The CMO who built a billion-dollar brand - and what he got in return - Udi Ledergor

0:00During the Super Bowl week of 2021, we broke our record for most pipeline created in one week. Creating great content is actually the cheapest, most cost-effective option. Five of the Fortune 10 companies are Gong customers right now. If you want to be a millionaire, go be an executive at a company. If you want to be a billionaire, go start your own company. Most marketers dream of having Gong's billion-dollar bread. But few realize that behind every courageous campaign, there's an even more courageous marketer. In today's episode of Billions, I have the pleasure to interview Udi Ledgor, chief evangelist and former CMO at Gong.

0:37I've known Udi for a few years now, and not only have always been super impressed by how Gong's brand is so unique, but also by how great of a piano player Udi is. In today's interview, I want to discuss how to create a billion dollar brand, how much money does it cost, and how much one should be rewarded for it. Udi, thanks a lot for accepting the invite. What a hard intro to follow. Thanks for having me, Guillaume. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, you just released your book. Can you maybe like show it so everyone can look at it? Courageous Marketing. I really loved it and really enjoyed it. And I think there are like some golden nuggets and story and I want to mention it and talk about it during this interview and also tie it to Gong's, you know, like story.

1:21Eventually, you said that Gong looked more like a$1 billion brand when it was only doing 30 million in annual recurring revenue. So how exactly did you create that perception when you're small and you want to look much bigger? Yeah, so here in the US, we call that punch above your weight. And what it means in the context of marketing and brand is, let me take you back a little bit to some of the classic books in the field. Jeffrey Moore wrote Crossing the Chasm, classic business book in the 1980s. And he talked about the chasm where most companies go to die between selling to the early innovators, the early adopters and the early majority.

2:03Right. So you'll always find a few early adopters that love having the latest iPhone and the latest B2B software and they'll try your new product. The problem is getting beyond those early adopters to the early majority. When you get to the early majority, these buyers are much more conservative and they don't want to try the latest technology. The latest technology scares them. They want to see that everyone is using something or that some regulation forces them to use something before they will buy it. So how can companies cross that chasm, bridge it from the early adopters to the early majority?

2:34And there's two main motions you need to do that. Number one is have a product that is ready for that early majority, which means if you're selling to enterprises, it really has to have enterprise level security and privacy and all the compliance stuff. Two, great marketing can make you appear to be much bigger than you really are. And that is a really, really big component and my area of interest. How can a small startup look much bigger than it is to appeal to those larger buyers? Because if you think about it, the catch 22 most startups have is that they're trying to sell to much larger companies.

3:07But those larger companies, they don't want to buy from a young startup because you might not have the funding to even be around in two years. Your product is probably not tested on enough enterprise customers. You don't have customer references. You didn't build out the full product. There's lots of good reasons why enterprises don't want to buy from a startup. But great marketing can make your company appear to be much bigger than it is. And that way, you are more appealing to the large companies. You still need the product to deliver, but at least you get a foot in the door. So that is something that was my focus area for many years at Gong as when we were very small and we were trying to get the attention and get these big companies to use our product.

3:46So what I found is that there are many, many ways that I consolidated into a formula or framework that you can use, any company can use, to look much bigger than you really are. And in short, the framework goes like this. One, you find a media opportunity that's typically associated with big advertisers. So a classic example would be if you see a billboard on Times Square, you know that's coming from a big advertiser, right? Because that's where Netflix announced their new series. That's where Apple announced their new iPhone. So you know that a Times Square billboard is something iconic that's usually done by a big advertiser.

4:22Step two, you find an affordable way of sneaking into that medium and using it. So you don't have to spend a million dollars on a billboard in Times Square. In fact, you can buy an on-demand billboard for$500. And I give all the details in the book for how to do that. You might just get the billboard for one hour, but you've now got a billboard in Times Square. But wait, we're not done there. The third step of the process is making some creative use of the billboard to get noticed. So that's a recurring theme across my entire book and everything you do from events to content to brand. You have to be creative.

4:57Don't just settle for mediocre or best practices because those are boring. They're gonna get you ordinary results. You need to do something different, right? So you make creative use of that medium. Step four is you get a photographer or a videographer to take great photos or videos of that billboard. Even if it's up for one hour, you get a photographer to take a photo of it with all the foot traffic walking around this iconic location. Step five is now you share that photo and video with your captive audience that you really care about. Because when I took out a billboard in Times Square, I didn't care about the random tourists on their way to see Phantom of the Opera.

5:33They're not going to buy my software. but once I had the photo of the billboards with all the tourists, I posted that to my LinkedIn and Twitter profile. And now hundreds of thousands of the relevant audience members are actually seeing this. And then the final six step is getting all of our employees to share that as well. And then I get a ton of extended reach for free. Gong has 1600 employees, but even when we had 12 employees, which is how many we had when I joined, I got everyone to share it. Now imagine every employee only has 500 followers and many of them have a lot more, multiply that by how many employees are sharing it.

6:08And now I'm getting a ton of free reach. In some cases, we even got our customers to share our posts because if you use a billboard to say, shout out a customer that just won an award or did a funding route or using your product in a creative way, now the customer is proud of it and they want to share that billboard as well. So that is in a nutshell, the punch above of your wig framework. That's super smart. And when it comes, you know, to like creating something unique that will be shareable, what are the things that you've done apart from mentioning like a customer story, you know, on a billboard?

6:43Were there anything particular that you enjoy? Yes. So I think the approach for creating something that could go viral that people will want to share is starting the thought process with what do they care about? what would make them feel good about sharing. And most companies make the mistake of starting here, which is what do I want to say? What is important to me? And when you start with what's important to me, you end up talking about, hey, we just released version 2.1.4. We have these four new features and there are a few people who care about it, but most do not. But when you start with what my customers care about, there's a great book by Dan Heath and Keith.

7:24They wrote a book called Made to Stick. and they talk about the principles of why people share stuff, what sticks around. And Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in The Tipping Point, like what becomes a trend? It has to be something that makes people either feel cool or feel smart or feel informed. So you want to be part of that. At Gong, we created the Gong Labs content series very early on. It became very, very popular because we put an end to a lot of arguments that were actually happening in the real world about what works and doesn't work in sales. How many questions should you ask an executive when you get them on a call?

8:02How long should you be talking on the call? When should you talk about pricing in the beginning of the end? Well, we found the scientific answer to all those questions. We even found and published research that showed that salespeople who use curse words like the S word or the F bomb on their sales call have an 8 % higher win rate. So you can imagine that when we published that, it went viral because everyone took out their most colorful vocabulary to respond to that on LinkedIn. And they were happy to share it and share their view. Either they said, yes, this is the shit I've been talking about, or they were appalled that we would suggest using this type of language in a professional setting.

8:40Either way, we win. That's a marketer's dream when you're creating a conversation about your content. And so that is the type of approach to think about what would interest them and how do I tie it back to what's important to me, but not the other way around. Super smart. And I love what you were saying, you know, like when you create content, make sure that the person, you know, like either like feel smart about it, feel informed or feel cool. You also talked in your book about creating content that people will actually pay for, but doing it for free. so I'm quite curious like because Gong Lab is really like amazing content I've followed like your content it's it's really really great you can see that you've put a lot of efforts and I think for marketers what's kind of like tough to to launch this kind of initiatives it's measuring ROI is not always super easy and the resource to invest in order to create content that people would pay for are usually like quite huge.

9:41So how exactly do you want go, you know, by starting building this, like what was the setup, what was the budget, and what was the whole process behind creating like Gongflab? So let's unpack that into the launch process and budget and to the measurement and ROI. So first, I can confirm that reality is the opposite of what you might have guessed. creating great content is actually the cheapest, most cost-effective option versus throwing money on distribution because your content is so mediocre that you have to pay people to look at it. So think about it this way. When we were small and most companies like you and me, we started a small company.

10:21I can't afford to be boring. I can't afford to be boring. Think about it. Large companies, think about your bank or your cable provider. They can afford to be boring because they have so much money they can throw on distribution so they can spend a million dollars a day or a week on propelling very boring content so that some people see it and act on it. You and I can't afford to be boring. We have to get creative. Creativity is cheap. You just have to get creative people to get in the room, come up with a great idea, and then for very little distribution budget, you get a lot of eyeballs. So that's the beauty about it.

10:57Great content is not only more effective, as in people will actually read it and act on it, it's also more efficient. It's the cheapest way of getting in front of your audience. So if you stay in the mindset of, I can't afford to be boring, then let's put in the work and be creative. So that's what we did with Gong Labs. You know how big the content team was? People were sure I have an army of content creators. I had one person writing the content and half a person, a contractor, data analyst, crunching the numbers. One and a half people created Gong content for the first five years. My marketing team is going to be when I will share that with them.

11:32Sorry if I ruined it for you guys. I'm sorry. Literally, I don't know what to do with an army of content people. Like, just give me two really smart people and that's all I need. So that is on the approach now. So it's very, very cost effective to get very creative and then spend very little on distribution. So that's number one. Let's talk about measurement and ROI. So here's why it's important. And again, I'll go back to the basics for a minute because a lot of marketers ask me, well, how do I explain to my CEO and CFO? They just want leads today. And I'm telling them, no, we need to build content.

12:06It takes time. And then they say like, I don't care about that. Just bring me leads today. But here's the thing. Let's say I want to buy a car in three months. So what am I doing now? I'm going to websites of car manufacturers. I'm looking at their features. I'll go to YouTube and look at a few reviews of the cars that I'm looking at. I'll go to the reviews websites and compare the car models. But then I've decided on the car and I bought a car. Now, a week after I bought a new car, do I still care about all the features and prices of the other cars? No, because I'm now in my honeymoon with my car.

12:39I'm getting in love and falling in love with my car. I'm not going to buy another car for the next three years. But what are all the other car manufacturers doing? They're still retargeting me with all their ads for their car features. And they have a Black Friday deal now. And I don't care about all this. They're just wasting their money on showing me their product related content, but I'm not in the market anymore. Now take that story back to the B2B world where we usually live. It's the same thing at any given moment. There's only about 5 % of your TAM that is in the buying zone and cares about your product.

13:12The other 95%, they're simply not in the buying zone. Now, if you're wasting your advertising and marketing budget on showing them your product features and your special deals for the week, that is a complete waste of money. Instead, you could be targeting that 95 % with a content marketing strategy, nurture them with something that gives them value, even if they're not buying your product right now. And the reason you want to do that is create memory links. It creates memory links between your area of expertise and your brand name, so that in six months or 12 months, when that audience moves from the 95 % who doesn't care about your product to the 5 % who are in the buying zone, you are the first brand name that they think about.

13:56So let's say in your case, you're trying to promote Lemlist to people who don't want to buy right now a sales engagement product. But what if you gave them great tips about sales engagement that they can use on any product? And then in 12 months, when it's time for them to update their sales engagement system, they think, oh, who's the biggest brand that I've gotten a lot of value from in the first name I think of? Oh, that's Lemlist or Lempire or whatever name you want to put out there. Nice. So that is the way that you do it. And it's really, really important to create those memory links because if you don't do it, your competitor is.

14:27And so when they're ready to buy, they're going to remember your competitor and not you. The last thing I want to unpack there is you asked about measurements. So how can I measure content? So our content team definitely has measurable goals that tie into demand gen and pipeline. Here's a very simple way of how we do this. There's many ways of engineering this. So when we put out an article, we usually put it out first where our audience is, which in our case is LinkedIn. Sales leaders and sales reps, they live on LinkedIn. They're looking for their next job, their next customer, they're hiring or they're looking to get hired.

15:02They live on LinkedIn every day, just like you and me. So we publish our articles first on LinkedIn. And as you know, on LinkedIn, you have to publish the article ungated. It's free for anyone to read. Now, there's maybe a thousand readers will come in and read it because we publish it first by a human because we know the people will interact with the human more than they interact with the brand profile. So we publish it under a human profile. But then what we do is in the middle of that article, and again, at the end, we will put a link to a premium piece of content that's related to the same content.

15:34So let's say I put out the study about salespeople cursing having higher win rates. I could use a premium asset. Do you want the 20 top curse words that salespeople use successfully? Click here to download. Now, when you click there to download, this is, remember, in the public article on LinkedIn, that click takes you to a gated landing page on Gong's website, and there I ask for your email before you download the PDF. Now, if I correctly assume that you're in the zone to learn more about cursing on sales calls, I can get a very high conversion rate on that landing page. And in fact, we do see 70 and 80 % conversion rates on those landing pages that there's nothing fancy about them because it's context sensitive.

16:17I know you were already reading an article on this topic. I know you want to read more about it. So now I'm letting you give me an email and get that content. And this takes advantage of what Robert Cialdini called the reciprocity effect in his book Influence. I first gave you value on LinkedIn. I didn't ask for anything in return. You already saw the value. So now you feel, okay, these folks are legit. They gave me value. And only now when you're asking for that premium asset, that's the first time I'm asking you for an email. And so you're very likely to give me your email at that point. Now, if you do that, I can measure the number of downloads of the premium asset on the day that I published the public article.

16:55So if I published the public article and got maybe 3000 eyeballs on it. And now I got a thousand of them to download the premium asset. That is measurable. I just created a thousand MQLs and I can start processing them. I have your email. I can now start nurturing you. I can have BDRs reach out to the right ones if they're raising their hands and saying that they're ready. So that is how we tie content marketing into the demand gen strategy. That's super interesting. And I was actually wondering because in your strategy, you start with and you talk a lot about organic reach and making content shareable.

17:28So I'm wondering, like is this also like a way for you to kind of like test which content performs the best and then reuse the content that outperform every other content organically and you reuse it as you know your ad funnel or something like this? Absolutely. So the top three organic channels that were key to Gong's early success, one was organic social media. As I said, I could never compete with the big brands spending millions of dollars. I did not have millions of dollars. So I had to produce really good content that people wanted to organically consume. And we used to do like giveaways where we said, if you tag another salesperson, we'll, I don't know, we'll give the first hundred people a copy of this sales book that everybody wants or something like that.

18:15And then they started tagging each other and following Gong. So we quickly got organic followers, but it didn't cost me anything. Nice. So organic social media was our biggest channel. The second one was the email list that we were building. Again, completely organic. It costs you nothing to send an email to your house list. So we kept building that list and cross pollinating between our social media followers and our email followers. So an example would be once a quarter, we'd send an email to all the email subscribers saying, hey, if you're not already following Gong on LinkedIn, click here to follow us so you never miss the latest updates.

18:47And we did the same on LinkedIn. We said, hey, if you want these to hit your inbox before everyone else, subscribe here to our newsletter. So we kept cross pollinating the list. So those were the two biggest ones. And the third one was because our content was so interesting, we could get invited to conferences without paying a sponsorship fee like most speakers have to because their content is so boring that they have to pay to get on stage. But if you bring interesting content like salespeople cursing sell more, they will invite you for free. They will pay for your flights to come and speak at the conference because you're adding value to their conference.

19:22So we got a lot of speaking opportunities and earned media, like that story about swear words actually got picked up by fastcompany.com. Radio stations interviewed me about it. All this was free. So you get earned media when you produce content that's good enough. That's really cool. And I was wondering, because we talked a lot about content. And, you know, there is an industry where people are selling like online courses. and we've seen a lot of people, you know, like, I don't know, leveraging some kind of manipulation technique, et cetera, et cetera. But in B2B, I've never really seen like a company really creating like advanced courses that actually work.

20:03Is that something you've tried or have you ever thought about it as a strategy? No, we didn't create that ourselves. I've seen companies do it more for the idea of testing whether their content is so good that people will want to pay for it. So, for example, Gainsight, the leader in customer success software, they created a whole education section. They called it Pulse Plus because Pulse is their community name. So Pulse Plus. And for a while, it was paid courses. I don't know that they ever charged money for it, but it allowed their reps to give away free licenses to their education platform and for people to take courses.

20:43But it felt like a premium offering. Google just opened up for a while now. Google has had their courses on AI, like Google AI Essentials on Coursera for free. But it's a paid platform. So it feels like premium content. And now they're putting together a lot of other educational offerings because they want to get more people to use AI tools and then increase the use of their own tools. So we never did that because we're selling software. We're not in the business of trying to make revenue off of content. But I will give a couple of examples. When we did publish and we still do a ton of content that helps sales leaders and sales enablement leaders, we occasionally get an email from a university professor who says, hey, I'm teaching a course on sales.

21:29in Illinois. I just saw your latest Gong Labs. I would love to use this in my classroom. What would it cost me to license your content? So when we get an email like that, we circulate it and celebrate because we just proved that our content is so good that people want to pay for it. And we get similar emails from sales enablement managers who read our content and say, wow, this is amazing. I'd like to use it for my internal team training. What would it cost to license it. So I always respond, say it is free for you to use. Just credit Gong on the slides when you use it, but it's absolutely free.

22:01But that's how we prove that the content we created is so good that people would pay for it, which is such a high bar that many marketers don't even believe they can achieve that. But you can. Nice. I really like it. And another thing that I loved in your book is you talk a lot about courage. And was there like a single moment in Gong history where courage kind of like changed the trajectory? If you have like a story that you could share. I don't think there was a single moment. You know, it was kind of like death by a thousand paper cuts. So it was a thousand moments where we took the courageous decision when we thought about what's our next event booth going to look like?

22:41What will our brand colors look like? What will our mascot look like? What will our content be about? What is the next medium that we can do that no one in our field is doing? So we became quite famous for doing a Super Bowl commercial when nobody in our space was doing that. We did some pretty elaborate out-of-home campaigns using billboards in very creative ways. We sponsored very big podcasts like Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, that became a bestseller and a Brad Pitt movie. We sponsored his podcast. we did a lot of what you could call little moves, but every one of them has a compound interest effect.

23:17And when you do one and two and 10 and 100 of these, you quickly create a gap between you and everyone else in the field by consistently making the courageous decision and refusing to be mediocre or just follow best practices, which are in reality, very, very boring. Can you tell the story maybe of the Super Bowl commercial? Sure, sure. So the full version is in chapter one of the book, which I encourage everyone to read. But the short version of it was this. So we were just on the heels of one of our fundraising rounds. And just like anyone in the business knows, once you complete a fundraising, your inbox is flooded with people trying to sell you yachts and private aviation and villas and everything else.

24:01So one of those emails I got from Monica at CBS. And Monica said, hey, congrats on the fundraising. I think you'd make an amazing advertiser on the next Super Bowl. And for some reason, I decided to respond to Monica. I don't always have the chance to respond to all these emails. I said, Monica, I appreciate you reaching out. I'm still nowhere near Super Bowl budgets, but happy to keep in touch for the future. And Monica immediately responded. And she said, Uri, I think you'd be surprised if you give me 15 minutes, I'll show you how affordable your next Super Bowl commercial could be. And I said, OK, Monica, you've earned a call.

24:35You piqued my curiosity. This is exactly the type of stuff I love learning about. So I took a call with Monica. And what Monica explained to me in a nutshell is this. She said, look, most people know that a national spot, a 30-second spot in the game costs about six or seven million dollars. Back then it was five and a half, but today it's like over seven million dollars for a 30-second spot in the game, which is crazy, right? That's why you always see the the biggest insurance companies and beverage companies, you know, Pepsi takes those spots and farmers insurance. Those are the companies who can afford$7 million for a national spot.