Spark of Ages
In every episode, we interview B2B Marketing leaders, executives, and innovators about their successes and challenges, asking them how they broke through and what spark in their careers took them to the next level.
Spark of Ages
The Playbook for Courageous Marketing/Udi Ledergor - Gong, Super Bowl Commercial, Magic ~ Spark of Ages Ep 35
Udi Ledergor, Gong's Chief Evangelist and former CMO, reveals how courageous marketing strategies helped propel Gong from startup to multi-billion dollar company status while redefining the B2B marketing playbook.
• Creating bold B2B marketing that stands out requires courage and rejecting "boring practices" that yield ordinary results
• The "punching above your weight" strategy helped Gong appear much larger than it was, allowing early access to enterprise customers
• Gong's Super Bowl commercial hack: buying regional ads in tech hubs for under $350K instead of spending $20M on national spots
• The 95-5 rule: most marketers only target the 5% ready to buy, while Gong created value for the other 95% through Gong Labs content
• Breaking B2B visual identity norms by rejecting "Series A blues" for bold fuchsia and purple with a bulldog mascot
• Building psychological safety within marketing teams encourages innovative ideas and calculated risk-taking
• Udi's background as a magician influenced his marketing approach: complex work behind the scenes creates simple, magical experiences
• Marketing's ultimate goal is making sales easier – creating alignment across teams and driving measurable business results
• Finding courage to take strong, bold points of view in marketing requires leadership that celebrates creative experimentation
You can find Courageous Marketing: The B2B Marketer's Playbook for Career Success by Udi Ledergor available everywhere books are sold starting April 10th.
https://www.amazon.com/Courageous-Marketing-Marketers-Playbook-Success/dp/B0DZQLTW45
What does it take to transform B2B marketing from forgettable to phenomenal? Udi Ledergor, reveals the bold strategies that helped drive Gong from early-stage startup to multi-billion-dollar powerhouse with over $300 million in ARR.
Udi shares the genesis of his new book "Courageous Marketing: The B2B Marketer's Playbook for Career Success," distilling two decades of hard-won wisdom into actionable insights for marketers at every stage. The conversation explodes with practical, counterintuitive approaches that challenge the status quo of B2B marketing.
The discussion dives deep into building memorable brands through distinctive visual identity creating content that serves the 95% not yet ready to buy, and fostering a culture where marketing teams feel safe taking calculated risks.
Whether you're a marketing veteran or just starting your journey, this episode delivers a masterclass in breaking free from "boring practices" to create marketing that drives real business results while genuinely connecting with audiences. Ready to inject some courage into your marketing?
Udi Ledergor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/udiledergor/
Udi was Gong's first marketing hire as their CMO. He's the mastermind who helped define the revenue intelligence category and create Gong's iconic, human-centered brand. He's led marketing at five B2B startups and is known for his bold approach to branding and storytelling that puts people first. When he's not evangelizing for Gong, Udi wears many hats as an author, speaker, mentor, angel investor, and board member. He is passionate about startups, storytelling, and creating unforgettable
Website: https://www.position2.com/podcast/
Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/
Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/
Email us with any feedback for the show: spark@postion2.com
Welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast. Today we're chatting with Udi Ledergård, the chief evangelist at Gong. Udi's got quite the story. He was actually Gong's first marketing hire and their CMO, helping the company skyrocket from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions in revenue and reach that coveted multi-billion dollar, multi-unicorn status. He's the mastermind who's helped define the revenue intelligence category and create Gong's iconic human-centered brand. This isn't Udi's first rodeo. He led marketing at five B2B startups and is known for his bold approach to branding and storytelling that puts people first.
Speaker 1:When he's not evangelizing for Gong, udi wears many hats as an author, speaker, mentor, angel investor and board member. He's passionate about startups, storytelling and creating unforgettable brand experiences. In fact, udi's newest book, courageous Marketing, which we're going to explore with Udi today, debuts on April 10th. So ask Google, your AI, amazon wherever you get a book from to get more details on where to grab it. Udi graduated with both his master's and MBA from the College of Management Academic Studies in Israel, which, interesting fact, is the largest college in Israel. Some of the key takeaways you can expect from this episode Bold and courageous go-to-market strategies, which emphasizes taking risks and building bold brands. How to build and inspire high-performing marketing teams. The story of how Udi managed to convince his company Gong to do a Super Bowl commercial and, finally, insights on how Udi's mind operates in our ultimate word association challenge when we put him into the spark tank. Udi, welcome to the Spark of Ages.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, Rajiv, what a hard act to follow. Thanks for having me to follow.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. So great to have you. You and I have run into each other at so many common events. We must have at least a hundred common LinkedIn connections.
Speaker 1:And so it's just a thrill to have you here, especially around your brand new book. So it's a great title. As I read through the advanced copy, I deeply appreciated how you were able to take your concepts, which a lot of folks may understand, but really bring it to light with great stories, great ways of bringing the point across and helping to encourage me to do bolder things. So maybe you can talk about the concept and what sparked your interest to write it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. First, thank you for supporting my book launch. I'm super excited to have Courageous Marketing, the B2B Marketer's Playbook for Career Success, come out on April 10th, everywhere books are sold. Here's where this book was born from. We talked about this before we started recording. There's over a hundred hours of me talking on YouTube and Spotify on podcasts and webinars and events that I've been doing over the years, and a lot of people want to learn the lessons that I've accumulated in 20 years of B2B marketing, almost half of them from Gong, where I was fortunate to be marketer number one and build a team of 60 marketers who really did the most amazing work I've ever seen a marketing team do and that helped drive the company, along with our amazing product, of course, to a multi-billion dollar valuation and, as we just published a couple of weeks ago so I can finally talk about it in public to 300 million in ARR so far and growing very fast. And so a lot of people wanted to learn the lessons and I wanted to scale myself, because there's only so many podcasts I can do in so many stages I can be on, and I thought a book would be a great way of doing this.
Speaker 2:But during my CMO years.
Speaker 2:My schedule just did not allow me time to sit down and write down those stories and lessons, and let alone interview other people and make it into a fun, delightful book to read.
Speaker 2:But then two years ago I shifted into my current role as a chief evangelist and that gave me a little bit more time than I have as a CMO and that's when I thought would be the perfect time. So for the last 15 months or so I've been working on writing down the best stories, the best lessons, updating them and then interviewing over a dozen people, half of which worked with me at Gong, and they told me about points of views that I didn't even know about, how we created things from our Super Bowl commercial to our content, marketing, our event experiences. And I put all those points of view into the book because I think it's really important to understand how we build such an amazing team, doing their absolute best work and giving them a safe environment in which they can experiment and try things and, yes, often fail as well but we celebrate those as learnings and move on.
Speaker 2:Cmos names that you'll all recognize from Michelle Tate from MailChimp, tricia Gilman from Box, dave Gerhardt, now at Exit 5, originally at Drift and Anthony Canada who built the customer success category at Gainsight and so many other great marketers, and as I was putting all these stories together and validating my approach and the nuances that all the different CMOs brought, I realized what the book was really about. So it's kind of funny because I had a different working title when I started working on it, but only in the final rounds of editing I realized that all these stories were about finding courage and doing something that was counterintuitive, often going against the grain and against the established best practices which in most cases are, in reality, boring practices that will get you ordinary results.
Speaker 2:And all these people, and all the people on my team and these other great CMOs and occasionally myself as well we found our voice, we took a very bold stand and we used a very strong point of view, and all of these together constitute what I now call courageous marketing. So I hope to inspire marketers, whether they're up and coming or seasoned, to take the boring out of B2B marketing and take a strong, bold point of view and create awesome marketing, because the world deserves it from us.
Speaker 1:I definitely agree. I mean, there's so many. So the easy thing to do when you're marketing is just to stick to the main messages of your product and not really work to stand out, and you've definitely done that. I thought one of the big takeaways I got from your book was the notion of you may be small, but you present large. Maybe talk about some of that but you present large.
Speaker 2:Maybe talk about some of that. Yeah, I call that idea punching above your weight, which I think is kind of fun and catchy and everyone wants to do that. Right, I was a scrawny little kid. I definitely didn't do any punching.
Speaker 2:I was the one on the receiving end of the punches, so at least in marketing I get to punch above my weight a little, and the idea is that many, many startups and even larger companies.
Speaker 2:They look out there and they see the incumbents or big players in their field or adjacent field doing these big marketing investments whether they're naming stadiums or flying airships or Super Bowl commercials and out-of-home campaigns and all they can do is dream that maybe one day they'll either be a big brand or work for a big brand and they'll get to do that stuff. And I never wanted to settle for that. I was looking at those inspiring campaigns and programs and growth hacks and I wanted to look like a big company and before I get into the mechanics of doing that, I think to understand the importance of that. Anyone who's been in a startup knows this catch 22, where you want to sell to large enterprises at some point before you're actually ready to do that and you realize that large enterprises don't like buying from small startups. Large enterprises like buying from guess what Other big enterprises.
Speaker 1:Their safety in numbers. Their jobs are on the line. They're taking a risk, so they want to buy from a place that other people have bought from. They want to feel comfortable.
Speaker 2:Exactly. But how do you do that if you're a small startup? If no big enterprises are going to buy from you, then you'll never reach that status. So you're stuck in this vicious cycle of you're never big enough to sell to those large enterprises and beyond, being product ready, building all the enterprise security stands and privacy compliance and everything you need to build.
Speaker 2:Marketing has a really, really important role in appearing to be bigger than you are, and I make the case in the book that marketing great marketing can make a company appear to be two or three years ahead of where it really is, and that can make a big difference in how early on larger enterprises will take a chance on you.
Speaker 2:And so one simple framework that I talk about in the book that I've done and many of the CMOs I interviewed for the book have also done, looks something like this you take an offline campaign that is typically associated with large companies, and this can be anything like a big billboard in Times Square or a Super Bowl commercial, or wrapping cars around a conference, or doing something that, or taking a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal right?
Speaker 2:These things that everyone knows cost like tons of money, either hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Now I'm not suggesting that you go pay that money, because I didn't have it in my budget and most startups don't have it in their budget, but what you do is you find the smallest version that you can afford of those campaigns. I'll give some examples. You go do it and then you make sure to videotape it and photograph it and then amplify that on all your digital assets, whether it's your owned media, on social media and emails. Get your employees, get your customers to help you amplify that and that's now going to your actual target audience on digital and that can make you look much, much bigger than you are.
Speaker 1:So let's break down. Yeah, so you guys did that really well. You mentioned a Super Bowl commercial where you didn't spend a lot. That's right, so tell that story, I think that's a great one, because we all dream, as marketers, of doing the Super Bowl commercial right Absolutely. We think we have to spend millions of dollars on it, just to put it together, and that's $8 million a 30-second commercial.
Speaker 2:But you didn't pay that.
Speaker 1:That would have depleted your first round of funding.
Speaker 2:Probably, I think that was more than our first round of funding. So here's what happened. I was working one day, as usual, when I got an email from Monica, from CBS, and Monica, I think she just read about one of our fundraising rounds they were joking about and she said hey, udi, you know, with Super Bowl coming up in a few months, I think Gong would make an excellent advertiser this year and get your message across to millions of people.
Speaker 2:And I appreciated the outreach, but I responded politely. I said, monica, I'm nowhere near the kind of budget that I'd need for Super Bowl, but thank you for thinking of us. And she immediately responded saying Udi, I think I'll surprise you with very affordable ways of being on the Super Bowl. I said, okay, monica, you've reeled me in.
Speaker 1:That was a good hook.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about that You've earned a call.
Speaker 2:You've earned a call and, even if it was just for the intellectual curiosity, I wanted to learn about Super Bowl because, like what marketer doesn't right? So I get on the call with Monica and she explained something to me that I'd never heard about before because I had assumed, like everyone, that to get on Super Bowl you need to buy the national spot, which is about $7 million or so for a 30 second in-game commercial, and that's just for the media. Most advertisers who do that end up spending a few more millions on the creative Right.
Speaker 1:I mean you're not going to spend $8 million on one or $20 million on three and not spend money on the creative.
Speaker 2:So you spend a few more millions on the creative. So now you're like a $10, $15, $20 million, which of course I don't have and most advertisers don't have. But what Monica explained to me is that Superbowl, like most television events, they have a national inventory of advertising and they also have a regional inventory, and the viewing experience is identical. So if I'm sitting in I don't know Nashville, tennessee, and I'm watching the game, I see a few commercials go on at halftime. Some of them are being served from the national inventory, along with everyone else in the nation, and others are being served from the Nashville regional inventory. That only I'm seeing, together with a few zip codes next to me, and I'm none the wiser.
Speaker 2:I have no idea which ones are served nationally and which ones are served regionally. So that presents an amazing opportunity for marketers, who can identify specific regions where their messaging would be most effective, to buy just those regions, if they can afford them, at a fraction of the cost of the national ad. To give folks an idea if they haven't seen this math before, I already said the national ad costs something like $7 million. Well, regions can go for five or six figure amounts. So what I ended up doing is buying three regions, so San Francisco, which is a fantastic region for any SaaS company.
Speaker 1:That's your target market, right? I mean some of my friends who run, who work MarTech companies, many of some of whom have been on this podcast. They're, you know, 40% or 50% of their revenue comes from just this region. Exactly, that's exactly right, there's only tech companies in this region.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I did the math. I ran a report by CRM and I saw that at that time, about 60% of our customers and prospects were in the Silicon Valley area. Now here's the beauty of it San Francisco is a very small city. It's only got a population about 800,000. And so the regional media is priced according to the population, which, for consumer brands, makes a lot of sense. For B2B brands, that's an amazing hack, because even though it's not a densely populated area.
Speaker 2:You can get to a huge proportion of your target audience by targeting that area. And so, armed with that information, I met my CEO, amit, on a rooftop bar in San Francisco a few days later and I knew I could probably get him excited about this, and my hope was that if I got him excited enough, he would join forces with me in twisting the CFO's arm, which is the tough cookie to get past, and maybe, just maybe, we could actually pull this off. So by the time he was lifting his second drink from the table, I said I mean so I've got this wild idea for you and said carry on, he likes wild ideas. I said I was talking to Monica from CBS and I told him what I had learned about regional advertising on Super Bowl, and I could literally see Amit's eyes like lighting up and he said I love the idea because he realized the potential of making Gong look so much bigger than we really were at the time. This was 2019 or 2020. So this was still pretty early days for Gong and we wanted to shout off the rooftops how big we are and how important we're going to be, and we wanted to get to more enterprise customers and this could be just the break that we were looking for in terms of marketing perception. So it literally took him seconds to see the potential and he said I love it.
Speaker 2:And we had a dinner the next night with Tim. Our CFO, amit, said let's go twist Tim's arm. And so Amit, in typical Amit fashion, brought it up during dinner. He said Tim Udi got us an amazing deal on a Super Bowl commercial. At this point Tim was rolling his eyes back, because Tim has a famous saying. He says the three horsemen of the apocalypse, according to Tim Ritters, is number one Super Bowl commercials, number two stadium naming rights and number three is when you want to start flying private jets.
Speaker 1:That nails it yes.
Speaker 2:Right, tim is an amazing CFO. He's taken other companies public. He's been Google for many years. He's a very accomplished person. But he's got a few Tim-isms like that and we got to him and we didn't leave him much choice and we made the case for it. To cut a long story short, we still had to get through the board. We kind of lowered expectations, saying this is a long-term brand awareness play.
Speaker 2:We're not expecting short-term results but if we don't see any impact, we won't do it again, but we think it's worth doing. And the board responded to me and Amit and they said look, we normally wouldn't support something like this for a B2B company, but we know you have Udi and he's probably thinking through this and we'll know how to make the most out of it, so we're going to allow it. And Amit forwarded those board emails to me with his little addition at the top and he basically wrote basically your neck is on the line, good luck.
Speaker 1:Great idea. Now you're on. Now you got to make it up, so I think you then took it right and you, you made a. You put it together not with a million dollar, multi-million dollar budget, correct, you were very clever about I think. In your book you have a. You have a link to it. You can find it on YouTube as well, right, which is, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can also just search Gong Super Bowl commercial. There's two of them.
Speaker 1:And it's really clever. And then you just had this amazing way of promoting it that went way beyond just the San Francisco audience, correct.
Speaker 2:So we did the commercial. We did very modest creative, below $100,000 for a Super Bowl commercial creative and the whole media cost was, I think, about $250,000, including San Francisco, new York and Seattle that year.
Speaker 1:So you hit all the tech markets yeah.
Speaker 2:The whole project was like $350,000, which is real money, especially for a startup, but it's nowhere near the $20 million that we talked about, that other companies spend and most people assumed we had spent. And then what I knew is that the random people watching the commercial well, they're not random, because they're well-targeted, but we need to get people to share it on digital because that's where we have already many followers on LinkedIn and other social media. And so, on Super Bowl day, we started sharing the ad on social media and we told our audience if you share this commercial with your network, we'll give you a special edition Gong Super Bowl t-shirt. And by 11 am, even before the game started, we were out of hundreds of t-shirts because people were sharing this frantically Because they love the idea.
Speaker 2:Salespeople, they get excited when they feel seen, like most of us, and they love the idea of a Super Bowl commercial talking to salespeople and sales leaders. And so they start sharing this with their network, and this had been the first time in many years that a B2B company in that space had done a Super Bowl commercial. So everyone was talking about it for weeks and so, long story short, at the end of Super Bowl week I looked to see the impact that we had had so I could get back to Amit and my CFO, tim, and the board.
Speaker 1:And hold on to your job.
Speaker 2:And hopefully hold on to my job for a while and I came up with three data points. So the first one I used Gong, for I set up a tracker in Gong to alert me on customer conversations who mentioned our Super Bowl commercial and I found hundreds of calls where prospects came in and they said so. I was on the fence about Gong for a while, but then I saw you on the Super Bowl and I realized you're that serious of a company that I decided to take this call and learn more about your product.
Speaker 1:I've got those calls, which is exactly what we were dreaming of, so in the end. So you did all these things to promote it and I think you actually did it before a lot of other folks were doing this. You did it for a B2B technology company, which wasn't considered a normal thing, and the impact did it pay for itself.
Speaker 2:It absolutely did pay for itself. So I'll just finish with the other two metrics.
Speaker 2:So one thing I already told you I heard hundreds of customer calls which confirmed that we'd hit the right audience, because they went to our website and they asked for a demo and some of them bought the product, and I measured that even six months later, that well over a million dollars of sales I can attribute to that Super Bowl commercial, which cost me a fraction of that.
Speaker 2:The second thing I saw was during the game and throughout the week, our website traffic and demo requests were, of course, peaking. We had 30% higher traffic that week and a lot more demo requests. And then at the end of the week, my CFO, tim, came to me and said Udi, do you realize? We just broke our company record for the most pipeline ever created in a week, and that was no coincidence, of course, that it happened on Super Bowl week. So, armed with all that information from the calls, from the website traffic and from the pipeline created, it was clear that this was a really sound investment. And then we got an even bigger investment to go and do that again next year.
Speaker 1:Amazing, that's awesome, and you have so many great instances of that in the book.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned this in the beginning, right? A lot of B2B marketers try to play it safe, but also, you know, you're saying be courageous, stand out. And so to grab attention, a lot of us, as marketers, say be noisy, stand out, don't be ignored. On the other hand, you want to get measurable results, right? So it's a conundrum. So here's the question If everyone's being noisy, does it make it a lot harder to cut through the noise, and do you view that as a contradiction or as an opportunity?
Speaker 2:It's an opportunity.
Speaker 2:Here's why because I think most people want to be noisy, but they won't do what it takes to be noisy and noticed.
Speaker 2:And here's the problem with most marketing and why it sucks because people follow so-called best practices that are, in fact, just boring practices. They're doing what everyone is doing because either they don't feel that they have the freedom or the inspiration to do something different, or because they feel that to become an authority in their field, they have to look like the oldest, biggest companies, and those companies tend to become very bland and boring because decisions are made by committee and they're trying to please everyone, and the most they're spying for is not to lose their job. And so I think that's a very low bar which is pretty easy to cut through if you have the courage to do that, if you take a bold stand, if you choose or create an environment that tolerates that and celebrates that around you. And so I'll give you a couple of examples of what I'm talking about. Right, it goes from the type of content that you're producing to the tone of voice that you're producing, to the tone of voice that you're using, to the visual identity.
Speaker 2:Let's maybe touch on each for an example. So, when you think about the type of content you're putting out there, what do most companies put out there? It's all about their products, right? Look at our amazing features, look at our amazing capabilities. Here's a customer case study. Hey, that's boring, everyone's doing that. But it's not only boring, it's also ineffective. And here's why Because most marketers by now have heard about the 95-5 rule, which states that only about 5% of your target market is currently in market for a solution like yours. But what do marketers do? They put out all these sales offers which are only speaking to those 5% of the market.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean we're all, because, as John Miller would talk about, right, our collective friend John Miller, he said we got over due to his success. We got over gold on marketing qualified leads, meaning leads of people who are ready to buy. Correct, and that's all we're tasked upon is and so we're not hitting. The other 95% are the ones we want to get at some point, and if we're not getting to them, how are you going to get them if you're bombarding them with sales offer when they're not in the zone?
Speaker 1:Here's an example and basically, I think what you're saying you're pissing them off Because you're just pushing them to sell. You're pushing them to buy.
Speaker 2:You're not only not selling to them now, but you're reducing your chances of selling them in the future because they're going to unsubscribe and unfollow you. So you've actually lost the right to communicate with them. Here's an example that every consumer will find relatable, rajiv. Let's say you're researching about your next car. You want to buy a car. You're going all to the car manufacturer websites. You're comparing the features, the pricing, the color, finishes. You finally found your perfect car and you bought it right Now, two months later, are you still going to all these car websites and researching their features and want to know about their latest deals and financing? No, you're not, because you just bought a new car, right? You're going to make yourself happy with it, hopefully for the next few years, before you search for a new car. So think about that. What would you do if those other car manufacturers kept bombarding you with their sales ads and newsletters? You're going to unsubscribe, of course.
Speaker 1:I'm going to block. Well, nowadays those knuckleheads text me, so I'm going to block them forever and I'm going to call them junk.
Speaker 2:There you go. Now they've lost the right to communicate with you, but that's what B2B marketers are still doing so much of the time. They're bombarding unwanted audiences with unsolicited sales messages. And so, getting back to what the great marketers are doing, they have separate marketing plans for the 5%.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, give them sales offers that are relevant and you might If you want someone that's ready, you want to pull them in.
Speaker 2:I want to pull the 95 in and keep them top of mind. I want them to think of my brand every time they need something in my space, even if it's in two years from now. I want to have a relationship with them from now until then. I want them to look forward to that next email or next social post they see for my brand. I don't want them to block me. I want them to share it with all their friends because it's that helpful and that valuable to them. And so we built a plan for the 95% at Gong. We called it Gong Labs and we put out there really, really valuable content for salespeople about everything from how to open the perfect cold call to how to follow up on an email, to when to use curses and swear words to increase your win rates.
Speaker 1:That was one of my favorite. You had studies on this from what 20,000 calls right.
Speaker 2:You were able to we did that on tens of thousands of calls, we found that the salespeople who mirror their buyer's language by dropping a S-bomb or an F-word actually increase their win rates by up to 8%. Now I just gave you and the listeners a ton of value without selling you my product. And if you know salespeople, you're probably going to mention this next time you talk to them, because it's a fun story and anecdote. And that's how our content started becoming viral. People were sharing Gong Labs content years before they ever bought the product, because it was providing so much value. So that's an example of providing valuable content that people don't need to buy your product to get value from. And that's how the memory link between what actually works in sales, how to succeed in sales, and Gong is created. And so in six or 12 or 18 months, when you're ready to buy, what's the first thing you're going to think of? Gong? So that's how we do that with content.
Speaker 2:And then two other quick notes on the tone of voice and visual identity. So for tone of voice, we were also very deliberate. We knew that most brands to try and sound authoritative. They sound very buttoned up, they sound very stuffy, almost condescending. We've all read these posts and more and more companies are adopting this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you know you guys are. You could just be more playful, right. I think you found that in your audience to appeal to salespeople, you had to stand out right and be much more playful.
Speaker 2:If you're going out to a bar and you bump against someone at the bar while you're waiting for your drink and they start talking like that you know more and more companies do that Are you going to stay around?
Speaker 1:and hang out with them, or are you going to?
Speaker 2:grab your drink and run to the other side. Not going to happen, yeah Right, so you want to hang out with someone approachable and friendly and helpful, and that's the tone of voice that we developed at Gong, and people stuck around and brought their friends and wanted to hang out. And then, finally, when we came to our visual identity, we also wanted it to match our personality that we built, and so we looked around us at dozens of B2B sites and at that time this was like 2018 when we designed our first visual identity everyone was using what one of my team members called Series A blues. They're the most unoffensive colors.
Speaker 1:Boring-ass blue, that's right.
Speaker 2:Boring-ass blue. It pairs beautifully with whites and grays and it's absolutely indistinguishable from a million other sites. But everyone was doing those, so we thought, okay, what can we do? That's the farthest away from that and would actually stand out. So we chose fuchsia, pink and bright purple and we slapped on a crazy bulldog as our mascots.
Speaker 1:The bulldog rocks, I got to say that Everyone loves their dog Everyone, yeah, so you created a personality all around it. So let me ask you, like what this actually leads me to said this is getting around the notion of being courageous, right. So marketers want to be courageous, they want to stand out. In your background you you had like a dramatic arts background a bit right. So you've been a performer, so you're used to standing out, but not a lot. A lot of marketers aren't. We're standing delivered sorts of folks. So how do you create a culture of that internal of courage to go stand out like that? What were some, just a couple of key things that you did to foster that? It sounds like Amit, your CEO, was open, very open to that. I mean, the name of the company kind of gave it away, right.
Speaker 2:But it was more than open. He was an inspiration and he was driving us to do that. I think he was driving me to always think bigger and crazier, and I, in turn, tried to do the same with my leaders on my team, and they did the same with their people. So, by constantly driving each other. You know, there's no better way to demonstrate that we want crazy ideas than by coming up with them ourselves and by driving our people to come up with them, like nothing was ever big enough or crazy enough.
Speaker 1:Did you? Did you give out awards for people who did that? Did you recognize them? Did you Absolutely? When you interviewed them, did you ask them about the nutty things that they did to see?
Speaker 2:Because you weren't crazy but you also want them to get work done right. So there's that, yes. So I think it's a combination. It's a combination. It's a great point you bring up.
Speaker 2:You know, in Adam Grant's great book Think Again he talks about there's a chapter where he talks about how to encourage teams to come up with great ideas and do that. And I read that and I realized that that's kind of exactly what we did with my team and he said it's a combination of two things because, just like you said, it's not enough to drive crazy ideas. We're also mission driven and we have goals to hit and we have a business to support. He gave examples and Adam Grant gave examples from teams at NASA and other places where they needed to land a rocket on the moon or back safely on Earth. So how do they do that?
Speaker 2:But they also have to be really, really creative to solve problems along the way. So one way to drive the creativity and give people the freedom, it's a state known as psychological safety, where you make it safe for people to come out with crazy ideas. You don't knock down any ideas and you let people speak freely and when they start feeling safe, then their mind opens. And now we're almost all creative when we have the right environment to do that in and if we know that we don't need to be afraid to bring up an idea.
Speaker 1:So what's the one thing you did to do that?
Speaker 2:We used to have brainstorming meetings where we literally listed on the whiteboard everyone's craziest ideas. I remember one that we listed years ago but only have now just started to implement was I'm like there's so many puns and jokes we can make about sales and animals. I wanted to shoot a video at the zoo. We actually got in touch with the three Bay Area zoos, trying to get a permit to film in one of them. We couldn't manage to do it, but now, with green screen and AI technology, I've started creating a whole series of promotion videos for my book, each of them with a different animal, so you'll see those soon on social media, but that came up years ago in a team brainstorming meeting.
Speaker 2:We're like, let's just throw out ideas and there's no bad ideas at that point, and then we started narrowing down and voting the best ones and then going off and producing them. And one way of doing this is inspiration is everywhere, rajiv. I remember thinking of crazy locations for otherwise pretty mundane videos like a conference promo, and my inspiration was that there was this thing a few years ago, this trend called extreme ironing.
Speaker 2:If you haven't Googled back on YouTube, prepare to spend more time Go to search for extreme ironing on YouTube, you will see people with an ironing board and an iron and clothes doing ironing while scuba diving, while skydiving, while mountain climbing, like in the weirdest environments they're ironing clothes. It's the funniest thing. And if you just think of that idea, why not do that for B2B marketing? And so when we happened to have a management meeting in greece one year and it was before one of our conferences I grabbed one of my team members, chris, and we were up in the acropolis in athens, greece, and I said this is where we're going to shoot our conference promo video. And we did that. That happened. We have a promo video for our first celebrate conference shot at the acropolis in greece and of course, it got a lot of attention because people are like whoa, we've never seen this before. That's nuts.
Speaker 1:So is that something you actively push as part of pushing courage? Get people out of their element, out of their normal world, take them places or encourage them to do things outside to bring those ideas back in.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent. Inspiration is everywhere. If you look at B2C brands, they tend to be more courageous because they have so much noise. And B2C brands tend to be more courageous If you look at some of what they're doing. A lot of brands were doing and still are these like man on the street videos. So when Devin Reed was on my team, he had this great idea let's do a man on a street on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. He went out with a videographer and came back with incredible funny footage where he was interviewing people on the street about what they like and hate about salespeople and it was a hilarious video. Oh God, that's brilliant and it got a ton of engagement. At some point there was a pigeon standing next to him. He handed the mic to the pigeon and asked the pigeon what they thought about salespeople.
Speaker 2:That's a type of moment that people crack up about and there's just so few brands that dare go to those places.
Speaker 1:And then you can take that video clip and put it in your email right A little gif in it, so as part of your outreach, all right. So, udi, this has been fantastic. We're now going to open our minds a little further and play the Spark Tank game. So here we go. Welcome to the Spark Tank game. So here we go, welcome to the Spark Tank, where we dive into the minds of marketing trailblazers and ignite the power of bold thinking.
Speaker 1:This is the ultimate word association challenge, where every response could uncover a new dimension of courageous marketing or reveal what happens when a CMO's brain is put on shuffle mode. This is where daring strategies meet spontaneous thought, where brand building collides with the art of human connection and where a single word will unlock a universe of innovative ideas. Think of it as a bungee jumping into the marketing subconscious, exhilarating, revealing and just right amount of controlled chaos. Here's how it works. I'll start with a word and, udi, you'll respond with the first word that comes to mind no second guessing, no filters. Then I'll respond with your word and, udi, you'll respond with the first word that comes to mind no second guessing, no filters. Then I'll respond with your word and we'll keep this chain association going for about three or four volleys. So are you ready, udi? I am ready, let's do this. All right, let's go have some fun with this. We'll start with brand.
Speaker 2:What people say about you Promise.
Speaker 1:Keep it, keep it, oh gosh, keep it, strength no no, no, I think it's about so.
Speaker 2:the obvious is, like what I said before about the boring practices, best practices. You don't have to literally do things the loudest and the hardest to be thought of as a great leader. I mean, just look at someone like Tim Cook leading Apple. He's a soft-spoken person. He's not the outgoing charismatic person like Steve Jobs was, but he's brought Apple to their highest valuation ever, which is many many times bigger than Steve Jobs ever brought the company. You can be a soft-spoken. What's the sentence? Speak softly and carry a big stick.
Speaker 1:Teddy Roosevelt yeah.
Speaker 2:There you go. You can absolutely be a very strong leader without being the loudest person in the room.
Speaker 1:That's right. I feel like saying something more akin to today. We speak loudly and carry a white flag, but anyways, we'll go from that. Here's another one Purple Pink Tapestry.
Speaker 2:Alignment why?
Speaker 1:alignment.
Speaker 2:Because? So this topic is so important that I dedicated a full chapter in my book about it, the last chapter of the book. I called it your half of a two-headed dragon. And by that I mean that I've never seen a go-to-market team succeed without impeccable alignment between sales and marketing. And if you wanted to expand that, you should also, of course, align well with customer success and finance and other teams. But those two together are the only way to drive successful go-to-market. And it's a tapestry. There's all these marketers and there's all these salespeople, and in many companies they don't trust each other, they don't have rapport and they just go on doing their own thing, and none of them are maximizing their potential by doing that.
Speaker 1:So maybe in your mind the tapestry was I had a bunch of colors. I thought you were going to go the purple cow route, but you actually took it in a more special way, which is in that tapestry there can be multiple wild colors, but they have to work together.
Speaker 2:They have to work together and the headline is that marketing exists, in my mind to make sales easier. And if you make that clear to your team and you make that clear to the sales team and you show and demonstrate how you're making their sales easier, then guess what? They will cooperate with you and they will follow up on the leads you brought back from the trade show and they will give you feedback when something is not landing with customers. And that's the type of relationship you need to succeed in marketing by demonstrating how you're making sales easier.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:All right, here's our last one. I have a bunch of words I can use but I'm going to pick magic Experience.
Speaker 2:That's what we all want. If you go to Disneyland.
Speaker 1:Yeah, change, I guess I thought. Well, here's my response to that. The great.
Speaker 2:Houdini. I knew that would come and bite me back in the behind, so who's the great Houdini?
Speaker 1:What is this magic? Who's this magical person?
Speaker 2:I was a magician in my childhood years. I did magic shows on Israeli television and shopping malls and other. I did hundreds of birthday parties and all those events and gained quite a lot of stage experience and with my first name, udi, it was kind of only natural. I didn't really have a choice to pick the stage name, udini, so that was the name I ran with and I think growing up and transitioning from the performing arts, I did music and magic and puppeteering and all that into marketing, which is really creativity in service of capitalism.
Speaker 2:If you ask me, I still want to put on a show and I want to put on an experience, whether it's a marketing event or a webinar or a podcast, like we're doing today. I want to entertain people, I want to educate people, I want them to feel something. I want them to walk away with an experience. I don't care if they don't remember every single framework and lesson, but I want them to remember how they felt and that they were inspired and that's magic. It's the same feeling you get when you walk into a Disney park or you watch an amazing movie. I want more marketing to hold itself accountable to that same bar.
Speaker 1:I mean, that is what everything that Steve Jobs and Apple talks about is capturing magic and Disney. It's Disney, too, like you're talking about 100%. So let me ask you I mean, you talked about how you started as a performer, or you grew up as a performer, but you decided not to go that way. You went into technology. When was that point where you said you know what I got to go into high tech? Or was there a moment, a project? Where did you, you know, how did you spark that passion?
Speaker 2:So the performing art that I was maybe doing most seriously for years was music. I was playing on the hotel circuit and the wedding circuit and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:And I was having lots of fun, and I still play.
Speaker 2:I still play the piano, even occasionally at concerts as an accompanist, because I just really enjoy it, and I was jamming at the Berklee School of Jazz for a couple of years before COVID. But A I don't think I have what it takes. For the daily grind to be truly exceptional. You need a ton of talent, which I don't have enough of, but also just hours and hours of practice and improving. And I remember growing up in Israel.
Speaker 2:I majored in music in high school because I was that serious about it and I saw how my teachers, who were some of the best musicians in the country, were living. And they were all living pretty much small apartments, running from gig to gig, doing a wedding here, chamber music concert there, teaching a student there, and I thought, well, this is how the best musicians are living. I don't know that I want that lifestyle. I want something with more stability, with more options.
Speaker 2:And when my first job, kind of after my army service, kind of landed in my lap in a tech company which I never thought of myself as going into, I kind of liked the range of things that I did every day. It was kind of a product manager job, my first role. I loved the variety of it. I loved that I was learning every day. I loved the stability that it was full-time, that it was good pay all the things that are almost impossible to get from a musical or other performing career. And that's how I kind of started through product management, and product management for those who've never done the role is, of course, yeah, no, I, yeah, you have to, really you're.
Speaker 1:You're working closely, you're understanding the market, you're working with this a lot of times with the seat, you're working with the CEO. If you're on a founding team, you're understanding what the product market looks like and you're working with engineering. And then you go from product into product marketing, where you then take that and bring it out to messages to the market, where you build those initial marketing, market-friendly messages.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I enjoyed working both with the market side and with the engineering side. But I saw that I truly shine when I'm working with the market to get them excited about what the product can do for them and show them all the possibilities of how they will get value from it. And so when I was in one of my later product management roles, I talked to my CEO and I said, look, I think the company would benefit if we had a full-time marketing role, because we don't have it right now and I'm kind of doing it as part of my product management role and we would get the word out there and we'd get more business. And he said, yeah, I agree. And I said, good, I've got just the guy for you. And I told him of my plan, that is, to hire someone that I'll train to replace me in product management and I will transition and be the first full-time marketer at the company. And he bought into the idea and that's how I created and which company was that?
Speaker 2:This was a company called Sarin Technologies. What?
Speaker 1:year what year was that? This was a company called Sarin Technologies.
Speaker 2:What year? What year was that? Oh my gosh, this must have been around 2005.
Speaker 1:Wow, so this is awesome, so you've-. Exactly 20 years ago, you set up your own transition into something that you would love to do. This is cool.
Speaker 2:And I did that for every other role. I've never stepped into a role that someone else has held before me. So I've been the first marketing leader at five companies, the first product leader at two companies and I'm the first evangelist at Gong. So that's kind of the only thing I know how to do.
Speaker 1:That's great, and one of the things you did you talked about it earlier working with Amit Bendoff at three different companies over 25 years. So, beyond a lot of what I like to talk about is the collaboration that makes you great, right, or what drives the innovator right, and you're talking about it from the point of view of not just what you did but also how you came together as a team. So, beyond your professional relationship with Amit, what's the most compelling factor or vision that he shared about Gong that made you decide to join as the first marketer, right, especially given what you did at other startups?
Speaker 2:Right. So I think what's magical about the way that Amit and I have been working together for all these years at different companies is that he lives with his head up in the clouds, his feet are grounded on the ground, but I would say that he's very high level idea man. I would say that he's very high level idea man and I am closer to the ground, so I still have big ideas, nowhere near those that Amit has, but when he comes with a big idea and I get excited about it, I can operationalize it, and that's why our duo has worked well for so many years, because he will come with a big idea and then five minutes later he's already on his next big idea. But he needs someone to operationalize like actually turn the dream into a plan, right. As the old saying goes, great idea without a plan is just a dream. Like it's not going to happen and you can't have a goal without a plan. And so when he came with these ideas, I cherry picked the ones that I thought would be most impactful but also doable, and then I operationalize them, and I think he appreciates that partnership with me, and when he called me back in 2016, he said this was after a couple of years that we had worked in separate companies.
Speaker 2:He said would you remember the crazy idea I told you about for this call recording idea? It could be a new idea instead of a CRM. I said yes. He said, well, we built the product, an early version, and we rolled it out to 12 beta customers and within three months 11 of them turned into paying customers. So I think we have early product market fit and we should start marketing this thing. Do you have time to come help us? And I said yes, I will make the time to come help you. What took you so long?
Speaker 1:He already gave you product market fit right as part of before you came in. You didn't have to prove it and be like so many marketers. When I, when we work with early stage companies, super early stage companies, they're like this shit works, you know, let's go to marketing and marketing will make it happen and marketing fails because they really don't have product market fit. They have a founder that knows how to sell and that doesn't mean you have fit, and so you knew that before you walked in. So that's brilliant, yes.
Speaker 2:It could not have been a better sort of opening situation for me to come in with even 11 product, 11 customers, but they they loved what they were using and that's an absolute necessity to start doing marketing that scales, because so many marketers that I feel for and I've been in that situation we fail because we come into a company where it doesn't matter what we do. If the product doesn't stick, if it doesn't provide clear value, if we're telling a story that the customers don't believe in, it's not going to work.
Speaker 2:It's just not going to work, so it's important as we head to a close here, that I give all the credit to the product people at Gong who build this amazing product, because I could have not achieved a fraction of my success at another company without the success of Gong's product and how well it continues to meet its products, its customers' needs.
Speaker 1:That's great. Now, if I go back to your, you mentioned your background about performing arts, magic music. What was the most unexpected way, a skill or experience from those early passions influenced your approach to marketing, particularly in the early days, before focusing on B2B.
Speaker 2:I would have to say that if I look back at my magician days of doing magic, it's all about doing some sleight of hand, something sometimes complicated, in a way that's almost completely hidden from the audience, and what they see is so simple and sometimes incredible that it appears like magic. And I think Steve Jobs said something to that effect that technology advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic. And that's what we're trying to do in marketing to do all the hard work and make things complicated on ourselves so that we can make it so simple that it's magical to the customers, whether it's how they use our product, whether it's how they experience our events, whether it's how they consume our content, whether it's how they navigate our website. Make it so simple and delightful that it's magical. Our website. Make it so simple and delightful that it's magical. And the way to do that is take on the hard work ourselves doing behind the scenes, you know, in the sausage factory, that nobody else has to see, so that the experience externally is so simple. It's magic, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:What's your personal moonshot?
Speaker 2:That I've achieved or not achieved yet.
Speaker 1:What do you want to? What are you aiming for next? I mean you've had a lot of great successes. I mean you just released this wonderful book.
Speaker 2:Yes, I just released my wonderful book Courageous Marketing. Well, you tell me if it's wonderful when people read it.
Speaker 1:I love it. By the way, I had a blast. The reason I got through it so quickly is because of your engaging writing style, chock full of stories. You didn't bore me with a lot of frameworks, and when you did give me a framework, you put it to action with examples.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that. Yeah, this might be one of the last books you'll read that wasn't written by AI. You know, I actually wrote every one of the 40,000 words.
Speaker 1:Those are your words.
Speaker 2:Nothing went through a chat engine, never went through a chat engine, not once it's all my words. I know I'm so old fashioned, so what is my moonshot At this point? I'm really about I think I've achieved what I wanted to achieve in marketing and in business, and I'm really about helping and mentoring and inspiring the next generation of marketers, and so I'm hoping my book will help me achieve that and get into the hands and minds of many, many marketers and get into the hands and minds of many, many marketers and who knows what doors it'll open for my next chapter. Not that I'm going anywhere anytime soon. I'm having a blast at Gong. We're growing fast, we're doing really, really well and as long as I'm making an impact and they will have me I'm sticking around.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're going to keep you around, I would definitely say. Well, one more question If you have a lot of great sayings in your book, if you were to leave the audience with one, what would it be?
Speaker 2:Ooh, just one. I think if you remember the one thing that business is creativity in service of capitalism, or, in other words, marketing's goal is to make sales easier. If that is your driver, if you drive your team to think every day how to make sales easier, you will succeed, the team will succeed, you will have better sales marketing alignment, your sales leaders will be advocating for you as a marketer, and that's the best endorsement you could ever get and that's probably the key to successful career in marketing is understanding that your goal is to drive business in the most creative ways that you can, but with measurable results.
Speaker 1:I love it. Udi, thank you so much. I just thought today's session was super fascinating. Your book is great. I love having you on and I hope I can have you on again. So thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2:I'm up for it, rajiv. Thank you so much for having me and thanks for helping launch my book Courageous Marketing, now available everywhere books are sold.
Speaker 1:That's right. Udi's a game changer and it's a fantastic read. Thank you for joining me. That was truly enjoyable, a great conversation with Udi. He's just such a natural and you can sense his energy, enthusiasm, confidence, passion, and I think if there's something I can take away or you can take away from this is that where you start, if you're open to it, can lead in so many ways, and in his story he goes from being a kid magician to someone who goes in the military, figures out where he wants to go next and, in doing so, finds a way to express himself in a way that enriches many companies, many people himself, and then shares it with so many others, like, if you think about well Gong, you know it records calls, you think that's all it is, but it's actually truly a revenue intelligence platform, which is what the category that Amit him and his team created. And it's that notion of taking, of understanding what people are saying about you and what your team is saying, gleaning insights from that and then building from that, and you can see the flywheel-like passion or flywheel-like capability that they have, from Gong Labs to the messaging they create, to the marketing that they do, how it all feeds back and being courageous is very hard in marketing. The average tenure of a CMO is as little as 18 months for many companies, and it's a hard job and you really have to stand out and you have to also be metrics driven while being so creative, and I think Udi is a great example of that, as have so many marketers been on the Spark of Ages podcast. I love how, by talking to a great person like him, I get to read his book and learn more about him and I get inspired to do a lot more with what I'm doing every single day, so I'm glad he was able to convey that for me and for you. So thank you so much for listening today.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed the pod, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple, spotify, youtube and everywhere podcasts can be found. What's especially cool on YouTube is that you can see the video now, so that's really fun, and hopefully you'll see us on LinkedIn with our clips. The show is produced by Anand Shah and Sunneit Parikh, production assistance by Taryn Talley and edited by Sean Maher and Aiden McGarvey. I'm your host, rajiv Parikh, from Position Squared. We're an AI-driven growth marketing company based in Silicon Valley. Come visit us at position2.com. This has been an effing funny production and we'll catch you next time. And remember, folks be ever curious.