(173) Gong's Executive Content & LinkedIn Thought Leadership Playbook w/ Udi Ledergor - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqlaUdpOgCU

Transcript: (00:00) So, first thing is is make sure I'm working for a company that creates a product that people really love using because I can't fix that. We think twice before we publish anything boring. We don't have to publish anything. That should be the aspiration of early stage marketing team. What can you create that's such a great story that people will organically want to follow, subscribe, read it, share it. (00:21) Most people's opinions are kind of middle of the road. They're like, "Yeah, they agree with most things that are going on." That's not going to get you a bunch of followers. Uh, the only way to get attention and cut through the noise is by being bold and different and having a sharp unique point of view. (00:39) All right, I'm here joined by Udi Laragore. UI is the chief evangelist and former CMO at Gong. Gong is an AI powered revenue intelligence platform used by some of the biggest and most innovative companies in the world. Companies like LinkedIn, Canva, Google, Dropbox. You guys have a ton of logos on the website. (00:56) You guys are doing about 3 million ARR. You're about 2,000 people according to what I got a few zeros but Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Uh where are you now? Like can you share a more the last number that we shared publicly was 300 million but that was at the beginning of this fiscal year. So you can imagine we're farther ahead than that. It's been a it's been a wonderful year. So way above 300 million ARR. (01:20) Let's just say that Udi joined Gong in 2016 as VP marketing and their first marketer, CMO in 2019, chief evangelist in 2023. He's also the author of the best-selling book, Courageous Marketing, The B2B Marketers Playbook for Career Success. There we go. And little fun fact, he has a bearded dragon as a pet. (01:43) That's what I found on your LinkedIn profile, among other things. Anything. Bearded dragon. There's a chameleon. There's a cat. We we have an entire zoo here at home. I love it. Anything else to like amend there or any fun fact you would like to add? You also like playing the piano. That's a great intro. We'll we'll get to the rest of it as we go through it. (02:01) Okay. Awesome. Cool. Before before we we did this, I asked you what's your most controversial marketing take and you said best practices are boring practices. Can you expand on that? Sure. I think in in every profession and especially in marketing, you know, there's there's many incentives not to fail. Uh we want to look successful. (02:27) We want our resume to be studded with successes and we don't want to get into trouble. And uh one of the things that that causes is that we tend to look at best practices. We see what other companies are doing. And when we have a task at hand, whether it's rebranding the company or running a campaign or running an event or creating content, we look at what's called best practices in our field and we try to use them to create our own new uh campaign or event, whatever it is we're working on. And and I think that's that's a problem and that results in a lot of mediocre work (02:58) because in fact what we call best practices is actually boring practices because by the time anything becomes a best practice in our field everyone's already doing it and so by definition it's going to result in ordinary results. If you think about it it's it's a little bit like Jad GPT and the other uh common LLMs that we all use. They're regurgitating the state-of-the-art. (03:22) They're regurgitating what they learned and rearranging the words slightly so it looks a little bit more original, but you're not going to get anything groundbreaking that's going to make you go, "Wow, this is the next, you know, crime and punishment or the next Dan Brown thriller." You're just not going to get that from Chad GPT. And uh us marketers are no better if we follow best practices. (03:42) And so my whole thesis that that led to my book, Courageous Marketing, is that we need to move away from those boring practices, which we like to call best practices, and develop a unique sharp point of view that's going to be different. Um, and at least for now, I can't see how AI is helping us do that. It's it's actually restricting us from getting there. (04:01) Um, and then I give dozens of examples throughout the book how we create this in the world of branding and event marketing and content marketing and category creation and all the wonderful things that not only at Gong my team did, but also dozens of CMOs that I talked to. um they were all a stroke of brilliance that that was created in a certain culture that encouraged creative thinking, risktaking, uh walking on the edge and and not being afraid to fail and doing so safely. So, I'll stop there because there's a lot to unpack. Do you have any favorite current pet theories (04:41) or or or ideas that you're munching on that that that are absolutely not best practice that you're debating or feel like there's a gap right now? Oh, there's lots of them. I mean, um, first, if I look around me, I see I see some great people and companies using a lot of the principles that I've used and that I've talked about. (05:08) Uh, one great example that that comes to mind is uh, Peter Walker at uh, Carta. He's creating amazing content. If you're not following already, you should. Uh, and that's just a prime example of creating highly valuable content that everyone who follows and reads enjoys, especially in their target audience of founders and executives who want to run their equity on their platform. (05:33) But the beautiful thing about it is that unlike bad product marketing, their excellent content marketing gives you a lot of value without requiring you to buy their product. And if that sounds familiar, it's the same thing that HubSpot did for many years, creating inbound content for marketers. (05:53) Everything from their website greater to their email signature templates to their out of office templates that Ryan Bonichi created during his time there. Um, and that's of course what Gong has been doing for the last nine years with Gong Labs content, telling salespeople and sales leaders what's working and not working in sales without asking you to buy our product to get value out of that content. (06:11) And so, um, I wish I could say this is already a best practice, but it's not because very few companies are still doing this. U, Lavender is another great example. Will and Will there are uh creating great content on what's working in emails these days, how to test your subject lines in in the modern technology landscape and all that sort of stuff. (06:34) But it's really uh just a few handful of companies that are creating amazing content like that. Um so that's a really good one. Um, if you're asking about things that uh I'm not seeing quite yet and uh I wish I could uh dabble with more, uh here's one that's a little bit out there, but uh a scratch that I haven't been able to itch yet has been uh incorporating B2B products in uh Netflix series and in uh blockbuster movies. Uh that's something I've been dreaming about. (07:05) Uh it's something we see consumer brands do really well. If you think about your favorite series, whenever they're in the whatever MI6 war room, you see either Apple computers or Dell computers or you see James Vaughn sipping off a Macallen whiskey. Um, all of these are of course product placements. (07:24) Uh, and the the Austin Martin cars that he drives are no coincidence that that's a big collaboration that they're doing with them. Um, I dream of of one day putting a B2B brand in in such a context. I know there's very few examples of that being done. I I haven't been doing it myself yet and I I wish I had the opportunity. Wasn't there recently some B2B software tech company that sponsored Formula 1? No, the Formula 1 movie, right? And they were criticized for spending a ton of money while being unprofitable or something like that. Yes, you're right, Finn. You're right. And I and I forget the name of the company, which maybe is is proof that (07:55) it's not a great idea, but but I know what you're talking about. I did read the story. I I I have also been in touch with uh Formula 1 uh with at least a couple of their teams, McLaren and Austin Martin. Um and I I could never um even remotely justify the ROI of of doing that sort of work. Um sometimes you've got to take a leap of faith. (08:15) So, right. What about Gong um Super Bowl ad? We did a couple of those in 2021 2022. Uh right, I'm glad I did. uh in 2021 uh it was very successful with clearly positive ROI. We we measured the pipeline created during Super Bowl week and we could attribute a lot of it to people talking on gone calls and saying we saw you on the Super Bowl so we reached out and asked for this demo and six months later we looked at the revenue generated from that pipeline. (08:45) So it was highly positive ROI. in 2022 that was not the case. And I I wrote about my lessons from that in in my book, Courageous Marketing. Um the short of it was that we didn't have the same element of surprise the second time around that we did the first time. Um because people were kind of expecting it. (09:03) Uh I also tripled the budget uh assuming that I could get even more bang out of the buck with a bigger budget, but that proved not to be true. Um, and I think the the final lesson worth mentioning here is that I uh I forgot a great piece of advice that I got and implemented in the first commercial but did not do it in the second one which is show the damn product. (09:29) So in the first commercial I actually showed the product in a few seconds even during a 30 secondond Super Bowl commercial so people understood what it did and for which audience. And in 2022, uh, it was a more classical kind of consumer style Super Bowl commercial with the running gag and noises and large casts and acrobats and all that fun stuff. So, it was it was lighthearted and fun, but for people who don't know what the product does and who it's for, it did not educate them on that. (09:52) And some brands can get away with doing that. If you're a Carlber or a Farmers Insurance, you don't need to explain what your product does to the Super Bowl audience. But if you're a B2B startup, uh, which like all of us, we kind of cater to a certain market niche, you can't get away without explaining what the product does and just rely on the entertainment value to drive traffic and business. And and I I didn't take that into account in 2022. (10:16) So after that one, uh, especially with the kind of collapse of the economy that year, we decided to, uh, put the Super Bowl commercials on freeze. On the Peter Walker thing, I think people should check him out. And I had him on the on the podcast, too. his his role is called head of insights and I think what's interesting about him is that it's almost like so there's I see at least with this kind of thought leadership executive communications LinkedIn personal branding this whole world there's two main approaches which is either you'll have people at the company (10:47) who are the CMO or or the CEO create content kind of as a side part of their main job right their main job is being an AE Brian Lana or someone else and then they create some content on the side or they hire external influencers who have an audience and then they pay them deals and and Peter Walker's almost like they're breeding an influencer inside of the company whose main job is to be an influencer. (11:16) We took a similar approach. You know, in the first three years uh that I was running marketing at Gong, I had Chris Orlo on my team that I think a lot of your audience members would know. Uh he's still very active on LinkedIn. He's running his own business now. Yep. And uh he he was that classic internal influencer. (11:34) When when he joined Gong, he he was not active on LinkedIn. He had close to zero followers, but he created some amazing content that promoted him and Gong in the best way possible and grew uh and and kind of exploded his followership. And when he moved to the dark side, when I say that uh half- jokingly, I mean he took on managing a sales team at Gong. (11:54) Uh I took another salesperson uh one of our mid-market AES Devin Reid and gave him his first marketing job. So again Devin Reid was uh a wonderful persona but very little followers on LinkedIn when he started that role but he took on and continued Chris Orlo's work. (12:15) Chris was an expert of the written word and Devon has more of a screen personality so he started creating a lot of video content which we didn't really have a lot of. Uh, I know it's hard to believe, but that that was the situation back then. And and Devon expanded our sort of mostly written blog channels and social channels to multi- channelannel video. (12:33) And he started the podcast with uh with Sheena Badani and and uh continued that work of being sort of an internal influencer and and persona that allowed us to continue growing both his followership and Gongs. And uh just recently uh we we crossed 300,000 followers on Gong's LinkedIn channel alone. Uh which is of course more than all these individual influencers combined. (12:56) And and I think that's an important reminder that you need to balance between growing followership on the people profiles because people like following people, but do so in a very calculated way that you're also driving traffic and followers to the main corporate profile because all these wonderful people, they have a stint at Gong and and all these people we mentioned had a very respectable stint. (13:15) You know, OralB was at Gong for about five years, three of them on the marketing team. uh Devon was had at gong for about five years, three of them on the marketing team and then they moved on and fortunately they had worked very smartly to make sure that uh not only they gained followers but the Gong corporate profiles gained those followers and now we continue to enjoy that uh traffic and readership that we continue to grow. (13:41) I I was going to ask you about about exactly that because I think Chris and Devon are amazing examples where more and more companies are realizing that they need to be leveraging the people at that company because that content is performing better, it's resonating more, it's more personable, all those things. But then you pour budget and resources into building someone's personal brand, not your company following, your company newsletter, your company blog traffic, and they might leave. (14:06) And in some cases, you might end up being happy about the win-win because they stay at least for 5 years and yes, then they move on with the brand that you help build through your investment. But do you think do do companies need to approach contracts differently? Now, how do No, no, I don't think so. I I think I think modern leaders whether it's the CEO or the CMO they they need to understand how social media operates and they need to have clear boundaries of what is company property and what is not company property. To be clear um your (14:39) personal LinkedIn profile is your personal LinkedIn profile. Uh if you go and work for me or someone else tomorrow, we don't suddenly own your LinkedIn profile. It is your LinkedIn profile. It always will be. Um, I I never understood companies that put unreasonable restrictions on how employees can use their LinkedIn profiles or or ask to take control of the LinkedIn profile to post on their behalf. That that's a no no in my book. Uh, we would never ask that. (15:04) Uh, we have a very short social media policy at Gong that like every company our size we had to put in place to make sure that employees. We have like like you said over 1500 employees now. uh so we can't you know guide every single employee uh on what they can and cannot do. So we have a very short social media policy. (15:24) I think it's no longer than three pages long and there's not many words in there and it basically tells them to there's nothing secret there. It tells them um you know don't ever disparage your uh competitors or our competitors. Uh don't get into heated political uh debates in any way that would make it sound like you're representing the company. (15:42) U but other than that like this is your profile. do whatever the heck you want. Now, alongside that, we do encourage people to create their own content and we encourage them to have their own take on gong content. And so, uh I'm sure many of you have seen uh our LinkedIn takeovers when we produce a piece of content and then we have hundreds of gangsters post the content with their take on it. (16:08) So Brian Lammana's take might be different from my take and might be different from JC Pard or Kyle Willis's take u because we we encourage that these are content creators that are doing a great job and some days they post content about their side gigs they're all creating and selling content and whether it's fitness programs or sales coaching and that's great as long as you know they do it on their own time with their own resources and sometimes even on the same day you'll see them posting their take of how Gong helped them sell better or how Gong um brought them into a team that they're growing (16:39) with or how Gong gave them coaching opportunities. Whatever it is, uh we make it easy. We make it easy and we encourage them and to write their own take. We don't ask to review it before they post it. Again, this is their profile. They can do whatever the heck they want. (16:56) Um and you know what? I think in the nine years that I've been at Gong, there've been less than a handful of incidents of someone abusing their social profile or using it in a way that uh was completely uh incompatible with what we wanted at Gong. And it was like never about creativity. was sometimes about people overstepping and maybe uh sharing with excitement their team achievements in a way that uh we would not want them to do uh in terms of uh we're starting to act like a public company and we want to uh make sure that uh we don't post early results in in public spaces before we've had a chance to review them and post them formally by (17:29) the company. So it's that sort of thing that just governance that that is in an inevitable part of a growing company. Do you believe compensation needs to be rethought for some of these corporate influencers? Like let's just take um uh Peter Walker again as an example and I'll just drop his LinkedIn here in case so people have context. (17:48) So obviously if he leaves the company you you lo lose the talent. That's always the case. But you'll also lose the audience that he he built which is the asset. And I think about it almost it's like if as if you had a software developer and when they leave, not only do you lose that talented developer, but they actually take the code that they wrote in the 5 years that they worked. They can't take the code. No, they they can't take the code with them. That's that's part of the deal. (18:13) But he takes the followers the the 130,000 LinkedIn followers that Peter Walker now built. He takes that with him. Obviously, he he he has a good number of followers, about 148,000, but you know how many Carter has? Carter has 275. (18:34) Carter has 275. So, Carter has a lot more followers, 50% more followers, um more than 50% more followers than uh than Peter Walker. And it's the same situation that we had in Gong. Uh Chris Orlo and Devin Reed, they each have a really good number of followers. I can tell you uh both of them combined are fewer followers than Gong who has way more than 300,000 followers. (18:52) So Peter Walker is doing a great job just like Chris Orlob and Devon Reed did by growing their own followers and at the same time there's a huge overlap between the people who follow them and the people who follow the companies that they work for as it should be as it should be. Fair enough. (19:13) Now you you mentioned you listed a couple of the people who who are right now active at at at Gong and and posting on LinkedIn and there's so many of them. What have you learned around besides having a let's say loose policy around what you're allowed to post, what else have you learned around how to enable people, how to empower people, how to encourage people, how to get more of that? Yeah. (19:32) Um, so, so there's a few things I'll mention there, there's a few, uh, kind of concentric circles that we think about when we talk about content creation and distribution at Gong. So obviously there's a small team within the marketing team that creates a lot of the official Gong content and and controls our official distribution channel. (19:49) Around that there's a larger circle called the Gong Content Council. And the Gong Content Council has a couple of dozen people in it. Let's see if I can even find the exact number for you. So the Gong Content Council, I'm looking it up right now in our in our Slack channel. It has 21 people in it right now. And I'm I'm fortunate to be one of them. (20:12) So there's there's 20 people plus me and uh we get together at least once a quarter. Um we try to do that in person when we can. So uh we build it around our big company events and other uh events where people can fly in. Uh we get together and we talk about the themes of the content coming up in the quarter. (20:31) We talk about lessons that each of us has uh seen and can share about what's working for them right now, what's not working with them right now. And we also hear from the Gong social team what's working. So we we literally hear about changes like hey video is doing really strongly right now or if you're doing a carousel you should do this because this we found works better than that and uh don't do a static image right now unless you're doing this like we get very tactical with what's working and not working. We align on the themes that Gong is pushing to the market so we can all start thinking about what's our (20:57) angle that we can write about this content. Um and we have a pretty active Slack channel. So when one of us posts something um that is relevant for the others to to use as inspiration or simply engage with we can do that within the company boundaries. (21:16) Now this is very different from what uh people are calling engagement pods that are you know random people that don't work for the same company should not be promoting the same type of content and they're just kind of doing tit fortat and uh yeah I'll promote your content even though my audience has no use for it whatsoever just so you'll promote mine one day. No. here. (21:34) We're all working as a team because we all work for Gong and we all want to promote uh how Gong is helping companies revolutionize their revenue teams with AI. So, um we're pro I mean sometimes I'll promote Brian Lammana's course or he might promote something about my book, but that's not the type of content that we would share in the content council for others to promote. It's going to be gong focused content. So, that's the second concentr circle. (21:53) And then the third one is the employees and and this is a practice that we built over the years and it's it's actually quite simple. So first u when I was CMO for many years I did a monthly onboarding sessions and I explained to the new hires many of them salespeople SDRs and CSMS who are responsible for bringing revenue. I explained how the LinkedIn algorithm works and how they can help us help them. (22:19) And so here's a simple very short explanation. And I said, "Look, when the LinkedIn feed algorithm sees that a certain article is getting a lot of traffic during, say, its first hour, it tells LinkedIn this is a great article that it should make more visible to more people to keep them on the LinkedIn feed so they don't go to Instagram or Tik Tok. (22:41) " Now, in practical terms, when Gong publishes an article on LinkedIn, it's usually for salespeople and sales leaders. If all of our salespeople engage and share and comment on it, LinkedIn goes, "Oh, I see this is interesting to salespeople. I'll show it to more salespeople." When they do that, we have our mechanisms of scraping those people in legal ethical ways. LinkedIn, don't get it. Don't get your hands in place. (23:06) Um, we can bring those salespeople back as qualified sales opportunities, which is what you all want, right? So sales people, if you like sales opportunities, when you see the content team asking you to like, share, or comment a piece of content on LinkedIn, please do that. That will help us bring more of those sales leaders back to you as qualified sales opportunities. (23:24) So by just explaining what's in it for them and making it super easy, like with a single click, we let them share a piece of content. And for those who are more creative and do want to write their own take, we we tell them how to do that very easily by leaving a piece of like share how Gong helped you close a deal and then share this piece and then if you want to fill that in, you fill it in. If you don't, just share the the generic content post and that'll be great as well. (23:48) And so that's the next uh kind of concentric circle of content influence. And then there's an even broader one which is our customers and other audience members. So we have several activations a year where we say we do a week that called gong love week and approaching that week we talk to different customers and we make it a fun competition asking them to share how gong has helped them in their work and we encourage them to post it all during the same week and we also give some prizes or gift cards or whatever it is and so we get a lot of (24:19) very authentic customer stories. Uh we also do an annual uh contest called the golden gong the golden gong award where uh customers share their creative uses of gong to create more revenue. So again we we post all those during the same week and there's a whole nominations and then an award recognition process. (24:40) So there's a lot of opportunities to involve a broader audience that's sharing gong love and gong related content. So that's kind of how we think of it. Gong uh content team, Gong Content Council, all of our Gongsters and Gong customers. That's kind of the hierarchy of all the people who can help us uh create and distribute Gong content. I have a couple follow-up questions. (25:01) I think it sounds like it's a it's a mix of making lowering the barrier that people are you're you're okay with people posting more or less what they want within some boundaries. There's encouragement. Obviously, you guys are leading from the front. people see you and other people doing it. Um, you give them insights of like just how the algorithm works, what what performs on LinkedIn, what doesn't perform on LinkedIn. (25:23) You provide them resources like, hey, here's a research that we did. You can repost that. Um, and then celebration is a big thing. So, you celebrate, there's like contests, there's awards, there is um there is appreciation for the people who do it on the on the Gong Content Council. I assume those 20 people are not just marketing people. There's sales reps in there, executives. It's a mix across. Most of them are not marketing people. (25:48) Um yeah, there's there's a couple of marketers on the team, but the rest of them are salespeople, CSMs, just people who uh we know want to be involved. um they have a a talent for creating content and we want to bring them under that umbrella to say, "Hey, um keep doing your thing, but we want to also use your voice to spread some of this gong content. (26:10) " And they're happy to do so because as any content creator knows, you're always looking for new content, especially if you want to post every day. Uh some mornings you just can't come up with a great idea. So being part of the Gong Content Council gives you this constant feed of ideas. Uh you don't have to share them all, but um if some days you need some inspiration, hey, we just published a great customer story about how Google is using Gong to do so and so, go ahead and publish that. Um or HubSpot just published a great (26:35) case study of how they're working with Gong. Go yeah, publish your take on that. And so those those 20 people that were selected by them raising their hand and saying, I want to do this, plus they've already done it to some extent that they you can see there have some talent for it. Exactly. (26:53) It's it's mostly people that the marketing team observed that they're already creating or sharing uh great content and we tapped them and asked them, hey, you want to join this content council thing. I don't think anyone ever said no when they were asked to join and uh and others are are welcome to join as long as they're, you know, creating and sharing content. I mean, that also sounds dope. (27:11) I want to be part of some It is fun listening to these lessons. Yeah. you know, the these people who are getting so much traction, they they really understand all the latest changes in the algorithm and and what's working and not working. And I know that if if I'm having a problem on LinkedIn, like I'll I'll tap one of these people and ask them how they solved the problem and they're likely to have a solution for me. (27:34) Now, now Gong has been quite active and and and visible on LinkedIn for a long time. Besides just doing more of it and getting better at it, do you would you say your your LinkedIn strategy as the company matured has fundamentally changed in any in any ways? It it has. It has. Um, I'd say the the highlevel premise has not, which has been we want to share valuable content that people want to consume, that they look forward to reading, and that's what's going to cause them to tell their friends to subscribe to our social channels and subscribe to our emails and follow us. That has not changed. Um, we we think twice before we publish anything boring. We don't have to (28:15) publish anything. We publish things that we think people are going to find valuable the vast majority of the time. And if we do that 90% of the time, we believe that earns us the right to use the other 10% to publish something more salesy like check out this new product feature or join our webinar or sign up for this event. (28:33) But we're always thinking through the lens of what would our audience find useful. And that's why you still see some fun memes and jokes and uh this edutainment combo of we want to educate you in an entertaining, fun, light-hearted sort of way. So that has not changed. (28:52) I think one thing that has evolved over the years is that we started by creating this groundswell audience of telling salespeople what we found work and doesn't work for their sales calls for their sales emails. You know, you all remember nuggets like uh sales people who swear on their calls have a 8% higher win rate and this is the open a cold call with how have you been versus how are you? That's going to get you longer time with the prospect. (29:17) So we still do some of that, but if that used to be the majority of that content, I think now it's the minority of the content. And we've evolved to more executive level content. So we now publish a quarterly state of revenue um report, which Dan Moresy on the content team, a former forester analyst that we hired to create that type of content on our team. (29:40) Um he's putting out this content which gets a lot of engagement from executives and enterprise companies which have evolved into becoming part of our audience. So that the marketing voice and content had to evolve with our business goals to make sure that we're engaging with the right audience. So that is just a function of you guys going up market and trying to reach CRO's at large enterprises rather than SDRs at tech startups. (29:59) Correct. Yes. Yes. You see very little content. I think forever you've seen very little content coming from Gong that was directed at SDRs because we love them and we we we love that they use our product but they have zero buying power and so we we make sure that we create useful content for the users of the product and also very thoughtful content for the buyers of the product economic decision makers. (30:23) What I was curious about if you were today in 2025 CMO at a mid-stage early stage startup doing 5 million in revenue maybe it's one of these cool AI companies doing something in the I don't know outbound space signalbased all those I mean there's a ton of them popping up on LinkedIn every single day how would how would you think about building brand today you were you're now in the seat they're doing 5 million in revenue some hot AI some signal based stuff. (30:56) What do you do? Uh, so first thing is is make sure I'm working for a company that creates a product that people really love using because I can't fix that. Product market fit is I think the biggest reason why marketing efforts fail, but it's usually not something that marketing can fix. (31:15) There are marketers that are very f passionate about product and they want to be that channel between uh R&D and customers back and forth. Um, sometimes it's harder to do depending on the culture and the power play within the company, but I'd make sure that I'm working for a company that that has the elements of strong product market fit because otherwise I can't scale that. (31:33) Uh, if you have a bad product, you know, I can fill the bucket once or twice with people who are willing to try it, but if they're all going to churn because the product doesn't provide value, I can't fix that. Um, so that's number one. After I checked and verified that, um I think the the two biggest things would be a really strong content marketing to create an audience even when they're not in the buying zone yet. (32:00) Um it goes back to the 955 rule that I know we all talk about a lot. So 95% of the audience are probably not in buying zone right now. they can still be engaged and nurtured with great content that will make them want to subscribe to your emails and follow your social channels so that you can insert as I said about 10 to 20% of product related content which reminds them what you're there for and if they're in the buying zone in six or 12 or 18 months they get an opportunity to raise their hand. (32:29) So that content creates memory links between your brand and being useful and what they can use you for so that when they're ready, you're the first brand that they think of and they don't go somewhere else. And and you don't achieve that by only spreading sales content because then anyone who's not in the buying zone just unsubscribes and unfollows you and then you don't create those memory links and they won't think of you when they need you. (32:51) So that would be probably the the biggest marketing effort that I would start with. The other is taking every customer success story that I have and amplifying the heck out of it so that uh prospects can see their peers uh companies in the same industries, geographies, size, and stage and say, "Oh, they're getting all this value from this vendor. Maybe I should try them out as well." Um, so those would be the first things that that I would do. (33:15) And so both sound like organic content. There's no like lots of performance marketing here or Google ads or 100%. Uh I don't know how to win in early stages with performant marketing. It's too expensive. Um now it's it there is a lot of nuance there. So I I know people want a simple takeaway. Sometimes I can provide it. (33:35) Other times it's harder. Um I can say that at Gong paid advertising paid a very played a very negligible role in our early success. Um I had such a small budget that I could not make a dent in the marketplace. LinkedIn ads are expensive. Google ads are expensive and uh when we were creating this new category early one was called conversation intelligence then evolved to revenue intelligence. (33:59) Now it's revenue and AI and that's evolving now as well. Um I I couldn't tell that whole story of why there's this whole problem area that you're not thinking about and within that area we're the best solution and here's why and here's how how we differentiate. I can't do that in a simple LinkedIn ad while you're scrolling your feed. It would just be too expensive. (34:17) And so, uh, we had to get creative and on a shoestring budget, I have never found a better way than creating organic content and distributing in organic channels like organic social, organic email lists, getting on stages and talking about it, not because you sponsored the conference, but because they asked you to come speak because you're providing so much value to the attendees. (34:41) Those were the ways that we spread our content in the early years with very very little budget. And some of that content was so good that it earned us even more reach. Uh when we published the story about salespeople swearing on sales calls, it was published on websites like fastcomp.com. Radio stations called me and brought me on air to interview me about it. (34:59) I couldn't ever afford that reach. But because we created such good content, we got we earned that reach. And that that should be the aspiration of early stage marketing team. What can you create that's such a great story that people will organically want to follow, subscribe, read it, share it, and even media outlets will want to carry that, run with that story. (35:23) How would you decide for that organic content whether you create that through the company or whether you try to take your founder and build their brand on social? How would you evaluate how to So, so here's kind of in my experience, I found that there's broadly three buckets that I've arranged mentally in a hierarchy of what creates amazing content. (35:45) And uh I I break down the the like full structure for those who haven't read the book yet in courageous marketing. There's a whole chapter on content marketing. It's titled would you pay for your own content? And and I challenge my readers with that question because we all pay for content on YouTube Premium or Spotify or New York Times or Netflix. We pay for content. (36:05) Uh so we should hold ourselves to that bar of high content and and I prove how that's possible even in a B2B software company to create content that you actually get signals. People are willing to pay for it because it's that good. Um so I I break it down into like what are the elements of that content. (36:22) But to answer your question kind of succinctly, I'd say I found there's three hierarchies of content that you can create. The first one is what Peter Walker and Carter are doing. It's what Gong Labs is doing and what other companies are doing. And that is using exclusive insights that you could not get elsewhere. And it's usually done by uh harvesting internal data. (36:47) So Carta is harvesting all these cap tables of the thousands of companies that are running their equity on Carta. Gong is harvesting data from two billion customer calls and emails that we have in our system. Uh HubSpot can tell you what the industry standard open rate for an email is because they have billions of emails of customers running HubSpot. So you get the idea. (37:07) Many many companies have this type of unique data. I would carefully say I think most companies have this if they just think about it correctly like something that they may not have thought is so interesting in their data if you ask the right questions and tell the right story about it you can use a lot of these unique insights and and nobody can easily copy that if they don't have the quantity and the quality of that data. (37:30) So I put that at at the highest hierarchy of what creates amazing content. The second hierarchy, if you don't have that content, okay, some companies just don't if you don't have that sort of exclusive insights, you as a marketing team can create it. Uh, for example, by running a survey, so if you want to find out like what percent of sales teams are running AI initiatives, let's survey 300 of them and put that out. Uh, Pavilion does a really good job. I think they use partners to do this every quarter. (37:55) They publish a bunch of interesting surveys about the state of the revenue industry, about the state of compensation, about like lots of different things like this which are really interesting. And it's not very difficult to run a survey. There's software. You can do this online. You can buy a remote uh panel. You can do focus groups. (38:13) You can do so many ways of creating primary data in the shape of a survey or a focus group and then publish the findings from that. So I would put that as the second hierarchy. Why is it the second? because arguably any company in your space could do that just like you organize a survey someone else could but if you do it first or better or bigger then you will enjoy uh the fruits of that and I've done that many times in the past and today at going we do a combo of that and the first one that I describe of uh exclusive insights and then finally the third bucket way at the bottom is your (38:43) opinion thought leadership the problem with that is that everyone has an opinion on everything and without data I'm just another guy with an opinion and I think Some people can pull this off well. Um, I'd say Sam Jacobs from Pavilion has built a great followership with his opinion. (39:01) A lot of them are not based on data, which is fine. He has strong opinions. He has good experience and he's writing lots of opinions. Um, there there are other folks doing this uh well, there's uh Mark Kosaglo from Toshibbo. He publishes a lot of opinions. (39:19) Some of them are related to real work experience and sometimes a little bit of data, but mostly they're his opinions. And he writes beautifully. has a lot of followers who engage with that content. So, there's ways of doing that. I think for most people, um, that's not going to work. Most people, they don't have either, uh, provocative enough opinion to warrant a real discussion and engagement with their readers because most people's opinions are kind of middle of the road. They're like, "Yeah, they agree with most things that are going on." That's not going to get you a bunch of followers. to to use (39:45) your opinion as a lead magnet or as as a engagement magnet, you have to be on the edge. You have to be controversial. You have to be willing to piss off some people a lot of the time. You have to be polarizing because if you don't do that, just why would anyone engage with your content just to say, "Yeah, of course we all agree with that." No, that's not interesting. (40:08) If it becomes very fluffy content unless you're on the edge and willing to be controversial and polarizing. So, that's kind of in my head how it organized the three types of content you can create. I'm very open to uh learning about other types or having my opinion changed. I it reminded me that there's a video that John Gray, the the president and COO of Blackstone, who's quite active on LinkedIn, he posts these running videos. (40:32) Uh he he just he he talked about how early on in his consulting career, one of his partners took him away and he's like, "Look, there's three layers and you need to work your way up. There's the the world of facts and stats. Then there's analysis and synthesis of those facts. And then there's opinion. (40:51) And when you start out, you need to live in the world of opinions as an associate and intern. And only later on when you're a partner, then then people will care about your opinion. Um so I don't know, make me would you not? Yeah. I mean, you know, if you're an Elon Musk, whether you love him or hate him, doesn't matter for the sake of this argument. (41:08) He has such strong opinions that it's very difficult to stay indifferent to them. There's these people that just have such big personalities and their brain thinks so differently from most of us that most of us will have an opinion and it's like watching a train wreck. Like we want to watch it whether we like the result or not because it's interesting and different and polarizing. (41:25) But most of us are not Elon Musk. We we don't have such far out opinions or ideas or aspirations. And so if if the best you're doing is publishing your kind of mediocre opinions on LinkedIn, I wouldn't expect that to blow up and become something huge unless you have some data to base it on real life experience, results you can show, how it's helped other people, etc. (41:50) Do you believe that founders I mean founders need to at least have some opinion on their market that's differentiated between because otherwise why start a company? Um, if they if they don't have an an interesting opinion on that, then there's probably a bigger problem at the company. And even if most people don't agree with that opinion, isn't it your job anyway to kind of over time convince the market that your opinion on this thing of why you started this company is the right opinion? 100%. 100%. (42:20) I mean again coming back to the gong example for the last nine years we've been spreading the word that revenue should not be run on gut feelings and hunches it should be run on reality it should be run using AI to understand what's working and not working and help your reps and managers run revenue efficiently predictably um getting a forecast that is actually grounded with facts and data and deal warning and not what the rep feels is going to close. (42:52) And when we started that 9 years ago, we had a lot of negativity coming at us saying, "No, we've been doing this for 20 years. We we we know what's going to close and not going to close. We we don't need all this call recording and fancy AI stuff." And today, if you're still saying that, you're you kind of belong in a museum. I think that's the consensus, right? Uh, we're seeing sales team from very traditional industries come to Gong to use our AI because they realize that trusting a rep's gut feeling on what's going to close is not scalable when you have 20,000 sellers. So, we're seeing companies from even the most traditional industries come and adopt Gong's a (43:25) revenue AI now. But, but that took a decade to get there with the world. Yeah, makes sense. I am trying to find a post right now by your CEO. Must be somewhere here. I have a feeling I know which one it is. I had it earlier and then my computer There we go. I found it. Gonna get me into trouble, aren't you? Is it Was that the Did you guess the correct one? I did guess the correct post. (43:48) All right. Tell me how this post like passes whatever all the internal thing. I mean, you must have had a conversation about this post, right? So, let's just set the stage. There was the announcement of the Clari and Salesoft merger agreement that that a lot of people saw on LinkedIn. (44:07) They're obviously competitors of yours and your CEO reshared this announcement and said powerhouse more like group therapy will send snacks. So like one of the things that I feel I associate with Gong is this kind of spiciness and you clearly managed to to keep this identity even as you're now a big company selling to serious enterprises. (44:33) So talk through this mindset and how this conversation went about this post. Um so so to be clear first I I'm not Amit's spokesperson and right you have to ask him directly about his thoughts and and motivations for the post. I will say that on the same day that the merger was announced and Amit published this, I published a longer post which which did not do as well as Amit's, I got about half the engagement that he got on on his post and I explained why I I I just felt that that calling uh this merger a powerhouse was being disingenuous and I explained uh what's really happening. It's it's really financial engineering of the PE firm, which is fine. Um, but I wanted to (45:11) make sure that uh everyone has the transparency and honesty that I believe in. Um, so yeah, you you could probably find must have been a month agoish. I know. I know. There's like four weeks. I think it was just a plain text post. Uh, yeah, I remember that post. Sorry. I I do post a lot as you can see. So, uh, yeah, this one, right? Yeah. Um, yes, that that would be the post. (45:36) So you can see it it got it got about half or less than thank you for that like what amid got on his. So clearly you understand where the audience u preferences right. Amit doesn't have that many more followers than me but his short snarky post got a lot of engagement almost a thousand likes and and mine got a third of that. You can see here. Yeah. Um because people don't like a lot of words. (45:59) They like very simple snarky messages. Well your yours is also more balanced thoughtful. his is just like right and you know he's got his style, I've got my style. Um, look, the the idea is really this is one of those rare occasions where we address our competition, which is something very rare that we don't often do. Uh, we like to obsess over our customers and let our competitors obsess about us. That's usually how it works. (46:22) This was a special day, of course, when they uh uh two companies in our space announced a merger and they they build a narrative around it that we just felt was Yeah. so far-fetched that we had to say something and so Amit commented with his style and I commented with mine. Uh I I I wanted to make it uh well understood what my intention was and u but I think where what I'm trying to get at is like a lot of companies probably have founders and CEOs who are who have strong opinions and they might read this announcement and that's what they think, (46:54) right? But then there's comms and then there's PR and then there's the legal team and they say no no no let's just let's just say something nice or let's not ruffle some feathers, right? So like talk to me about the mindset of like how do you find the courage? Why is it worth having that courage because you guys have that as an identity to me? Yeah. (47:18) Yeah. So, so again, uh there's an entire chapter in in the book uh that I call building a courageous team, which I describe mostly in the context of building a courageous marketing team, but you could absolutely apply those lessons onto a a broader team and and we do it. Gong and why is it? Let's talk about why it's important then how you do it. (47:36) So, why it's important? Um, look, we we started this conversation uh with you quoting me on uh why best practices are the most dangerous thing to do because they're they're in reality boring practices that are going to lead to ordinary results. And that's true in everything in in marketing, in product development, in comms. (47:54) Uh the only way to get attention and cut through the noise is by being bold and different and having a sharp unique point of view. And so we do that in our content marketing. We do that in our product. We do that in our category. We do that in our visual identity. We do that in the language that the CEO uses when he responds to current events. Um that is the only way to get attention and stand out. (48:13) The companies who are just being nice and not ruffling feathers uh at all, they're they're not getting a lot of attention. You just can't. Um so that's why it's important, right? You everyone looks at these outliers. (48:30) Again, going back to like, forget our space, but the like Elon Musks of the world, and they're dying for that sort of attention, whether it's good or bad, set that aside. It can be your style or not, but anyone would love the number of followers that Elon Musk has on X, right? Um, you don't get that by just posting agreeable content that's nice and doesn't ruffle any feather. You don't get to that ever. (48:48) Um, and so that's why it's important. Now, once we talked about why it's important, let's talk about how we create that culture in a company or in a team. And uh when I interviewed uh about half a dozen of my team members uh over the years uh when I was writing that chapter in the book, I interviewed Chris Orlo and Devon Reed and Sheena Badani and Russell Banzon and Vince Chan, all these great people and Jonathan Costad uh my loyal beta reader of the book who read some very ugly drafts of it. Um, all these people I (49:16) asked them like what made you feel that you can create your best work and take all these risks and be edgy in what you posted and what you wrote and what you suggested and all of them said the same thing. And all of them said that they felt it was it was safe for them to fail. (49:36) They weren't expected to succeed in every single thing that they do. and they were actually expected to push things to the edge and to take risks and walk that fine line and when I heard all these things at the same time I was reading Adam Grant's book think again which is a great book and in that book there's a chapter quite at the beginning of the book where he covers it's actually in the in the final third of the book where he talks about successful teams and he quotes research on teams at NASA and other highly successful organizations and the model that they use uh is a combination of psy psychological safety and process (50:09) accountability. I know these are a lot of like big words, so I'll explain very quickly. Um the psychological safety part is the more interesting part to what you're asking about, Finn, which is teams who felt that they can fail safely. They had psychological safety. (50:26) They weren't on edge feeling that if they hit that send button or if they hit that post button, they could be fired for it. When they didn't feel that, when they felt that they could do these things, they created more creative work. that got more attention and benefited their organization and and that is in a nutshell what happens on Gong marketing team and what happens in Gong in general that's why our product is light years ahead of the competition that's why our brand is light years ahead of the competition it's the same starting point uh many of our competitors raised similar amounts of money they were (50:56) founded literally in the same year a couple of months away from us we were not the first company in the space but I think we have the boldest mentality of that psychological safety and Just to complete that answer, I'll quickly um explain that other side of what Adam Grant calls process accountability, which basically means we're not going to go crazy in every direction because that would be too dispersed and would not necessarily serve our business goals. (51:21) So process accountability, think of it as your north star of here are the business goals that we're trying to achieve. So when we come up with these creative edgy ideas, we have a thesis or a hypothesis of if this succeeds, how will this help us achieve our business goals? In marketing, how will this help grow our brand awareness? How will this help grow our pipeline? If it's in product, how will this increase our user NPS? How will this increase our retention? So with that in mind, that is the process accountability side, so we don't go (51:52) completely crazy in all directions. Combine that with psychological safety where people feel it's safe to fail. That's how you build a winning team that take risks, that don't afraid to be edgy, that don't afraid to be controversial and polarizing and put out stuff that others are just not courageous enough to do. (52:11) Why did you write a book? I wrote a book because for many years I've been mentoring hundreds of marketers and entrepreneurs. Uh, I work with a bunch of VCs and private equity firms and I come to their accelerators and launchpads and and all these events and I've been doing wonderful podcast like yours Finn. I think it's my second time maybe third. (52:30) Second and I hear that my experiences bring a lot of value to the listeners and I was looking for a way to scale that. Uh, I only have 24 hours a day just like you. I only have 24 hours a day. It's a big limitation. looking of ways of of relieving myself of it, but I couldn't find one. (52:51) Um, and so, uh, in my search for scale, for how can I inspire more marketers to take the boring out of B2B, uh, when I finally transitioned from my CMO role two and a half years ago into my chief evangelist role, I figured this was finally a time where I had some more control over my time and I could sit down and write a book. (53:09) And I spent 18 months taking these ideas and putting them into a pretty well polished book, I think. And and the dream has come true because the book has been selling thousands of copies. It became a bestseller in about a dozen categories. And it's been doing really really well. (53:28) And it's reaching more people than I could ever reach with any one podcast or one accelerator or one conference. So that that is the reason uh very very humble uh reason that I wrote the book. Uh you know, I'm not selling a course behind it. I don't have a product. It's not a lead magnet for anything. I just want to inspire as many marketers as I can. You're leaving money on the table. (53:48) I just uh put the I I put the link to the book in the in the chat just now if anyone wants to check it out. Uh last question and then I'll I'll finally let you go. Now, I think often when you write a book, there's like things that you personally like the most, your favorite chapter, your favorite thing, and you're going to be like, "People will love this. (54:06) " And then sometimes the resonance that you get is not exactly that. Have you heard like is there a recurring theme of like particular anecdotes or stories that people come back to for you and said they loved that or that resonated the most? Does any one or two stand out that somehow resonated the most? Yes. (54:27) Um so there there's 12 chapters in the book and um the first twothirds of them I think cover things that people expected to hear from me. How we built the revenue intelligence category, how we built the Gonglabs content. Um, I think from that part, the one that's resonated most with people is the chapter called Punch Above Your Weight, where I talk about brand campaigns that make your company appear to be two years ahead of where you really are. (54:51) And that chapter has become a a very uh sought-after talk that I've been giving at conferences uh almost every week now. So, I've been traveling the world. I'm very lucky uh to be called to all these conferences and talk about uh how to punch above your weight. And I'm doing this outside of tech. I'm doing it for the food industry and insurance industry and all these places where they they want to look bigger and more creative than their competitors and where they are. (55:14) So that chapter resonated really really well because I I think I came up with a very handy framework that you'll have to go read the book if you haven't yet uh to find it out or attend one of my talks that that anyone can follow. And you know I was at uh HubSpot's inbound event two weeks ago in San Francisco. (55:32) People came up to the booth and opened their phone and showed me billboard campaigns that they had done at Times Square and they said we did this after reading your chapter punch above your weight in your book Courageous Marketing and we took that inspiration and we ran this campaign. It's been a huge success. So we wanted to just come and say thank you for inspiring us and that was exactly what I was dreaming of when I wrote the book that people would take the inspiration go try it out on their own campaigns and come back with that. And then the second thing uh from the last third of the book, that's where I get into the kind (55:56) of the human side of marketing. How to advance your own career, how to pick the right company, how to work with your CEO, how to align with sales, and how to build a courageous team. I loved working on that because these are topics that I didn't really talk about in podcast and talks before writing the book, but I felt that for completeness, I should write them and do the research. (56:18) And I would say in that part, my absolute favorite is is the chapter on building a courageous team because I got to hear all these experiences from all the wonderful team members that I work with and combine them into a framework that I think is really really powerful. Uh because so many marketers, marketing leaders that I talk to, they want to build a bold team to take risks and they just don't know where to start. And I think that chapter in the book gives them a really good starting point. Unfortunately, we're at time. (56:42) Gera marketing tactics. I think that that that could probably be another full podcast exploring those. So Udy, thank you so much for taking the time. I learned a ton. We'll link up both Udy's profile, Gong, the book, all of it in the show notes so people can check it out.