Udi Ledergor of Gong on the CEO and CMO relationship

Udi Ledergor 00:33

Excited to be here. Just a small correction: I'm not the CEO but the CMO of Gong. I don't think I would take the CEO's job anytime soon, he's doing a great job there.

Udi Ledergor 01:05

I'm Udi, I'm 50 years old, born and raised in the Tel Aviv area, the broader Gush Dan area for the Israelis in the audience. I've lived in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, all over the place. Six and a half years ago I moved to the Bay Area, living in San Francisco with my husband and our three children. I've been working at Gong for the last eight and a half years. I started working for Gong in Israel, and a couple of years into it my CEO Amit and I agreed that the go-to-market team needs to be based on the west coast, so I packed up the family and we moved here, and it's been a great experience for us ever since. Prior to Gong I led four other marketing teams at other Israeli-founded global startups, names like Sarine Technologies and Panaya, and even some short stints at other companies. I've done and I'm still doing some board work, advisory work, speaking work, and a bunch of other exciting stuff. I try to enjoy time with family off work doing hikes, we've got beautiful nature here in California and the Bay Area.

Udi Ledergor

The way we do things at Gong, we've had a pretty tight planning process even from the very early days, whereas at other startups I've been at they waited much longer for that level of planning maturity. At Gong we believe there's a lot of value in the planning process, even if the initial plan we come up with is not going to be accurate and precise. There's a lot of value in ironing things out and working out the details in the planning process. So what that looks like at Gong: we typically start sitting down around July to plan next year, so we give ourselves five or six months to do this. At the ELT, the executive level, we come up with anything between one and three goals. In the early days it was easier to keep it simple and have one or maybe two, these days it's more like three or four, but we try to keep it down to three. Those high-level goals are then given to each function, marketing, sales, finance, people, product, engineering, everyone else, to go and derive their own goals and targets and KPIs from those high-level company goals.

Let's give an example. Let's say we have two goals at the company level, category leadership and customer retention, and we translate that into more exact numbers, of course. Then within marketing I would sit with my marketing leadership team and see what we have to do in demand gen, what we have to do in brand, what do we have to do in product marketing, what do we have to do in comms to serve those higher-level goals. Then within their teams they do the same exercise, and within the demand gen team what does the website team need to do, what does the events team need to do, what does paid advertising do, and so on. That gives everyone a clear sense of priorities and purpose, because even the person running social media, or a tech support engineer, or a recruiting coordinator understands how her targets roll up into her bigger team targets and how that rolls up into the bigger company targets. Then we report on those targets, at some levels on a weekly level, other levels on a monthly or quarterly level, but we know how we're serving the bigger purpose, and that's how we keep everyone aligned.

Udi Ledergor

I don't know that the weight lifts at any point. Yes, it's very stressful to have to get to that first $100,000 or $1 million. I don't think it's an easy job getting to 200 or 300 or 500 million either.

Udi Ledergor

Our work is always going to be a juggling act between short-term and long-term, because if we plan everything for short-term we're never going to build a long-term sustainable company. There are things you need to start building early, like a product that's actually going to be the infrastructure and base of a long-term successful product. You can't just build features that your first customer wants, you need to think of what is my product vision, what am I building for the long term. In marketing we need to think about how do we create a brand that people start talking about, that will serve us in the long term.

07:22 We might not see the fruits in the first six months, but if I only think about what I need to produce in the first six months I'm never going to get to creating those long-term efforts, building a brand, building a category, building a platform. All these things take years, not weeks, not months. I've seen this because I've worked for first-time founders, I worked for second-time founders, I worked for serial entrepreneurs, and there's a level of maturity that is usually found in more experienced founders where they know they have to start planning for the long term from day one, and they've got to build something that they have a vision of how it's going to scale to a galactic level, not something tiny that five customers will find useful.

Everyone tells us you've got to begin by making your first five customers happy, that's inarguable, but having a vision of how we're going to get to 5,000 customers pretty early on, and I can get into details where it's interesting, but the idea is, and I see this sometimes with first-time founders, where they have that mortality, a sort of panic mode that you talked about, where I don't even know if I'm going to be around next year, so I'm not going to invest in infrastructure, I'm not going to invest in process, I'm not going to invest in planning, I'm not going to bring people who know how to do what I'll need in two years, I'll just scramble and figure out how to do it now.

08:53 Sometimes it works, there's more than one way of building a successful company, and as one of the more successful investors and operators in the field, gilad, says, the best generic advice for startups is that there is no good generic advice for startups, so that's always good to keep in mind. But there are themes that if you're as old as I am and been in the business long enough, you start seeing themes of what is more likely to succeed, and having a long-term plan and going through the process to get to it, even if you know it's going to change multiple times, even throughout the first year, is a valuable part of building a mature business and giving it a real chance at being a sustainable business.

Udi Ledergor

There's a lot to unpack there. At the very end of your question you ask something that sounds like who should be the face or the spokesperson of the company, should it be the CEO or the CMO or someone else, so maybe I'll start with that and then work back to the larger question of the CEO and CMO relationship and how that can work in different situations. As for the spokesperson, I think it can go in a variety of ways. I've worked for companies where the CEO, either because of a language barrier or stage fright or just lack of interest in being the spokesperson and face of the company, left it all to me, and a lot more people knew me and identified me with the company than they did with our CEO, and that's fine, that's absolutely fine. I've also worked for companies, like Gong is a good example, where we have a pretty charismatic, outspoken CEO who does like getting out there and likes getting on stage at our events. Many times he'll send me to speak instead of him if he can't make it or doesn't want to make it, or he has to be in two different places at the same time, so I'll take one of those opportunities, but he is a pretty high-profile CEO.

11:58 But not every CEO I've worked with wanted that role, again, some of them struggled with English and we were selling into US and European markets, some of them just didn't feel comfortable preparing for presentations and giving those presentations, so I was happy to take that from them. I'll also say there's a third option, and that is the spokesperson of the company or the face of the company does not have to be an executive, does not have to be the CEO, does not have to be the CMO. I'll give an example from the early days of Gong, when I made my first hire to start creating content for Gong under the title Gong Labs, where we created lots of content, still do, to show sales professionals what's working and what's not working in sales based on data and our AI analysis.

I hired a pretty anonymous guy named Chris Orlob, and for the next three years he created a ton of content and became very well known and built a huge personal brand, because he's super talented and created great work, but did it under Gong and became very identified with the face of Gong. When he turned to the dark side and moved over to our sales team, I took another ex-salesperson, Devin Reed, who was pretty anonymous at that time, and brought him onto my team to continue the work that Chris started. He took Gong Labs from mostly written blogs to video and live events, and Devin built a huge brand for himself and advanced Gong's brand and did those two things together really well. So Devin was everywhere all the time and people knew that name far more than they knew my name or my CEO's name, because he was out there. So there are many options of doing this, and you don't have to force someone who is not naturally inclined to do public speaking or be on social media, or won't put in the work to do it well.

It doesn't have to be your CEO or CTO or CMO, it can be anyone from the marketing team or someone else. Today I'm in a role as Chief Evangelist and I do a lot of that as my full-time job. So there are many ways of going around this, if you want to pick the company face it does not have to be an executive, does not have to be the CEO. Taking that to the broader question of the CEO and CMO relationship, I've worked with a few types of CEOs, and maybe I'll rank them in the following way. There's the CEO who actually understands marketing, so he knows that he knows, and that's the case that I currently have at Gong. Amit Bendov and I have worked on and off at three different companies over the last 25 years, so we know pretty much what each other's capabilities and limitations are and how to work together.

He can be the biggest pain in the butt, I hope you're listening, because I've said this on multiple podcasts, but he's also the best leader I've ever worked for, because he knows what great marketing looks like, he knows how to guide marketing, he knows how to be a sounding board to marketing, and he trusts me to take a lot of ideas that we come up with together, or he comes up with, or I come up with, or someone else comes up with, and go execute them and break them down to a program. The second type of CEO, which is also workable with, is a CEO who knows that he doesn't know enough about marketing. We had a CEO like that when Amit and I were at Panaya. Amit was the CMO, I was the VP marketing, our CEO was Yosi. Yosi was a brilliant technology person, he was a computer science PhD, or working on his PhD, when he founded Panaya, and he knew a lot about technology but he did not know very much about go-to-market, and he realized that he doesn't know a lot about go-to-market, so he brought in marketing and sales leaders who would teach him about these professions, and he gave them a lot of wiggle room, a lot of rope to go do what they need to do and educate Yosi about what they're doing and what the company needs to do, and that also worked very well most of the time. The third type of CEO, which is probably the most challenging to work with, is the CEO who doesn't know that he doesn't know.

Udi Ledergor

I've seen that, I'll combine those two together, there's probably nuance there, you're right, Etgar, but I'll combine those together. Whether or not they know, or they think they know, or they don't know that they don't know, they can get in the way of great marketing and block a lot of great marketing, for multiple reasons. A, they might have unrealistic expectations of what marketing is supposed to do. B, I've worked for a CEO briefly who knew so little about marketing that everything I did he applauded and said, oh, that's wonderful, and that feels good for the first few months, but then it gets a little frustrating because nobody's pushing back, nobody's pushing me farther to do something better, or asking intelligent questions, or thinking together with me about what could we be doing even better, or have you thought about this.

I was getting no meaningful feedback, no pushback on anything, and this was pretty early in my career, so again it feels good, it strokes the ego really nicely in the first few months, but then you're like, can someone actually challenge me so I become better, and maybe show me my blind spots, what am I not thinking about, and what someone else might have been doing in that situation. So that's the problem with CEOs who either realize that they don't know but won't bring anyone in to challenge and push back and be a bigger authority, or like you said, they think they know. I've also had the situation where they just have unrealistic expectations about what marketing needs, what marketing can produce, and they get in the way and they create fear of failure rather than encourage curiosity, experimentation, big bets, and that sort of thing. So choose your CEO wisely would be my number one piece of advice for CMOs. They can really determine how much joy you will get from your job, but also how successful and how long you'll keep that job.

Udi Ledergor

So to do that well, and at the risk of making this a little bit more complicated, I would add that it's not just about exploring the CEO and her qualities but also the company, and those things are very intertwined. Here's what I mean. I've learned how to do better due diligence on companies before joining them, after making some mistakes along the way, and this is really important. Maybe I'll jump to the spoiler of why I'm talking about this first, because if you pick the wrong company where marketing is not the biggest problem, and you can't solve the biggest problem, which might be something like product-market fit, then there's no way you can succeed there. You might have a charming CEO who is a joy to work with, but if the product is not sticking with customers, if it doesn't solve a real problem, or if it's just too problematic that customers churn on you, you're not going to be able to solve that with the best marketing in the world, not for the long term. So I would start by doing due diligence on the company, looking at things like, if they already rolled out a product, then there should be reviews on websites like G2 and Trustpilot and TrustRadius and others.

What are customers writing about the product? If they all love it, that's a great start. If they all hate it, that's not a great start, go further into that. If they don't yet have a product that is publicly reviewed, and they're still working on it or in stealth mode or about to release it, go talk to prospects, either the ones the company is already talking to, or people you know that would be potential users of the product, and ask them, is this a real problem that you're having, and would you pay for a product that would solve that? Try to do your own due diligence to understand if this is more than a hot air balloon, if they're actually working on a solution that solves a big enough problem for people with enough power and resources to pay for it. Again, if it's already rolled out in the market it's much easier to do that by looking at reviews and talking to actual customers. So those are some of the things I would check there.

I have a whole list of due diligence that I would do on the founders and the investors and the runway and a bunch of other things, but let's say you went through that, because you want to focus on the CEO relationship. I would start and ask the CEO, "What will success in my role look like for you in six to 12 months? If we're sitting a year from now, after I've been working with you, what will need to happen by then for you to say you crushed it, you did an amazing job?" I want to hear, in very specific terms, what is he or she looking for, because I want to hear that they're looking for things that I think I have control over, that I think are within my domain of expertise, and that I think can be accomplished. So I'll start with success, and then if that still sounds realistic and good, and I'll give an example, they might say, this year we need to create $10 million of pipeline, we need to get our messaging straight because we're rambling and talking about it in different ways, and we need to have a strong story that prospects understand in two minutes.

So that's the pipeline we need, we need a strong story, and maybe a few other tactical things, we want to do our first customer event, and we want to do some brand awareness investments. Okay, those are things that are within marketing's domain. And then I'll ask, okay, and what resources were you thinking of allocating to do this this year? And if they say something like, well, we're really just still looking to raise money, so we probably have $5,000 for you to work with, I'm like, whoa, okay, you want me to create $10 million of pipeline but I've got $5,000, I don't know how to do that, you probably need to find someone else who knows how to do that. So those are my top questions, and every one of them is very telling. I'll give you an example: if the CEO thinks you can fix something like customer satisfaction, if their current NPS is minus 50 but they make it your goal to get it to plus 50, but you don't control the product, well, I can tell everyone the product is great, but once they try it they're going to see it's crap. I can't fix that NPS, that's not a marketing problem that I can fix.

That's just one example out of many, but you want to understand that their expectations for what success looks like are realistic, and then that the resource allocation behind those goals is also realistic, and that you feel comfortable signing up for all of those things. And then that happens every year after that as well, you and the sales leader and other leaders sign up for the goals, how much revenue and how much pipeline and what other metrics we need to achieve, and you've got to be really comfortable. They should be stretch goals, they should be difficult. At one company we worked for together, Amit and I, at Panaya, we called them hardly achievable goals, so they should be hard but they should be achievable, because if you consistently set something that's not achievable people are going to lose all their motivation, they're going to leave, people want to feel that they're set up for success, and that involves setting up targets that are ambitious, that require a lot of blood, sweat and tears and work to get there, but that we all see a path to getting there and that it's achievable. If they're too easy that also means they lose motivation, and it's probably also a bad way of running a company because you could be growing a lot faster, and you could be paying unnecessary accelerators and bonuses if the targets are too low. So you want to set the targets where they're hard. I can share one number like that that I've seen used in various sales teams: you want 70% of the team to hit 70% of their target. That means your goals are in a difficult yet achievable place.

25:23 If 100% of the reps are achieving 100-plus of their targets, the targets were too low, and if nobody's achieving the targets then the targets were too high. So 70% achieving 70 is probably a good starting point to think about, and you can tweak that any way you want, and then think about every other function, what can I set that's an achievable but hardly achievable goal.

Udi Ledergor

So that sounds like a CEO who knows that she doesn't know and needs some education, that's something I can work with. I would start with, okay, what are your company goals, what are you trying to achieve this year? It could be certain milestones that the investors or board have set for the next round. So let's say, oh, we want to see 10 happy beta customers, that might be a goal. And where are you now? Oh, I have one and I'm talking with one more. Okay, what seems to be the challenge of getting 10 more? And then work your way there, and then see, okay, here's how marketing can help, I can do some brand awareness which will let more people know about you. Actually, for smaller numbers I don't think mass media is going to be the solution, because the law of big numbers, as my statistics professor taught me, only works on big numbers, doesn't work on small numbers. So if you look at mass media like email or billboards or TV, that's for very large numbers, it's not going to work for getting a specific small number of customers you need to get. So for that it's more of a sales problem than a marketing problem, but here's how marketing can support that and do part of that for you.

27:24 So you can break that down by having a CEO who understands what the top company goals are, and then derive from those what marketing can do to achieve and support that. If the CEO doesn't even have those high-level goals, then I don't know how I or anyone else could succeed in that situation, because, as the caterpillar told Alice in Wonderland, if you don't know where you're going, every direction is going to be fine. There's just no way, if you can't imagine where the company wants to be in 12 months, then how are we going to know that we succeeded in getting there? I don't know how to handle that situation.

Udi Ledergor

So at a high level, in the early stages of companies, you're talking about the two main things that marketing is expected to produce, which are, number one, pipeline, and number two, a story, clear messaging: what do we do, what is the value we bring, to what audience, how are we different from other solutions out there, why should you care, why should you buy from us. Those are the two things, and that's what my board slides usually focused on in those first stages of the company. So again, let's say you have a goal for the year of creating $1 million in revenue. To create $1 million in revenue, you want to be on the safe side, let's say you need a 4x coverage of pipeline, so you need $4 million of pipeline.

Now let's say your deals take two to three months to close, so you work back from that and you know when you need to create those pipelines, basically by the beginning of the last quarter you have to have all that pipeline, otherwise there's no chance of the sales team closing it in time. So every quarter you report on, here's my goal for the end of quarter, here's where I am in reality, if there's a gap here's what I'm doing about it, here's what I think caused it, and then hopefully next quarter we see an improvement and some lessons learned. So that's what we do on pipeline. If everything is going well we should be at or more than my goals for pipeline, or at least consistently hitting them, even though it's very rare that every single cylinder is firing fully, especially once there's some complexity in the business, like you might have SMB and mid-market and enterprise, so these might have more to eat than they can chew and these might be a little bit hungry, and sometimes you over-hired AEs but the SDRs aren't ready, and sometimes you have over SDR capacity but no AEs to take the calls, there's always something to balance between sales, marketing, SDRs, but pipeline is usually the number one thing that the CEO and the board and the investors care about, if there's healthy...

I'll quote my CFO Tim: revenue cures all ills. If revenue is coming in, and to do that of course we need pipeline, everything else is probably forgivable. And then the second thing is the story, having a clear story that everyone who's customer-facing can tell: what do we do, what problem do we solve, who do we solve it for, why is it better than other alternatives. Today, using AI tools like Gong, we can measure the adoption of that story by every customer-facing function in the company, who's using it, how is it landing, we can go and listen to those calls, we can see in aggregate what percentage of the team is using it, if team APAC is using it but team North America is not, we can go in and ask questions why, we can do more reinforcement and training. So having a clear story that stands out and eventually gets quoted by customers, by analysts, by press, that's how you know you've achieved that.

So in the early days of Gong we measured a lot of social media listening to see if our story was landing, and we had a goal that we wanted to dominate two-thirds of the conversation about conversation intelligence on social media. So every week I had an agency go on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and measure not what the brands like Gong and executives like Udi and Amit were saying, but how much engagement we got, how many comments and retweets and shares and likes we got, because that shows the market is responding and creating conversation with us. We measured that for a year to make sure we're dominating at least two-thirds, so the goal was to be twice as engaging as everyone else combined, and we actually hit that and more, we regularly dominated 75 to 85% of that conversation. Focusing and optimizing for that in the early years was a big part of our success in brand building, because we were producing a lot of counterintuitive, sometimes controversial content that got a lot of people to engage with us and have a conversation. Even when our sales numbers were very similar to another competitor in the space, we got three times more publicity, and that really helped us get off to a much better start.

Udi Ledergor

To take a different angle on that, our CEO likes to say, we built a product so good that a mediocre go-to-market team could sell it, and we built a go-to-market team so great that they could push a mediocre product. If you build them both, then the sky is the limit, and that's what we did.

Udi Ledergor

There are things I can teach and there are things I know I cannot teach, so I need someone to come with them. One example is raw energy and motivation, that's something that is very easy to detect in an in-person interview, I think it's still doable over a few Zoom interviews, which is how we usually do the first screenings today. It's very difficult to detect in writing, especially now when a lot of people are using ChatGPT for their writing. I don't know how to teach energy and passion and hunger, but those are absolutely qualities that I look for. So if someone comes in looking tired and exhausted, and it could be a point in their life where their current job or current bosses depress them, but I don't know that I can pull them out of it, or how long it will take, or if they can even come out of it, I don't think I'm going to get what I need from a person in that state. I know I'm probably disqualifying some otherwise good candidates, but that's a quality I look for, I need someone who's excited to join the team and can't wait to sink their teeth into the challenges and work we need to do.

The second thing I look for is the ability to quickly self-learn. This is always important, I think more so in early stages of companies where we don't have an employee handbook, we don't have processes, we don't have an onboarding course, we don't have a lot of structure, and we need everyone on the team to be able to figure things out for themselves. So to uncover some of those qualities I'll ask people, tell me about a recent skill that you picked up, why did you need to learn it and how did you go about it. I want to hear how they, it could be something as simple as, I found a few YouTube videos and figured out how to do it, great, that's something I try to teach my kids to do instead of asking me about everything they need. It could be, I took this course and got certified, or I went to someone I know who's an expert and asked them to sit with me for two hours and teach me how to do it, or I listened to these podcasts and read this book. I want to see self-learning skills, because again, I don't think I can teach those in a cost-effective way if someone is coming to me without those skills.

36:33 One of my peers at 6sense, she's now the CRO, she was their CMO, she's famous for saying, I only hired fully developed adults to my team. That's a bit of a harsh way of saying it, but it's kind of what we're all looking for, I want someone who knows how to learn for themselves and is excited to do so, to solve problems. So those are some of the top qualities. Another thing I'll say is that when I can, I do like hiring for potential over experience, and I have several great stories, but one of them is, when we were putting on our first customer event back in 2019, Russell was the head of my demand gen team, and he had a friend through a dance company that they both danced in, and he wanted to bring him in as an intern to help us prepare for our customer event. He brought in Vince.

Vince was working on his uncle's Filipino food truck when Russell called him and said, hey, we're doing this event, we need an extra pair of hands, can you come help us for a couple of months, and Vince said sure. In those few months Vince came in and very quickly everyone on the team fell in love with his passion and hunger and helpfulness, and after the event Russell suggested that we keep Vince and let him manage our social media, because we were talking about bringing our first dedicated person to handle social media. Up until that point I think it was Chris Orlob who was managing all of our content and also managing social, and we said sure, we'll let Vince handle that.

Vince is still with the company all those years later, doing a fantastic job, and has grown from social media to marketing operations, and built our merchandise store, and built a whole bunch of different things, and I'm super proud of Gong for letting me give Vince that opportunity, taking someone with a very untraditional background and bringing him into his first tech company, into his first marketing role, and a pretty high-stakes role at that, managing Gong's social media, which is a huge part of our brand efforts. Under Vince's management our social media growth has been phenomenal, we're at about 300,000 followers on LinkedIn right now, which for a B2B brand is very respectable, and a lot of that is thanks to Vince's work. So I don't always go for the safe bet. There are certain roles, if I needed brain surgery I probably wouldn't go for potential over experience, I'd want someone who's not doing this for the first time on my brain, but luckily in marketing it's very rare that the stakes are that high, and for many things we do there are many untraditional-background candidates we should consider, and they often bring a lot of hunger and motivation that you wouldn't find with someone who's been doing this for 10 or 15 years, and they bring unconventional approaches and points of view, and you can really turn around someone's life while making your team better at the same time.

Udi Ledergor

Sure. There are many ways that Gong's marketing team and our clients' marketing teams use revenue intelligence to make their business better. I can give you a few examples. Here's one. We have a client, and I'm using the story with their permission, a Canadian client called TouchBistro, they make a point-of-sale hardware and software solution for restaurants. Before they were using Gong, part of their sales team focused on the hardware components of what they were selling, it's kind of an iPad system with some peripherals, and some of their sales team focused on the software part, and each of them was like, this is what I believe works best, and they all did their best. As soon as they started using Gong they actually saw that the sales reps focusing on the software components, which was proprietary, they were not creating their hardware themselves, they were just repackaging it, but when they were focusing on their proprietary software their win rates were much higher, and they never had a way of doing that before Gong came in and analyzed the calls and said, okay, Sarah and Tom are getting the highest quotas and highest win rates, and by analyzing their calls Gong found that they're doing that by focusing on software.

Dick and Harry, they're at the bottom of the leaderboard, their win rates are the poorest on the team, and Gong analyzed and saw that they tend to focus more on hardware than they do on software. As soon as the team at TouchBistro saw those results they retrained the team and said, okay, now that we have the data we're all going to do it one way, we're going to follow Gong's advice, we're going to focus on software. They did that for a quarter and everyone's win rates went up. So that's a great example of using, and this is a few years old so there's a lot more advancement in AI you could use today, but that's just taking something pretty basic to us, using AI to make the business better, understanding what the right message is, do we need to focus on hardware or software, well now we know the answer, it's not whatever you feel like, it's actually software is working much better for this market at this time. Here's another simple example.

One of our big clients, who shall remain nameless, discounted a competitor who they believed only showed up in their enterprise segments, and they didn't think that competitor showed up in their mid-market deals. A few weeks into using Gong they saw that that competitor is coming up in about 40% of the calls in their mid-market deals, and the product marketing team saw that and changed their first-call deck to preemptively differentiate against that competitor, because they realized they might not get another chance to do that, because if you're not talking about that competitor and your salesperson is unprepared to answer questions about them when the customer brings it up, if your customer then goes and takes a call with that competitor and they do a better job of differentiating against you, they might never come back and you've lost that deal before you were even in the game. So they changed their preemptive differentiation against that competitor for a segment that without Gong they had no idea was showing up so often, and they saw their win rates go up in that segment specifically against that competitor, because their reps were better armed with better messaging. So those are just a few of the many examples I can give.

Udi Ledergor

Absolutely.

Udi Ledergor

I have many examples of things that didn't go as planned, as anyone who's ever done something would probably agree. We like focusing on successes and that's what we become known for hopefully, but there's a lot of experimentation and therefore a lot of things that don't go as planned along the way. A pretty expensive mistake was my second Super Bowl commercial. Back in 2021, and I've told this story many times so I'll be brief here, I got the permission to run a Super Bowl commercial, being very strategic about buying media, so I did it at a tiny fraction of the cost that people think goes into a Super Bowl commercial, and we also, for budget reasons, were forced to make a very modest creative ad, and we did a really good job on that ad. In 30 seconds, which is very little time, we managed to be both funny and engaging, and in the first four seconds the audience it was meant for understood that it was for them, and we even got a chance to show a little bit of the product and explain how it's used, and it worked out really well.

The results of that first Super Bowl commercial were that we saw a huge spike of traffic on the website, we had 30% higher traffic for the week, we had hundreds of calls, I think there were almost 500 calls talking about our ad that we measured within Gong, and at the end of that week we saw a new record in pipeline creation. So for the modest investment I made, those were fantastic results, that even my CFO agreed was a brilliant investment, and then he helped me triple that investment for my second Super Bowl commercial, and there things did not go nearly as well. I went again for the regional media buy so that didn't change much, what did change was, one, I did not enjoy the element of surprise in that second year. In the first year the fact that a company at Gong's stage, a B2B startup for salespeople, was going on the Super Bowl surprised a lot of people, and a lot of the success came from that element of surprise.

In the second year it was not a surprise anymore, and we started talking about it probably too early, and people were just expecting it, so we didn't see that big spike we saw in the first year. Some of it came from the surprise. Two, our second commercial, the creative I think was a miss in many ways. In the first year, as I said, it was a much more modest commercial that talked about the product in an interesting way. In the second year we didn't really talk about the product, it was a more typical Super Bowl commercial with some physical and audible gags, and some people thought it was funny, it was much bigger and fancier, but if you never heard about the product you didn't come out of the commercial understanding what we do any better, and that was a miss. If you're a huge brand, a household name like a Budweiser or a Farmers Insurance, you don't have to explain what your product does, if you're just going in it for the fun to be part of the Super Bowl, but when you're still a growing B2B startup like Gong, in hindsight I could not have afforded not to talk about the product and explain what it does for people who don't know. Those were some of the elements, the surprise that we didn't enjoy, not talking about the product, all those things contributed to lackluster results in that second year, and after that I took the hint and didn't even ask for budget to do another one.

Udi Ledergor

So I think a lot of this goes back to the due diligence we talked about earlier, that maybe it was a wrong hire, either the wrong person for the wrong company, or wrong timing. For example, if there's a product-market fit that marketing can't solve, then even the best marketer is probably not going to be able to solve that and will have to leave, or be asked to leave, because they couldn't solve a problem that's not in marketing. If it is a good fit to begin with, then the biggest advice is to continuously adapt to the changing state of the company, the changing state of the market, the state of the competition, the customer needs.

The job in the first year should not look like the job in the third year, and should not look like the job in the fifth year. You're scaling a different size of team, you have to invest in different types of people and processes and structure, budgets are different, channels are different. We went at Gong from trying to scream from the rooftop so people know we exist, to then switching to the challenge of focusing on creating a category, and once we conquered that, now the challenge is how do we continue to differentiate within our category and continue being the leader and break away. Those are very different stages, and everything we do in marketing is different, which channels do we use, what content do we create, what audiences do we target, what do our events look like, how do we address competition if at all.

51:27 All that changes in every one of those stages, and if you keep using the old playbook it will go stale and not serve you well, so you have to stay on your feet all the time, looking around you to see, okay, what did I do last year that's not going to work this year anymore, what needs to be done instead, and just adapt to all those changes in the environment. The ones who stay in the seat manage to do that. I managed to do that from zero to a few hundreds of millions in revenue, which is longer than most CMOs do it. I think at this stage it's probably great that we have someone who's seen the next stage of growth, taking us to a billion in revenue and beyond, and bringing some of those practices that I have.

Udi Ledergor

Probably a bunch of them. I would say probably the most common one, and it also stems a lot from the pressure that maybe the CEO is putting on a novice marketer who doesn't know any better or doesn't have the confidence to speak up otherwise, is they focus most of their marketing on advertising, sales offers and product-related offers, which can work on those who are ready to buy right now. The problem is that about 95% of your market is not looking to buy right now. We, if we had more time, could talk about that in detail, but I know we're towards the end here, so very briefly, there's the 95/5 rule that listeners can look up and read more about, but it basically states that in any given year only about 20% of your market is looking to replace a solution you're selling, and if that's true then every quarter only about 5% of them are looking to buy a solution like yours, and if that's true, and anyone who's done marketing for a while understands that in B2B that's typically true, could be 5%, 7%, doesn't matter, that's the range, then why are you spending all of your marketing, and specifically advertising and content dollars, on sales offers that are only being picked up by those 5%?

That's probably the most common mistake I see, because you're pouring all that money and it's falling on deaf ears, because 95% of the audience out there is not looking to buy from you this year, they need a completely different marketing plan, and that plan looks like valuable content and offers that bring value to your audience, to keep you top of mind so that in 12 or 18 months when they are in market you're the first name they think of. But most companies don't do that early enough, spending all of their budget for that 5% of, here's a sales offer, here's what we're offering, here's what you should switch to. There are multiple reasons why that doesn't work, and that's what the good companies get very early, that they need one plan for the 5% which is sales-focused, and they need a different plan for the rest.

Udi Ledergor

Think for myself, and not take best practices too seriously. Best practices, by the time they become known as best practices, are only ordinary practices, and they're going to achieve ordinary results, and if you have unique problems and you want to achieve extraordinary results you have to think for yourself and do things differently. I think it takes some maturity and confidence, and stepping out of the general advice everyone's giving you, and the sooner you do that, the more exciting the job becomes, the more rewarding it becomes, and the higher your chance of achieving extraordinary results.

Udi Ledergor

What question should you have asked me? There are many things we could have talked about. What should be the first hires that a CMO makes, or how to align with sales to make sure that really prolongs the tenure of any CMO. So maybe I'll quickly answer that one, because we talked about CMO tenure. I've never seen a successful company where sales and marketing were in silos and not working very closely together, yet that's so often the situation. When I advise a handful of companies, I see sometimes their challenges stem from sales and marketing being on completely different pages. There's no way to succeed like that, and that's another one of the things that's going to lower the chances of the company succeeding and lower the CMO tenure. So learn how to align with your head of sales, maybe it's difficult, maybe you don't like each other, none of that matters if you don't align and come together as a team to tackle the company priorities and come to the CEO with joint solutions to problems. If you don't do that, if you're finger-pointing and blaming each other, neither of you is going to succeed in what you're doing, and marketing is probably going to be the first to find itself outside the door, because that that's usually what happens.

Udi Ledergor

Thanks for having me. Bye.