Winning During a Downturn – 7 Lessons From Building Gong to $7 Billion with Udi Ledergor at Gong

This episode is brought to you by VanHack. Want the secret hack to staying competitive and building great products? Extend your company's hiring budget with VanHack's pool of 400,000 remote engineers at a lower cost than local hires. Join companies like Dapper Labs 1Password Brex and Dooley, who've hired great engineers with VanHack. Mention Traction Remote when you sign up today and get 10% off your first hire@vanhack.com that's V A N H A.

C K.com Money and budget sometimes make us lazy because we can do big, expensive things without really thinking them through. Some of our best campaigns were done when we were much, much smaller and we had to get more creative and think how we're gonna be very effective on a shoestring budget.

Foreign.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors?

This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo.

We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more. Super excited for today's session here with Udi Ledergore, CMO at Gong, recently valued at 7.25 billion. We're here to talk about marketing and growth during a downturn with massive shifts and uncertainty in the markets. Right now, most companies are working on defensive plans, reducing spend, increasing cash to get through. While defensive strategies might help you survive to exit the climate in a stronger competitive position, you must also play offense and UDI is here to tell us all about it. Udi, welcome to Traction. Thanks for joining us. Where are you tuning in from?

Hi Lloyd, and good morning from not so Sunny San Francisco.

So Udi, you're a five time VP of marketing for leading B2B companies and most recently CMO at Gong. And you took this position after running a highly successful marketing consulting business for two years and part of that, for two decades you've been a VP Marketing at four different companies, leading world class teams across a range of industries. And you're a champion of diversity and inclusion and you love taking inspiration from B2C brands to make B2B brands more exciting. You also authored this phenomenal book, 50 Secrets of Trade Show Success. What an impressive career. Give us your backstory. How did you get into marketing As a child?

I loved the performing Arts. I dabbled in magic for about 10 years, then I studied music and actually majored in that in high school. And I'm still playing the piano to this day. I've done everything from stage lighting to sound to working with dance companies. And many of my friends are in those industries. And I think if I were not in marketing and maybe one day I will be in the performing arts. I think in the business world, marketing is the closest you can get to putting on a big show. We're putting together a brand, we're putting together events, we're putting together content, we're. We're showcasing our company to our prospects, to our candidates, to our investors, and it's a big show and I love being part of that.

And in your journey, what are the most important skills you've learned that someone who wants to become a CMO like you one day needs to learn?

So I found that there's two broad sets of skills if you want to divide them. One of them is the creativity side and the other is the analytics side. And most of us probably identify as having one of those stronger than the other. I think it doesn't matter which side you start with. You can be super creative and learn the analytics parts, or you can be super analytical and learn to be a little bit more creative. It's also important and possible to hire for your weaknesses. So if you're going to be the analytics person, get someone who's creative as one of your first hires to help you with that side or the other way around. Because honestly, I think all the great marketing leaders today, they have to have both sides of that equation. You need both the analytics and you need the creative. So think of it as the right side, left side, brain, or any other analogy that is helpful. But you really do need those two things to succeed in marketing today.

Creativity is what sparks emotion and emotion is what differentiates brands in many ways. But then the data, I guess, helps you become more creative. I don't know. I'm an engineer, accidentally got into growth and marketing. But let's talk about that for a minute. How do you leverage data to become more creative or you can't?

I think you absolutely have to. So let's take a simple sort of day to day experiment that every marketer ends up doing and how you use both sides of the brain. So marketing has a lot of the soft side of understanding human psychology. So does sales, by the way. But marketing we're talking about today has a lot of the soft skills of understanding human psychology, understanding persuasion, motivation, what makes people tick. And there's plenty of books I think we're getting later to some book recommendations on how to do this and how to get started. And then you need the analytics to know how to set up a good scientific experiment. What is the minimum sample size that you need? What does statistical significance mean? When can you stop testing and start optimizing? And by combining these two things together, we'll never have enough traffic to our website to try a billion different variations. So you've got to use some hypothesis. You've got to say, okay, based on my understanding of human nature, these are three or four directions that I think might persuade users to want to click on my offer. I could use social proof, I could use credibility, I could use authority, I could use likability, I could use a good price. There's a bunch of different ways, but there's probably not a billion. There's maybe five, six or ten. And then you use the analytics side to know how to plan that experiment, exactly how many times to run it, how much traffic you need on each variation, when is it enough, and you can start driving more traffic to your winning variations. So that's how the everyday combines both understanding of human nature and the behavioral psychology, which sounds very fancy, but every marketer has to know how to do this with the analytics side, which means you can run an effective and efficient test that has some statistical significance that will get you the results that you're after.

Marketers have earned a bad name over the years because they're mostly from the creative side. And then HubSpot and all these companies started coming along over the last 20 years and started bringing the value of data. Gong is dominating that, having created a category in revenue intelligence. So let's dive into startup marketing now. We're in the middle of a downturn. Everyone's just playing defensive, reducing spend. What advice do you have for companies creating a marketing strategy during a downturn, Perhaps diving into tactics for offense vs defense?

Happy to chat about this as long as people want because obviously it's something we're going through right now and I'm seeing many of my colleagues go through. So here, here are a few things in kind of random order that we're doing right now. And I would recommend anyone who's trying to adapt their marketing to do right now. One thing is don't panic, right? This is a market cycle and markets always go through cycles. They go up, they go down. Depending on how long you've been in the workforce, you might have, like me, lived and worked through the 2000.com bubble burst. You might have lived through the 2008 subprime crises. You probably lived through the COVID 2020 downturn. And here we are again in 2022 going through another downturn for different reasons, but it is a downturn and shares some of the same behavior as other downturns. So first, don't panic. And this is easier to do if you've seen one before because they're not going to last forever. I read today that in all the market downturns since 1990, the average duration of a recession, which we're not officially in yet, is 15 months. So this is not going to last forever. They usually last for a year and a half, and then the market recovers and goes back to an upcycle. There is hope, folks. Now what do we actually do? For me, if you want to take a headline away from downturn marketing, it is Back to Basics. That is the headline, and I'll explain what I mean. In times of everyone has prosperity and lots of money and lots of time, then people look at trying out new products that maybe they don't have an immediate need for. They look at spending some discretionary money on products that they don't actually need. But it would be nice to have or nice to try. A downturn is different. A downturn is when everything comes down to the basics. People have to be a lot more focused on what's going to drive their main goals right now. And you're seeing that with companies stopping to buy things that they don't have to have this year to succeed, projects are being pushed out to next year and beyond. They are not going to move the needle for this year. Hires are being frozen, sometimes even cut off. Some companies, unfortunately, are letting people go. And all of this is part of refocusing on what are the few critical things that the company needs to do to succeed during this downturn. And if you think about it, most of us are acting this way in our personal lives as well. You can plan fancy vacations when you've got the certainty of money coming in, but if you're in a downturn, you're going to cut down on some of the nice to have stuff. So what does this mean for marketing? There's a pretty simple recipe here. It's easier said than done, of course. I recognize that, but the recipe is pretty simple to understand. You need to look at what your customers need most from you right now and look in areas like product messaging, salesmanship. What can we change and do that quickly? And that's going to be my next point. What can we change quickly that gives our customers exactly what they need before our competitors do that? So I'll give you a few examples. Product. Now, when we went into the COVID downturn a couple of years ago, teams were going remote for the first time. Many teams that were working out of an office like our own team suddenly went remote and people were trying to adapt. So our product team devised a brilliant feature that our chief product officer called. It's like the manager's swivel chair that they had in the office where they could turn and see what each of their team members were. They could no longer do that once they went remote. So they developed a feature that was a virtual swivel chair, if you want to think of it that way, that gave managers a team view of what their teams were up to hour by hour, which opportunities they were working on, which projects they were working on. And that was exactly what our customers wanted. And it got really fast. Adoption. Now, during this downturn, lots of customers have on their mind what is happening in my markets and how many of my opportunities are talking about hiring freezes or layoffs or budget cuts or budget freezes, and how is this affecting our win rates? So within about two weeks of getting into the situation, our product team launched new features that all of our customers can use as part of their regular subscription, where they're getting a tracker on how the economic downturn is coming up in their sales conversations. Where is it calling deal delays so they know exactly what's happening. And also looking at the reality of how that's affecting win rates, because not all the warning signals are going to manifest themselves as a lost deal. So that's examples of what you can do on the product side, on the messaging side, let me give you some examples, because this is at the heart of what marketing does. So back in Covid again, teams were going remote. We did a very simple change. It took us 10 seconds. We looked at the headline of the website on the homepage and it said something like revenue intelligence. And we changed it to the number one system for remote sales team. That week, we saw a 12% lift in conversion rates on the website at the beginning of the downturn that was a result of COVID people were quickly looking for solutions. How can I help my team go remote? And by giving them what they want without extending the truth too far. Right. We are still a revenue intelligence system for sales team, but you can package that in many different ways. So by focusing on the aspect that we're actually helping sales teams that are remote right now. We saw a 12% lift, and we're doing the same thing now. Not around remote, but about how to get more productivity and how to get more efficiency out of your team using our reality platform. So you have to be thinking about your product right now. Now, some products, it's going to be easier. For other products, gonna be harder. Right? If you're going into Covid as a travel or hospital, my heart goes out to you. There was not very much that those companies could do, even though the big ones, the good ones, they found ways to survive. Right. Airbnb switched from live like a local to virtual experiences, and they managed to come out thriving from that. And they're still moving very quickly. So look at your product and think, how can you repackage it quickly? I'll give another example. When we sell GONG during times of prosperity, we focus on how it helps onboard new salespeople very quickly. It actually takes about half the time to onboard salespeople at a company that has gong compared to a company that doesn't have gong. But guess what? During a downturn, people aren't hiring thousands of new employees. Most companies are not hiring thousands of new employees. So we push down that part of the talk track about onboarding, and we don't use it to start our sales pitch. Right now we're talking about how this helps you get more out of the resources you have on board, because you might not be getting more resources anytime soon. And it can even help you do more with less if your company's going through layoffs. So we're positioning gong in a way that is very true, that companies need GONG more than any time right now during a market downturn. So I talked about product updates, talked about messaging updates, and the final thing is the sales motion. How can you help your customers in sales and customer success get through this time and show that you are a valued partner? Some of this is trivial stuff, like talking to them about payment terms if they're going through a tough time and they need some concessions with payment terms, with discounts, with extra licenses. Licenses. Find something that will keep them as a customer, because if you don't, your competitor will find a way to keep them as customers. They will come back to you and increase their subscription when this downturn is over. And of course, use all that messaging stuff and showcase the new features, the product put together that we talked about in your sales motion. So those are the high level things.

Now, let's say you're a New founder or you are starting a company today. Oodie, where would you start? You have no budget, markets are going down. What were some things you would try out to get your early customers and build your marketing strategy?

So I was in this position six years ago when I joined gong, and I've been in this position at four other companies that I led their marketing before. GONG is a very well known brand today. We didn't always have a multibillion dollar valuation and multimillion dollar marketing budget. When I started gong, it was after our seed round. We had a very modest budget to work with and we had to get creative. And I'll say this money and budget sometimes make us lazy because we can do big expensive things without really thinking them through. And some of our best campaigns were done when we were much, much smaller and we had to get more creative and think how are we going to be very effective on a shoestring budget? So when I started at gong, I thought about it this way. Look, the two channels that we all want to build are inbound and outbound. Now inbound is the holy grail of marketing because it is super efficient, it is cost effective. You get people knocking on your doors, coming to your website, asking for a demo, or signing up for a trial. The problem with that is that it takes time to build. You can't build that on day one. When I joined the company, we had zero website traffic, zero demo requests, and I knew I couldn't build that in a week. So I wanted to start building that because I wanted to have it as soon as I can. But at the same time, I realized I'm going to have to quickly act on outbound, otherwise we're not going to make it to the next round. So here's what I did with both those channels. For inbound, the easiest and cheapest thing you can do, maybe it's not easy, but it's cheap. And it's the right thing to do, is to build organic content that your prospects and customers really get value out of. And so late 2016, when I joined Gong, we created the Gong Labs content series where we analyzed sales calls in our system that our customers were having. We anonymized them and aggregated them so you couldn't identify any sensitive information or even which companies we were analyzing. And we surfaced insights. What's the amount of time you should be talking on a sales call versus listening? What's the number of questions you should be asking to move on to the next call? How to set next steps, how to talk about pricing, how to talk about competition. We surfaced all these insights which lots of people had opinions on, but most people never had the data to tell them what actually worked and didn't work. So we started publishing this content and from the first time we put it out there on LinkedIn, which as organic content cost us $0, we saw a ton of people coming in and reading this and then sharing it with their friends, tagging their friends in sales. We didn't do anything for this. The marketing team was two people. It was me and Chris Orloff. We were putting together this content, putting it out there to the world and people were eating it up. You don't need a fancy distribution machine, you don't need millions on TV ads or paid advertising. Just create really good content and people will read it. So that was what we started to do, which eventually became this huge inbound machine that now brings in 40% of our pipeline and revenue. So that's what we did with Inbound. But it does take some time to build on the outbound side. And this is my generic advice for most B2B startups that do not have a PLG motion, but they actually have to go out there and market and sell their products top down, down. Go very aggressive on outbound from day one because that's what's going to get you the early results and you'll learn from your mistakes. And what I mean by aggressive outbound, early on, sit someone down. It can be a dedicated SDR or a full cycle AE or in our case, it was my CEO. My CEO sat there and sold the first 100 copies of Gong to customers because he wanted to figure out how to do this before he could trust a VP of sales or a sales team to do this for themselves. He said, if I can't do this, how can I ask someone else to do this? So he sat there, I gave him content and stuff that we could send out to prospects, get him an email list of ideal customer profiles and start pounding the phone. And you say your script. And if they bang down the phone, you sit and wonder, what did I do wrong? Let's change something, try something new. And then you get 30 seconds with them on the phone and then they bang the phone down. Okay, this is better, but we're not quite there yet. What can we tweak here to bring the main point up earlier? And of course you can use something like GONG to record it and actually help you learn this, which is what we did. And very quickly we identified who the right buyer was. It was not the first one that we thought would be the right buyer. We moved from sales ops to sales leaders and we changed the script of what we were offering until people started staying on the phone and going, huh, that's interesting. Can you show me a demo like of course. And here's the demo. And that's how we did it. So aggressive outbound together with sowing the seeds for the future Inbound motion so that when it's ready it will fuel your revenue engine.

Whether you're PLG or not, there's immense value in founders picking up the phone, sending emails, sending LinkedIn message of course stemming from your ideal customer profile and doing that work because it, it helps you figure out the messaging also. Right. If you your PLG doesn't kick off on day one like there's no virality. Right. So you really need to figure out that messaging. Everyone's looking for that magic bullet in the early days. Unfortunately it doesn't exist. So someone asked here, what is plg? PLG is product led growth. And perhaps udi, you can give us your ideal definition of that.

Yeah. So product led growth is where using the product helps distribute it to others. Classic examples are product like Dropbox or Slack. If you're using Dropbox and I'm sending Lloyd a file, then by him getting the email alert that's saying hey udi, just send you a file using this new Dropbox system. Now Lloyd is a Dropbox user and Dropbox didn't have to do anything to make that happen. If I'm using Slack and I add Lloyd to my group Slack, now Lloyd becomes a Slack user and it has a network effect. So there are many products and great companies that were built using a product led growth motion. My expertise is elsewhere which is in enterprise software sales. Classic Motion where you have someone asking for a demo on the website and SDR qualifies them and sets up a meeting for an ae. So most of what I'm doing talking about today applies to the classic enterprise software motion.

Once you create the content, how do you distribute it? Email blasts, LinkedIn posts other especially when you don't have budget and can't run ads.

The short answer is all of the above and you can rank them by cost and effectiveness. So in the early days again I did not have much of a budget. We created a LinkedIn page and we started posting our content there on our corporate LinkedIn page and on our private LinkedIn pages. If you're active on LinkedIn then you probably know this and if not, you should. There's lots of importance on how you distribute the content between personal profiles and corporate profiles. The short lesson here is that people by far prefer interacting with people than they do with brands. That's why you see a lot more comments on personal posts than you do on company posts, because nobody knows who's behind the company. There's a cold logo. Nobody knows if you're, if you've got a paid intern behind that corporate page or if it's the CEO behind the corporate page. So they prefer commenting on personal profiles because there is a face, there's a name, and if you have something good or bad to say, you want a real person to be reading that. So we started experimenting and we ended up using both personal profiles and the corporate profile because we want to grow the number of followers on the corporate profile. So the more followers we get, the more audience we get. For every piece of content that we publish, there's. And if you have a bunch of people posting from their personal profiles and they leave the company at some point, then you lose their followers as well. So it's important to do a combination of both. And using that strategy, we were able to grow to 150,000 followers on LinkedIn in a pretty short amount of time. And so now when we publish a piece of content, a lot of people see it there.

You got a lot of your team members posting on personal and then from the corporate as well. And I tell people often, don't devalue email. Email still works for outbound and inbound.

100%. Email is the most amazing marketing channel. And I'm not even joking, Email has been around for tens of years. It is not going anywhere. And in many ways it is better than social media. And if you haven't thought about this way, let me explain. On social media, timing is super important because you publish something at 10am and unless it gets a lot of traction so it hangs around the feed for a little bit longer, three hours later, nobody's going to see it anymore, let alone if it was yesterday's news. Nobody's going to see it on their social feed. And most people never see 95% of what is published on their social feed anyway. Email is different. With email, as long as it gets through the spam filters, you're in someone's inbox. It's like sitting at their front door and they have to act on it. They need to actively delete it or actively open it, but they can't really ignore it. So it's really sitting there. And guess what? It's still free to send out. I don't know how after all these years it's still free, but it is still free to send out. So it's highly effective. And if you know how to write to the right people with the right message at the right time, email is going to be your most effective marketing channel. I know it has been for Gong. We regularly send out to our opt in list of hundreds of thousands of subscribers who look forward to hearing from us because they knew that we're not going to abuse their time and attention. We're going to send them valuable content that they can actually use to do more business today. So if you use it that way and make sure that the ratio of give and ask is at least 4 to 1 if not 9 to 1. And by that I mean we send out nine emails providing you value without asking anything in return. And once we provide you that value, we'll use a tiny bit of that earned credit. So 1 in 10 emails or 1 in 20 emails, we'll offer you a sales offer or a demo or ask you if you're ready to take a call with us. But if all your emails are, are you ready for that 15 minute call? Do you have 30 minutes today in your first email? Of course I'm going to block you and who would want to talk to you if you do that? So give a lot more than you ask.

You're giving 80% of the time. You're mapping your content to the journey of your customer. And you know what? We grew to 110,000 almost subscribers. Attraction mostly through email. People talk about like communities and having Slack Group. The world doesn't need the millionth Slack group or the millionth Facebook group. When I send an invite out to come to a webinar like this today we have almost 300 registrants or a little more an email. One email does it LinkedIn and Meetup and Social probably does 10% of those registrations. The rest is all email. So there's huge value. Agree. Let's talk about this for a second. How should startups identify and prioritize marketing channels and activities? You're a new startup founder, you get lost in this FOMO. Oh you're not on HubSpot. Oh you don't have Instagram or you're not on TikTok and FOMO kills you when you're an early founder, especially like who is clueless about marketing in some ways and then they go and scream down their marketing team. Probably it's a junior person or a mid level person and they're like, ah, the CEO, the founder is, oh, you got to be here and there and everywhere. So what is your advice for prioritization?

So the answer is, once again, back to basics. And here's my approach to identifying the right channels and right events and where to show up. So if you've been focusing on building the most beautiful, informative website with all the right messages and you've got a pixel perfect and every word is correct, but then you're disappointed because you're sitting back and nobody's coming to the website, then you share this challenge with most of us, which is getting people to show up to your party is much, much harder than showing up to where the party is already happening. And I'll explain. Depending on which industry you're in and who your buyer is, they're probably already congregating somewhere, assuming you're not the first vendor or company trying to sell something to this buyer. So we experimented. In early days we were looking for sales leaders and we had a couple of ideas of where they would be hanging out. So online we thought they might be hanging out on LinkedIn, we thought they might be hanging out on Twitter, and we also looked for events where they hung out. So we found organizations and associations like the aaisp, the American association of Inside Sales Professionals. We found the sales hacker community that Max Altshuler was running and we started signing up for their events, coming around saying, oh yeah, this place is full of sales leaders. Okay, so if this is where the party is happening, this is where the traffic is already going. It is so much easier and smarter to show up there with your message than try to drag everyone to your website because that takes a lot of effort. So that's what we did. We experimented on LinkedIn and Twitter and within a few months we found out that, and this is again our experience that LinkedIn is really where the sales leaders are. They always have their tab open because they're looking for their next candidate, their next partner, their next deal, their next job on LinkedIn. Twitter is where there's a lot of consultants and self proclaimed gurus giving out advice and starting fights, but we weren't seeing any. Business leaders really spend a lot of time on Twitter. In our area, maybe it's different for your industry or your product. And so very quickly we started creating all of our content to be optimized for LinkedIn and then repurposing it for Twitter and Facebook and other mediums. But we really created to be LinkedIn first to optimize for LinkedIn and the LinkedIn algorithm has also changed throughout the years and you've got to keep track of that to make sure your posts are performing well. And then we did the same for the in person events. We scouted all these sales communities, local and national and international, and we started showing up to their conferences and we saw, oh, okay, in this community we're seeing the tech sales leaders. While in that community, like the aisp, it's actually a really good mix of some tech, but also a lot of legacy. So if you want to get into manufacturing and, I don't know, oil and gas and telecom and finance, you want to go to that one instead of that one. So you've got to get the lay of the land and show up to where the party is. Now once you're there, you put up your booth, you get a speaking opportunity. That's my number one hack for conferences. Always get the speaking opportunity, do whatever it takes. If you've got really good content, they will let you on stage for free because they're trying to get really good content to drive the attendees. And even if you have to pay for a sponsorship, do it if you can. Because speaking opportunity, where people are sitting for 20 or 45 minutes and listening to you talk about something you're an expert on, that's providing value and associating it with your brand, that's way more powerful than giving out tchotchkes at a booth somewhere that nobody's gonna remember, they're probably gonna throw it out before they leave the show floor. So get that speaking opportunity. And if you're on social media or in a community, online community, get your content, get your thought leadership out there, provide a lot of value and then you earn the right to occasionally ask for something. And a lot of this does not have to cost a lot of money. And so that's how we did the initial marketing and by showing up in all these places, then we made people search for gong because they heard us at a conference or saw us on LinkedIn. Now I want to learn more about these people. And that's how you start building the website traffic. And that's when you own the traffic because you can start converting it into trial requests. Email subscribers, new letter subscribers, any sort of conversion CTA that you want to put up on your website.

So summarized visibility, credibility and then profitability. I like it. And I like the maniacal focus on the ideal customer profile because then you can map out where do they eat, breathe, drink, sleep, who are the influencers, what tools they pay for what events they go to, what magazines they read. You can create these lists and then try to prioritize and dominate that. A lot of people don't think of it that way, but that is a very important strategy. So let's shift gears here for a sec. You are starting out now. You've been visible, you got, you prioritize your lists, you've got some traffic going now as you scale this from like zero to maybe millions. What are tools, resources, skill sets you need to have when going from pure startup to say maybe 5, 10 million in revenue? People? Who are the people you bring on, what key processes and what do you need to have in your tool stack?

People are always going to be the most important thing in your stack. Way more important than the technologies that are going to come and go and change. And a lot of them honestly do the same or almost the same for your business. It's far less important which CRM you choose or which chat tool you use than the peoples that you have on your team because the best people are going to give you 10x the outcome and of just okay people. And of course you don't want any poor performers on your team, especially if you've got a tiny team. And for years we had a very small team at Gong. Even going into the pandemic, I think we had like 11 people on the marketing team, which is pretty small. We've done most of our growth since COVID started because the company's been really successful and we've got more resources. But especially in those early days, every single one of the people you cannot compromise. I can tell you what my first two hires are and I think that model works for many, if not all companies. As you can guess from the advice I've been giving so far, the first person I hired was a content person. I hired someone who was a domain expert on the same topic as our audience is he had a past in sales so he could write credibly for sales leaders. And that was my first hire. The second hire was a marketing automation person and she was an expert on gluing together all the disparate systems that we needed to get to work because I was spending hours a day on getting the email system, working with the CRM, with the landing page builder, with the chat, with the ads, with all that stuff. And I needed someone to take that off my hands so I could focus on the higher level strategy and give more guidance and measure the campaigns. So those were the two first hires that it was just the three of us for A very long time in the GONG marketing team and we grew and created so much content and traction. The people were sure I already have dozens of people on the team when we were just a tiny team of three. So get the right content person and a good automation person that's probably going to take away like 80% of the work that you would otherwise be doing and free you to focus on strategy, decide which experiments you want to do, which platforms you want to go to, and just work together really successfully in those early days.

Yeah, and both of those things also help with outbound in many ways. Right? Like how do you optimize for open rates, how do you optimize your messaging so people will take a call with you? All of those things are super helpful for your sales team because otherwise most salespeople that I know, they're not messaging experts and so you gotta help them. There have, I'm assuming your team in the early days and until today provides some of that assistance to the sales.

Team percent so it's both on the writing side and on the automation side. I'll explain. Lots of people ask me, udi, when you guys publish an announcement or a new report like today, how do you get 500 gongsters to spread the news? You must have these really sophisticated technologies and systems that alert people like no, I honestly just make it easy for them and ask them. So when we publish a report like today, you'll see if you're following some folks from Gong. Your LinkedIn has probably taken over by the reality of forecasting report that we published. And the way we do this is we know that not everyone is Hemingway and not everyone can write a thoughtful post at 7:45am so we give them one, two or three drafts posts that they can post on their feed. They can change it like I do because I enjoy being unique. Or they can use it verbatim and it'll still be perfect. And we give them two or three image options or video options depending on what the post is. And say, pick from this folder an image, pick one of these three copy options and it takes you 10 seconds to post that. Or you can get fancy and customize some of this, but just make it super, super easy. So that's one component. The second component is to explain the why. Okay, nobody's doing marketing a favor ever. Nobody wants to work for marketing. Marketing's goal is to make sales easier. So when I speak with our sales team and I onboard the new class every month, I tell them, here's how you're helping us Help you. Here's how the LinkedIn algorithm works. When they see a post that's getting a lot of traction, people liking sharing and commenting within the first hour or two, that tells LinkedIn, wow, this is a great post because lots of people are interacting with it. I should show it to more people to keep them on the platform so I can sell more advertising. And so by having a bunch of employees interact with a post, the LinkedIn feed algorithm is going to show that to more of our prospects and leads and that turns into opportunities that I send back to my sales team once those people interact with our posts and then convert on premium content and go to our website. So by telling them the why you're not doing me a favor, you're helping me bring you your next opportunity and making it super easy. So there's a 10 second version if you don't want to get fancy because we provide you all the drafts. That's how you get your team to interact and everyone in the company becomes part of the marketing team and that's a true win as a team moment.

Not many companies do this, right? They feel like they're asking people a favor, but I've seen you guys succeed in a few other companies where everyone's posting all the time, interacting with each other's posts and then that goes, there's compound interest on that in a huge way that helps you go viral in a B2B sense. Now you build this content engine, you've somehow got to 4 or 5,6 million in a methodical way. Content plus outbound, you got revenues, people are watching you on LinkedIn. How do you go from now startup generating revenue with happy customers to becoming a mega brand? What are the key characteristics to become a mega brand and where do you start when you have some of these early stage things going?

Right? So people want to be associated with brands the same way they want to be associated with humans, right? If you walk into a party and you see there, there's one gal that she always has something smart and funny to say. She's got a good story, she's going to really ask you how your day has been going and listen as you tell her about your day and maybe give some advice or comment on it. You might go up and speak to her. But then there's the guy at the other end of the bar that you know that you've got to stay away from because every time you go talk to him, he's going to just talk about his day and his problems for an hour. He's not going to let you put in a word. He's definitely not going to listen while you tell him about your day. So which one of them are you going to hang out with? You want to go to the smart, funny gal, right? Not to the boring guy who's self centered. And when you're building a brand, you should think in the same terms. People on LinkedIn, they're just like the people walking to the party. There's lots of brands on LinkedIn, lots of people at the party they get to hang out with only a few of them. How can you make yourself the one that they want to hang out with? And so we made a very early decision at GONG to marry two qualities into the brand personality. And we did a long exercise that took into account, I think, eight or 12 brand personalities that you can think of them as human personalities. Are we young or old? Are we rich or poor? Are we snobbish or approachable? How do we dress? Would we be wearing a suit and tie or wearing jeans and a T shirt and sneakers? And think of all these things and what we eventually managed to do, which I think is rare, but is now being broadly copied. Where people can succeed in doing that is being an authority, a trusted authority. So when people have a question on what actually works in sales, they turn to gong. So we've created ourselves an authority, but we've done it in a way that always remained human and approachable and a bit funny and tongue in cheek and a little quirky. And we married those two things together. And it was risky because many brands, they end up either very authoritative but also very boring and stuffy, or very quirky and fun and approachable. But you don't really trust them as the authority in their field. You'll go to someone else when you want that information. We were able to marry these two qualities in a way that if you ask the average GONG follower or customer, they'll say, oh yeah, GONG is. I read all their content. I share with my team. My enablement team uses GONG content as our course curriculum. But they're always so fun to hang around. Their events, their social media. I love their emails, I love everything they do because they're fun and approachable. And you'll never think of us as the boring guy in the sweaty suit, but always as the fun person who's just asking you about your day and offering some friendly advice. So that's what we did. And of course, it was not coincidence. We have a very detailed style guide. Our editing and content team have 150 page guide on how to write for Gong, which they use with some of the contractors and freelancers that we use to help us create content. Our brand and creative team have a very long style guide of what colors to use in what sequence and how the logo fits in and what imagery we use. We never use stock image and photography on our website. You won't see any of it ever. At least not since 2017, because we figured that it tells you nothing unique about us. If we're using the stock photography of business people in suit shaking hands in a meeting room, who wants to see that? It tells you nothing about the brand except that they're boring and lazy. So instead, for years, we commissioned our photography and we chose this cast of characters of very diverse humans from different ethnic groups, different ages, different genders, and also the English bulldog known as Bruno, who's still on our website all these years later. He's the only cast member who survived all the different website transformations because nobody could let him go. And then since last year, in our latest visual identity, we've kept all the boldness of the colors and the logo shape and the quirky dog, but we've up leveled the maturity and sophistication of the website for our enterprise customers now that some of the biggest companies in the world are using gong. They needed that level of maturity to remove any unnecessary friction when we looked like a startup selling to startups. And now we're commissioning all of our illustrations. So we've got a unique illustration style that you can find throughout our website where we have all these diverse characters, but they're illustrated in a really funky, interesting way. And we give that treatment to event speakers and customers that we showcase in our case studies and customer success stories. So they get that special treatment and it's very unique and it tells you something about the brand and how fun and approachable quirky we can be, while also being this trusted authority. So it takes work and deliberation and of course, it's not the only way to build a great brand. There's many other ways, but that's the approach that we took.

Yeah, but if you're different, people take a look at you, right? People are used to seeing the same blue and white for decades now, especially in software. And so you're different, people stand up and take a look at you. It's like going on a Highway at 100 miles an hour. But what hoops did you have to jump to come up with this personality? Or it was just an extension of the early team and the Founders.

It really was the extension of the early team. I'm extremely lucky to work for a company where our CEO is a past cmo and that comes with a lot of goodness because he understands and values marketing and knows how much marketing can contribute to the company. So I never had to prove why we need marketing at GONG or why we need to invest in marketing. The internal joke is, and it's not a joke that the CFO occasionally gives me an emergency call. Udi, quick, we need to spend more money. Where can you invest this Now? How many times has your CFO called you as the CMO or VP marketing to offer you more money to invest because they trusted you would use it to create more pipeline, more demand, get the company narrative out there. That's the kind of culture that we have at gong. Even during downturns, whether it's Covid or whether it's now. We've never cut the marketing budget because we're able to show how it contributes to pipeline, how it contributes to brand awareness. And that's one of the first thing the company wants to invest in and probably the last one that they want to cut it.

Now, you guys did a Super bowl ad speaking of budget and we do.

Actually we did one last year and one this year.

And was it expensive? Sure it was.

Depending on how deep your pocket is. It's not for the faint hearted. It's not something that I would do in the first, second or third year of building the brand. We did that when we were already a pretty mature, successful company and we had earmarked and I do this every year. I earmark around 15% of my budget for experiments that I don't even know what they are when I get the budget approved because I know there's going to be many opportunities throughout the year that I'm going to want to utilize and I don't want to have to start a budget approval process for them. So I earmark that percentage of budget for experiments and there's never a shortage of experiments.

How did this experiment turn out from an ROI perspective? Was it worthwhile? Would you do it again? Would you recommend it to other to be founders?

So it's a more complex question than you might think. If you ask me, do I recommend LinkedIn ads? Yes, of course. You see daily ROI. I can explain why super bowl is a little more complex because we thought about it last year when we headed into super bowl as a long term brand awareness exercise that would uplevel the brand to be thought of as a very large successful company and we didn't even think we'd get any short term measurable roi. So that's how we stepped into it. And one of the hacks that I use there is, instead of buying the national spot, which is super expensive, it's in the multimillions of dollars which I was not ready to put down, that would be too big a part of my budget. I spent a tiny fraction of that in the low six figures buying regional spots in San Francisco, in New York and in Seattle. And we worked with one of the creative agencies that done good work for us in the past. And we created a modest but fun super bowl commercial in the middle of COVID Just one actor, one small set, one day of shooting, and it performed really well. The bottom line is we ended up having our biggest week of pipeline generation ever in the company during super bowl week of last year. And all the brand impression stuff that we were hoping for, we got that in spades. The sales team was delighted because we could see I was using GONG to track sales calls where customers were talking about seeing us on super bowl and hundreds of the customers and prospects on calls were talking about seeing us on super bowl and how exciting this is and how this helped them realize that we were such a big successful company. Candidates were telling recruiters, I've been thinking about Gong, but then I saw you on super bowl and I thought, okay, this is time for me to apply and take that call now. So it really had a huge effect, even more than we were hoping. And as I said, we had the biggest pipeline week ever. And many of those opportunities six months later or sooner turned into meaningful revenue. So that was a really good year. And then it made it very easy for me to get approval to double the budget for the 2022 Super bowl and go bigger, buy more in game spots that are right in the game and not before or after and experiment with some new regions. And again, the goal was to do a long term brand awareness play that may or may not contribute to short term pipeline. To make a long story short, we hit the brand awareness goals out of the park with even more brand awareness this year than we saw last year. We did not see a comparable immediate pipeline impact as we did last year. Could be for a variety of reasons. Either the creative was different this year. We didn't show anything about the product. It was meant to be a funny super bowl commercial that grabs people's attention and it did, but it didn't say very much about the product. So it didn't drive people to ask for demo requests as much as they did last year, which is why we're a little bit torn in the team. I'll be honest and admit it. Some of us are like, yeah, we should totally do this again because it has all these great effects. And others are maybe we've finish this experiment and play and we can move on to something else and make better use of our money next year. So I don't know yet if we'll be in 2023 Super bowl, but stay tuned.

Maybe you'll buy a slot like the Weeknd did to take it over and do a performance there. But this begs the question, right? A lot of early startups and even once you've raised Series A B, lots of money and a lot of tech focused leaders, they want to see roi. So how do you balance this brand and performance investments when brand clearly is not very hard to measure? The ROI is not clear right there. You got top down pressure to generate sales. So is there a percentage balance? Do you throw that in the experimentation bucket and don't ask questions kind of thing? Is that the culture? How should we think?

So there are a few angles to this. One of them is the balance of how much we're spending on things that are measurable versus how much we're spending on things that are not measurable. And I think in B2B marketing and probably in any marketing, the vast majority of things we invest in should be measurable and should be clear to show roi. So that's how my budget is built. The vast majority goes to things like digital advertising and sponsorships and other means like events where we can show clear roi. And then I keep that part of the budget that we all agree that brand awareness is important. And then I look for indirect ways of showing the impact of that brand awareness. I'll give an example. We got our CEO on a famous podcast and those things are typically really hard to measure. But using gong, we could track every time a customer said, oh, I heard your CEO on that podcast and we could see this showing up. And when that podcast was made live, we have dozens of mentions of really important customers who heard the CEO on the podcast. So that was a really good sign of, oh, we should do that again, because people are showing up and they remembered it and they're talking about it. I did the same thing for Super Bowl. I saw hundreds of calls where they were talking about watching our super bowl ad. That's got to create some memorable brand impression that leads them to to preferring GONG over other brands. And so there are indirect ways that you should look for. But you should also get everyone comfortable and show the data, even if it's not your own primary data, that people see your billboards and see your events and see your commercials, and that makes them a lot more likely to click your ads and go to your website. The biggest source of traffic to our website is direct, which means people saw us offline somewhere and that made them come to our website. They didn't just wake up in the morning say let's see what happens if I type in gong IO. They saw us on the super bowl or on a billboard or at an event and they went to our website. And that doesn't just happen and you can show it. If you've got like a big event, like a Super bowl or a big sponsorship, then you can measure around that day or week and see if there's a spike in traffic, as there should be. But explain that to your cfo, to your head of sales, to your CEO and help educate them. Not everyone is a marketer and a lot of them will need your help with education. It's definitely worth the effort.

And this begs the question of multi touch attribution. Right? You've in some ways figured that out. A lot of people do last touch attribution and Lisa asks you what metrics prove attribution from real world exposures. And I think you've tried to convey that is like you mentions and what happens maybe before, after, during the day, the week of, maybe it's a press release or TechCrunch features, your new York Times or Super bowl, you're measuring around that. But do you assign points to it or like how do you say that this.

So we are still very much evolving our attribution model. And I've never gotten this perfect. I have yet to meet a marketer who even thinks that they got this perfect. So don't bash yourself too much about not figuring out multi touch attribution. No one has figured this out. I can say this with a lot of confidence, especially once you start factoring in out of home or non digital stuff. How we approach measuring some of the offline stuff. If you do a Super bowl commercial on a Sunday and you see a traffic spike on your website and a conversion spike on your website on Sunday, you don't have to be Einstein to know where that's coming from, right? It wasn't a spontaneous movement of people who decided to go and ask for a demo on your website. If you put up a billboard campaign for a certain four weeks, you can Measure traffic to your website on those four weeks against the previous four weeks or the average rolling four weeks in the three months that came before that. There are ways of doing this today. A lot of out of home companies, they know that marketers are looking for better ways to measure them. They do offer ways that are tempting. Not all of them work as well as promised. I will say this. So a lot of the static billboards and especially digital billboards you can buy today, they work with cellular networks to track mobile phone users who supposedly walk by that billboard or drove by that billboard and have seen it. And then they give you a pixel that you can use to retarget those folks on digital media. I know it sound little Big Brother in sci fi, but this stuff works up to a point. So you can put up a billboard and you can get from the company who you did the billboards with digital pixels that you can use to retarget that same traffic with a follow up message or repeat message on digital. We even did this a few years ago with a kind of unique type of out of home. We wrapped cars when there was a big Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The last big one was 2019. I didn't want to sponsor the conference because what I could afford would be a very small booth that would not give me any meaningful traction. So Instead I hired 20 cars that were rideshare cars from Uber and Lyft. I wrapped them in our GONG branding, had them swarm around Moscone center in San Francisco, dropping off and picking up people. And I could see on a map where these cars were driving. And I got digital data of which people came across these cards and I could target them and retarget them on digital afterwards. So that was a very interesting campaign to run. And again it got some of that soft ROI of lots of people texting me, oh, I just got into this GONG car, what's that about? And posting on social media, which again I didn't have to pay for that. But lots of people really love the campaign idea and posted that on social media. And at the same time we got the more measurable side of being able to track those users and retarget them on digital. And when they did end up converting, we knew where they came from.

Perfect marriage of creativity and data. Did you use a service to accomplish that or you manually?

Yeah, yeah, that one was done with a company called Rapify, spelled W R A P I F Y Rap. Their friends and partners, they operate here in the Bay Area and several other cities. So yeah, look for Them if you want to do wrapped cars, they do some really fun stuff.

You guys created this category around revenue intelligence. Did you deliberately set out to create the category and what do you think are or from your learnings are some key elements to create a category like this?

Yeah, very deliberately. We set out to create a category and I could probably take up the rest of our time with this. I'll try to be brief. We, we decided three, three and a half years ago that the category we were in, which was Conversation Intelligence at the, at the time we had outgrown the category because one, our product vision was far reaching more than anyone else in the category was just talking about recording calls and using them for coaching salespeople. We already knew that we have a much broader vision. And two, we wanted to get the attention of senior sales leaders who didn't really care about recording calls because that's a very tactical thing. And so we didn't know what the solution is going to be yet. Now it sounds obvious. So we hired a senior leader to our team, Sheena Badani, who's still wonderful leader on our team. And she took us through a process of examining what we could evolve our category into. And we ended up landing on Revenue Intelligence, which now is a household name of a category because everyone else has copied it from us. But when we launched that in 2019, it was novel. Nobody knew what it was but the sales leaders started caring about it because they care about revenue even though they don't care about conversations. So that minor change from Conversation Intelligence to Revenue Intelligence got the senior sales leaders involved. And two, it allowed us more freedom because now we have this whole category to ourself, at least initially to share our vision and explain how revenue intelligence is so much bigger and better than Conversation Intelligence. And three years later, how do we know it worked from zero to getting both Gartner and Forrester to publish market reports and waves on revenue Intelligence, a category that didn't exist two years ago. To see the vast majority of our competitors change their messaging to introduce revenue intelligence as part of it because they know that where the market is going. Following Gong's lead and to see the increase in Google searches, which has been exponential, we tracked this to see the increase in Google searches for revenue intelligence. This is now a very real category. So that's how you know that it works.

Yeah. And again site did something similar with with customer Success and HubSpot early days with inbound marketing. But what were some key elements to getting. I guess the holy grail is when Gartner and Forrester. Tips.

Here are some really quick tips. First, repetition is key, so we repeated it thousands of times until we were blue in the face. We created the Revenue Intelligence Podcast Reveal, which has hundreds of thousands of downloads and has been going strong since we launched the category in late 2019. Sheena Badani and Devin Reed are the co hosts. Every single week they interview a senior sales leader about how they use data to drive more revenue. And they've been promoting it as the Revenue Intelligence Podcast. Not the Gong podcast, but the Revenue Intelligence Podcast. And for years. For the last few years, we've been spending a big part of our advertising and marketing budget not around our product, but around the category so that we drive Revenue Intelligence to the front. And when people look for Revenue Intelligence, they more often than not end up with Gong, because we are the category leaders and we own all those assets. If you look for the Revenue Intelligence Podcast or the upcoming book or whatever, you all end up at Gong because we are the leaders behind it. But that takes some discipline to promote the category ahead of the company, to get that attention and get people to drop their arms, because they're a lot less defensive when you're teaching them about a category than you are when you're pushing your product.

In many ways, you built like a community of practice to make professionals in that better and people saw value with it. And in many ways also, success is one or two things done extremely well consistently over time. What are some books that have formulated your journey that you recommend others to read?

The number one book, and if you've heard me before, this is like a broken record, but I recommend Everyone Starts with Influence by Robert Cialdini. He talks about the six pillars of human persuasion and that is the base for everything that we do. He wrote that book back in the 80s, before there was social media and LinkedIn and Google and all that stuff. But it's amazing how well his book has survived and how everything he wrote there is still relevant to this day. So start there and then you can take that to whatever media you're working on.

First principles. I love that book. I've read it a few times. Even tied to that is Dale Carnegie's how to Win Friends and Influence People is another great book. What is the biggest trend that will change the way marketing is done today, in your opinion?

I think it will continue to become more and more personalized. We're seeing this in our consumer behavior with Amazon and any other site that you're on personalizing your behavior and your promotions. So you're not just seeing generic promotions anymore. Netflix and Spotify giving you personalized recommendations. B2B has to continue evolving in that direction because people are sick of being spammed with generic messages. If we don't have a mom in our family, I don't want to see Mother's Day deals because they're just offensive to me. And if I'm not in the market for revenue intelligence, I don't want to see ads for that today. So B2B marketing will have to become more and more personalized and there's many technologies and creative ideas that are going to get us there.

What is one piece of unconventional advice that marketers or founders ignore?

I think it's different is better than better. And by that I mean that most companies and individuals try to play the game that someone else has already created and they try to play it and be better than everyone else. That's super hard to do if you take a different approach, which is instead of being better than everyone else, just be different. Do something different with your brand, do something different with your content, do something different with your product, do something different with your sales motion. Think about everything that you do and how can I just do it different? You've already won because you're by definition now unique and doing it better than everyone else until they start copying you and by then you're onto your next thing. So rather than trying to follow, try to lead, do things differently and you're going to stand out 100% of the time.

Love it. You guys have been standing out from day one. Thank you so much for joining us. UDI wishing you great success. Another 10 billion on your valuation.

Thank you Lloyd. Thank you for listening and we hope.

You enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction Podcast.

If you enjoyed the show, please leave.

Us a five star review and you can find all the information mentioned in Today's episode at TractionCoff IO that's T R A C T I O N C O N F IO.