Episode web page: https://bit.ly/3YTrCuW ----------------------- Got a question? Want to recommend a guest? Or do you want to tell me how the show can be better? Send me a voice message via email at [email protected] ----------------------- In this episode of Insights Unlocked, UserTesting CMO Johann Wrede chats with Udi Ledergor, former CMO and current Chief Evangelist at Gong, and author of Courageous Marketing. Udi shares why bold, differentiated marketing beats "best practices" every time—and how marketers can unlock extraordinary results by giving themselves permission to stand out. Drawing from his own nontraditional career path from magician and musician to marketing leader, Udi explains why simply following industry norms creates a "sea of sameness." He unpacks strategies for building trust with sales, the critical importance of aligning marketing metrics to real business outcomes, and how to thoughtfully invest in brand marketing—even when budgets are tight. Whether you're just starting out or leading a large marketing team, this episode offers candid, actionable advice for becoming a more courageous marketer, building iconic brands, and driving measurable impact. Why following marketing "best practices" leads to ordinary results How courageous marketing stands out and drives growth Practical tips for building trust and alignment between marketing and sales How to measure brand investments creatively when ROI isn’t immediate Smart ways to manage marketing experiments with limited budgets Career advice for marketers at every stage—from entry-level to CMO Resources & Links: Connect with Udi on LinkedIn Udi’s new book: Courageous Marketing Udi’s website Gong Connect with Johann Wrede on LinkedIn Learn more about Insights Unlocked: usertesting.com/podcast What you'll learn:
Chapter 1: What is courageous marketing according to Udi Ledergor?
Enjoy the show.
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers, and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content Marketing Manager at UserTesting. And joining us today as host is UserTesting's CMO, Johan Reed. Welcome, Johan. Thanks, Nathan. And our guest today is Udi Lederger, a five-time B2B marketing leader who served as CMO during Gong's rise from SaaS startup to industry dominance.
Udi has advised startups, served on boards, and mentored hundreds of marketers. His work reveals how courage and creativity can build iconic brands. He's also author of the recently published Courageous Marketing. Welcome to the show, Udi. Thank you so much, Nathan, Johan.
I'm excited to be here.
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Chapter 2: How does Udi's career path influence his marketing philosophy?
I'll jump right in. I looked at your journey and I read your book, Udi, and it stood out to me that as a magician and a musician, to get to the CMO role and now the chief evangelist role, that is anything but a typical career arc.
And so what I'd love to start with is when you look back at that arc, going from this performing arts background to building one of tech's most iconic brands, what really stood out to you as being pivotal in shaping the way that you think about storytelling and brand today?
I think the main point that I figured out, which is also the theme of my book, Courageous Marketing, is that most marketers either... by choice or because they feel they don't have permission to do otherwise, they tend to do best practice marketing.
Chapter 3: Why do marketing 'best practices' lead to ordinary results?
They tend to follow conventions by looking around them, what the bigger competitors are doing and thinking that if they do the same, they will enjoy the same status. But that's the fallacy because by doing that, you create a sea of sameness and you do anything but stand out. By the time anything becomes a best practice, everybody's doing it.
And so it's really a boring practice that if you do it, you will get ordinary results. If you want extraordinary results, you need to do something different. And that's where courageous marketing comes in. That's where...
trying to take in what others are doing, understand the context, the environment, your customer needs, their expectations, the competitive landscape, but then coming up with a crisp, unique point of view
that is not like someone else, is not the Uber of, but actually something entirely fresh that hasn't been seen, that's for some people difficult, but I think the harder part is for people to feel that they have permission to do that.
Because once you create that environment, we can talk about that later if you want, on how I created that environment for my team and how it was created in virtually every team at Gong, Once you have that permission, a lot of people's creativity just starts flowing. And that's when you start standing out and people start paying attention because now you're different.
You're not following the best practices. You look different. You sound different. You put out a different product. You try different marketing channels. You put out different marketing messages. You can create an entirely new category and I can go on. But that is the theme, the transition from best practice marketing to courageous marketing.
I love that. I think your point is well made. We're often surrounded by creativity, especially when you start talking to people about their hobbies. You discover that you have photographers and poets and all kinds of people with creative bent on your team. But often we're in this quest for a predictable result.
The board wants to see predictability and the CEO wants to see predictability and guaranteed results. And there's that permission that you talked about that's often missing. What was your spark to say, hey, listen, I'm willing to take this on my shoulders and give my team permission to go and take these kinds of creative chances? Yeah.
So I have a somewhat frustrating career hack and it's frustrating because it's not easily copied and it is working for a great CEO. And I've done that not once, but at least three times for this specific CEO. So Amit Bendo of the CEO and co-founder of Gong, he and I have worked together back and forth for the last 27 years at three different companies.
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Chapter 4: How can marketers build trust and alignment with sales?
And so being able to identify that situation as you walk into it and maybe stop yourself at the door, turn around and go look for someplace else, if I can help one marketer do that, I think the book is already going to be a win.
I love that. That definitely stood out to me. I think you even said this is something you can't fix as a marketer. Product market fit is not a thing that you can fix. I love that you talk about that. There's some other things in your book that I love. You're part of a two-headed dragon when you talk about the relationship with sales. I love that. I think-
part of what I take away from your comment about, you know, picking the right CEO is it's, you know, you can, you can work with people who you have trust with.
And, and if you don't find yourself in that position, you have to build trust quickly so that you can earn the right to take some creative chances and to, to demonstrate that, that you have to demonstrate that you know what you're doing so that they will trust you and fund your ideas and, and, then you have to probably get that first one right to continue building that trust.
I think it's about, again, coming into a situation where the CEO, ideally the CRO and the CFO as well, understand from their past experience what great marketing can achieve. And they don't expect you to just be the arts and crafts department, which many companies, that's still the reigning expectation.
Like go put on a nice trade show booth, make some nice brochures and decks and just stay in your corner and let us grownups handle actual messaging and pipeline and stuff like that. If that's what you want to be, you want to be a Marcom coordinator, by all means, go do that. But if you want to be a bold...
marketing leader, if you want to be a VP or a C-level, you have to be in an environment that wants more than that. And being able to prove that, and as a headline, because I like being practical here, I don't want people walking away saying, okay, that was fluff. So here's the point of view on your North Star. If you can demonstrate in everything that you do that you are making sales easier,
you're already ahead of 95% of marketers who operate in an isolated silo. And so when I onboarded new reps every month during my tenure, almost seven years as CMO at GAW, my first slide said, marketing's goal in this company is to make sales easier. And when you do that, they're already listening and they are already kind of vibing with you because, okay, that's what I need.
I want you to make sales easier. Sales is really, really, really hard. And if you can be the guy or gal and team that makes it easier, you're already a hero. And then with that starting point, go ahead and show how even things that are maybe counterintuitive, like why do we need everyone to share content on LinkedIn? Well, I explained, here's how the algorithm works.
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Chapter 5: What are smart ways to manage marketing budgets for experiments?
And SQL and SAO, there's so many names, I don't care what you call it, But it has to be something that sales understand that means business to them. And so when you say we achieved a thousand SQLs, let's celebrate. Sales agrees that you should celebrate because they can see a thousand opportunities that they want to work on.
I love that. And I totally agree. I think our success is when sales feels like they're getting what they need for marketing. And I think going to some of the more brand-oriented activations that you've done, I think I'm curious about, those carry a lot of risk with them, those investments. And if you're talking with sales and with your CEO about...
SQOs or SALs or whatever, as you said, any of the many names we give those things. Where do you feel like taking those big swings is appropriate and how do you assess risk in that context? Because that's not a conversation that's easy to say, hey, we're getting to the SQOs and draw a straight line between we did this activation, we got these leads, right? Yeah.
So I'll say three things from different angles that might even seem contradictory, but they're not, not really. And then again, there's a lot more on this in the book, but one thing that's important is just like with medicine, the best type of medicine is force preventive medicine.
And when you're thinking about funding marketing experiments and brand investments, it's important to have a preemptive budget to do so. And so the way that I did this at Gong for many, many years, and I did this in previous companies as well, I had a budget line item called marketing experiments. So whenever the budget cycle is, let's say November, I get that approved.
It's five to 10% of my program's budget. And I use two ways to explain and justify it. One, any marketing channel that I have that's working right now will stop working at some point. And that's just the nature of the business because if it's successful for me, everyone else is going to come and use it. It's not going to be so successful for me. It might be too expensive at some point.
The cost per lead is going to be crazy or I'm just going to tap it out and I'm going to get the same leads over and over again if I'm in a small pool. So that's one reason why I should be experimenting with new channels so that I create and find the new ones now before I run out and go, oh shit, what do I do now? That's one reason.
The second reason is there are many marketing opportunities that present themselves throughout the budget year. A classic example is an October event might be announced only in April prior to that event. But I don't know about it last November when I need to budget for it. And if I don't budget for it, I'm going to be missing out on a lot of these opportunities.
Like I want to sponsor this event or one of my media contacts called me and he's got some leftover budget and lessover inventory because another advertiser backed out at the last minute. I want to have budget I can move quickly with and capitalize on this opportunity. It could be a 75% discount on the media. I don't want to start a whole budget approval cycle or I'm going to miss that.
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Chapter 6: How should marketers measure brand investments creatively?
And I think marketers forget that advice, but it applies equally to us. If you're on a shoestring budget of $100,000 a year trying to be active on 20 channels, there's no way you're going to succeed in any of them. Because A, you're stretched so thinly, you can't really learn what works and doesn't work. You don't have enough resources to put on them.
And the little resources that you have are just not going to be enough to prove anything that's working or not working. And so with Gong, after very little experimentation across different channels,
we decided that we're going all in on linkedin because we figured from our data that that is where sales leaders live and that that is our audience for you it might be tick tock or snapchat or somewhere else but find that channel where the party is at where your audience is hanging out and go all in on that and that meant we were reading the linkedin developers blog to understand changes in the algorithm in real time before other advertisers figured them out so we know when
Surveys are hot and when video is hot and when live blogging is hot and when images are hot and how to format your text posts and how to spread them apart and how to capitalize them or not. And like the tiniest thing, I'll give you a funny story that you might have read in the book. There was a point in time where I read in the LinkedIn developers blog that they were testing a new dwell factor.
that the longer someone stared at a post without scrolling on, the more visibility they gave that post. So I thought, well, okay, how can I hijack that? How can I get people to artificially stare at my post for a long time? And then I remembered those Where's Waldo books. Remember when we were kids, we were looking at a page for 10 minutes looking for Waldo?
I said, what if we do something like that, but instead of Waldo, we'll hide Bruno, the gong mascot, which is an English bulldog. So I had my team quickly bring up an image. This was before AI. They actually needed an artist to do this. Created a Where's Waldo style image, and they hid Bruno in it. And I posted that as an experiment of like, hey, we hid Bruno here on the beach. Can you find him?
And that post blew up. because people were dwelling on it. And I was just testing the LinkedIn algorithm and lo and behold, the darn thing worked. And so that just shows you, it had a little business value, but it probably did get more followers for Gong's social handles, which is always a good thing. talking about the fun things we're doing.
But the real idea here was that we're testing this minutia of the algorithm because that's how you win a channel. And we could not have done that if we were trying to focus on 20 different channels. So that's one piece of advice. Focus on one channel, make an educated bet on where your target audience is and get really, really good at that.
Two, of course, which was a big, not so well-kept secret of Gong's success, is that we created organic content so good that people wanted to follow us. They wanted to subscribe to our emails. They wanted to show up to our talks at events without us having to use a lot of paid advertising to get to them.
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Chapter 7: What career advice does Udi offer to marketers at different stages?
How do I uplevel my reps? How do I coach them better? And that's what we talked about, the outcomes that they cared about and how we help them solve their problems, not showing off our technology because nobody cares about it.
Yeah. And what advice would you give to somebody who's struggling to figure out what their audience's priorities really are, especially if maybe they're not selling to big public companies who are publishing strategies and annual reports? Yeah.
You have to start with a customer problem. If you don't know what that is, you probably shouldn't be writing a single line of code or building a solution for them yet. Go talk to them. When Gong got started, we used a very well-connected VP of sales to connect us to 10 others, and we used them as design partners and sat down with them and...
learned about their problems and found enough of common ground that we could solve for with a single, very simple product back then that was recording calls and analyzing and helping them do something that they never could have done before. And that solution worked magically for all of them, so we really understood their needs. But that just comes from talking to them and being in their seat.
Some of the best products are built by founders who experienced the problem themselves and didn't find a better solution. That's the case in Gong as well. Our CEO was prior to Gong, a CEO of another company. And he had a quarter from hell, as he describes it, and he didn't know what was happening. And nobody on his sales team could explain what was happening.
So he thought there must be a better way than asking reps or looking in the CRM, which doesn't give you any insight. And so he went and built Gong. He found a technical partner, explained the problem, asked him to find a solution, and together they found a solution. And other sales leaders agreed that this is what they needed. So you have to start with the problem domain.
I think we're still seeing... A bunch of founders that fall in love with a technological idea or a solution and then they go chasing after a problem. It can work. It's much, much harder getting there and you risk losing your way there and running out of money much faster than if you start with a problem and solve for that.
Yeah. And I think that also applies to marketers, right? Even though we have a problem domain that the product solves, we often don't go out and really try to understand how people are talking about it today. And I think that's maybe part of the point you were making around AI, where the way that your audience started to understand the solution changed, even though the technology
didn't because you'd been doing AI for so long, but the way they understood it started to change. And so you needed to change your vocabulary in the way that you talked about the same product that had been evolving over 10 years.
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