

All right, well, thanks for having me back, Dave. I'm excited to be here.

Change nothing. I. You gotta. You can't tell somebody. I do so many interviews with people and then once I start here recording, they literally become a different person. And I'm like, no, no, I want you from the green room.

There's only one version of me. Sorry to disappoint. There's only one version of me, whether it's on stage, in bed, in the kitchen.

That's right. I feel the same way.

All right, well, yes, genuinely, thank you for having me back. I'm excited to be talking and thank you for chatting and helping me clarify some ideas as I was writing this book. So to answer your question, I grew up in the Tel Aviv area in Israel, far, far away from San Francisco, where I am these days. And like most people, I went into the army at age 18, and I stayed there for four years, regular army, and then like 20 years of reserve duty, which is a whole other story. But then I grew up with a father working in tech, and I remember during summers I used to go do, like, office work at his office, and I saw him sitting there typing away code and emails and meeting. I'm like, that seems like the most boring job in the world. I'm never going to be in tech. And here I am at age 50 after 25 years in tech. So that. That didn't age very well, but my father did. He's in great health and he's doing well. Just recently retired.

Hold on. So you put in 20 years in the reserves?

Yes. Which means in Israel, because I know it means different things in different countries. In Israel, it means that they can call you in for a few weeks a year during peace time. It's a few Weeks a year during wartime. Like, now some of my friends have been doing like 250 days of army service.

That's crazy.

While trying to run a family in a business.

Not to get super deep on you in this, in this podcast, but I'm sure you've reflected on what your life could have been and where you've come from. You know, now you're in the U.S. right? But, like, especially over the last two years, right? I mean, that was your life for 20 years, right?

Yes. Yes. The situation in Israel, which I'm assuming you're alluding to, is heartbreaking. I've got my parents and my in laws and my siblings and my niblings. They're all there and they're thankfully safe but absolutely exhausted. And I feel terrible for them every day. And I'm very grateful that I get to live in San Francisco where things are generally more hospitable.

So is that something that, like, do you think about that often? Like, does it drive you in the world of like, you know, I'll post something on LinkedIn about like, SEO is dead. And someone's like, screw this guy. Classic thought leader. White male. Hate this. Like some. It's always a solo consultant guy that always wants to come in on dunk on me. And I tell these things to my wife and she's like, do these people not know? Like, there's real things happening in the world? Like, you're mar. Like, are people really so mad about your opinions on B2B marketing?

Yes. That happens to me literally three times a week when, you know, one of my kids will get worked up because, I don't know, I didn't make the Mac and cheese shape that they like. And then my husband and I look at each other and, and we're remembering that our parents right now are in a bomb shelter in Israel because there's missile alarms going over their heads. I'm like, everything's okay, everything is fine. Just it gives you perspective. And jokes aside, I think growing up in Israel gave me one of the qualities that is so, so, so important in business and in marketing, which is being adaptable. You've got to roll with the punches. And there's going to be so much shit thrown at you if you're living in Israel. Not to diminish anyone else's shit growing up elsewhere, but I think my experience in Israel is there's so much shit thrown at you. There's a violence round every couple of years on average, none of them as terrible as the current one. But there were Some pretty bad ones before that. And you just got to get up and, and go to work. Like, you know, I, I'm texting my sister and brother and asking them like, how are you doing? Are you okay? I have no idea how you're coping with everything going on at home. You know, not getting sleep because you could get missile alarms three times in the middle of the night and have to move to the bomb shelter, but then you have to get up and go to work in the morning. One of my sister in laws is a special ed school teachers and my other sister is a lawyer. And like, how do you do it? And they just respond, well, what choice do we have? That's, that's just our life and you've got to admire that. And people there are going through crazy, crazy, crazy shit. But again, back to our topic. I think it teaches you to become adaptable. And what we've all seen during COVID and during the economic downturn is that it's not necessarily the ones with the most money in the bank that survive. It's not necessarily the smartest one that survived. It's the most adaptable ones that survive.

All right, so you people know you from gong, but recap your. Can you just recap your tenure?

Yes, real quick. I started out in product management. I took two roles in product management, which I thought was fascinating. Being on the fence between what customers want and are looking for and then what our engineering and product teams put out there and being that bridge to simplify very complicated technology into very simple benefits for users. I loved doing that and then taking their requests and putting it in a language that the engineers knew how to go build the product that the customers wanted. So I did that for quite a few years, probably seven years or so. And then I realized that I liked the customer facing part better than working with the engineers. There's only so many product requirement documents I can build with, showing them where the buttons need to go and what they need to do. So I decided to pursue a career in marketing. And this was during a time where I was at a company that we eventually took public and I was doing both product and marketing at the same time. And I just came to my CEO and I said, Zev, I think the company would benefit from having a full time marketing person. We get more brand awareness, you get more pipeline. And he said, yeah, I agree. And I said, and I've got just a guy for you. Let me step into that role. I'd been at the company for like five years as a product manager. Then I said, I'll hire and train someone to replace me as product manager. I'll keep doing that job until we have someone in seat and then I'll step into a full time marketing job. And he said, yeah, I agree. So that's how I created my first PP marketing role. And fun story, the hire that I made for replacing me as product manager eventually worked his way up to replace the CEO when he retired. So that was a good hire.

Pretty good. I had something like that. I hired somebody that ended up being the CEO. And you know how they say like hire people that are smarter than you? This was the, to the extreme, Truly the first person that I hired in like two weeks in the job. I was like, this guy would come to me and ask me questions. I'm like, yeah, yes, absolutely, yes, yes, just do that.

Sounds like it worked out pretty well.

Yeah, it worked out great.

And yeah, from there I just kept going from one company to another. Five of them to be complete. I did five marketing leadership roles. Some of them grew into decent sized teams like a company called Panaya that we eventually sold to Infosys, this Indian IT giant for a few hundreds of millions. Remember back when a few hundreds of millions sounded like a big exit? That was about 10 years ago. And then I did a bit of consulting when my twins were born because I just couldn't bear the thought of 10 Zoom meetings a day. And then Amit Ben Dov, whom I had the pleasure of working with twice, once at Panaya and once at Qlik Software, we kept in touch and we got together for coffee while I was doing consulting. And he shared this crazy idea about software that would record sales conversations and extract all the insights of what's happening and what customers want and what they like and what they dislike. And I said, yeah, I can see the value of that, but is the technology even there? And he said, well I don't know, but I'm going to find out. And then he called me six months later and he said, udi, remember the crazy idea I told you about? Well, we built the product. I found a technical co founder Elon. We built the product, we rolled it out to 12 customers and within three months 11 of them turned into paying customers because they loved the product so much they didn't want us to shut it off. They wrote us a check and he said, I think we have early product market fit and we should start marketing this. Can you come help? And I said yes, I can come help. And then I dropped everything else I was doing and that's how I joined gong. So this is my first, third time working with Amit Bendo as my leader and fearless CEO.

Yeah. But you know, career hack, if you, if you know a CEO that is an amazing product visionary, go work with them.

Just follow them. Wherever he'll go, I will follow him. Yes, that's a big career hack. I think some people underestimate. You know, there's the old cliche, which is true, that people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses. And that's often the truth.

How do you, you know, one thing when I mentioned that, like, sometimes people are like, oh, yeah, you know, must be nice, like, for you. You can do that, right? What advice would you give to someone maybe early, like, how can we extrapolate that a little bit and say, like, okay, if you're early in your career and you don't have a CEO that you can go follow? In a world of like, trying to pick the right company, it might not always be the right product at the right time. We've all had companies, you know, I'm looking at your LinkedIn just like mine, where, you know, you got a bunch of successes, but there's also, you know, you, you were at a company for eight months and that clearly was not the right spot for you at that time. And so you left. And I've done that too. Right. But for the up and coming marketers, what is it to look for outside of the. They can pay me this much money. And here's the job description. I think there's a, there's a, there's a lesson in like, picking the right company if you can.

There is. So here's what I learned, and I'll take that apart into two questions, which I think are somewhat separate. How to pick the right company and how to pick the right boss. So it starts with first self reflecting and understanding. Even if you're early in your career, like, being honest with yourself, how much chaos can I withstand? How much lack of structure and process am I comfortable with? If you ask some people, they're like, oh, I need an employee handbook. I want to know what the HR benefits are. I need to know, like, when they expect me to clock in and clock out, then maybe startup environment is not for you, man. Just be honest with yourself about that. And so that's one thing. Now, looking at the company, and I talk about this in my book, I think one of the main reasons that marketing and marketers fail is not even their fault. Except for not checking this in advance, which is lack of product, market Fit. Now, most marketers, and I think I've seen you write about this as well, Dave. I for one know how to take product that has even early product market fit, which means we understand what value it provides to which user and now go scale that, bring more of those users so we can get in front of them and sell them and make them raving fans. I know how to scale that. That's. That's called demand generation and building a brand. I don't know how to take a vague idea that some founder or engineer fell in love with. They don't have a single raving fan and now they want me to scale that. I don't know how to do that. And I've been at companies like those that show up at 8 or 10 months in my tenure where I tried doing that and it just didn't work. So I was labeled as a failure because I didn't scale this vague idea. But guess what? The company didn't figure it out or took them many, many years to figure it out before they can do any effective marketing.

Well, I think what's interesting on, on that also is that vague idea. It's like with any of these companies, right, there's often so many directions that you can go in. And I do think there are multiple paths to be successful. But it's like the, the value. Good things happen when you can be clear. When the CEO and founder and whoever can be clear about like the vision and the one, the the one lane you're going after, right? Like, I, I can think of a founder that I know right now, in the early stages of something, and it's like, well, we're, we can do this and we can also do this and we can. That's a night actually a nightmare for a marketer because it's like the website is never good enough. It's never clear enough. The story is never good enough. Every week they want to come back and rework the sales deck. Like, was there something with the guys that Gong in the early days where it was like it was always going to be for sales, sales calls. It was never like, you know, esoteric platform that was going to be impossible to articulate. Like, it seemed like you guys were clear from that from the beginning.

Yes, absolutely. I think Gong is one of those rare companies that. And Amit occasionally shares some of his 2015 slides that he used to raise a seed round. We are still on that roadmap. We have not diverted left or right from the 2015 roadmap and the company's Doing pretty well.

Yeah. I mean, dude, look, as somebody who. There was one point where like Drift and Gong were on the same trajectory and then now like, I, it's. It breaks my soul. Soul people are like, I'll talk about a marketing play that I did at Drift. And then in the Exit 5 community, someone's like, can you go find a link to that? And they, they literally killed the website. It's gone. It's all gone. It's all gone. But you know what I love about the Gong story is like, it is your mother, your cousin, whoever, no matter what industry you're in, you can explain what it does. And that is always going to pass the sniff test for me. It's never been. Gong has never been positioned as the all in one, you know, platform to do X, Y and Z. It's very simple and easy to explain and I have been jealous of that for, for sure.

And you should be. Dave. I. You won't see me marketing cybersecurity or something that I can't explain to my mother or my children. I can't, I can't. I want to understand. So I chose Gong for three reasons. One was the leadership, because I'd already worked with Amit twice before and I knew that he's a seasoned, experienced founder that knows what good and great looks like and he also knows quite a bunch of mistakes to avoid. And that's something I didn't find in first time founders that I worked with twice and that did not work out. So I don't think that's a coincidence. I'm not saying don't go work with any first time founder, but you've got to understand, do they have the maturity and do they have some of the experience to make fewer of the mistakes and more of the right decision? That's hard. Second thing is the product, right? We had those 11 beta customers that had turned into paid customers. They were raving fans from day one when I arrived in the company. Within a month we had 12 testimonials on the website from those first 11 customers because they were raving fans and they went on video. We shot them with an iPhone and they were just telling how excited they were to record the calls and be able to search for their competitors and use it for coaching. And you don't usually see that in really early stage companies. So the sniff test definitely passed. This is a product people are going to get excited about. And the third thing which you just talked about is the buyer Persona. I love marketing to sales and marketing Personas to Go to marketing Personas because they're not too technical, they care about the business results and so they have the budget. Because if they're convinced that you can help them achieve better business results, they will find the money. Good luck doing that with selling to HR or finance or it. Those are often seen as cost centers, which are much harder to sell to. Possible, of course, but much harder. And then the products usually become so messy to explain.

All right, so long story short, Udi was VP of marketing at Gong, CMO at Gong, and then a couple years ago moved into this chief evangelist role. Company's been wildly successful, done hundreds of millions in, in revenue. But now I think Udi, UDI did something cool, which is wrote a book called Courageous Marketing that will be out when we, when we put this podcast out. He's got it right there. He's got his red sweater on today.

I'm on brand today.

I love the book. I love the title. There is a. There's a very handsome, well known bald thought leader featured multiple times in the book, which I'm sure is just going to blow your mind. But I thought it'd be fun. I thought it'd be fun to dig into, you know, people. Here's how. Let's spend this time together. So people love specific examples of great marketing plays. And so let's dig into some of the. You know, you said this in the beginning, you know, taking the boring out of B2B marketing, that's kind of the goal for your book. We can talk about gong, we can talk about anything that you want in the book. But let's talk about some of the most memorable plays under this vein of courageous marketing. First, why does marketing need to be courageous? Why did you frame the book in that lens as opposed to the B2B marketing playbook?

The playbook because I think it's the solution to some of the biggest problems of why marketing doesn't get off the ground. And I explored this in the beginning of the book. I talked to you and half a dozen other exceptional CMOs and asked them about their failure stories and what they've seen works and doesn't work. And I found that many, many times the reason we marketers fail is because we kind of gravitate to a consensus and to something mediocre. I just call it playing safe is the riskiest strategy of all because you don't get into trouble immediately for playing it safe. Right? It's just like the IT person of the 1980s who didn't get in trouble because they bought an IBM. Right. There's the whole saying, nobody got fired for buying IBM. You don't get fired immediately for doing what everyone else is doing in marketing because it seems safe and agreeable. The problem with that is that you will never cut through the noise. You will never create something unique and differentiated by doing what everyone else is doing. You remember this? When you launched the Drift website and I launched the Gong website, everyone was doing blue and white and gray. That was kind of the only approved color scheme for B2B websites. So as soon as we saw that, I went for fuchsia, pink and purple because I wanted to stand out. Now, I would have found it very easy to get consensus on blues and whites because it looks very professional and look like what everyone else was doing. But that would have been the most boring website that nobody would have given the time of day to. So I slapped a drooling bulldog. I went with bubblegum pink and purple. Now people were talking about it.

Yeah.

And that is why I think finding your courage in everything you do in brand building and content, in tone of voice, in your event experiences, in your category, building and fighting against the consensus and fighting against the conservatives, that is how you're going to stand out and create really exceptional marketing that moves the needle.

Oh, Odi, I could. I wish I could come give you a hug right now, man.

I want to hug, Dave. I'm a hugger.

Because, like, I just think we spend so much time arguing about nonsense in marketing, or not even arguing. It's just like the things that really matter. It's not that little nurture email, it's not that website optimization. It's not like ABM is dead. It's not SEO. Is that. Is this. And you did this at Gong. I'm sure Amit had a lot of influence on saying that you need the permission from the founder of the company to do that. Like, when I was at Drift, what was really wise about David, who was the founder and CEO, was like, look, he had awareness of the market. It's even crazier now with AI. But this was, you know, 2015, 2016, you know, Scott Brinker's martech landscape, there was 15,000 tools. Nobody needs another sales tool. Nobody knows needs another Martech tool. And so he's like, if we're going to go build this brand, we want to get attention. We want to do it in a way that is going to stand out. And I just think this is such an. It's so obvious, but it is an underrated ingredient. Why. Why go through the Effort of starting a company, raising all this money, doing all this stuff and then damn it, your website looks like stripe. Like why would we do that verse spend the calories to like make a brand that, that stands out. And I think we're in a world where we're chasing so many little tweaks and optimizations. The obvious answer is honestly to just take a bigger swing. And I think seeing the gong bulldog, seeing the gong purple, the whole, you know, visual identity that you all went and did and you made that investment in a relatively early time in the company to completely change and level up that identity. Right.

I think I understand why, why that happens though. They think about it, the typical company, I mean, I know you advise a bunch of companies and so do I. We've all seen this happen. You get a CEO who typically does not come with marketing experience. Right. Most CEOs were not marketers. I've been very lucky to work for a CEO. I didn't mention this earlier, who used to be a cmo. Right? I mean, no, but they do think.

They know everything about marketing.

Right. So that's how it starts now. Now here's where it really gets nasty. Because they hire someone not to be provocative and a thought leader because they're a startup. So you and I probably wouldn't go work for them right now. So they end up hiring someone who maybe manage social media on at some medium sized company and they don't feel they have the authority or the permission to go do something crazy. So you've got a CEO who doesn't know marketing. You've got a kind of mid level, early stage marketer that didn't really do anything radical and that's a deadly combination if you're going to build some exceptional marketing. It's a deadly combination.

All right, so number one would be like this visual identity that you gave to Gong.

Yes. What do you want to know?

What else? I think it's good. I think it's good.

I can talk about like how the visual identity was kind of the lipstick at the end of the process of defining our brand personality. Because I think that's a step that lots of marketers skip. And it's a shame because then you get this incongruent tone of voice with their look and feel and someone is putting out very stuffy content. But then like, oh, we're cool and friendly.

Yeah. So you made a conscious effort to say this is our brand personality and here's what that means. Tell me about that.

Yes, we went through a process pretty early on way before the visual identity process to understand who we are as a brand. Because some people think that choosing your font is, is something random. It's, it's not. They're fonts that make you look serious, they're fonts that make you look playful, they're fonts that make you look scary. Just look at what movie producers use on their posters. They use very different fonts for Batman, for Nightmare on Elm street and for a ROM call. Right. They're different fonts, they're different colors. There's different everything in the design. So you can't just choose that randomly. And it has to come from a deeper place of who are you? What is your personality as a brand? So we went through that process, I'll cut the long story short. And we, we identified a few qualities that were very important to us. Amongst them we said we are mature in the sense that we're authoritative and we understand our space. But we're going to marry that with playful and friendly. Whereas many, many brands think that mature has to come with kind of old and conservative and stuffy. And that's how you end up sounding like a bank. Like we didn't want to be that, so we wanted to be an authority. But that help helpful friend that you can go up to at a cocktail party and ask a question and you know they're going to have a great story. And I think that's the vibe that we're giving off to this day with Gong Labs content, with Bruno the Bulldog and with our visual identity and the tongue in cheek tone of voice that was all intentional all came back from that brand personality exercise.

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So that's a big one, setting the direction for the brand and that gives everybody the playbook to run off of. People that listen to this podcast love hearing about specific campaigns and plays that you've run. I know there's a couple that you talk about in the book that you're proud of, so let's pick some to dive into.

Yeah, so one of the topics I talk about in the book, which I think you also happened to post about this morning on the day we're recording, is what I call punching above your weight, which is making your company appear to be a couple of years ahead of where it really is. And before I get into the examples, maybe we'll. We'll say why this is important because most startups are in a pickle because they're trying to sell to large enterprises. But large enterprises don't like buying from startup. So you're screwed. Right. You need to sell to enterprise because you're building enterprise software. But what right minded enterprise is going to buy from a small startup? Small startup that might not even be there next year. So you've got to overcome that one. On the product side, you've got to create all that boring enterprise, great security and privacy compliance and nobody wants to talk about that, but you have to do that. But then on the marketing side, you can make your company appear to be much bigger and much farther ahead than it really is.

Well, this is, there's just a perception lesson here, right. And it's like whether you're buying a sandwich or pizza down the street, you want to walk into that restaurant or little sandwich shop and you want to feel like that place is dialed in. Right. You want to feel like they have their shit together.

Yes.

Whether they're brand new or not. And I believe in, like, I love the comment that you made about punching above your weight because I think you can do that by. I think a lot of companies will just partner with anyone and do co marketing with anyone. And I think we used to be really intentional about like who we'd want to do partnerships with and who do you want to be seen with. Yeah, there's a whole perception element there. And there is a, there's a line from. I saw this clip on Instagram one time and I think it was. Is the comedian Jack Lemmon. Is that what his name is? Do you know?

So the Jack Lemon I'm thinking about, that's a Hollywood actor that's been long dead.

He's an actor who's long dead. But I saw a clip, I saw, it was an old clip and it was right, he's having dinner at this, at this. He's friends with Frank Sinatra and he's having dinner with this woman who he's trying to wine and dine and, you know, whatever. And he tells Frank Sinatra to come over and say hello because it would make him seem like he's a really big deal. And so Frank Sinatra walks over the table and Jack Lemon's like, oh, would you get the hell out of here, Frank. Can't you see I'm having dinner? And he just treats him like a piece of crap. And it just created this leader, like this guy, guy's so big he can even tell Frank Sinatra off. And I was like, man, that is a great like marketing perception, perception lesson.

Perception is reality in our world.

So I don't know if this was one of the examples that we talked about in the book. But I, I, this is what I was referencing on LinkedIn that I wrote about today. We, we wanted to get involved at Saster. And at the time we had a hard time justifying the cost of say, a booth, right? But we were like, let's go, let's just do something anyway. And so we found out that outside of the convention center where the event was, there was like one billboard. And you could get basically that billboard a la carte. And it was like, I don't know, four grand for like two weeks or something to have that billboard, right? And then we could also like wrap the train station for like 10 days. And that was maybe like eight grand. And this was, in the world of social media. I knew that if everybody, what would people do when they saw that? They would take pictures of it. And even if they didn't see it, you better believe I was going to go out there and take a picture of myself in front of it. And so I just love, I love stuff like that. And so like, I, to me, like, when we think about like, what is courageous marketing, that is, it's very easy to be like, well, how did you measure that a day?

So let's, let's give our listeners the formula to do that because you've pulled it off many times. I pulled it off. And other marketers like Andrew Davis from Paddle pulled it off by sending a spaceship to outer space and recording like custom ABM videos of his customer software running, which is wild. Go, go, go. Look at that. And so here's the formula, folks. What you do is you look for a medium that's usually associated with a very large advertiser. It can be a billboard, it can be a TV ad, it can be wrapping cars. Something big can be a full page ad. In the Wall Street Journal Step two, you look for the smallest version that you could possibly buy of that thing. So in the Wall Street Journal, there's a regional edition that doesn't say that it's a regional edition at the top of the page. So when you take a photo of that, it still says Wall Street Journal at the top, but it cost like a quarter of the national app. If you follow Dave's advice, you buy a cheap billboard in a strategic space. I've done this multiple times, spending $500 buying a times Square billboard that lights up for like two minutes of the day. And during those two minutes, I made sure there was a photographer and a videographer there, which cost me another 300 bucks. So they could capture that with all the hustle. And bustle of Times Square. So that's the next part. You get creative with how you use the medium. I've used Times Square billboards for everything from a product launch to acknowledging our outstanding gongsters, which is our version of Employee of the Year. So you do that. I know you took one in some dodgy alley in San Francisco. I saw one of your little billboards. It was a tweet of one of your customers. Right. I remember that. So you get creative with how you use that.

Dodgy to who? Maybe dodgy to you? Myself. I'm numb to get after it. I don't care.

I remember exactly what it is between fifth and sixth on Mission, because I used to get coffee there. I know exactly where.

We're lucky that when we took that picture, there wasn't like a man pulling down his pants and taking a poop on the side of the sidewalk. Like that.

Kind of dodgy for those who haven't been to San Francisco. So you get creative with a medium, then you take great photos and videos of them. And here's the crucial step now you amplify the hell out of it on all of your owned digital mediums, like your social media, your emails, your speaking opportunities, wherever you can get it out there. Because now you're talking to your captive audience. I don't care about the random tourists on the way to Phantom of the Opera on Broadway looking at my billboard. I care about the 300,000 followers we have on LinkedIn seeing a screenshot of that billboard. And that is a point.

And they're going to be like, wow, this company, the company that I use is so legit. They have this huge billboard in Times Square. They don't. It's not just a geo target people in New York.

Exactly. And while we're on it, another reach hack is to get every single employee to share that on their social media. That costs $0 and gets you more reach than you could ever afford.

Well, udi, they're proud to do it because if they. If you have a company where the company's growing, things are going well. People are always like, how did you get everybody to share on LinkedIn? It was like, well, they were drinking the Kool Aid at a crazy rate. It wasn't like we ran some campaign. It was like, you know, work is. Work is a key part of everyone's identity. You go to a party, you meet someone, they say, what do you do for work? And so when people were so proud to work at Gong, they love the company. They wanted to, like, show Their mom and their cousin. Look at, you know, my company's got this big billboard in Times Square. So I Love Love Love plays like this. Udi, when I talk about this though, the number one question people ask me is like, how do you measure that? Or why do it? Or what's the impact of that? Doesn't matter if it was $12,000 instead of, you know, $120,000, you still need to, like, you're not just lighting that money on fire. So how do you help folks answer that question?

So there's a pre measurement tip that I have to insert here, which is how do you budget for that and how do you make it easier? So it's not a long argument with your CFO or CEO every time you identify an opportunity. And the answer to that, like with any good medicine, is preemptive medicine versus curing an illness. And how do I do that? Every year during budgeting season, I allocate 5 to 10% of my program budgets to what's now officially known as marketing experiments. The original internal marketing version just called it Udi's Crazy Ideas. But Russell was smart enough to tell me we should change that to marketing experiments before it goes to the cfo. So we changed Dudy's Crazy Ideas budget line item to marketing experiments. And here's how I explain why. We need a budget for marketing experiments. And every CFO and CEO will nod in agreement when they hear this. Number one, there's two reasons. Number one, there's going to be opportunities that present themselves in the next budget year that don't exist yet. Example might be a big industry event that gets announced in March and happens in September. September, I don't know about it. This November and budgeting season, if I don't budget something for it, we're going to wish we did because we're going to want to be in that event, but we won't have a budget. Then we're going to have to be in a squeeze and find a budget. So that's, number one, just marketing opportunities that present themselves throughout the year. Number two, any and all of the channels that we have working right now are going to tap out at some point. So we constantly need to be experimenting with new channels to see what the next big thing is. New technologies, new mediums that come up. Everyone remember Clubhouse that came out during COVID Everyone thought that was going to be the next big thing, or now it's TikTok and Instagram and all these things. We have to be experimenting. So we need a budget for that so that when our current channels tap out, we have something else as a backup. So you explain that and that's how you get your marketing experiments budget. Now you have an experience to actually go play with. So we went and played with it. Now how do we measure it? So first we have to be comfortable and we've got to set expert expectations that not everything is going to show up neatly on your digital dashboard. This is not a LinkedIn ad. It's not a landing page with a clear conversion rate. When you do some of these brand campaigns, you're not going to get clear, measurable ROI and every single thing. But there are things you can do to estimate the impact that these are having and what I call soft roi. You know what soft ROI is? On the billboards that we did to showcase outstanding gongsters that came out of the marketing budget, I spent a few tens of thousands of dollars showcasing our outside gongsters. It was so good that we keep doing it. Now, eight years later, we're still doing it every year. So here's what soft ROI looks like. First, the employees who get recognized, they all fly to the nearest billboard. They take a selfie, they send it to their mom, they post it on their social media, and they are gangsters for life. Those employees will not leave unless we really F up. So that's soft ROI number one. Two, all of their team members are cheering from that for them, sharing these photos and, and asking me privately, how do I get on a billboard next year? What do I need to do to be an outstanding gongster? Because I want to show my mom my face on a billboard. That's number two. Number three, when candidates come into interviews, we hear them say, oh, we saw your employees on, on the billboards on the way into the office. What a beautiful way of recognizing and acknowledging your employees. So that's another piece of roi. And then I'll give you another one. If you use revenue intelligence like gong, you can actually ask Gong, in which sales conversations were these campaigns mentioned? So I'll give you two quick examples. One, we sponsored the Michael Lewis podcast. Michael Lewis, bestselling author of Moneyball.

Yeah, Moneyball, the Big Short.

So he was speaking at one of our events and he offered, hey, we should have your CEO come for an interview on my podcast. Now that sounds very generous until you see the price tag, which is a nice five figure number. So we decided to go for it, even though most of us would not. Because you'd say, how would I ever measure the impact of that? So here's how I measured the impact of that on the week that the episode with my CEO aired. I went into GONG and I typed in Michael Lewis podcast, and GONG showed me, actually, there are 40 calls, 20 in the first week, and then like 21 in the first week, and then Like 40, 14, and 7 in the next two weeks that the lead on the call said to the salesperson, I heard your CEO on the Michael Lewis podcast. So I went to your website and asked for this demo. How cool is that? Now I can measure some of the impact. And I knew that even if those were the only 40 people who asked for the demo, it was totally worth. And I had great positive ROI. But I also know that there's probably 50 others who didn't mention it because we didn't ask them how they heard about us. And I did the same for our super bowl commercial. When our super bowl commercial went live, I used a bunch of ways to measure it, but one of them was looking into Gong, and I saw 455 calls that were talking about super bowl around our commercial. So even my CFO could not stay blind to that, especially when I coupled it with website traffic showing increased traffic 30% higher that week and much higher conversion. And at the end of the week, my CFO came to me to tell me, hey, Udi, do you know we just broke our weekly record for most pipeline ever created at Gong? And that was on super bowl week. So that's all the proof I needed.

Love it. All right, end of the podcast. There's enough ROI in that rant to go buy Udi's book. There's a couple of things. First of all, Michael Lewis, you can go on his podcast, but you have.

To pay for it.

In this case, yes. I'm sure he invites other guests to Shady. This was a paid opportunity.

Okay, interesting.

I don't want to shame anyone, but this was a paid opportunity community. All the big podcasts are doing this now. I'm sure you've heard Dave.

No, I'm like, shit, we should start doing that. You should go Send you the bill for this. My goodness.

I'll send you a book.

Thank you. Please. That's great.

It's actually in the mail. You should be getting it, like, today. Tomorrow.

I'll go check. I did see FedEx just come right now. So. So I love. I love that you talked about the success in that is about the pre framing. Right? And it's like, I think if you go and do all that stuff, it makes perfect sense. Why, if you just go and do all that stuff, then everyone looks at it as like, well, how much pipeline did that generate? We didn't book any new meeting. But if you go up and you say, well, hold on, we're not gonna. This is not gonna eat away from our, like, budget that's used to drive pipeline. This is an additive thing. So I love that. It's when you just are like, yeah, we spent a hundred grand on billboards. And the CFO is like, well, how many meetings did we drive from that? We're like, well, the goal wasn't meetings. I also love the idea of the soft roi. And I think there's just so much of marketing, like, yes, you can measure everything, but a lot of the marketing stuff like this is harder to measure, but it's more of a feel thing. And we have so many ways of measuring that today, though, that are just qualitative. Like, I would always have screenshots from LinkedIn in my board deck, because if an ICP customer writes this, like, amazing thing on LinkedIn, like, sure. Does that translate directly into, like, you know, website visitors and traffic? No.

Your board members get it. They get it.

People are not dumb. Right? Like, we have to show people how marketing is done. And people are not dumb. They know that everything is not bought in a straight line. Right.

And so it's probably worth mentioning for. For folks listening who maybe haven't done this at scale, Once you're spending 2, 5, $10 million a year on media, then you can actually kick in some measurement tools. I think we both know a great company called Paramark who's doing something like this where they're using marketing media mix to actually show the impact of those black boxes saying, hey, on that quarter where you invested more in billboards and podcasts, you actually had more traffic on the website convert, because that's how brand impacts demand gen. But you can't accurately measure that when you're spending $10,000. You need to be spending a few millions for the statistical models to kick in. So we have the data to support this. We just need the scale to measure that more accurately.

I love that. And so once you get to that scale. Yes, like, absolutely. You know, can. Can HubSpot measure the impact of their, like, out of home campaigns? They absolutely can. Right? But I just think, like, for, you know, when I say, like, oh, yeah, we spent 12 grand on this billboard, I do get a lot of questions, well, how did you measure that? And I think hearing you say that, it's like, the answer was not 12. The answer is 12. No, it was like, well, people took pictures of it and it made our employees feel amazing. And we did this thing outside of our customer's office and it's pictures like, let's bring that into the marketing. And then, yeah, maybe it can be a way to test into that. Also, you mentioned the thing that I got burned by probably my first time really running marketing. Biggest thing was like, you're under so much pressure to hit the number today. I did not do enough to hit the number for two years from now, three years from now. And it's very hard to do that. It's like you need to brush your teeth and floss every day so you don't get a cavity. I am tired and I'm not going to floss my teeth. Right.

Like, it is hard because you're like, you know the cliche, we're building the plane while we're flying it.

But what you have to do, what you said though, which is when you budget, you have to intentionally put that money aside.

You know, you're going to need it. You're always going to need it. Why not put it in the budget?

But then what you said is such a smart move, is like the CFO and the rest of the company, they look at that budget differently. That is your experiments budget, right?

Yeah. Which is true. Like, these things are truly experiments. You know, we did the outstanding gangster billboards and it was such a hit with the employees that now we have a line item for outstanding Gongster billboards. That's a line item at Gong for years now. Because it was an experiment that UDI did and worked out really well. So those things do mature into real budget line items later if they're successful. You know, super bowl, we did twice and we stopped.

We got like 10 minutes. What would you want to say before if we hung up now and you're like, damn it. I wanted to tell that to Dave in the podcast.

I think something that is not talked about a lot is how to build a courageous team and how to motivate those people to do their best work. Because we talked about so far about, well, how do you get that buy in from above? How do you get the CEO to get it and the CRO to get it? But many times you hire a team and they're just doing mediocre best practice work and not being edgy. So how do you, how do you do that? Do you think that's interesting?

Absolutely, I do. Yes. How do you do that?

Let's talk about it. So to actually uncover how to do this I talked to half a dozen of my team members throughout the years of Gong. Folks like Russell Banzon, Sheena Badani, Devin Reed, Chris Orlob, Vince Chan. I'm sure you've talked and seen all these names. They made Gong's marketing how amazing it was. It was not all Udi's work. I Devin created things I could never do and Russell did things and Sheena did things. Sheena created our category, revenue Intelligence, for God's sake. I couldn't do that by myself. And I talked to them and as I was interviewing them and asking them, like, what motivated you to do these experimental things and do crazy things? So there's a few things that emerged and for us managing teams, I would say the top line and then I can go into some details is you need to create a situation where your team members have the psychological safety to experiment, to do trials and errors and understand that they're not going to get fired for everything that goes wrong. They're actually going to be asked to teach us the learnings from that and then move on to the next thing. And that's why we have an experiments budget. And you've got to create a culture that celebrates and supports. Go farther, be edgier. I heard this from Devin and from Chris when I interviewed him. They said, you and Amit, you kept pushing us like that's not crazy enough. Go bigger. How could we 10x this? Don't talk to me about a 10% increment. Talk to me about a 10x increment. Go wild. Like there is no limit. And Amit still says that. He says marketing budget is unlimited. Show me the ROI on what you're doing and you get more money. It is unlimited. Because why would he limit the budget of what's bringing in business? And if you have that mentality and you drive people to just do something big and crazy, they will start doing that now. On the other side, you do need to harness them in or rein them in. And you do that with what Adam Grant called in his book, Think Again Process accountability, which sounds boring, but it's not. The idea is that we do have goals, we do have a North Star. So we're not going to do random acts of marketing and do this random billboards all over the world. Like if we have an event that we need to support and we have an idea of, we can explain why in the best case scenario this will help us, then let's go do it.

Well, it's like do crazy things in service of that goal, right? And so the goal is we have a pipeline goal. Hey, let's come up with crazy ideas. And I do love that. I mean, first of all, this only works at a culture where you have the CMO and you have the CEO saying like, I want you all to take more chances. And so I think I used to roll my eyes at that term, psychological safety, and now I understand it.

It's so true. Because if people don't have it, they won't do their best work for you.

Well, and then you just get a content machine that's, you know, we got three blog posts a week and that's our content.

You know, my husband's a physician and he said that for years now in the US the medicine has been defensive medicine because doctors are so afraid of getting sued. That's the same thing that's happening with marketers. They're afraid of getting fired. So they're doing defensive marketing. They're doing the equivalent of buying an IBM in the 1980s. Right. What won't get me fired?

And that is like, you know, go back and study any marketing ever. It's like the all of the opportunity. You know what it is? It's like, it's like investing, right? It's like VCs. It is that they might make 100 bets and 98% of those bets fail, but the two of them have 10x100x.

Or they return the fund. Yeah.

So do you have an example of like, is there something that return the fund at Gong? I'm just going to, I'm going to riff on one thing that I talk about that you guys did a lot was I think in an, in an era where like content marketing was like, write five blog posts a week, have a newsletter. What I loved about what you guys did with GONG Labs was like, we're going to only publish one thing, but it's going to be super data driven, original research, fact based data shared everywhere. And it's like we might only publish immediately applicable.

Everyone reading it can do what it says and be better for it today. That's the important thing.

So like that's a good example of like taking a big swing. And it's like, yeah, just because everyone else is blogging for SEO, let's not do that. Let's write two pillar pieces of content a quarter and those pillar pieces are going to have the like 10x returns.

That is our fund return. And GONG Labs is still going strong nine years after we started it. It's crazy, right? What content series has kept up? There's not many podcasts or YouTube series or anything that's gone for nine years. Gong Lapse has been going strong for nine years while we've tried, and a bunch of other stuff that didn't do as well. Gong Labs just keeps. It's a gift that keeps on giving because we're giving people something that makes them instantly better. Here I'll give you two examples that you might have heard from me before. But one, if you open a cold call by asking, how have you been? You'll keep people longer on the line than if you ask, how are you? Or is this a bad time to call you? So how have you been? Makes you sound vaguely familiar. And people give you more time as they go through their head trying to think, oh, have I spoken to this guy before? Like, he sounds familiar. So that works now you can use that. I took 10 seconds to teach you something new. And that's a typical Gong Labs content. The other one, of course, that we became very famous for a couple of years ago was when we found that salespeople who swear on their sales calls tactfully increase their win rates by 8%. What does tactfully mean? It means the best way of using that is as a mirroring technique. If you've read Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference, he talks about different mirroring techniques. Well, here's a manifestation of one of them. If your buyer signals that they like that colorful vocabulary by using it first, you should absolutely respond. Using the same vocabulary, you just build more trust and rapport. And you just increased your win rates on average by 8%. Who doesn't want to do that? That was a 30 second snippet that anyone can use that. And the best part is you don't have to buy my product to use that. I'm giving you value that is independent from using my product. That's what great content does.

And I think what's great about your example is I think that recently I've been on this kind of tirade of like, we spend so much time in marketing talking about marketing and sales alignment. Marketing and sales alignment. I don't think enough people talk about marketing and product alignment. Like that is fundamentally like you need, you need to be. You need to have a product roadmap. You need to have a product vision that is whatever the relationship with the sales team is, whatever we can work on that. Show me an awesome product, an awesome roadmap, a product leader with vision. That's the person that I want to pair up with from a marketing standpoint. And none of this, all the Gong stuff you're talking about is product related stuff. It's being able to get that data right. It's not like we made up this marketing campaign. It's, it seems like it's such a crucial part of your success.

There it is. And I think this is a good place as any to give huge kudos to Gong's product and engineering teams because with, for all my marketing talent, I could not have succeeded at a company that did not make an absolutely awesome product. So that, that is, that is the biggest career hack. Find a company that makes a truly awesome product. And there's ways to look for that that I talk about in the book. We won't get into them now, but the second thing like, like you said is we provided exclusive content that folks could not get anywhere else and we used our product to create that content. So that is the best combo of all. And I've done that before at other companies. It's not unique to Gong. You know who's doing that amazingly today? Carta. Carta are using their product to produce Walker's content, which is mind blowing. I love his content. He provides so much great content for founders and investors and employees. And on the way he's very subtly promoting their own products. So you want to use it because you're like, if I can get this content for free, imagine what I can be getting by using their product. So that's how you go use it. If you can't get that exclusive content, you can always survey people and that's kind of secondary data. And if you can't do that, then you can always revert to thought leadership. But at the end of the day, without data, your content is just another opinion. So if you can bring data to the table and especially if it's exclusive and related to your product, that's how you create the best content marketing.

Before we wrap up, we can plug the book where do you think the future of marketing is going with AI and as it relates to this idea of courageous marketing, is AI going to allow you to do more courageous marketing? Is AI? Is our inboxes just going to be filled with a bunch of shit because of AI and maybe there's more opportunity. What I'm sure you have a philosophy on, we know the future. It's a very exciting time. I'm not, I don't mean to poo poo on anything. I think it's a very exciting time to be, to do marketing. It's given me a lot of energy recently, but I'm curious as it relates to this topic of courageous marketing, where.

You see the role of AI. I think courageous marketing is not going away. If anything, it'll be needed more than ever. I think what we're seeing, and if you look at our friends in coding and engineering, there are a couple of steps ahead of us in using AI as far as I can tell, and what I've seen there is that they need a lot fewer junior people who used to do very mundane tasks, because those are the first ones that AI is replacing. And so I think in that dance of figuring out where we use human intelligence, where we use artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence is first coming in and doing the entry level work. So as an entry level marketer, the bar is so much higher now you actually have to do what used to be called, I don't know, mid career marketing to get an entry level job now, because AI can do the super simple stuff. And that's going to leave us more time to do courageous strategizing and coming up with the best ideas for our brand and for our content and for our events. And I think we're going to be doing a lot of more interesting work rather than resizing ads and summarizing or expanding articles for different content formats, because that's what AI can do for us already today. And it's going to be able to do more and more of that, potentially help us with ideation. Although right now most of the ideas that we get are again, these kind of average of the best practices that everyone else is doing. So the best hack for using that in marketing. I think I saw Kyle Lacy write about that, the CMO jellyfish. He said, when we go into brainstorming meeting and we want original ideas, we first ask Chad, what are the top 10 ideas for this project? And then we take all of those off the table because those are the most obvious ideas that everyone's already doing, so we're not going to consider them. And now starts the real ideation. So I think that's a creative use of understanding the limitations of AI, what it can do today and what maybe it will help us do tomorrow.

I dig it. Nice. All right, your book is out now.

My book is out now.

When this episode is out, your book is out now. What do you want people to do?

Well, go to Amazon or wherever you buy your books and look for courageous marketing. There's only one book for now titled Courageous Marketing and I would love to hear your take on it. And I'm the only Uden Ledger Gore on LinkedIn. So if you connect with me there, you can tell me what you hated about the book. Hopefully you love at least one thing and I'm happy to connect with everyone there.

No, the book is great. I, I appreciate what you did with the book and I think what, what you'll get from the book is like as tactical and specific as UDI was on this podcast. If you want those specific examples, screenshots, I think it's a book that you will dog ear and highlight and mark up. It's easy to write a fluffy marketing book and this is not one of those. And so definitely go and go and check it out. Maybe it was a year ago almost, I think I spent about an hour and a half. UDI interviewed me. I know the level of work you put into this book. Who else that people would know did you interview for the book?

So amazing CMOs like Carrie Lou Dietrich, who took Atlassian Public, Tricia Gelman, who you know who's now at Box, Michelle Tate from mailchimp, Andrew Davis from Paddle, a whole bunch of Russell Banzon, who's now CMO at Cresta. And I think that the most heartwarming endorsements that I got after the book was already written and went out for endorsements, folks like Daniel Pinks are on the COVID Robert Cialdini, who we all know from Influence, is on the COVID Like, these people read the book and said, this is good. Like people should read this. So if you don't trust me and Dave, but you do trust Cialdini or Daniel Pink or Nirayal or Neil Patel, all those folks are endorsing the book and are on it and we'd love to get more takes on it.

Love it. Bardudi, great job. Good luck with the book. We'll see you out there.

Thanks for having me, Dave. It's always a pleasure.

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