What It Takes to Build Successful Marketing Teams (Over & Over Again)

Due Diligence Framework for Joining Companies

Udi Ledergor: Glad to be here Louis. Thanks for having me.

Louis: So here’s the challenge. You’ve done that five times already, which is by that I mean you’ve actually started in a new company. I mean the company is not new, but you were new as VP of marketing. And what I want to try to extract from you today are the fundamental principles that you kind of always have been using and maybe they have involved with it, but the things that are the underlying truth about your work and what you try to put in place. I know you know your shit around content marketing, category creation, building a brand that’s kind of what we can Touch on. But I really love for you to start describing, you know, even before you join, what other things you do, what are the things you rely on, lay on to generate revenue and reach your results. So let’s say for the sake of the argument, you’re leaving, you’re joining a new company or we can go back in time and say you’re joining Gong again. What is the very first thing you

Udi Ledergor: like to do prior to joining a company? There’s a few things and I think every time I joined a company I learned something new about the due diligence that I should do when joining a company. And I found that some of the principles are helpful for others as well. A few of the things that I look at when I join a company are one. Looking at the founding team now you know there are no absolute truths here because what I’m about to say I’m sure some people won’t agree with about first time founders and just their chances of succeeding are infinitely lower than experienced founders. And of course people will give me examples of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and they’re amazing first time founders, they are the outliers, they are the exception. And of course if you found a first time founder or you are a first time founder, I don’t want to discourage anyone and I wish everyone best of success. I found that looking at previous success stories of founders can be a good predictor for me. Not only on the chances of these people to succeed, but also that they know how to work with a management team, that they know how to hire the right people, that they know what a great company looks like. It’s not just about, you know, the impressive resume, but are these more mature people that won’t explode with every little crisis or act in a way that I won’t be able to work with. So for me, I honestly don’t see myself going to work with 25 year old first time founder again. I’m happy to advise those people and I do it a lot. I probably don’t see myself working full time with young first time founders. That’s one. It affects so many things, you know, their ability to get funding without experience, it’s infinitely harder, et cetera, et cetera. But of course there’s the outlying success stories as well. The second thing is all around the market and the product. So one thing that I’ve found in recent years that the closer I am to the buyer Persona that the company is trying to sell to, in the case of Gong, we’re selling to sales leaders, which is pretty close to a marketing leader, my own Persona. The closer I am to the buyer Persona, the easier and more excited I can get about my job. And to give contrary examples, in the past, I’ve marketed to diamond manufacturers and to IT managers, upgrading their ERP systems. Now, these are all great people, but I had to work so much harder to understand what they’re going through, what challenges fill their days, and how our solutions can help them. When I was marketing at a company called Sarin Technologies, I was there for seven years. We went public. It was great success story. But I really had to put my mind in what is a diamond dealer and diamond manufacturer’s life look like. I took a gemology course. I got certified. I can rate diamonds and other gemstones. And I really had to go deep into that to be able to come to them and talk with confidence, whether it’s through my marketing or the seminars or webinars that I gave or the marketing materials that I put out for them to make sure that I don’t come off as a fraud, that I really understand what they’re going to, what they’re going through, and how I can help make their day easier. And so I learned that, that if I’m not excited about the buyer Persona that I need to market and sell to, and if I don’t really feel capable of getting into their shoes and understanding what they’re going through, I’m probably not going to do a great job and I’m going to find it hard to get excited about it. So that’s one tip that I think a lot of people will relate to. Right.

The Three-Angle Problem Validation

Louis: So to piggyback on that, just briefly, it feels like this advice can be also applied to folks who are trying to start their own company and they are going after a market that they don’t have a clue about or where they don’t know that many people in this market. And exactly as you said, it’s going to take a huge amount of time to actually go through the pain of trying to understand your audience. And as you said, diplomas and courses and interviews after interviews until you get there. But it could take two years, three years sometimes to get to this point. So I think this advice is very much similar when you’re a founder, oh, you want to create a new product, you’re a creator, you want to create a course. It’s much better to get closer to home to. To who you are, to what you believe.

Udi Ledergor: Yeah. Of course, not every person in the company can be a domain expert. On, on who you’re selling to. Right, but certain pivotal roles, like the head of product, which many times is the CEO in the early days, but if not, the person who’s building the product has to be the number one expert on the daily lives of your user, otherwise how the hell are you going to succeed there? And then anyone selling to that user and anyone marketing to that user and their customer success people, they don’t all have to come from that domain necessari, but they definitely have to get a crash course and feel comfortable enough to use the right words to describe the daily lives and the problems and the solutions that these folks are using. Because people are very cynical and we all have bullshit meters and if we smell that someone’s picking up a few words that he learned just yesterday, but they’ve never seen someone like me do my job, I’m not going to buy from them. Why would I?

Louis: You mean you don’t like disruptive big data synchronization? And don’t forget blockchain and crypto and yeah, and AI. AI powered machine learning algorithm, etc. Etc. Okay, so those are the first two things. So you vet, you like to look at whether the founders have experience and you look at whether you’re close enough to the Persona. What else do you look into?

Udi Ledergor: So the third biggest thing would be looking at the product. And these are the questions that I ask and try to answer before I can, I can join. And I do this even when someone asks me to advise their company. Like if I can’t answer this questions in a way that I’m satisfied, I don’t think I can help them succeed. So one thing is, are there enough people who are experiencing the problem that this product is trying to solve? I have some big problems, but I might be the only one with that problem. You’re probably not going to build a big scale company if you can only solve a problem that one or two or 100 people have. You want to have a target account market of at least several thousand really big companies or millions of consumers or tens of thousands small to medium businesses. But it has to be a sufficient size audience. So that’s one angle at which I look at the problem that the product is trying to solve. Is there a big enough audience that needs a solution to this problem? Two is how difficult is this problem to solve? If the problem is not very painful, if it’s just a minor inconvenience to the audience, that probably tells me that they’re not going to invest a lot in a solution. To solve that problem. Right. I don’t know if I’ll give just a silly example I’m thinking of right now. We all spend a few seconds a day. At least we did before COVID tying our shoelaces before we go out of the house. It’s a minor inconvenience if someone built the best machine in the world to tie your shoelaces in half the time. Yes, there’s a big enough market for that. But is it a big enough problem that people are willing to pay money to solve? Probably not. Right? Like, maybe I’d pay a dollar for a machine to tie my shoelaces. I wouldn’t pay $100. So looking at how deep the problem is, how painful is it to the target audience? That’s the second angle that I would look at. And the third, how do you do that? You go and talk to people who have the problem. If you talk to 10 people and nine out of 10 say, oh, my God, I would give my right arm to solve this problem. You know that there is a painful problem here. If they all go like, yeah, you know, it’s a minor inconvenience. I’ve learned to live with it. Like, if you give me a solution for free, I might use it, But I’m not going to go out looking for a solution paying money for it. Then you want to rethink it. And I’ve seen so many solutions that are just solving a minor inconvenience. Right.

Louis: Give me another example.

Udi Ledergor: Ooh, now I’m going to really get in trouble.

Louis: Yeah, take your time. It’s interesting.

Udi Ledergor: I’ll mention a company that already died, so I can’t get in trouble. Last year, they made headlines when they raised a few hundreds of millions of dollars. I think maybe like a billion dollars. The company that made this juice presser for home use, you know what I’m talking about?

Louis: Yes.

Udi Ledergor: I heard the right product that they were gonna. They’re gonna make a living on. On selling subscription and selling these bags of fruits and vegetables that you put into the machine. And it imply, and it applies incredible pressure to squeeze the fruit and vegetables and produce fresh juice for. For the folks who want to drink fresh juice and don’t want to, like, I don’t know, buy their own fruit and vegetables and figure out how to mix them for the ideal morning shake and use just a regular Vitamix or other mixer or blender to make it. And when people started sort of looking at beta prototypes of the machine, they found that, you know, this incredible machine that we’re trying to sell for thousands of dollars. If you just took your two hands and squeezed the bag of fruit, you still extracted the same amount of juice from the bag. And so they’re like scratching their heads, okay, is this really a problem that someone is going to pay thousands of dollars for? And it’s got this robotic arm that puts all this pressure to squeeze this bag of fruit to produce juice. If I can do this with my two hands, why would anyone pay for this fancy machine? And of course, that was just one of the problems with the company, but I think that’s an example of you built a tank to shoot a fly. Nobody needs this. It’s a minor inconvenience. So that’s one example. And so the three angles to the problem. One, are there enough people suffering from the problem? Two, is it a painful enough problem that they would want to fork away cash to solve it? And three is, do they have the money and the authority to pay you for the solution? And here’s what I mean. Many times if you’re selling, say to salespeople, they don’t have the money and the authority to buy your solution unless it’s like a $20 a month solution. Someone wants to upgrade their LinkedIn license, I think you can do that for like 40, 50, 60 bucks a month. They have the money and authority to do that themselves. But if you’re trying to sell a thousand dollar a month solution to a salesperson, salespeople are not going to buy that from you. And then you’ve got to think about, okay, are they really our buyer or are they just my user? And if they’re just my user, then who is the buyer? And then ask the same questions for the buyer, okay, do they have the authority? The money is a big enough problem. Is it a painful enough problem? So those are the three angles that I think are most important. There’s others as well. For looking at the viability of your solution and the company, you’ve got to have a big enough audience solving a painful enough problem and make sure they have the authority and money to buy your solution.

Louis: That reminds me of the five qualifiers or five sales qualifiers that some, I don’t remember the name of the person who coined them, but that’s pretty much summarizing. You know your thoughts, what you said they have a bleeding neck problem. So it’s a massive problem. They can say yes themselves. They have the money. Like another market. To me, that is, obviously those folks need help sometimes for a lot of stuff, but another, another market that is typically a lot of startup we touch on is like the student market, you know, folks who studying in college and whatever. And one of the key question is, okay, do they have money actually to spend? And usually the answer is no, they don’t, they don’t have any money. And so when you try to sell something like that is above a certain price, price range, you almost always know unless it’s very niche and maybe there’s a huge problem for certain kind, you know, that those people won’t be able to.

Udi Ledergor: I mean if you have a great solution to a big problem that millions of students have and you can market it for $20 each, they might be able to buy that and you could make a big, a big fortune from that. But if you’re trying to sell a thousand dollar solution to a broke student on student loans, you’re probably not going to build a huge company out of that.

Louis: Indeed. Okay, so we’ve covered the first two steps. How you pick those companies. I’m sure you have a bit more, there’s a bit more details and finesse to the way you do things. But I think what’s going to be interesting now is let’s consider you joining the company. Is there a particular stage you want to focus on, like where you tend to join? And again, I don’t want to mean that you’re planning to leave Congo or whatever, that’s fine. But just for the sake of the argument, like when do you like to join and what example we’d like to take to just take that further.

Udi Ledergor: So all the companies that I joined had between I think 15 and 50 people in them. So always very early stage, usually after the seed round, but before the A or around the A round, that’s when I joined all of the companies that were venture backed. One, one that I joined was structured a little bit differently, but, but still I joined as employee number 20. So that’s like the average employee number that I usually have is around 20. At Gong, it was 15. And when I joined Gong, just to sort of briefly connect that to the criteria that I talked about earlier, people asked me why I joined gong. So there were three reasons really quickly. One is the leadership, the founders. So Manit Bendov, our CEO, he and I had worked previously twice at two different companies at Qlik Software and Panaya. So over the course of the last 22 years, we’ve been working together on and off at three different companies for most of those years. And when he called me In July of 2016, exactly four years ago, he said hey, Udi, remember that crazy idea I told you about six months ago? We built the product, we rolled it out to 12 beta customers, and 11 of them wrote us a check after three months. So we won’t shut off their beta. I think we better start some marketing. Are you free to come help? So I said, what took you so long? I dropped everything and I came. And the reason is that I know Amit. He’s a serial entrepreneur and leader, and I would follow him anywhere. You know, as you can probably see, pretty much everything he touches turns into gold. And this is the person that I wanted to work with again. So that’s one Leadership, two, the product. When I came in and I saw the ugly beta version of gong, my jaw dropped and I said like, wow, this is going to change an industry, Obviously the industry. Just to show how sort of I did the parallels with the criteria that I gave that, they’re not theoretical. They’re, I think, 100 million salespeople or something around that in the world. There’s a huge, huge TAM for that. Their leadership has budget. They have huge problems around not understanding what’s happening with their customer interactions. Because today sales teams rely on salespeople manually entering information into their CRM systems. That doesn’t always happen when it happens. It happens late. When it happens late, they only put a fraction of the information that actually happened in the call. And it’s always biased to make the salesperson look good. So there’s like five different problems there that each one alone is probably deep enough for and painful enough to want to solve. All of them together are really a bleeding neck, as you called it, Louis. So I saw the product. I’m like, wow, this is going to change an industry. And three is the buyer Persona. I was really excited about marketing to salespeople again after selling to some other buyer Personas, which you don’t always get a lot of feedback from, like, IT managers. They tend to kind of not be as vocal on social media and kind of secretive about their work. But salespeople, they’re out there. They’re completely transparent. If you do something cool that they like, they’ll share it and amplify it. If you do something that they hate, they will put it on social media and tell you that you did wrong, and they’ll get very nasty. But that’s great because you get immediate feedback and you know what’s working and what’s not.

Louis: So that’s a great overview. Let’s say you’re starting as VP of marketing. I mean, there’s no need to try to create a fictional scenario. Let’s go back four years in time, right? But let’s try to extract the key fundamentals, the things you tend to always do, even though, yeah, tactics might change or whatever, but the underlying principles. So you joined GONG four years ago. If you can recall from this experience, the experience before, what are the core mistakes you’ve made, the core lessons you’ve learned, the things you tend to do in order. Even though I understand that sometimes it

Parallel Demand Generation Strategy

Udi Ledergor: happens in parallel, of course, again, first sort of to set expectations. I don’t have all the answers and there’s more that I don’t know than things that I do know. And all of our expertise is just the sum of our own experience. So I’m missing big parts of experience that other people have. But I can share what I’ve learned along the way. When I came to Gong, we set out to do two things and I’m going to get tactical for a minute. In the marketing sense, what every startup is concerned about is demand generation. How do I bring in enough customers to survive until the next funding round and how do I show some traction so investors want to invest more money. Right. Based on my learning so far, this is how I addressed it at Gong, and how I’d probably look at it at the next company as well. You want to build two flows of demand gen. One of them is inbound, one of them is outbound. Let’s dive a little bit deeper into what, what attributes each of those has. Inbound is a marketer and a company’s dream because the cost per acquisition is very low, right? It’s magic. People come to your website, they ask for a demo. Since this morning, we’ve had more than 100 demo requests on our website. Actual number that I checked before I jumped on this call. Before 8:30am, we had 100 demo requests on our website. But that’s kind of unfair because yesterday we had some big news announcement on our latest funding. Normal days, we still get a few dozen of these every day. But I’m four years into this game. On the first day that I came, we had zero demo requests coming into our website. So you’re starting to get the good and the bad of this. The good is once you’ve built it, it’s scalable, it’s very cost effective, but it takes a long time to build and that’s why you can’t put all your focus on inbound on the first days. If you do that, you will run out of money far before you get enough inbound to support the business. On the first day I started building a brand and I started working on the inbound flow. But I knew that in the first year I’m going to get almost zero from it. So that’s one thing. But the later you start, the later you’ll enjoy all those benefits. So you do have to start early. And I’ll get back to that if you want to. The second flow is outbound. Outbound is where you get your first customers from. You never get them from inbound, as far as I know. I’ve never gotten them from inbound. To do outbound, you need to create some content. You need to bring an sdr, get them with a list of prospects and give them a script to start working with and have them call and email and LinkedIn those people, get them on a demo call, do some discovery, understand what they need, and see if your solution is a match that is outbound. And you can do that on the first day, right? You get a list of names, you get an sdr, you sit them down and they start calling. So by doing those two things simultaneously, you use outbound SDR to start having calls every day. If you sit back and wait for a demo request to come in on your website, I mean, you know it’s going to take months. So doing those two things in parallel outbound for immediate results. But you also get a lot of feedback because on every call, people are going to call you out if you’re talking bullshit, if you’re not addressing the problems they actually have, or if your solution doesn’t solve their problem in a way that they’re interested. You’ll learn very, very quickly every day. And at the same time, you build the longer term inbound flow. That’s the high level. I’ll pause here.

Louis: That’s the way you like to see it. Okay, that’s super interesting. And just to define just sdr, it’s Sales Development Representative, right? Just for people. Correct.

Udi Ledergor: Sometimes called also bdrs or Business Development Representative or ADR Account Development Representative. And there are other names, but the function is basically the same.

Louis: So let’s go to one concept that you briefly mentioned, which I think is incredibly powerful. You said from day one I started to build the brand, right? That’s probably those three words I used so many times with so many folks and it’s almost impossible to get to the bottom of. What the fuck do you actually mean? What do you actually do? So maybe we can try to cover that because I would invite everyone listening to this podcast to go to Gong IO, which is the website. Just look around, look at the copy, the design, how the system works, how everything seems to be connected and increase the feeling, even as a first time visitor, even though I don’t care about the product because I’m not in sales, I get it and I understand what the feeling you’re trying to give me. But let me ask you, okay. What does it actually mean and what did you actually do?

Building Brand from Day One

Udi Ledergor: Sure. So I’ll try and cover two things here. One, I’ll talk about the brand and two, I’ll talk about the content marketing, which is something we’re kind of famous for. And it’s the second content machine that I built. The last one was a Panaya that was hugely successful and contributed to a lot of our inbound and outbound demo flow. But let’s start with the brand. Maybe I think with a brand. And of course every company and every industry will need their own brand. And even with this, within the same industry, every company should have a different brand. I mean, if you want to be a me too brand and just copy someone else, that’s also a valid tactic. We have plenty of those in our industry, but we never wanted to be one of those. To summarize our philosophy on brand, I would say, and I didn’t make up this motto, we just live by it. So I don’t take credit for making it up. It is different is better than better. I’ll say it again, different is better than better. And I’ll explain what I mean by that. When you’re trying to stand out in a crowded space, and if you’re not in a crowded space, you want to make sure you’re in the right room. Because if no one else is there, maybe nobody needs your solution. But if you want to be in a crowded space, which we all do, right. If you build a successful company, competition will come. If you’ve been at this for three years and there’s still no competition, maybe they figured out something that you haven’t. But going back to assuming you’re in a valid space to stand out amongst other players by doing the same thing they are but doing it better, you have to be 10 or 20 times better than they are. That’s extremely hard. That’s extremely hard. Like how many things can you do that are 20 times better than the best people in your industry? I don’t know that I can do many things, 10 or anything, 10 or 20 times better than others. And so a different approach is to be different and if you see everyone zig and you zag, by definition, you’re now the best at zagging because nobody else is doing it. You’re the first, the last and the only. And if you think of brand building and content building and other aspects of marketing, that way, by doing something very different from everyone else, you’re going to stand out by definition. Right, because everyone else look at people’s websites. Okay, I’m going to give us just a really trivial example. Open up 20 B2B software company websites. I can guarantee what you’re going to see at the top of all of them. There’s going to be a Mac screen, there’s going to be an ugly screenshot of their product at the top, and then they’re going to attempt to explain three bullet points of why it’s so great and then ask you for a demo. We don’t have that screenshot at the top. We have an English bulldog woofing at you. And we’ve got a diverse group of people who represent a Silicon Valley sales team. It’s a very human approach. It’s very different than. There are zero stock images or illustrations on our website. There’s nothing that you will find on another website in the world. These are all actors and actresses that we auditioned and brought in for a photo shoot. And we bought their clothes for that photo shoot. These are exclusive characters. I’m serious. And we auditioned seven dogs. Bruno the dog.

Louis: That’s what it takes.

Udi Ledergor: That’s what it takes.

Louis: Audition seven dogs.

Udi Ledergor: We auditioned seven dogs and only one made it to stardom.

Louis: The only one who could speak.

Udi Ledergor: It’s a true story. That’s how specific we are when we say that we want to be different. Just try chatting with Bruno the dog on our chatbot. I can guarantee you’ve never had that chat experience on any other website. He might bark at you, he might show you stuff, he might ask you very casual stuff. But you know what? He books hundreds of meetings every month. And that’s automated. There’s no human behind that.

Louis: So let me stop here because this is incredibly important and perhaps we will switch course a bit and focus only on this, because it’s probably the most critical aspect. I would say the rest follows. I think once you have something that stand out, a clear difference, your content marketing, even your outbound, everything starts to. It gets easier, doesn’t it? It’s just the grinds is less grindy. It’s anyway, it feels like you’re part of a wave and you’re surfing it. You’re not behind it or too much in front of it. So there’s a very good book called actually different by Yongme Moon. And she talks about this innovation by augmentation, which is exactly what you described the razor. Twenty years ago, razors had two blades, then three, then four, then five. That’s just fucking slightly better, Slightly more, slightly faster, slightly cheaper. Exactly.

Udi Ledergor: As you said, we will always buy the latest blade.

Louis: Yeah, exactly. So there you go. But like, that’s, that’s. It’s not because they’re different, it’s because you know them and that’s part of your memory structure. Like you just, you just habit. You just buy them because they’re the leader. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about radical differentiation in a sense. You mentioned Zag, which is another book by Martin Umayer, if I’m not mistaken. Talk about that very well. And then you have the Blue Ocean strategy on top of it, which I think is something that maybe we want to mention because, yeah, the story of the dog, the story of the actors, your audition, that’s a nice little story, but it’s part of a bigger thing. So let’s dive deeper into the next layer. How did you engineer this difference? What did you look into to consider? Okay, this is what we’re going to do differently. This is what we’re going to stop doing or not even the time to do. Tell us what.

Different is Better Than Better

Udi Ledergor: Yeah, so I think I should talk about two things here. To answer your question. One is the brand personality or brand attributes, and the other is our content strategy. Let’s start with brand, since we’re already on it. We sat down two and a half years ago and this was after our Round A. So the reason I’m mentioning this is it’s a relatively early stage to be thinking about brand. And I think there’s no early and too early stage to be thinking about brand. And I think the most successful B2B companies today look at companies like Drift. They build a brand before they launch their product. I was, I joined Gong a full year before our first VP of Sales joined us because Amit, our CEO, believed that we need to start building a brand and authority and drive demand gen before we can expect a salesperson to sell to these people. And I think a lot of companies get this wrong. They bring a salesperson and after a year they fire the salesperson or leader because they’re not succeeding. They bring a second one, she fails too. And then they’re like, maybe we need some marketing Support. We should find a marketer to build a website and make some brochures. But, but that’s, that’s the wrong way to do it. You have to start either together or bring the marketing earlier. If you want to create a brand, if you want to create demand gen and then you’re setting up your sales team for success, then they come in and they’re like, wow. There’s actually demo requests coming in. Like, wow. We actually have materials and content. We can send our prospect. Okay, with this, I can work. What we did is we sat at a very early stage, like two and a half years ago, and we sat with the branding agency and they facilitated this process. Of course, we initiated it and we discussed for days what is our brand personality? If our brand was a person, would it be male or female? Would she be old or young? Would she be playful or serious? Would she be like upper class or everyday commoner? And we talked about all these things and we mapped them out and then we looked at like six or seven dimensions of our brand personality and we picked all of them and then we started looking at how we connect them together. Can you really be authoritative yet approachable? And if you ask most B2B brands or don’t ask them, just go look at their websites, you’ll see that most brands confuse authoritative with boring. And you see a lot of website, I don’t want to mention names, of course, but you look at a lot of websites and you see that they’re trying so hard to look authoritative even though they’re like a one year old startup. So they make everything so serious. And they use everyone’s blue and gray colors, which they think adds more authority and it’s all these silly icons. But we decided that we’re going to be authoritative. We’re going to be the number one authority on what works in sales. And I’ll get soon to the content strategy that helped us create that part of the brand. But we’re also going to be extremely approachable. And one sentence that we use internally all the time is we take our work very seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. And you mentioned our website and if people go there, they’ll very quickly get that vibe that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. And if you’ve been following our social media on LinkedIn or Facebook, you see that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We love goofing off. You can find a video of me in my underwear on our website, right? Go check it out, you’ll find it. We do these crazy things because people want to relate to other people. They don’t want to relate to this opaque brand or something that they wouldn’t want to have a drink with after work. And I think we create a brand that people want to go have a drink with after work or at least come pet our bulldog.

Louis: Did you also look at what, obviously you did look at other competitors and try to look at their personality and you purposely then looked at this map and said, we’re going to go all the way to the edge of this map while leaving all of the others there. Right?

Udi Ledergor: Yeah. So I will say that looking at competitors I think is a little bit overrated. Depends on what your market position is, if you’re a number two or three or coming very late into the game. Again, I’ll give Drift as a great example. They came in originally to a space of online chats where there were established players like Intercom and Live Person Olark and there were many players and they decided, okay, we’re gonna, we’re gonna essentially start by building a Me Too product in a very competitive space because there was enough room for other players, but we’re gonna build a completely different brand. And they did. Right. Like, most people couldn’t talk about the other brands that I just mentioned, but most of us know Drift because they’re doing amazing stuff. Gong came into a different position. We came into a space that we were just creating. There were a couple of very, very early stage startups that are now far, far, far behind us. And so we never looked at them to see what they were doing and see, okay, if they’re doing this, I’m going to do something else. We’re like, okay, we have a completely blue ocean, as you mentioned. We need to figure out what the leader is going to do in this space. And it’s a challenge that I prefer. That’s why I tend to join companies that are creating a category or are in very early stages of a category that you don’t have to look at others and just think, okay, what do I want to do a little bit different or better? No, let’s figure this out for the first time. It’s way more exciting for me than coming into a space where there are already three established players and now you’re trying to figure out your niche angle. So, I mean, we did look at other B2B companies, we looked at other sales tech companies, but there was really very little inspiration in our immediate field. So we had to make all of this up.

Louis: The key here is that I Think, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you had the confidence as a team, as a founding team, to fucking go for it, right? To actually go and stay there. Like, not diluting things, not making the curry less spicy, not scratching off the rounding of the edges and making everything average. No, you. Because that’s what happens. I start on a lot of meetings with brand agencies where you decide and fucking reinvent the world and we’re going to be this and that and that. And then the Monday morning you come back and like, I’m scared. Let’s just go back to average shit. Is that. Is that a fair assessment? So it’s very fair.

The Power of Being Polarizing

Udi Ledergor: I love the analogy of we didn’t make the curry less spicy. That’s a perfect description. If there’s something that we talk about a lot in my marketing meetings and in our brand management meetings, we are not afraid of being controversial and polarizing and saying things that are going to piss off some people. Because here’s what I believe really strongly. If you’re not pissing anyone off, you’re also not exciting anyone. If you’re trying to please everyone, you are going to bore everyone to death because you’re not saying anything exciting. The worst thing that can happen to your content. Look at, like, 99 out of 100 brands who have a LinkedIn page. You go to their LinkedIn feed, you look at their posts. How many reactions do they have? How many likes and comments do they have? 2, 7, 12. Nobody cares about what they’re posting because they’re playing it so safe. Or, as you would say, making the curry so bland that nobody wants to eat it. There’s nothing exciting. They’re not starting any sort of conversation. If you look at posts, we regularly post stuff that gets hundreds and sometimes thousands of reactions and hundreds of comments because we’re pissing some people off. We’re creating an argument that people either want to say, yeah, exactly that, or tag someone else. This is what I’ve been talking about. Or say, hey, Gong, you’re completely wrong. How dare you recommend that people go and swear on sales calls?

Louis: What do you know?

Udi Ledergor: Our data actually shows that it increases your win rates by 9% if you do it correctly.

Louis: Does it?

Udi Ledergor: It does. Aren’t you happy now?

Louis: I like.

Udi Ledergor: So if you’re not creating something that people can argue with or have a double take on, like, wow, I never thought about it that way, or I always thought A. But Gong just showed me data that suggests that B is actually true. If you’re not tinkling their curiosity. They’re not going to engage in a conversation. It’s going to be just boring.

Louis: So you pick something, you go to the edge. You had a very nice position to be the first in the category, which is rare. It very rarely happens for real. A lot of companies try to create a category, but it’s not real. It’s mostly a side of the red ocean and all of that. But I won’t go into that too much. You picked those and you went for it. You had the confidence to go for it. Well, it seems to have happened as well. And then we can mention content strategy, because I’m probably a good segue is you looked at the places, the things that are currently done in the industry in general, in the sales industry, software sales, and you kind of said, okay, for example, LinkedIn, everyone is on fucking LinkedIn, fine. Every company has a LinkedIn profile, fine. But every single one of them are boring as fuck. Could we do something radically different there? Is that the way you approach it or am I creating a story that didn’t happen?

Udi Ledergor: No, that’s very close. I would just. The only correction I would make is that LinkedIn is just one channel, but the content strategy is something much bigger. And of course, you know, people consume content in many ways by email and webinars and on stage performances. LinkedIn is one of our very successful channels. But yes, we thought about how can we create so much noise? And here’s another sentence that we use internally all the time when we sit down in our monthly or bi weekly now content meetings. We’re thinking about creating content so good that people would pay for it. Try applying that filter to your content calendar. Look at your calendar. How many of those pieces would people pay for? I can show you actual emails of universities and sales teams sending us emails inquiring about pricing because they want to license our content marketing to use in university courses, in sales enablement courses and sales kickoffs. And of course, we grant full license to all these people to use it freely, just to credit Gong. But every time we get those emails, we smile and say, it worked. We created content so good that people are willing to pay for it.

Louis: How do you do it in practice?

Data-Driven Content Strategy

Udi Ledergor: How do we do it in practice? All right, so it’s a lot like developing a product. Remember the questions, do we have a big enough audience? Do they have a painful enough problem? And are they willing to pay for it? So here’s how we apply to content. So once again, Gong is selling to salespeople and sales leaders. So we Looked at what other problems they have that I can solve with content. And here’s the thing. We found that if you go on Amazon, you’ll find. I forget the exact numbers. Probably at least 4,000 books on sales. Here’s the thing. They’re all based on opinions. It’s people who sold at xerox in the 1980s. They’re telling you what worked for them, and you should go do the same. I just summarized 4,000 books for you. So we thought, okay, there must be a better way. And then we looked inside and we saw that we have. This was four years ago, on my first day. We had 20,000 calls already recorded sales calls from our customers. Now, if we could apply our AI, not the bullshit people call it AI, but actual AI and machine learning to analyze those 20,000 calls and find a few things that are clearly working for salespeople who get the next call or get that deal, and things that aren’t working. For example, what percentage of the calls should the salesperson be talking versus listening? How many questions do salespeople ask when they win the deal? Should you be swearing? How long should you wait for the awkward pause after you give them pricing? There’s so many. There’s like a million questions that there’s thousands of books that try to answer them, but none of them have data. So we’re like, wait, we have all this data? What if we became the number one authority on what’s actually working in sales? And we back everything that we say with data. We don’t give our opinions, we just show the data. And so I’m not kidding. On my first day, it was August 1, 2016, I asked my CEO, do you have any data or something I can use to create the first ebook? And he gave me, like, five slides that he presented at some conference a week earlier. And they talked about what we found in our call database. What was the optimal talk time? Turns out it was about 46% for the salesperson. You should be listening about 54% of the time and talking 46%. And how many questions should we ask? And we found that for most scenarios, something between 4 to 11 is the right number of questions. Less than that, and you’re not getting any of the information that you need any more than that. And you’re starting to piss off the customer. And that number changes depending on the seniority. I won’t get into that because it doesn’t matter right now. But we found a few tidbits like that. And then I took his PowerPoint. I literally went to the file menu and chose Save as PDF. And that was my first ebook. And then I set up a simple email campaign and posted a few LinkedIn ads and I started sending it out and what do you know, people were downloading it. They were actually interested in what actually works in sales. I think I called that ebook the like five Pitching Secrets or something like that, because it was five slides that became our content strategy. For the last four years, we’ve been producing thousands of content pieces as part of the Gong Labs series. And I actually have data scientists working for the marketing team going now through 20 million sales calls that we have in our database and hundreds of millions of emails that we’ve ingested from our customers. They’re looking at them in a very anonymous, aggregated way. They never know, like who the people or companies are. And then they surface these insights in ugly charts and Excel sheets. They give that to my content team, they look at that and say, okay, how are we going to craft a beautiful story out of this? And then they put out an article in plain English with two or three beautiful simple charts that everyone can understand. And we post that on LinkedIn and emails and we do webinars and conferences about it. And thousands and thousands of people are consuming that. And that’s how we built our authority in the sales space, by being the first company to actually use hard data to show what’s actually working.

Finding What’s Not There

Louis: But yet again, I think the mechanism is the same than before for the brand, right? You looked at the empty space, which is something. Again, humans are pretty bad at this. We are very good at looking at what’s there and looking at patterns that what is there, because that’s how we survive, right? We look at what is there. But actually the most valuable thing to do usually is to look at what is not. And exactly as you said, 4,000 book on sales. What is not in there? Fucking data. Real data. Now, you also had the advantage of generating data yourself. And so that’s a match made in heaven, right? But I guess if you had to remove your example from it and just extract the principles, it’s like looking at what isn’t there. Looking at the problem as you described, the pains that are really painful, the bleeding necks, and looking at what are the things that others don’t do that will help them solve this problem, not what are the things that people currently do. And just let’s make it 10x 10% better.

Udi Ledergor: Exactly.

Louis: Is that a fair summary?

Udi Ledergor: Just to sort of show that this is not a fluke, right? We did the same thing when I was at Panaya. At Panaya, we were selling God awful boring product. It was a great product, just boring. That helped IT managers automate the upgrade of their ERP systems. It’s about exciting as it gets, right? And these people, they were working on systems like SAP and Oracle and before every version release SAP put up like 2000 pages of documentation on their website on what’s changing in this version of SAP. Now if you’re an IT manager, how are you going to understand what’s going to happen in this upgrade of of SAP and what’s it going to break in your system? You’re not going to go read 2,000 documentation pages. So we identified that in the marketing team at Panaya. We’re like, okay, we can help people like Louis who’s trying to prepare for the next upgrade. And we had again, we used some fancy software of our own to analyze that coming version of SAP and we produced a two page summary of what’s changing in this version. And we showed hard data. This is going to affect your HR module and the finance module. You don’t need to test this, you need to prepare for this. We produced a two page summary of the next SAP upgrade and we put that out once and we saw how immensely popular it was. And then we start putting it out every quarter for every SAP release. Once we were late and people started emailing us, hey Panaya, when are you putting out your SAP update fact sheet? We’re waiting for IT to know what’s coming up. So now they were relying on our version of documenting the SAP upgrades because we managed to do it in two really useful pages versus 2,000 pages that you had to go read on their website. So I mean it’s not rocket science. Just see what problems people are actually having and how you can make their lives easier and in a way that’s a little bit difficult that others haven’t figured out yet.

Louis: Yeah, I think it’s pretty good summary of what you’ve been talking about in the last few minutes and hopefully that should put some fire under pressure. Your ass listening. You listening to this episode right now to test stuff and look at what is not there and try to solve pains differently and not just 10% better because everyone else is doing it. I think it’s a great example of doing things differently, having the conviction to do it because you know what I mean, That’s a belief of mine. I don’t have data to back it up yet, but I believe that sometimes it’s not really about the focus, like what you’re picking, the thing you’re choosing to do necessarily is just the fact that you’ve actually picked one thing and done it very well, or just different. It could have taken 100 other different routes. But just by focusing on one thing and doing that very well and just fucking going all in, there’s already more chances to success than just trying to do everything.

Udi Ledergor: That’s very true. And same goes for your marketing channels. If you’re trying to market on 20 channels, you’re going to suck on all of them. Pick one or two, that’s all you can manage. And that’s going to be hard enough. If you try to do 20, you’re not going to beat the competition on any of them. And same with content strategy. Pick one and go all in on it. I completely agree.

Louis: So, Udi, you’ve been a pleasure. Thanks for going through the steps and trying to understand your thinking. When you come to a new company, I just have two more questions to ask you. The first one, what do you think listeners should learn today that will help them in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years?

Essential Skills for Marketing Leaders

Udi Ledergor: What should listeners learn that would help them? I think I’ll start with what I think the market needs today, and then you can identify your gaps. The best marketers who are being promoted from a specific point role to manager and director and VP and cmo, they are very good at using both sides of their brain. And by that I mean that they can merge creativity with analytics. And if you have a gap in one of those, and most people have a gap in one of those, you have to go in and fill it. You don’t have to become, if you’re predominantly creative, you don’t have to become the best analytical mind in the world. But if you don’t advance significantly there, you’re not going to be a cmo. Okay, you can’t be a CMO if you’re just a creative guy because you have to know how to present numbers to your CRO and to your CFO and to your board of directors. And you need to be good enough at analytics to show that you understand how what you’re doing with creativity is affecting the business. And the other way around, if you’re all numbers but you can’t come up with a creative campaign to save your life, you’ve got to get people that will help you fill in those gaps. You’ve got to know how to guide them. You’ve got to know what’s good when you see it. So you’ve Got to also adapt and learn in that area. So the ones that are going to merge creativity with analytics, the best, those are the ones that are getting promoted right now. And I’m not a prophet, but I don’t see that changing in the next 10 years.

Louis: What are the top three resources you recommend listeners? So it could be anything from books to podcasts to events.

Udi Ledergor: Right? So number one, my bible of marketing is Robert Cialdini’s Influence book that he wrote in the early 80s. It was complete flop when he published it. The publisher stopped distributing it after a few months because it was doing terribly.

Louis: Yeah, I know that.

Udi Ledergor: Yeah, yeah, Robert wrote about it. It’s a great story. And a few years later, when sort of data based decision making became a thing, people started rediscovering the book. And then of course, it became history and sold out multiple editions, been translated into dozens of languages. Robert is a brilliant scholar on marketing. It talks about the six pillars of influence that every marketer needs to learn. And the good news here, folks, is the book was written in the early 80s. We’re now, what, almost 40 years. Oh my God. Almost 40 years after the book was written. And everything that you see working on Twitter and TikTok and YouTube uses the same six pillars that Robert wrote about in the early 80s, before all of this crap was invented. So the good news, you can really master those six foundations. You will understand consumer behavior. And when you create a new piece of content, doesn’t matter for what channel, whether it already exists or not. You can look at it through the prisms of those pillars of influence. I could talk about his book for an hour, so I’ll stop there, but just go buy Influence by Robert Cialdini. You can thank me later. Wow. Other resources. We regularly look at events and content and websites of companies that inspire us. Some of them in neighborhood spaces to ours, but others completely different. We regularly get ideas from Disney and Red Bull and consumer brands that are doing amazing stuff. I think we stole an idea from Nike at some point for a campaign because consumer brands usually get to have a lot more fun than B2B brands. And if you can bring 10% of the fun that they get to have into your B2B brand, you’re already standing out and doing way more than those around you. So don’t limit your search and education to your competitors or, or your immediate neighborhood. Just look, look much broader than that. Look at super bowl ads. See what they’re doing and what can you. They’re usually, you know, very extreme, very, you know, they. They put some companies, put 30 of their advertising budget a year into their super bowl ad. Look at what they did there. You might get inspiration and an idea that you can scale down to something that’ll work for you.

Louis: So that’s two. Oh, you’re really missing one.

Udi Ledergor: Gosh, where else do we educate ourselves to learn something good? I would say you should, and this is maybe an unorthodox answer, but whatever position you’re in, go find two people that have been doing it longer and better than you at companies that you admire and get them to mentor you. If you’re a social media manager, if you’re an events manager, go find people who are doing it better. My events manager, Danny, he’s on my team. Incredible guy. When we launched our first virtual events in April, he thought that other event managers might want to learn about it more, so he opened up a modest Slack community on the first day, like 400 event managers signed up to learn how we’re doing our virtual events. I can’t remember how many he has there right now. And Danny and I published an article on Forbes a couple of weeks ago about how we’re doing our virtual events and got thousands of views and questions afterwards. Go find people that are doing what you’re doing, but they’ve been doing it for a little bit longer and a little bit better. They’re more advanced. Get them to mentor you. Talk to them. You’ll be surprised that people will make time for this. I talk to CMOs and other marketers many times every week. It’s something I enjoy doing and it just feels good to help advance other people’s careers, especially in their early stages. So go find a few people you admire and get half an hour of their time once a quarter. You’ll learn a ton from it.

Louis: Amen to that. Udi, you’ve been a pleasure once again. Thank you very much for your time.

Udi Ledergor: Thank you. Louis had lots of fun.

Louis: SA. And that’s it for another episode of Everyone Hates Marketers dot com. Thank you so much for listening. I’m super, super grateful. I’d love for you to consider subscribing to my daily newsletter Monday to Friday called Stand the Fuck Out Daily. I send very short, hopefully interesting, surprising, shocking, entertaining content to help you Stand the Fuck Out. It’s at everyone hatesmarketers.com you can subscribe for free and obviously unsubscribe whenever you want. I’m just gonna read a couple of emails that I got recently as a reply. Juma said your content attacks the mind primarily, which is such a good thing because most of us are skilled at what we do, but we don’t have the courage to do it our way. Mark, who just subscribed couple days before, said, this is my first issue of your newsletter. Love it. Glad I subscribed. Brianna Said, I just realized this morning that my email Habit is now to 1. Came through the list 2. Select all unread industry email except your yours 3. Delete and don’t think twice. 4. Quickly scheme yours. Amy said, Also loving the new content is coming from you. It feels really lovely. Campbell Said, I like your writing a lot. It really resonates. There’s so much out there. It’s good to touch the authentic. And Chloe said, where is the I love this email button? Brilliant.

Udi Ledergor: I hope you subscribe.

Louis: You’ll be joining more than 4 14,000 subscribers at this stage, which is crazy. It’s the size of a small stadium. Anyway, thank you so much. See you on the other side.