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- [00:00]
Ty Degrange
Foreign. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty degrange. I'm really excited to have Udi Ledergore back on the pod. Udi, how are you?
- [00:18]
Udi Ledergore
I'm great, Ty. Thanks for having me. Again, excited to be here.
- [00:21]
Ty Degrange
It's awesome to have you back. And we have Kermit as well, which is a fantastic addition.
- [00:27]
Udi Ledergore
Never leave home without him.
- [00:28]
Ty Degrange
I will spare the audience my average, at best Kermit impersonation.
- [00:33]
Udi Ledergore
Please don't.
- [00:34]
Ty Degrange
I always love the background and the Gong reference and it's just we had such a great conversation on the last pod and yeah, I think you have some news to share with the audience and wanted to give you the microphone to share a little bit about what you've been working on.
- [00:50]
Udi Ledergore
Yeah, thanks for letting your audience be amongst the first to know about this, but my new book, Courageous Marketing just came out April 10, so the book subtitle is the B2B Marketer's Playbook for Career Success. And my goal here is to help both up and coming marketers and seasoned marketers take the boring out of B2B and actually create inspiring marketing. And I aim to show you how to do it. But it's not just for my lessons of almost 9 years at Gong and 20 years in B2B marketing. I also interviewed many world class CMOs that have led marketing organizations at companies like Salesforce and Atlassian and Box and Oracle and Drift and other companies whose marketing has become to be admired. And together we put together what I think are some really great timeless lessons for everyone to learn, even in this age of AI, or rather I should say especially in this age of AI, when we can talk about this. But AI has amazing use cases, but also many ways of abusing it. And I think that best marketers are going to learn how to harness AI for things that it's great at, but they're going to keep their unique human perspective and strong point of view for things that AI can't quite replace us on just yet.
- [02:07]
Ty Degrange
That's awesome. Yeah, no, you're kind of preaching something that's I think really a critical reminder and something that's near and dear to some of the conversations you and I have had and what we see in B2B marketing. And I think it's easy for people to kind of get, get caught up in following playbooks, following competitors, getting overly fixated on maybe metrics and data. And AI is very important for efficiency and you need to be tracking it. But I think there also needs to be kind of a human component. So maybe, yeah, let's drill down a little bit more into kind of what do you kind of define as courageous and talk a little bit about the content side of it. What? Tell us more about it.
- [02:50]
Udi Ledergore
To start the discussion, I suggest we start with what I found. Together with help of other marketers are some of the most common reasons that marketers and marketing organizations fail. And from there we can try to climb out and see what it takes to actually make it. So. There are a few problems that I don't think get talked about enough and let me maybe just talk about two of them today, which I cover a lot in the book, and provide ways of how to get out of one of them, which I think most marketers will identify with. I know I do, is we were brought in to solve a problem that marketing can't solve. And the most common of those problems is lack of product market fit. I've been at companies and practically every marketer I know who's been at startup companies, right? This does not apply if you built your entire career on large enterprise companies who are selling in millions and billions of dollars. This does not apply to you. But if you've ever worked for a startup and things just never got off the ground and you were let go or had to leave because you couldn't make marketing work, you couldn't help sales, you couldn't drive revenue, it might not have been your fault. It might have been because there was lack of product market fit and getting marketing going in the best of situations where there's an amazing product that customers love and they can't get enough of. Even then, it's pretty darn hard to do great marketing. It's absolutely impossible to get marketing off the ground. If you don't have a product, you don't have a story. Nobody sees the value or the differentiation in the product. It's impossible for marketing to succeed. And I think pretty much every startup marketer you'll talk to can tell you a horror story about a company he or she joined in that situation. So I think that's number one. And being able to identify that situation, ideally before you join the company, so you can actually make the right decision and move on to another company where you can actually help them with your skills and experience. But even if you missed that opportunity and you joined a company identifying that situation where they don't have product market fit, I call it the one thing marketing can't fix. Because we're magicians, we can do a lot of Things there's one thing we can't fix is product market fit.
- [04:59]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We've had some really good conversations with, you know, from the Reforge alumni community to our own experience, just from being internally at a startup or as an agency ourselves, and boy, have we seen it. I was just communicating this requirement to a group today. Exactly that. And I remember writing out post product market fit. In other words, you've achieved it. It's really a requirement for us to be able to bolt in and help you with, you know, proper affiliate influencer marketing. So I just love where your head's at with that. And it's, I think for us it's become a table stakes reminder. But I think for a lot of marketers and a lot of people in the ecosystem, it's really important and bears repeating. And I think you hit the nail on the head.
- [05:46]
Udi Ledergore
Let's talk about the second problem, Ty, that I see many flavors of and I think it's a real weight on successful marketing and that is playing it safe. And in one of the flavors of playing it safe, it's death by committee. And I'll explain what I mean. So a lot of marketers, when they come in and they're either early in their career or just a little insecure, all of us were there. I know I was there. We like to do things that will fit in. We like to fit in where we are. We like to make people happy. We don't want to be contentious or controversial or polarizing. And then we tend to do things that we like to call we're following best practices. Now, here's the problem with best practices. By the time anything becomes a best practice, it's a completely ordinary, boring practice. And if you follow it, you will get boring, ordinary results. Now, I'm not here to tell you that you've got to go against the grain in everything you do and ignore best practices just because they are best practices. That would not be smart advice. But to take every best practice with a huge grain of salt and think about how good of a fit is to the problem that you're trying to solve would do you very, very well. I'll give you two quick examples. When at Gong back in 2018, we created our first intentional visual identity. We looked at dozens, if not hundreds of other B2B websites. And you know what the most common color scheme of them was? It was one of my team members called Series A Blues. There were all these kind of smoky subtones of blue. They pair beautifully with Grays and whites. And that's what everyone looked like in 2018. Still, a lot of websites look like that. Why? Yeah, because nobody can hate it. It's very agreeable. Like, nobody's going to look at that and say, I hate it. There's nothing to hate. It is so agreeable that it becomes transparent. You become blind to it. And so when we saw that, we said, well, we could do that, but then we'd look just like everyone else. Or we could take a bolder point of view and do what nobody was doing at the time. Let's take a fuchsia pink, let's take a purple, and then slap on a drooling bulldog as a mascot and. And that'll become our visual identity. And I'm oversimplifying the process, of course. And I can talk about how we actually decided on our brand personality, which what I just described was a good portrayal of. But a starting point was, let's see, who are we serving? What are their alternatives? What do they look like? What are they offering? And they all look stuffy and stale and boring, and we don't want to be that. So we're going to do the exact opposite. Now, that requires a certain courage, because I. I had to put up with internal discussions, internal arguments. I knew I was not going to please everyone. I intentionally did not ask for too many people's opinion because that's where good ideas go to die. There's a famous saying by a British author that I looked in all the parks and I couldn't find any monuments erected for committees. And that is so true when you think about it. When you look at monuments, they're usually for a single woman or a single man, sometimes on a horse, that they did something great. I haven't seen any monuments for committees, and that's because they rarely produce inspiring work. Just think about that next time when you're thinking about how many people to get involved in a very important decision where wrong point of view will take you forward. Those are really hard to achieve in consensus.
- [09:05]
Ty Degrange
I love where you're going with this. It's. The two big takeaways for me is kind of like knowing there needs to be kind of an owner and inspiration and a voice of a brand, of a campaign, of an idea in a lot of different cases. And I think you're absolutely right. It's something that it's easy to. We see it in so many examples in businesses and clients and internally working in an organization, that inspiration and that authenticity, that real value can get eroded if you run it through everybody in the org or too many individuals. And I think so really, really important reminder. The other, the other piece I think is critical is, you know, those best practices at some point weren't neither thought of yet or they were novel or there's everything goes through kind of waves and cycles in marketing and in business. And I think that it's such an important example to think about that when you are crafting some of these things, right? Like something that was a no brainer a year ago, six months ago, even more recently, you know, may not be as obvious or you need to be. I think it's just an important, those two things are such an important reminder for people in marketing in particular B2B SaaS. But in any type of marketing that you've got to think about that before you, before you necessarily launch into your strategy 100%.
- [10:29]
Udi Ledergore
I, you know most companies would say that they're, they're leaders in the product space, they're doing something nobody's done before their innovators and then they build a go to market strategy that doesn't portray that innovation doesn't portray that being first at something because they're doing what everyone is doing with the same boring press releases about all the new features they released and the same boring websites and the same boring colors. Imagine if you'd coupled innovative, inspiring marketing and sales and customer success along with an innovative product, then the sky would be the limit. Our CEO at Gong Amit put it this way. He said we build a product so great that a mediocre go to market team could push it to market. And we build a go to market team so great that they could push a mediocre product to market. When you have both, that's when the sky's the limit. And I think a lot of organizations fall short because they are working on an innovative product. Because obviously nobody's going to invest in something that's not innovative. They but then they forget about that innovation when it comes to sales and marketing and they're like let's just do what everyone's been doing. There's a lot more you could be doing to stand out. And great marketing can make your company appear to be two years ahead of where it really is. We did this agong and I've seen other companies doing things with clever brand awareness campaigns in the early days that really make us look two, three, four times bigger than we really are. And that's super important. Especially when you're trying to sell to enterprise organizations. They will not buy from Tiny startups, it's too risky. Nobody there is going to get a medal for buying from a small startup. As they've been saying for years, nobody gets fired for choosing IBM. You want to look more like the IBM in the eyes of those enterprise buyers in the early days. Not by being stale and boring, but just looking big and authoritative and confident. And there's ways of doing that. If you're willing to step out of your comfort zone and scare a few people internally about yes, we're actually going to do this. It could be an out of home campaign, it could be hijacking a trade show traffic, it could be a clever regional media buy for print or TV or radio or anything like that. And most marketers are afraid to even have those conversations because some of those things are going to be a little bit difficult to measure. They're going to make some people uncomfortable, but that's really the only way that you're going to stand out.
- [12:50]
Ty Degrange
Yeah. And when you. The standing out piece clearly makes sense. Right. There's a clear value value in the eyeballs involved. And obviously the engagement that works is there. Are there elements to it that kind of lock kind of involve the brain and psychology a little bit or in terms of just the. What are some of the observations you saw with gong that that seemed to work. What that kind of went beyond the eyeball? Obviously the volume's important, but in particular when you're talking about punching above your weight.
- [13:21]
Udi Ledergore
There are a few things I think one that, that most marketers can learn from is how we almost religiously separated our content marketing from our product marketing. And this is worth diving into for a minute or two. So there's been talk more recently, although it's not a new concept, but still I see many teams ignore it for various reasons. What's been become known as the 95.5rule and the 95.5 rules for those who aren't familiar with it, is it came out of the LinkedIn Research Institute and it basically states something that most of us marketers understand. At any given point in time, only about 5% of companies in our addressable market are looking for a solution like ours. Only 5% in any given quarter. I can do the math for you, but that's not important right now. But once you understand and believe in that, then you realize that you really need two different marketing plans. You need a marketing plan for the 5% who are in market right now. You need a different marketing plan for the 95% who are not in market now. What does that look like for the 5% who are in market, that's the easy stuff. They are in the zone, they are ready to buy, they're looking at alternatives, they understand they have a problem, they understand the category of solutions and they're trying to decide who they should buy. So you should absolutely bombard them with your best sales materials and sales ads and case studies and testimonials and feature comparisons and all that great stuff. But only those 5% are going to respond to that. Here's an example for you, Ty. Let's say you just bought a car last month and you, you bought a car after a three to six month search. You were looking at all the car manufacturers websites and the review sites and comparing the test drives and watching the YouTube videos. Then you finally made a decision and you bought a car. How are you going to spend your time in the next three months? Are you still going to go into those car manufacturers websites and read about their latest features and bells and whistles and read more reviews about other cars? Of course not, because you're not in the market for the near future. Now imagine your audience if you're a B2B company and they're not in the zone, they're just like you after you bought your car. But all they see from you is we have a great sale and look at how we're better than our competitor and read about our happy customer. What are they going to do? They're going to unsubscribe, they're going to unfollow because you're tone deaf to what they need from you right now. And so what the best companies do, they have a separate marketing plan for the 95% who are not in market right now. Why we need it because we want to stay top of mind. We want to create a memory link between value that we can create now and our brand name so that in six months or 12 months or 24 months when that prospect is in market, when they move in the 95% to the 5%, we are the first name that they think of. And the way of doing that is creating valuable content that is not pushing your product in an obnoxious way. And the way we did this at GONG was with the GONG Labs content series and the GONG Labs content series. We provide value. We've been doing this for the last eight years. We provide value to sales professionals and sales leaders everywhere. Increasing the connotation between sales value and GONG and creating those memory links without obnoxiously selling our product. So the type of content that we put out is what actually works for a first sales call. What's the best opener? Did you know that asking how have you been Keeps people on the law on the line much longer than asking how are you? I just gave you a 5 second tidbit without selling you anything that you can go use on your next cold call. We showed salespeople that by thoughtfully swearing on sales call, especially if your prospect signal that they love using that language first, you can increase your win rate by 8%. I just gave you free money. I did not sell you a product. You don't have to buy my product to use that, but go try it on your next sales call. And that's the type of content that we put out for all these years and created a huge groundswell of thousands and thousands of GONG fans who stayed tuned in for this content every week. And when it came time for them to buy or recommend or influence the purchase of a revenue intelligence platform, guess who was the first name that they thought of? It was gong. Because they've been getting all this value from us from all these years to end this little story. You asked about sort of the psychological motivations behind this. So Robert Cialdini, who wrote Influence the six Pillars of Human Persuasion many years ago and they still apply today and they're as fresh as they were when he first put it out. His number one pillar of influence in the book is reciprocity, which basically states he, you give before you ask. And that's what a great content strategy does. It provides value. It gives a ton of value. Before ever asking someone to sign up for your webinar or take a product demo or take a call with a salesperson and that's what the best companies are doing.
- [18:09]
Ty Degrange
I love it. I think I have a note, an idea of where you're going with this answer. But you know, for there's, there's obviously varying flavors and slices of B2B SaaS. Can you talk a little bit about where you've seen this, where obviously GONG is a great example, but you know, are there stages where it's harder to implement? Are there stages of organization where there are sizes, committees become more required and apparent and part of the game? Is there a stage where this kind of clicks in and works better than another?
- [18:40]
Udi Ledergore
Yeah, that's a great topic, Ty, because the strategy obviously has different flavors depending on the state and maturity of the organization. So back in 2018, when we were a very small company, I could get two people in the room and make a lot of pretty big decisions without Being concerned about who's going to get insulted or offended that they weren't invited. As organization grows and more people are expected to be involved, then it becomes a lot more crucial to really define and agree on the decision making, team and structure. So there's several of these, there's Raski and there's Rapid. I like RAPID just because of its simplicity. So for those unfamiliar, RAPID stands for recommender, approver, performer, influencer and decision maker. And there's several of these models out there. What matters is you pick one. And now when I'm trying, I'm leading a project right now in Gong that I needed to make clear what my role in it is and make clear what other people's roles are. Because this, this is one of those projects that has the potential to get into an infinite loop of people seeing it and then saying no, actually I don't like it, but they don't realize that, well, it's okay that you don't like it, you get to provide input, but you don't get to make the decision or even the recommendation on this project. And I want that to be very clear on the onset of the project that this is your role. So there is one decision maker to that project, there's one recommender, there's, there's several people who provide their input and then there's going to be another group of people that are going to perform the output of the project. But that's something that I didn't have to do when we were just a tiny team and we kind of all knew that we're going to do whatever it takes now that there's so many people and so many people want to be involved and we want to make sure they're involved in the right capacity. One of my first slides in presenting this project is here's the RAPID for this project. Any questions on this? Because I want everyone to know where they fall into that and I think that helps us. It doesn't completely eliminate the risks of getting into a loop of people saying, yeah, but I don't really like this and maybe we should revisit this. Yes, but remember, these are the recommenders, these are the decision makers. We've heard your input, we take it into account, it might not make its way to the final product that we're building here.
- [20:53]
Ty Degrange
That's amazing. No, that's helpful. And I've been a Rasky kind of guy for quite a while and I've heard of rapid, but being reintroduced to it is, it's not rocket science in terms of difference. But I think I like simplicity. I think it's important to simplify, and I think there's some magic in there, for sure. We talked a little bit about this in terms of being able to punch of your weight and create content that people are willing to pay for. I love the direction of that. When it comes to category creation, how do you kind of think about that as it relates to courageous marketing?
- [21:30]
Udi Ledergore
So we did this in 2019-2021 when we went out with our category slogan of goodbye opinions, hello reality. And you almost had to squint to find the Gong logo much smaller at the bottom of those ads, because at that point, we were the only ones doing revenue intelligence. I wanted people to take home the message, we need revenue intelligence. This is this new thing that's going to help us do business based on data and not gut feelings and hunches. And I knew that if they searched up revenue intelligence, the first brand they would find was Gong. So I was confident enough not to put my logo at the top of those ads. I wanted them to remember the revenue intelligence stuff. And there's great examples of that from other industries. The best one that I found so far is as far as you can get away from tech, and that is the diamond industry. So back in 1947, De Beers, the largest diamond conglomerate in the world, had a problem. It was sitting on a huge stockpile of diamonds, and there was not enough demand to keep the price. Price is high. So they went to their ad agency, awa, and they said, you need to help us create more demand for diamonds. And so they asked one of their youngest copywriters to come up with. To come up with Frances Garrity. That was her name. They asked her to come up with with a line, and she. She couldn't come up with anything. She went to sleep praying, God, give me a line. And she scribbled something on a piece of paper. And she woke up in the morning, she found that she had written a diamond is forever. And that became the slogan for De Beers. And if you look at their first ads from the 1940s and 50s, that's all the ads say. There's no De Beers logo or name on it anywhere. And it almost looks like a public service announcement. You should buy a diamond for your engagement ring. You should buy a diamond for Valentine's Day. You should buy a diamond for birthdays and Christmas and all that. And they were putting out guides for how to evaluate diamonds and how much money to spend on a diamond. And it all almost reads Like a public service announce announcement. But it's just De Beers building the diamond retail category. That category, that slogan years later, was named by Advertising Age as the slogan of the century in 1999. This was weeks before Frances Garrity passed away at the ripe old age of 83. So she lived to see her recognition on that.
- [23:40]
Ty Degrange
I love that, Edie. I love that story. I so appreciate it. And I think couldn't be more, gosh, relevant to a lot of the things that we're observing firsthand in our world. I mean, the whole concept of trust and authenticity. We've talked about it. It's something that we're kind of obviously leaning heavily into. We're observing the data that supports there really has to have that in order for partner marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing to work. It's kind of where a lot of the things we're seeing, and we're obviously seeing it transcend and kind of bleed into and be foundational in paid ads and organic. How much of it are you seeing is really trust and authenticity related as well? Not to try to bolt onto what you're saying, but it seems like there's a real reoccurring kind of steam bubbling up here that you're calling out, similar to some of the things we're talking about, which is great. Yeah.
- [24:36]
Udi Ledergore
Again, I think especially for startup worlds, getting a few folks to raise their public profile and speak with their own voice and name and profile picture on LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever your audience is goes a really long way in creating that trust. You're far more likely to get any sort of engagement, let alone a discussion on a human profile than you are on a corporate profile. Like, who wants to argue with the logo? That's insanity. But if a person with a name and a photo puts a message out there, you can love it, you can hate it, and you're more likely to communicate with that and you're more likely to trust that than an anonymous logo that you don't know who's the team of people behind it.
- [25:18]
Ty Degrange
If you give somebody a chance to argue online, they're going to love it. Right? They're going to love to argue with the human.
- [25:23]
Udi Ledergore
Hold on, honey, I can't come to bed now. Someone on the Internet is wrong. That is a favorite pastime of all of us. But we're a lot more likely to argue with a human being than with a logo, because that's just unsatisfying.
- [25:36]
Ty Degrange
Oh, it's amazing. It's amazing. It's. It's such a I think it's going to be a great resource and I love the way you're going at it from a place of like frameworks and actionable things and you're talking to real, you know, successful boots on ground, CMOs, marketing leaders about this topic. So I think it's something that people are going to be pretty excited about.
- [25:57]
Udi Ledergore
I hope so.
- [25:58]
Ty Degrange
Where can people check it out, purchase, learn more about what you're doing in the book.
- [26:04]
Udi Ledergore
So the two best ways are first, first, Courageous Marketing is available everywhere where books are sold. So Amazon, Barnes and Noble just type up Courageous Marketing and my pretty little red and white book should show up for you and love to hear what you think about it. So once you've read it, I'd love to see your honest review on Amazon. And number two, if you want to follow me for more stories and see where I'm speaking and come join one of the events, just follow me on LinkedIn. That's Udi Lettergore on LinkedIn. There's only one of me there. I guess the world wasn't big enough for two. So I'm happy to connect with you and see you at one of the upcoming events where I'd be speaking about the book.
- [26:40]
Ty Degrange
I love it. I think we're going to get a lot of people excited about it. I certainly am. I can't wait to get, get it all dialed in and get copy. And I think you're going to have a lot of people, especially in B2B SaaS, clamor for this because it's needed. I think there's just, we talk about it a lot. You know, there's so much noise, prices are higher in terms of just media generally. There's this stuff isn't easy necessarily and like you said earlier to kick it off. Like you can't just follow same old best practice. You can't just take a look at a few things here and there. It requires a really, you know, it requires courage as you outline in your book.
- [27:14]
Udi Ledergore
Absolutely. Well, thanks for this opportunity, Ty, and thank you for everyone who listened to us today. Would love to connect on LinkedIn and hear thoughts on courageous marketing.
- [27:23]
Ty Degrange
Let's do it. Let's keep, let's keep the courageous marketing going. It's good for everybody. And thank you, Hoodie. Appreciate you coming on and congratulations. I can't wait to read it.
- [27:30]
Udi Ledergore
Thank. Thank you.
- [27:31]
Ty Degrange
Thanks everybody.