Gong CMO Udi Ledergor, 5x Marketing Leader at B2B Startups

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1, 2, 3, 4. Exit.

Exit. Exit.

Hey, everybody. On this episode of the Exit 5 podcast, my guest is Uber Udi Ledergore. He is the CMO at gong. By popular request, I am republishing this interview. We did this discussion about a year ago on the B2B Marketing Leaders podcast. Budi is a tremendous CMO. He's done an awesome job at Gong. They've really blazed a path in B2B SaaS in the sales and marketing world. I think there's a lot to learn from. This was a great conversation. Here it is, me and Udi Lettergore.

Udi, good to see you. Thanks for doing this. Here's an icebreaker to get you going. Cause I have like 17 questions that I'm just gonna fire through and it's not gonna be like, you know, we're not gonna be talking about each other, but I do. You did something awesome recently. So Gong, I think it was your series D was the last announcement. My favorite part of the whole thing, though was you actually pulled. So it's no secret that I love gong, but you actually pulled. You pulled snippets for your video. Can you explain that campaign and how that came to life and how you actually pulled it off? Because a lot of people are going to be using gong, but like to know that you can actually get permission for that stuff. So take me into that campaign.

Yeah, absolutely. I can send you the link later if you want to share it with folks. What we did is maybe let me take a step back and talk about. So the problem we're trying to solve. So one of our challenges is what I call the GONG experience gap. And what I mean by that is when we get someone to experience gong, even on a trip trial, we have like a 70% win rate from there. Okay. If you were to try gong, you won't ever shut it off. That's how I got to gong. My CEO called me, said, hey, Udi, we rolled out this really early stage product to 12 beta customers. Every single one became a paying customer within three months. You want to come work here? I'm like, sure. What took you so long? So, yeah, so we had product market fit before we turned the lights on. But here's the challenge though, because if you haven't used GONG yet. You're like thinking, oh, that sounds like a nice call recording tool. Yeah, maybe it's a next year thing. I don't have time for, for that initiative right now and budget and people. And so that is the GONG experience gap we're trying to overcome. And one of the creative ways my team came up with is let's take some of these wow moments. And when I say wow moments, I mean wow moments. I mean, you've heard the clip. Our CSMs are getting marriage proposals when they demo new features. Our AES are getting job offers when they show what the product can do. People are like stopping the call to go call their colleagues. You've gotta come see this. You don't see that for many B2B products. And we wanted to communicate some of that magic and amplify it. What we did, Jonathan on my team, he's a great content creator. He tracked down within Gong, of course, several of these aha moments. And then he painstakingly reached out to every one of those customers, getting them to sign a waiver that we could use just their audio track with no identifying information to show their reaction. So if you know the genre of YouTube reaction videos, that was very popular a while ago. So we created this version of just the audio tracks of hearing the people aha moments and just having people like you pointed out and talk about it. I guess it's starting to work. And then we decided to use that and launch it on the day of our Round D announcement. And it got some really great reviews with lots of marketers like tagging each other. Oh, you've got to listen to this. We should do something like this because it just hasn't been done as far as I know.

I think the reason I wanted to ask you about it because I think that to me is like, that's the best. If you're using Gong, like you have your actual customer's words like go in and spend the time to chop that up. And that's how you should go and make your next social proof video or testimonial. That's the best product marketing you could.

Do is GONG on gong?

Yeah. Okay, so that's good. We got you going a little bit. So. Alright, so number my first question is, what is your role?

I'm the chief marketing officer at gong.

Okay. And how do you explain what GONG does? Obviously we talked about it a little bit, but how do you explain what the company does?

Sure. So Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that ingests insights from Every customer interaction that we're having on a zoom call or an email and then understands those interactions and finally surfaces insights that help every sales professional and their managers better manage their pipeline and become better salespeople.

It's pretty accurate. How do you talk about the company's marketing strategy? Right. So, like, if you're presenting almost like the business case for marketing gong is this revenue intelligence platform, like, what purpose does marketing serve at the company?

The purpose marketing serves the company is very, very, very simple. I can describe in three words, make sales easier. That's what we do.

I like that.

That is my first slide. When I speak every month to the new class of gongsters that are onboarding, my first slide is what marketing does make sales easier. That's the whole story.

Yeah, I like that a lot because I think it almost has a double meaning.

Right.

Which is like, make sales easier. Like the function of like help make it easier for the sales team to sell.

Yep.

But it also just overall macro make sales easier. If you have better content, better case studies, better proof, a better experience, it's going to actually make it easier to buy. So I love that.

Very unpretentious.

Yeah. Our job is to make sales easier. That that would apply even if you didn't have salespeople. Okay. So speaking of sales, this is a B2B company. Can you just give me a rough sense of like, how many people. So three things. How many people in the company, how many people in marketing, and how many people in sales?

We have 350 employees in the company. We have a grand total of 12 marketers, including yours truly. And there are just over 50 AES, just over 50 SDRs, and around 50 CSMs.

Do you think your marketing team is small? That's. I mean, I would never.

I would never tagging my CFO on this podcast.

Yeah, you should. That. I would expect that that team would at least be double that just based on the stuff that you guys have done. Is that something that you battle over or like, you're happy with the team size?

Honestly, I don't. Since I'm pretty sure my CFO is not going to be listening to this, I'll continue fighting with him over budget and people. But my secret is that I'm almost against growing the team too fast. I'm intentionally growing this team very, very slowly. You know that up until like a year, maybe a year and a half ago, we were like four people on the marketing team. And that was pretty recent. The team really started growing just about a year ago. I had a Tiny team. For years and years, it was Chris Orlov and me. He was creating the content. The second hire I made was a marketing ops person. First it was a great gal named Noah. And then when I relocated from Tel Aviv, San Francisco and she couldn't come with me, we hired Kyle here in the Bay Area. It was just like the three of us, we were tiny marketing team for years. And I honestly think that's way more productive and conducive to creativity than a bloated team where you're constantly dealing with people issues. And what one of my team members called this morning, dead weight, which is she's worried about. She came from a company where she said we got more work done when we were five marketers. When I left, we were 30 marketers and we were getting less work done because we had so much dead weight on the team.

And.

And I'm not going to let that happen on my watch. So we're growing very slowly, intentionally.

I'm feeling that firsthand. Like my, the team I have right now is seven and like I. It's the best. The team is working so well together. And I think what I'm realizing is to what your point was, when you have small, when you have a, when you have fewer people, everybody has to do a little bit more where the team can get over specialized. And everyone starts to have that like, oh, that's not my job. Because there's like, there's a person for this and there's a person for that and there's a person for that where it's like the best marketers are like, hey, here's this campaign idea. You go and execute on it regardless of the channels you go figure it out.

Right? So the two, you know, you didn't ask for it, but here are my like two OD tips for hiring. One, I don't hire anyone until everyone on my team, and that means everyone starting with me, of course, are completely maxed out until we are, as one of my team members quoted me, I didn't remember saying that. She said, I think I heard you once say in a presentation that you don't hire anyone until your team desperately needs it. That is my hiring strategy. I don't hire anyone until we desperately needed. There are no nice to have hires on my team. And two, I do my best. I don't always succeed. I do my best to never compromise on the quality of the hire, even if I desperately need them. Bringing in someone that's less than perfect is going to just become dead weight. It's going to take up and suck up a lot of my attention and energy and I'm going to have to get rid of them at the end anyway. It's only happened to me once at Gong in four years, and I'm hoping it'll be many years before it happens again. So I only hire when I desperately need them and never compromise.

And oftentimes if you do that, you're going to have people that are kind of already doing a piece of that job anyway, like, because, okay, hey, this thing became 20% of Mark's job, so I think we're going to have to hire. And by the way, that's also better because then you've kind of proven out that that's going to work a little bit. And so the gap for, hey, we've never done events at our company before and we're gonna cold start hire an events person versus, like, hey, make that part of Russell's job for six months and then you have a playbook to scale into.

Exactly. I haven't hired anyone on my team. I don't know if that's like the only way of doing things. Probably not, but I've never hired anyone. That was a venture bet in and of itself in the function. I hired Mike the digital advertiser after Russell and I were dabbling with it for years. And we're like, we know there's potential here, but we just can't get to this. So let's hire someone who knows what they're. Same with events. I moved Danny from SDR to my team to manage events after Gabby and I were doing it for three years. And like, okay, we're done. We need a professional to do this.

Yeah. And you, you and Russell do, you know, did ads at a, you know, at a 50% level, but then you go and hire a true expert. It also feels like, oh, not only did you get your time back, but now they're better at that thing than you were.

Exactly. Okay, here's tip number three for hiring. I look for every new hire to add a skill set that we don't have on the team. There's some rare exceptions to that, but I hate hiring just another set of working hands because if it's just another set of working hands, I'm probably better off hiring an agency or a contractor, which are easier to onboard and off board. If I'm adding someone to the team, I want them to truly add a skill set that we need and can all learn from.

When that happens, do you think you can tell? Right. Do you think you can tell right away?

I try and tell them in the interview stage. That's one of the things I look for. And if I don't find it, I'll ask the other panelists on the hiring process to tell me and justify why we're hiring this person without them adding a skill set.

Yeah, that's good. I think, like, I screwed up a bunch of hires and in my last role, and I think, like, it was actually great because I learned, I think you have to suck at hiring in order to get better at it. But I think, like, your thing that you said is really important. Like, ideally in the interview, I'm like, man, we gotta hire this girl because she's an expert on whatever, and I wish we had this person right now. Like, it's gotta be that feeling.

Exactly. I can tell you what that thing was with most of the team members, what I was looking for when I brought them.

And also, it becomes less of an interview and more like, is this person gonna fit on the team? But that's when. I mean, we're not in the office now, but that's like when you're in the interview with that person and, like, they're up at the whiteboard drawing stuff for you, saying like, hey, you should be doing this and you should be doing that.

Exactly. And of course, you know, you've gotta be realistic. Sometimes you need an entry level role, you need a coordinator. You sometimes do need an extra head of Helping Hands. And then we do everything we. To teach them new skills and point them in the right direction to expand their education and at some point. Yeah. So here's a funny story for you, Vince. Vince on my team. I don't know if you've heard the name. We hired him as a temporary coordinator before we threw our first big industry event last year, Celebrate San Francisco, which ended up being the last one we did in San Francisco before we all went to work from home. His last job, he was working on a Filipino food truck. By the way, they make killer food. Senor Sisig. You've got to get. It's amazing if you're in the city. So his last job was on a food truck. And Russell said, hey, I know this guy. How do they know each other? They both dance in the same dance company. I'm like, okay, if he's a dancer, he's your friend. Bring him over. He brings him over. This guy looks like his little brother. Turns out Vince is actually older than Russell, but took us a year to figure that out. And so Vince comes In as a temp worker, completely crushes it, manages all the social media for celebrate the conference and a whole bunch of other logistics that were huge headache for us. And then Russell said, let's, let's turn him into a full time employee. I'm like, of course we've all fallen in love with this guy. Now he becomes a full time employee. And they're like, okay, what niche can we put him in that we haven't figured out well yet? You know what that is running our instance of Drift. So we had the Drift bot on our website for a couple of years now. It's doing a great job, but we always felt that if we had someone dedicated that would really learn the nuts and bolts, we could get a ton more out of it. The guy dedicates like half the time into it, increases our meetings booked by 40% in the first quarter. From the Drift bot. From the Drift bot. So that's the kind of thing if the guy didn't already come in with a new skillset that we needed, let's give him all the time and resources he needs to learn something. I don't know how to do what he does now.

Right. And I mean you knew he was a good person, a good teammate, a figure it out type of person because he already had the win from your event. So you feel even better about like.

Oh yeah, he was a no brainer. I never officially interviewed him. I think he's the only guy on the team I never officially interviewed because Russell sort of sneak snuck him in as a temp worker. And then by the time it was time to make a decision on onboarding him fully, we all knew him and loved him. So no point in interviewing.

All right, I have a question. A couple things that, that I wrote down on that. So the team has gone from four to 12 people in a year, maybe.

A year and a half.

Yeah, yeah. So whatever it is, how is your role as, you know, the marketing leader of that bunch? Like how has that evolved from, you know what, what were you doing when the team was 4 verse? What is your role? How's that change?

So you know, I was the first marketer at Gong and four companies prior to Gong as well. So it's pretty much the same routine every time I come in. There's a blue ocean. I've got to figure everything out. So on the first day I compiled the first ebook, I set up a marketing automation machine, I wrote some email copy, I'll do a LinkedIn ad. Literally did all this on day one and then I started bringing in people to scale and do things better than I can piece by piece. So every person that brought in took away a piece of what the existing team was doing already. My role has definitely changed and now it's about bringing in the resources that my team needs. So getting the budget, getting the people, getting sometimes introductions or connections to vendors or partners or whatever it is we need, coaching them and giving them feedback and guidance where they need it, but not any more than that and then just getting out of the way. And I feel so fortunate to be working with 11 people who are so self driven and do so many things without me even knowing about them before they're out there. We just announced yesterday our upcoming Celebrate 2020 conference which is going to be virtual. I had nothing to do with the speaker lineup with like anything because I've got an amazing team and by now we work so well with each other. They know, they have so much leeway to just get shit done and if they have a question or they need help, they know who to come to. But if I don't ask to specifically know or get involved with something, they will just run for it. And I much rather have these people that you know, occasionally that means they will make a mistake or do something that I would have done differently had I known in advance. But because I give them so much room for error and making mistakes in order to move fast, we just get lots of shit done. And the alternative of someone who just sits there waiting for feedback on everything and waiting for guidance on everything. I cannot work with people like that. I just don't have that mode.

When those people take off, that's when you get to, you don't have to sit like, that's why that happens. You have a great team. That's why they're doing things without you. How do you balance like the other thing I wrote down was like, okay, you, you only hire people when the team is maxed out. And so how do you balance the line of like burning people out? Because I've been, I've been there, I've maxed out the team, I've burned people out. How do you, how do you walk that line?

So you know, we're doing a lot of things at GONG as a company and within our team to make sure that we don't burn people out. I don't know that we're succeeding 100% of the time in doing that. I'll have to be honest. Hey, there are days and weeks that I maxed out. I'm sure some of my team members are as well. We keep a close eye on it. It's become especially challenging in the last six months when, you know, sometimes someone will join a call without their camera on and just don't know what their mood is. This morning. Do they look tired? Do they look excited? It's sometimes hard to tell. This morning I had a one on one with a team member that like in the first two minutes told me that, you know, everything going on with Black Lives Matters and killing this week have really gotten to him and he's just not in the mood. I'm like, okay, let's wrap up in five minutes. Take a personal day. And we just have to really have our finger on the pulse and check in with people more frequently and as deep as we can in this weird virtual environment. So I don't have any silver bullets there, but really just checking in on people and having every manager on my team check in with their people to make sure that the people are excited and motivated and they're going to be peaks. You know, the night before the big event or the day after with the follow up. My team is up at 5am sending out, you know, cleaning up all the lead list from yesterday's event, making sure the emails go out at 7am before like any other vendor starts sending out their stuff. So we know that they're going to be peaks. But then a day after that. So not the day after the event when the follow up went out, but the day after that. I gave the team a day off. I told them a month before the conference. Look, I'm going to need you to work really hard after the conference and to do the follow up the day after. But guess what? The day after that, like no meetings, nothing, you're off. And so we try and balance that.

Okay, so in that same vein, what's the rhythm that you have with your with your team? So first of the people on your team, of those 12 people, how many report to you directly?

Only two.

Only two?

Yep. I'm very fortunate. I'm looking for the third to add now we're hiring a VP of product marketing. I currently have the head of Demand gen and head of category creation reporting up to me, Sheena and Russell. And the cadence we have is Monday morning we have a full team meeting for an hour and there we discuss how are we doing with KPIs. I know you want to talk about that.

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And what, what's the plan for this week? And any sort of business updates and it's more about alignment for the week. Who needs, who needs to know about what's going on and what campaigns are going out? What do we need to coordinate on, make sure nothing is clashing. So that's the longer Monday meeting. And then we have a short check in Wednesday morning. No official agenda, just checking in to see everyone's still alive and doing well. On Thursday, I have a leadership meeting just with Sheena and Russell for the three of us to coordinate on how are things going and what do we need to roll out to the entire team. And then on Friday at the end of the day, we have a happy hour. Entire team can bring a mocktail or a cocktail, but you've got to be holding glass. And that's how we round out the week.

Okay, a couple questions. Number one is you have two direct reports. How often do you meet with them and then how often do you do something with the other eight people?

Good question. So with my direct reports, as I said, I've got three team meetings plus one leadership meeting. That's four. Five is I have a one on one with each of them every week. So that's at least five meetings that I meet them on and there's always more because we're together in the revenue leadership meetings and other broader meetings. So there's like five times a week. Basically daily I meet with my two direct reports. In the last employee engagement survey that we did, I saw feedback from at least one of my team members who said that they missed having more time with me now that we're not in the office. So I took immediate action and set up a recurring cadence. Every Friday morning, I meet with one of my eight non direct reports and so each one of them gets to meet me at least once every eight weeks. That's the best I can do right now with my crazy calendar. But at least that's on the calendar and it's not optional. So every eight meet every person on my team, including Vince, who's like, you know, two levels down in the, in the org chart, I meet every single person at least once every eight weeks on one on one, plus the three weekly meetings that I get with them.

That's good. I like that. The other thing I was going to ask is, you go, okay, you're going to have three teams. You have product marketing, demand gen, what is category create, what is in the category creation team. A lot of people are going to have questions about that.

Yeah. So category creation is really a mighty team of one. Sheena Badani joined us a little over a year ago to lead us through category creation. And I could talk about this for a full hour, but I'll give you the NutShell version. About 18 months ago, we realized that the category we were identified with, Conversation, Conversation Intelligence, was not serving us well anymore. We felt that we had outgrown the category for two main reasons. One, CROs, they don't care about Conversations, but guess what, they do care about revenue. We didn't have the word in our mind yet, but we knew that there was a problem with Conversation Intelligence because we kept getting bumped down to enablement people and other great folks that just don't have the power and money to buy Gong. And so that was one problem we're going to solve. How do we stay at Power and talk to the CRO about something she cares about? Second problem is all the other Conversation Intelligence products in the category, and some of them are good companies, good people, they have a very, very narrow product vision. They're all about, let's record your calls, play it back, and maybe use this to improve your sales skills. We already back then had a much, much broader and deeper product vision. And now we have an actual product with the Great Deal Intelligence module and Market Intelligence module and world domination plans coming soon. And we didn't want to stay bogged down with Conversation Intelligence because people thought, oh, Conversation Intelligence, it's a call recording tool. No, this is Gong, it's something completely different. And we thought it'd be way easier to explain that if we were in completely different product category. So for those two reasons, we decided we have to go through the very painful but exciting motion of redefining our category. We brought Sheena on board to do that. She's an ex VP Marketing and she took on this really exciting role and she took a big risk there and she walked us through, picked Revenue Intelligence as our new category, which really helped with both of those challenges that I talked about. We now get to talk to Enterprise CROs and VP Sales. We are no longer considered a call recording tool. And it's much easier to explain the difference not between GONG and someone else, but between Revenue Intelligence and Conversation Intelligence. So now it's a category discussion and not a feature to feature comparison of two vendors. So that's my shortest version.

No, I love it. So I'm just trying to look her up on LinkedIn. But so where does like. So question number one is how is category? What's going to be the difference between the Category Creation Team and Product Marketing? Because I think, you know, like I've had product marketing, own category creation and analyst relations. So what do you. What are you splitting out?

Yeah. So you're absolutely right. In the medium term, we're going to merge those teams together. I think we made the right decision bringing a dedicated leader to focus only on category creation for a year because it's so easy to get them preoccupied in shorter term needs. Because product marketing is never ending. Slew of requests and materials and content and trainings. And we didn't want to get her buried in that. So we focused her for a full year just on category creation. We are now looking for a new VP of product marketing. And I do see category creation being merged into that group. So that's going to happen pretty soon already. What China is doing, like, she does all of our analyst briefing. She works with Gartner and Forrester and Topo and everyone else. She's managing our press relations for the last six months. You're doing a lot of things that sort of naturally sit with product marketing. So those are going to merge soon.

Yeah. No, that's cool. I like that. I like the idea of like, hey, we need someone to do a bunch of different things and it's not going to be a traditional role. So let's make up the role. Because like, you could have tried to like stuff a PR person into that or an analyst person. But like, it seems to be more of a marketing person who can, who can become that?

Yeah.

Where's content and creative?

Okay, so creative is a group that does not exist yet. That's going to be the third group that I'm going to start next quarter. So we are looking for a brand and creative director and a web developer and a designer. That is the third group that I'm building within the team that's coming up next quarter. Pretty late I mean, considering, you know, GONG has a pretty polished brand. We've never had any in house designers. I know that's your first hire according to the DG mentality. I've never had a designer at gong. I've never had a video person. Gong and you know, we produce videos like almost daily.

All right, so who does it? You have an agency that you work with now?

Yeah, yeah. So we found some really great partners for the last like two and a half years. We've had a branding agency that we've been working with. They built the awesome brand, the visual brand that Gong is pretty known for. We have an amazing team of two, videographer. One of them does the editing, the other does the shooting. And we've been Working with them also for like three years and, and that they feel part of the team, but they're, they're an external agency, which means I can give them more or less work. Obviously now it's less work more easily than if I had someone on board. So if it ain't broke, I'm not looking to fix it a hundred percent.

I think, look, that's like. I think that's a good example. Like that that's what has worked for me, hiring a designer first. So, you know, maybe you know someone or not. And like, you build or you have to build around your strengths or like, if you. I think a lot. I think my earlier in my career, I was always afraid to like, hire an agency because I thought, like, now that shows that I can't do it. And it's like, no, you have to think to be able to scale. And like, okay, that's an example where you can just put some budget toward it and have that problem solved versus having to spend six months and find a designer.

Also, I have a slightly different approach I think some of your listeners might find interesting when I need to make a decision, because I know lots of marketers, they have these dilemmas. What should I prioritize on hiring in house and what can I keep outside as an agency? Like SEO as an example. AdWords is an example. Designers, videographers, like, what should I hire and what can I keep outside? I use a very simple criteria. What is core to our operations that I would never consider outsourcing? Here's an example. Our AI research and R and D. Not in my department. Right. But in the product and engineering, they would never outsource their AI algorithm writers and the software developers, because that's a core part of what makes gong. Gong and very difficult to copy. Now zoom into marketing. If you've been following gong, you know that our content is really the core of what we do. So I've never, ever outsourced a single article, and we've written hundreds over the years. They've all been written by an internal team member. For the first three years, I had the famous Professor Orlob, Chris Orlob on my team working on those articles. And then the last year or so, I've had Devin Reed take the Gong Lab series over. But that has always been a core competency of my team that we would never outsource. You know, I get writers approach me daily offering their services. I'm like, I'm sure you're great, but we just don't outsource content we write all of our content, every single word internally, because that is a core competency of my team. Now, is SEO a core competency? No, honestly, I'm fine working with agencies. Is design a core competency? If you're. If you're Apple, then yes, design is a core competency. At gong, design is not a core competency. I want it to be beautiful, but. But I'm not going to fret over it all day, so I'm fine working with agencies in those areas.

I love this. This podcast is everything I want it to be. Okay, so we talked a lot about team. I feel comfortable moving on from team. I'm sure there's things we didn't get to. That's fine. We're going to. Actually, the cool part about these podcasts, I'm going to try to do an ama, like where people can ask you questions later, which would be fun. Let's talk about channels. Okay, so we talked about team. I want to talk about channels. And then we're going to talk about metrics. So channels. What has been. Has it just. It just been magic? You guys had product market fit instantly and it's all been organ. What are the channels that really bring demand?

Well, product market fit means that the users actually get value from your product. It doesn't mean that they're going to be bring all of their friends to buy your product. They still need to market the heck out of it. Right. So it's a huge starting point. I've been at companies with less than ideal product market fit, and as any marketer who's been in that situation knows, that sucks because you're selling a dream, you know it's not going to deliver. You know, customers are going to churn, so you've got a leaky bucket, you know, you're customer success. Managers are going to get abused for trying to support a product. Doesn't really work. That's a really sucky situation. So that's not the situation going, we have an amazing product, actually works, but nothing, nothing sells itself. I'll quote my CEO, Amit Ben Dov. He's written and said a few times, we've built a product that even a mediocre marketing team could sell, and we've built a marketing team that could sell even a mediocre product. Now, if you have them both, the sky's the limit. And I love that.

I mean, that's why you must have felt good though, even joining the company. Like, holy cow, if we can add marketing to this thing where this is really going to go.

Exactly. I wrote a Forbes article about it. The one thing I don't believe marketing can fix is product marketing fit. I'm not an inbound marketer in the sense of product marketing inbound. I don't know how to tell product what to build the customers will like. I did that in my years as a product manager. I don't want to do that anymore as a marketer. I was a product manager for five years before turning marketer. So I was busy telling product what to build for many years. I've had enough of it. Now I want them to give me a product I can actually sell.

Alright, so let's try to go one layer deeper on this. So of a hundred percent of leads that you generate in a month, what are the roughly the breakdowns of the buckets? Like for me for example, it's like 75% is organic, 25% is paid.

Yep. So at Gong, I'll give you two breakdowns. One, 40% of our pipeline comes in inbound, 60% we build outbound. And I'm happy to dive deeper into those of the channels that we use. The top three channels that by far bring in most of the pipeline are organic. LinkedIn, our email subscription list, and all of our events, including virtual events in the past, field events and webinars and roundtables. You know what's the beautiful thing about these three things? They almost don't cost a dime. The budget that we put on digital advertising and paid channels is embarrassingly low. We are working to increase what we can get from them, which is why I hired a great person to run them. And we're giving him all the budget that he needs. But honestly, if you shut it off, nothing terrible is going to happen right now because we're getting everything we need from LinkedIn, email and events.

Okay, this is fantastic. Let's talk about LinkedIn organic. First of all, how do you even measure that? And what is the content? Like, is that a, is that a dedicated effort? Like, hey, we're gonna post this many times and this creative and we're gonna test this. Like what is the, what's the LinkedIn funnel even?

Sure, sure. It's again like super simple. Complicated things tend not to work. So make it simple. It's really simple. Amit and I 4 years ago Sat down, said, okay, what's gonna be our content strategy? And we're like, well, well, we've got 20,000 calls in the database. That was 40 years ago. Four years ago. Now we have 20 million calls. We have 20,000 calls in the database. What if we have a data scientist rummage through it and find some things that are surprising, that will surprise salespeople on what actually works and doesn't work in sales. And so we did that and we saw that people actually like those insights, like what are women doing differently than men? And what's the worst time of week to schedule a sales call? And what's the best CDA to use in an email and all these things. We have the data, right? There's thousands of books about sales, but they're all opinions. We are the first brand to come out and say, hey, we're going to tell you what's actually working. But this is not our opinion. We've got the data to show you. And so we published four years ago our first Gong Labs article and we haven't changed a thing about our content strategy in four years. So Chris and I wrote the first ones, then he gave it a life of its own. Devin took over a year ago. So every three weeks or so, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less, we published Gong Labs article. They're not too long, probably about a thousand words. They have like two to four charts showing the actual data. And then we make sense of them in plain English that my mother would understand what we found to be working in sales based on this data. Now here's a very simple flowchart of how this works on LinkedIn and how we measure it. It'll be self explanatory. So we post the article on Devin's personal LinkedIn profile. Why do we do that? Because people interact with people, not with brands. You know this, I'm just telling you.

Right now, people are gonna eat this up. This is exactly what everybody wants. So go, keep going.

I hope everyone copies us. So we have to figure out something new. So we put this on a personal profile. You know, when Devin started a year ago, he had a very small following. Guess what? Now he's got tens of thousands of followers. Same thing Chris Orlov started with me had, I don't know, 2000 followers. Got tens of thousands now. So we post on his personal profile and the first ones are not going to get a ton of engagement. So bloody what? So you post it there now in parentheses. I'll say that. We also mirror that on our website blog a couple of days later quietly, for the, for the future SEO value. Because LinkedIn is wonderful for getting the traffic of salespeople that's already in their feed. It's terrible for future SEO finding. So that's why we mirror it. We experimented with medium and the different orders of posting in different places. This is the best we came up with for us. Again, I'm not suggesting this is going to be right for everyone, but we post on a personal profile on LinkedIn first and then quietly on our website. So when anyone searches for those keywords or the articles later, they'll find it on our website where it's easier for me to convert them back to LinkedIn. We post the article on LinkedIn. It's a fully thought out article that takes weeks to put together because it's got data, it's nothing trivial you could have googled. So it's always relevant and interesting and hopefully non trivial to the readers. Now you'll find just like clockwork, one third of the way down in the article and then again at the very bottom, there will be a call to action to download a premium piece of content very relevant to continuing your journey. So if you came in into an article about the top 10 email CTAs, we will offer you to download the cheat sheet we put together, which is not the full form article, but just the 10 best CTAs in a piece of single piece of letter size paper that you can print out and stick up above your desk. Now who wouldn't want that, right? So this is where the first conversion happens. We put a nice banner and an inline link about 1/3 of the way. And then once again at the bottom, people click on that as they're reading the article or at the end of the article. Yeah, of course I want that cheat sheet because I just read this article providing me a ton of value, I want to continue my journey. When they go to that cta, then we ask for their email for the first time to download that premium piece of content. You know what conversion rates we get on Those landing pages? 80%. 80% conversion rates on those landing pages.

And when you create the like, are you creating a separate. So you have the like anchor piece of content that people are going to see on LinkedIn? I click that, I read that. Are you creating a different type of. Because it's like a content upgrade, like an upsell, right? Hey, you get this for free, but if you want more, give us your email. Right? Is that one asset? Are you creating like a dedicated thing each time? So hey, we're gonna publish a new report. The report is gonna be free, but this is gonna be the upsell that we're creating with it.

So we almost always create a dedicated premium upgrade. Sometimes, you know, if we're doing a series about doing discovery calls, then we created one premium upgrade and we wrote three different articles on different angles of discovery calls and they all pointed to that same premium content. But it has to be deeply related in the most cases. You'll see that it's obvious that we created it especially for this. Right? The article is on email CTAs. We're offering you a download about email CTAs. I'm not offering you anything else because this is what you're in the zone to be reading about right now. So you've got to just imagine yourself going through the workflow like what would be mouth watering for the reader right now that they could not refuse. And so that's where the KPIs come in. Right? We post a Gong Labs post in the morning. By lunchtime, we've got 850 downloads of the premium piece of content that matches with our marketing automation system and tracks who are the Personas that downloaded what accounts are they on and if they're a relevant Persona from a relevant account. That's a mouthful. That'll trigger an SDR alert. Hey Madison, go call Dave. You just downloaded this piece from Devin and he seems to be the VP Sales at Privy. You should go talk to him.

Awesome.

And that's how it all comes.

Do you now, like, when you're planning, like, are you, you know how much you're going to, what the yield is going to be from each one of those things and so you're going to say, hey, we need to do this three times next quarter.

Yes, we definitely have averages and estimates of what an average Gong Labs post gets us. And the plan needs to come together with enough cushion. Right between the webinars, the email campaigns, the social media campaigns, there has to be enough cushion there because we don't always know content is not an exact science. Some of them are duds and some of them are amazing.

Well, that's what I was, I was going to ask because it's like, oh, okay, hey, if we're getting this, I think the mindset would be like, let's just do more. But there's probably some max of like if, you know, if you did one of those every week, the yield is going to go down.

You're probably right. You're probably right. And people do need some variation. And you know, at the end of the day, I think you share a similar point of view with what we're trying to do with our marketing in general and with our social feeds specifically. Is What I call edutainment. It's a combination of education and entertainment, and you've got to keep it light. So you'll find that the GONG social posting has a good cadence of. There'll be like one lightweight post per day. It could be something inspirational, could be something, you know about the current climate, something that's lighthearted that you don't have to overthink. And those do really, really well. And then every other week or so, we'll post a really big Gong Labs post. And in between, we'll do filler posts like Throwback Thursday to old rehashed articles that are sort of evergreen and are super valuable. And as our following continues to grow, people are exposed to these for the first time.

Okay, I have more questions. We gotta go. Unfortunately.

I know I'm completely ruining your cadence here.

No, no, this is. No, this is perfect. I'd rather we do this than be like, you interview some people and it hasn't happened yet, but it's like, next question, next question. This feels like how I would talk to you if we were just hanging out. So that big approach on LinkedIn content, do you think about SEO? Cause, like, I've missed the boat on that before where, like, you can focus so much on social and then you end up not building the foundation for SEO. How have you balanced that? And it could be you're not even thinking about it.

We are. It's definitely not the driver of what we write about and how we design our site. I've hired and fired, I think, three SEO agencies so far at Gong and including the best and the most expensive in the business. I'm not going to mention any names. They're good people. They do what they can. I've eventually decided to bring that in, not even as cost saving, just because I didn't see the value. I didn't see the value. We are doing so well with targeting our content to the right people. And so Jonathan on my content team, he has an SEO background, probably spends 10% of his time optimizing our articles for SEO. But like, honestly, he doesn't report on that. And it's just a side thing that we do.

Yeah, just. I mean, you got to figure though there is search intent for the, you know, your industry. There's got to be people searching for stats or, you know, data points. I'm sure it's there.

We do look at the Google trends and. And, you know, we've got to make sure it's relevant. I mean, I don't want just the traffic for the sake of traffic, I want the traffic that's looking for the right things that I can eventually sell to them.

Right.

So I mean if you do look for like, I don't know, sales demo tips or things like that, you will see GONG articles on the first page of Google, which is awesome. And then yeah, there is a fraction of them that actually want to buy GONG eventually. But I'm not obsessed with SEO, not at all.

All right, let's talk about metrics. We could go into all those channels forever. But so using that LinkedIn thing as an example, like how does, how does the team set. First of all, start here. Overall marketing goals at GONG are based on what?

So myself and the leadership are measured every quarter on the company revenue attainment. There's a revenue goal for the company and senior directors and above that determines their bonus. We all are minded on the company revenue, that is it. We usually measure it as either ending ARR or net new ARR. There's some differences but. But we won't get into the boring details. And that's the number for leadership. Everyone below that level has between 1 and 3 KPIs that are simple to measure and track. So there should be no arguments at the end of the quarter. Did we hit it? Did we hit 80% or 90%? So I'll give you an example. One of the goals that the content and social team have because LinkedIn is such an important channel, we set a target for number of net new followers on our LinkedIn page every quarter. We've been doing this for a couple of years now and we're growing like crazy. We're now at like 46,000 followers on our LinkedIn page. And most of that growth has been in the last 18 months, I think in the beginning of 2019. So 18 months ago we had like 4,000 followers. So we added 42,000 followers in the last 18 months.

Does everybody's goal like individually on the marketing team somehow like roll back up into revenue?

Exactly, exactly. Now why am I obsessed about new LinkedIn followers? Because I know the more people I can organically get their eyeballs on our articles are more people that I can convert to that premium download, which is more people the SDR can convert into ops. And that is our number one goal on demand gen, number of new business opportunities. So everything rolls up into one of the higher level business goals.

And so if I'm like a product marketing person, I might have two or three goals that I set that get set by you every quarter.

I set them so now it's their managers, Sheena or Russell, setting their goals. Until I think about two quarters ago, I was working on every one of the team members, but I've just lost that capacity at this point. So what we do is every single person has one to three KPIs. One because they need a North Star to know what to focus on. No more than three because I don't know human being can optimize for more than three different goals. So one to three is the golden range that I use. And then whatever they hit, that's going to be multiplied by the company revenue attainment. So if the company hit 80% of revenue goals, even if you hit 100% of your KPIs, you're getting 80% of your revenue because it makes no sense that people are getting their full bonuses if the company didn't hit their targets. We've got to pay those bonuses from somewhere.

So does your team. Everybody on your team has a quarterly bonus.

Every single person on my team has a quarterly bonus. And the bonus part of their OTE, the lowest which we're going to fix is 10%. It should be 15%. The highest is 25%. So in sales, you know, they work on 50, 50. Their OT is 50% base. 50% bonus. In marketing, it's around 20, 25%.

I like that. So, so you have some upside. So hey, here's your job. Here are the three goals that you own. If you hit your goals, but also the company performs and hits well, you're going to be successful.

Yeah.

So how you just read those just get reset. Those just get reset every quarter.

Yep, yep. And I try to avoid, but sometimes it's hard. The, what I call checklist KPIs of oh, let's launch a new website or let's implement this ABM system. Sometimes it has to be done because you know that people won't find the time for it if you don't put it down as a target. But I know that as soon as I do, it's going to get done. So they're going to get like 100% of that part. So it's never the only KPI that they get. It might be one out of three.

Is this your like, have you always done this at your other companies and you brought this here? Has it been evolved that way?

Yeah, I think. You know, Amit, my CEO and I have worked together three different companies now over the course of the last 22 years. We've been working on and off together. This is pretty much how we've always done it. And you know, up until a year ago, he was involved in every KPI of every marketer. He's that involved.

That's good. I mean, I think I just like the alignment. It gives people a clear sense of whether it's right or wrong. Hey, here's what I own and here's how I'm going to be measured. You know, I'm going to be measuring on success. I. I'm asking a lot about it because I just haven't. I don't know that many other marketing teams where I know once you get to a certain level, whether it's director, VP or C level, there is typically more of a bonus structure. But I don't know every. That's pretty awesome that you could be a marketing coordinator and have some upside.

Every single person. So we talked about Vince, sort of one of the entry level positions on the team. He has a goal of what percentage increase in drift, scheduled meetings. We need every quarter because that's his area, that's one of his APIs.

And if I was your content person, it'd be like organic traffic, new social followers and whatever, because those all lead back to pipeline some way. Okay, this is fantastic. The cool part is other people can listen to this, like to get ideas for it for themselves. That's the most important part.

Yeah, I mean, figure out what works for you. I'm never gonna suggest that what works for us should work for everyone.

I gotta skip a couple. But here, two things that I do want to ask you. Number one is if you had one wish and you could solve any marketing problem, what would it be? So for me, it'd be like, I wish that I could get. I would get an email and profile data from every podcast listener, but that doesn't happen. So what's that for you?

I would love to figure out better inbound predictability. That's a big question mark in my budget. You know, two weeks ago we announced our Round D. I knew about it a few weeks earlier and I was like, like, Russell, don't worry about Inbound this quarter. We're going to be fine. But we can't raise money every quarter. Okay. And a big part of our plan is inbound. Right. 40% of our pipeline is inbound. We're getting better at predicting it and understanding the relationship of everything we throw into that machine and what comes out at the other end. But it's so far from perfect that that keeps me up at nights. The lack of predictability for Outbound, we're Like, really good. Like, tell me how many headcount I have in sdr. I know what content to produce. I know what the cadence needs to be. We know, like, down to the few last opportunities, how much they're going to create. Inbound is still a black box for me, and I don't like black boxes. Well, like how the sausage machine works.

You could have three Gong Labs pieces that you think are going to be awesome and they actually flop. And then the one that you didn't think was going to be and you just have no predictability over it. The hardest part, and I've had this happen before, is you do the big funding announcement and then you have to spend the rest of the year explaining why that month was so big and you haven't been able to come close.

Well, luckily we have a very marketing forward management team, so they get that. And when I show the charts, I do annotate. Okay, here's the point on the chart. Why did we triple website traffic that week? Because we announced our round D. Don't expect that every week.

Yeah, I mean, hey, if you, the CEO, if you want to come back with a couple hundred million dollars every week, we'll gladly keep announcing it.

It's got a great effect every time we do fundraising. But that, for example, is not a scalable part of strategy.

Okay, two more. Number one is. No, number two is how do you tell your family what you do? And your line is pretty good, but I can't imagine that you're at a family gathering and you're saying, like, I make sales easier.

No, I tell people that I work for a company that helps salespeople sell more. That's what we do. I like that people sell more.

And then everybody goes, huh.

Paste hors d'. Oeuvres. Yes.

Yeah, I don't know. Okay. I always say I work at a tech company, and then I hate myself for explaining it that way.

Yeah, my grandmother, bless her soul, she knew that I just like my father, we work with computers. So whenever, like her radio transistor went off, she'll call me. Hey, Udi, does your company make radio transistors? I need a radio for my kitchen. Like, no, Grandmama. I'll get you a radio.

Anyway, that's perfect. Both you and your father. And last question is, who? You did awesome on this. Thank you very much. Who's one other marketing leader that I should have on.

Who'S interesting these days? I should have prepared for that. You sent me the question. My bad. Well, you know the obvious names. I know you're probably talking to you, you're talking with. Whether it's Trisha at Drift or Ryan at G2, I think there's some great people. I think Shane at Intercom is very interesting. He's going through a turnover of a, a sort of a transition of the team there. That could be an interesting story. It's not so much the early stage startup, but more okay, what happens when you're not the coolest kid on the block anymore? I think that would make an interesting story. You could talk to me and Megan Eisenberg from Trip Actions. They're going through a lot of unpleasant times now. Very interesting to see how they're thinking about coming out of this period. So I think those would make some interesting stories.

Those are good. All four on my hit list. Good.

Awesome.

All right, Udi, great to talk to you. Glad to see you. I hope you have a great afternoon and good weekend.

You too, my friend. Take care.

Bye. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

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