Your Marketing “Best Practices” Are Killing Creativity

Summary

Marketing Trends Podcast: "Your Marketing 'Best Practices' Are Killing Creativity"

Host: Stephanie Postles | Guest: Udi Ledergore | Release Date: March 5, 2025

In this compelling episode of Marketing Trends, host Stephanie Postles welcomes back marketing powerhouse Udi Ledergore to discuss how conventional marketing best practices may be stifling creativity and hindering extraordinary results. Through an engaging dialogue, Udi shares his insights, experiences, and strategies for fostering a bold and innovative marketing approach, emphasizing the importance of courage, authenticity, and strategic thinking in today’s dynamic landscape.

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1. The Downside of Marketing Best Practices

Udi opens the conversation by critically examining the concept of marketing "best practices."

Udi Ledergore [00:00]: "Most things that fall under the category of best practices are, in reality, boring practices. By the time something becomes a best practice, pretty much everyone is doing it. And so you can't expect extraordinary results by doing ordinary things."

He argues that following standard best practices often leads to mediocre outcomes because it promotes uniformity over innovation. To achieve exceptional results, marketers need to deviate from the norm and embrace unique, bold strategies.

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2. Cultivating Creativity and Courage in Marketing Teams

Stephanie probes into how marketers can rekindle their creative spark amidst a culture of caution.

Udi Ledergore [00:18]: "Before you can be courageous, you probably want to make sure that you're in the right environment that will value that and treasure that, rather than making you walk on eggshells. Because that's what I think kills most of the creativity."

Udi emphasizes the necessity of fostering an environment that encourages risk-taking and values innovative ideas. He notes that many marketers leave companies that do not support creative expression, underscoring the importance of aligning with organizations that prioritize and nurture creativity.

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3. Choosing the Right Company and Leadership

A significant portion of the discussion centers on selecting the right company and CEO to support courageous marketing efforts.

Udi Ledergore [06:25]: "Pick the right company, and part of that is picking the right CEO."

He outlines criteria for evaluating potential employers, such as assessing product-market fit and the CEO’s vision. Udi shares practical tips like reviewing customer feedback on platforms like G2 and Glassdoor, and directly engaging with prospective buyer personas to gauge the viability of the company’s offerings.

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4. Innovative Content Marketing Strategies

Udi delves into the importance of content marketing that genuinely adds value, rather than just serving as a sales pitch.

Udi Ledergore [13:59]: "I would go again and create content marketing that really, really brings value to people regardless of them buying my product."

He highlights the effectiveness of leveraging proprietary data to create insightful and shareable content. Udi shares anecdotes from his time at Gong and Panaya, where data-driven content sparked significant conversations and engagement, proving that valuable content can organically build brand awareness even on a limited budget.

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5. Strategic Hiring for Enhanced Creativity

Udi discusses unconventional hiring strategies that prioritize potential and domain expertise over traditional experience.

Udi Ledergore [21:07]: "Bring a content creator who lived in your buyers or audience's world."

He advocates for hiring individuals from diverse backgrounds, such as sales professionals, who bring firsthand experience and authenticity to content creation. Udi shares the success story of hiring Vince Chan, whose unique background in event management injected creative energy into Gong’s marketing efforts, leading to innovative and engaging event experiences.

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6. Learning from Marketing Failures

Udi recounts a significant misstep during a campaign supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, illustrating the importance of sensitivity and swift action in crisis management.

Udi Ledergore [36:04]: "We had to quickly issue an apology email coming from my name because the earlier one was kind of from the Gong team or someone else on the team."

He explains how an attempt to merge social responsibility with a transactional email campaign backfired, resulting in negative backlash. Udi emphasizes the lessons learned about the importance of aligning campaigns with genuine intent and being prepared to respond rapidly and appropriately to mistakes.

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7. The Role of AI in Modern Marketing

The conversation shifts to the impact of AI on marketing roles, with Udi offering a balanced perspective on automation and human creativity.

Udi Ledergore [51:54]: "I do think AI is going to take away jobs in every sector. It's going to take away the most mundane, easily automated or replaced jobs."

He predicts that AI will streamline repetitive tasks, allowing marketers to focus on strategic and creative endeavors. Udi advises marketers to embrace AI as a tool that complements human ingenuity, fostering a collaborative environment where AI handles routine work while humans drive creativity and innovation.

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8. Upcoming Book: “Courageous Marketing”

Udi introduces his forthcoming book, "Courageous Marketing," which encapsulates his philosophy on bold and innovative marketing practices.

Udi Ledergore [45:46]: "The book is out on April 10th. It's called Courageous Marketing."

The book features 12 chapters filled with practical advice, stories, and insights from top CMOs. Udi collaborated with marketing leaders like Tricia Gelman and Michelle Tate to refine his ideas, ensuring the book serves as a comprehensive guide for marketers aspiring to lead with courage and creativity.

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9. Lightning Round Highlights

In a fast-paced segment, Udi shares quick insights on influential leaders, admired brands, memorable ads, and impactful advice.

• Influential Marketing Leaders:

  Udi Ledergore [59:12]: "Carolu Dietrich is amazing. I love John Miller. I really like stuff that Dave Gerhardt and Tricia Gilman are doing and need one more. Sydney Sloan now G2."

• Admired Brand:

  Udi Ledergore [59:46]: "Disney completely out of the B2B world. There's nobody in the world better at storytelling than Disney."

• Notable Ad:

  Udi Ledergore [60:00]: "The British department store Harrods does Christmas commercials every year that are complete tear jerkers."

• Memorable Advice:

  Udi Ledergore [60:29]: "When you're planning something, whether it's an email campaign or a webinar or anything you're doing, what is the big idea?"

He underscores the importance of a central "big idea" that drives all marketing initiatives, ensuring that each campaign is impactful and resonates with the target audience.

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10. Conclusion

Stephanie wraps up the episode by expressing her excitement for Udi’s book release and providing information on how listeners can connect with him.

Udi Ledergore [63:09]: "I'm on LinkedIn, the only Oodie letter gore, so I'm very easy to find there. And if you want to read more of all these crazy stories, just go to Amazon or Barnes and Nobles. Look up courageous marketing, and I'll see you there."

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Key Takeaways:

1. Challenge Best Practices: Marketing best practices often lead to mundane results. To achieve exceptional outcomes, marketers must innovate and step outside conventional norms.

2. Foster a Creative Environment: Creating an environment that encourages courage and values creative risks is essential for nurturing innovative marketing strategies.

3. Strategic Hiring: Prioritize potential and domain expertise over traditional experience. Diverse backgrounds can inject fresh perspectives and drive creative solutions.

4. Value-Driven Content: Utilize proprietary data to create authentic, value-driven content that engages and resonates with the audience.

5. Learn from Failures: Sensitive and swift responses to marketing missteps are crucial. Authenticity and alignment with genuine intent are paramount.

6. Embrace AI: AI should be viewed as a tool to handle repetitive tasks, allowing marketers to focus on strategic and creative endeavors.

7. Central Big Idea: Every marketing initiative should be driven by a core "big idea" that ensures cohesive and impactful campaigns.

8. Continuous Learning: Staying adaptable and open to new tools and ideas is key to thriving in the evolving marketing landscape.

Notable Quotes:

• On Best Practices:

  “By the time something becomes a best practice, pretty much everyone is doing it. And so you can't expect extraordinary results by doing ordinary things.”
  — Udi Ledergore [00:00]

• On Marketing Reactions:

  “The worst reaction to your marketing is indifference. If nobody's paying attention, if nobody has a strong reaction to it, it's not going to do anything except being agreeable and trivial.”
  — Udi Ledergore [02:26]

• On Content Marketing:

  “Any great marketing has some polarization and controversy is actually a really, really good thing.”
  — Udi Ledergore [16:34]

• On AI and Creativity:

  “If you're not afraid of learning something new, leveraging something new, and having a new co-pilot work with you, this is the most exciting time that's ever been to be in marketing.”
  — Udi Ledergore [55:09]

Final Thoughts:

This episode of Marketing Trends serves as a vital reminder that while best practices provide a foundation, true marketing excellence lies in creativity, courage, and the willingness to innovate. Udi Ledergore’s experiences and insights offer invaluable guidance for marketers aiming to break free from the mundane and drive their brands forward with bold strategies and authentic engagement.

For those seeking to elevate their marketing game, Udi’s upcoming book, "Courageous Marketing," promises to be an essential resource filled with practical advice and inspiring stories from leading industry figures.

Transcript

[Udi Ledergore]

Most things that fall under the category of best practices are, in reality, boring practices. By the time something becomes a best practice, pretty much everyone is doing it. And so you can't expect extraordinary results by doing ordinary things.

[Stephanie Postles]

How do you get marketers to think outside the box again? How do you get them to be courageous?

[Udi Ledergore]

Before you can be courageous, you probably want to make sure that you're in the right environment that will value that and treasure that, rather than making you walk on eggshells. Because that's what I think kills most of the creativity. I think that's one of the biggest reasons that marketers joined the wrong company. There are no boring industries where you can't create compelling content. It's about really looking and seeing what can you create that your audience will derive a ton of value from that you would want to consume if you were in that audience, and that potentially they would be willing to even pay for. And yes, people pay for content, right? Every one of us has subscription to either New York Times or YouTube Premium or Spotify or Netflix or one of those. We're paying for content. Why don't we hold ourselves to that same bar of quality when we're creating content?

[Stephanie Postles]

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Marketing Trends. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, and today I'm super excited to be bringing Udi Ledergore back on the show. UDI has led the marketing at five B2B startups, including being the first marketer at Gong, then became the cmo. Now as the chief evangelist at Gong, Udi is a marketing powerhouse known for his bold strategies and his ability to humanize marketing and brands at scale, which is why I'm really excited to dive in with you today. Udi, welcome back.

[Udi Ledergore]

Thanks, Stephanie. I'm excited to be back.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah, it's good. New host, though, new vibe. It might be different. We're going to go into all these different places now.

[Udi Ledergore]

I got an upgrade. It's all good.

[Stephanie Postles]

I know. So I want to start right out the gate with things that'll probably resonate with almost anyone listening. I know you are known for courageous, bold marketing, and so I wanted to start with what are some old, outdated, lame marketing practices that just get to be left behind.

[Udi Ledergore]

I think most things that fall under the category of best practices are, in reality, boring practices. In other words, by the time something becomes a best practice, pretty much everyone is doing it. And so you can't expect extraordinary results by doing ordinary things. And so you have to think about a strong, fresh point of view that isn't being Done. And the problem with that is that it sounds great. But on paper everyone says, yes, I want to be bold and difference. And then they hear some crazy ideas and like, oh, no, but that's going to upset some people. We can't do that. But that's exactly why it actually has some potential to work. And if you look at all the great marketing, all the marketing that you and I and others admire, they have a strong, different point of view that they are not afraid to move forward with. And that comes at a price of alienating some people. It's not going to be for everyone. But here's what I say about reactions to marketing campaigns. The worst reaction is not that you get haters. Every great campaign has some haters. The worst reaction to your marketing is indifference. If nobody's paying attention, if nobody has a strong reaction to it, nobody's excited about it, it's not going to do anything except being agreeable and trivial. And so as my team and I used to always say, if you're not afraid to hit that post button or that send button because you know you're going to piss off some people, you just don't know how many and how bad it's going to be, then it's probably not going to be a killer campaign.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yep. Do you think marketers have gotten scared over the years? I mean, I just think about like this cancel culture that came and everyone's just getting offended by everything and then trying to wipe brands off the map and people off the map. And I feel like there was a couple years that where everyone was just like really timid to do anything. Are you still seeing that now and like, how do you get out of the way?

[Udi Ledergore]

I think that was always the case. I wish I could say it was new. I think it was always the case and some of it is for really good reasons. Right. Even people who in their day to day feel like they're pretty courageous maybe when it comes to work, like, I don't want to lose my job and you can't really lose your job for posting something agreeable and trivial. That's a very popular opinion. You might lose your job when that fails to create the pipeline and brand awareness that you wanted. But that seems like a longer term thing. And so posting something that is could be perceived as problematic because it's controversial or polarizing or unconventional. That's where I think people get tripped off and like, oh, I don't know that we have the culture here to do this. And I can say that even at Gong, I'VE seen tolerance for some of these things change over time. Because in the early days, we were this young, reckless toddler of a startup and we could get away with a lot. And a lot of the stunts that I pulled off back then would not be well received today. And over the years, as we came to serve some of the world's largest Fortune 50 companies, I've also been told to tone down some things that maybe make us look less professional or not the right perception that we're looking to send out into the universe right now. But the good news is, for the vast majority of startups, which is probably a lot of our listeners here today, you can get away with almost anything. And if you are in the stage where you're just trying to get heard and notice that you exist, trying to sound like these big fat organizations like a bank or an insurance company or an analyst firm, and you think that that's what's going to make you sound authoritative and a leader in your space, it's not. It's going to make you sound boring and stuffy and outdated.

[Stephanie Postles]

I feel like the space we're in right now is like converging into sameness because everyone's now using ChatGPT to create their strategies and ideas and how they're talking and like, oh, use this person.

[Udi Ledergore]

That is in this awful.

[Stephanie Postles]

Like, it's all becoming the same. And so, like, how do you get marketers to think outside the box again? How do you get them to be courageous? I'm sure a lot of people come to you and they're like, yeah, Udi, I want to be courageous, but I don't know how to because I've been in this, you know, structure for so many years. Like, how do you get them to break out first?

[Udi Ledergore]

It's probably not for everyone, you know, and it's a matter of personality, both of the marketing leader, but also in the environment that they're in. So I think before you can be courageous, you probably want to make sure that you're in the right environment that will value that and treasure that, rather than making you walk on eggshells, being afraid to trip, because that's what I think kills most of the creativity. I have a book that's coming out, Courageous Marketing. I talk about it there of starting your career by picking the right company, and part of that is picking the right CEO. So do you want to dive into those two for a minute?

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah. Yes, I do.

[Udi Ledergore]

So I think the. The two things there when looking for a company, the number one thing I look for is their either existing or potential product market fit. Because that is something that very few marketers can really help fix or create. And I am one of a giant group of marketers who's made that mistake before of joining a company without product market fit. And then anything you're going to do is probably going to fail and it's not going to be your fault, but it's still going to be a stain on your resume and it's going to be a story you're going to have to carry with you for every future job interview. Why it didn't work it out that company, and trying to convince them that it wasn't you, you did all the right thing. But the company had no product fit and there isn't any marketing that can fix that. And so things that I would do to look at product market fit, whether it's existing or potential, is if there are customers, go read their reviews on G2. If there's employees, go read their reviews on Glassdoor if there's. Because they will tell you if they're feeling that they're selling a dud and there's no hope for this company, especially those who have to leave because the company maybe didn't hit a milestone and had to let people go or people just wanted to sell a product that actually works and has competitive differentiation. So you can see those things and pick them up on Glassdoor, you can read them on G2 from actual customers. If it's super early stage and it's a pre product or pre revenue company, then go talk to some of the beta users, go talk to people who are even just the buyer Persona that the company is claiming to want to sell to and pitch them the idea. See how excited they are. If they're like, oh, that already exists or that's not a real problem or I wouldn't pay money to solve that, then those are all warning signals that you want to look into. So that's on product market fit because I think that's one of the biggest reasons that marketers joined the wrong company.

[Stephanie Postles]

What if they don't have customers yet?

[Udi Ledergore]

If they don't have customers, I would go talk to the buyer Personas. Let's say you're considering joining a company that's going to sell to CMOs. Pick up a CMO from your network and go ask them, hey, I'm thinking of working for this company. They're solving this problem. They're going to make podcasts for cats. Is that a priority for you? Would you pay for that? Is one of your top three things that you need to solve this year. And if you get a string of no's after you've talked to three of them, then maybe, maybe it's the next big thing, right? If you told me Twitter's business model before they came out, I would have thought it's complete nonsense. I still don't get it. But it worked fantastically, right? So what do I know? But in many cases, when we're selling a B2B product that has to solve a problem and make their life easier, it usually ties into one of their top three priorities. If it's not helping the buying Persona in their top three priorities in a measurable way of either increasing revenue, saving costs, saving time, or reducing risk. If it doesn't do one of those four things and it's not time to run their top priorities, it's going to be really, really difficult to sell. So I would go have those talks, just grab a friend for drinks, say, hey, I want to run this idea by, see if you would buy this. Because sometimes, and we all have met these founders, they are in love with their solution and now they're in search of a problem to solve. And sometimes that works, but not always. So that's, that's what I would say on the, on the company and product market stuff. And then getting closer to what you originally asked about picking the right CEO. So talking to a CEO and it's easier to do if this is not a first time founder and CEO, but someone who's had a marketing leader before them. And then ask them, like, what worked well, like you worked with a couple of marketing leaders, what did the best ones do and what do you consider success in this role? And I want to hear that what they're expecting to see a success in six or 12 months is something that I know how to do. They might be expecting me to do something that's just not in my skill set. They might be asking me to do something that sounds way too small for a role that I want to fill. And through that, you can also understand their appetite for risk and being different. And by having them describe what they see as success, even if they're a first time founder, like what they think they want from marketing. And then talking about this, well, here's typically my approach when I come into a company and I do A, B and C, like, do you think that could work here? Would we get the resources to work on this together? Would we have the appetite for trying some things that not everyone's going to love? And then you can read through their body language and through their answers. Is this going to be someone that you're going to enjoy working with? You're going to spend most of your working hours with your manager? It might be. Might as well be someone that you want to spend that time with.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yep, totally agree. So, I mean, when thinking about choosing these companies, I feel like most of this is applicable for, like, startups, but does this also work in the enterprise stage? Like, can you be bold in a big enterprise company that it's not a startup and you're not maybe the first marketing leader to join the team?

[Udi Ledergore]

So I will answer this with a big grain of salt because I've never joined a large enterprise. Gong is the largest company I've ever worked with that are tiny little, what is it, 1400 or so employees now? So I haven't joined a large startup. But if you look at enterprises, definitely the bold moves are rarer there, but some of them are known for it. There were years where I think everyone was hailing Wendy's social media for being provocative and so good. Right. And there's other brands that do this occasionally. And you look and he's like, oh, I'd love to work on that team. And so I think in some ways it's even easier identifying this in a larger enterprise because if they have a history of doing these fun things that you connect with even at their stage, that's a pretty good assurance that you're going to be allowed to continue doing that fun stuff for a while, as long as it's still effective. But if you're looking at one of these, I don't know, pick any big bank and it's all kind of stale old marketing. Chances of you turning that around into a fun brand are existent, but not great.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah, Yeah. I just saw, I think it was IKEA put out a campaign where they were doing one of those dancing trends that was like, totally from, like years ago. But they were kind of making fun of themselves of like, we don't need to be first and it's still funny. And it was like, it hit. It was so good. I'm like, okay, whoever's leading that team, they know how to make this fun and they don't have to keep up with the trends and they're like, poking fun at themselves while still, you know, having, like, good culture around it. It was really good. So, yeah, you can talk about that.

[Udi Ledergore]

Yeah, they're great fun things like that. If you look further back, this is probably now 15 years ago or so. But Domino's Pizza, which was a very stale brand at the time and was getting a ton of complaints about their product, they came out with this really cool self deprecating campaign where they were reading bad reviews of their product, kind of like the mean tweets where the celebrities read them. So it was kind of in that vein. And then the CEO came on and said, okay, it's time for a change. Like we've heard you and we're taking responsibility and we're coming out with the new recipe and the new digital experience that now we're all used to, that we can track our pizza from when the pepperoni is being put on it until it lands on our doorstep. That's when they started that campaign and it won them a lot of great publicity for taking that ownership and not trying to quietly change as many large corporations do because they don't want to upset anyone.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yep, yep, that's awesome. So when going back to your gong days, you built a lot of buzz around the brand. You mentioned earlier that you know, some of the things that you did back then would never work now or they wouldn't hit in the same way now. What would you do all over again if you didn't have budgets for a Super bowl ad and you had like a scrappy marketing budget, but you wanted to create buzz around a brand or a product? Like, what would it look like for you to create, you know, buzz in today's environment?

[Udi Ledergore]

I think without a doubt I would, I would go again and create content marketing that really, really brings value to people regardless of them buying my product. That was the single biggest lever of starting our demand generation. And I've seen it work so well at other companies. Think of the early days of HubSpot. They created all this content about inbound marketing, early days of drift. They created all this content about different types of product marketing and inbound marketing related to chatbots and other stuff. And Gong is still doing this. But early on it was such an important lever because when nobody knew about us and I didn't have media budgets, super bowl commercial came way, way later. We were five year old company, Super Bowl. But in those early days when I was on a shoestring budget, I had to create content so good that people wanted to organically consume it and share it with others. And we started surfacing these insights from analyzing our first customer sales calls, we found things like, well, salespeople who speak less than 50% of the time, they have the biggest chance of getting another sales call and closing that deal. And There was no data published on that before. We found that the big. The best cold call opener is not, is this a bad time? Or how are you? But actually, how have you been? Because makes you sound like you've had a previous relationship with this person. By publishing these things and showing the data behind it, it sparks a conversation. Because now people are attacking each other, saying, marilyn, this is what we were talking about this morning. Now there's the data that shows this. Or you can imagine what happened when we published a few years ago that salespeople who occasionally swear on their sales calls have an 8% higher win rate. And the Internet went berserk over that because most people were coming out using their very colorful vocabulary to make a point of. That's the I was talking about. And then other people were appalled that we were suggested to use this kind of language in a professional setting. And we were just there, like, rubbing our hands together. This is a marketer's dream to have everyone have an opinion about your content. When was the last time you saw a good piece of B2B marketing that really got polarized opinions on? That's what you want to care. That's what you want to create. And as I always say, the worst response to your marketing is indifference. You want to spark a conversation. You want people to have different opinions. You don't want to piss people. People off for the sake of pissing them off. Right? Because I don't believe that any news is good news and any press is good press. You actually do need most people to love you and want to work with you, at least respect you. But having some polarization and controversy is actually a really, really good thing. So content marketing is easily the first thing I would go do.

[Stephanie Postles]

Again, I like the idea that data can be found in places that you might not be looking. You were getting data from your own sales meetings and being like, oh, this is interesting. Instead of what I see a lot of companies doing is like, let's go out and survey for an end goal of something we want. Like, we want to make sure we can tell this story. And then here's our PDF telling the story that we already were going for. And it's like, it doesn't resonate because it's like your whole aim was to get that data that you wanted, and then you had a survey and, like, it wasn't organic. And so I like the idea of, like, data is, like, hiding in places that it's probably all around you all the time. It's just, you can have to tell A story with it.

[Udi Ledergore]

I think there's a hierarchy of what you can use to make exciting content. And absolutely, like you already guessed, Stephanie, right at the top is using your own proprietary data and using it in a way that alludes to what your product could do for your customers, but without becoming a sales pitch in their face. And I think Gong is a perfect example of doing that. And people sometimes tell me, oh, but that was easy. You worked in a quote unquote sexy industry like that, you could pull out all these great insights about swearing on sales calls, like, are you kidding me? When I came to the company, it was about recording sales calls. How sales, how sexy is that? Before Gong, I worked at a company called Panaya which did ERP upgrade automation. That's about as an exciting thing, as a root canal. But we managed to make exciting content for that company by using our proprietary data to analyze every new version of SAP and later Oracle and later Salesforce that came out and producing a very actionable two page sheet for IT directors whose job was to keep their systems up to date, showing them what's going to break in the next upgrade, what they need to focus their testing on and which pieces of code they need to fix. And guess what? They loved it so much that if SAP came out with a version and we were taking a little too long to come out with our support pack update, we used to get inbound emails saying, when are you coming up with that piece of content? We're waiting for this to see how this new SAP upgrade is going to impact us. So there are no boring industries where you can't create compelling content. It's about really looking and seeing what can you create that your audience will derive a ton of value from that you would want to consume if you were in that audience, and that potentially they would be willing to even pay for. And yes, people pay for content, right? Every one of us has subscription to either New York Times or YouTube Premium or Spotify or Netflix or one of those. We're paying for content. Why don't we hold ourselves to that same bar of quality when we're creating content? And so using your own proprietary data is a great way of creating something that they can't get anywhere else. I think surveys are also good. We've done some great surveys at Gong, but you want to ask questions that are not just important to your sales team for qualification, but would also make a great news story. So again, going back to an old example of something I did at a previous company at Panaya, we were trying to get more SAP users in our database so we could market our product to them. And back then it was not as easy as it is today to get a list like that. So we thought, okay, what kind of survey could we do that would want, everyone would want to read the survey and even take part in it to get early access to it. And then we saw, well, what do we ask them about their salaries? And so I send out the survey. The email subject line was SAP Professional, are you being underpaid? And it got an amazing open rate because everybody wants to know if they're being underpaid. And then we told them, hey, take this five minute survey and you'll be the first to receive the report when it's out. And we will benchmark your salary against others in your field and you can see what's going on. And when we designed the survey, we started from the end and we thought what would make a great headline for the PR that goes out once we have the survey report? And unfortunately we guessed correctly that we'd find a gender gap as we do find in almost any field. So we made sure to ask about the respondents gender to put into the report. And unsurprisingly, I wish I could say we were surprised. Unsurprisingly there was a big gender gap between men and women doing the exact same work with the same experience. And that got quite a bit of press as you can imagine. It is the world that we're living in. But it also got a bunch of people to download the report and we use that as a lead back. So finding something that people really want to get value from regardless of whether they buy your product, that's how you start a great content piece.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yep, yep, I love it. How do you train team members to think like this? Because I mean, when you're saying it it sounds easy. It's like, yes, make good content, make it resonate. But how do you actually train people to think that way and be like, think what a customer wants, even if they're not buying your stuff. What are they searching for? How do you do that?

[Udi Ledergore]

So it's part craft, part art, part science. But to be practical, I'll give you two tips that I think are often overlooked. Number one, something that I've always done on the gong marketing team and I've seen some marketing teams do it, but not all separate product marketing from content marketing. The common mistake of having the same person or the same team create both content marketing and product marketing is going to kill the creativity of your content marketing. Because they're always going to divert to product marketing and bad product marketing at that. Because when you're, let's say, producing a listicle of 7 things you could do to improve your life and number two is buy our product and it'll do that, that's just terrible. Product marketing.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah.

[Udi Ledergore]

Now if you gave a content marketer the same job, they wouldn't have to mention their product on that list at all. And definitely not number two, because they're not doing product marketing, they're actually creating content marketing. So that's the short version of that tip. And the second one is bring a content creator who lived in your buyers or audience's world. So when I hired Chris Orlob as my first content marketer, I hired him straight out of a sales job. This was his first marketing job. Three years later, I took Devin Reed, who was a salesperson in the mid market team at Gong, never worked in marketing. I gave him his first marketing job and both of them knew how to write in a salesperson language. I was never a salesperson. I could not write a piece like Devin and Chris could. So when they start a piece by saying something like this, it was the last day of Q2. I was 150k short on my quota. I didn't know how I was going to make it. I had these opportunities in my pipeline. Here's what I did and got across the finish line. Only someone who's lived in my audience's shoes can buy, can write that way with that conviction. I could not do that. And so that, I think, is another very, very big mistake that marketing teams do. They bring, quote unquote, professional writers who've written about healthcare and cybersecurity and, I don't know, groceries. That means that they're not an expert on any of those. They can write with good grammar and style and punctuation, but that doesn't matter. I'd much rather get someone who really knows their domain and can speak the language and with authenticity of what my audience is looking for. Because otherwise their meter is going to work from a mile away and they're going to see, oh, they just got a content writer to Google a few tips and put together something so trivial that we all know. No, I got salespeople who were in your shoes. They know the life that you're living, they know the problems that you're struggling with. And now they're offering you some new solutions to them that are not about buying my product. And that's how you reach that golden area of Creating content that sounds authentic, that provides a lot of value and doesn't wreak of a sales pitch.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah, man, this is so good. So like practical of, I mean one, I think about a lot of different companies that I always see content and product marketing together.

[Udi Ledergore]

I don't know because it kind of makes sense. Right? They're both creating content.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah. I can't think of one company where they're really separate and like oh, that's yeah, just very, very practical.

[Udi Ledergore]

I'm working with a few companies that have realized the benefit of separating those team and they're, they're seeing the results.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah. Does it look like with these two teams, does it look like content marketing is starting first and then it goes to product marketing? So it doesn't like or like are they just operating in two silos? It's like two different teams where they're like doing their own thing or what does the engagement between those two teams look like?

[Udi Ledergore]

So as far as who starts, I think that depends on what the company needs. And here's what I mean by that. When I often get asked by founders or first time marketing leaders, what should I hire first? So I, I asked them the following three questions. One, are you selling to a highly technical audience like engineers? Two, is your product highly technical and leads a lot of technical explanation? Number three, are you completely struggling with explaining the value of the product to your buyers? If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, you should probably start with product marketing because that seems to be your biggest problem. When I came to gong, we did not answer any of those questions. Yes, because we were selling to sales leaders, probably the least technical buyer I can imagine. We were selling a very simple call recording software. So not a very difficult product to explain. And number three, when we showed it to sales leaders within the first 30 seconds, their jaw dropped when they saw that we could search for when their competitor came up in a sales call and they're like oh my gosh, I get it, I need this. So we didn't answer yes to any of my three questions. And so I started with content marketing because I could because the value prop and story were simple enough at that point that most people could just get it and I didn't have to put a full time product market on there. I'd say on the other side of the spectrum you see companies selling to engineers or selling cloud usage optimization products, something super technical or inventing a completely new category that is challenging to explain. Then you'll want to start with product marketing to make sure that you nail that message, at least initially. And then in parallel or a little bit later you can start working on content marketing. Once you have both teams working, they can work on similar themes. So if, let's say this quarter we're launching a new product, I want content marketing to focus on content related to the problem that that product solves and skills that the same people who will be using the product might want to obtain. And then I want product marketing to of course do the whole product launch and all the product materials related to that product so they're not completely siloed, but their KPIs are different and their work dynamics are very, very different.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. It makes me think too like hiring, like building teams. I mean I like your idea of like I hired someone who actually was in sales and they knew how to speak the pain points and I had them come in and write like how do you think about maybe unconventional hiring strategies to bring in different kinds of people who maybe you normally wouldn't bring in? Where you're like most people are like going to hire a content writer and here you are bringing in a salesperson to write something instead. Like how do you think about that?

[Udi Ledergore]

So specifically for content and probably other areas where a certain expertise is needed, then I do look at experience. So in the case of content writer for sales, it was pretty easy to make that choice because I brought someone who really understood sales. I think it's much easier teaching someone how to wrap up their decent content into a demand gen campaign. But I don't know how to teach that domain expertise in the domain that I've not lived in. And then there are some very technical roles like product marketing. If you don't understand your buyer's domain, you will struggle as a product marketer because it's not just about building a product launch, Gantt and Chart and all the activities. It's like what is the actual value that we're selling or how is this making our prospects lives better? If you don't understand the core of that, anyone can do the presentations and all the cadence around that. That's something we can all learn in a few weeks. Not, not to diminish product marketing at all, but the best product marketing does all of that really well, but also comes with deep domain expertise. But then if you put aside for a minute those types of roles that do need deep domain expertise, there's plenty of roles where I absolutely look for potential over experience. I can tell you a story that demonstrates that. So back in 2019, we were putting together our first big customer conference called Celebrate. And our events team was completely understaffed at the time. I had one person on the team and Russell, our head of demand gen, said, we're going to need more working hands. But we didn't have an open headcount. So he said, Russell, when he was not working a gong, he was moonlighting as a director of a dance company, a hip hop dance company. He said one of our dancers would be a perfect fit to come help us for three months as an intern to put together the the conference. I said, sure, we can budget for that. So he brings over Vince. So he calls Vince. Vince Chan was working on his cousin's Filipino food truck, Senor Sisig, which make amazing burritos, by the way. So you should absolutely try them. They've got a few locations in the city. And he called Vince, he was on the food truck, said vince, we've got this project at Gong. I think you should come help. Do you want to do this? And he said, like, sure. He had never worked in tech, let alone in marketing before. And Vince came and helped out prepare for the event. And at the event he was doing all the live tweeting on social media and he was helping speakers find their rooms and setting up the stage and doing so many things that by the end of the event, the entire marketing team had fallen in love with Vince and we wanted him to stay. And a few weeks later he was still helping out with the post event stuff and social media and stuff. And Russell came to me and said, udi, I think we should hire Vince because I know we're looking for someone to full time manage social media and Vince has never done this before, but we've all had a chance to work with him in the last three months. I think he would quickly learn and be an amazing addition to the team. And I said, I think you're right. And so we didn't even do a formal interview. We talked to him about what we're going to do. We kind of let him pilot it for a couple of weeks and he was crushing it. And Vince is still a gong today. So this is six years later. Vince is there. He's managed everything from social media to marketing operations to he built our merchandise store. He's done all these things for the first time because he's a fast learner. He's a hungry person in the best sense of the word that just wants to get the job done and he will break through walls and find a way to do it. And that's Just one of many people that I hired to the team where I looked at their potential and I saw something there that was way more important than their experience.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yep, yep. I love that. I feel like that's. I've heard this theme now in a couple of the interviews of like, it's harder to hire just based off, you know, this thing or you're good at this tool because everything's just changing so quickly now. It's like now instead you have to just be curious and like a lifelong learner and able to rapidly pick up new tools and ideas and concepts and like self motivated. It's like, seems like it's just a very different skill set. People are desiring now instead of like, you know, HubSpot or whatever, like you're proficient in X, Y and Z. It just exactly seems like a new world.

[Udi Ledergore]

Look, if you have 25 tech systems in your stack and you need someone to come in tomorrow and keep the lights on and they've never done this before, I would probably favor someone with some experience, especially with the more complex system. But having this ridiculous laundry list of, oh, you need five years of Twitter experience and three years of HubSpot, come on. Some of these tools didn't exist five years ago. And the tools that are coming out tomorrow are way more important than those old things. So you've got to balance between those things. And extreme example I like to give is if you need brain surgery, you don't want to give someone their first chance of doing this on your brain. You're probably going to go to the more experienced surgeon. Right. So there are cases where it's clear that you do need the experience. But fortunately for us in marketing, the stakes are never that high. And if you're doing something like social media or event management or content creation, there's so many opportunities to hire someone with the right state of mind and hunger and learning abilities and they're gonna crush it way more than someone who's been doing this for 20 years maybe has gone stale.

[Stephanie Postles]

Do you ever ask people about like their hobbies or. Cause I know you have an interesting background. I think you were in theater and I think you do magic and you have like these other interests that you said previously when we were talking of, just like it influences your marketing and you know, how you lead and so like how do you think about finding out that information? Do you care about that? Do you ask people about these things to see like what other things might be influencing them?

[Udi Ledergore]

So you're right. And here's how I do It. So I think having varied interests is a really, really good thing for anyone because some of the biggest opportunities to do something creative is when you connect two or more seemingly unrelated things to create a great experience. I'll give you a simple example. So one of the people I hired from an unconventional background, Danny, I hired him first as a SDR at Gong, and later when we opened up our first full time events manager position, he interviewed for that position alongside other external candidates that had a lot of event management experience. But he gave Danny the job because I love that his background before coming to Gong was managing merchandise for Rock Band on their global tours. So he worked with bands like Panic at the Disco and others, touring with them and selling their merchandise. And he saw how show business worked. And most B2B marketers, they know how to make sure that the napkins match the flowers at the events that they're doing. But they have never had that scale of filling a stadium and seeing what kind of things and shenanigans they put on there. And I love that he brought that show business background with him. And that allowed us to create some pretty remarkable event experiences during his time. From everything from bringing special effects like smoke machines and lighting to our stages at our conferences for dramatic effects, to taking the smallest booth that we were sponsoring at someone else's show. And we were thinking how to bring it alive to life. And he said, oh, you know on how on our website we have these bubbles that pop. What if we brought some bubble machines to the booth and we let people have fun popping those bubbles like, I love it, Daddy, can you get it here in like two hours? He said, yeah, I've got a guy, he picks up the phone. Two hours later, we had two bubble machines at the booth. We did have to pay for the carpet cleaner cleaning, but it was totally worth it because everyone was flocking by our crazy booth with all these bubbles blowing there. So those are the type of creative moments that I don't expect from anyone. But bringing in these people with this diverse background, just allow them to connect these things together. Because all these special effects is stuff that he'd seen a million times before in showbiz. So he was no stranger to pyrotechnics and smoke and bubbles. But most B2B corporate event marketers are kind of strangers to that.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah. Did you see people copying afterwards? Where next? You know, the next year, everyone has bubbles and it's like, that was so lush.

[Udi Ledergore]

We do see people copying, which it mostly happens with swag when they see. When you see one great booth doing something with swag, they'll want to copy that. So that keeps us on our toes and makes sure that we come up with something even better next year to keep them behind. But, yeah, it's always a compliment when you see anyone copying what you're doing. Just means that they're looking up to what they're doing.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah, no, it was good. We. We were at a conference, I think, with Salesforce back in 2018 or 19. It was like the Forester B2B conference. And we did a live podcasting booth, like a Glass One. And we had people coming in and they were podcasting. It was like our idea, brand new. And then the next year, everyone all of a sudden had booths, and we're like, okay, like, it's not cool. Last year. Yeah.

[Udi Ledergore]

Now you need to come to something new.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah. So, I mean, if you look up your background, people have probably heard a lot of stories of, like, so much success, and you've done so many amazing things and built great teams. But I'd love to hear from you, like, are there any big moments, let's just say, like, failure stories that come to mind that really influenced your career that you'd be open to talking about?

[Udi Ledergore]

Yeah, absolutely. So this was in, I want to say, June of 2020. So this was after the terrible murder of George Floyd and the very understandable rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Everyone's emotions and feelings were kind of raw, and we wanted to do something to play our part in helping the Black Lives Matter cause. And we came up to this point that comes up every quarter where we need to drive customer reviews to G2, one of the review platforms that we use. And the typically how we've done it in the past is we send out emails to a few thousand customers saying, hey, thanks so much for being a great user of our product. It would be super helpful if you took two minutes to leave us a review on G2, and in return, we'd be happy to give you this $25 gift card to Amazon. Go buy yourself bookers. And those campaigns always work without a hitch. Good responses. And someone on the team had the idea of tying these two things together and saying, hey, we need reviews on G2. Why don't we send out the usual email, but instead of a gift card, we'll tell people that will donate in their names to one of the organizations supporting Black Lives Matter. And I approved that campaign because the idea, on the face of it, sounded like it makes sense. It's a way of us to spend a few thousand dollars on a cause that matters to us and hopefully make some people feel good about not having to put any money or work into it. Except two minutes of writing a review and I approved the campaign. It went down to about 6,000 people. And within an hour I got six responses. Some of them were sent to me directly, others came through my CEO and even board members. And all of them were livid with rage. And they said this was the most tone deaf, distasteful, offensive email campaign they've ever seen. They're so disappointed this would come from a company like Gong, which they really liked up to that point. One of them threatened not doing business with us anymore, an actual customer. And one of them, I remember the response was, I hope my black VP of sales didn't get this email and seize this, because this is absolutely offensive. And looking at those six emails, I realized that I completely messed up. And this, this email should not have gone out. And now I had to quickly make a decision of what I'm going to do about it. And so one option is kind of the, the easy option is don't do anything like, okay, so six people got upset. I just talked about this 10 minutes earlier, right? That some people are going to get upset with what you're going to do. Haters are going to hate sometimes. That's okay. I didn't feel that this was one of those times that it was okay. And I had a really strong hunch that beyond these six people amongst the 6,000 that received the email campaign, I was guessing that there's dozens if not more that took offense and not because we said something clever like use an S word on a sales call, but something that they deeply care about. And I messed up. And that those dozens of people either didn't find the time or didn't find the words or energy to email me back. And so that was my strong hunch because if I'd received. If I'd received a hundred complaint emails, it would be obvious I need to do something. But I only received six. But those six were enough for me to realize that there's probably 10 or 20 others behind each of those 10, each of those six that didn't find the time or energy to write. So I decided very quickly, we're going to send out an apology email coming from my name because the earlier one was kind of from the Gong team or someone else on the team. I'm the cmo. The buck stops here. The responsibility is mine. I approved the first campaign. So the apology is going to come from my personal email so that anyone who responds to it goes directly to my inbox. And so the first thing we did is we. We donated $5,000 to four organizations supporting Black Lives Matter causes. And then we sent out an email to report that we had done that. That I realized that that email should not have gone out. That I realized that it hurt people's feelings and I'm deeply sorry about it, and that we're taking measures and learning lessons so that never happens again. And I invited the recipients to continue the conversation with me if anybody wanted to. And that email went out probably in three hours or so of the first email going out in the morning. And I decided to send it out to all the 6,000 people, not just the six who rode back to complaints. And I knew that by doing so, I'm also increasing the visibility of the mistake. So, like with most marketing emails, most people didn't even open the first email. So I didn't even know what's in it. But now I'm sending all those people a second email with a much more provocative subject line of I messed up, which I knew they're going to open. So I knew that I'm increasing the visibility of my mistake. But I still believe this was the right thing to do. And so I sent that email out and I got 66 or so responses to that email. So 11 times the number of responses to that email. And every single one of them was positive. So they came in two groups. One group said, I looked back at the first email. I didn't see anything wrong with it, but thank you for sending this out to clarify in any case. And then the other, bigger group wrote back and said, I read your first email. Something didn't quite feel right, but I didn't quite know how to put it in words. I'm so glad that you figured it out and send out this email. So thank you for making right. Thank you for donating the money. And a lot of them also said, I'm also happy to go and write that review now for you. And so that was a very long day. It was a very long day. But I did learn a few things from it. I learned that a those transactional campaigns of here's a gift card for reviews. They're fine in many, many cases in that give and get is very common in business. It's not fine when we're talking about really important, deep social issues that people care a lot about turning any aspect of that or suggesting that part of that become a transaction really rubbed them the wrong me and I will never do that again. So that was one lesson that I learned there. And I think the second, the second lesson I learned is that my hunch was correct, that if six people complain, you should assume it's 16 or 600 of them that are feeling that way, but they didn't find the time, the energy, the care, or the words to write you back. And so a few of those complainers were very indicative of a much larger group. And then the third lesson was that making a very swift correction went a long way. If, if I had waited another week, people would have simmered and gotten upset that we didn't do anything about it. I'm guessing they would have started posting that offensive email on social media or other channels, maybe even cutting ties with Gong. It could have escalated and got a lot worse. So in that case, working very swiftly to get that response out and extinguishing that fire was absolutely the right thing to do. And it was relatively easy to do because we were at a size and reporting structure where I could quickly just talk with my team and CEO and say, here's what we're going to do. Let's quickly put out a draft, show it to two people, sign off on it, donate the money now, and let's go. Let's go with it. I can imagine how much of a challenge that would be at a larger company where there's committees and it'll take two weeks to get all the people in the room for that meeting. Like, so much damage is going to ensue. And then when you see big companies F up like that and then you're wondering like, why are they staying silent for two weeks after they clearly messed up? That's why. Because someone asked the executive assistant to set the meeting and the first time she found on everyone's calendar is in two weeks. So they're not doing anything for two weeks. And I think we need, we all need to do better that and find a way to quickly repair what's clearly been wrong.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing that story. Have you, since that happened, have you been in any moments where you've had to advise just a companies, founders, other marketers of like, hey, problem, act quickly, send something else out. Like, have you been able to kind of like take this and like use it with other companies and other projects?

[Udi Ledergore]

We had much smaller but somewhat similar snafu at Gong, where it was just some silly automation typo that added the letter F in front of people's first name in the subject line and it made it look like we're almost swearing at them. Don't. Don't ask me for the details. But we had to quickly issue. This time I was happy was kind of a humorous response that went out an hour later of like, so sorry, you know, didn't mean to call you any names. But our automation system has a life of its own and we corrected that. But I think that lesson of quickly respond to mistakes because the longer you let them marinate, it's only going to get worse. It's not going to solve itself. So definitely use that principle again.

[Stephanie Postles]

I love it. I'm sure that had a great open rates, though. People would be like, what the heck? So I'm like, I don't know, this sounds like a good strategy for someone out there. Maybe just not long.

[Udi Ledergore]

But, you know, a great open rate is not always a good measure to the success of an email. You know, if I send out an email with a subject line like, this is about your mother, you'll probably open it up. When you discover I'm trying to get you to download a white paper, you probably won't want to do business with me again. So, yeah, facts don't just optimize for that in a vacuum.

[Stephanie Postles]

All right, so I want to pivot now to talk about the book that you are writing. It's coming out in April. I want to hear, like, what's inside of it. Give us a sneak peek because you were giving me a little tidbits last time we talked. I'm like, I want this book now. I want to read it. So I'd love to hear what's going to be in this book. What are you writing about?

[Udi Ledergore]

Absolutely, Stephanie. So over the last 20 years, I've been doing B2B marketing, and especially in the last 10 or so, I've been taking meetings with hundreds of marketers and founders and CEOs who are asking me, okay, how should I think about my hiring and how should I build my content marketing and how should I build that and do that? And I felt that A, I could use crystallizing some of that advice and stories so that I could be a better help to people and especially early career marketers. And two, I really wanted to reach as many of these marketers as I could at scale. And as crammed as my calendar is, I'm never going to be able to meet more than a few hundred in these meetings. And I do mentoring in larger groups as well. So I decided it's probably time as I stepped into my role as chief evangelist. I had a little bit of extra time that I did not have as CMO that I could dedicate to crystallizing these stories, cleaning them up, extracting the most practical advice, and putting them all in a book. So that's what I did. And when I finished writing the first draft, it had a different working title. And then I looked through it and I started working with an editor. And we looked through it and we realized that it's really about courageous marketing. It's about having a strong point of view, having a big idea for everything you do, from your content strategy to your brand campaigns, to punching above your weight, to hiring people that are risky in many ways to your team, but they probably will produce the best work team will ever do. So all those things are about finding the courage in building your team and content and events and brand and category building. And we put all of that into a book. It's got 12 chapters and amazing stories. But I didn't stop there. I then talked to half a dozen CMOs, amazing people like Tricia Gelman, Carrie Lou Dietrich, Dave Gerhardt, Michelle Tate from mailchimp, and other folks who are doing cutting edge marketing. And I got their stories and I got their opinions on my ideas and my experiences. And that really helped me polish out the advice and sometimes show a different point of view, which is always great, and sometimes strengthen and reinforce that the things that I did and discovered actually work for a bunch of other companies. And those wonderful CMOs shared their experiences from companies like Salesforce and Oracle and Box and Drift and mailchimp. And it's wonderful to see the threads going through all those stories that, yes, if you do these things, you are really upping your chances of creating some amazing marketing. And so the book is out on April 10th. It's called Courageous Marketing. It's available on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and wherever you buy your books. And if you want to learn all of my secrets and experiences that were worthy enough to put in the book, they're all going to be in there.

[Stephanie Postles]

So good. I'm excited to read it. When those CMOs were looking or hearing about the content in this book, was there any one topic or story or theme that like, really stuck out to them that either maybe surprised them or they didn't agree with, they pushed back on or they gave new insights to, like, change, you know, perspectives on something?

[Udi Ledergore]

Yes, there were. There were several. I think one. One interesting one that, that, that is always a thorny topic is when I shared my opinion and then asked other CMOs on their opinion about standing up for social and global issues. So it can be anything, like Black Lives Matter. It can be the overturning of Roe vs Wade. It can be trans rights, all of those. It can be a war in Ukraine, like all of those global and social issues. I think a lot of executives are a bit at a loss in recent years. Like, what should I respond to and comment on? Where do I draw the line between my views as a person and myself as an executive representing the company? What should I do with my own team? Should I talk about these thorny issues that they might care about, but I'm risking alienating or upsetting some of them? And what should I do? Maybe publicly on social media or at conferences? And I have my opinions on them that, like most things, I'm very certain about. But listening to some of these executives kind of opened my mind to different opinions and different circumstances where my initial opinions maybe don't always hold true. And I appreciate the nuance of different situations and company sizes and seniority and appetite for these things. For example, a small startup probably has very different stakes than a big public company with tens of thousands of employees and customers. And both of them have different considerations when they make decisions, like which social issues they're going to talk about. Will the CEO talk about them? Will they talk about it internally only? Are they going to make their views public? And you can see examples of this, like when Disney challenged Florida's governor on their LGBT policies and they pulled a billion dollar investment in their parks in Florida until that was resolved. And then you see some large companies and executives voicing their opinions, like I usually do, about gay rights and women's rights and other issues and others who are like, nope, I'm going to talk about nothing unrelated to work. And I know executives, even some work that gong at some point with me were like, I never talk about these things. Nobody on my team even knows how I voted and what my opinions are. My view on that is different. But I've come to appreciate people with different views on those issues. So that was a really interesting topic when I talked about it with several executives. And I took the most interesting points of view and put them in the book so you can decipher yourself and not just have to follow what I think about this.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yeah, I love that. All right, so for this last little portion of the interview, I do want to talk about the hot topic of AI because I feel like that's the theme sometimes in a lot of my conversations. That keeps coming Up. I'd love to hear from you, like how you're thinking about leveraging AI. Is it going to take jobs? Is it really just supporting us? Like, what's your viewpoint and how are you seeing marketing teams being supported by right now?

[Udi Ledergore]

I do think AI is going to take away jobs in every sector. It's going to take away the most mundane, easily automated or replaced jobs. And so the message that that sends to me and to others in the profession is that you've got to become skilled at using AI to do things together that AI cannot do alone. Because if you're doing something so repetitive, so basic, that can now or soon be replaced by AI, then yes, your job is at risk. Absolutely. And we've seen that happen in every area. I'm talking to my friends in engineering and they're saying that they hardly need any early stage engineers because they're using coding tools that are now doing that basic stuff for them. They only need advanced engineers who can work with that AI. And if you look at marketing, I think we're going to see smaller, tighter teams around areas like content creation. So I don't think AI is ready to replace a strong point of view and come up with a great idea yet, in fact, a great way. I've heard other marketers eliminating Kyle from Jellyfish. He's the CMO there. He had a great hack that he shared on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. He said, if you're in a brainstorming meeting and you want to rule out the 10 most obvious ideas, use ChatGPT for that and ask ChatGPT for the top 10 ideas for whatever problem you're wanting to solve, and then rule out those 10 ideas, because that's what everyone's going to be doing. Because that's how ChatGPT works. It averages out the existing state of art. I thought that was brilliant. And so we're going to need marketers with a strong point of view to come up with that next big content piece or that next big keynote idea or anything. But we are going to need fewer people to expand the writing, to rewrite it for a hundred word format, for a social post of 300 words, and then for a 2000 word blog post. Because ChatGPT can actually do that, and other dedicated tools can do that actually pretty, pretty well. Just like creative designers and directors are still needed to come up with a really strong point of view. Although some of them, instead of using a paintbrush or Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, are now using prompt generators and putting in prompts for what they want to create. And then the AI can easily resize that for all the different social networks and all the different advertising networks so you don't have to sit and do all that manual work that we used to do in the past. So I think that's where we're going to see jobs lost of people who don't evolve beyond the basics of what AI can do. The ones who are going to continue to be in high demand and probably even more demand are the ones who leverage AI to do things that we could never do before, or do things faster, better, cheaper, more accurately.

[Stephanie Postles]

I mean, to me, it seems like we're in such an exciting time because we're moving into this age of valuing creativity and humanness and connecting dots that are not normal to connect and be able to bring in wisdom from places that no AI would think of, because maybe it's your own personal wisdom from some random thing you saw and did and it wouldn't be on the Internet. And so it seems like it's a very exciting time to be a part of. And of course it's an amazing time.

[Udi Ledergore]

Yeah. If you're not afraid of learning something new, leveraging something new, and having a new co pilot work with you, this is the most exciting time that's ever been to be in marketing. But if you're not in that mode, if you're checked out and just hope to keep doing what you've been doing, then, then you probably are at risk at some point of being replaced by AI.

[Stephanie Postles]

I do wonder you were mentioning about, like, using AI for writing, and that's still something. And maybe it's because I'm a media company, my bar is very high. I'm like, that's not good writing. But are there areas like that that you're kind of like, hey, I wouldn't maybe use AI to do all your blog posts because then it's going to sound like everyone else. Or here's an area where it is very helpful, like the brainstorming piece, of course, but specifically for marketing. Repetitive tasks, all that, like, those are good ones. What areas are you still kind of like? Be careful, don't just jump in, because it's there.

[Udi Ledergore]

Absolutely. So, you know, most people, even if they're not experts, they can easily detect AI written content because it just has this very verbose style. When you read a few paragraphs, you're like, okay, they're using way too many words. They're needed. They're repeating themselves. This sounds like AI wrote it. And so nobody wants to Read that content. And to have content that's sharp and bold and to the point needs human point of view. I'm not an AI hater. I'm not saying don't use AI. I say use it very strategically to clean up your grammar and style and other stuff, but keep your writing style and personality in it and most importantly, keep your point of view in it. Here's a simple example. You know, I. I just. I wrote an entire book without using AI. I put all my words down on paper. So it's not perfect grammar. It's. Hopefully there's no spelling mistakes, but I can't even guarantee that. But it's all written by me, and I think it makes it interesting because it sounds like I would speak but then write. In one of the last polishing and editing rounds, I found that a certain figure of speech, I think it was a sea of sameness was mentioned both in the foreword that Sam Jacobs was kind enough to write for me, and then I also used it in my introduction, and it was only a few paragraphs apart. And when I used AI to read the book to me, I'm going to record a full audiobook later. But when I was using AI to kind of qa, it sounded too familiar, too close together. And so I open up ChatGPT and I asked for 10 alternatives to sea of Sameness. And I thought that was a legitimate use of AI because it didn't change the meaning of anything I meant to say there. I just didn't want to repeat the exact same figure of speech twice in close proximity. So I picked one of the alternatives that I didn't even pick the exact alternative that came up, but one of those 10 gave me inspiration for changing it to something else. So I think that's a way of quickly leveraging the tool. I could have stared at the ceiling for 10 minutes and I would have come up with an alternative. But I decided to shortcut and get some inspiration as a starting point for ChatGPT without letting it write anything for me. And one of those 10 were good enough inspiration that I picked up on that and ended up using it in the book.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yep. I love that. Yeah, that. That's definitely just like pulling out certain pieces and getting brainstorming help. Just on a piece is where I found a lot of value. Instead of, like, write a whole article or, like, take this whole thing, it's like, no, just take this one sentence that I'm struggling with and help me think of a different way to say it so it's easier to Read just this one.

[Udi Ledergore]

Exactly. I did not want ChatGPT to come with any like preconceived point of view or content on the topic. It didn't even know what I was writing about. I literally just gave it this isolated phrase like what are alternative sea of sameness and it understood that I'm looking for some sort of soliloquy that sounds cute and gave me 10 options. Most of them were terrible, but one of them was half good and then I changed it and made it good enough to put in the book. So I thought that saved me probably five minutes of work, which I think is a really good use case of AI because if you're doing a lot of writing, you can save a lot of those five minute gaps. Now you've got a whole hour back in your day.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yep, Yep. I love it. Okay, I want to do a quick lightning round with you. I'm going to pull out a couple of questions I just want to throw your way. You've got a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?

[Udi Ledergore]

Udi, let's go.

[Stephanie Postles]

Okay. I want to hear. I know you have a great network, so I want to hear who are five marketing leaders that you are influenced by? You respect, you look up to you follow on LinkedIn. You watch. Who are these five people?

[Udi Ledergore]

Carolu Dietrich is amazing. She headed up Atlassian Marketing and a bunch of others. I love John Miller. He's the co founder of Marketo. I really like stuff that Dave Gerhardt and Tricia Gilman are doing and need one more. Sydney Sloan now G2. She's. She's a fantastic marketer.

[Stephanie Postles]

So good. I knew you would have that answer right away. What is one brand that you admire that maybe most people wouldn't think about looking to when it comes to marketing or like making big splashes?

[Udi Ledergore]

Disney completely out of the B2B world. There's nobody in the world better at storytelling than than Disney. We can all just aspire to reach their heels.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yep, yep. I love it. What's the last ad that you remember that was like notable?

[Udi Ledergore]

The British department store Harrods does Christmas commercials every year that are complete tear jerkers. Go binge on those and take a box of tissues with you. The one they did with Elton John a couple of years ago before his biopic came out completely. Made me into a puddle.

[Stephanie Postles]

Okay, I might have to look this up now. I want to be a puddle just for a minute.

[Udi Ledergore]

Go for it.

[Stephanie Postles]

And then the last one is, what's a piece of advice you've received that has stuck with you over the years that you go back to, you think about or maybe pivoted your journey.

[Udi Ledergore]

I think it's a question my CEO Amit asked me many years ago at a different company when I came with a plan for a trade show, something kind of mundane like that. He asked me, what's the big idea? And I couldn't explain the big idea. And I had to go back to the drawing board and come up with a big idea. And then everything became 300 times better. And now I use that question with myself and with my team members. When you're planning something, whether it's an email campaign or a webinar or anything you're doing, what is the big idea? Like, think about the action we're trying to drive. Why are people going to line up at the booth? Why are they going to show up to the webinar? And if you can't really answer that, and the answer is not a laundry list of 20 things we're going to do, I don't know, what is the offer? What is the big idea? Once we understand that, then all the tactics are going to serve up to that and make it work or at least give it a fighting chance. If we don't have a big idea, just running through the laundry list of their usual activities, they're not going to drive attendance. They're not going to create an impact. They're not going to create something people are going to wow over.

[Stephanie Postles]

Yep. Okay, that's a good one. What is one, like big idea you remember? Because I just want to hear, like, what does it sound like? What does the big idea sound like? 3 words.

[Udi Ledergore]

So for that trade show, I can tell you for that one trade show where it was at a SAP show called SAP Sapphire and previous trade shows, I think we came back with like 100 leads because we were doing what everyone else was doing, offering product demos. People were leaving their business cards. And we came back, we thought, what would it take to come back with 300 leads? And then we thought, we thought, we thought and we thought, like, okay, all these, it shows. Everyone's booth is so boring. They all look the same. They're not doing anything exciting. I'm going to turn my booth into a cruise ship. So I got a 10 by 20 booth which is not very large, but the whole backdrop was this huge cruise ship photo. I rented actual palm trees and I put them in the booth. I got a bartender who looked a little like Isaac from the Love Boat and he was making mocktails and we opened up a bar at the booth. So we were handing out mocktails and we were raffling cruise tickets every day at the booth. You can imagine we had a very long line of people coming to see what the heck we're about. Again, we were selling some IT software, but that's not the point. Everyone else in the room was I was trying to optimize for lead generation, so I wanted as many people as possible to leave a card or let me scan their lead. And when we did that, we came back with a thousand leads and user shows, we came back with four and 5,000 leads. But having a big idea like that, turning the booth into a cruise ship spectacular, that went us go from 100 to 1,000 leads. And so that strategy of coming up with a big idea absolutely works.

[Stephanie Postles]

I love it. So good. Well, Udi, this has been amazing. I'm so glad you got to come back here for round two. I'm excited for your book to come out. Where can our viewers, our listeners, find more about you?

[Udi Ledergore]

I'm on LinkedIn, the only Oodie letter gore, so I'm very easy to find there. And if you want to read more of all these crazy stories, just go to Amazon or Barnes and Nobles. Look up courageous marketing, and I'll see you there.

[Stephanie Postles]

Amazing. Thank you.

[Udi Ledergore]

Thank you, Stephanie.