North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring, and as a leader it's your job to deliver. If you're wondering where purpose-driven leaders direct their time, team, budget, and energy, you'll find out here on the North Star Leaders Podcast. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of this show.

Remember, purpose isn't what you hang on the wall, it's what you do when the choice is hard. Today, I am so happy to be joined by Udi Ledergor. Udi is chief evangelist and past CMO at Gong, the AI operating system for revenue teams.

He's also author of the bestselling book, Courageous Marketing. Udi, welcome to the show.

To start us off, what's the most energizing thing that you do in your role as chief evangelist?

Udi Ledergor

Probably public speaking. My kids have had enough of me, so they just send me off to conferences to speak on stages. I come back and they're shocked when I say, people actually wanted to hear me talk.

They're paying me to do this. They're like, yeah, dad, because they don't have to listen to you speak 24-7.

Lindsay Pedersen

You've been a performer. I know that growing up in Tel Aviv, you were into the performing arts then as well. Is that a coincidence that you became a marketing leader or are those two things, is there a straight line between those two things, you think?

Udi Ledergor

I think there is a connective tissue between my teenage years playing piano at weddings, doing magic shows, even a bit of puppeteering. I wanted a more stable, grown-up version of that. I found that in marketing.

Lindsay Pedersen

Really? You're doing the equivalent of magic tricks and puppeteer. Figuratively, you're doing that with the marketing that you create and sometimes even when you're on stage.

Udi Ledergor

I am. I think marketing puts on a show, whether it's actually literally a show like in a customer event or an industry conference, but a well-executed product launch, that is a show. That creates a magical experience.

It's like going to the movies or to the theater. You want to give your attention to something that's interesting, that's valuable. You want to learn more about it.

You want to sit there. It has some entertainment value. It has some educational value.

It has some work-related value if it's a working product. I love it and I think the best ones give you a theatrical experience and not just a white paper to look at.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh my god, yeah. Shoot me now. Yeah.

At Gong, you went through a very deliberate exercise. You talk about this in your book to pinpoint what Gong is like, what Gong would be like if Gong were a person. What is that person like?

Tell me something about that exercise that daily makes you glad you did it. What helps you in a mundane way about having done that for Gong?

Udi Ledergor

The exercise you're referring to was really defining our brand's personality. Are we old or young? Are we fun or formal?

Are we accessible or on a high horse? We went through all of these different personality traits and we ended up defining what our personality is in human terms. That makes it infinitely easier to decide so many of the day-to-day things.

If we have a campaign opportunity of doing some crazy stunt, is this on brand? Does it work with our personality or not? Should we be in this publication?

Is that too formal or not formal enough for our brand? What is our tone of voice on social media, in content endeavors? When we're creating presentations, should they be full of memes and funny things or should they look like a bank?

When you know who you are, when you know who your personality is, it creates consistency. One of the great things I've heard from people over the years is they look and they read and they watch and they listen to all these things that we put out there and they say, it looks like they were all created by one person because they're all using the same voice, literally the same voice we have in our content style guide. When do we use the first voice and the second voice and what do we joke about?

It's so detailed that it allows even an entire team of writers and editors and videographers and podcast hosts to speak in a similar voice that you would know a mile away, oh, that's gong. That's gong. They're goofing off as they do or they're making jokes at this or they're providing information on this.

They're doing this in a gong way. That's what you want because if everyone is speaking a different voice, you're wasting your brand equity. You're wasting your brand equity.

I want someone to walk in into a giant trade show and from the end of the hall to see just a sliver of our booth and say, oh, that's the gong booth over there. I want you to be driving on the highway, see in passing a gong billboard and say, oh, that's gong because we're speaking the same language. It sounds similar and on brand, it looks similar on brand and that consistency is really important.

Lindsay Pedersen

Have you ever been in an organization where that wasn't as concrete and intentional and you had to have workarounds to have a single voice? What's the contrast of those two experiences?

Udi Ledergor

Even the early years at gong, as we were evolving the brand very quickly before we accumulated enough equity and value in it, I was changing my brand colors from blue to black the next day until we finally landed on the pink and purple that have been with us now for a good eight years, I think. But in the first couple of years, we went through all these different options and it just meant that you could walk past the gong booth because we had a new clever slogan and a new graphic and I switched design studios and you had no idea it's the same company that you walked past last week at a different event. So I think there's a price you pay for that.

Fortunately, a lot of our content efforts were really well executed from day one. So I think on the tone of voice and the type of content and language that we use, we were very consistent pretty much from day one. On the visual identity stuff, it took us about three years to get our act together.

And from that point, people started recognizing, oh, that's the gong look.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Is the gong look and the gong tone, does it govern culture too or recruiting or like the type of person that you hire or is it truly a customer facing way of showing up?

Udi Ledergor

No, I think it's all encompassing. A lot of candidates who come to interview, they want to work for gong, they talk about the brand and there's obviously a natural filtration because the I love your brand. I want to work at this company.

It looks so cool. And they say that just based on what they see on LinkedIn and on our website, they'd never stepped into an office. They might have never met a gongster, but they see the type of language that we use.

They see the energy that people are posting with on social media and they go, I want to work for that company. And so it all works together. One of my favorite definitions of brand is what Jeff Bezos famously said, said brand is what people say about you once you leave the room and that affects everyone, right?

How many times have you met someone after someone told you something about them and that kind of colored your perception about them even before you met them? That's what a strong brand does. It could be good, it could be bad, but that's what it does.

And so we wanted to define what are people going to think and say and do about us even before they meet us, let alone after interacting with us.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. And it's almost like, I imagine there's something that you can't really fake. Like you didn't just come out of thin air and articulate gong is kind of like this, not like this.

It actually was based on somebody's personality or the values, perhaps the values. You can't just paint on like a really fun brand on a corporate culture that's like a bank. Or maybe you can, maybe if it's done well enough, you can have a really stodgy culture, but a really spunky brand.

Udi Ledergor

You can definitely evolve a culture, but it's probably easier to build on what you already have. If you're a 10,000 person company, changing your culture overnight is going to be very, very difficult to do. And it might mean that some of the people both working for you and working with you are not going to like the new brand personality.

And maybe they don't want to keep working there or doing business with them. We've seen sometimes organizations that got into trouble by trying to steer too hard in either direction. So it's probably best to be thoughtful about these things from early on and then evolve deliberately, carefully as you grow, because culture is going to change.

There is no company that had the same culture when there were 50 employees. And when they have 500 employees, by definition, culture is going to change. We're careful about the language we use at Gong.

When we interview people, say to work with us, we don't say we're looking to see if you're a good culture fit for us, because we don't expect them to only fit into our culture. We expect them to evolve it. But the fact that they're now part of us is going to change us.

We're no longer the same culture that we had before you joined. And so we want to see what kind of value add are you bringing to our culture? And is that going to help us evolve our culture in the direction that we want to go?

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. And it makes me think of something you wrote about in your awesome book, Courageous Marketing. You talk about this counterintuitive truth that playing it safe is actually the most risky thing that you can do.

Talk about that belief a little bit. I'm really intrigued. There's something in me believes it, but I can't quite put words to it.

Talk about how you landed on that insight, or if you always had it, and how it shows up.

Udi Ledergor

So here's the thing. A common mistake I see folks making is focusing on what they have to say and believing that they have a stage to say it on, or they have a captive audience that will listen to it if what they're saying is groundbreaking and interesting. Now, communications in the modern world just don't work that way anymore.

Unless you're literally a keynote speaker on a stage where everyone had to deposit their phones outside and can't be multitasking, and they're forced to sit and listen to you for 20 minutes, you rarely get a captive audience anymore, right? And so before that persuasion has to come capturing someone's attention. Now, to capture someone's attention in this very noisy world, we have to do something that is different.

When everyone zigs, we have to zag. If everyone's blue, we have to be pink. We have to do something different to capture that attention.

And I think that's where folks mess up a lot because they think, oh, but I've really got this groundbreaking product, but your persuasion might be great, but if nobody's listening, then that doesn't matter. And to capture that attention over and over again, try launching a product on LinkedIn. There's thousands of products that are launched every day on LinkedIn.

You might have the best product in the world, but you first need to stand out and capture people's attention. And so by doing things differently, visually, audibly, in the format, in the channel, in the medium that you choose, there's many ways of capturing attention that way. And my book is full of dozens of examples from many companies, including my work at Gong, but the fact that a small startup does a Super Bowl commercial, or you're able to secure a Times Square billboard and amplify that across your social channels, and you use those mediums in a creative way, not in a boring standard way, that is part of how you can grab attention and do things differently.

Lindsay Pedersen

So the idea is that with the sheer volume of stimuli and things competing for the attention of your audience, that playing it safe just doesn't stand out. And therefore, assuming that you're spending money on that thing that you're, quote unquote, being safe with, it's simply a waste of money. And then that becomes risk.

It's money, and it's focus, and it's a missed opportunity to win hearts and minds with something that's distinctive. So it's actually risky. That's what's counterintuitive, is that it is a mirage to think that there's some such thing as being safe by doing something that is not kind of bold.

Udi Ledergor

Yes. And here's another way of looking at it. Many times, people do things that feel safe, in the sense that they're not going to get fired because they're not doing something that's too out there, too risky, too experimental.

The old 1980s IT saying was nobody gets fired for buying IBM. That might be the case now for buying a widespread CRM or other ERP. The thing is that by doing something like this, yes, you're safe in the short term.

You're not going to get fired for doing that thing. But you're actually risking your job and the success of whatever you're launching in the medium and long term because nobody's going to pay attention to it. I'd rather try a whole bunch of risky things, giving myself a fighting chance of getting noticed and launching a product or a company or something very successfully and getting a lot of coverage for it.

And some things are going to be duds, for sure, than playing it safe and just going through the motions that's never going to get me noticed. And I don't want to be successful in a company that's not going anywhere. I want to be successful in a company that's succeeding and stirring up a commotion and getting attention and growing very quickly.

And you can't do that by playing safe.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. I would love for you to talk about your Super Bowl ad, the experience of putting out a Super Bowl ad for Gong as a B2B, a small company, not with a huge marketing budget, not a company you normally associate with advertising at the Super Bowl. So tell that story of what you did and what happened.

Udi Ledergor

So the Super Bowl ad came to be because it fit a mindset that I'd had for a while, which when I sat down to model it for my book and make it accessible for other companies, I called it punch above your weight. And what I mean by that is picking mediums that are typically associated with very large advertisers, using them in a strategic way on a fraction of their perceived budget, and then amplifying that in digital channels to your captive audience. Let me explain.

For example, getting a Times Square billboard is still something that most people associate with large advertisers. I mean, that's where Netflix launches their new series. That's where Broadway launches its new musicals.

That's where Apple launches its newest iPhone. Times Square, that's like the world's biggest out-of-home stage. And yes, if you were to do a complete takeover or buy a bunch of signs for a long while, that could put you off by hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

So you're not wrong to assume that big advertisers go there because you need those deep pockets. But there is a budget-friendly option for doing that. There are on-demand, out-of-home marketplaces.

Today, most of the billboards have shifted from static paper billboards that folks have to glue on at 5 a.m., and they're now digital. And so they can rotate six or even eight different ads in a minute. Now, what if you could buy a rotating ad like that for one hour?

Technically, you've got a billboard up in Times Square, right? Now, people might immediately react and say, okay, but that would be stupid. Why would I buy a billboard for one hour?

There's a bunch of random tourists on their way to see Phantom of the Opera. They're not going to buy my B2B security software. No, they're probably not, but that's not why I'm doing the billboard.

So here's where it gets interesting. So first, I chose the Times Square billboard because it's associated with these big advertisers. Two, I got a very budget-friendly version of them.

You could go on an online marketplace like blimpbillboard.com and buy a $500 billboard in Times Square right now. I've done it. You can do it.

Then I make sure that I create something creative that is not boring like everything else that we do. And the next step is strategic, and that is I make sure there's a photographer or even a videographer ready before that one hour of fame that I'm going to get on my Times Square billboard. And they're going to take a bunch of great photos of that billboard in context with the hustle and bustle of Times Square and people on their way to the Phantom of the Opera or whatever.

And then I'm going to use that photo or that video footage on my social media channels, in my presentations. I'm going to let my reps use it in their decks. And now I'm reaching the audience I do care about, the people who are following me on social, reading my emails, attending my presentations.

And now they see this great success. Oh, look, we're on Times Square. So they're thinking in their head, oh my God, they spent millions of dollars on this Times Square campaign.

They must be doing really, really well. But I did that for $500. Let's add another $300 with the photographer.

And there you go. And so that is a framework that I've executed over and over again, both with out of home with print advertising. I got a full page out in the Wall Street Journal and shared it to a lot of my relevant audience.

But I didn't pay for the national edition of the Wall Street Journal. I paid for a much cheaper regional edition. But nobody knew that at the time because it doesn't say anywhere, it's the West Coast edition.

It just says the Wall Street Journal. So people assumed, oh my gosh, Kong got a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. That's big.

And then we finally did that on the Super Bowl as well. So when I got an email from Monica from CBS, asking if I would be interested in advertising on the Super Bowl, I responded politely saying, thank you for the offer, but I have nowhere near the budgets I would need for that because I knew like most marketers that a single 30-second in-game spot on the Super Bowl costs around $7 million and the price only goes up every year. And she immediately responded.

She said, Udi, I think you'd be surprised by how affordable this could be. You have 15 minutes to discuss. And she piqued my curiosity because I love learning about these things.

And I took the call and I'm very glad that I did because I learned that in the Super Bowl, like in so many other cases, there are affordable ways of doing it. And the simplest way of doing this in Super Bowl is to buy regional media for the regions that I cared about. And so I was able to buy the San Francisco Bay Area and New York and Seattle altogether for about $350,000, which is still a lot of money, but that's not $7 million.

And then I was able to create a very low budget commercial for less than $100,000, which is unheard of for the Super Bowl. And so the whole campaign came in at like $350,000, created the Super Bowl ad, and then we launched it on social media. So that audience was more interesting to me than the random football fans that were sitting with their Doritos bowl watching the game.

Yes, a lot of them went into my website and asked for a demo and some of them did turn into business. But more interestingly, the fact that we could launch our Super Bowl commercial on social media got a ton of interest from people who had at least heard of Gong before and I captured this in the sales conversation that they were having with my sales team in the week that followed the Super Bowl day. And they were saying, I was on the fence about Gong until I saw you on the Super Bowl.

And then I realized, wow, you're a big deal. I need to be talking to you. And so, yes, we were a big deal, but not because we'd spend $7 million, just because I knew how to leverage a very affordable version of that medium and amplify it to the audience I really cared about.

Lindsay Pedersen

So badass. So, so inspiringly clever. It's funny because we were talking about risk and the whole thing with the buyer, the IBM, no one got fired for choosing IBM.

So the idea of going with a big established player has a perception of lowering one's risk. So it's neat that in your case, you're honoring that instinct, right? Of the audience wants the sense of safety, that this is a big, stable company that's going to be around a long time.

We need that to offset that kind of maybe fear. And then you're also using a deep comfort with risk to do something that not everybody else is doing. I just, I really admire it.

Udi Ledergor

Thank you. Yes, it is kind of like you described it. On the one hand, I'm not trying to change how my buyers work.

I'm trying to give them what they want. And especially larger enterprises, they don't want to buy from young startups who are unproven yet because they don't know if we'll be around next year. The product is not tested.

We probably don't need their enterprise grade security and privacy regulations and requirements. But if we can look like a much bigger company in a consistent way, and of course, provide them the product that they want, they'll at least take a look. And it's some of these tactics that got us the attention and permission to sell to larger enterprises earlier than many companies get the chance to do.

Lindsay Pedersen

What would be like a clue or an indication that you or somebody on your team is playing it too safe? Like, we're not leaning in enough to something sharp and provocative enough to stand out? Like, when would you be like, Ah, no, that's no, not easy.

Udi Ledergor

That's easy. The answer is crickets. I'll explain.

So a lot of marketers and specifically content marketers are afraid that people might not like or even hate something that they put out there. And it's that fear that paralyzes them into cleaning up and polishing everything to the point where there's no chance of it being the slightly bit offensive to anyone. It won't stir up any commotion.

Everyone's going to love this. Well, here's how reality works. If you create something that has no polarizing potential, it is not the least bit controversial.

It has zero chance of pissing off anyone. The truth is you're not going to excite anyone with it either. That's just how it works.

There's a reason why the cable news networks and especially on social media and tabloids discovered this 150 years ago, they're always sensational. They're always bigger than life. They always evoke an emotional response, like now I'm afraid or I'm entertained or I'm in suspense.

There were a few attempts throughout the history of media to produce good news only. I saw that the New York Times just relaunched another newsletter of good news only because they're trying to use it as the antidote to all the bad news that we're surrounded with all day. Here's my prediction of the future.

It's going to die out. They'll probably try for a few months. They'll see that it's getting very low engagement.

It's going to die out, just like every single good news outlet before them, every single time. The reason is that we become complacent and those good news become transparent. My point is if you're posting on social media and you need to walk desk by desk and ask your employees to engage with it because nobody cares about what you just posted, it's boring.

It's too polished. It's too clean. It's too meh.

There's nothing interesting about it. When we post interesting content that has a hot take on something, it could be analyzing some behavior that we found on calls, like salespeople who swear on sales calls have an 8% higher win rate. That's an actual stat.

When we published that, the internet went wild because there were people who used that as permission to vocalize their most colorful vocabulary and say things like, that's the shit I've been talking about. There was another group of people with equally strong reactions that were appalled that we would suggest using such language in a professional setting. That is a marketer's dream.

It created a conversation. It created a visceral reaction. People could not help themselves but respond to it.

Now, did it piss off some people? Yes. Would I do it again?

Absolutely. The worst response to your content is not someone hating it. It's no response at all.

Indifference is the worst enemy of your content and brand. If nobody cares about it, if your employees and their mothers are the only ones responding to your content, you know you're doing it wrong.

Lindsay Pedersen

I get this image in my head of the column of things that show you that this is right. Say that's on the left. It's like, he loves it.

He hates it. He's appalled by it. He bonded with it.

He talked to his friend about it. He hates your guts because of it. That's on one column.

The other column is quiet. Stepping back, what you're saying is it's all about framing what does success and non-success look like. If you're really honest about that, then you would never put out something anodyne because it would evoke quiet, which you have now said is failure.

Udi Ledergor

Yes. If you're putting out news, what is the point? You want people to get excited.

You want people to share the news with excitement. Why would they share, we just released product 3.14 and it's got this new feature in it. Who cares?

Who cares? There's ways that you can catch these things and nip them in the bud. In my book, I dedicated a whole chapter to content marketing and a couple of the bars that I set for my team that you could easily copy are first, would you consume this content if you didn't work for our company and have to read every piece of content we put out?

Would you want to read this? If you're like, no, why would I read that? Then why are we expecting anyone else to read that?

The second higher bar is, is this content so good that someone would pay for it? That's a very high bar of content. We all pay for content.

We have subscriptions to the New York Times or to YouTube Premium or to Spotify or Netflix or whatever it is. We know that good content is worth paying for. Are you creating content so good that it's worth paying for?

There are enough opportunities to see if you are. I always go back to the examples of when we published this type of content in the Gong Lab series of what works and doesn't work in sales. We occasionally got emails from university professors who asked what it would cost them to license our content to teach in their classes because it was so insightful.

We got sales enablement managers writing us asking what it would cost them to use our content for their internal sales teams training because it was so helpful and they were sharing the content. They wanted to make sure they're allowed to do that. Every time we got those requests, we circulated them and celebrated them in the marketing team because we had proven that we created content so good that people were willing to pay for it.

Lindsay Pedersen

Again, that's being crystal clear about this is what we're trying to accomplish and then being really honest with yourself and your team about whether it evokes that or not. I love the idea of, yeah, would you pay for this content?

Udi Ledergor

You can see leading indicators. If you're posting on social media, you should see your followers grow every time you post a great piece of content. If you post a new piece of content and you got zero new followers, maybe you didn't excite anyone.

You should see that on your email subscription list. If you send out a great email, guess what? Some of those people are going to share that email with co-workers and friends.

Those people are going to want to subscribe to your email. If no new subscribers came out of your latest mailer, maybe it wasn't that exciting.

Lindsay Pedersen

This book is so good. I hope all of our listeners go out and buy Courageous Marketing. As we finish up, I have a few rapid fire questions to ask you with one-word answers.

Are you ready?

Udi Ledergor

I was born ready. Let's do it.

Lindsay Pedersen

All right. Okay. What's something that people are usually surprised to learn about you?

Udi Ledergor

Here's a funny one that my stage name as a magician was Udini.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh my God. Awesome. Okay.

What is a pet peeve of yours?

Udi Ledergor

I can't stand grammar and spelling mistakes. Thankfully, AI is taking a lot of them out of our lives. For years, I had to read everything five times to make sure it's perfectly clean.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. When you fly, do you prefer a window seat or aisle seat?

Udi Ledergor

I'm a converted man. As I've gotten older and occasionally need to use the bathroom more often on a long flight, I've changed my views literally from a window seat to an aisle seat. I'm now an aisle person.

Lindsay Pedersen

You can stretch your legs. Yeah. What is the most recent song that you have blasted?

Udi Ledergor

Oh my gosh. Well, when my kids go into the car, I'm usually listening to either classical music or jazz, which are my two favorite genres. But by the end of the first song, they'll ask ‘’Dad, can we put on something else?’’ And so I think more than anything, I hear a lot of Disney songs.

Lindsay Pedersen

OK, OK, yeah.

Udi Ledergor

But also Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Katy Perry.

Lindsay Pedersen

OK, they're well-rounded kids. OK, and last but not least, what is the best brand of ice cream?

Udi Ledergor

Oh, you know, I'm a simple person. Give me an It's It ice cream sandwich and I'm happy.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's It ice cream sandwiches. Yeah, you should not be able to get those on the West Coast, but now you can. I love it.

OK, where should we send listeners who want to learn more about you or about Gong?

Udi Ledergor

Well, to learn more about Gong, if you're not already using our revenue operating system, you've got to go to gong.io and check it out because it is mind-blowing and it will change how you as a marketer and you as a revenue professional work. If you want to follow more of what I have to say, go to LinkedIn, look for Udi Ledergor. There's only one of us.

And finally, if you haven't yet read Courageous Marketing, it's on Amazon and everywhere else, books are sold.

Lindsay Pedersen

Awesome. Thank you so much, Udi.

Udi Ledergor

Thank you, Lindsay.

Lindsay Pedersen

Thanks for listening to this episode of North Star Leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North Star leader whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com.

Also on that website are show notes, transcripts and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter. I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.