Udi Ledergor: The CMO of Gong talks B2B Marketing and ‘Creating a Show’

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. Today's conversation is with Udi Ledagor, the CMO of Gong, one of the hottest tech companies on the planet right now. Udi is a five-time marketing leader who grew up in Israel and just moved to the States about four years ago. We start our conversation by diving into his background growing up in Israel and how his early passion for performing arts, magic, and music led him to a career in marketing and how he applies much of what he learned back then to what he's doing today.

As one of the first 15 employees of Gong that is now over 1,500 employees, Udi knew early on the importance of building a strong culture on values and principles that permeate through every aspect of the organization to this day. We went on to discuss the role of marketing versus sales and where he sees things evolving with all the technology that is now available and how he looks at everything as an experiment and encourages all of his employees to experiment and fail fast. We finish up with a discussion around personal brands and how organizations need to have people internally that represent their brand and all the challenges that come with it. This was a fascinating conversation with somebody who is at the top of his game at a company who has defined its own category and continues to lead the way.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. What's happening, Make It Happen family? Big shout out to our partners today, Gong, Vidyard, and Chili Piper. Gong's data is more than valuable. It's cornerstone in any organization looking to collect the data that's going to tell them where they can improve and where they need to spend their time making changes. Vidyard makes it easy for people to use videos anywhere. No matter whether you're sending videos in email or on social media, posting them somewhere, or sending them in a DM, Vidyard has got you covered. Our friends at Chili Piper are so much fun to be around. They make it easy for people to get on your calendar.

And every sales rep has got to have this function locked in. It's one of the most important things we can do as a seller. How can I get you on my calendar easily? Chili Piper can make that happen for you. Be sure that you're checking out all these great tools. And now let's pass it over to John to find out who's joining him today. See you soon, everybody. Unni, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on, my friend. Excited to be here, John. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And look, I think enough of the people who listen to this podcast know who you are. So I don't think we need to go through the gong background. I want to dive a little bit more into something where you're coming from, though, because I was in prepping for this.

I started looking through your history, and I think it's a rather unique one. Coming from Israel, getting into performing arts, getting into magic, and really, you know, then music. So could you kind of just talk to me a little bit about your childhood, if you will? Because I think that's a lot of, obviously, who you are. But I'd love to learn a little bit more about you growing up and get some perspective there, if you don't mind. No, I'm happy to share anything. I'm kind of an open book. So I was born and raised in Israel, a first-generation Israeli. My father came from Sydney, Australia. My mother came from the former Czechoslovakia, which is now broken up into the Czech Republic and the Slovakian Republic.

And their parents are from even yet other countries like Uzbekistan and Austria. And so I've got a little bit of everything. If I ever did one of those Me23 tests, I'll need a long printout of all the places my family is originally from. So we're kind of from all over the place. So Israel, for those who don't know, is kind of a melting pot for Jewish and other people from many parts of the world, from North Africa, from Eastern Europe, from the U.S., from many, many places. So it's an interesting place to grow up in. And most of my friends are first or second-generation Israelis at most. Few families have been there longer than that. So kind of a country of immigrants. And as a child, I was fascinated by the performing arts.

I remember performing arts is kind of a big word. But as a kid, I used to love making and playing with puppets. So I found a couple of buddies who thought that was fun, too. And we used to put on little puppet shows for ourselves and, you know, use sheets and blankets to make the little theater and put up desk lamps as lighting and put some probably flammable cellophane over them to tint the lights. Got into trouble with that. I managed to electrocute myself three times just playing with those desk lamps and pulling the wrong plugs. So that was fun. I started with puppetry. And then I discovered magic, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. And I still do. And from there, I started that.

By the way, just real quick, was there a magician that just struck you? Or was it just like, you know, there's the famous musicians now like David Blaine and those types. But was there a magician that you saw or a show that you went to? You were like, oh, my God, I think that is incredible. When I was a kid, like many in my generation, we kind of grew up on David Copperfield. He for many years had a really big Vegas act and had television specials. And I read dozens of books about past magicians. Harry Houdini completely caught my imagination. And he based his stage name on Robert Houdini, who came before him. Yeah. Harry Houdini's real name was Eric Weiss. He's a Jewish voice from Hungary, kind of similar to my family.

But Harry Houdini sounds a little more impressive on stage. And then, of course, given my name, Udi, I had to pick a stage name. So if you haven't heard it yet, I'll out myself in more than one way today. And my stage name was Udini. That's awesome. I love it. Yes. So I come from a long chain for Robert Houdini, Harry Houdini, and then there's Udi Ledergore. Although I did have a different last name at the time. We can talk about that if we have time. I did magic for a good 10 years, started birthday parties, moved up to like illusion shows at malls and a bit of Israeli television and did some fun stuff with that. And then as a teenager, I discovered music and really got into that. Started by playing the organ and moved on to the piano.

I was classically trained and then later discovered the love of jazz. So I've been kind of alternating for all these years ever since. I still play the piano. I don't do magic. I don't know about it anymore. But I do play the piano. And I kind of love the cross between classical and jazz and everything in between. So I will end that story with, I think, that love for performing arts that goes on to this day. I mean, this last weekend alone, I was at the SF MoMA. I was at the Opera House. We've got tickets to the ballet, to the musicals, to everything. So I love that and I'm excited about it. And I see B2B marketing as a way of performing to an audience and creating a show, creating an experience.

When we talk about creating raving fans with our product, with our brand, with our event experiences, it's pretty much a magic show. It is a performing art. And the teams who do this well, when you come out of an event and you're completely elated and you go like, wow, that was worth every minute and every penny I spend on this, you know you were served with an experience like that. And I don't think it should be reserved for going to the opera or to the musical or going to a museum to see a piece of art or to a concert. You should be able to go to a B2B conference and come out and say like, wow, that was totally worth my day here. I love that. And we'll get into the experience and the science versus the art because you talk a lot about that and the combination of the two using data to be creative.

But you mentioned something briefly there that stuck out while I was doing the prep. So you talk about your guiding, your principles, right? And one of them being raving fans. And you're a four-time marketer. I think you were, what number were you at at Gong again? Fourth or fifth? I was employee number 13 at Gong. It's my 15 now building. 15. And I heard that you, around 70 employees, very purposely did a kind of a principle or a values exercise. Could you, I'm a huge believer that values and principles dictate almost everything that we do or should at least. Could you kind of, and that's why I asked about your background, right? About where you got your values from, kind of trying to explore a little bit of that.

But when it came to Gong and building these businesses for you, how important was it to start with values or principles? And could you just walk us through that, how you kind of came to that and then what you did and how you grounded yourself in them? Absolutely. So I think what happened when we hit about 70 employees is we had enough folks, mostly in management, who had worked at larger companies. And we all know that at some point you sort of look around you when you're 200 or 500 or 1,000 employees. And there's a distinct office culture or organizational culture, and no one really knows how we got there. But it's so hard to change after a certain stage. Because people bring their type of people with their types of behavior and things kind of get this momentum that is really, really hard to break out of.

So we have the foresight at a pretty early stage to say we want to be very deliberate about the type of organization and culture we're going to build here. And we want to be very specific about what we're trying to build, what is already working for us, and what could be a little aspirational. But we want to formulate and codify these operating principles at this early stage, make them completely public so they're on our website, so candidates can see if this is the type of org that works for them or not. So we're drawing the right type of people for what we're trying to build. And then we incorporate that in onboarding, and we incorporate that in dozens of other ways into our culture, so that we're solidifying these operating principles.

And so we took a bunch of folks from individual contributors to junior managers, middle level and senior managers in both sites that we had, both in Israel and in San Francisco. And we sat down for a few days with a facilitator, started with one of those sticky notes exercises where there's hundreds of post-it notes on the board. Where everyone's writing down different ideas of what it means to them to be a gongster, which is how we fondly call ourselves a gong. So what does it mean to be a gongster? What do you do that makes you a gongster? And we started with hundreds of these ideas, and then we started categorizing them. And we ended up with something between seven and 10 of these big principles, both in the U.S.

and in Israel. And there was a good amount of overlap, but also a good amount of differences. And that's where it became interesting seeing what it means to merge this Israeli and U.S. culture. I'll give you an example. In Israel, out of Israel, came an interesting principle that is a big pillar of our org today, which is called no sugar, which talks about the way we communicate at gong. We don't believe that anyone benefits by sugarcoating hard discussions or hard news. And we just want to put it out there being very respectful to everyone in the room, but calling things out as they are so we can fix them and move forward. And that came from the Israeli team. It's a very Israeli thing to do.

If anyone has met Israelis before, we tend to be very blunt and direct to the point that we're crude at times. But finding a version of that that works and it becomes a part of the gong culture is actually something that many of our U.S. team members appreciate because many of them came from organizations, which will remain unnamed, where that was not a principle and people were afraid to have difficult conversations. And everything was always perfect and beautiful. And they're like, we know it isn't. Why can't we just talk about this and solve the problem? I'm curious on that one because I'm from Boston, right? And I've always said Israelis and Germans, I love because here in the States, they think Bostonians are direct, right?

I'm like, we don't hold a candle to Israelis and Germans. Yes. There's something I've noticed, and this goes to hiring too, but I'm curious if you're seeing it. The generational component to this as well, right? You know, I'm a Gen Xer here. I'm 46 years old. You know, I was very used to getting very direct feedback from my parents about, yes, you did a good job or you did a bad job. And there was first, second, and third. You didn't get those trophies. All that stuff that people talk about today. Do you see that there's a macro challenge right now with people being willing to accept direct feedback compared to like kind of more senior generations, if you will? That's a really interesting topic.

Probably spend the hour just talking about that. I'll give you my quick view on this. I do see a generational gap in expectations. And I think a lot of that gap is understandable and justified. Here's the blunt truth. You and I are almost the same age. I'm a little bit older. We grew up when it was okay to tell blonde jokes in the office and homophobic jokes in the office, and everyone used to have a good giggle and move on. And today's generation of the younger workforce will not tolerate that bullshit, and I'm so glad that's the case. And so I think that's where some of the stuff stems from, the so-called PC culture that has developed over the years, and now everyone has these high expectations of, don't offend me by saying anything that marginalizes any group or person.

I think that's a great thing. And when you get to some extreme points of this, then you find that you can't have direct conversations about certain things because you're just so afraid that you're walking on eggshells, and who are you going to disrespect or hurt their feelings? And I've crossed that line in the past. When I was new here, I've only moved to the Bay Area four years ago. And despite having worked with US colleagues my entire professional life for the last 25 years, being suddenly submerged in this culture here definitely needed some adapting to. And I found myself thinking 10 times before I told a joke in the office, and I'm kind of known as being the one with the wisecracks, not always the funny ones, but the ones with the wisecracks and a good rebuttal to everything.

But I started toning that down and thinking twice, well, I might say something that might make someone feel uncomfortable. I better not do that. And it's probably a good thing that I have these thoughts, but I think in some extremities, you find that people are afraid to have direct conversations. So I think it's a worthwhile exercise to find a way to have these conversations. And, you know, at Gong, we deal a lot with diversity and equity and inclusion. We have teams that are doing work around this. I'm an executive sponsor of the Proud at Gong group, and we have very active ERGs. And so we have to have these direct conversations and how global events affect our employees' feelings and actions and restrictions.

And what are we going to do about it? How are we going to support them? How are we going to hopefully make this world a little bit better than we found it? And you have to have direct conversations to do that. I'm curious, and this is a very kind of personal question on my end because I struggle with this as well. How do you know when to speak up and when not to? You speak of world events, right? And this is taking a little bit of a different track than I thought it was from a conversation, but I think it's important. You know, with all the stuff that's happening, right, there's major issues that are happening out there, right? And you can't comment on all of them. And so for you personally, as the CMO of Gong, being who you are and an advocate, what, I guess, criteria do you use for yourself to say, okay, I need to kind of now step in and say something about this from a company standpoint to let everybody know where we stand versus being like, hey, I have a diverse team here.

A lot of people have a lot of different views. I don't want to impose my personal view on this world case on everybody here. So how do you make that balance as a leader? So as I said at the beginning of this interview, I'm an open book, which means that if I feel strongly about something, people are going to know about it, whether they like it or not. And I'm usually prepared to live with those consequences. Now, I can say that for me, it's easier to decide personally when I'm going to speak up about something. As a company, it's a far more trickier situation. I'll give you a couple of examples. First, I like to speak about things I'm educated about. There's most of the things in this world I'm uneducated about.

A few of them I am, and fewer still I feel strongly about. So when a few months ago, Roe versus Wade was overturned, I didn't wait for anyone's queue. I wrote a short post on LinkedIn saying how appalled I am from today's ruling. And I got a ton of engagement, both ways, by the way, which is fine. When legislation passes or rulings are changed around LGBT rights, I always speak out very vehemently, stating my opinion, of course, which is pro-equality for everyone everywhere. So these are things I feel very strongly about. And I've been a social activist back in Israel. I was a co-founder and the chairperson of the Israeli Association of Gay Fathers for five years. I only left that position because I moved to the Bay Area.

I was an advocate for other LGBT groups and doing other work for non-LGBT, non-profit organizations, etc. So there are areas where I feel very strongly about, and I feel it's my obligation to speak up and use my position of power as an executive to make my opinion heard and make the opinions of those who maybe cannot speak up heard as well. And I can tell you that every time I do that, I get, I'd say, 95% positive feedback from team members, not just on my marketing team, but other team members at Gong and other random contacts on LinkedIn who messaged me privately saying, thank you for speaking up, because I don't yet see myself in a position where I can do that without consequences. And Udi can, so thank you for speaking up.

And I realized that privilege, and I want to use it where I can. Now, as a company, it gets way more complicated because the same topics that I just talked to you about that I feel very clearly about, and everyone who's ever crossed my path knows exactly how I feel about them, as a company, it's way more tricky. And there is no textbook for how to do this. I can tell you that our teams are hard at work to create a protocol for how we address this and how we make decisions fast, because when these world events slap you in the face, the team members want you to act yesterday. And of course, they want different things depending on their position on the issues. So we're trying to figure out a protocol that will allow us to act faster and look out for our gongsters.

That's our first mission in all of these events. You know, whether they need expanding their medical insurance or just taking some time off to process certain events. There's so many things going on or donating to certain causes, et cetera. But we want to do this so thoughtfully and definitely make it so that people realize that we have the best intentions, we're looking out for our gongsters, and we're not trying to create any sort of separation or favoritism amongst different groups within gong. So it's a really, really tricky thing to balance. Again, as an individual, it's a little bit easier. As a company, it's terribly difficult. Especially when you're public and you have all the other pressures coming in.

And so I can't imagine, I mean, my little 15-person company, I struggle with sometimes knowing what to say, when to say it. I mean, you basically, what you just explained is what I have tattooed on my arm here, which is when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. And that, to me, is the idea that privilege isn't that you are given what you have, right? But that's what it feels like. It's like, I didn't earn this. Now, privilege is that when I wake up in the morning, I don't have to worry about what I'm dressed like so I don't get sexually harassed. Privilege is when I get pulled over by the police, I don't worry about getting shot. That's privilege. And to not recognize that and not do something about it and with it, I think, is a disservice to yourself and to the community.

So I appreciate you leading the way there on that. So let's kind of get back on a little bit of the track of the business side of the house. And I'm curious your perspective on sales and marketing and how you would define the two roles right now with where we are today, right? Because you talk a lot about how you pull a lot of inspiration from B2C to apply to B2B. And the personalization of marketing is really what we're seeing, right? The B2C marketing is so personalized at this point. I mean, Instagram has me figured out. I mean, the algorithm on Instagram, pretty much everything I see an ad for, I'm like, I want that. I'll buy that, right? PayPal connected by. And so that is obviously bleeding into the B2C, B2B world with artificial intelligence and intent information and all that other stuff.

So with where we are today, how would you define the two roles of sales and marketing? And where does one end and the other begin from your perspective? I think it's hard to draw the line in a generic form because every company and business and category have different needs. I'll give you a simple example. If your company has a PLG or a product-led motion, a sales team has a very, very specific part in that. But in a traditional enterprise sales motion, sales has maybe a much bigger part in that or a different part in that. And that also means that marketing has a different part. In PLG, you're pushing the customer to take action themselves. In an enterprise sales motion, marketing is actually bringing prospects to speak with human salespeople.

So it changes based on your category and based on what the goals of the business are. I will say that sales are where the ultimate personalization happens, right? Because a good salesperson knows how to speak and uncover the pains of the customer and pinpoint the exact things in their product or service that are going to answer those pains. And that is really hard to do at scale, which is why large enterprise deals are sold one by one and we're not taking bulk orders just yet. So that's the sales experience. Now, marketing needs to get to that point where sales have the opportunity to do that one-to-one personalization. And to do that, we have to start with one-to-many mass marketing and then go to one-to-few ABM programs and eventually do one-to-one people-based ads and event experiences and direct mails and, of course, emails and web experiences that are highly personalized to drive to that sales experience.

So there's no artificial separation between sales and marketing. And I would also add customer success to the mix because today, customer success are just as much salespeople as people with sales in their title. Because in SaaS, that's kind of the viable model. That's how you stay in business, by keeping your customers retained and adopted and happy and making sure that they expand and upsell and cross-sell and all that good stuff. So these are all parts of the same funnel and we have to operate like this three-headed dragon of marketing, sales, and CS. If you operate in silos, if each dragon stays in their own den, it's never going to work. You're not going to create the magical experience for the customers.

You're going to end up asking them the same question 10 times. You're not going to know who's using what and who's doing what. And I haven't seen successful organizations build in silos like that for a very long time. Yeah, no question. I think there was an optive word that you used there, though, when you related it to sales, which was good sales professionals. Good sales professionals engage, ask the right questions, have context around the information. My fear right now is that we are turning most of the quote-unquote sales reps into robots. So basically, marketing, right? With the sales cadence tools, right? I'm not naming names, but all these tools that allow sales reps to push one button, send out a million emails, and basically act like marketing.

So my fear right now is specifically for the SDR rule and the BDR rule that, yes, the ones who elevate and leverage these tools the right way to engage and put that human element before it hits your inbox. Those are the ones that are going to survive and thrive in the future. No question about it. But do you see, with the current construct of the predictable revenue model and how we have it formatted right now and how most of the SaaS world is following along on that suit, do you see us basically beating sales out of the equation and really turning most of what sales is right now into marketing? No, that's not how I see it at all. Here's how I see it. And there's a few angles I want to approach this from.

First, just a couple of days ago, I was giving a talk to this CMO school group, and they were asking me about our tech stack and the different automation tools that we use. And I'm like, don't worry about all that stuff. The tech stack, it will never replace strategy. It will never replace quality execution. A tool in the wrong hands is going to allow you to take a bad email that is not engaging anyone and send it to more people. A bad tool, a tool used in the wrong way is going to let you take a piece of content that nobody wants to read and spam more people with it. Why would you want to do that? If anyone out there listening to us right now feels that a big part of their day, they're acting like robots, they're clicking to send a preset cadence or email to a bunch of people they know nothing about, here's a newsflash.

You will be replaced by the robots. We are building the robots right now to replace you. Okay? How do you know if you will not be replaced by the robots? Congratulations. If you are actually doing something that requires you to use your brain actively every hour of the day to figure out what this person is trying to solve for today, how can you be helpful to this person? What would they love to hear from you about? That will not be replaced by the robots anytime soon. So that's what you need to do. And we want to help salespeople focus on what they're good at and what the world needs of them to do, which is customizing their approach and solving problems for customers that robots cannot solve at scale.

And sending the same darn email to 2 million people, you don't need to hire a human being to do that. We've got you covered. And all those static cadences, they're not helping either. They're just, again, taking that power of evil and putting it in unequipped hands. So without giving too much away, I can say that Gong is about to disrupt that world as well. If you actually tune in to our event, Celebrate, coming up on November 15th, you can go to celebrate.gong.io to sign up. That's celebrate.gong.io. We are actually going to unveil the next stage in prospecting software and what will that look like and how it will be one-to-one customized and not one-to-a-million. Because there are not 1 million people with the exact same needs out there.

There's a million people with a million different sets of needs. And once you start using reality to figure out what they need and reality to give them what they need, then you're starting to create human value and not just being replaced by a robot. What's up, everybody? I know you're enjoying this conversation. John does a great job with genuine curiosity on these episodes, and our guests consistently bring the heat. We want to take a moment here and let you know that you've got an opportunity, an opportunity to become better than you were yesterday. And you can do so by gaining access to all of JBSales' content, all of their training, tips, techniques, tactics, and takeaways can be yours for $1 a day.

$365 for the year gets you annual access to everything, including our private Slack channel for members only, which you get access to all of us directly 100% of the time, 24 hours a day. And then at the same time, you're going to get access to our biweekly Ask Me Anything sessions, where you can bring real deals to the table and get the help that you need where you need it. This is very, very important. Sales reps that invest in themselves are often found at the tops of their leaderboards. Join us today and get the help you need to become the seller that you deserve to be. That URL, one more time, is joinjbsales.com. Let's get back to the show with JB and our guests for this week. How do you get somebody to care enough, though, to do it the right way?

And I know that's going to, you know, an easy answer to that is hiring, right? But there is that point when, you know, you get somebody out of school, you hire on good things. But, you know, to genuinely care, I call this the give a shit factor, right? Like when Morgan came to me, Morgan Ingram, right? I tell this story a lot. He came and we started building cadences using our approach and all this other stuff. And he was doing really well. And his results were pretty good. And then they kind of leveled off. And he came to me and he said, John, you know, I'm a little worried. He's like, you know, I'm doing, I feel like I'm doing all the right stuff, but I'm not getting the results I would expect.

He's like, what do I need to do to get to that next level? And I said, well, Morgan, your results are going to change until one thing does. And he said, what's that? I said, until you start giving a shit. And he said, what? I go, look, I know you give a shit about your job. I know you give a shit about, you know, working here. But until you genuinely start caring about that person on the other end of that phone or the other end of that email and think of them as a person and having empathy for what they're going through on their day-to-day basis and what they're being told by their boss and what their husband or wife or partner is doing, you know what I mean? Like until you really look at them as a person, you're not going to change because you're going through the motions with those numbers.

So how do you, as a leader of a rather large organization growing rather rapidly, how do you instill the give a shit factor? Because you can't always hire the perfect person who cares deeply about this. I mean, you're hiring a lot of people as you scale here. So how do you implement the give a shit factor so that what you just said there is true and it's not just going through the motions? So I'll try and go beyond the obvious and cliche hiring stuff that you already alluded to. So here's one quote I really like from our CEO, Amit. He said, we build a product so great that a mediocre go-to-market team could sell it. And we build a go-to-market team so great that they could push a mediocre product.

Now, once you have both of them, the sky's the limit. And that's one clue to how to go about building this thing. And the difficult realization is that you have to make sure that everything you build is really fantastic. The product has to be amazing. Otherwise, even the best salespeople are going to struggle to push it. And anyone who's tried to market or sell a mediocre product knows that you can fool some of them some of the time. You're not going to be able to fool all of them all the time. It's going to be a leaky bucket. The customers are going to leave you. And you're going to be a frustrator. The competition is going to eat your lunch. You're just going to end up leaving and consider that chapter of failure in your career.

So you need a fantastic product. Now, anyone who's had a fantastic product or built a fantastic product knows that those products never sell themselves. You need a fantastic go-to-market team. And that means amazing marketing and amazing sales and amazing CS and amazing support and amazing ops and amazing enablement and all that stuff. You can't drop the ball on any of those. So that's one sort of operating principle, which in our book, that's called Want More. We are always positively discontent. We are trying to outdo ourselves and be a little bit better than we were yesterday. And teams who drive that sort of behavior, I think, can change individual behaviors, right? We get these kids out of school, like you said.

They've never really worked at another org before, or they've worked at one organization that didn't do anything remarkable for their career. But then they get this amazing experience at Gong, which many of them call, this is like the best MBA I could ask for, being an SDR and a salesperson or a marketer at Gong. You see what great looks like. You see how to build something inspiring. And then you take that experience and you've got it for the rest of your life. So I think putting those operating principles in place, putting the leadership in place that knows how to drive that, and that creates a virtuous cycle. Because the business succeeds, the people succeed, the salespeople are making lots of money, lots of money.

We are recognized as some of the best marketing in the industry. We're recognized as the category leader with the product. It creates this virtuous cycle, which is obviously the opposite of the vicious cycle. When all these things fall into place, then most of the time, the snowball is going to keep rolling in the right direction. So to get to that fantastic spot in all the products and all the teams, you talk a lot about experiments. And I'm curious how you look at things at Gong. Because we look at things similar here at JV Sales, specifically around there's no more real strategy for us. Everything for us is an experiment. And we come up with a hypothesis of how it's going to add value to what we're trying to accomplish.

We put a beginning and an end to it. So could you kind of explain your approach to experiments within Gong to get to it? Because there's a lot of failure to get to that fantastic level. So how do you build an agile organization and look at experiments at Gong? I think it starts with the approach and tolerance and expectations for experiments and failure, which in some environments, I feel people are not given the liberty to experiment and fail. And they're afraid that one failure and they're out. And so they don't end up doing better work. They end up doing very little work because anyone who's ever created something knows that it comes with a lot of trial and error and experimentation, which by definition means you will be making mistakes and failing a big portion of the time.

I can't count how many campaigns we've sent out that kind of duds, you know, probably not catastrophes, but should I have spent that money elsewhere on something else? Maybe. Did I learn something out of it? I certainly try to. And that makes it worthwhile. So, you know, as the old saying goes, you either win or you learn from your mistakes. There's no losing. And if you have that mindset and if you set that mindset from leadership down to the team saying, folks, I expect you to do 100 experiments this year, maybe 10 of them will be a great success. And that'll cover for all the other learning tuition that we have to pay on the others. But you have to do these experiments. In product, there's a famous saying that says, if you're not embarrassed by the product that you push out to market, you push it out too late.

Now, at our scale of Gong and with how businesses rely on Gong as a mission-critical system, we have to up our standard for how much we can break on the way and how much embarrassment we can tolerate. But do we ship something out when it's pixel perfect? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. We've learned this, that by shipping something out early, in the first week that it's out in the field, we get so much product feedback that's 10 times more valuable than keeping that product in the lab for another three months. Trying to perfect it with a bunch of product managers and engineers scratching their head, trying to guess what customers are going to want, how they're going to use it, and what's going to break.

Push it out there. The customers will show you what's breaking. They'll show you what they're using. They'll tell you what they want. And within one week, you'll get that feedback. It would have taken you months to figure out in the lab, and you probably wouldn't have come up with all of it because you don't use it like a customer. And so the same goes for product. The same goes for marketing experiments, right? We're not going to get every word in every piece of content pixel perfect. We're going to push it out there. If we see that there's interest, we're like, okay, we're on to something. We'll keep tweaking and optimizing that. And if it's dead in the water, we'll move on. Was the Super Bowl an experiment for you?

Absolutely. Super Bowl was experiment. We did the first one in 2021, and we set up expectations that this would be a long-term brand awareness play. And we feel we achieved that. But as a bonus, we also got some short-term pipeline and revenue results that were very, very encouraging. We had our record week for pipeline creation on Super Bowl week of 2021. We never had a week with so much pipeline created. It was insane. And six months later, when we tracked those opportunities created during Super Bowl week, we saw a very significant amount of incremental revenue that was created from those opportunities. So that gave us appetite to repeat that experiment in 2022 and try to scale it up a little bit.

So we doubled our investment in 2022. And then earlier this year, we did it. We got better at measuring the long-term awareness stuff. We actually did surveys in three cities where we broadcast a commercial. We did a before and after survey comparing us and other players in the markets to see if people had heard of us before and many have only heard of us after. And we did a bunch of things on connected TV and digital and others that were great. We didn't fully replicate the short-term success that we saw last year. So that was definitely a learning. Nobody got fired for it. It was an expensive experiment. I'll be the first to admit that. Will I do another one next year? Maybe, maybe not. There's so many opportunities, even just within sports sponsorships that are knocking out of my door every day from car races to basketball and baseball and football teams that are looking for sponsors and stadiums that are looking for names and so many things you could be doing.

So we'll do what we think will work for our customers. We'll keep experimenting, see what works. I love it. And with that, the experiments, short-term, long-term focus, long-term awareness, I think there's obviously short-term marketing things that drive MQLs so we can pass by. But then there's the long-term brand awareness. And like you said, there's so many options right now. From an experiment standpoint for long-term, how do you measure that? And put some context on this one. I'll give you an example. Like, I decided to jump into TikTok, right? So it was about four months ago at this point. Gary Vee's talking about TikTok. It's the best of the algorithm, all this other stuff. And I'm like, okay, B2C.

And let's go back to the B2C and how it applies to B2B, right? B2C, I can see it, right? I mean, it's the most viral platform there is. And I've been on it and I have the luxury now as the CEO to kind of do my own experiments, right? So my company's kind of running their own thing. And I can now go take a beating on certain platforms and try certain things out. And so I'm like, all right, TikTok, let me see if I can figure this out. And I'm getting my ass handed to me on TikTok. But the way I'm looking at it is, I mean, and I've run the numbers. Within four months, I've got over 2 million impressions, over probably 50,000 comments. But then I have a link tree on my D2C to try to just drive to my podcast.

That's all I'm trying to get people to do, right? See if I can drive some type of connection to that massive brand awareness to an action. And after four months and 2 million impressions, there's like 40 people clicked on the link tree and like 25 of them clicked on my blog. So I'm now saying, look, I don't think there's a short term ROI for TikTok. But I think there's a long term. And the real reason I say that is because you and I now, when we're looking for something on the internet, we Google it, right? Whereas our 15 year old kid is not Googling it. They're searching for it on TikTok. So they're indexing on TikTok. It will be the search engine of the future. So I want to be there hashtagged and ready.

So when people search sales training, eventually when they become buyers, but that's like five to 10 years out. Not a lot of companies have the ability to play the real long game when it comes to experiments like that. So for Gong, with the position that you're at, how do you measure the long term impact of some of your experiments? And what are some of the long term experiments you're playing with right now? Wow, that's so much to unpack there. So let's take a few steps back and try to unpack a bit of that. First, I think what you're seeing on TikTok and you're two years my younger, but it's already showing because I'm not on TikTok, but like any media platform, they want you to stick around for as long as possible.

So they are always going to favor their native content. And we've seen that in the past when, you know, the early naive days, we were trying to pull people from say LinkedIn or Twitter to go read a blog post on our website. And that was like pulling teeth. It is, they make it virtually impossible for you to pull people out of there. So we learned to work with native content and we learned what it means to optimize content that's created on LinkedIn and what it means to optimize it for other platforms. And so I think there's something a little bit archaic, if you don't mind saying so, about the whole attempt of trying to pull people from a 15 second TikTok to go listen to an hour long podcast.

That's not what they built the platform for. They want you to be creating 15 second snippets that people are going to consume on TikTok. You'll probably get millions of impressions if you do that in their native format. So that might be a way, you know, thinking out loud, you can take a podcast like this and pull out 10, 15 second moments, put them out there and just call it a good day if you got the 2 million impressions on those. Most people will not go listen to the hour podcast. It's not even the platform. It's the audience. Like the 23 year olds, I don't think they want to listen to one hour podcast. No, they don't. Definitely don't. And that's what we do. So we cut up this kind of, we put it in TikTok format, but it's, I look at that and I say, okay, cool, it's there and people are consuming it that way.

And, you know, kind of like you said, old school, trying to find some way of connecting. And I guess in your opinion, though, is there a need to connect the mass audience with kind of ROI, if you will, from a marketing standpoint? Because there's very direct things you can tie to online. There is. And I'll tell you how we think about it. So, you know, as a business, we're not a nonprofit. We're not in this for the art. We're not in this for the exposure. We're in this to sell something, a service or a product. We're in this for the business. So shameless self-plug here. One of the ways that we measure these hard to measure long-term awareness brand campaigns is using Gong. I'll give you two examples.

We had our CEO on a different podcast. And with podcast sponsorships, you never know who in your target audience is listening to them. Did that even affect how they reached your company? And we stopped asking, how did you hear about us like in year one of Gong? Because just adding any extra fuel to your form, as most marketers know, is just going to decrease conversion and add friction that we don't want. And people don't even remember where they heard about you anyway. So we set up a tracker in Gong with that podcast name, and we found dozens of mentions of prospects getting on a customer call and saying, oh, I heard your CEO on so-and-so's podcast. Now we go, bingo. We know we're reaching the right audience because people are showing up for demo calls within like three months of that podcast going live.

So that's one interesting way. I did the same thing for Super Bowl. I saw hundreds of customer calls on the two weeks following Super Bowl where the prospect brought up the topic Super Bowl and said, hey, I saw your commercial on Super Bowl last week. So you can measure some of these things. It's not going to be accurate. It's not going to be 100% of the impressions. But it gives you directionally. Like if nobody ever mentioned it, you've got to scratch your head and go, well, maybe that was not the right audience or it just fell completely flat that nobody recalled it. But if you're hearing dozens or hundreds of mentions, you know that you're directionally in the right direction. And you do want to know that because there's so many options of where to invest your marketing, you can't be doing...

We talked earlier about the importance of experimentation, but we only have so many resources of time and money and so much traffic to test this on. So I might have 2,000 ideas for my homepage, but I don't have enough traffic to test 2,000 ideas. I have enough traffic to test 20 ideas. You've got to pick those 20. And so you want some directional evidence that you're going the right direction. So that's... Gong is one way that we do that. And some of it is a leap of faith. Some of it is a leap of faith. And when we hear from our sales leaders and salespeople that they heard about some of our campaigns, someone saw a billboard, another hard to measure example. Someone saw a sponsor, some, I don't know, esoteric event, but they were there and they mentioned it, you know, okay, that was probably worth it because it came up in conversations with our sales calls.

And if you keep your sales team happy, you're always going to be in a better position as a marketing team. Absolutely. Let's kind of finish up on your thoughts on influencer marketing a little bit here. And I bring this up with context using Chris Orlob as a great example. When Gong came out, Gong, Chorus, ExecVision, you know, it was kind of like the platforms. Okay, cool. But Gong all of a sudden shot to the front very quickly. And my opinion of that was it, yes, it was obviously a really good product. But if you were to ask the normal person, tomato, tomato, as far as these, you know, call recording intelligence, I don't really know what it is. It's a market right now and it seems kind of interesting.

But what Chris Orlob was doing with your content as far as grabbing that data and putting it out there and contextualized and helping and adding value, I mean, literally, it skyrocketed Gong to the front, without question, in my opinion. It was everywhere. I mean, I used a ton of that data myself to reset our training. I was like, well, wait a minute. If the Gong data is saying something different than I'm saying, I need to kind of check now what I'm saying. I can tell that, yeah. Right? And so I'm curious with influencer marketing. I think it might have jumped the shark a little while ago with, you know, Fire Island. I don't know if you saw that Netflix series, right? The nightmare that Ja Rule was.

But, you know, they had all these fake Instagram and like, oh, you know, and then it was a disaster. So I think it a little jumped the shark there. But how do you see, in my theory of the advent of the chief evangelist officer, right? Somebody within the organization who doesn't necessarily need to be the CEO, but they need to be the personal face of the brand because people don't trust corporate brands. They trust people. And so how do you see the world of B2B evolving with, quote unquote, influencer marketing? Are we going to be hiring influencers? Are we going to be tying to influencers? Are we going to be leveraging them as a major form of getting out there? What are your thoughts? I think it's a combination of all of the above.

Let me break this down into maybe two main thoughts on that. Number one, I think content marketing and creating thought leadership is by far the easiest and cheapest way to build a strong brand in your field. And teams who do this well make their companies appear to be two years ahead of where they are. I remember in the early Gong days when folks used to meet me at a conference. We were like a 50 person company. And they're like, so what is Gong? Like a thousand employees? Now I'm like, yeah, something like that. I'm like, yes, this was a good day. We're creating so much noise out there and cutting through all the clutter that people actually think we're two years ahead of where we really are.

And I say cheapest because literally this was Chris on my team for three years and then was Devin on my team for three years. And now there's a bigger content team and creating thought leadership. But the strategy hasn't changed. We are putting a lot of thoughts into what content is going to be so valuable to our customers that they would be willing to pay money for it. And that's not just a cliche that we put out there. There's like once a quarter or so, I get an email from either an assistant professor at one of the 50 universities in the States that are teaching sales asking me to license our content marketing to teach in their class or from a head of sales enablement somewhere asking me what it would cost them to pay to use our content in their programs.

And the good news is I always give it out for free. I've never tried to monetize the content because I'm not a media company per se. The media company that we build as a means to an end, and that is to sell product units of Kong. And so as long as they credit us and attribute it, I'm happy for everyone to use it for free. So that's one strong thought that I have on this. And if I move somewhere else tomorrow, I had to build a B2B demand gen motion. I would start with figuring out the content strategy. That is the single biggest rock you can move to a successful demand gen strategy. And then finally, you mentioned the people versus brands. That's something we discovered very, very early on. People prefer, by far, interacting with a person, whether they like or hate what they wrote, whether they agreed or disagreed.

It's way more fun responding to John than it is to JB and associates. You don't want to talk to a logo because it feels like you're speaking to a wall. You want to speak to a person. You want to make them feel good. Or sometimes you want to make them feel bad. Some people do. You want to speak to a person. And that's why we found the strategy of using real people. They don't have to be executives. Chris was a director or senior director on my team. Devin was a manager and a senior manager on my team. And we do also incorporate our executives, like Amit Bendo, our CEO, Kelly Breslin-Ryde, our COO and president. We have a newsletter that goes out in her name to top executives in enterprise. And we use her voice and content that people, her caliber, would want to read.

So we've got to match the persona of who's delivering the content and who's receiving content to create credibility. But definitely do your research and speak their language. It is so, so, so worth it. And that is one of the differences that allowed us to break forward so soon when products were a little more comparable. And doesn't that present a challenge, though, from a leadership standpoint when it comes to individuals, right? Because, you know, from an outsider looking in, Chris Orlub, Gong, right? Holy shit. And then Chris went away, went over on the sales side of the house. And from my perspective, Gong disappeared for a little while until Devin started to build his brand with the content, right?

And Devin then championed it. And this is to the masses. I know your CMO has your CMO audience. But to the masses, right? Doesn't it present a very unique challenge to leadership within organizations to find the person that they entrust that brand with? And then what if that person leaves? What if that person goes? What if they stay? Right. So we don't expect any of these great people you mentioned to stay with us for 30 years and then retire. Right. I got three wonderful years out of Orlov. I got three wonderful years out of Devin. I consider myself very, very lucky. Both for getting all the value that they provided and also, hopefully, in some small way, helping them build their own career and brand as they move on.

And that's wonderful that we now have different companies who got their big break at Gong. I will say that a part of the tactical strategy when any person within the company is using their name on an email or in a social post is to tie it back and think, how do I turn this into a follower of the Gong brand page? How do I turn this subscriber into someone who subscribes to the official Gong newsletter? And that is where the big traffic is. We have hundreds of thousands of subscribers to the Gong newsletter. We have over 170,000 followers on the Gong LinkedIn page. That's more than the sum of all the people you mentioned and their personal followers combined. Wow. Go look at the numbers. So that was always the strategy behind it.

And we do it in a subtle way that even though you're there to read what Udi or Devin or Chris or John are saying, you end up clicking that follow button on Gong. You end up clicking that subscribe button on the Gong email. And now you're in the company list and you're on the company page, which is where we wanted you from the get-go. But we knew it would take a human for you to want to follow and engage with first. So that is the strategy. And we do capture those on the company assets so we don't lose anything material with someone. Yeah, because I think there's so many people, there's so many leaders that I've seen out there that are scared to entrust their brand. Well, good luck getting 170 followers on your logo without incorporating humans.

I haven't seen that done before. Yeah, me neither. And that's why I cringe at some of the reps that I see out there who are doing a really good job building their own personal brands. And the marketing team of that company is mad at them or gates them from saying certain things. I'm like, what are you talking about? Let that person add as much value to the world and build their brand as they can because you're just going to benefit from it. And if you don't let them do it, they're just going to leave anyways. A hundred percent. That's another thing we've done from the very early days. We've not only encouraged every team member to build their personal brand and encourage them to share their experiences, but also help them when they need it.

So if you look at folks like Sarah Brazier, who documented her whole SDR journey at Gong and is now successful AE at Gong, she's built her own personal brand with thousands of followers with little help from the marketing team. But Gong is gaining a lot from her presence out there and it's a symbiotic relationship. More recently, we've had Caspian on the SDR team who's become our king of memes and he's getting thousands of impressions on his daily memes and creating a lot of edutainment out there on social media. He's both educational and entertaining and we all need that break. And we're proud to have him associated with the Gong brand. And I'm sure he's having the time of his life building his personal brand under that umbrella.

I love it. Super tactical question. Do you have guidelines for brand building at Gong? Do you give people like, hey, here's kind of the guardrails. Like if you're thinking about this type of stuff, then at least come to us and ask before you just post anything. There's, I think, like a two-page social media strategy that every employee signs in the employee handbook as part of onboarding. It's mostly the legal gobbledygook of, you know, you can't disparage Gong or our competitors or your fellow employees and stuff like that. But otherwise, it's really, really open. And we talk about it during onboarding and we show some of these positive examples of team members and former team members who've done this really, really well and built their personal brands.

Hey, any seller will tell you that if you get to that status of building your personal brand on social media, it's going to be so much easier for you to sell. I mean, when someone picks up the phone and you go, hi, this is Sarah Brazier. Like, oh, my God, I was speaking with Sarah Brazier. You just got a celebrity call. Of course you want to entertain that call. And so we encourage that. Honestly, in my six years at Gong, I haven't seen anyone abuse it. There have been, I can count on less than one full hand of fingers, certain posts that we talk to the people and ask them to, to either tweak or remove them because if it was either sensitive information or something in bad taste or just jumping the gun too early on some exciting news, we had a couple of those as well because we prep everyone on news that's upcoming.

But literally, one hand, I can count all those mistakes that happened in six years and we're an organization of 1,300 employees. So bottom line is it is totally worth it. And even as we talked about experiments, a few mistakes will happen. They are a very worthy price to pay for all the good that you see by having such a large number of your employee base be out there on social. I love it. Well, Udi, I think it's pretty evident why most people I talk to, I mean, our partnership with Gong has been awesome. Just working with your team has been fantastic. And, you know, it's pretty evident that, you know, almost everybody we talk to who is associated with Gong has nothing but great things to say about working or being associated with Gong.

So you just appreciate what you do and what you're out there trying to elevate people in the profession in general and do things for the right reasons in a lot of ways. So thank you so much. I appreciate it, John. We love our partnership with you as well. Absolutely. And I know you have, so talk a little bit about, you got Celebrate. I know you don't want to, you don't want to tell too much here, but you'd spoke a little bit about some of the cool stuff coming up here. You want to give anybody a little preface to what's happening? Yeah. So, you know, three months ago when we did the Celebrate Roadshow, we stopped at Seven Cities. We launched our reality-based forecasting product back then called Gong Forecast.

And we now, three short months later, we have over 100 customers, 100 paying customers who are using Forecast every day, and they will never look back because they have much more accurate forecasting. They spend far less time across the team forecasting. And most importantly, they're all aligned on the forecast. So we're going to be sharing what's up next for Gong Forecast and some of the traction our customers have seen in the last quarter, plus a bunch of exciting news about new product releases. I won't say more, but you're all welcome to join us for the virtual event. That's at celebrate.gong.io. It's November 15th. It will be well worth your time. So looking forward to seeing you sign up and attend.

Love it. And Udi, do you want to point anybody in direction for you personally? Do you like your LinkedIn or anything? I'm the LinkedIn. I'm nowhere near cool enough to be on TikTok, but I am hanging out on LinkedIn. There's only one Udi Littergore there, so you can easily find me. I'm happy to connect with all of our listeners. Perfect. Well, again, thank you so much for coming on, Udi. I really appreciate the conversation. And good luck with what you're launching up and your next experiment, if you will. Thank you very much, John. Thank you all. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did and got something out of it that will get you maybe a little think differently or do something a little different in your own organization.

And look, like I always say, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day goes or how bad you think it is, if you make somebody smile today, you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much for listening. I'll see you on the other side. Thank you so much for your time today and listening to the podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts in the industry with over a million downloads, and I can't thank you enough. To keep the momentum going, if you could go to your favorite podcast platform and leave us a five-star review, I would greatly appreciate it.

In return, I will answer any question that you have on Instagram. Hit me up there at John M as in Michael Barrows with a video question or a DM, and I will get right back to you, I promise. And last but not least, if you're looking for training, I'm adjusting my training approach this year, and I'm actually going to be delivering training to the masses. I'll be delivering live training the first and second week of every single month with our two marquee courses, filling the funnel and driving a close to anybody who wants to join. And it includes membership in our on-demand platform with weekly AMAs. So you can go to jbarrows.com slash open to check out the details. Thanks again, and have a great day.