Why Being Different is Better than Being Better

0:00You and the team took a significant risk in marketing strategy and it paid off. Being different is better than being better as a strategy. I love the idea of zagging when others zig. And I think it's a bold strategy that Gong zigs when others zag. And why that is, is if you're trying to win a game by being better than everyone else, that is really, really hard to do. If you know anyone who's ever remotely made it to the Olympic team cut, you know that it's really, really hard. Like these are very few humans in the world to make it. You've got to be like 100 times better than the average human being at doing what you're doing.

0:38That's really, really hard. I don't think I'm that good at anything. And so I found it's a hack or an easier way of winning is by being different. Like if you're the only one doing something, you're kind of the winner in your category by definition. But that is the point.

0:58Welcome to Marketing Trends. Today, I'm getting right into it because we have a phenomenal guest joining us as I scour the landscape of legitimate B2B marketing leaders who have done the deal, who don't just talk about growth. They actually live it. They are it. I'm pretty sure this human's middle name is growth, but I want to introduce briefly Udi Letergor. He's a five-time marketing leader. I mean, we're talking gong. We're talking advisor at a ton of companies. I don't know how he does it all, but Udi's journey from being the first marketer to the chief marketing officer at Gong, now the chief evangelist at Gong, is nothing short of extraordinary is the word I'd like to use.

1:41So I'm going to shut up and just, Udi, welcome you to the show. It's so awesome to have you. Thanks for having me, Jeremy. This is a great opportunity and I'm looking forward to discussing today. Indeed. I mean, I had a lot of fun in the prep, kind of looking at the content that one, you put out there, but your opinions on marketing and AI. I mean, you have a lot of thought leadership in the space. You have strong opinions on things. You speak very loudly on certain things. And also I look at the results you've generated, Udi, which is like, okay, the results speak for themselves. I'm paying attention to what this man's saying.

2:13One piece I'm curious about, let's get right into this AI, AI and content. Everybody's talking about AI and creative marketing content and push a button, spit out the easiest content you ever saw. It's high converting. It's all the things. What are you finding in that space around using AI for creative content? I'll start with where I think people get it wrong, and then we can cover some of the great stuff that people are using it for. I see a lot of marketers looking at AI as this godsend that's going to allow them to create all this fantastic content. Great. I had this problem of scaling content before, and the problem just went away.

2:50I can hit a prompt and chat GPT. It's going to create thousands of content pages for me. Here's the spoiler alert. That is trash content. Nobody wants to read that content. And it reminds me of 15 years ago, people discovered you could offshore your content initiatives and have someone in some foreign countries spend an hour and for 50 bucks spew out as many blog posts that you want. Nobody wants to read those blog posts. And today's AI-driven blog posts are no better than those. And here's why. I'll tell you why, Jeremy. I talk a lot about what makes great content, but the two specific things that make great content that AI does not do well yet is one, I'll start from the softer one, is on the style.

3:36So great content has some point of view and has a tone of voice that's specific. You might either want to sound serious like a bank or you want to sound cheeky like a startup, but you have a tone of voice. You have a style that you use and AI is not great at all at emulating those styles. Have you ever tried using the new tools like, oh, make me sound more Gen Z? It sounds like a caricature of someone doing a bad impression of Gen Z. It does not sound like we would talk. And so that's my first problem with AI generated content. But the bigger problem is it does not have a strong opinion. It does not have a courageous take on the topic that you're asking it to write about because of the way it was built.

4:20It's by design. It's not a bug. It's a feature. ChatGPT and all the other similar engines, they were built on training themselves on all the materials out there and then spewing out a smart autocomplete based on what's already been written. And the greatest content that you read and get excited about is not that. The greatest content that you read is a new, bold, courageous, controversial, polarizing point of view that ChatGPT cannot create because it hasn't been written yet. And if I look at all the greatest pieces of content that my brands have put out and other brands have put out, they were first or early to state that opinion.

5:02And they did it in a very bold, unapologetic way. Whereas all the content that you read from Gen.AI tends to be middle of the way because that's literally what it is. It's stitching together agreeable things that have been published millions of times before. And if everyone agrees with your content, nobody's truly getting excited about it. Do you think we're getting there? I mean, I know that AI can generate content quickly. We understand that. But as you said, it's not always tailored to the specific needs and the preferences of the target audience. And it can come across generic and impersonal.

5:35And like you said, kind of a caricature sometimes. So how soon will we get there, right? When we get to the place where it won't lack personalization, right? And it won't ignore quality control on these things. Right. So I think there's a few things that you can already use AI well for today, and there's things that are coming up. So let me start with maybe, because I don't want to be negative Nancy, that there's definitely things that AI can do really, really well for you today. So one is, let's say you have a piece of content that you wrote that has a strong opinion and a good tone of voice.

6:09And now you need to repurpose it and say, now I need a Twitter version of this and I need a LinkedIn post version of this. And I want to make a short script for a podcast or something else or create a slide deck out of it. AI does a pretty good job of repurposing and reformatting content because that's low value work. That's just kind of grunt work, right? Taking a 300 piece article and keeping the essence of it in a 144 word piece, AI can do that pretty well. AI can do that pretty well. So repurposing is fantastic. Nobody should be spending time just rewording and making a shorter version, a longer version, and a spiffier version.

6:48So that's one great use of AI. Two, if you need to combine several data sources, for example, salespeople, think of, this is a little bit outside of marketing, but it's a A good example, an AE or an SDR needs to send a cold call message to someone, cold email, and they want to put together some information from their last financial report and some information from their LinkedIn profile, some information about a previous interaction they might had. AI can do that really well today. And you have products like Gong, sorry, first shameless plug, that do that for the salespeople. So those are really, really good use cases for AI today.

7:27I think AI is moving fast on improving, emulating a specific tone of voice. So I can probably already train AI to read 100 pieces of content that I've written and get the vibe of how I write, what kind of words I use more often, what words I would use less often, what length my sentences are, and then emulate that pretty well. So that's the good news. I don't see us getting there as soon with coming up with that original point of view that I talked about because again all the great pieces of content that we did at Gong they came from someone having a bright idea then sending someone down a rabbit hole to go research like do we have data on uh is it good or bad for salespeople to apologize so if you ask ChatGPT you're going to get this generic response well here's some pros of that here's some cons of that great so it's so trivial that I have to agree with it.

8:24But once you actually look at the data, you actually see that there are very specific cases that you want to do that. And there's most other cases where you never want to do that. I'll give you one more example. We ran a piece a few years ago that we looked at the impact of salespeople swearing on their sales calls, which was like a very weird thought. Why would you want to even suggest that salespeople use that sort of language on sales calls, we found that salespeople who use swear words like the S word or the F bomb as a mirroring technique of their buyer's language have 8 % higher win rates.

8:58Who doesn't want 8 % higher win rates? And that was an original thought that we found a lot of validation for, and we created a great content piece on it that then got completely exploded, went viral on radio stations and fastcompany.com ran with it. We got a ton of earned media and we had a lot of people having a visceral reaction to it. So I'd say about two thirds or three quarters of them were using all their colorful vocabulary to show their support. And this is the shit I've been talking about and so on. And then we had the other group, which was appalled that we would suggest using this type of language in a professional setting.

9:37And they were also very vocal. And that That is a marketer's dream because we created something that had a really strong opinion that had not been voiced to that extent before. And it pulled everyone out of the woodwork to create a real debate because it was controversial. It was counterintuitive. It was really polarizing. And I haven't seen Gen.ai content do that. I am also really curious about utility when it comes to Gen.ai in the C-suite, right? Like how you are interested or actively using it in your, just your day-to-day, right? If at all, right? I was talking to the CMO for Cisco earlier this week, and she had some interesting things to share how she was using it for meeting prep and different things that she's using kind of in her day-to-day, like this is what I do as a CMO.

10:28But I've asked a lot of other CMOs that are still kind of testing and at the table, but not really moving as fast as others. It's been really interesting, especially in the Fortune 500, where I think that they're definitely going to be way ahead. They're not even moving that fast, right? But in terms of just utility in your type of role, someone with your background, how are you using it? How is it helping you now? Yeah, absolutely. So I would say the number one AI use case for executives at Gong and in many of the companies that I help, because in the last month, I've met with over 60 marketing teams that use Gong and wanted to use it in a deeper way.

11:07And I've shown them several executive use cases that are not for the sales reps, actually for the executives, the CMO, CRO, the CEO. And I'd say the number one that floors them every time is, you know how marketers, we love doing A-B testing on things like which email subject line is going to get them to open the email or which tagline on the ad is going to get them to click. Well, until recently, people thought that you couldn't do that to an entire sales pitch. If you roll out a new sales deck and you want to see how it's landing with customers and how is it really impacting business, is deck A better than deck B?

11:43People didn't think that was possible, but it is now with the power of AI. And so in a 30 second nutshell, the way we do this with Gong is Gong captures every salesperson's conversation, whether it's on a Zoom or Google Meet call or whatever they're doing to talk to customers. We capture what they're doing and then we look at how that affects business metrics like their win rates, their deal size, their deal velocity, and other important business metrics. And that is essentially the same thing the marketers are doing with A-B testing their emails and ads. Executives can now do that to see if the company messaging is landing.

12:23And if the new version, the product marketing and enablement we're working on for the last three months? Is it actually better or worse than the last one? Show me a marketer who can answer that question without going through the process and using the technology that I just described. And they're like, I don't know. We roll this out at Sales Kickoff. Everyone applauds and go their separate ways. And then three months later, I'll meet an AE and I'll ask her, how's it going with the new deck? And she'll say, oh yeah, it looks great. I've been meaning to give it a try. And that's pretty much all the feedback that they get.

12:52They have no idea who's using it, how it's landing with customers? And is it really better or worse for business? Are they driving the business outcomes that they were tasked to drive forward? So that I think is one of the top use cases that it's just magical to see how AI does this and can tell you, well, you know, Sarah, she's using the new deck, she and her team, and that's driving their deal sizes to be 30 % larger. Their deal velocity is 12 % shorter and their win rates are 58 % higher versus John's team, who's not using the deck and all of his metrics are worse than Sarah's team. So that just gives you this visibility that is really a jaw dropping moment for most executives when they see that for the first time.

13:36Why do you think so many execs are kind of slow, a bit like slow to running down the road with this, right? Like, I mean, there's, again, like I'm not going to name names and brands, but we've had a ton of them on this, on this show and they're brilliant in their own way. But I'm surprised still that, you know, unlike you, they just aren't willing to go there as quickly and aren't moving as quick. And I'm like, man, this is wild to me. I would think you have entire teams dedicated to moving quickly. And some of these executives just aren't going there. And they seem to be moving real slow. And I'm just curious what you think, why you think that is.

14:13And some of these are storied brands. I think there's a couple of reasons. One of them is a wrong focus, not because anyone's got bad intentions. I think it's just this is the way it's always been done syndrome. So people are obsessed with measuring everything that they do for brand awareness and demand generation, sometimes to a fault. because I think that when you're obsessed about measuring things that some of them are inherently difficult to measure and don't lend themselves to be measured well, then you don't do things that are good for the business because you're afraid of not being able to measure them and then show the results.

14:48So I think that's a mistake. And at the same time, things like messaging, which usually the product marketing teams are tasked with, people just assume that because for decades we couldn't really measure what they were doing, that's still the case, but it's not. And so So they're putting that effort, they're misplacing the effort in trying to measure things that should not be measured or measuring them in the wrong way for, say, brand awareness and demand gen, and completely neglecting the measurement on the product marketing and messaging side, which can be measured. And then I think the second reason is that there's still this fear of, oh, if I let AI in through the door, it's going to replace me soon.

15:26And someone will say, oh, oh, AI can do my job. In some jobs, that is going to be true. I think more often than not, especially in complex jobs like sales and marketing, my school of thought, I didn't make it up, I just subscribed to it, is that the reps and the marketers using AI will replace the reps and the marketing who are not using AI. And it's not that AI is going to replace us, it's that the ones who learn how to harness AI to make them better, more productive, faster at their work, more prescriptive at showing results. Those are the marketers that are going to get the next promotion. And the ones that are still like, well, the attribution model doesn't show us what this is doing.

16:07And I have no idea how to measure what the impact of our new sales deck is. So we'll just roll out a new one every six months and hope that it's better than the last one. Those ones are not going to get the promotion and they might be out of a job. Yeah, I agree. I agree wholeheartedly with all of that. and we shall see as the ride continues. I really liked a LinkedIn post. You actually posted today. You're very active online. So everyone follow Udi because he's dropping bombs, all kinds of places. But you had a post today, Udi. I want to double click into some of this because it's well known that between 2016 and 2023, you helped Grow Gong from zero to nine figures in ARR as their first CMO.

16:47And you talked about some really interesting things in your kind of six-step marketing playbook. I want to touch on these because I think these are invaluable and relevant today. You talked about stewardship versus ownership. And this concept really resonates with me, Udi, because it shifts the focus from a single leader to this entire team, right? Fostering this sense of, I guess, shared responsibility and collaboration. Can you elaborate on the distinction and how it influenced your strategy at Gong? Yeah, I'll give you a simple example that I think kind of tells the whole story. So the easiest way to fail with a brand launch is making it a marketing project.

17:25You take this hapless CMO and you tell her, look, this is your project. We need a new brand. Customers don't know about us. And we want to stand for, let's say, creating raving fans. Customers love us. And so the CMO goes and works with some expensive agency and they put out these nice billboards and website of how they make happiness and spread happiness and everyone's wonderful. And then your customers who see that, they reflect on their experience with your brand. And they remember that they asked for a demo and it took the SDR eight days to get back to them because they were busy doing other stuff.

18:00And then if they're already using your product, they had a technical problem and they reached out to support and took them a week to get back to them. and even then they didn't solve the problem. Or a candidate who wanted to actually work for you because she thought she liked the values that you reflected in your advertising. She had a terrible experience in the recruiting journey and the recruiting coordinator didn't get back to her. And finally she was ghosted after two interviews. And I'm making some of this up, but none of it is really made up. I'm just creating a composite character for my story because I've seen all these things happen.

18:37Exactly, exactly. and you're providing all these experiences that are contrary to what you're trying to create in your brand, and it just doesn't stick. It doesn't stick, and you start getting bad reviews on Glassdoor from candidates and employees who point out this discrepancy between your values that you're putting out in your advertising and marketing, and you're not really living them, and then customers are writing bad reviews on G2 because they're experiencing these problems as well. And then you go like, well, we must fire the CMO because she did a really terrible job with the brand building.

19:13Let's go get a new one and have her get it right. And that's the problem that I talk about. So that's the bad way of doing it, which I'm afraid is all too common. The right way of doing it is for the entire executive team to sit down with the CEO leading this and brainstorming on who are we as a brand? Not what do we want to look like on an HR poster in the kitchen, but who are we really? And let's say that we are a company who creates raving fans. Well, let's make that an operating principle that the whole company runs by. We interview for that quality. We recognize and award the employees who exhibit that behavior most so they know that this is the behavior that we expect of them.

19:57And that's going to be criteria for their promotion and for with their future hires. And we make that as basic as the plumbing in everything that we do. And now when that's a reality, we can ask marketing and only then can we ask marketing, go and amplify that and make that part of our external brand as well. So people know that here at our company, we create raving fans and they're going to get a great experience from the recruiting coordinator and from tech support and from sales and marketing and CSM and everyone else that they ever have a touch point with. And that's the beginning of creating a great brand.

20:32You talked about interviewing for that quality. I love that. Can you talk about how you do that? And I think that's phenomenal. And now you talk about building a team, building the culture from the outside in. How do you interview for that quality? Yeah. So one of the common questions that I use for any role that's customer facing is, tell me, and this could be the classical cases like a technical support or CSM, but really it goes for sales and different roles in marketing and even product engineers who interact with customers. Like, tell me about a situation that started with a pissed off customer and you managed to manage to end with a raving fan.

21:10Like, walk me through the steps. What was the problem that you were facing? What were the alternatives you considered? What steps did you take? And how did you confer that the customer became a raving fan? And if they can't walk you through one story like that, then it's probably not a candidate who's done this before. But if they have a few stories to choose from, and you can see that they proactively took action to drive that customer from a detractor to a promoter or raving fan, then you might be onto someone who can help you on that mission. I love that. And I've always believed that the best brand advocates come from within the company.

21:48And hearing that create raving fans, which was another one of your points that you made. Can you share a successful initiative where you had kind of cross-departmental collaboration and it boosted this brand engagement? It boosted this raving fan experience? So here's just one initiative that we love. For a few years now, we've been doing this customer reward program. And there's hundreds of them out there. Many companies do them, but most of them don't really make an impact. They either don't get nominations or the nominations are few. And then when you actually give out the awards, nobody cares about them.

22:24Nobody gets excited about them. At Gong a few years ago, we rolled out the Golden Gong Awards, which we give a handful of companies every year for making really breakthrough uses of our AI in their revenue excellence. And because our employees are excited about this, when we start the nomination process, you see a lot of Gong employees amplify the competition out there. So it looks like a LinkedIn hijack day when everyone's talking about this. And because our customers love our brand, because they've been getting so much value out of us and they want to be associated with us, we get dozens, if not hundreds of nominations from customers who want to win the Golden Gong Awards because they know that's going to have a positive impact on them.

23:12When we finally pick our whatever, half a dozen winners, we give each of them a lot of attention and we see them and their entire teams amplifying that they won this award. So we know that it's meaningful to them. We're not paying them to do that. They don't have to do that. I've been nominated on so many fake lists that I never amplified because I knew they were fake and I was not helping myself or my reputation at all by doing this. But you see these customers who've put in the work to nominate themselves. And then when they win it, they are so grateful and they want to show the world, hey, look, Gong recognized me for being an innovative revenue leader.

23:49And of course, we make it all about them and not about Gong and the product, but we also benefit from them winning one of our awards. But I think that's an example of a good play that you can't do with a company who has a bad reputation, doesn't treat their employees well. So the employees are not going to play along and they're not going to want to amplify these customer messages and let the companies take over their LinkedIn profiles, especially if they don't believe in the company values. And the customers of a mediocre brand are not going to get excited about nominating themselves. And even if an award is forced upon them, which is, I've also seen that happen when, And nobody applies for your competition.

24:28So you just randomly pick some winners in hopes that at least they'll amplify that they've won this. But they won't even do that either. It's like, I don't remember applying for this. I don't even like your product. Or I use it because my manager makes me. You've got to create that whole thread. And it's hard to do. It's really hard to do. Like creating raving fans internally, creating raving fans externally, and reaching that situation where everyone's excited to be part of this. Yeah. And something that you and the Gong Squad have done really well, you also talk about this, is like, it's humanizing the brand, right?

24:56Like this idea of, you know, making your brand feel like a person. It's incredibly powerful. Talk about how Gong made this transition and the kind of reactions you're receiving. Because I first heard about Gong, I think when I first started hosting this and I was like, Gong, who are they? And even when I first like checked out the brand, I'm like, this is different. Like, what are they doing? There's a palpable buzz around this brand that feels different. The interaction is different. The content's different. So clearly you had a lot of really magic in humanizing the brand. Would love your insight and kind of how you did that.