Udi Ledergor: Courage Over Clichés in Modern Marketing

We're all going to get knocked down. It's not about never getting knocked down. It's about how we get up and taking every failure, learning something from it so we don't repeat it too many times and then doing something brand new to more and more. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, today's guest is the second time around, Udi Ledergore. He was the CMO during Gong's rise to industry dominance. I remember talking to him back then that they were on a rocket ship. He's now the chief evangelist officer over at Gong, which is a really interesting role in and of itself that we got into.

But he's also advised multiple startups, served on boards, and mentored hundreds of marketers. And really, his new book, Courageous Marketing is all about elevating marketing to a point where we got to stop playing it safe. And that's really what we dove into this. He's got a lot of frameworks and ideas around how to really push and stand out in a world of sameness, because it is a lot of the same out there right now, especially with AI. Like you can say, give me the best practices for all this stuff. And so he really encourages companies to allocate 10, 15, 20% of their budget on just ridiculous ideas so that the budget can be there so that when it does come up or if it does come up throughout the year, you can jump on those opportunities.

So we dove into that. We dove into a lot of other things about, you know, getting back to his background, but really more where things are headed right now and the line between sales and marketing and how marketing needs to be a much more strategic part of the organization. And we need to stop worrying about these vanity metrics and get into the stuff that matters. So if you are a marketer or if you are a sales professional who wants to learn and understand marketing more effectively and how we can all work together to really elevate, you got to listen to this episode and you got to check out his new book. So hopefully enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Udi, what's up, my friend?

Welcome back to the Make It Happen Monday podcast. How are you doing? I'm doing great, John. Thanks for having me back. I really appreciate it. We also have a good conversation. Love it. Yeah. And it was actually a serendipitous a little bit when we saw each other at G2, right? Because I hadn't seen your caught up in a while. And then we were at the GTM fund and yeah, not G2, but and it was, it was interesting, right? I had a really good time there. I don't get out much anymore. I don't know if you do a lot of traveling anymore, but I become hermits at some point in our life. Yeah. I've kind of got, but, but when I know there's quality people and there's a good environment, I'll show up. I'm done with those like huge conferences at this point.

Like I'm, I'm, I have no need for that. For sure. So I think the last time we talked was, was it mid, I forget, was it mid 2023 or early? Cause I, cause it didn't like, like it was right in the middle of the shit, right? It was. Yeah. I think it was a few months after I transitioned into my role as chief evangelist. So that must've been mid 23. Yeah. And that was like, quite frankly, uh, looking back on that, that was probably the hardest six months of my entire career. Uh, I, you know, nobody misses that time. No, no, but green lights, you know, a lot of things, I'm a Matthew McConaughey fan of that book, green lights, where not everything happens for a reason, but silver lining. Right. And, and I think now, and this is going to transition to our conversation as far as agility and what we need to be moving forward here and how we got to keep testing things.

And now that I'm just back on my own and it's just me and Megan, like it's, I'm so much happier because I can be agile. I can move. I can, I can play around, I can test. So, you know, as hard as it was, uh, looking back, I'm kind of happy, but with you, you wrote a book since we last talked. I did. I did. I wrote Greatest Marketing. Here you go. Love it. Yeah. Came out on April 10th, uh, became an instant bestseller in all of sales and marketing and a half a dozen other categories. And, uh, yeah, I'm excited. You know, I go once a week or so into the reports. I see how many people are listening to the audio book and, uh, people buying the paperback and the hardcover and the digital and all of it.

So that's, it's really exciting. Um, I, I had a pretty humble goal for the book, which, which I'm, I'm hitting pretty consistently, which is just to inspire as many marketers as I can on taking the boring out of B2B marketing. Um, that that's all I ever wanted for the book. I, I really don't care how much money the book makes. I I'm not selling a product behind it. A lot of business books comes out, comes out as a lead magnet as, as they're called an industry where people are selling workshops and others. I I'm not selling anything. I just, I genuinely want more marketers to stop doing boring marketing and do some cool stuff and inspiring stuff. And, um, based on the multiple messages I'm getting every week from readers and listeners of the book, I think it's hitting the mark and people are going, Oh, I was stuck in a rut and this is exactly what I needed to get out of it.

Um, so I'm just happy I could be there for that. I was going to ask like, why'd you write it? Right. Cause a lot of people write it for legacy. Other people write it for the lead magnet, but it sounds like you just really are trying to inspire other marketers to think big. And is that coming from a little bit of a selfish spot too, of like, you're just bored with the typical stuff that you're seeing out there and you want to see more creative things, or are you really just trying to get people to wake up a little bit? Um, I don't think it's from that selfish, um, point. Although I, I will say that when, um, people write me and say, Hey, Udi, you know, I read your chapter on punch above your weight and it inspired me to do a regional Superbowl commercial, or we did some, uh, times square billboards with the framework you explained.

And my board was amazed and you know, they're, they're really, uh, happy with me right now. That's a great reward in and of itself, just to see the profession elevated and to see people succeed. Um, you know, as anyone who's been in the business long enough, we'll tell you it's nice to win marketing awards and it's nice to super nice to be part of a really successful company like, like gone. Uh, but I think one of the sweetest rewards is really seeing people who professionally grew up on my team, folks like Devin Reed and Chris Orlov and Russell Banzon and Chena Badani and seeing them CMOs at companies and entrepreneurs running their own companies. Now that is really one of the best moments.

And I'm in touch with all of these people. And so I get to follow their journey and meet up with them occasionally. And it's just amazing what different places we all were 10 years ago and where, where we all are now. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JB sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, which are filling the funnel and driving a close that cover all aspects of the sales process. It also includes monthly workshops that'll be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like chat GPT and how to leverage AI throughout the entire sales process.

Finally, the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to jbarrows.com, click on the individual membership link and use coupon code podcast at checkout, you'll get 25% off. Now let's get back to the conversation. Yeah. I think that, you know, once you get to a certain level in your career, I think that is what really resonates like the difference that you make in individual people and you can see it, right? Cause you don't know what you're doing when you're putting out a big campaign. Okay, fine. You hit some KPIs and you hit that. It's a great. Okay. But when you see that, that, I mean, I don't know if you, uh, you had seen, but I did a keynote and, um, where my, it was called continuous growth mindset.

And it was after my dad had passed away and I was kind of lost. I was in, I was in, um, Aruba and just kind of staring out. And I get this phone call from, uh, one of the rep that I had hired way early in my career. And I was at first I was like, eh, I don't know. Like, I'm not in a position right now to have this conversation, but something told me the universe was making this phone call for me. So I pick it up and he goes, Hey man, what's going on? I hadn't talked to this kid forever. And he goes, Hey man, um, what's, I was like, I just want to say thank you. And I was like, for what? And man was like, what? He's like, well, remember back, you know, at Thrive Networks when you hired me and you fought for me because nobody else wanted me and you were the one who fought and brought me in.

And then, you know, we worked together as like, and then you left and I took over VP of sales. I was like, yeah, he goes, well, um, we, they staples sell sold us to a private equity. We recapped about three times and I've stayed there the entire time. So all my equity has been flipped and I'm now a multimillionaire and I never have to, my family never has to worry about money ever again. Oh my gosh. And Udi, when I tell you in that moment, like there was no, look, I'm not a multimillionaire. So, but, but there was no, like, it was all joy. It was all. I'm sure that made your day in day and week. Yeah. Like it shifted. And when I talk about like needing something like that at that time. So I think that's where you start to get the true satisfaction out of both what you and I do is when you can impact individuals and see what they, what they become, right?

Not that we are the ones that caused it or even, but if we were just a little part of it, right? You don't have to be that humble, John, because I believe that you're of the same mindset. We put a lot of goodness out into the universe, call it karma, call it just being a decent human being. A lot of that is going to stick and make an impact. And even just hearing about it and getting a thank you call or no, that's, it makes it all worth it. Yeah. So a lot's changed in the past couple of years here. And I mean, AI is accelerating faster than I've ever seen. Last time, I think we talked about how the sales reps, you know, aren't going to get replaced, right? If they use it right way, but lazy ones are.

Let's start with like, where do you see things now compared to then? And, and are you, because we haven't seen mass layoffs because of AI. We saw a bunch because of 2023 and those type of, but we haven't seen the doomsday. Oh my God, everybody's getting fired. So where are we right now from your perspective with AI? Is it still a force multiplier? Is it, is it on its way to replacement, replacing a large portion? What do you, what do you, what do you see right now? Yeah, I, I, it's definitely a force multiplier. And just like you said, we haven't seen massive layoffs. I think where things are a little more subtle and perhaps harder to, uh, to see is I've heard from multiple CMOs and other team leaders, uh, that they're growing, their teams more slowly than they would have two years ago because they now expect every member of the team to be running half a dozen agents.

And before you go ask for an increase in head count, like show me why an agent can do this or at least part of it. And so now we're becoming superhuman beings instead of just having a hundred percent of what we can do. We can probably get to 150 or maybe 180% by adding all these agents. And that means that we will need to hire fewer human beings. And the ones that we do hire, we want to hire them because they can learn how to do this as well. And then before they go hire three people, probably going to set up a bunch of agents and they'll take longer and they'll need fewer people, uh, to grow their team. So I think that's, that's really what's going on. And the, the arms race with, with all the tooling and the platforms, again, I've seen this in sales.

I'm seeing it in marketing. We're seeing it in coding. We're seeing it in finance. We're seeing it in legal is you can kind of break the AI into two neat buckets. Um, one of them is an extension of what we've been doing for years and calling automation. Um, but automation was something that had to follow a very specific script, like an algorithm. You do this and step one is this and step 42 is that, but it's always the same flow. Whereas, uh, AI agents don't have to stick to a predetermined script. They actually have logic that can think and say, Oh, in this situation, this is going to be the best thing to do. So they're far more advanced than what we used to call automation, but we can still call it automating away, uh, things that AI agents can do now.

And every day we wake up to news of the AI agents being capable of doing something that they couldn't do yesterday. So that is incredible and mind blowing as you just see the new things coming out at a breakneck pace. And then the second bucket is the things that the agents can't do for us yet, but they can save us a lot of time and add efficiencies and productivity by guiding us on what we should be doing next, how we should be doing it. Um, and those are the tasks where we still want to be involved. And so that's where really those two buckets of automating away things and guiding us on the rest of them. That's how AI is becoming a fierce force multiplier because it allows us to do much more than we could do before and stop doing things that AI can do for us.

So I want to get to that, uh, making decisions because how, well, how fast things are moving right now, but I, I, I want to ask you this question because I've been searching for this one and I can genuinely need some help with it. You mentioned all the different professions, right? Like lawyers, doctors, all this stuff. So, and the fact that now instead of replacing reps, we're going to empower the ones that we have to be okay. I am deathly afraid. My daughter's 14 years old. I am deathly afraid for what the next three years, right? High school, fine, whatever. But when she gets out of high school, okay. College, I don't know if it's going to be relevant anymore because IQ, I think is kind of over.

EQ is everything in a lot of ways, but where my fear is, is you and I growing up marketing, sales, whatever. We did all this grunt work early in our careers, right? We just, we, we did the shit work. Like, I don't know. I forget when you graduated. I graduated in 98, right? So there's, I mean, phones were there, uh, phones, email was a thing, but it's, it wasn't like the, the thing, right? So it was still cold for me. It was cold calling. It was knocking on doors. It was writing shit down. It was doing all this shit, dirty work that I, quite frankly, I didn't love, but the benefit of all that was that it turned me into the sales professional that I am today with context, with business acumen, with grit and all these things.

And so if we look across the board, right? And I'll, let's forget about sales. Let's pick lawyers. A lawyer goes to school, they pass the bar and then the first four to five years of their job is just shit work, like case precedent, looking through crap so that they can give it to the big, you know, girl lawyer. And, and so they can, but now AI can do all the grunt work fat better and faster than almost any junior position ever could. Okay. And also the tolerance from a societal standpoint, we tolerated it before AI. We tolerated the learning curve. We tolerated that 22 year old kid that was going to call us with some piece of shit value proposition and be like, yeah, yeah. Okay. Like kind of sounds interesting.

Let me talk to somebody else. We tolerated the fact that as a lawyer, it was going to take them two to three weeks to get me back a briefing for whatever it was, because we knew that the kids had to go do the homework for it. But now that's an instant. So my question is twofold on this. One is where do the fundamentals come from at this point? And I think the, my, my more curious and bigger picture of one is what are the fundamentals anymore? It's a great discussion, John, which I had with multiple people over the course of the last few months. And, um, here is my unfiltered opinion on it. Uh, which some of it is probably grounded as some of it is pure speculation on my part, but here's how I see it.

Um, if I zoom out and I look historically, um, when I was in the military, this was 30 plus years ago. Um, I learned to navigate by spending hours looking at maps and charting out my navigation course. And then, uh, I had to put away the map. And as soon as the stars came out at night, I was thrown into the field and I had to go walk tens of miles, uh, according to my memorized map in my head and the chart that I had routed hours earlier. Um, that is a skill that very few, if any people need these days. So I'm pretty, a pretty good at navigation, but any five-year-old can compete with me very successfully now by opening Google maps. Right. And anyone who already has an autonomous car or uses one, I live in San Francisco where like literally in front of me, I can see autonomous cars driving down the street.

You have hundreds of them in the city that nobody even needs to look at their Google maps anymore. Now you could look at it from the point of view of saying, Oh, but what about those basic navigational skills? They're, they're gone. I choose to look at it from the different point of view, which is now that they don't have to invest all that time in what we call the basics back then they're starting from a much, much higher starting point. They can go much farther because let's assume that, uh, life expectancy is not growing at the rate of technology, nowhere near, right? Um, our parents could expect to live till give or take 80. And so could we, right? I don't know about our kids yet, but, but right now that's pretty much it.

So if, if we needed to start from the very basics, there's only so much farther, so many rungs we could climb on that ladder. But if someone's now starting at rung number 32, imagine how much higher our children are going to be able to go. Um, I took pride in, uh, programming my grandmother's VCR. My children are never going to have that skill. And I'm thrilled for them that they don't need to spend hours going through those manuals and program the VCR. I mean, if they do want to learn how to do something now, they go short, they go search for a five minute YouTube video, and they learn how to do it, or just ask the machine to do it themselves or ask Google or whatever digital assistant they have.

So I think that now back to your sort of work, um, environment related question, I think what we call entry-level jobs and positions is dramatically changing. And the bar for early career is dramatically elevated. Um, I don't think workplaces are going to stop hiring entry-level people, but if in the past you gave an example from the legal profession, you expected a, an intern to be able to sift through libraries of old case studies and precedents to find the relevant one. Today, you're going to expect them to know how to use three different AI tools to come up with that answer, not in three days, but in three minutes, and then do something important with that information. So there's still an entry-level position, but it's changing.

Um, you know, when my, when I used to go to my dad's office 40 years ago, um, there was a small army of, um, typewriters and secretaries taking notes and printing letters and doing calendar work and, and what then became writing emails. But now even the most important executive in the world is typing their own emails on their iPhone or Android. They, they don't need that secretary pool anymore. So entry-level jobs need more education, need more skillset, but they're still entry-level jobs. They can just do what was considered five years ago, a pretty mid-level career job. So that, that's how I'm looking at it. So, and I think you're like the edge, which leads to the education system, which even scares me even more because I don't think education system is evolving in any way, shape or form to, to meet the moment right now.

And that's what, oddly enough, that's why I think sales might, might have the upper hand here. And the reason is, is because it's never been an educated profession that, well, it has like back in the early 1900s it was, but, but now it, it, there's, there's probably still two, about 250, 250, 300 colleges that you can actually get your degree on, but in it, so it's going up. So now I think the tolerance for starting at zero in sales, like coming out of school with your whatever degree and then be like, Oh no, I got a low barrier to entry. Let me get in it. And starting with no knowledge of it at all. I think those days are over, but I think if you go to school and you learn the profession of sales, you're now into the working force at a much higher level and much more valuable in a lot of ways.

Yes. And so I'll start with the yes part. Definitely. I know there's sales schools that, that are teaching how to use tools like Gong so that when their graduates come out to the workforce, they already know using some of the top tools of the trade so they can find a easier way in. And I would say that even if you don't take a sales course or sales degree, which most salespeople still don't, but you come to your job interview and said, and you show them that you know them because you use your AI tools that you generically know to research who you're talking to, what they're looking for, what their achievements are, what their, I don't know, quirks are. You're going to convince them that you can do that for your buyers and prospects.

So you probably get hired for that entry-level position even without any sales achievements. That's where I think this is going. You need to show, um, that you're savvy with, with these tools. Um, there's another word I'm looking for, but, um, that that's, that's what you need to show that you live in the 21st century and you know how to use these tools, um, so that they don't all spring on you as new when, when you start your training. So yes. And, uh, I agree with you on the, on the, on the 20%, uh, on the top 20%. I think, I'm, I'm really hoping this isn't true, but I think this, we're evolving into a Pareto's rule. You're 80, 20 across the board where 20% of every profession, every student, every entry at whatever are going to be assassins because they know they're curious.

They're interested. AI is a superpower for those people, but the other 80% who are quite frankly lazy. And this is my biggest challenge right now is we've gone from a search engine to an answer engine. Like Google, you could, and look, once you Google something, we could all argue that Google fed us, whatever it felt like feeding us regardless. So we didn't really have choice, but we had this perception of choice where it was like, Hey, you know what? Okay. Add, add, add. And let me read this one. Let me read. Ah, there's my source of truth. Right. And now based on that source of truth, let me kind of ideate now and figure out how I'm personally going to use that information to therefore share it with whoever else.

Right. Now you go, boom, AI gives you the answer. And inherently that answer can't be 100% true. 100% of the time it's pulling off the internet for crying out loud. Right. Talk about lawyers, like talk about some mistakes I've seen lawyers make. Right. So going from that, right. I think for somebody like you and I, who are curious, who have business acumen, who understand like, it's like, I'm like, Hmm, I don't know where you're like bullshit. Tell me more about that. Where'd you get, give me the other view of this, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right, cool. Now I'm going to use that and I'm going to formulate based on this. Right. But unfortunately on the vast majority of our population are lazy as shit.

So they're just going to search, boom, cut, paste, go. And with that, there's no learning. There's no business acumen. There's no, and I don't understand the, the, I don't understand the point of the human in that scenario. And that's where my fear is. My fear is that we're, we're not allowing the, the late, the laziness is allowed to be just absolutely blown up right now because it's so easy to get answers that seem really, really real. So outside of, yeah, John, you're like, yes, the 20% are going to be assassins. Like, how do we address that? Because that to me is leading towards mass, uh, you know, unemployment. It's leading to all these different things. If that, if that is true. And I, maybe not justifiably so, but I, I am optimistic because if I look back just the last 150 years, which is a speck of dust in human history, um, a vast majority of people worked in agriculture because they had to sow the seeds and work the land and pick and, and, and, and do all the work, uh, of, of getting us fruit and vegetables and, and meat and fish for those who eat them.

And now it's, I think far less than 2% last time I read it work in agriculture because of all the automation that was introduced. Um, so definitely it was tragic for some people who lost jobs when the farmer finally bought that fancy new tractor or new sorting device or new packaging plant. But if we look at generation over generation, that meant that more people could work in safer jobs, not outside in the sun, not with heavy equipment that could chop their arms off. Um, they became knowledge workers and they were doing some of this, what we now call robotic work, um, of searching something and copying that information to another system. And they got paid for that. And that was their job. And everyone was happy for that with that, but now we're all expected to do more.

So it is going to, it is going to suck for some people who are, I don't even want to say that it's, although I I'm, I'm very well aware that it's, that there is correlation in that and different generations and age groups. Um, but, but I do think at the end of the day, it's, it's on the individual mindset and someone who is curious and exciting. You know, my boss Gong CEO, Amit, uh, he's in his sixties now. I have never seen someone more curious with, with the energy of a five-year-old taking apart a puzzle or a Rubik's cube. That's the person I get to work with every day. So it is not an age thing. It is a state of mind thing. And I try to, to, to strive to those, uh, levels of curiosity and energy.

I'm not where Amit is, but, uh, probably more than the average 50, 51 year old that I am. Um, so for some people who are not, who don't have that mentality and won't adapt to that mentality. Yes. If their job has been mostly searching for something, copying the result, pacing it somewhere else and calling it a day, they, they will probably be out of a job soon or the rest of us who are evolving beyond that and are in the mindset of the ones who survive throughout history and evolution are not the strongest, not the heaviest, not the biggest are the most adaptable. It's, it's any evolution book that you read. That's what you'll find there. It's the most adaptable. If you realize that, if you realize that the job we were asked to do 10 years ago is not the job we need to do today.

And whatever we're doing now is completely different from what we're doing, what we'll be doing in just two years. Now, if you can adapt and produce value that is valuable today and produce value that is valuable tomorrow, then we're going to have a job. But again, if I zoom out beyond this generation where there's going to be some collateral damage of people who cannot or will not adapt, the next generation just won't need people in those yesterday's job. They're going to be doing something that's far more high value and interesting and probably won't be as mind numbing for them as a lot of these, uh, drudgery jobs are today. Yeah. Yeah. I look, I, I'm all about evolution. I, I, I just look at this evolution as a, as a, as a faster one.

Right. So I don't, I don't, I don't disagree. I just think that the industrial revolution and all these other things, like they took so long for that transition to happen where the old and the new kind of, whereas this one's like, whoop. Okay. We're moving fast. So if you don't jump on this train fast, it's, I think the irrelevance factor is going to be faster than in, in previous generations in a lot of ways. So. I agree. And you know, I, I have additional perspective on this because I'm, I'm on a school board here in San Francisco and I've got three pre teenagers, uh, 12 and 10. Um, the 12 year old, uh, is, is in the middle of middle school and the, the little ones, my twins just started middle school.

And, uh, I can see how the school and the students are struggling with using AI tools. You can't stop them from using them at home anyway. And I think at this point, the, the smart schools are not trying to stop them from using it at school, but actually teaching them how to look at the output and say, is this credible? Does this make sense? Is it a hallucination? Can I cross-reference this with another source? Does it make sense? And I love that they're doing that. And they, nobody has this figured out. No school has this figured out yet. Um, but, but I just love that the students are tackling these questions and problems now, because again, you and I, when, when I was a kid and I had a question that was factual, I had to go to my parents set of encyclopedias, look up, you know, uh, K to L, uh, volume.

And I look for the answer, but that was probably five years outdated by the time I got to that. And now they're getting real time answers from this morning's news. But, but now the questions are different. Is this credible? Is this been cited? Like, who is this by? Uh, can I cross-reference this? So I, I love, I love that they, they are forced to use these cognitive skills, but they're probably coming up with better answers. Yeah. I actually saw a school and this is how I think it really should be done is they, they, they spend two hours. So with what I do, like training and coaching, I actually think the, the best application for AI in, in the short term here is frontline coaching, right? Is like, I just got off a call, tell me what's going on.

And because it's, it's right there, whatever. So the school from a coaching and training, what they do is they actually personalize AI is to the kids learning style. Cause when I train 30 people, right, I try to do my visual auditory kinesthetic stuff and get everybody engaged, but inevitably I am not connecting. There's some people just don't learn the way I present. Right. But AI knows exactly how you learn compared to, I learned compared to somebody else. And so what happens is they spend two hours learning using a, like, actually the AI is the teacher and they spend the rest of the day on EQ things like learning how to make things like, you know, like working together on stuff. And I'm like, that's the answer because AI might be, it might be.

I, I, I, I'm raising a brow here because a last week there was a big story in the New York times exactly on that AI use for education in K to 12. And there is no conclusive evidence yet that those systems that adapt to the student learning styles are actually improving learning so far as measured by standardized tests and other things. Um, I think the jury is still out. And the, the, the one thing I just put in there to, to make it a little more complicated is that, uh, there's a lot of pressure from the vendors of AI to push half-picked technologies. Um, just like they did in the past of, Oh, you all need laptops and you all need our search engine. And now you all need, uh, our AI, uh, before there's any conclusive proof that this is actually improving learning.

And I'm, I'm glad that you, you ended your answer by saying that actually frees up time for the EQ stuff. Cause I think at least in the first half of school years, that is all that matters. I don't care how my children's spelling is in second or third grade. I care that they learn how to resolve problems with friends and learn how to share and learn how to not use their body to solve problems with France. Yeah. That's why I like, I, I still love, uh, the, uh, Montessori, the whole Montessori system, right? Cause it's experiential learning. And I've said to my daughter, I said to my wife, I don't say this to my daughter cause I don't want to put this in her head, but I'm like, I don't care that she, you know, passes a math test or science.

I care that she learns how to learn. She's curious and she's a good person. Those are the things that, that I want to make sure. And she has good values, right? So she achieves that she's, she's already far ahead of most of the kids. Most unfortunately. So, um, well, let's talk about this going back to coaching. You bring, I think we talked last time about your approach to, to candor and feedback. I think you called it like your no sugar approach, right? Yeah. That's the gong approach. Yeah. That's the gong approach. So feedback these days is interesting because I think it's the most important thing that we can do, but I think a lot of people are a don't know how to give feedback and don't know how to accept it either.

So how do you find like, what's the fine line of giving direct feedback and, and, and having it be accepted? Like how, what's the nuanced approach to, to talking to a rep and giving them feedback so that they're open to it, even though it might have to be very direct. And because I've failed at this horribly, by the way, and I have a great example of it recently where I give, sometimes I give very direct, like, look, dude, whatever. Like some kid asked for a refund on it, like took a 50% discount on, on my training. Um, took advantage of a, of a, of a deal that I gave, used it, loved it, said he got a ton of value out of it and then got fired and then came back to me and said, Hey, um, can I get my money back because I'm fired now and I don't have a job.

And I was like, and that one didn't sit too well with me because usually I'm very sympathetic and empathetic to people. I'm like, yeah, no problem or whatever. But this time I'm like, dude, you, you took it a 50% discount. You got a shitload of value out of it because you got fired. Right? So I said, Hey, look, um, I'll give you your money back to send me an email, that type of thing. But I do also have some feedback for you. I actually don't, I think you should reevaluate whether sales is the career for you. Cause quite frankly, I don't know any successful sales reps who have the mentality that you have right now and would do what you're doing right now. So as somebody who's been in this industry for 30 years, uh, that just that approach alone tells me, I don't think you should be in this profession and should probably find a different role.

And he was like, Oh, you know what? Like it was, I forget the, but then fast forward, like, I think it was like over two years later, I get this, I get this thread on LinkedIn of like, I just want to thank you, John Barrows for all the stuff I've learned from you over the years. And I, I didn't know it was him by the way, cause I got memory. So I was like, Oh my God, dude, thank you so much. Like, this is why I do what I do. And then I was like, how do I know this kid? And I looked on the thread on email and I was like, and it was like straight, like punch him in the mouth type. Cause I probably was a little pussy right to him still in sales. I'm curious. Oh yes. And, and, and then he pinged me back.

He goes, yeah, man. He goes, look, that feedback that you gave me, it hurt. It absolutely stung at the time, but it made me realize I was, I was not in a growth mindset in any way, shape or form. He's like, I was in a limiting mindset and, and I kind of needed that to kick me in the ass to get, and now I'm killing it at job. I'm doing this and everything else. So he didn't accept it then. Right. And maybe I didn't deliver it the right way, but as you've seen Gong grow, as you've seen this, these new generations come in, what's the, we can give the science of feedback all day long. What's Udi's, what Udi's, what's your art of feedback? So in no, in no particular order, here are a few principles that, um, I, I strongly believe in, and I've seen them demonstran, demonstrably useful.

Um, and I, I'll say the two kind of sources that helped, uh, forge my thinking on this are one, uh, you already mentioned, which is Gong's operating principles of, uh, no sugar. What we mean by that is that nobody benefits from brooming or brushing, uh, complicated issues under the carpet that just prolongs and bubbles up and simmers the situation. And then when it explodes, it's going to be a lot worse. So face things head on respectfully, uh, but, but face the problems and challenges head on that do not try to avoid conflict and try to avoid difficult conversations or making difficult decisions. Every time we do that, uh, we regret it. And, um, it's much better to pay the price now for having that uncomfortable conversation, making an uncomfortable decision.

I mean, some of them are very uncomfortable. Like you have to let someone go or you have to tell someone that what they did was really bad. Um, but if you do it respectfully and constructively, you're always going to end up with a better result by, by doing it head on. So that's one source of my thinking on this. The other one, I don't know if we mentioned last time we chatted, um, is, uh, Kim Scott's book, Radical Candor, um, which I'm a big fan of. Uh, I'm not the only one I know. They just have millions of readers. Um, and she, she talks about her time, uh, working with Sheryl Sandberg and, um, uh, a lot that she learned from her and then kind of continue to develop her, uh, framework. And a few of the nuggets that I took from her, I read this book years ago, but I can still like recite a lot of the nuggets in there because they're just very practical are things like one, um, give feedback immediately.

Don't, don't wait for that annual performance review, which is we all was complete bullshit. Um, just something happened today. You should give feedback on that today or tomorrow latest, but do not wait for that quarterly or annual performance feedback. Um, two, you have to be known for both praising when things are going well, especially for effort. Um, and then constructive feedback will be received much better than if you're the curmudgeon that only comes into complain all the time. And then at some point people tune out, but if 70, 80, 90% of the time you're calling people out on good things and they know that you're serious and should be trusted when you call them out on constructive things.

And then on that, another great tip that she gives, which I think makes intuitive sense, but it's good to remember, um, praise publicly and criticize privately. And I can't tell you how many people don't operate that way. And it's just terrible because if you, of course, criticize, criticize someone publicly, not only are you acting like a schmuck, but that person is going to get defensive and going to, is going to be worried about saving face in that meeting or whatever form you're doing that rather than actually listening and having a real discussion on how they can grow from that. So those are, those are a few of the, of the tips. And here I'll, I'll, I'll give a positive shout out to one of my former team members, Russell Banzon, who's now a CML Cresta.

I remember more than once that, um, I goofed up in a meeting and, and said something, uh, out of place or, or should have said something better. And the moment the zoom meeting was done, uh, my cell phone rings and it's Russell and says, Woody, you have a minute before our next meeting. I'd like to give you some feedback on the meeting. We just came out from, here's what you said. Here's how that made some people feel. And here's what I think you should do next. And I loved having him as, as a team player who's actually coaching me on a lot of this EQ stuff and feedback stuff. And so you need people like that on your side. And, uh, I know I learned from him at least as much as he learned from me.

Love it. And I, this is good gets into not only coaching, right? But, but encouraging now, especially with AI and all this other stuff, you know, coaching reps to the fundamentals, but also encouraging them to take risks. And I think the one you had said, you know, fail fast, right? Last conversation talked about failing fast, but in the book, I saw this little concept of failing shallow. Is that, is, was that it? Um, I don't think I called it that, but, but, uh, I know where you're going with this. So, um, one of the chapters I had the most fun, uh, writing in the book is, is the one I called building a courageous team because, um, a lot of people ask me, it's one of the most common questions I get when I do mentoring for hundreds of marketers and different, uh, accelerators and VCs and all these forums.

And they asked me, but, but Uri, how, how do you assemble this team of super humans that can take risks and be edgy and try stuff? Like we, we, we, we've been struggling with that part. Even if I have that state of mind, how do I make this happen? And so I could answer anecdotally how I thought that worked on my team, but I decided to dive in deeper. And so, uh, not only did I read some books about it, um, but I most importantly interviewed over half a dozen members of my team over the years. So I talked to Chris Orlob and Devin Reed and Russell Benzon and Jonathan Costat and Sheena Badani and Vince Chan and others. And I asked them, Hey, can you give me an example of when you felt you were liberated to take risks and run an experiment knowing you could fail?

Like what caused you to do that in the first place? How did you feel when things went right? How did you feel when things went wrong? Uh, what did we do as a team to make you feel safe and encourage you to do those things? And out of all those interviews, um, and then I coupled that with some of the more academic research that I read and could put labels on some of those things. I realized, um, that there were a couple of things going on that, that drive people to do their absolute best work, which also involves taking risks and, and doing things that are edgier. And so the first big part is what Adam Grant calls in his book, uh, think again, simply psychological safety, which is creating an environment where people can fail safely, where they don't feel that if they get something wrong, their job is at risk.

Obviously. Um, I'm not talking about the finance department. I, if someone is embezzling the money, yes, they probably will be talking about, I'm talking about running a campaign that, that might have edgy creative or trying a new target, uh, segmentation list or a different approach to an event experience. Um, not, not things that are life or death experiences, right? Uh, fortunately the, the, the, the stakes in marketing are usually not life or death. Um, so we do get a lot of rope to do these experiments. And so, um, um, I, I won't give it all away here because we don't have time for it, but, uh, but I do break it down in the book based on all these, uh, team interviews. What are the three or four things that we really made sure happened all the time in our team that created that psychological safety?

But that is the goal. That is the goal of creating that psychological safety where people, if you ask them, they said, I knew I was expected to come up with crazy ideas and that playing it safe was the riskiest thing we could do. And, and that Udi encouraged us to do this and that Amit, our CEO encouraged us to do this. And they were always trying to challenge us to think even bigger and crazier. What, how could we 10 X this? Not 10%, but how can we 10 X this? What can we do? That's bigger and wilder. And so if you create that excitement and you push everyone, um, and, and you do it in a way that makes them feel safe, they will, they will do their best work for you. Then the second part of that, uh, is what Adam Grant calls process accountability, which sounds like a yawn, but, but the concept is important.

And, and the, here's why it's important to balance out the psychological safety, because if we only talk about psychological safety, then you might rightfully ask, well, Udi, doesn't that just lead to a huge waste of resources? Cause people are scattered all over the place. It's borderline anarchy because they're experimenting and doing things that might not even be helping the business. And I'd say, John, you'd be right to suspect and ask that. And so that's where we counterbalance that with process accountability. And what that simply means in my, in my words, not Adams is that we have clear understanding at all times of what is the North star that we're all marching towards. What are the KPIs that we have to hit?

So here's a practical example. If we're in the world of marketing, maybe we have a pipeline target. We need to hit, we need to create $1 million of pipeline this quarter. That is our North star. Now go in all different ways, plan your experiments and try your different things, but be ready to explain why you believe if what you're suggesting works, it will help us towards that goal of $1 million in pipeline. So if, if doing a times square billboard can plausibly help us do that, achieve that by all means do it. But, um, if you're planning an event in Idaho and we don't have any prospects there, uh, so that's not going to help us reach our pipeline target. That's probably not a good experiment to suggest right now.

So it's, it's the coupling of those two things, psychological safety process, accountability. That's where the magic happens. And you get your team to do their absolute best work. Do you have to structure that within the organization? Cause I think on one of the podcasts, uh, I was reviewing for me, like in, uh, insights unlocked, you had talked about carving out five to 10% of the budget for bold plays. Um, is this kind of like the Google concept where they want Googlers to, you know, spend 20%, whatever, 10% of their time on, on, on weird stuff. And, and so do you structure it so that they can have those big ideas or is it unstructured with depending on what the scenario is? So, so it's a little bit of both.

So, um, with the, with the time management, I think today in most tech companies and other knowledge workers, um, we don't really know what people are doing a hundred percent of their time. You could look at their calendars, but even that, you know, if someone closes three hours for deep work, you have no idea what they're actually doing. So I wasn't as worried about carving out the time. Their, their famous stories is about Google is one, but 3M, uh, has a famous story. That's how the, the, uh, post-it notes were created by someone recycling some glue. There was a failed experiment into what we now know as post-it notes. Um, so they did have a policy of like 15% of your time or 20% of your time.

You can work on whenever you want. Um, I don't know that that had process accountability though. It was definitely psychological safety. Um, but today, especially now that so many of us are remote or hybrid, I'm not worried about, uh, policing people's time management. Um, but, but I do want to go to, to the part of budgeting that, that you talked about that I did mention in my book. And here's another very common question that I get from marketers. They say, okay, Odie, uh, we have all these crazy ideas, but how the heck am I going to get someone to sign off on a budget for it? Like if I've never tried this thing before, I have no idea, honestly, if it's going to work. I probably don't even have the courage to work up and go ask for budgeting for this thing.

How did you get buying for the Superbowl commercials and podcast sponsorships and billboards and other crazy stuff you did. And, and this is where, um, I, I tell the story of just like in medicine, uh, most doctors will tell you the best form of medicine is preventive made medicine, right? Like watch your diet and workout before you get diabetes, not after. And so with, uh, crazy ideas, otherwise known as marketing experiments, uh, I would propose the same approach. And here's what I've been doing for years at multiple companies. And I advise other marketers to do when you're creating the budget for next year. I always try to set aside roughly 10% of the program's budget. It can be 5%, 12%. If you can get 10, that's wonderful.

Set them aside in a budget line item that is labeled marketing experiments. Um, internally, when we were working on the budget, uh, what you would see in that spreadsheet would, would literally say Udi's crazy ideas. And I think Russell, again, uh, stopped me before sending that to the CFO and said, we just change it to marketing experiments. So it looks a little more professional. Like, yes, we should do that, Russell. Thank you. Good idea. Good idea. So one of as many. So, uh, here's now it always got approved. Maybe they lowered a percent or two, but, but that budget line item, I always got approved and, and here's how we approved it. So there's, there's two rationales, uh, when the CFO or our finance partner, or even the CEO would ask, well, why are you like you're marking this budget for marketing experiments?

And so here are the two things I explained. One, there are going to be marketing opportunities that show up throughout the year next year that I don't know about now when we're signing off on the budget. And we're both going to agree that we should take advantage of those opportunities, but I don't know about them yet. Here's a super simple example. Let's say John is putting a big marketing event next, next October, and you're planning it six months in advance, which means you're going to start announcing it and looking for sponsors in April. But now we're in November trying to close this next year's budget. Mark hasn't even thought up of his, uh, uh, next big event. So he hasn't announced it.

So I want to make sure I have a budget so that when I get the call in April saying, Hey, do you want to be part of our big event next October? I can say, yes, I've actually earmarked some budget for this thing. Exactly. So those are some marketing opportunities. And I can tell you that a lot of the really amazing stuff that we've done is when one of my media contacts at NBC or CBS calls me and say, Hey, Udi, I just had an advertiser back out of a, uh, deal of, I don't know, taking over a, uh, Superbowl in-game spot in Seattle. I can give it to you for like a quarter of the price. And I, yes, I've saved money for this. I can do this now. Or we want to try this new digital overlay on the Warriors court.

I'll give it you for $5,000. Now, $5,000 is not a lot of money, but for some marketers, it would still be a three week long process of trying to get budget approval. By then Jesse from NBC has moved on to their next contact is he needs to sell this by end of week. And so having preemptively having that budget is really, really helpful. Then the second, uh, rationale that I give, um, is, is the following when we're doing demand gen, which is arguably the biggest job of any marketing team, any channels that are working for us now are going to tap out at some point. It could be next quarter. It could be year next year. I don't know. I do know that whatever we're doing now, we cannot assume that it's going to continue working forever.

And if that's the assumption that we can all agree on, then I need to be experimenting with new channels now. So that when one of the existing one taps out, I already have the next one ready to go so we can double down on those channels, uh, when we need them before it's too late. Yeah. And I think that, like we said, it kind of goes back to the agility and there's one more, a question before we wrap things up that I, that really kind of caught my attention. And I think it speaks to your values and the way you show up. It's the courage arc in your stories here and how, instead of it having a hero and you kind of, you outlined this decent, really well in the book is, you know, you show vulnerability mid story.

And could you give an example of that? Could you give me an example of something that either Gong did or you did personally and, and how that changed or, or how that differentiated you compared to all the other noise that's out there? Yeah, I think I don't do this in the book, but just in our conversation today, I think there's some interesting parallels between what we talked about a few minutes ago on how to give good and constructive feedback and how to manage yourself as, as a leader or manager in any organization. A lot of us, especially in the early career days, especially first-time managers, they don't want to, we don't want to embarrass ourselves. We want to create the perception that we've got everything under control.

And so we often portray everything as sunshine and rainbows. Everything is going great. No challenges, all good. And then when, when things inevitably go wrong, it's a big surprise to everyone. And I'm like, oh shit, how could this happen? Um, I think over time, and as I grew my professional competent, confidence and maturity and received good feedback from my colleagues, I learned how to portray a more balanced picture of what was really going on in my part of the business. Um, I'll give you an example from, um, our template for board slides for, at Gong for years has been every business function shows a slide with two columns, highlights and lowlights. And, uh, the highlights are what we all want to start with the things we're proud of that went really well.

The lowlights or watch items are things that are not going as well as planned. And we want to show them early a to show that we know about them. Uh, here's why we think they're happening. And here's what we're doing to fix the moving forward. Now, even in the best of quarters, we never leave that lowlights column empty because there's always something that needs repair or improvement in the business. And when we show that consistently over time, it actually increases confidence in us because that really shows that we're on top of everything and we know what's going well. And even when everything is going well, we could be crushing targets. There's still a bunch of things that we want to make sure are going to be better next quarter.

When we show that, that shows maturity and that shows that we can be trusted because we're not always selling internally. Uh, right. You're salespeople. You always need to be selling. That's great. But to be a good seller, you have to be trusted. And, and when, especially internally, if we're drinking our own Kool-Aid and if we're just selling sunshine and rainbows the whole time, we're going to lose that trust. And that's what, that's what scares me right now is like the Instagram world where everything looks perfect. Right. Like, and we all know the family that, you know, if you saw them on Instagram, you're like, Oh my God, like they have all their shit together, but you know, they're a train wreck.

And, you know, like you actually know them as a good Lord. And I, and this goes back to authenticity and a conversation I was having yesterday. And my just, I don't understand why authenticity is so hard because it's so much harder to be fake. And because now you got to remember shit like, you know, so I, I remember I, I had done a, I forget what it was. I had posted something about, Oh yeah. Like back in 2023 when I got the shit kicked out of me and I was just going through it. Right. And I had posted like, yep, this sucked. I lost everything. I went from 6 million to zero and dah, dah, dah, dah. And I get on the phone with a peer of mine and I start, he's like, how you been? And he hadn't read anything, but, um, I was like, yeah, man, it's been brutal.

Uh, and I, and I kind of talked through it and, and no joke, Judy, he goes like this. He goes, Oh, thank God. And I was like, what, what? I'm like, dude, I just told you I had the worst six months of my entire career here. And you just said, thank God. Um, please tell me why you just said, thank God. He goes, John, I thought I was the only one. And I was like, what? He goes, I honestly, he's like, I see everybody on LinkedIn crushing it. I see people getting tons of likes and comments and all this other stuff. And everybody's, and he's like, I'm not. And I'm, I feel like I'm the, I honestly feel like I'm the only one. So for somebody like you with your following and how long you've been in this business for you to be struggling right now, actually, he's like, I'm, I, I'm sorry, but it makes me feel so much better.

And that's why I was like, whoa. And I, and I immediately after that conversation just lit up a video on LinkedIn. And I said, Hey, everybody, it's fucked up out there. Like it's okay. Like nothing, like you don't have to pretend like it's like I'm struggling. There's millions. And I just had this conversation. And so if you're out there thinking that you're the only one, I promise you, you're not. So why let's, let's end on this. Why do you think authenticity is so fucking hard for so many people? It goes to, it goes to the, the, a lot of things that we've been talking about here, right? Like why is it so hard? I just don't understand it. I'm not going to pretend to be a psychologist, but my somewhat educated guess is that just like we sometimes notice how we react when we see someone messing up and then we don't want to be on the receiving end of that.

We don't want others to judge us for things that either we don't have our shit together. We might've just lost the job. We're not doing great as parents or as children or spouses or whatever. And we just want to keep it to ourselves thinking that that will help keep up appearances. And everyone's going to think we're these hotshots. But I, I think I speak for all of us when I say we all have these friends or acquaintances in our life that we just get tired of because every time we meet them, everything is just going so great and everything is so awesome. And at some point you try kind of probing. Yeah, but what about that? And what about that? Like, tell me, like, couldn't all be great. No, man, it's all great.

It's all amazing. It just gets really boring because I know they're not sharing everything. I want to be them for them. I'm not looking to pry to, to judge them. I'm looking to be there to share some sort of shared experiences. And I'll, I'll, I'll end with when, when I forgot that myself, um, as I was, um, in pretty advanced rounds of editing my book just a few months ago, uh, my editor, uh, Lori Lynn, she, she went through the advanced draft. She said, Udi, I, I, I like all of this. Uh, but here's the problem. You seem too damn perfect because the entire book is how you went from one success to another. People are not going to be able to relate to that. I need you to add two chapters with failure stories.

I need you to go back and dig up some of the worst shit that you've done, things that did not go as planned and put those in there. So people know that you're a human being. And I hated that feedback in the moment, but I do what Lori tells me to do. And I dug up quite a few failure stories because anyone who's ever done anything will tell you that we have way more failure stories and success stories. But of course we enjoy talking about the successes a lot more than we talk about the failures. Um, and several of them made them into the book, including, uh, my second Superbowl commercial, which was complete flop compared to the first one. Um, a terrible campaign that we did around reviews collection and black lives matter.

Go read it in the book if you haven't. Um, and I've been getting disproportional feedback on those seemingly short chapters that are kind of mentioned in passing from people who read them and said, wow, I was so glad that you put those in there. Cause it really showed me that you're a human being. And like all of us, you fail a lot more than you succeed. And seeing that in tandem with the success stories just shows me how resilient you are and that you, you got up after being knocked down because you know, the old cliche is there for a reason. And it's true. We're all going to get knocked down. It's not about never getting knocked down. It's about how we get up, how quickly we get up. And, and I hope that's part of the message of courageous marketing and courage in general that I tried to send with the book is we all mess up all the time.

It's about just getting up and taking every failure, learning something from it. So we don't repeat it too many times and then doing something brand new to more and more. Yeah. It's like, I tell my daughter that all the time, right? Like failure isn't failure as long as you learn something from it. If you didn't learn anything from it yet, it was failure. You know what I mean? And you can, you can categorize it that way, but if you quote unquote failed, but you could look back and learn something from it, I don't consider that a failure in any way, shape or form. The only people who never fail are the people who don't do anything. We don't try. So those are terrible role models. Oh, those are the worst.

Awesome, Udi. Well, this has always been an awesome conversation. My friend is, uh, outside the book, where, where can people find it? Is the best place to go Amazon? And just what else are you working on right now? What do you want people to pay attention to? Uh, yeah, first of all, pay attention to Gong, uh, where I'm still chief evangelist and, uh, Gong is going from strength to strength. If you're running a sales team that is not using revenue, uh, AI like Gong, you should absolutely take a look at Gong.io. Uh, I'm happy to connect with, uh, any listeners on LinkedIn. There's only one Udi letter gore there, so that's pretty easy to find. And of course, uh, if you're a marketing leader, a sales leader, an entrepreneur, CEO, um, you haven't read courageous marketing yet, you're wondering what all the hype is about.

Uh, it's available wherever books are sold. So Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you get your books, courageous marketing by Udi letter gore. Love it, my friend. Well, congrats again on the success of the book and all the success moving forward. And I'm looking forward to keeping this relationship going, my friend. So thanks for having me, John. Absolutely. And everybody else, hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, you make somebody smile and you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now.

So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. Hey everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going. It would mean the world to me. If you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also, I am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where I'll be sharing everything I know and everything I'm learning along the way while I'm out there selling every day, just like you go to jbarrows.com slash newsletter to sign up today.

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