How Bold Marketing Builds Breakout Brands with Udi Ledergor of Gong

I am always looking for ways to improve. Send me a text and let me know your thoughts! - Kevin

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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This is Tech Marketing Rewired.
Welcome to Tech MarketingRewired.
Today I've got on Udi Ledergoreon the show and he's the former

(00:41):
CMO and now chief evangelist atGong.
Udi's a five-time startupmarketer, a keynote speaker and
now the author of a new bookthat I just read, courageous
Marketing, which is fantastic,and also a pretty mean piano
player.
I've seen your piano playing onLinkedIn.

Udi Ledragor (00:56):
I do okay yeah it's good.

Kevin Kerner (01:00):
Yeah, well, you can see behind me We'll have to
get together sometime to playsome Dave Brubeck or something.
There, you go, so reallyexcited to talk to you today.
We're going to get into some ofthe book and a bit about
courageous marketing from yourperspective, but I'd love for
you to just give a bit of yourbackground, a little bit about
your chief evangelist role atGong and just a quick overview

(01:22):
of Gong too, for context.

Udi Ledragor (01:24):
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 yearsI've been doing B2B marketing at
five different companies, witha bit of consulting in between.
Fun fact, the CEO and co-founderof Gong, amit Bendov, and I
have worked together at threedifferent companies over the

(01:47):
course of the last 27 years, souh we went through the dot com
bubble, burst together at ClickSoftware and a decade later he
hired me to run marketing at acompany 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 saidUdi, remember that crazy idea?

(02:08):
I told you about recordingsales calls.
Well, we built the product, werolled it out to 12 beta
customers and within threemonths, 11 of them turned into
paying customers.
I think we're ready to startmarketing 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 byjust like that.

(02:29):
Two years into my journey withGong, it was clear that I would
be more effective if I movedfrom Israel to the Bay Area,
where a lot of our earlycustomers were, as many tech
companies start by selling toother tech companies, and we
were no different.
So seven years ago, I took thefamily and we moved here to San
Francisco, where we're still atthese days, and it's been a wild

(02:51):
journey.
So I joined Gong as marketernumber one and employee number
13.
It was me and a dozen geekswriting code and I was very
fortunate to grow the marketingteam to a team of 60 really
strong marketers that did someincredible work over the years
and a couple of years ago webrought in a few new leaders

(03:12):
into Gong for revenue andmarketing and people and other
functions people who have seenthe next stage of growth.
Gong is now in the hundreds ofmillions of revenue and we
brought in people who've seenbillions in revenue so they can
help get us there faster.
And that's when I took on myrole as chief evangelist, which,
for the first time in manyyears, gave me a little bit of
time to sit down and reflect onall the great things that we did

(03:34):
, and I thought what a great wayof getting it in front of as
many marketers as I can tohopefully inspire them, but not
only marketers, also salesleaders, entrepreneurs, ceos,
founders and investors.
And so for the last year and ahalf I spent writing my book
Courageous Marketing, which cameout just a couple of months ago
in April, became an instantbestseller in all of sales and

(03:55):
marketing on Amazon and severalother categories, and I've
really been enjoying goingaround the world talking about
it and meeting with lots ofmarketers and helping them take
the boring out of B2B.

Kevin Kerner (04:07):
Yeah, it's really.
I mean, if anyone's done a goodjob 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 youcan possibly do, and I love how
the book goes through all that.
It's really a great, gives agreat perspective on the ground
tactics of hey, here's what youwant to, here's what you need to
do to sort of break out.

(04:27):
And that's kind of what I wantto get into today is I've always
been sort of fascinated byreally great creative marketing
which is sort of doesn't have tobe expensive, it's guerrilla,
it's super clever.
They can play against sort ofboring marketing.
But then there's this middlebetween trying to get courageous
and being boring.

(04:49):
There's kind of cringe maybe inthe middle, and so you've done
a great job just navigating that, and even the book points out
some mistakes that you wentthrough, so it's just really
good.
I'd like to start with maybe alittle bit of background on the
book and why was now the righttime to document the playbook?

Udi Ledragor (05:09):
I think a few things came together to create
the perfect moment for it.
First, as I wrapped up mytenure as Gong's CMO and
transitioned into ChiefEvangelist, I'm still an
operator, but no longer runningthe main marketing efforts at
Gong, and while all of thosememories and experiences were
fresh, I wanted to get them outthere as quickly as I could

(05:30):
before some of them inevitablybecome stale, because marketing
trends change, technologieschange, but the underlying human
psychology doesn't change.
If you look at some of theclassics in marketing literature
I'm talking about RobertCialdini's, influence and Made
to Stick by Kip and Dan Heathand others those books are
decades old and they read justas fresh as always because they

(05:55):
touch on things that aretimeless.
And so I tried to strike asimilar balance in my book and
describe both principles thatare just what makes us human,
what makes us tick, what makesus open an email or watch a
commercial or click on something.
Those things are prettyuniversal and, I would argue,

(06:16):
almost timeless.
But then I wanted to couplethat thought leadership and make
it a very pragmatic book thatmarketers couldn't stop taking
notes and highlighting, and Ithink I've achieved that, based
on the feedback that I'm gettingfrom thousands of readers.
They're saying, like Udi, mybook is so filthy now because
I've been highlighting everysecond letter and I've been
putting posts and I boughtcopies from my team because I

(06:39):
put dozens of practical examplesof how to put these principles
to work.
So I think it's a good balanceof both those things and, as I
mentioned, because for the firsttime in many years I have more
flexibility with my schedule nowthat I don't run a team of 60.
So I don't have 12 Zoom calls aday.
It's slightly fewer than that.
I actually had the time to sitdown and write all this down,

(07:01):
and a really big fun part of itwas not just doing a brain dump
of what I remember and what Idid, but interviewing over a
dozen other marketers so roughlyhalf of them were team members
on my team and gone during someof the best periods that we had
Folks like Devin Reed and ChrisOrlob and Russell Banzon and
Sheena Badani, vince Chan,jonathan Kostet and others.

(07:25):
They brought in beautifulinsights and behind the scenes
stuff that some of it I wasn'teven aware of.
That was going on at the timebecause things were so hectic
and being able to gather thoseexperiences was awesome.
And then I also brought in lotsof perspectives from other CMOs
because I wanted to make surethat the frameworks I was
describing were not a fluke,that something happened to work
for me.

(07:46):
But actually no, here arepeople who led marketing at
companies like Atlassian CarrieLou Dietrich took them public as
their head of marketingSalesforce, where Tricia Gelman
was.
At Oracle Drift, where DaveGerhardt and others worked, and
I got their stories and kind ofcross-re, cross referenced them
with mine and that brought in alot of depth and nuance to the

(08:08):
frameworks and examples that Igive in the book.
So I think that made the bookthat much better.

Kevin Kerner (08:13):
Yeah, it's a lot of, a lot of really great
practical advice, not just fromyou, but from others Most
marketers I see nowadays.
Just I think the default ismore 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 begandoing sort of counterintuitive

(08:34):
for sure.
What did you see that made youthink playing bold was the right
move when you entered into gong?

Udi Ledragor (08:43):
So I think in one of the first chapters of the
book I argue that playing itsafe is the riskiest strategy of
all.
When you think about it it's alittle bit counterintuitive, so
it's worth explaining.
Anyone sort of my age wouldremember the 1980s saying
amongst IT buyers nobody evergot fired for buying IBM, which

(09:05):
goes back to the kind of cultureof the time where nobody wanted
to take big risks.
And if you bought an IBM as amainframe like, nobody's going
to fire you even if it didn'twork out like you bought the
standard that everyone wasbuying right.
And if you expand that idea tofollowing best practices, that's
a lot of.
A lot of us tend to do thatbecause we think, well, they're

(09:26):
best practices for a reason,right, right, they work and that
logic is correct.
The problem with it is that inreality, by the time anything
becomes a best practice,everyone is doing it to get
ordinary results.
And if you follow bestpractices which I like to think
about as boring practices you'regoing to get ordinary results.

(09:47):
It's not going to becatastrophic, they're going to
be okay because that's why theybecame best practices.
But you're not going to getextraordinary results.
You're not going to stand out.
Nobody's going to applaud youfor being creative or creating
an outsized result or engagementor curiosity.
It's not going to win anymarketing awards Not that that
should be the goal of themarketing team but it is a good
measure of creativity and that'swhat I think a lot of us

(10:11):
understand.
But then, between that andtaking the leap of action and
feeling safe enough to takerisks, run experiments, do trial
and error without fearing foryour job or livelihood that's
what causes so many people todefault into the best practices.
And then you go.
Well, if I buy an IBM today ordo the same LinkedIn and Google

(10:32):
ads that everyone's doing, I'mnot going to get fired this
quarter, and you're probablyright, because who could blame
you for doing what everyone'sdoing?
But then, six or 12 months fromnow, when the needle hasn't
moved, because you're justgetting ordinary results and
you're drowning in a sea ofsameness, that's when you're
going to get fired, and that'swhy I'm calling playing it safe
the riskiest strategy of all.
And so to create courageousmarketing, which we'll talk

(10:56):
about more, you need not onlythe recognition that that's
what's going to work, but alsothe psychological safety to work
that way.
That's what's going to work,but also the psychological
safety to work that way, andleaders need to create that for
their teams so they don't feargoing out on a limb, taking
risks, running experiments.
And I dedicated a whole chapterin my book, which is one of my
favorite chapters You're notsupposed to love one child more

(11:17):
than others, but this is reallyone of my favorite chapters of
the book called Building aCourageous Team, because I
didn't find anything about thatin the context of marketing.
I had to do research and pickedup work from Adam Grant in his
book Think Again and otherresearch done on teamwork and
what makes team produce theirbest work, because I don't think

(11:38):
marketers ever learned thisstuff, and so I was intrigued by
reverse engineering what workedon my team and then bringing in
some of the academic literatureand theory into this, and what
I discovered is now it sounds abit trivial creating that
psychological safety which Ibreak down in the book, how we
actually did that in practicecreating that psychological

(11:58):
safety and coupling it with whatAdam Grant calls process
accountability, which meanswe're not just doing experiments
for the sake of art and runningin all different directions.
Process accountability means weknow what the North Star that
we're rowing to looks like.
We know what the KPIs that weneed to hit are.
Let's say, we're trying tocreate a million dollars of
pipeline, so that's our process.

(12:19):
Accountability that's wherewe're all explaining that what
we're doing is going to help usget to.
And accountability that's wherewe're all explaining that what
we're doing is going to help usget to.
And then we can go wild withall the creativity, knowing that
we either succeed or we learnfrom it, but nobody's going to
get fired for a failedexperiment.
And so that's that's really thewhere 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'msure there's a lot of marketers
are listening going.
I don't know if my elt isreally gonna buy this stuff and
I I think there's probably a waythat you can iterate your, your
inner way, iterate your wayinto these more creative options
, um, but I'd love your take onthat because I'm sure that

(12:58):
that's a that's a roadblock forsome people.
So, um, I want to get into someof the good stuff in the book
and give people a little bitlittle tidbits of the different
types of things.
When you were at Gong you didn'thave the Salesforce budget.
I mean we were little atgetting started.
12 customers on board, whatwere the?
I'd like you to take us throughjust a few of the tactics that

(13:19):
you mentioned in the book thatallowed you to punch above your
weight, because some of them arejust really good, usable, like
use tomorrow type of tactics.
So if you could give us some ofthose, it'd be great.

Udi Ledragor (13:30):
Yeah, so I'll preface this with two things.
First, there's a catch-22 thatany startup trying to sell to
enterprises is painfully awareof, and that catch-22 is we're a
startup, we're trying to sellto large enterprise customers,
but here's the rub the largeenterprise customers hardly ever

(13:51):
want to buy from startupsbecause they don't know that
you'll be around next year.
You don't have lots ofreferences that are enterprise
customers like them.
Your product might not bestable enough or mature enough
for what they need, so they justmove on.
But you're stuck trying to sellto startups, to large
enterprises, because you build aproduct or you want to build a
product for large enterprises.

(14:11):
The second thing I'll prefacewith is that when we go into a
space, there could be incumbents, like a large CRM provider or a
Google or an Amazon or whateveryour space is, and you're never
going to out-budget them withyour shoestring startup budget.

(14:32):
And so you're kind of stuck andthinking well, I can never rise
above the noise and cut throughthat with my tiny little budget
.
And so that's where PunchingAbove your Weight, which is also
the title of a chapter in thebook, talks about how to bring
those things together and how touse creativity with a
shoestring budget to cut throughthat noise and make your
company appear bigger than it is, so you can sell those

(14:55):
enterprises.
Jeffrey Moore in his landmarkbook Crossing the Chasm, talks
about the need to go from theearly adopters to the early
majority.
That's when your product andcompany really become mainstream
.
And to do that you have to makesure that the product can
support enterprise and that'sprobably a topic for a different

(15:15):
podcast.
But great marketing can alsomake your company appear to be
two years ahead of where itreally is, making it a lot more
appealing to enterprise buyers.
So I'll give two examples ofthings that we did that worked
really well to work with ourshoestring budget and I'll say
that it happened to me and myteam as well, and I've seen this

(15:36):
across the board.
As teams and budgets grow, wetend to become lazy and we tend
to throw money at the problem.
The classic example of thisinstead of actually figuring out
a good strategy for contentmarketing or good creative for
ads, we outsource a lot of thisstuff to agencies because they
said, yeah, we've taken care ofhundreds of customers like you

(15:58):
and they have.
And guess what they're going todo?
They're going to copy the exactsame templates they did for the
last dozen customers onto youSounds familiar.
Those are boring practices,otherwise known as best
practices, so they're not goingto produce any extraordinary
results for you.
But having scarcity of budgetand resources really forces us
to get creative, and that'swhere I think we created some of

(16:18):
the most remarkable marketing.
So I'll get to two practicalexamples.
One very early, like in thefirst couple of months of my
work at Gong, we launched theGong Labs content series, and
the premise at the time was howdo I get to a big audience with
almost no budget?
I literally had no budget.
I want people to know that weexist.

(16:40):
I want them to know that wespecialize in turning customer
interactions into actionabledata and insights, which was a
novelty in 2016, when I joinedGong and I thought well, if we
analyze our customers' callseven those 12 first customers if
we analyze those calls, it's afew thousand calls.
We can start seeing patternslike how much do the best

(17:02):
salespeople speak to get thenext call?
How many questions do they askin a good discovery call?
What's the best time of theweek to set up a call?
And it kept getting crazier.
At some point I was curious andhad our data analysts run the
research.
What is the impact ofsalespeople who swear on their
sales calls, use the S word oran F ball?

(17:22):
Turns out they have an 8%higher win rate if they swear on
sales call with certainstipulations.
But that was really excitinginsights and so I had a data
analyst run all these testsanalysis to answer my questions,
which I thought would make agood story.
And my first hire to my team wasChris Orlov, who basically

(17:44):
created and took over the GongLabs data series content series,
and it's still running today,nine years later, with hundreds
of thousands of readers whosubscribe to the email and
follow Gong's social mediachannels.
This month we're going to hit300,000 followers on LinkedIn
for our corporate profile.
That's quite a landmark andquite a benchmark, and the

(18:06):
reason is that we providecontent that people really find
value in.
We're not just shoving our nextwebinar or our product release
Nine times out of 10,.
We're providing value for free.
It doesn't require you and ouraudience to buy our product to
enjoy that value.
If I tell you how to useswearing on a sales call to
increase your win rate, there'svalue right there.

(18:26):
It's fantastic If I teach youthat opening a cold call by
asking hi Kevin, how have youbeen?
Is a much more effective,opener than hi, kevin, how are
you?
And we break down thepsychology of why that works.
I've just given you that valuethat you didn't have to pay for.
And guess what?
I didn't have to pay a lot tocreate that either.
I used one data analyst to runthe data.

(18:47):
I used a content writer tocraft a beautiful story, and I
use my organic email and socialmedia channels and get up on
stages at conferences that payus to come over and talk about
this stuff because it adds somuch value to the audience.
So a great content marketingstrategy which, again, I have a
whole chapter in the book thatexplains about it is one great

(19:08):
thing that we did on a very,very low budget.
It got us a lot ofacknowledgement and engagement
in the early days.
And then the second thing iswhat I called punch above your
weight, which is really how doyou make your company look much
bigger?
And one of the things that wedid over and over again with
lots of success is the followingso we ran everything from Times

(19:30):
Square billboards to full pagead in the Wall Street Journal to
Super Bowl commercials, whichpeople thought all of these
things must have cost millionsof dollars.
They did not.
They did not.
I ran Times Square billboardsfor hundreds of dollars.
I ran a Wall Street Journal adfor maybe $20,000.

(19:50):
And I ran a Super Bowlcommercial for less than
$300,000.
How?
The formula is simple and ofcourse I break it down more in
the book, but here's thenutshell version of it.
One I pick an offline mediumthat is typically associated
with large advertisers, so TimesSquare billboards, wall Street
Journal, super Bowl and manyothers.
Two I buy the smallest, mostaffordable version of it that I

(20:14):
can.
So for Times Square billboardsthat might be going to an
on-demand website likeblimpbillboardscom and spending
$500 to buy a billboard thatmight run for one day, rotating
on a digital billboard withseveral other ads, you can get
that for hundreds of dollars,not thousands, not tens of
thousands.
With Wall Street Journal, turnsout, you don't have to buy the

(20:35):
150K national edition ad.
You can buy a 20K regionaledition that doesn't say it's a
regional edition on it anywhere.
For Super Bowl, you don't haveto buy the $7 million national
spot.
You can buy a 75K regional spotif all you care about is an
audience in Silicon Valley or inSeattle or in Chicago or in

(20:55):
Boston, you can buy just thatone region or more, targeted at
where your customers are.
So that's step two.
Step three is getting creativewith the medium.
Do something that's going tomake people go huh, that's
different.
So when we ran a Super Bowlcommercial that targeted VPs of
sales, people took noticebecause this was the first time
in many years that a B2B ad hadrun in the Super Bowl and I

(21:18):
can't remember the last timeanyone was targeting VPs of
sales with the type of messagethat we did.
When we take billboards andTimes Square, sometimes we use
them to advertise ouroutstanding gongsters, which is
our version of employee of theyear, to show them recognition,
and we see that drive a lot ofjob applications after we do
that.
So that's step three becreative with the medium.
Step four and this is where themagic really happens we send a

(21:45):
photographer and a videographerto all these locations where we
put up billboards or whateverwe're doing out of home.
We take great photos of themthat people will recognize the
iconic location.
And then step five isamplifying those photos and
videos on our company's socialchannels, which is where our
captive audience that we careabout really is when I put up a
billboard in Times Square.
I don't justify it by tellingthe CFO that people on their way

(22:08):
to see the Lion King onBroadway are going to see the
billboard and go to my websiteand buy my software.
I don't care about those people.
All I care about is the onephotographer I have there taking
a photo of my billboardsurrounded by all those people
and then amplifying that on mysocial channels to my captive
audience, who does care about mysoftware.
And then step six, the finalstep, is also further amplifying

(22:31):
it by activating your employees.
So when we do any campaign likethat, we have all of our
Gongsters share this on socialmedia.
So now I get reach that I couldnever afford to pay for.
But if I can get 200 or 500 or1,000 Gong employees to share my
post, I just have an order ofmagnitude more reach than I

(22:51):
could ever afford.
And if you do this for acustomer story, you ask the
customers to share that.
If you're advertising afundraising, ask your investors
to share that and they'll beexcited to do that.
So that is the Punch above yourweight framework.
Pick a medium typicallyassociated with large
advertisers.
Two, buy the smallest,affordable version you can.
Three, get creative with howyou use the medium.

(23:13):
Four, make sure you take goodphotos and videos of it.
Five, amplify it on your socialmedia.
And six, activate youremployees, partners and
customers to help you get morereach.
That is it.

Kevin Kerner (23:24):
Yeah, fantastic.
And the mention of data Allthese startups they're
technology companies.
They have data coming out ofthe platform in some way.
They have user groups, theyhave data, they have metadata.
It's monetizing that data intothought leadership and then
using it.
It's really just unique.
It's monetizing that data intothought leadership and then and
then using it.
It's really just unique.
The thing that's got methinking is, like, are you just

(23:45):
built differently than otherpeople?
Like, is this just something inyou and maybe the people that
you were able to hire just had acreative background, so they
did it or is this something thatyou can actually work yourself
into?

Udi Ledragor (23:58):
I think it's the latter.
I think I think you canengineer this environment.
I don't think I'm that special.
In all honesty, I don't thinkI'm special, and even if I were,
I don't think I have the eye tohire 60 people with all the
same traits.
I think it's about me growingup, personally and
professionally, in anenvironment that was prone to

(24:19):
taking risks, and I electrocutedmyself several times playing
with electricity.
This is a true story.
I grew up in an environmentwith not enough supervision.
That was personally.
And then, professionally, Igrew up in an environment
working for Amit Bendo twicebefore I came to Kong, where he
was always pushing us to doeverything crazier and bigger.

(24:43):
And what would this look like ifwe wanted to get 10x the impact
?
Because when you think abouthow can we get 20% more, you're
thinking incrementally.
If you're thinking about how dowe get 10x more, incremental
thinking is not going to get youthere.
You have to think aboutsomething completely different,
because doing somethingincremental is never going to
get you to 10x.
You've got to think in arevolution, not in an evolution,

(25:05):
and so that type of thinkingwas instilled in me in my
professional work very early on,and I brought that to Gong and
created an environment with thepsychological safety for that
team to do their best work andtake risks and go to the edge
and make things that are notboring and rarely follow best

(25:26):
practices because we usually hada better idea.
So I absolutely think you canengineer that environment and
we've seen that happen on ourproduct team, in our marketing
team, in many, many functions athome.

Kevin Kerner (25:37):
Yeah, the best practices thing is super
interesting because, especiallyin the age of AI, don't you
think that most people will?
The algorithms are going topick up what the next best
practice is, and it's possiblethat most of the stuff that
comes out will just pick up onthe best practice.

Udi Ledragor (25:51):
Are you concerned about the use of AI in this, or
is it an opportunity to sort ofrethink, if you're a brand, Of
course, ai is changing so manyprofessions, but if you go back
to the basic human principles,I've been in marketing long
enough that I remember that 15years ago, some marketers got
very excited when theydiscovered the gig economy

(26:14):
websites like Fiverr andMechanical Torque and others and
said, oh you know, instead ofhiring an expensive content
marketer in my territory, I cannow offshore this and there's a
guy on the other side of theworld 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 withfive blog posts a week.
Now the problem is nobody inthe world wanted to read your

(26:37):
$50 blog post.
It's someone who knows nothingabout your industry, your
product, your customers or yourdomain wrote for you.
Yes, you got it for cheap, butit was completely boring,
useless content.
And I'm seeing a reincarnationof that now, where the new
version of offshoring yourcontent developing is offshoring
it to AI and AI is writing yourboring content that nobody

(26:58):
wants to consume.
So the same lazy principleshave survived all these
different technologies all theway from offshoring to AI.
I think the best marketers knowhow to use the right tool to
drive the right strategy and notthe other way around.
The tool is not going to saveyou.
There was never a tool that wasgoing to save you.
Not email automation, not CRM,not ABM software.

(27:21):
None of these tools are goingto save you.
Not email automation, not CRM,not ABM software.
None of these tools are goingto save you.
If you wrote a bad prospectingemail, just because you have a
tool that lets you to send it5,000 times doesn't make it a
good email.
You're just sending a bad email5,000 times.
And just because you have AIthat can write content at the
tip of your fingers doesn't meanit's creating good content.
You're just creating thatcontent faster.
And so once you understand thatand you go oh wait, if I

(27:43):
actually spend the time tostrategize on a brilliant
content idea and I break down inthe book, in the chapter about
content marketing, what makesgood content?
It's a pattern that you canrecognize across all great
content.
I'll give you the naturalversion of it.
It has to be hyper-relevant toyour audience.
It has to be interesting andtimely.
Why should I read it now?
Creating a sense of urgency.
And three, it has to beimmediately applicable, that I

(28:05):
can learn something new in justa few minutes, if not seconds,
and if you create an idea or abunch 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.
Ai is wonderful for doing thosethings, but could AI ever come
up with the idea of asking howsalespeople who swear have

(28:29):
higher win rates?
Of course not.
That was a human idea that wecame up with and we did a lot of
work to create the blog postbehind it.
Today we probably could havecreated it in a fraction of the
time using AI, but AI is not yetat a point where it could help
me ideate and get to those greatideas.
So I'm not afraid about peopleusing AI.

(28:49):
I think they're going to abuseit like they do with any tool
and any technology.
Over the years, the greatmarketers are going to know when
to use human intelligence andwhere to leave the rest
artificial intelligence,completely agree.

Kevin Kerner (29:01):
Thought partner right.
I'm excited as the thoughtpartner angle on it because it
can give you different ideas tohow to go to market and content
creative ways to do things.
But having it write your stuffis really bad.
That gets me to the Gongplatform a bit.
I'm really intrigued by some ofthe marketing use cases.
I'm hearing of people usingGong as an intelligence platform

(29:23):
and then coming out with someidea or some new angle from the
Gong data.
I would love to hear from yourperspective some inventive ways
that you see customers usingGong for marketing purposes.

Udi Ledragor (29:35):
So in my role as chief evangelist, I actually
meet with hundreds of marketersusing Gong, and that's one of
the fun parts of my job.
I actually meet with hundredsof marketers using Gong and
that's one of the fun parts ofmy job and I see these creative
use cases and then I go andshare them with other marketers
so they can all get thesebenefits.
So here are just a few of thethings I'm seeing marketers do.
First and I use this as well Italked about brand investments,

(30:01):
things like billboards, maybesponsoring podcasts, doing
events.
A lot of marketers eitherhaven't worked up the courage to
try and ask for those thingsbecause they know they're going
to have a hard time measuringtheir impact, or they experiment
in a small way, but they setvery low expectations on
measurement because those thingsare notoriously hard to measure
.
Gong is actually super helpfulfor measuring some of those
brand investments.
I'll give you two quickexamples.

(30:24):
Many of your listeners haveheard about Michael Lewis, who's
the author of Moneyball andother bestselling books and
movies that were made after them.
He also has a podcast with areally broad reach I forget how
many millions of listeners hehas and he does sponsored
episodes where you can send aguest that works for his topics

(30:45):
and you pay quite a bit of moneyfor sponsoring that and he
tells you yeah, whoever listensto it listens to it.
He can't guarantee anythinglike any podcast and I decided
to take that risk and send myCEO to be interviewed by Michael
Lewis on his podcast, and Ipaid a nice five-figure number
to do that.
As soon as the episode launchedwith my CEO, I opened up Gong
and I searched for Michael Lewispodcast.

(31:07):
As the episode launched with myCEO, I opened up Gong and I
searched for Michael Lewispodcast and, lo and behold, I
found 40 customer calls wherepeople came on a demo and,
unprompted for it, said I heardyour CEO on the Michael Lewis
podcast, so I asked for a demobecause I wanted to learn more
about your software.
Now, that already gave metremendous ROI, knowing that,

(31:28):
even if these were the only 40people who heard my CEO on the
Michael Lewis podcast and theyasked for a demo, that was
already runaway ROI and at thatpoint I could start getting
creative and extrapolate thatfor every one of those, maybe
there were 10 others that didn'tthink of mentioning it or
weren't asked about it.
So I knew I had a lot ofrelevant listeners who listened
to that.
And then I did the same thingafter my Super Bowl commercial.

(31:50):
I went into Gong and looked forSuper Bowl and, lo and behold,
I found hundreds of salesconversations where they said,
oh, I saw you on the big gamelast night.
Congrats on the Super Bowlcommercial.
I was on the fence about Gong,but after seeing you on the big
game, I realized I need to reachout and get things moving.
So, coming with this to the CFOor the CRO or the CEO and

(32:12):
saying, okay, this is the impactof our brand investments, can
we do more of these?
Of course they'll say, yes,please do more of those.
So that's a really creative wayof using Gong to measure what
you're doing.
The other example I'll touch onyou talked about listening to
the voice of customer, so youcan mirror that in your
marketing material.
So that's a very good use caseof Gong where you can set up
trackers and streams and manyother mechanisms that we have

(32:35):
now, and one that's coming outvery soon that I'm very excited
about, is a theme detector,which can tell you how the
conversation amongst yourcustomers and buyers is changing
.
So what are their topchallenges?
We can scan across all yourcustomer base and pull out those
trends.
We can tell you who are the topcompetitors that are coming up

(32:55):
this quarter so you can brush upyour competitive battle cards
and preemptively differentiateagainst those competitors.
We can tell you which people onyour sales team are using which
version of your collateral andwhich one is working better, so
that you can enforce that oneacross the entire team.
So there's all these reallycreative, robust use cases of
Gong, and if marketers are notusing Gong, or still using Gong

(33:17):
just to occasionally listen to asales call, they're really
missing out on a lot of thevalue.

Kevin Kerner (33:22):
Wow, amazing.
I can give you one that I'veheard from a customer is
account-based marketing related.
So they're using Gong to listento the banter before and after
the call with the salespersonand finding out personal
information about the customer.
Not too creepy, but they'llfind out they're golfing this
weekend or they're doingsomething else and they'll use
that data and then they start touse it across people in the

(33:44):
account and beyond the accountin the categories.
That's very cool.
So it's not like the mark, it'snot 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 usingsendosa and other things to
send up.
So it's really cool use caseand 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 orbasketball?

Kevin Kerner (34:04):
right, listen to this music, this music or
whatever.
Yeah, it's really an amazingtime when you can interrogate
that data at scale.
It's really incredible.
So I mentioned this in thefirst part of the call, so I'm
sure there's a lot of peoplelistening to this that are very
interested in the book, andeveryone wants to get into this,

(34:25):
be more creative.
It's a great idea and I'm sureit's very compelling.
But how do you get your ELT Ifyou don't have an ELT that's
supportive or your boss isn'tsupportive?
Is there a way that you caniterate to do these things in
small ways, or how can you sellit into the leadership?

Udi Ledragor (34:50):
sell it into the leadership.
Yeah, so I touch on this topicin many different angles
throughout the book, but I'llgive you here maybe three
actionable tips.
So the first one is, just likewith any good medicine, looking
at preventive medicine.
So you want to start eatinghealthy and working out before
you get diabetes, not after.
So one way of doing this in thework setting is to really vet

(35:11):
your next company and your nextCEO that you'll be working for,
for their openness to whatmarketing can supply and what
marketing can do.
I knew when I was joining Gongthat Amit was a leader known for
expecting a lot from marketingand giving marketing a lot of
creative freedom, to the pointwhere he says the marketing
budget is unlimited.

(35:32):
As long as you keep showingresults that we need, you can
get more of it because you'reconverting those dollars into
even more dollars of sales.
So why wouldn't I give you morebudget?
Of course, that has someguardrails around it, because
we're running a business thatneeds to become profitable, but
with that attitude, I had a lotof rope to do a lot of creative
things, and I break this downfor how to check these things

(35:56):
externally and what kind ofquestions to ask your CEO and
other people who work with himor her, because you might not
want to go work for someonewhere you know it's going to be
an uphill battle every singleday, talking about why you need
to do something and why you needbudget and why you even exist.
So many marketers need tojustify their existence every
day.
I like comparing this to ourfriends in sales.

(36:19):
Nobody wonders what sales does.
Marketing doesn't enjoy thatprivilege.
We have to explain anddemonstrate the impact of what
we're doing and how that makessales easier, and I talk about
how to demonstrate that as wellonce you're in seat as well.
But the first part is reallychoosing the right company and
right CEO that have a goodchance of being open to these

(36:40):
experiments and giving you somerope to try some creative
freedom.
The second thing is again goingback to the preventive medicine
metaphor that is, budgeting foryour experiments ahead of time.
So the way I do this from thevery early days, I always set
aside 5% to 10% of my budget, orwhat was known internally in my

(37:01):
team as Udi's crazy ideas.
But moments before they sentthat to finance, they changed
the title to marketingexperiments, and the way I
justify the marketingexperiments budget is twofold.
One I explain look, any demandgen channel that's working for
us today is going to tap out atsome point.
I don't know if that's nextquarter or next year, but it
will tap out.
And to make sure that we cancontinue providing the pipeline

(37:23):
that we signed up for, we needto be experimenting with new
channels all the time.
So I need a budget for thoseexperiments.
Some of them are going to workout and we'll double down.
Some of them won't work out.
We'll learn from them and moveon.
So even the grumpiest CFO andCEO get that.
And the second explanation Igive for marketing experiments
budget is that next year therewill be some marketing
opportunities that we will wantto take advantage of but we

(37:46):
don't know about yet becausethey haven't presented
themselves.
Here's two examples.
One a marketing event mighthappen next October, but it'll
only be announced in April, sixmonths before.
But I'm now in the previousNovember trying to finalize my
budget.
If I don't leave any wiggleroom for that event that I'll
learn about in April, I won't beable to attend in October and

(38:06):
we'll all feel that we missedout because our audience was
there, our competition was there.
So I need to reserve somebudget for these opportunities
that I know are going to presentthemselves after budget
approval.
Another example is I've builtrelationships with media
contacts at NBC and CBS and allthe out-of-home advertisers
companies, and they come to mesometimes with last minute deals

(38:27):
because another advertiserbacked out so I can get
something for half price.
But I need to give an answertoday, otherwise they're going
to call the next CMO on theirlist because they need to fill
that medium.
It just has to happen, and soif I have some budget that I can
pull from very quickly, I cantake advantage of those
opportunities, and I give manyexamples of the book of times
that that happened.
So you want that flexibility,and so that's how we pre-budget

(38:52):
for marketing experiments.
And the last thing I'll say isyes, you do have to get good at
internal marketing, atdemonstrating how marketing is
making sales easier byexplaining why you're asking all
the employee to share a pieceof content.
You might have to explain tothem.
Here's how the LinkedInalgorithm works.
If you all share this piece ofcontent right now, linkedin

(39:14):
understands that this is a hotpiece of content.
It'll show it to more of yourprospects and we can bring those
back as qualified salesmeetings.
You like those, don't you?
So please help us do this.
Or if we ask the salespeople tohelp drive attendees to a
dinner that we're doing, then weshould come back a couple of
months after the dinner andshare the stats.
Look at that dinner that youhelped drive attendees to.

(39:36):
We influenced $1 million ofpipeline.
We sourced another 100,000, and250 of that already closed this
quarter.
So that's an amazing job.
Please help us drive traffic tothe next event that we're doing
, because it's going to help youclose more deals.
So those are kind of some ofthe 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 peoplethink about the budgeting for
experiments.
I always talk about it as beinga stock portfolio.
So you know you've got whenyou're doing your stock
portfolio.
You've got the easy stuff, theNASDAQ stuff, and then you put a
little bit in high growth.
That's the thing right.
And if it works then you'regoing to put more money into it.

(40:15):
So it's really smart.
I will put a plug in for theevent 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 shortbook on trade show marketing 10
years ago and it did prettywell and I've been meaning to
get to update it.
And then I had the opportunitywhen I sat down to write
Courageous Marketing.
I rewrote, updated the tradeshow stuff to add virtual events
and new lessons that I learnedin the last few years and then

(40:51):
tightened that up into a prettymeaty chapter on creating
magical event experiences.
So I hope marketers take notesand take inspiration from that.

Kevin Kerner (41:01):
Awesome stuff.
Okay, well, I've kept you waytoo long here and I know you
were up against time.
I want to do one thing I do onall these podcasts I ask an AI
roulette question.
This is a completely AIgenerated question.
Through perplexity, I put inyour your profile, I put in your
website, I put in otherquestions we had today and a
couple other things, and so I'mgoing to click here, send.

(41:21):
I'm going to click submit hereand let's see what it comes up.
Submit here and let's see whatit 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 anAI to be your creative partner,
would you want it to be morelike a jazz improviser, riffing
off your ideas and surprisingyou with unexpected twists, or
more like a master puppeteerpulling the strings behind the
scenes to orchestrate theperfect campaign performance?

(41:51):
It must have picked up on thefact that I put those two things
into perplexity.
They thought that was the beststuff.

Udi Ledragor (41:58):
So you don't want to be a jazz improviser or a
puppeteer no, no, I, I am anamateur 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 peoplestruggle with that initial
creative idea, but they reallyknow how to rock the execution
If they're given clear guidanceon what is the big idea.
In the early years that Iworked with Amit Bendo, that was
kind of how we divided the work.
Amit used to come in with hisbig coffee cup from his long

(42:35):
commute to work, walk straightinto my office and say Udi,
driving here, I had a crazy idea.
Then I'd look up from my screenokay, amit, what was it?
And then he'd give me a crazyidea and I'd give him direct
feedback on it and if I liked itand believed in it, I'm like
I'm going to do it.
And then I rolled out theexecution plan and programatized
it, so so we could actuallyroll that out.

(42:57):
I think over the years I'vebecome a lot more creative with
my own ideas and come up with myown visions and then kind of
relinquished execution to myteam members to execute on a lot
of them.
And I think I actually knowthat I also nurtured and
cultivated them to become morecreative and come up with their
creative ideas.
So you do need both.

(43:18):
You need a big idea.
But a big idea without a planis just a dream or a wish.
It's not going to become areality.
So execution absolutely matters.
You do need both.
Um, I think sometimes I coulduse inspiration with big ideas
and sometimes, um, I have a bigidea, I just don't have the
energy or the time to go andexecute it.
So sometimes I would use thathelp awesome puppeteers and

(43:40):
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 whyyou've had really good
leadership too is because of you.
You got a lot of creativityinside of you, which is
fantastic and it really comesout in the book.
I really enjoyed thisconversation.
I hope everyone goes out andand picks up the book.
I'm listening on audio and Ithink you read the audio too,

(44:03):
right.

Udi Ledragor (44:04):
I do.
My husband jokes that if youwant to get a feel of what it's
like living with me, you can nowhear me talk nonstop for four
hours and 42 minutes.
So our Courageous Marketing isavailable on Amazon and Barnes
and Noble and everywhere booksare sold.
It's in hardcover and paperbackand audiobook and in digital if
you prefer that.
So there's no excuse not to getit.

Kevin Kerner (44:25):
Yeah, awesome.
And your LinkedIn profile isgreat too, so I'll put that in
the show notes here.
Udi, it's been so good talkingto you.
Thank you so much.
So much gold in this one.
I took a bunch of notes and Ireally appreciate it.
Hopefully we will talk againsoon.

Udi Ledragor (44:38):
Thanks for having me, Kevin.

Kevin Kerner (44:39):
Okay, take care.