Special: What you need to know about brand (With Udi Ledergor)

Everyone agrees brand is important, but struggle to articulate why or even how to manage it.

That's why we brought on Udi Ledergor from Gong to share his insights from building the gong brand.

We get into:

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:29) - Why brands don't invest in branding
• (03:37) - What does brand even mean?
• (06:14) - Why even consider brand?
• (09:36) - Creating a category
• (15:48) - Brand at the early stages
• (18:37) - Investing in big brand bets
• (30:25) - How to handle budget and brand
• (35:01) - What are the signals to pay attention to?
• (37:44) - It's not enough to say "the CEO doesn't get marketing"

Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

Guest

Udi Ledergor

Udi Ledergor is a five-time Marketing leader at B2B start-ups and currently the Chief Evangelist at Gong

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Toni: Hi everyone. This is Toni Holbein.
[00:00:01] You are listening to the Revenue Formula. In today's special episode, and it's special because we have a guest. It's Udi Liddegaard from Gong. We are going to talk about brands, why it matters, why you should consider it.
[00:00:16] Enjoy.
[00:00:21] Toni: no, we had some nice Kinder Chocolate. Oh yeah, the German, German candy. Um, I'm really worried it's going to end up like stuck on the teeth.
[00:00:29] This is going to be a new trend. Yeah, that's right. No, we were looking in the mirror all the time and it's like, okay, that works out actually. Okay. Anyway, let's, uh, let's start, um, maybe we're already in this. Yeah. But the thing is, I don't think, you know, a bit of chocolate on the teeth is going to ruin our brand.
[00:00:43] Oh, wow. Yeah. The segway is fantastic.
[00:00:46] Udi: I would push back on that. Have you, have you ever tried talking to someone with some, some parsley stuck in their teeth? Do you remember anything they said?
[00:00:56] Toni: Yeah. But you also know that when that person walks away, looks into a mirror and then it's like, why didn't that person help me? Yeah. They could have told me.
[00:01:05] Udi: It's a, it's a lose, lose situation. Like an hour later.
[00:01:10] Toni: You know what, I'm so happy to have you on the show, Udi, because we were at a loss. What are we going to riff on today? And here we are. It ended up nicely. So that's pretty good. I think we're already way into the riffing actually. So for people that maybe haven't, you know, realized that we have Udi Ledergor on the, on the show here today.
[00:01:24] Welcome Udi.
[00:01:25] Udi: Hi everyone. Very happy to be here today.
[00:01:27] Toni: Wonderful. And we're going to talk a bit about the very hard to measure, quantify, and almost also in some cases justify investment brand. I think it's just perfect to have you here, having been at Gong for quite some time, having been, a marketing leader at five other startups as well, and doing a lot of advising and so on.
[00:01:50] So I think it's really great to have you here, really, you know, in my view, an authority on the subject. So hopefully we can help. Business really understand how do you build that case? And that's what we're going to get into today. I think first of all, one of the things I've, so I'm a marketer, uh, and I've dealt with this issue that a lot of people I talk with, uh, whether it's CIOs, uh, CFOs, they agree, yes, brand it's, it's really important, but then when push comes to shove, there's this, you know, neglect and to actually then put money down, why do you think?
[00:02:24] Why do you think we are in this tough situation where it's really hard to convey to people the importance of brand?
[00:02:29] Udi: I think the two main reasons that brands don't invest more in brand is two. One of them is it's hard to measure. And, uh, many aspects of brand advertising are still hard to measure. If you put up a billboard, you have no way of accurately knowing who in your relevant audience saw it and what did they do, if anything, after seeing it and how it affected their buyer journey.
[00:02:53] And the same goes for many types of events and radio and television and other, uh, types of new media that are not a hundred percent digital. That's that's reason. Number one, it's hard to measure. Number two, even in the best of cases, even if you are, if you can measure that effect, it's more often than not going to be a long term effect.
[00:03:16] And many, many B2B startups, uh, want something that they can easily measure and that has an immediate effect, which, which is not a bad way of thinking about it, right? If you've only got, I don't know, a million dollars in the bank. And you've got to make that last till your next round. You want something that's going to drive results that you can see tomorrow.
[00:03:33] And so those are the two main reasons I think companies don't invest more brand.
[00:03:37] Toni: and just kind of from my perspective, kind of Mikkel, the marketing guy saying like, Hey, everyone likes brand and wants to invest in brand. Um, can we maybe define it just a little bit more kind of what does brand actually mean? What are, what are brand building activities and what are not brand building activities?
[00:03:53] And, and a lot of people throw those two things usually together.
[00:03:57] Udi: Yeah. So it's, it's, it's not a, it's not a clear cut definition. Uh, and every team defines it a little bit different on the activities. But I think to your first question, what, what is brand? If you look in marketing books, there's long descriptions with long, lots of words that make. People look smart when they read them out.
[00:04:13] My favorite definition of brand is brand is what people say about you when you leave the room. That's what brand is. And it, it works that way for people. It works that way for companies. It's what people say about you when you leave the room. Um, so when you think about it, um, if I say to you something like, uh, uh, Volvo, uh, what, what would that elicit?
[00:04:33] Probably you'd say It's a very safe car. Right? Cuz they, they focus a lot on, on safety. And if, um, if I say a brand like, uh, Disney. You might say something like magic or fun. That, that is, that is what brand elicits. It's what people say about you once you leave the room. And of course, when you think about people, it gets a lot more fun, but that's what we're talking about brands today.
[00:04:53] Toni: What would you say, actually kind of quick follow up on this one, when, when, uh, people leave the room, what, uh, when, when you leave the room, what are people saying about gong actually, or what would you like them to say about gong?
[00:05:05] Udi: I think if we're talking about the company and it's different than talking about the product, right? I think when people talk about the Gong company, they say, Oh, that's a really fun, smart brand because they educate us a lot about what works and doesn't work in sales. So it's, it's, it's very authoritative.
[00:05:24] It's a thought leader in the space, but they also have a really fun, quirky personality. They, they use. Uh, crazy bulldog as their mascot, and they've got these funky pink and purple colors, not the old boring corporate colors, and their tone of voice is always very conversational, so it feels like someone, I want to meet the person who writes for Gong, or the people who write for Gong, it's a whole team now, uh, because they seem like really fun, interesting people, so hopefully that's what lots of people are saying about the brand, and we, we've confirmed that with, with many, many conversations and, and posts that people write, even unsolicited on social media, if you look on LinkedIn or Twitter, or whatever, And look where people are writing about Gong, it's, it's always something in that.
[00:06:03] In that realm of, Oh, they're, they figured out how to be very smart and authoritative at the same time, not being stuck up and too corporatey, but they're actually really approachable and fun and they have a good personality.
[00:06:14] Mikkel: so, uh, you know, Gong has obviously become this massive brand, uh, in our space, right? I mean, if you work in B2B SaaS, it's really hard to not encounter Gong if you're, if I'm being really honest, right?
[00:06:27] So what yeah, yeah. So what I wanted to hear from you is there's going to be some folks out there. who need to understand why it's important in the first place to invest in brand.
[00:06:35] And I thought it would be interesting to hear what has it actually done for your business? What, what outcomes has it helped drive over the years, uh, in the direction of, of Gong?
[00:06:44] Udi: Yeah. So, so for those who, who haven't been in the, in the great position of having a brand work for them. I'll mention some of the things, some might be obvious, some might not be obvious, but a brand makes almost every aspect of the business easier. And I'll give a few examples. When you have a brand, people come to you.
[00:07:02] When I started working for Gong, I had zero traffic on the website, zero email subscribers, zero social media followers, zero inbound demo requests. And over the course of a few short years, we built a brand. That ended up with having 40% of our revenue come in inbound. So we can sit back or go to sleep and 40% of our revenue comes in inbound.
[00:07:24] They are looking for us. They're looking for the brand. So business comes to you. Two, uh, it's much, much higher to hire people. If you're a brand, um, Most people want to work for a big brand, whether it's Google or Apple or Amazon, you pick your, your, your favorite. That's where people want to work and they want that logo on their resume.
[00:07:42] So Gong has earned that status and people love coming to work for Gong. We've had thousands and thousands of inbound applications for every role that we Put out there because people want to work for a big brand. They know it's a great brand Not just as a company, but also as an employer brand So that's another thing that becomes easier three partners come to you, right?
[00:08:03] Many early stage companies struggle to find partnerships with larger companies. Once you have a brand the partners start coming to you We have a whole team now that's fielding these requests from tech partners go to market partners consulting partners integration partners They're coming to us several a week.
[00:08:20] So that becomes easier. Things like analysts and press, they come to you when you're a brand because you're now an authority on something and they want to cover what you have to say or what company news is coming out. So all these things are like a snowball. Once you start building the brand, you become bigger.
[00:08:37] People write about you. Once they write about you, you have a bigger brand. They come to you again because they want to follow on what's coming up next from you. So a brand makes almost every aspect of the business easier. Customers come to you. Employees come to you. Partners come to you, the press analysts, everything becomes a little bit easier.
[00:08:54] And I would say that, um, if you look at, at it from a rev ops point of view, if you look at deal cycles and conver uh, conversion rates, those get better when you have a brand because people trust you. Brand is essentially a name that people trust. Unless you, you have a bad brand. If you have a good brand, it's, it's a name to people trust.
[00:09:13] And so deals are more likely to close faster and deals are likely to convert better because you have that brand. At the end of the day, even if companies compare you to another product that might be similar, they will tend more often than not to go with the brand because as the old 1980s, uh, saying goes, nobody got fired for buying IBM.
[00:09:31] So in our space, nobody got fired for buying Gong because you know, it's a trusted brand.
[00:09:36] Toni: Actually kind of one, one question that is playing maybe on the intersection between brand and category and category design. Um, I mean, you, you mentioned when you started out Gong or when you were, I think you were the first marketing high on Gong, right? You had zero traffic, you had zero emails, you had zero social following.
[00:09:51] And so now, now you have inbounds, I think there are two things, probably a thousand, but let's just say two, two major things that also led to this one, obviously building a really recognizable brand that people associate wonderful things with, but at the same time, it's also, um, you weren't just a, um, you know, a copycat in an existing space that, that builded a cool brand that then attracted a lot of folks, it was actually also creating that category in the first place.
[00:10:16] And then. I guess with that brand also pushing out the category a little bit, I'm not sure kind of how it worked and you know, what was the chicken, what was the act, but I would love to have your, your, your commenting or your thinking on this over, uh, on your experience there.
[00:10:29] Udi: So, so happy to talk about that. And this is, this is a great. Plug to put in a lot of credit for our product and engineering teams, because you can't build and maintain a great brand if the product does not support it. And, um, as the first marketer at Gong, I had the huge luxury of having a product that was already best in category when we launched it.
[00:10:53] And we have an amazing product that reached ridiculously early product market fit. Which means customers adored it and wanted to keep using it. And they still do. And everything becomes infinitely easier in marketing and building the brand. And in sales, when you have a product that people actually love and rave about it, uh, we, we set our standard at Gong, not just having happy customers, but having raving fans, and you can measure that you can measure how many people go on LinkedIn and unsolicited right about what a great experience they had with Gong.
[00:11:21] You can measure that. If you look at the G2 reviews, if you look at the NPS surveys. If you look at how many customers want to speak at your conferences and at industry conferences And be in your press releases and customer success stories and we enjoyed all of that and it just makes marketing so much easier So it's important that listeners don't skip over that part. You can't just do some marketing hacks and build a category and become a leader if you don't have the product that actually supports it. So you absolutely need The best product if you want to succeed in the long term.
[00:11:52] So that's number one. Number two. Um, we actually came in as, as the third player in our category original in conversation intelligence. Um, so there were two other small startups, but they had customers, they had business, before going started and it was not a very big successful category. Uh, but we came in and we started moving very, very fast and within a couple of years, we had left other two smaller players way, way back behind.
[00:12:19] They kept growing because we helped them grow the category, but we very, very quickly eclipsed their number of customers combined and then grew it by an order of magnitude, uh, to the point where they were both sold off as small businesses. At some point while we continue to grow. Um, and, and that was a combination of creating really the best product that customers were raving about because you didn't see customers raving about the other two products.
[00:12:43] So I think that's a really important difference to recognize. It was not that I did some magic in marketing. It was, I really had the most happiest customers to work with and then take that and amplify that. So that, that was a big part of building the brand success. The second part I think is, is really more into marketing and that is recognizing that building really valuable thought leadership content in an organic way can help me get through a lot of my marketing efforts on a very small budget and none of our competitors were thinking about that at the time.
[00:13:19] So the approach that we took was building the Gong Labs series of content. And we figured that there's enough books about sales to talk about people's experience. You know, there might be a sales leader at Salesforce or a sales leader at Xerox and they did this and they did that and they wrote their memoirs and that's their sales book on how to do sales, but it's very, very subjective.
[00:13:38] And so we decided to inject a lot of data. And put aside opinions and show what's actually working and not working in sales. So from day one, I started looking internally at our customer calls and later the customer emails and other forms of communications had our data analyst team analyze that data and surface what's working and not working.
[00:14:00] And then we started creating content around that. So we found things like, you know, the optimal talk time on a discovery call should be around 46%. That was not a number that was out there before. We found what's the right number of questions to ask a C level versus a director or below. We found when you need to shut up, uh, after asking about pricing or presenting pricing, when to talk about pricing in your conversation to get the maximum conversion rate to the next call and so on and so on.
[00:14:28] Toni: And most recently, how much to curse and when. Yeah, that's
[00:14:31] true.
[00:14:32] Udi: that's very, very important. We actually did that study a couple of years ago, and that's a great example, actually, uh, Toni, because we, we found that salespeople and saleswomen who swear on their sales calls have an eight percent higher win rate than comparable opportunities where the salespeople don't swear, and there's a reason for it because it's a type of mirroring technique.
[00:14:54] It's best used when your prospect or customer is noise. Is using the same kind of language and you mirror that language, you're creating more report and you're going to sell more because you're creating more trust. And when we came out with that, which was very counterintuitive and also very polarizing, we put it out there as an organic article and the news sites ran with it and radio stations called me to interview me about it and on almost zero budget.
[00:15:19] We were able to get a lot of press that I could never afford. So that's a great example that you gave of how creating a really interesting news story can get you very far organically without a budget. And we were the only company in the space for many years doing this. Trying to churn out a new story roughly once a month or so because this analysis does take time because it's meaningful It's not just you know Fluffy tweets and posts that someone puts together in 10 minutes these stories take weeks and sometimes months to put together
[00:15:48] Mikkel: just a question. I think not everyone listening, they're going to be at the, the scale of gong. So the, and you've also gone through the early beginnings, right? So say you have a, an established business today, you're, you've passed the product market fit. What, you know, what are the first couple of steps businesses can take to get some of the benefits you've, you've talked a bit about here.
[00:16:09] Udi: Yeah, so if I were starting completely new, which, which I was fortunate to do about five times because I was always marketer number one at small companies below 20 employees. So the patterns that work are first, um, have a clear idea of who your target audience is. It's in every marketing book, but it never gets old.
[00:16:28] If you don't know who you're marketing and who you're selling to, you're probably not going to meet them. And then go and look for what I call their watering holes, whether they're in person or virtual. Where do they hang out? So if they hang out at user groups or events, you've got to show up there. If they hang out in reddit forums or linkedin discussion groups or slack channels, you've got to show up there.
[00:16:50] So first identify where they're hanging out because I think a common mistake that folks make is that they assume that they can easily bring These folks to their own assets like their website or their Uh, social pages.
[00:17:02] That's hard to do. If, if you're a nobody, and initially we all are, if you're a nobody, why would someone come to your party? It's much easier for you to go to where the party is at, and then try dragging someone from there to your party. So once you realize that, and you put ego aside, um, you start showing up to where they are, and then you start immersing yourself in the conversations.
[00:17:22] So you start learning what are they actually talking about, what are they actually interested in, where is there a conversation that you can embed yourself in that you have an interesting point of view, and by interesting point of view I don't mean responding to everything with yes, exactly, or that's my thoughts, exactly, you're not providing a point of view, right, when you see sometimes social media That have a quota.
[00:17:43] They've got to put 20 comments a day. They're all going to be yes. Yes. I love that That's not a point of view that that's being a cheerleader. You don't get famous for being a cheerleader You can get famous for having a point of view so by actually having a thoughtful view that many times can be polarizing or controversial. That's how you spark a conversation and get people to respond to you, right?
[00:18:04] Nobody will respond to you saying, yes, I love that. But if you say, actually, I think exactly the opposite and here's why, that might actually spark a discussion. So that's what we want to do. And once you understand what they're talking about and you understand what your point of view is, you can start creating those posts and get the engagement yourself.
[00:18:22] So find who you're talking to, where are they hanging out, go get immersed in their conversations and then start your own. That's pretty much what we did on LinkedIn and on Twitter, and we continued from there until we built our own blog and started getting traffic and subscribers there.
[00:18:37] Toni: so on the controversial side here, I actually do believe, you know, most of the things that you've mentioned so far, uh, you know, whoever's listening is like, yeah, cool. Let's do that. Right. Let's do some organic stuff. Let's have some, you know, user customer generated content that we're packaging and then bring it out in the, in the Gong labs.
[00:18:55] Uh, let's, let's do some cool stunts on LinkedIn and so forth. I think where the, where the crowd is a little bit more divided is, okay, let's run a Superbowl ad. Okay. Let's sponsor an NBA, court. I think you did, right? Okay. Let's do some other things that sound extremely expensive. And this is, I think this is where folks going like.
[00:19:18] Okay. We're, we're spending a mil. I don't show how much you spent on the Superbowl ad and maybe not a million, but you spend a significant amount of money. And that's then where then the RevOps folks going like, okay, so where's the, the brand attribution piece on the lead here, please. Because I need to, you know, have that in order to track back how much revenue we signed from the Superbowl ad.
[00:19:36] Right. So, and I think this is, so maybe we kind of move into this part now of the, of the show here, because that is, it is, um, obviously it's a bigger bang. Or maybe not. I don't know. Can of you please comment on that? Uh, but it costs something. And this is where I think then the, the friction really starts to, starts to happen between maybe the CMO, the CFO, the CMO, the CEO and so forth.
[00:19:58] Udi: Yeah, great, great topic, Toni So first, I'll say, uh, all those fun investments in Super Bowl and Warrior Games, uh, I didn't do those in the first five years at Gong.
[00:20:09] five years, I was working on a relatively small budget, just like any usual startup, and I found that having a really smart, organic strategy allows me to stretch my budget very, very far.
[00:20:22] Uh, I think, again, to reiterate, because it's important, one of the common mistakes is people take the little budget that they have And they put them on things like paid ads, which I found rarely work in the early days, because if you've got a paid ad, especially on social media, that nevermind, which, which channel you choose, wherever your audience is.
[00:20:41] If someone's scrolling through their feed and they see your your little ad for a brand They've never heard about because you're a startup and you're trying to explain the problem that you solve and the solution that you have and why it's better than everyone else and the call to action of Start now or buy now or get a demo. That is a very very complicated message to get into an ad that Should stop someone from scrolling their social feed. And if you don't have a brand that's not going to work very well.
[00:21:07] And so people, you know, I advise lots of companies They tell me Udi our paid isn't working and I tell them well just you're spending way too much time on that instead of building the brand organically and once you have a strong brand then people Identify your color or logo or presenter or product in the ad then they'll actually stop. So so paid advertising is rarely good enough To be standalone to drive business, but once you have a brand that becomes a lot more effective. So that that's something to keep in mind.
[00:21:37] And so in the first few years, I didn't do warriors I didn't even dream of super bowl. I did good old organic and we racked our heads on how can we create a provocative? thought provoking interesting video or article or blog or speaking session on a very tiny budget That would get people to stop and listen and read and watch and that's what we did for years Uh at some point we're we're like, okay, we've grown the space for recognized as a leader What can we do to jump to the next stage?
[00:22:05] And then I found very attractive opportunities around super bowl and warriors and out of home and print and things like that. And we always always hacked them when I say hacked them that is we spent a fraction of what people assume Those opportunities cost because people know that a national super bowl commercial costs six million dollars just for the media I think it's closer seven this year and When you do that, usually people spend a few more millions on the creative and get big stars So they end up paying like 10 million dollars for running a 30 second commercial. Um, I never had that sort of budget and that that's like beyond my annual budget most years.
[00:22:42] So, uh, I found out that you can do regional commercials and spend a tiny fraction of that And when you're a b2b business usually Usually not always your customers are not evenly distributed across the entire world or even across the entire nation. But usually you have one two or three hubs where eighty percent of your customers are that was the case for gong as well. So if i'm buying the regional spot in the bay area and new york and maybe one other hub in chicago or seattle. I'm probably covering eighty percent of my market ten percent of what the national spot costs.
[00:23:14] So that that's the first way that you can hack regional media and if you haven't guessed already I did the same thing with the warriors game I knew that the warriors most of their fans who are also Gong prospects or customers are here in the bay area. Who's watching the warriors game in idaho?
[00:23:28] We don't have customers there. Anyway So I sponsored like one quarter of a Warriors game only broadcast in the Bay Area. I think that cost like 5,000 dollars. I mean you would spend more than that on doing a dinner event for a few customers. So you can do things for pretty cheap if you're smart about them.
[00:23:46] And then the second thing that we did with all those things, we did it with out of home and with TV and with print and other formats, is You know that you're creating in order to amplify them to your digital audience, which you can measure, and it is the right audience.
[00:24:03] So if I did a full page, uh, ad in the Wall Street Journal, or a full page ad in the UK Times, all of these, which I did, the Wall Street Journal, you can buy the national paper, or you can only buy the West Coast edition, which is about 25% of the cost of the national edition. But once I have that, I can amplify it on social media, and then I get to all of my audience, which I can measure because I can see how many impressions and clicks and likes and comments and shares and all that stuff I get there.
[00:24:32] And now I can measure it to make the measurement numbers people happy. And I know I'm getting to the right audience because people who follow me on LinkedIn and the people to subscribe to my email newsletter are the right people. So I'm just using that, that, uh, small investment in print. Or in Super Bowl or in in whatever Warriors game as as a small investment to create content, which I amplify to my digital audience.
[00:24:55] And there I can measure everything. Uh, I'll give one one other anecdote from from Super Bowl. We wanted to make sure not just six months after the game to try and attribute something back to it, but see during the game during the game and during the week who's watching it. Are these even our customers or these truck drivers and.
[00:25:14] I don't know indiana. So we set up a tracker in gong to see how many times gong is brought Super bowl is brought up in gong sales conversations with prospects. And we saw a huge spike during the super bowl week that then slowly went down of hundreds of customers who said hey We saw you on the big game last night.
[00:25:32] We saw you on super bowl. That's so amazing. And our chief revenue officer reported to the executive team meeting after Super Bowl, he said, after this week's conversation of everyone seeing us in Super Bowl, we're perceived at a totally different level of brand right now in the market. Like everyone else is just doesn't exist right now compared to where we are.
[00:25:51] So when your chief revenue officer says that to management and your CFO and your CEO and sitting in the room. You know, you've done the right thing and that you're going to see great ROI. I'll say one more sentence, Tony. We also found that that week of Superbowl 2021 became our record week of pipeline creation to that point in the company.
[00:26:11] So even the most skeptical CFO, I
[00:26:14] love you, Tim. Came back and said this was a great investment actually, because the ROI is fantastic.
[00:26:20] Toni: So, uh, number one, you're totally right.
[00:26:23] Um, so when I saw this
[00:26:26] super bowl thing of you guys. I was just like, this, this is crazy. Um, and, uh, and it was an automatic conversation with everyone else I knew in the space and it was, it was such a fun topic also to bring up and so forth. Kind of, Hey, did you see this?
[00:26:41] Did you see what Gong did? Aren't they, aren't they nuts? and obviously this, this elevated you guys like completely, right? ,so I think that's great. Uh, I think the outcomes are great. I think the attribution is great. And I want to go back to, the, the point of time when you were starting to think about the Superbowl ad and then to have the conversation with Tim, uh, the CFO, and then to kind of figure out what should we be doing here versus the.
[00:27:09] Oh, look at this. After the fact, everything was great because that is, that is the easy, easier conversation to have with is the, Hey, believe me, this will be awesome conversation. And people having big question marks.
[00:27:20] Udi: Yeah. So I, I wish I had an, an exciting, inspiring answer there, but, but it was, it was embarrassingly easy because, uh, I'm very fortunate to be working with a c o, uh, who used to be a cmo, Amit Bedo, my CEO. Um, he and I have worked together at three different companies over the course of the last 25 years, uh, with, with some breaks where we went to do our own things.
[00:27:43] But we, we've been working. Closely together more than 10 years out of those 25 years at three different companies. And he gets marketing and he likes taking big bets. And so, um, I remember I took him, I took him for drinks at, uh, Charmines and on the rooftop bar in San Francisco. And by the second drink, I thought this was a good time to tell Oh, you know, I had this conversation this week with CBS thing.
[00:28:08] They have this really, really, uh, helpful, uh, sales lady. And she. She introduced me to the world of regional advertising on the Super Bowl, and It took me about 90 seconds to explain to him how it's broken down and what I suggest to do, which would be a a very. Low six figure number, very low six figure number, no more than we would spend on a big industry event to go there for two days with the booth.
[00:28:35] And I told him this, this could, could be our next big thing in brand awareness. If we break out of, you know, all the startups doing the regular Google and LinkedIn eBooks, this will put us in a whole different level. I haven't seen anyone in our space ever do this before. And he was like, okay, let's go twist Tim's arm and do this.
[00:28:53] That, that was word. He was convinced, um, like 90 seconds and two drinks later that we should do this. And, uh, and here's how we positioned it to Tim and to the board. We said, look, we're doing this as a long term brand awareness play. We don't expect to see any short term metrics move as a result, but we feel strongly that this is going to be a good brand play.
[00:29:16] Now, to be fair. At that time we were hitting our numbers and that is an important prerequisite, right? You can't just come and think that these things are going to save you If you're not hitting your numbers super bowl is not going to save you if you're not hitting your numbers Putting up a billboard on the 101 is not going to save you So sorry to break it to you marketers, but you actually have to hit your numbers on this quarter's goals and building pipeline for the next quarters, doing all the regular quote unquote, boring stuff.
[00:29:42] When you do that, you get to come and ask for extra pocket money to play and do fun things. And the way I build it is I always reserved roughly 10% of my media budget programs, budget. To do experiments that I would not easily be able to attribute to this quarter's results. I call them marketing experiments.
[00:30:02] Internally in the team, they were known as the budget line item called Udi's Crazy Ideas. Uh, but for the finance team, we put the, the, the title of marketing experiments. And we said, we're experimenting. That's part of growing marketing because today's channels are not going to work
[00:30:17] in a year from now. So we have to experiment and do other things.
[00:30:19] So that went under experiments and and this one was a
[00:30:22] very good one. I can tell you many others were just meh
[00:30:25] Mikkel: So I think, I think, this is another interesting point, right? Because you
[00:30:27] usually have, we do the whole budget allocation exercise.
[00:30:31] You need to go and figure out where do we go and capture demand. And where do we go and grow potentially our demand, which, which you're talking a bit about here, right? How, how do you best approach that part in terms of splitting your budget out?
[00:30:42] Do you have any kind of experience or advice there you can share?
[00:30:47] Udi: Um if I understood the question, um, so so it goes back to just allocating that small number Which I recommend to be between five percent and fifteen percent if you do that for any given budget that leaves you enough to experiment with and if you set expectations that Like, measure me on the 90%, this, this 10% is going to be my, my sandbox.
[00:31:06] This is where I'm playing with things. So if you have a 100, 000 budget, which is not a big budget, you can take 10, 000 and experiment with something. You can do a local print ad or, or you can do an event that you're not sure about, but, but you think there's reason to believe it'll work. And then when you've got a million dollar budget, I've got 100k for experiments.
[00:31:25] You can do some television or radio or do something interesting with that. When you get a 10 million budget, then you've got a million dollars. You can do a Superbowl commercial regional with that. You can definitely do some local sports games or other sponsorships to play with. So your, your budget grows.
[00:31:40] If the company grows, you get more budget. That means you're hitting your short term targets and then you get more, more play money.
[00:31:46] Mikkel: So basically rather than, you know, attempting to do a bunch of math for something you've never done before. You're basically advising, Hey, it's much better to earmark some resources to test. And then once something is working, you can implement it as, as an
[00:32:00] Udi: Yes, I think I think that's the only rational approach, even if the finance guys don't always love that because it's really impossible to tell the experiment by by the definition. I don't know what the result is going to be. I'm experimenting here. mixing two things. I don't know if they're going to explode or combust or or just be inert.
[00:32:16] I'm experimenting. I can make up numbers if it's going to make finance happy, but I'd rather just be up front and say, uh, I don't know what this is going to do, but here's my rational explanation for why I expect that there might be a good outcome to this. Right. I'm not just randomly throwing money around.
[00:32:33] I'm not, I'm not, you know, what, once I, once you start doing these, these things and, and, uh, other media companies see that you've done Super Bowl or taken up a big, uh, out of home sign, then every day I'm getting offers from sponsoring, um, uh, race cars in Formula One to sponsoring, uh, stadium naming rides.
[00:32:53] Uh, airport takeovers, all these things and I look at every one of them and most of them, the vast majority of them, I don't think they're a good fit. So it's not that I'm saying, Oh, okay, here's an opportunity, let's go spend some experiment money. No, because. Even at gong and many other companies you never have all the money that you could spend on everything that you're offered So you've got to be very Intentional about what you're spending that experiment money on so for super bowl, you know I broke it down and said these are the three territories where based on our crm data These are the largest hubs of gone customers and prospects This is why i'm choosing those it's not a random experiment if that's how it came off.
[00:33:28] I want to correct that impression I'm, not saying just throw your money at something and see if it sticks i'm saying have a Really good explanation for why you think this could work but even if you don't have certainty go and allocate some budget for it. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't
[00:33:42] Toni: So, and I think I know what the answer is going to be, but just because we have some people listening that think about, you know, resource allocation and CAC payback and planning and so forth. Um, so you didn't, you didn't sit there and I don't know when the Superbowl thing is, is it in February? Uh, usually.
[00:34:00] Udi: Early
[00:34:01] Toni: it's not like you planned in a big spike in whatever in February or March or Q1, and we're like, Hey, you know, this is how we associate these things. You were basically like, this is my marketing budget. I'm gonna, uh, in terms of target, I'm going to achieve it with a 90%. And then I have the 10% to do some other stuff that could, uh, obviously is well thought through and you have a strong belief and you're backing up the data and so forth, but, uh, you're simply lacking the, uh, the data yet to connect directly to a potential outcome, right?
[00:34:31] So basically you completely separated those two things also from an expectation perspective.
[00:34:35] Udi: Correct. Now, at the end of the day, you know, finance does their own math and they, they work with marketing to decide which budget line items are considered demand gen and which are not. And then they take all of the demand gen budget and divide it by the outcome, which could MQLs or SQLs or whatever you want, or pipeline.
[00:34:52] And that's their cost per lead. But but you do have to agree that certain things are considered brand awareness and we're not going to put them in that math
[00:34:59] Toni: Okay, very cool.
[00:35:01] Mikkel: I kind of wanted to get back to actually one of the, um, the benefits you went a bit into,
[00:35:04] which is, you know, with a brand you can impact the, basically the sales efficiencies, right? You'll see that the sales cycles, they, they move faster, the deals progress faster, right? I'm curious to hear, uh, are there some, you know, tangible things if, if there's a listener out there now who want to see, do we actually have potentially something going for us now or not?
[00:35:24] What would be some of the signals they could go in and look for themselves?
[00:35:28] Udi: That's that's a great question kind of how do you know that that you have a brand? Um, so there's yeah, i've seen several approaches to to that um But but here's here's some ideas. So first I would say If you want to know if you have raving fans, which is one of our measures of a brand You could go and check how many unsolicited social media posts are customers writing about our brand if the number is zero You probably don't have raving fans they could be happy, but they're probably not raving fans because that's that's the next level when people Who are just having a fantastic time using your product and it's either making them happy or successful or rich or something else or very efficient or whatever your product does for them.
[00:36:10] If they take time out of their day to go on LinkedIn or Twitter and just write praise for your product, which we see happen for consumer products all day long, right? Um, in B2B, it's a lot less common, but if your customers are doing that, then you're at that, you're in that realm of raving fans that are actually unsolicited.
[00:36:30] posts raving about your product. That's a really good start. Um, other, other ways that we've measured ourselves in marketing for that is creating content so good that people are willing to pay for it. And I'll give some examples. So B2B marketing by definition is just part of the marketing investment. We created to create a demand jet engine and talked about this in many opportunities.
[00:36:53] Um, But the standard that we said is we want content so good that people are willing to pay for it. Even if we're not going to take their money. And when we see occasionally, uh, a professor from University of Illinois is reaching out and saying, Hey, I just read your latest gong lab article. I'd like to use that for my class on sales.
[00:37:12] What would it cost me to license your material? We say bingo and we we wrote we uh, Distribute that across the team saying see we just make content that people are willing to pay for Or when a sales enablement manager reaches out and said i've just read your latest Uh templates from gong. I want to use that for internal team training What would it cost me to use that we go bingo.
[00:37:32] We did it again We create a content so good that people
[00:37:35] want to,
[00:37:35] pay for it And that that those are all good
[00:37:38] signals that you're creating something of an authority and a brand that the people are willing to pay for
[00:37:44] Toni: So I wanted to, and we need to kind of watch out on time here a little bit, but I wanted to go back to one of
[00:37:50] the,
[00:37:51] one of your earlier comments, um, which is kind of a knockout, uh, I believe it's the, Hey, my CEO gets marketing. Um, and, um, uh, so number one, not, not everyone is that fortunate. So this is number one, right?
[00:38:06] And, uh, and number two, maybe the CEO isn't even the person that you need to convince, maybe it's someone else. And, and, you know, I rarely hear, Oh, it's, you know, the CFO gets marketing and that's why it was, that was approved. Do you have a couple of, um, tips or advice on how to, uh, how to go about it when you don't have the, Oh, he gets marketing or she gets marketing, uh, labeled for a decision maker around you?
[00:38:33] Udi: Yes, uh, I do because because the question I hear from Um, marketers all day long, uh, my CEO or my CFO or my CRO doesn't get marketing and, uh, what should I do? So, uh, there's, there's a couple of ways that I suggest, uh, approaching this. Number one, you know, I've met many CEOs and CROs that don't believe in marketing.
[00:38:55] I've never met one that doesn't believe in sales. Now, why is that? Why is that? Because sales, they, they show their numbers. They're like, this is how much pipeline we have. This is how many deals we have. This is how much money we put in the bank. Many marketers just don't do that well. So I would start by looking back at ourself the mirror It's probably the marketers fault in many cases That they're not making a good business case for their investments or not Showing their results in the metrics and in the way that the business cares about if you're showing in a in a management meeting Or board meeting, uh how many likes or tweets you got that that's that's a problem Those are not metrics that the business cares about If you're showing how much dollar pipeline you created and what the conversion rate from that to business one is now you're starting to talk the language of the CRO, the CFO and the CEO.
[00:39:42] So first as a marketers, as marketers we have to educate ourselves on what the business cares about. And that is the only language we should be using in the boardroom. Keep the likes and the shares and the website views for the marketing team. They're the only ones who care about Okay, those are leading indicators.
[00:39:56] I'm not saying they're not important They're leading indicators because we have zero traffic on the website You're probably going to have zero conversions and zero pipeline created out of that So marketers should absolutely care about it But don't assume that your cfo or cro care about talk to them in a currency that they understand Which is at least the sales qualified opportunity that creates pipeline that sales admits as pipeline wants to work on.
[00:40:17] So that's number one. So it's our job to educate the team around us on what we're doing, why we're investing certain things and what are we producing as a result. Now back to the CEO or CRO or CFO that don't understand or get marketing. I think. As a marketer, our first attempt at solving this should be educating them and being aligned with them and really understanding their challenges.
[00:40:41] I've never seen a successful go to market team where the sales and marketing leaders were not talking regularly. And by regularly, I mean like on a weekly basis, uh, before we, we all went remote. We, my CRO and I used to go out every week for a coffee. We set aside 30 to 60 minutes. Went out physically from the office, talked about how the families are doing, how the team morale is, what challenges do we have, and how can we solve them together, so we were aligned.
[00:41:07] I wrote a short article about it once, um, if you're, if you're a CMO and you don't know how your CRO takes their coffee, you're not doing it right, because you're not meeting with them often enough. You should know exactly how they're taking their coffee. And so that, that's an easy lackluster test to know if you're really aligned with sales.
[00:41:23] If you're not, there's just no way you're going to succeed. If, you're not creating raving fans out of sales leadership for marketing. They're, they're not going to be good partners and there's no way you as a marketer can succeed. So after you've exhausted and done all those things, if you still can't get through and they don't want that partnership, they don't want that alignment because they really, really don't believe in marketing, then I would say you're probably not going to succeed in this company and you should make the difficult decision to consider moving on.
[00:41:50] There's marketers who get there, sorry, there's CEOs who get marketing. That's as you said, Tony is, it's a best case scenario. The next case scenario is. Leaders who don't know marketing, but they know that they don't know marketing and they are open to you educating them and with the right information and speaking to them in the right terms of currency that they care about, this can still work.
[00:42:12] And then the third and worst type is folks who don't know marketing, but don't know that they don't know marketing. So they assume that they know what needs to be done
[00:42:20] or they're just not open to learning about it.
[00:42:22] And, And, those, I don't know that you can fix.
[00:42:25] Toni: Yeah, no, I can, I can see that. So I think there is one important thing, um, that we keep going back to. It's like the 90% in my mind, right? You gotta actually make the numbers. And that kind of also tells me that you probably spend the majority of your time not thinking about the brand dimension. But thinking about all the existing elements that actually drives the business forward.
[00:42:49] And I think I did not expect the episode to take that route, but I'm happy we ended up here. Uh, because there you will have more predictability, right? And so I think that's actually for me. I think it's a pretty important takeaway for people to kind of keep in mind. Um, that there's that, that frame of reference, at least now, uh, from someone who's built been part of building a massive brand.
[00:43:10] Um, you know, let's, let's find a better name for, you know, those 10%. Um, you call it marketing experiments, I think, or, or, or crazy Udi ideas. Um,
[00:43:20] let's it that,
[00:43:21] Udi: I didn't
[00:43:21] Toni: do that.
[00:43:22] Udi: think reports
[00:43:23] Toni: Yeah. I like, I like that being a predetermined amount. I like that. This is not a, okay, I need to go
[00:43:30] to someone, give them a convincing spiel of something that doesn't, you know, that I don't know anyway.
[00:43:35] And then ask for the money, but it's, it's going the other way around, right? Kind of, it's already there and then you just find a sensible way to deploy it. I think this makes a ton more sense than, Oh, you know, I really want to do this thing, let's build a business case. And, and everyone that's reading this business case.
[00:43:51] Everyone knows it's BS, right? And, and I think this turns this dynamic around and makes this, uh, makes this a really cool, uh, and better approach, uh, but also sure, yes, you as a business need to be able to afford those 10% and this is, you know, this might be one or two months of kick payback and maybe you, you have investment round coming up and you want to think about maybe there's different.
[00:44:12] There might be so many other reasons to, you know, allocate those resources differently. Uh, but it's, I feel it's almost an impossible ask. Uh, for some of those things that you want to try out to then expect it to build a business case that someone actually believes in. And, you know, this dynamic makes this, uh, you know, way more, uh, way more doable to actually then get done.
[00:44:32] Right. So I think this is a pretty cool, pretty cool takeaway from, um,
[00:44:36] Udi: I, I, I think, uh, Mikkel put it in, in a, in a good way, you know, it, it might sound surprising to people that, that 90% of our budget and attention is actually on the behind the scenes demand gen Um, but we are famous and I get interviewed every week on things like Super Bowl and out of home and fun stuff that people see because it's more visible and exciting, which is, which is natural, but nobody hardly ever interviews us on.
[00:45:04] LinkedIn ads, which we get told over and over by LinkedIn that, you know, every month they do an internal audit and they tell us and other brands who advertise who has the most effective ads in terms of conversion rates and, and, uh, driving action. And, and Gong is up in the top, like. 1% or 2% or whatever of most effective ads on LinkedIn or we do a trade show and they tell us Um when once they count the lead scanners, you know No, no other booth got close to the number of leads that you scanned in the gong booth that's because we do very very meticulous planning for our events and We we spend a ton of energy on getting the most effective ads and creative and ab testings But those are kind of the run of the mill Dimension stuff, and yes, they absolutely take up more than 90% of our team's effort and attention and budget.
[00:45:49] Um, but it's, it's, at the end of the day, it's the fun Super Bowl and print and Chase Center stuff that... Get the attention but, but I guess that's only natural.
[00:45:57] Toni: No, I think kind of for this specific audience, it's really the, how do you argue for this thing? Uh, or, or how, how should you as, you know, a CEO or RevOps or, you know, some kind of a leader in between. How should you, you know, maneuver with this thing? And, and I think you, you gave a pretty cool roadmap. It's not the, Oh, you calculate this times that, and then subtract five, and then you to this number.
[00:46:20] Udi: straight face because we all
[00:46:22] Toni: no, no, no. Udi, this was wonderful. Thank you for being here. Thank you for
[00:46:29] spending time. Thank you for probably reciting the Super Bowl story for the 115th time. Um,
[00:46:35] yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks, Udi. Bye. Bye.