Your Marketing “Best Practices” Are Killing Creativity

23:34No, I got salespeople who were in your shoes. They know the life that you're living. They know the problems 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 reek of a sales pitch. Yeah, man, this is so good. It's so like practical of, I mean, one, I think about a lot of different companies that I always see content and product marketing together. I don't know if I - Because it kind of makes sense, right?

24:04They're both creating content. Yeah. I can't think of one company where they're really separate and like, oh, that's, yeah, just very, very practical. I'm working with a few companies that have realized the benefit of separating those team and they're seeing the results. 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 is the engagement between those two teams look like?

24:32So 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 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.

25:12When I came to Gong, we did not answer any of those questions yes because 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.

25:54I'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.

26:35And 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. 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 I 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 gonna hire a content writer and here you are bringing in a salesperson.

27:12to write something instead? Like, how do you think about that? 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 a 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.

27:55It's like, what is the actual value that we're selling? 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 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.

28:31So 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 head count. So he said, Russell, when he was not working at 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 conference. I said, sure, we can budget for that.

29:07So he brings over Vince. So he calls Vince. Vince Chan was working on his cousin's Filipino food truck, Senor Sisig, which made 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.

29:50And 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, Uri, 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.

30:20And Vince is still at Gong today. So this is six years later. Vince is there. He's managed everything from social media to marketing operations. 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. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I feel like that's, I've heard this theme now on 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.

31:02It'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, it seems like it's just a very different skillset people are desiring now instead of like, you know, HubSpot. or whatever, like you're proficient in X, Y, and Z. Exactly. It just seems like a new world. 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 a more complex system.

31:33But 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 a balance between those things And an 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.

32:01And 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 going to crush it way more than someone who's been doing this for 20 years maybe has gone stale. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Do you ever ask people about like their hobbies? Because 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 how you lead.

32:34And 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? 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.

33:17But 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 this 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.

34:05And 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'd 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 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.

34:34But bringing in these people with this diverse background, just allow them to connect these things together because all these special effects, the stuff that he'd seen a million times before in showbiz. So it was no stranger to pyrotechnics and smoke and bubbles. But most B2B corporate event marketers are kind of strangers to that. Yeah. Did you see people copying afterwards where next, you know, the next year everyone has bubbles and it's like, that was so last year. 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.

35:08So that keeps us on our toes and make 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. It just means that they're looking up to what you're doing. Yeah, no, it was good. We were at a conference, I think, with Salesforce back in 2018 or 19. It was like the Forrester 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, it's not cool now.

35:40It was cool last year. Yeah. Yeah. Now you need to come to something new. Yeah. So, I mean, if you look up your background, people have probably heard a lot of stories of so much success and you've done so many amazing things and built great teams. But I'd love to hear from you, are there any big moments, let's just say failure stories, that come to mind that really influenced your career that you'd be open to talking about? 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.

36:22everyone'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 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.

37:04And 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, will 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.

37:41And 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 expensive.

38:26And looking at those six emails, I realized that I completely messed up and 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 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 And not because we said something clever like use an S word on a sales call, but something that they deeply care about.

39:15And 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 received 100 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 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.

39:50The 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 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.

40:25and 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 wrote back to complain, 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.

40:58And 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.

41:35And 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. And 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 way and I will never do that again. So that was one lesson that I learned there.

42:13And I think the second lesson I learned is that my hunch was correct, that if six people complain, you should assume it's 60 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 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.

42:58It 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 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.

43:34So much damage is going to ensue. And then when you see big companies F up like that, and then you're wondering, 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 all need to do better that and find a way to quickly repair what's clearly been wrong. 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 say companies, founders, other marketers of like, hey, problem, act quickly, send something else out?

44:15Like, have you been able to kind of like take this and like use it with other companies and other projects? We had a 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 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. I didn't mean to call you any names, but our automation system has a life of its own and we corrected that.

44:52But 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. I love it. I'm sure that had a great open rates though. People being 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, 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.

45:27So email, don't just optimize for that in a vacuum. 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? 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?

46:06And I 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.

46:47So 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 way to hiring people that are risky in many ways to your team, but they probably will produce the best work your team will ever do. So all those things are about finding the courage in building your team and content and events and brand category building.

47:22And 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 Gilman, 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.

48:00And 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. But 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 & 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. So good. I'm excited to read it.

48:36When those CMOs were looking or hearing about the content in this book, was there any one topic or story or theme that 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 and changed perspectives on something? Yes, there were several. I think one interesting one 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 versus Wade. It can be trans rights.

49:15All of those. It can be a war in Ukraine. 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.

49:57But listening to some of these executives 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?

50:34Are 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 worked at 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.

51:13My 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. Yeah, I love that. All right, so for this last little portion of the interview, I do wanna 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. And I'd love to hear from you like how you're thinking about leveraging AI.

51:47Is it gonna 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? I do think AI is going to take away jobs. In every sector, it's gonna 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.

52:33I'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. Or then 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.

53:13He 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.

53:54And 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.

54:26Of 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. 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 to 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.

55:05And so it seems like it's a very exciting time to be a part of. And of course, it's an amazing time. 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 you probably are at risk at some point of being replaced by AI. Mm-hmm. I do wonder, you were mentioning about using AI for writing, and that's still something, and maybe it's because I have a media company, my bar is very high.

55:36I'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, those are good ones. What areas are you still kind of like, be careful. Don't just jump in because it's there. Absolutely. So most people, even if they're not expert, 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 that are needed.

56:11They'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 a 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. I wrote an entire book without using AI. I put all my words down on paper. So it's not perfect grammar. Hopefully there's no spelling mistakes, but I can't even guarantee that.

56:45But it's all written by me. And I think it makes it interesting because it sounds like I would speak. But then 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 audio book later, but when I was using AI to kind of QA it, it sounded too familiar, too close together. And so I opened up ChatGPT and I asked for 10 alternatives to see of sameness.

57:21And 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 ChatGipity without letting it write anything for me.

57:54And one of those 10 were good enough inspiration that I picked up on that and ended up using it in the book. Yep. I love that. Yeah. 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 sentence. Exactly. I did not want ChatGPT to come with any preconceived point of view or content on the topic. It didn't even know what I was writing about.

58:24I literally just gave it this isolated phrase, like what are alternatives to 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. Yep, yep. I love it. Okay, I want to do a quick lightning round with you.

58:54I'm going to pull out a couple questions I just want to throw your way. You have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Udi? Let's go. 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? Carolu Dietrich is amazing. She headed up Atlassian Marketing and a bunch of others. I love John Miller, who's the co-founder of Marketo. I really like stuff that Dave Gerhardt and Trisha Gilman are doing and need one more. Sydney Sloan, now G2.

59:32She's a fantastic marketer. 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? Disney, completely out of the B2B world. There's nobody in the world better at storytelling than Disney. We can all just aspire to reach their heels. Yep, yep, I love it. What's the last ad that you remember that was like notable? The British department store Harrods does Christmas commercials every year that are complete tearjerkers. Go binge on those and take a box of tissues with you.

1:00:10The one they did with Elton John a couple of years ago before his biopic came out completely made me into a puddle. Okay. I might have to look this up now. I want to be a puddle just for a minute. Go for it. 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 it maybe pivoted your journey? 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.

1:00:42And 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? 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?

1:01:11Once 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 the 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. Yeah. 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? Three words? 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 a hundred leads because we were doing what everyone else was doing, offering product demos.

1:01:46People were leaving their business cards and we came back and 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, looked a little like Isaac from the love boat, and he was making mocktails and we opened up a bar at the booth.

1:02:21So 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 future 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 to go from 100 to 1000 leads.

1:02:54And so that strategy of coming up with a big idea absolutely works. 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? I'm on LinkedIn, the only Udi 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. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you, Stephanie.