How Bold Marketing Builds Breakout Brands with Udi Ledergor of Gong
About the Episode
What if playing it safe is actually the riskiest marketing strategy of all? That's the provocative premise at the heart of my conversation with Udi Ledergor, former CMO and current Chief Evangelist at Gong, who shares the breakthrough strategies from his bestselling book "Courageous Marketing."
Udi reveals the counterintuitive truth that most marketers discover too late: following "best practices" (which he calls "boring practices") only delivers ordinary results. When you're competing for attention in crowded markets, ordinary is a death sentence. But there's an alternative approach that doesn't require massive budgets – just the courage to stand out.
From his journey taking Gong from startup to category leader, Udi shares tactical frameworks you can implement immediately. His "Punch Above Your Weight" strategy demonstrates how he created campaigns that appeared to cost millions while spending a fraction of that amount. Times Square billboards for hundreds of dollars? Super Bowl commercials for under $300,000? Udi breaks down exactly how he did it, and how you can too.
Perhaps most valuable is his insight on creating the psychological safety that marketing teams need to take creative risks. Drawing from research by Adam Grant and others, he explains how to balance creative experimentation with what he calls "process accountability" – ensuring all creative efforts align with business objectives.
For marketers drowning in a sea of sameness, Udi offers practical advice on carving out budget for experiments (he recommends 5-10% specifically for marketing tests), gaining leadership buy-in, and using customer conversation data to generate unique marketing insights. The content series "Gong Labs" is a perfect example – transforming pattern recognition from sales conversations into genuinely useful content that helped build an audience of nearly 300,000 LinkedIn followers.
As we navigate the AI era, Udi cautions against using technology merely to accelerate mediocrity. The truly human elements – surprising insights, unexpected angles, and genuine connection – remain the essence of breakthrough marketing.
Ready to take the boring out of B2B? Listen now and discover how to create marketing that doesn't just perform well, but stands out, sparks conversation, and drives extraordinary business results.
🎧 Tech Marketing Rewired is hosted by Kevin Kerner, founder of Mighty & True.
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Kevin Kerner: 0:00
Hi, this is Kevin Kerner with Tech Marketing Rewired. On this episode, I spoke with Udi Ledergård, former CMO and now chief evangelist at Gong, and the author of the new book, courageous Marketing. We talked about his perspective and advice on how challenger brands can break through without big budgets, what it really takes to build a bold brand, and how AI and conversational data are giving marketers a new kind of superpower. This was a great discussion and data are giving marketers a new kind of superpower. This was a great discussion and, honestly, I took a lot of notes. Let's get to it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. Welcome to Tech Marketing Rewired. Today I've got on Udi Ledergore on the show and he's the former CMO and now chief evangelist at Gong. Udi's a five-time startup marketer, a keynote speaker and now the author of a new book that I just read, courageous Marketing, which is fantastic, and also a pretty mean piano player. I've seen your piano playing on LinkedIn.
Udi Ledragor: 0:56
I do okay yeah it's good.
Kevin Kerner: 1:00
Yeah, well, you can see behind me We'll have to get together sometime to play some Dave Brubeck or something. There, you go, so really excited to talk to you today. We're going to get into some of the book and a bit about courageous marketing from your perspective, but I'd love for you to just give a bit of your background, a little bit about your chief evangelist role at Gong and just a quick overview of Gong too, for context.
Udi Ledragor: 1:24
Sure Happy to and thanks for having me, kevin. So I grew up in Tel Aviv, israel, where I was born and raised, and the last 20 years I've been doing B2B marketing at five different companies, with a bit of consulting in between.
Udi Ledragor: 1:40
Fun fact, the CEO and co-founder of Gong, amit Bendov, and I have worked together at three different companies over the course of the last 27 years, so uh we went through the dot com bubble, burst together at Click Software and a decade later he hired me to run marketing at a company called Panaya that was later sold to uh Infosys. And then, uh, nine years ago, he called me again I was doing consulting at the time and said Udi, remember that crazy idea? I told you about recording sales calls. Well, we built the product, we rolled it out to 12 beta customers and within three months, 11 of them turned into paying customers. I think we're ready to start marketing this thing. Can you come help? I said yes, I can come help. What took you come help? I said, yes, I can come help. What took you so long? And so I came help. And nine years have gone by just like that.
Udi Ledragor: 2:29
Two years into my journey with Gong, it was clear that I would be more effective if I moved from Israel to the Bay Area, where a lot of our early customers were, as many tech companies start by selling to other tech companies, and we were no different. So seven years ago, I took the family and we moved here to San Francisco, where we're still at these days, and it's been a wild journey. So I joined Gong as marketer number one and employee number 13. It was me and a dozen geeks writing code and I was very fortunate to grow the marketing team to a team of 60 really strong marketers that did some incredible work over the years and a couple of years ago we brought in a few new leaders into Gong for revenue and marketing and people and other functions people who have seen the next stage of growth.
Udi Ledragor: 3:18
Gong is now in the hundreds of millions of revenue and we brought in people who've seen billions in revenue so they can help get us there faster. And that's when I took on my role as chief evangelist, which, for the first time in many years, gave me a little bit of time to sit down and reflect on all the great things that we did, and I thought what a great way of getting it in front of as many marketers as I can to hopefully inspire them, but not only marketers, also sales leaders, entrepreneurs, ceos, founders and investors. And so for the last year and a half I spent writing my book Courageous Marketing, which came out just a couple of months ago in April, became an instant bestseller in all of sales and marketing on Amazon and several other categories, and I've really been enjoying going around the world talking about it and meeting with lots of marketers and helping them take the boring out of B2B.
Kevin Kerner: 4:07
Yeah, it's really. I mean, if anyone's done a good job at creative marketing, it's gone. I mean it's incredible. You created the category, really a new category, which is one of the hardest things you can possibly do, and I love how the book goes through all that. It's really a great, gives a great perspective on the ground tactics of hey, here's what you want to, here's what you need to do to sort of break out. And that's kind of what I want to get into today is I've always been sort of fascinated by really great creative marketing which is sort of doesn't have to be expensive, it's guerrilla, it's super clever. They can play against sort of boring marketing. But then there's this middle between trying to get courageous and being boring. There's kind of cringe maybe in the middle, and so you've done a great job just navigating that, and even the book points out some mistakes that you went through, so it's just really good. I'd like to start with maybe a little bit of background on the book and why was now the right time to document the playbook?
Udi Ledragor: 5:09
I think a few things came together to create the perfect moment for it. First, as I wrapped up my tenure as Gong's CMO and transitioned into Chief Evangelist, I'm still an operator, but no longer running the main marketing efforts at Gong, and while all of those memories and experiences were fresh, I wanted to get them out there as quickly as I could before some of them inevitably become stale, because marketing trends change, technologies change, but the underlying human psychology doesn't change. If you look at some of the classics in marketing literature I'm talking about Robert Cialdini's, influence and Made to Stick by Kip and Dan Heath and others those books are decades old and they read just as fresh as always because they touch on things that are timeless. And so I tried to strike a similar balance in my book and describe both principles that are just what makes us human, what makes us tick, what makes us open an email or watch a commercial or click on something. Those things are pretty universal and, I would argue, almost timeless. But then I wanted to couple that thought leadership and make it a very pragmatic book that marketers couldn't stop taking notes and highlighting, and I think I've achieved that, based on the feedback that I'm getting from thousands of readers. They're saying, like Udi, my book is so filthy now because I've been highlighting every second letter and I've been putting posts and I bought copies from my team because I put dozens of practical examples of how to put these principles to work. So I think it's a good balance of both those things and, as I mentioned, because for the first time in many years I have more flexibility with my schedule now that I don't run a team of 60. So I don't have 12 Zoom calls a day. It's slightly fewer than that.
Udi Ledragor: 6:57
I actually had the time to sit down and write all this down, and a really big fun part of it was not just doing a brain dump of what I remember and what I did, but interviewing over a dozen other marketers so roughly half of them were team members on my team and gone during some of the best periods that we had Folks like Devin Reed and Chris Orlob and Russell Banzon and Sheena Badani, vince Chan, jonathan Kostet and others.
Udi Ledragor: 7:25
They brought in beautiful insights and behind the scenes stuff that some of it I wasn't even aware of. That was going on at the time because things were so hectic and being able to gather those experiences was awesome. And then I also brought in lots of perspectives from other CMOs because I wanted to make sure that the frameworks I was describing were not a fluke, that something happened to work for me. But actually no, here are people who led marketing at companies like Atlassian Carrie Lou Dietrich took them public as their head of marketing Salesforce, where Tricia Gelman was. At Oracle Drift, where Dave Gerhardt and others worked, and I got their stories and kind of cross-re, cross referenced them with mine and that brought in a lot of depth and nuance to the frameworks and examples that I give in the book. So I think that made the book that much better.
Kevin Kerner: 8:13
Yeah, it's a lot of, a lot of really great practical advice, not just from you, but from others Most marketers I see nowadays. Just I think the default is more safe, for sure, but but courageous is going to win, especially how you pointed out in the book. Gong did the opposite. So you showed up and began doing sort of counterintuitive for sure. What did you see that made you think playing bold was the right move when you entered into gong?
Udi Ledragor: 8:43
So I think in one of the first chapters of the book I argue that playing it safe is the riskiest strategy of all. When you think about it it's a little bit counterintuitive, so it's worth explaining. Anyone sort of my age would remember the 1980s saying amongst IT buyers nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, which goes back to the kind of culture of the time where nobody wanted to take big risks. And if you bought an IBM as a mainframe like, nobody's going to fire you even if it didn't work out like you bought the standard that everyone was buying right. And if you expand that idea to following best practices, that's a lot of. A lot of us tend to do that because we think, well, they're best practices for a reason, right, right, they work and that logic is correct. The problem with it is that in reality, by the time anything becomes a best practice, everyone is doing it to get ordinary results. And if you follow best practices which I like to think about as boring practices you're going to get ordinary results. It's not going to be catastrophic, they're going to be okay because that's why they became best practices. But you're not going to get extraordinary results. You're not going to stand out. Nobody's going to applaud you for being creative or creating an outsized result or engagement or curiosity. It's not going to win any marketing awards Not that that should be the goal of the marketing team but it is a good measure of creativity and that's what I think a lot of us understand. But then, between that and taking the leap of action and feeling safe enough to take risks, run experiments, do trial and error without fearing for your job or livelihood that's what causes so many people to default into the best practices. And then you go. Well, if I buy an IBM today or do the same LinkedIn and Google ads that everyone's doing, I'm not going to get fired this quarter, and you're probably right, because who could blame you for doing what everyone's doing? But then, six or 12 months from now, when the needle hasn't moved, because you're just getting ordinary results and you're drowning in a sea of sameness, that's when you're going to get fired, and that's why I'm calling playing it safe the riskiest strategy of all. And so to create courageous marketing, which we'll talk about more, you need not only the recognition that that's what's going to work, but also the psychological safety to work that way. That's what's going to work, but also the psychological safety to work that way, and leaders need to create that for their teams so they don't fear going out on a limb, taking risks, running experiments.
Udi Ledragor: 11:12
And I dedicated a whole chapter in my book, which is one of my favorite chapters You're not supposed to love one child more than others, but this is really one of my favorite chapters of the book called Building a Courageous Team, because I didn't find anything about that in the context of marketing.
Udi Ledragor: 11:26
I had to do research and picked up work from Adam Grant in his book Think Again and other research done on teamwork and what makes team produce their best work, because I don't think marketers ever learned this stuff, and so I was intrigued by reverse engineering what worked on my team and then bringing in some of the academic literature and theory into this, and what I discovered is now it sounds a bit trivial creating that psychological safety which I break down in the book, how we actually did that in practice creating that psychological safety and coupling it with what Adam Grant calls process accountability, which means we're not just doing experiments for the sake of art and running in all different directions.
Udi Ledragor: 12:08
Process accountability means we know what the North Star that we're rowing to looks like. We know what the KPIs that we need to hit are. Let's say, we're trying to create a million dollars of pipeline, so that's our process. Accountability that's where we're all explaining that what we're doing is going to help us get to. And accountability that's where we're all explaining that what we're doing is going to help us get to. And then we can go wild with all the creativity, knowing that we either succeed or we learn from it, but nobody's going to get fired for a failed experiment. And so that's that's really the where the magic happens.
Kevin Kerner: 12:38
Yeah, that's, that's amazing. I want to get into later a bit, if we have time, about leadership support, because I'm sure there's a lot of marketers are listening going. I don't know if my elt is really gonna buy this stuff and I I think there's probably a way that you can iterate your, your inner way, iterate your way into these more creative options, um, but I'd love your take on that because I'm sure that that's a that's a roadblock for some people. So, um, I want to get into some of the good stuff in the book and give people a little bit little tidbits of the different types of things.
Kevin Kerner: 13:07
When you were at Gong you didn't have the Salesforce budget. I mean we were little at getting started. 12 customers on board, what were the? I'd like you to take us through just a few of the tactics that you mentioned in the book that allowed you to punch above your weight, because some of them are just really good, usable, like use tomorrow type of tactics. So if you could give us some of those, it'd be great.
Udi Ledragor: 13:30
Yeah, so I'll preface this with two things. First, there's a catch-22 that any startup trying to sell to enterprises is painfully aware of, and that catch-22 is we're a startup, we're trying to sell to large enterprise customers, but here's the rub the large enterprise customers hardly ever want to buy from startups because they don't know that you'll be around next year. You don't have lots of references that are enterprise customers like them. Your product might not be stable enough or mature enough for what they need, so they just move on. But you're stuck trying to sell to startups, to large enterprises, because you build a product or you want to build a product for large enterprises. The second thing I'll preface with is that when we go into a space, there could be incumbents, like a large CRM provider or a Google or an Amazon or whatever your space is, and you're never going to out-budget them with your shoestring startup budget. And so you're kind of stuck and thinking well, I can never rise above the noise and cut through that with my tiny little budget. And so that's where Punching Above your Weight, which is also the title of a chapter in the book, talks about how to bring those things together and how to use creativity with a shoestring budget to cut through that noise and make your company appear bigger than it is, so you can sell those enterprises. Jeffrey Moore in his landmark book Crossing the Chasm, talks about the need to go from the early adopters to the early majority. That's when your product and company really become mainstream. And to do that you have to make sure that the product can support enterprise and that's probably a topic for a different podcast. But great marketing can also make your company appear to be two years ahead of where it really is, making it a lot more appealing to enterprise buyers. So I'll give two examples of things that we did that worked really well to work with our shoestring budget and I'll say that it happened to me and my team as well, and I've seen this across the board.
Udi Ledragor: 15:38
As teams and budgets grow, we tend to become lazy and we tend to throw money at the problem. The classic example of this instead of actually figuring out a good strategy for content marketing or good creative for ads, we outsource a lot of this stuff to agencies because they said, yeah, we've taken care of hundreds of customers like you and they have. And guess what they're going to do? They're going to copy the exact same templates they did for the last dozen customers onto you Sounds familiar. Those are boring practices, otherwise known as best practices, so they're not going to produce any extraordinary results for you. But having scarcity of budget and resources really forces us to get creative, and that's where I think we created some of the most remarkable marketing.
Udi Ledragor: 16:20
So I'll get to two practical examples. One very early, like in the first couple of months of my work at Gong, we launched the Gong Labs content series, and the premise at the time was how do I get to a big audience with almost no budget? I literally had no budget. I want people to know that we exist. I want them to know that we specialize in turning customer interactions into actionable data and insights, which was a novelty in 2016, when I joined Gong and I thought well, if we analyze our customers' calls even those 12 first customers if we analyze those calls, it's a few thousand calls. We can start seeing patterns like how much do the best salespeople speak to get the next call? How many questions do they ask in a good discovery call? What's the best time of the week to set up a call? And it kept getting crazier. At some point I was curious and had our data analysts run the research. What is the impact of salespeople who swear on their sales calls, use the S word or an F ball? Turns out they have an 8% higher win rate if they swear on sales call with certain stipulations. But that was really exciting insights and so I had a data analyst run all these tests analysis to answer my questions, which I thought would make a good story.
Udi Ledragor: 17:41
And my first hire to my team was Chris Orlov, who basically created and took over the Gong Labs data series content series, and it's still running today, nine years later, with hundreds of thousands of readers who subscribe to the email and follow Gong's social media channels. This month we're going to hit 300,000 followers on LinkedIn for our corporate profile. That's quite a landmark and quite a benchmark, and the reason is that we provide content that people really find value in. We're not just shoving our next webinar or our product release Nine times out of 10,. We're providing value for free. It doesn't require you and our audience to buy our product to enjoy that value.
Udi Ledragor: 18:21
If I tell you how to use swearing on a sales call to increase your win rate, there's value right there. It's fantastic If I teach you that opening a cold call by asking hi Kevin, how have you been? Is a much more effective, opener than hi, kevin, how are you? And we break down the psychology of why that works. I've just given you that value that you didn't have to pay for. And guess what? I didn't have to pay a lot to create that either. I used one data analyst to run the data. I used a content writer to craft a beautiful story, and I use my organic email and social media channels and get up on stages at conferences that pay us to come over and talk about this stuff because it adds so much value to the audience.
Udi Ledragor: 19:05
So a great content marketing strategy which, again, I have a whole chapter in the book that explains about it is one great thing that we did on a very, very low budget. It got us a lot of acknowledgement and engagement in the early days. And then the second thing is what I called punch above your weight, which is really how do you make your company look much bigger? And one of the things that we did over and over again with lots of success is the following so we ran everything from Times Square billboards to full page ad in the Wall Street Journal to Super Bowl commercials, which people thought all of these things must have cost millions of dollars. They did not. They did not.
Udi Ledragor: 19:43
I ran Times Square billboards for hundreds of dollars. I ran a Wall Street Journal ad for maybe $20,000. And I ran a Super Bowl commercial for less than $300,000. How? The formula is simple and of course I break it down more in the book, but here's the nutshell version of it. One I pick an offline medium that is typically associated with large advertisers, so Times Square billboards, wall Street Journal, super Bowl and many others. Two I buy the smallest, most affordable version of it that I can. So for Times Square billboards that might be going to an on-demand website like blimpbillboardscom and spending $500 to buy a billboard that might run for one day, rotating on a digital billboard with several other ads, you can get that for hundreds of dollars, not thousands, not tens of thousands. With Wall Street Journal, turns out, you don't have to buy the 150K national edition ad. You can buy a 20K regional edition that doesn't say it's a regional edition on it anywhere. For Super Bowl, you don't have to buy the $7 million national spot. You can buy a 75K regional spot if all you care about is an audience in Silicon Valley or in Seattle or in Chicago or in Boston, you can buy just that one region or more, targeted at where your customers are. So that's step two.
Udi Ledragor: 21:02
Step three is getting creative with the medium. Do something that's going to make people go huh, that's different. So when we ran a Super Bowl commercial that targeted VPs of sales, people took notice because this was the first time in many years that a B2B ad had run in the Super Bowl and I can't remember the last time anyone was targeting VPs of sales with the type of message that we did. When we take billboards and Times Square, sometimes we use them to advertise our outstanding gongsters, which is our version of employee of the year, to show them recognition, and we see that drive a lot of job applications after we do that. So that's step three be creative with the medium.
Udi Ledragor: 21:38
Step four and this is where the magic really happens we send a photographer and a videographer to all these locations where we put up billboards or whatever we're doing out of home. We take great photos of them that people will recognize the iconic location. And then step five is amplifying those photos and videos on our company's social channels, which is where our captive audience that we care about really is when I put up a billboard in Times Square. I don't justify it by telling the CFO that people on their way to see the Lion King on Broadway are going to see the billboard and go to my website and buy my software. I don't care about those people. All I care about is the one photographer I have there taking a photo of my billboard surrounded by all those people and then amplifying that on my social channels to my captive audience, who does care about my software.
Udi Ledragor: 22:26
And then step six, the final step, is also further amplifying it by activating your employees. So when we do any campaign like that, we have all of our Gongsters share this on social media. So now I get reach that I could never afford to pay for. But if I can get 200 or 500 or 1,000 Gong employees to share my post, I just have an order of magnitude more reach than I could ever afford. And if you do this for a customer story, you ask the customers to share that. If you're advertising a fundraising, ask your investors to share that and they'll be excited to do that. So that is the Punch above your weight framework. Pick a medium typically associated with large advertisers. Two, buy the smallest, affordable version you can. Three, get creative with how you use the medium. Four, make sure you take good photos and videos of it. Five, amplify it on your social media. And six, activate your employees, partners and customers to help you get more reach. That is it.
Kevin Kerner: 23:24
Yeah, fantastic. And the mention of data All these startups they're technology companies. They have data coming out of the platform in some way. They have user groups, they have data, they have metadata. It's monetizing that data into thought leadership and then using it. It's really just unique. It's monetizing that data into thought leadership and then and then using it. It's really just unique. The thing that's got me thinking is, like, are you just built differently than other people? Like, is this just something in you and maybe the people that you were able to hire just had a creative background, so they did it or is this something that you can actually work yourself into?
Udi Ledragor: 23:58
I think it's the latter. I think I think you can engineer this environment. I don't think I'm that special. In all honesty, I don't think I'm special, and even if I were, I don't think I have the eye to hire 60 people with all the same traits. I think it's about me growing up, personally and professionally, in an environment that was prone to taking risks, and I electrocuted myself several times playing with electricity. This is a true story. I grew up in an environment with not enough supervision. That was personally. And then, professionally, I grew up in an environment working for Amit Bendo twice before I came to Kong, where he was always pushing us to do everything crazier and bigger.
Udi Ledragor: 24:43
And what would this look like if we wanted to get 10x the impact? Because when you think about how can we get 20% more, you're thinking incrementally. If you're thinking about how do we get 10x more, incremental thinking is not going to get you there. You have to think about something completely different, because doing something incremental is never going to get you to 10x. You've got to think in a revolution, not in an evolution, and so that type of thinking was instilled in me in my professional work very early on, and I brought that to Gong and created an environment with the psychological safety for that team to do their best work and take risks and go to the edge and make things that are not boring and rarely follow best practices because we usually had a better idea. So I absolutely think you can engineer that environment and we've seen that happen on our product team, in our marketing team, in many, many functions at home.
Kevin Kerner: 25:37
Yeah, the best practices thing is super interesting because, especially in the age of AI, don't you think that most people will? The algorithms are going to pick up what the next best practice is, and it's possible that most of the stuff that comes out will just pick up on the best practice.
Udi Ledragor: 25:51
Are you concerned about the use of AI in this, or is it an opportunity to sort of rethink, if you're a brand, Of course, ai is changing so many professions, but if you go back to the basic human principles, I've been in marketing long enough that I remember that 15 years ago, some marketers got very excited when they discovered the gig economy websites like Fiverr and Mechanical Torque and others and said, oh you know, instead of hiring an expensive content marketer in my territory, I can now offshore this and there's a guy on the other side of the world who's going to write a blog post for me for 50 bucks. I'm such an efficient marketer, I can write. I can afford to come out with five blog posts a week. Now the problem is nobody in the world wanted to read your $50 blog post. It's someone who knows nothing about your industry, your product, your customers or your domain wrote for you. Yes, you got it for cheap, but it was completely boring, useless content. And I'm seeing a reincarnation of that now, where the new version of offshoring your content developing is offshoring it to AI and AI is writing your boring content that nobody wants to consume. So the same lazy principles have survived all these different technologies all the way from offshoring to AI.
Udi Ledragor: 27:08
I think the best marketers know how to use the right tool to drive the right strategy and not the other way around. The tool is not going to save you. There was never a tool that was going to save you. Not email automation, not CRM, not ABM software. None of these tools are going to save you. Not email automation, not CRM, not ABM software. None of these tools are going to save you. If you wrote a bad prospecting email, just because you have a tool that lets you to send it 5,000 times doesn't make it a good email. You're just sending a bad email 5,000 times. And just because you have AI that can write content at the tip of your fingers doesn't mean it's creating good content. You're just creating that content faster.
Udi Ledragor: 27:39
And so once you understand that and you go oh wait, if I actually spend the time to strategize on a brilliant content idea and I break down in the book, in the chapter about content marketing, what makes good content? It's a pattern that you can recognize across all great content. I'll give you the natural version of it. It has to be hyper-relevant to your audience. It has to be interesting and timely. Why should I read it now? Creating a sense of urgency. And three, it has to be immediately applicable, that I can learn something new in just a few minutes, if not seconds, and if you create an idea or a bunch of ideas around that now, ai can help you flesh that out, reformat it for a webinar and a social post and a blog post.
Udi Ledragor: 28:22
Ai is wonderful for doing those things, but could AI ever come up with the idea of asking how salespeople who swear have higher win rates? Of course not. That was a human idea that we came up with and we did a lot of work to create the blog post behind it. Today we probably could have created it in a fraction of the time using AI, but AI is not yet at a point where it could help me ideate and get to those great ideas. So I'm not afraid about people using AI. I think they're going to abuse it like they do with any tool and any technology. Over the years, the great marketers are going to know when to use human intelligence and where to leave the rest artificial intelligence, completely agree.
Kevin Kerner: 29:01
Thought partner right. I'm excited as the thought partner angle on it because it can give you different ideas to how to go to market and content creative ways to do things. But having it write your stuff is really bad. That gets me to the Gong platform a bit. I'm really intrigued by some of the marketing use cases. I'm hearing of people using Gong as an intelligence platform and then coming out with some idea or some new angle from the Gong data. I would love to hear from your perspective some inventive ways that you see customers using Gong for marketing purposes.
Udi Ledragor: 29:35
So in my role as chief evangelist, I actually meet with hundreds of marketers using Gong, and that's one of the fun parts of my job. I actually meet with hundreds of marketers using Gong and that's one of the fun parts of my job and I see these creative use cases and then I go and share them with other marketers so they can all get these benefits. So here are just a few of the things I'm seeing marketers do. First and I use this as well I talked about brand investments, things like billboards, maybe sponsoring podcasts, doing events. A lot of marketers either haven't worked up the courage to try and ask for those things because they know they're going to have a hard time measuring their impact, or they experiment in a small way, but they set very low expectations on measurement because those things are notoriously hard to measure. Gong is actually super helpful for measuring some of those brand investments. I'll give you two quick examples.
Udi Ledragor: 30:24
Many of your listeners have heard about Michael Lewis, who's the author of Moneyball and other bestselling books and movies that were made after them. He also has a podcast with a really broad reach I forget how many millions of listeners he has and he does sponsored episodes where you can send a guest that works for his topics and you pay quite a bit of money for sponsoring that and he tells you yeah, whoever listens to it listens to it. He can't guarantee anything like any podcast and I decided to take that risk and send my CEO to be interviewed by Michael Lewis on his podcast, and I paid a nice five-figure number to do that. As soon as the episode launched with my CEO, I opened up Gong and I searched for Michael Lewis podcast. As the episode launched with my CEO, I opened up Gong and I searched for Michael Lewis podcast and, lo and behold, I found 40 customer calls where people came on a demo and, unprompted for it, said I heard your CEO on the Michael Lewis podcast, so I asked for a demo because I wanted to learn more about your software. Now, that already gave me tremendous ROI, knowing that, even if these were the only 40 people who heard my CEO on the Michael Lewis podcast and they asked for a demo, that was already runaway ROI and at that point I could start getting creative and extrapolate that for every one of those, maybe there were 10 others that didn't think of mentioning it or weren't asked about it. So I knew I had a lot of relevant listeners who listened to that.
Udi Ledragor: 31:48
And then I did the same thing after my Super Bowl commercial. I went into Gong and looked for Super Bowl and, lo and behold, I found hundreds of sales conversations where they said, oh, I saw you on the big game last night. Congrats on the Super Bowl commercial. I was on the fence about Gong, but after seeing you on the big game, I realized I need to reach out and get things moving. So, coming with this to the CFO or the CRO or the CEO and saying, okay, this is the impact of our brand investments, can we do more of these? Of course they'll say, yes, please do more of those.
Udi Ledragor: 32:18
So that's a really creative way of using Gong to measure what you're doing.
Udi Ledragor: 32:21
The other example I'll touch on you talked about listening to the voice of customer, so you can mirror that in your marketing material.
Udi Ledragor: 32:28
So that's a very good use case of Gong where you can set up trackers and streams and many other mechanisms that we have now, and one that's coming out very soon that I'm very excited about, is a theme detector, which can tell you how the conversation amongst your customers and buyers is changing. So what are their top challenges? We can scan across all your customer base and pull out those trends. We can tell you who are the top competitors that are coming up this quarter so you can brush up your competitive battle cards and preemptively differentiate against those competitors. We can tell you which people on your sales team are using which version of your collateral and which one is working better, so that you can enforce that one across the entire team. So there's all these really creative, robust use cases of Gong, and if marketers are not using Gong, or still using Gong just to occasionally listen to a sales call, they're really missing out on a lot of the value.
Kevin Kerner: 33:22
Wow, amazing. I can give you one that I've heard from a customer is account-based marketing related. So they're using Gong to listen to the banter before and after the call with the salesperson and finding out personal information about the customer. Not too creepy, but they'll find out they're golfing this weekend or they're doing something else and they'll use that data and then they start to use it across people in the account and beyond the account in the categories. That's very cool. So it's not like the mark, it's not like the use case data. It's more of the, the uh, personal data that they're using to send. You know they're probably using sendosa and other things to send up. So it's really cool use case and I'm sure there's a million more.
Udi Ledragor: 33:59
You could query gong and say like, do more of our customers play golf or basketball?
Kevin Kerner: 34:04
right, listen to this music, this music or whatever. Yeah, it's really an amazing time when you can interrogate that data at scale. It's really incredible. So I mentioned this in the first part of the call, so I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this that are very interested in the book, and everyone wants to get into this, be more creative. It's a great idea and I'm sure it's very compelling. But how do you get your ELT If you don't have an ELT that's supportive or your boss isn't supportive? Is there a way that you can iterate to do these things in small ways, or how can you sell it into the leadership?
Udi Ledragor: 34:50
sell it into the leadership. Yeah, so I touch on this topic in many different angles throughout the book, but I'll give you here maybe three actionable tips. So the first one is, just like with any good medicine, looking at preventive medicine. So you want to start eating healthy and working out before you get diabetes, not after. So one way of doing this in the work setting is to really vet your next company and your next CEO that you'll be working for, for their openness to what marketing can supply and what marketing can do.
Udi Ledragor: 35:21
I knew when I was joining Gong that Amit was a leader known for expecting a lot from marketing and giving marketing a lot of creative freedom, to the point where he says the marketing budget is unlimited. As long as you keep showing results that we need, you can get more of it because you're converting those dollars into even more dollars of sales. So why wouldn't I give you more budget? Of course, that has some guardrails around it, because we're running a business that needs to become profitable, but with that attitude, I had a lot of rope to do a lot of creative things, and I break this down for how to check these things externally and what kind of questions to ask your CEO and other people who work with him or her, because you might not want to go work for someone where you know it's going to be an uphill battle every single day, talking about why you need to do something and why you need budget and why you even exist. So many marketers need to justify their existence every day. I like comparing this to our friends in sales. Nobody wonders what sales does. Marketing doesn't enjoy that privilege. We have to explain and demonstrate the impact of what we're doing and how that makes sales easier, and I talk about how to demonstrate that as well once you're in seat as well. But the first part is really choosing the right company and right CEO that have a good chance of being open to these experiments and giving you some rope to try some creative freedom.
Udi Ledragor: 36:45
The second thing is again going back to the preventive medicine metaphor that is, budgeting for your experiments ahead of time. So the way I do this from the very early days, I always set aside 5% to 10% of my budget, or what was known internally in my team as Udi's crazy ideas. But moments before they sent that to finance, they changed the title to marketing experiments, and the way I justify the marketing experiments budget is twofold. One I explain look, any demand gen channel that's working for us today is going to tap out at some point. I don't know if that's next quarter or next year, but it will tap out. And to make sure that we can continue providing the pipeline that we signed up for, we need to be experimenting with new channels all the time. So I need a budget for those experiments. Some of them are going to work out and we'll double down. Some of them won't work out. We'll learn from them and move on. So even the grumpiest CFO and CEO get that.
Udi Ledragor: 37:37
And the second explanation I give for marketing experiments budget is that next year there will be some marketing opportunities that we will want to take advantage of but we don't know about yet because they haven't presented themselves. Here's two examples. One a marketing event might happen next October, but it'll only be announced in April, six months before. But I'm now in the previous November trying to finalize my budget. If I don't leave any wiggle room for that event that I'll learn about in April, I won't be able to attend in October and we'll all feel that we missed out because our audience was there, our competition was there. So I need to reserve some budget for these opportunities that I know are going to present themselves after budget approval. Another example is I've built relationships with media contacts at NBC and CBS and all the out-of-home advertisers companies, and they come to me sometimes with last minute deals because another advertiser backed out so I can get something for half price. But I need to give an answer today, otherwise they're going to call the next CMO on their list because they need to fill that medium. It just has to happen, and so if I have some budget that I can pull from very quickly, I can take advantage of those opportunities, and I give many examples of the book of times that that happened. So you want that flexibility, and so that's how we pre-budget for marketing experiments.
Udi Ledragor: 38:54
And the last thing I'll say is yes, you do have to get good at internal marketing, at demonstrating how marketing is making sales easier by explaining why you're asking all the employee to share a piece of content. You might have to explain to them. Here's how the LinkedIn algorithm works. If you all share this piece of content right now, linkedin understands that this is a hot piece of content. It'll show it to more of your prospects and we can bring those back as qualified sales meetings.
Udi Ledragor: 39:21
You like those, don't you? So please help us do this. Or if we ask the salespeople to help drive attendees to a dinner that we're doing, then we should come back a couple of months after the dinner and share the stats. Look at that dinner that you helped drive attendees to. We influenced $1 million of pipeline. We sourced another 100,000, and 250 of that already closed this quarter. So that's an amazing job. Please help us drive traffic to the next event that we're doing, because it's going to help you close more deals. So those are kind of some of the principles of getting buy-in from the team around you.
Kevin Kerner: 39:54
Yeah, it's great. I don't think a lot of people think about the budgeting for experiments. I always talk about it as being a stock portfolio. So you know you've got when you're doing your stock portfolio. You've got the easy stuff, the NASDAQ stuff, and then you put a little bit in high growth. That's the thing right. And if it works then you're going to put more money into it. So it's really smart. I will put a plug in for the event section of the book no-transcript. To get what?
Udi Ledragor: 40:30
you guys did, but it's really smart. I actually wrote my first short book on trade show marketing 10 years ago and it did pretty well and I've been meaning to get to update it. And then I had the opportunity when I sat down to write Courageous Marketing. I rewrote, updated the trade show stuff to add virtual events and new lessons that I learned in the last few years and then tightened that up into a pretty meaty chapter on creating magical event experiences. So I hope marketers take notes and take inspiration from that.
Kevin Kerner: 41:01
Awesome stuff. Okay, well, I've kept you way too long here and I know you were up against time. I want to do one thing I do on all these podcasts I ask an AI roulette question. This is a completely AI generated question. Through perplexity, I put in your your profile, I put in your website, I put in other questions we had today and a couple other things, and so I'm going to click here, send. I'm going to click submit here and let's see what it comes up. Submit here and let's see what it comes up.
Udi Ledragor: 41:29
You nervous I'm nervous.
Kevin Kerner: 41:30
But maybe you should be nervous, edie, We'll see. Here we go. Oh gosh, come on. Okay, if you could program an AI to be your creative partner, would you want it to be more like a jazz improviser, riffing off your ideas and surprising you with unexpected twists, or more like a master puppeteer pulling the strings behind the scenes to orchestrate the perfect campaign performance? It must have picked up on the fact that I put those two things into perplexity. They thought that was the best stuff.
Udi Ledragor: 41:58
So you don't want to be a jazz improviser or a puppeteer no, no, I, I am an amateur musician and and I I did dabble in puppeteering as well. So well done for flexity. Can I have both?
Kevin Kerner: 42:12
I mean.
Udi Ledragor: 42:13
I? I think so. So here's the thing. I think a lot of people struggle with that initial creative idea, but they really know how to rock the execution If they're given clear guidance on what is the big idea. In the early years that I worked with Amit Bendo, that was kind of how we divided the work. Amit used to come in with his big coffee cup from his long commute to work, walk straight into my office and say Udi, driving here, I had a crazy idea. Then I'd look up from my screen okay, amit, what was it? And then he'd give me a crazy idea and I'd give him direct feedback on it and if I liked it and believed in it, I'm like I'm going to do it. And then I rolled out the execution plan and programatized it, so so we could actually roll that out.
Udi Ledragor: 42:57
I think over the years I've become a lot more creative with my own ideas and come up with my own visions and then kind of relinquished execution to my team members to execute on a lot of them. And I think I actually know that I also nurtured and cultivated them to become more creative and come up with their creative ideas. So you do need both. You need a big idea. But a big idea without a plan is just a dream or a wish. It's not going to become a reality. So execution absolutely matters. You do need both. Um, I think sometimes I could use inspiration with big ideas and sometimes, um, I have a big idea, I just don't have the energy or the time to go and execute it. So sometimes I would use that help awesome puppeteers and musicians unite that's right.
Kevin Kerner: 43:42
That's right. Everybody. You know they're both creative, career, creative soul. I think part of the reason why you've had really good leadership too is because of you. You got a lot of creativity inside of you, which is fantastic and it really comes out in the book. I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope everyone goes out and and picks up the book. I'm listening on audio and I think you read the audio too, right.
Udi Ledragor: 44:04
I do. My husband jokes that if you want to get a feel of what it's like living with me, you can now hear me talk nonstop for four hours and 42 minutes. So our Courageous Marketing is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and everywhere books are sold. It's in hardcover and paperback and audiobook and in digital if you prefer that. So there's no excuse not to get it.
Kevin Kerner: 44:25
Yeah, awesome. And your LinkedIn profile is great too, so I'll put that in the show notes here. Udi, it's been so good talking to you. Thank you so much. So much gold in this one. I took a bunch of notes and I really appreciate it. Hopefully we will talk again soon.
Udi Ledragor: 44:38
Thanks for having me, Kevin.
Kevin Kerner: 44:39
Okay, take care.
Guest Bio
Udi Ledergor is the Chief Evangelist at Gong and the bestselling author of Courageous Marketing. A five-time startup marketer and former CMO, Udi helped Gong build a beloved category-defining brand through bold, creative tactics that defied B2B convention.
He now shares those lessons with marketers, founders, and sales leaders around the world, both on stage and in his writing. You’ll often find him posting smart takes on marketing leadership, brand strategy, and data-driven storytelling.
🔗 Follow Udi on LinkedIn
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