Most great marketing stories start with a spreadsheet. Udi Ledergor’s starts on stage.
Before he helped build Gong into one of the most influential SaaS brands of the past decade, he spent years in the performing arts: magic, theater, even puppetry. Strange origin story for a CMO? Maybe. But it planted the idea that business, like theater, works best when it feels like a show—designed, intentional, and a little magical.
That lens shaped nearly everything he later did at Gong.
The Power of Small, Compounding Advantages
Imagine two competing startups. Same market, similar features, similar IQ points. One inches 5–10% better on a dozen tiny decisions: sharper messaging, cleaner UX, smarter pricing, a sales deck people actually want to read. Nothing heroic. Yet those inches compound, and suddenly the race isn’t close.
That’s the story Udi tells about Gong’s early years.
Plenty of teams recorded sales calls. Only Gong obsessively replayed those calls, spotted patterns, and used them to coach reps and inform product. Plenty of teams used AI. Gong waited until they had undeniable value before saying the word out loud. Plenty of marketers ran safe campaigns. Gong picked fights, ran experiments, and published data that made people stop scrolling.
A thousand small edges, stacked.
How Gong Rewrote Its Own Category
Gong started inside a narrow box called “conversation intelligence.” Accurate name, terrible ceiling. It appealed to frontline managers, not executives who control budgets.
So the team reframed the whole space: Revenue Intelligence.
Not a cosmetic rename, an elevation. Suddenly the buyer changed, the stakes changed, and the product roadmap had a north star. The company didn’t just “record calls”; it illuminated the entire revenue machine.
Category creation usually sounds mystical. Udi strips it down: it’s about clearly naming the problem you solve, raising the altitude of the conversation, and giving customers language to explain why you matter.
Brave Marketing (And Why Most Companies Avoid It)
Udi argues that B2B marketing fails not because people lack creativity, but because teams run on autopilot.
He prefers a different mode: courageous marketing: a set of choices that might raise eyebrows but almost always raise brand affinity. His examples range from viral studies on swearing in sales calls to a privacy-policy email turned into a meme (complete with Britney jokes).
The common thread: don’t settle for being forgettable. Indifference is the real enemy.
Who Should Be Your First Marketing Hire?
Founders often hire the wrong marketer at the wrong time. Udi breaks the role into four buckets:
Demand generation
Product marketing
Brand/creative
Communications/PR
Only two matter early on: demand gen and product marketing. The puzzle is deciding which comes first.
His rule of thumb:
If you already have product–market fit and leads to scale → hire demand gen.
If your messaging isn’t landing or sales calls feel inconsistent → hire product marketing.
Gong started with demand gen, then added product marketing when deals began stalling due to unclear positioning.
Everything Is Marketing
A quirky release note. A tiny loading animation. An error message. A legal email. A booth your buyers actually want to walk into.
Every touchpoint tells a story, even the ones people ignore. Udi’s view is simple: if customers see it, it’s marketing. And if it’s marketing, it’s a chance to build trust or delight.
Gong used this mindset to turn the mundane into the memorable.
The Human Side: Betting on People
One of the episode’s standout threads: Udi repeatedly hires for potential over pedigree. His famous example is Vince, a Filipino food-truck owner who became Gong’s first social media manager and eventually a marketing leader.
Talent hides in strange places. Experience helps, but hunger compounds.
Of course, not every role tolerates inexperience, Udi jokes that you don’t want a “high-potential” brain surgeon, but in marketing, the upside can be enormous.
Why This Conversation Matters
Underneath the anecdotes, the episode is a masterclass in building a modern go-to-market engine:
Define your category before someone else does.
Make bold creative bets.
Use data, but don’t worship buzzwords.
Hire for slope, not just intercept.
Treat every customer touchpoint like an opportunity.
It’s a roadmap for founders, marketers, and anyone trying to build a company people actually care about.
If you want the full behind-the-scenes journey—complete with stories about early Gong chaos, category breakthroughs, and the real meaning behind Courageous Marketing—the episode is worth the listen.
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Chapters:
00:01 Welcome & Introducing Udi Ledergor
00:42 Growing Up Performing in Tel Aviv
02:08 From Computer Science to Product and Marketing
03:56 Leadership, Trust & Creative Risk-Taking
06:15 Product vs GTM: Building a Winning Engine
07:12 Gong vs Competitors: Small Edges, Big Outcomes
11:48 The “Quarter From Hell” & Gong’s Origin Story
14:20 Why the Shift from Conversation Intelligence to Revenue Intelligence
18:45 Breaking Through with Courageous Marketing
21:58 Data, Storytelling & When to Reveal the AI
24:37 Early-Stage Marketing Mistakes Founders Make
26:32 Udi’s Framework for Hiring Your First Marketer
29:50 The Missing Role: Product Marketing & Enablement
31:58 Writing Courageous Marketing & Its Core Message
34:22 Creating a POV That Polarizes (In a Good Way)
36:40 Turning a Privacy Email into a Brand Moment
38:57 Mascots, Dogs & The Hidden Layers of Brand
41:25 Hiring for Potential, Not Pedigree
44:09 How Udi Advises Startups as an Angel
46:52 The Underrated Power of Email in B2B
49:28 Lessons from Writing a Nonfiction Book
52:10 What’s Next for Udi & The Future of Revenue AI
53:02 Closing Thoughts & Episode Wrap-Up
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:00:56–00:01:19):
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Udi Ledergor on the mic. He’s the chief evangelist and former CMO at Gong, we all know that app, where he built a help define the revenue intelligence category and scale the company to a multi-billion dollar valuation. He’s also a best-selling author, investor, and board advisor known for his bold, human-centric approach to storytelling and marketing. Thanks for coming on.
Udi Ledergor (00:01:20–00:01:21):
Thanks for having me, Brian. Excited to be here.
Brian Bell (00:01:22–00:01:24):
Yeah, so I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your backstory?
Udi Ledergor (00:01:25–00:03:08):
I guess my backstory starts in Tel Aviv, Israel, where I grew up. Born and raised in Israel and lived most of my life there up until about seven years ago. I grew up going to the high school of the arts, which is relevant to what I think I’ve been doing in the last 20 plus years. I dabbled early in all sorts of performing arts from music to magic to puppetry to stage lighting, you name it. always been huge huge fan of the performing arts and to this day i i go to anything from one to three shows a week i i really uh i’m a big student of performing that’s amazing my my youngest daughter she’s nine is in the local theater troupe and she does performances you know so she’s already getting speaking roles and singing and yeah it’s amazing not just tree number four that’s such a enriching experience for anyone to be able to take part in any sort of performing arts or other arts And as I was growing up, I kind of wanted to see how I can converge a lot of these fun, exciting things into a grownup job. And that’s how I came across marketing eventually, which I think is all about putting on a magical experience, whether it’s creating a brand or a category or content marketing or brand campaigns. It’s all about simplifying something complicated, which I bring from the world of magic, right? And magic, sometimes there’s a very intricate way of performing a trick. But to you, the spectator, it seems like magic because it’s something very simple that seems unreasonable. And that’s what we’re doing in technology marketing. At least that’s how I like to look at it. We’re taking something that’s inertially... But most of our business users, unless you’re marketing to a very technical audience, our business users don’t need to know about all the nuts and bolts and the bits and the bytes. And I think that’s what great marketing can do amongst other things, simplify and create something that looks magical. And so that’s kind of how I think I ended up in marketing.
Brian Bell (00:03:10–00:03:16):
That’s amazing. And so did you always know, like, right in college, you’re like, I’m going to major in marketing, that’s my path?
Udi Ledergor (00:03:17–00:04:14):
Evolved. So I started studying computer science. And a year into that, I realized a couple of things. One, I love technology, I’m very interested in how it works and evolves. But I don’t see myself creating the technology and laboring away at writing the code and debugging all day. And I wanted something more people facing. And so one of my significant first roles was a product manager. And I did that for five years. And product manager is an amazing role because on the one side, you’re working with R&D, the engineering, telling them what to develop in a language that they understand. On the other side, you’re working with customers, hopefully to understand what they need, how they’re reacting to your product, and kind of translate between those two languages. And after five years of doing that, I realized that I love the customer side a lot more than the engineering side of the job. So I decided to focus all of my efforts in marketing. So just over 20 years ago, I stepped into my first head of marketing role. And since then, I’ve led five marketing teams to varying degrees of success. The longest, best-running one here at Gong, where I’ve been for nine years now.
Brian Bell (00:04:18–00:04:46):
Yeah, that’s amazing. We have a similar background, but you started from tech and CS and worked your way out. I kind of started in sales and finance and kind of worked my way into the tech. I never quite became an engineer, but I was a technical PM building lots of AI, big data systems and things like that. But, you know, I went from sales to marketing to product and then back out again, which is fascinating. So you’ve you’ve worn lots of different hats. How did all those early roles influence the way you lead team today and how you think about marketing?
Udi Ledergor (00:04:46–00:05:56):
You know, the longer you do a role, I think the more humbling it becomes. I know that word is overused on LinkedLinkedIn and other social media, but right. I think it’s true because in the beginning, you think that you’re expected to have all the great ideas and all the best ideas and everyone’s looking up to you to tell them what to do and waiting for that pearl of wisdom to come out of your mouth. The longer I was in role in leadership roles, the more I realized that Most of the great ideas are not going to come from me. They’re going to come from great people that I hire and get out of their way. And I discovered that creating this environment of psychological safety where they feel safe to fail is what pushes them to be risky and edgy and experiment and not be afraid to try some things, knowing that a lot of them are not going to work out. But rather than getting reprimanded for it, they’ll actually get encouraged for having the courage to try it. I’ll ask them what they’re learning from it is so we can all learn. And then we move on to the next idea. And so that’s, I think, is part of my evolution of trying not to micromanage, but still staying at the top of my craft so my team members could come to me for sounding board if they needed it. But otherwise, give them as much autonomy as I could safely give them. And sometimes maybe a little bit more than that to take risks and try stuff.
Brian Bell (00:06:00–00:06:12):
So given you have that CS and the product and the help desk and the marketing and the CMO evangelist now, you know, what has your point of view shifted around your mindset of product driven versus brand driven growth and success?
Udi Ledergor (00:06:14–00:08:35):
So I’ll put it… I’ll put it in a couple of ways. One, there’s a quote from my CEO, Amit Bendov, which I like. And he said, once he was asked about Gong success, and he said, well, it’s pretty simple, really. We build a product so good that a mediocre go-to-market team could take it to market. And we build a go-to-market team so good that they could take a mediocre product to market. And once you build both, the sky’s the limit. And so I love the way he gave those two sides of the equation pretty much equal to… And anyone who’s been at a hyper growth company knows that often that’s the case. I’m talking about enterprise sales motion where you actually need a lot of humans involved with PLG is probably a little bit different. For sure, it’s a bit different. And then the second quote is from our second co-founder, Ilona Veshev, our head of product at a recent internal leadership summit. He was talking about our starting point. And when we started, there were a couple of other startups even a little bit ahead of us. So we were, as far as I know, at least the third in the game of back then conversation intelligence. Chorus started a few months earlier. They had teams in the exact same places, so the same hiring and talent pool in Tel Aviv and in San Francisco. They raised almost identical amounts of money in the first few rounds. And then there was another company called ExecVision. And Elon says of them, look, we didn’t do anything magical. We just used compounding interest, if you want to call it that, on having a product that’s 5% better, marketing that was 10% better, hiring decisions that were 5% better. And all those things accumulate very, very, very quickly. As anyone who’s playing in the markets know, once you get that snowball rolling, it’s really, really hard to stop. And there was a point in time that I’m pretty sure Chorus had a few more customers or sales than Gong did, and maybe even a few feature advantages. And definitely ExecVision was ahead of us when we got started. But we just kept making these decisions and hiring these people that were 5% or 10% better. And over time, that accumulates so quickly. And I guess the lesson from that is just unrelenting excellence and not falling into mediocrity in anything that you do. Not the product, not the hiring, not the… the marketing, not anything. Because once you do that, the old saying goes, your B players are only going to be able to hire C players. And from there, you’re kind of in a downhill spiral versus bring A players that can hire A plus players because they want to work for someone they can be inspired from. And I saw this over and over again across our team.
Brian Bell (00:08:38–00:08:48):
Yeah, and I worked at Amazon as well, and we had this concept of the bar raiser, right? And you had to hire somebody in the role that was at least better than the median in that role currently. And it sounds like you guys were able to do that, and that just compounded.
Udi Ledergor (00:08:52–00:09:03):
I can’t tell you we did that with every single hire. We’re 1,600 employees and probably had double the number of employees coming in and out over the years. So obviously you can’t get it right 100% of the time, but if you shoot high, you’ll probably get there most of the time.
Brian Bell (00:09:05–00:09:53):
And you said something, I love the quote from your founder. Sometimes companies fail because of a lack of great marketing. And sometimes companies fail from a lack of a great product. You’re obviously biased. You come from the marketing angle. And I’ve been in both situations in my career where, oh, we have superior marketing. I remember working at a MarTech company. And I worked in the marketing department and the CEO was a marketer. And so like everything we did just flowed, like just the marketing was so good, but the product was just subpar compared to our competitors. And I’ve been in opposite situations. Rocket Fuel in particular, I was at Rocket Fuel to AdTech Unicorn back in the day where... You know, we just had a superior product, but our go-to-market was all messy. And we’re very, very antagonistic, I think, with our incumbents. And it kind of fell down because of a go-to-market motion and kind of lack of strategic focus. So you kind of need both, don’t you?
Udi Ledergor (00:09:56–00:10:27):
You do need both. But, you know, as a marketer, I will be the first to tell you that without a killer product that provides real value, that creates raving fans, I can’t work miracles. Even with all the best marketing and marketers in the world, you can fool some of them once to buy your product, to try your product, whatever that first...
Brian Bell (00:10:15–00:10:19):
You got really great enterprise sales guys going in there and landing seven figure deals.
Udi Ledergor (00:10:20–00:11:23):
Right. But then a year comes and they haven’t seen product value from the product. No magic is going to save you. You actually have to build a product that people love. You know, Sam Altman said that way back in the YC days. And that’s one of the things he hasn’t changed his mind on. And I think it’s just one of those axioms. especially in the world of any sort of subscription business, right? But we’re not just trying to swindle our way into one sale. Like we have to resell this product every single year. So the product has to provide tons of value every single year. Now, to be clear, especially in the early days, marketing can be a huge push from anonymity to a brand and great marketing can make your company look a couple of years ahead of where it really is, which is so important when you’re trying to cross that chasm that Jeffrey Moore talked about from the early adopter to the early majority. You need both products that can work in enterprise, great security and privacy and all that stuff, but also great marketing that makes you appear much bigger than you are, which gives your enterprise buyers more confidence to buy from you. So marketing is definitely important, but marketing can’t be pushing that train on its own. If the product isn’t there, it’s going to all fall apart.
Brian Bell (00:11:25–00:11:49):
Yeah, and I think his follow-up book was The Whole Product Solution or something to that effect.
Udi Ledergor (00:11:30–00:11:38):
Yeah, I forget the exact name.
Brian Bell (00:11:40–00:11:50):
Yeah, but it’s, you know, basically when you cross the chasm, you have to have a complete enterprise product to the early majority or they’ll just, you know, they won’t adopt it.
Udi Ledergor (00:11:51–00:11:52):
But when in doubt, listen to Jeffrey Moore. He’s a very smart guy.
Brian Bell (00:11:53–00:11:55):
Yeah, when in doubt, Jeffrey Moore knows what he’s talking about. So take us back to the early days of Gong. You know, what was the spark behind revenue intelligence as a category? Was that in the zeitgeist in your heads at the beginning?
Udi Ledergor (00:12:03–00:14:00):
The name definitely was not. So when we started, maybe it’s worth going even further back than revenue intelligence to explain the origin story of how the company started. So Amit Bendov, my CEO and co-founder, he was a CEO at another company before he started Gong. And he had what he describes as a quarter from Hill, where the numbers were just going down, sales were not closing, sales team was missing forecasts. And everyone he called into his room just couldn’t explain what was happening. Like, you know, they had anecdotal stories about this opportunity going south and that not working. And Amit tried to figure out what is the big picture? Like, why is this quarter so bad? And fortunately, they were recording a few calls for compliance purposes using some arcane call recording system. And he tried listening to a few calls and quickly realized this was not scalable. Like listening to a one hour call took one hour and you had no AI. This was 10, 11 years ago. You had no AI or anything to tell you what’s really happening there. make any sense of it, let alone aggregate and look for trends. And so he had the spark that said, there’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way of understanding how to unlock all these insights happening in customer interactions, because we’re on calls with them, we’re on emails with them, but nobody has the big picture. And that was when he decided that this is going to be his next company. He teamed up with Elon Rechef the technical co-founder, and they built this first thing that just recorded calls and allowed you to go back and search for something in the transcript. Now, all of us are so jaded with AI at this point that it’s hard to imagine this. But if you go 10 years back, when I saw me show me that initial demo of looking for a competitor name in a transcript and seeing where it shows up and how many times it shows up, my jaw just dropped. I mean, that was groundbreaking. And That word is, again, overused, but that was really groundbreaking. Like to see how you could take this unstructured data, voice calls, video calls, and search for something in it. This technology is only 10 years old. So that was a big moment. And we started rolling that out. It went really well. I already told you we had a couple of competitors at the time and more were created as they saw that the space was picking up.
Udi Ledergor (00:14:02–00:16:10):
Fast forward three years after we came to market with conversation intelligence, we had a couple of problems that we wanted to solve for. So one, we wanted to better differentiate ourselves from the other competitors, the ones that we mentioned earlier. Their vision for what this technology could do was far more limited than ours was. They were mostly still talking about recording calls, listening back to them for coaching purposes. We knew that someday this is going to manage entire revenue teams from prospecting to data to spying signals to forecasting, to doing everything with it. And we wanted a better way of differentiating ourselves. And by saying, oh, we do conversation intelligence, we were kind of pigeonholed to that technology that everyone else was describing as you can record your calls and listen back to them. So that was one big problem we wanted to solve. A second problem we wanted to solve was trying to get and keep the attention of senior revenue leaders. And what was happening at the time, let’s say we’re trying to sell to a large company. We managed to land a meeting with their chief revenue officer. And then she asks, okay, what are you doing? And we say, well, we do a conversation intelligence. And then more often than not, she would say something like, oh, that’s an enablement tool. Go talk to Michelle from enablement. I don’t deal with these tools. Like, I don’t know why you booked this demo with me. And so those were the two problems we were trying to solve. And we had a hunch that by reframing the category that we’re operating in, we could solve both of those problems. A, make it easier for us to differentiate. Two, get and keep the attention of senior revenue leaders. And so there was a bit of serendipity where we were interviewing for a head of product marketing role. And one of the candidates, her name is Sheena Badani. She really made a great impression on all of us. And we really loved her. The only problem was she didn’t have the right experience to be a head of product marketing at Gox. But this was the same time that we were having this internal discussion on the future of our category. And then we thought, well, what if we hired someone else to be head of product marketing but offered Sheena a job? Her only job would be to lead us through new category creation and push that category to market. So it’s related to product marketing for sure, but it’s not leading that entire team.
Brian Bell (00:16:14–00:16:16):
Yeah, you might call that segment product marketing or...
Udi Ledergor (00:16:16–00:17:08):
I don’t know. We just made up the title. Yeah. I think her title was Senior Director of Product Marketing, but internally she was known as a category creep. And she was crazy enough to say yes to our crazy idea. And I’m so glad that she did because she was with us for many years and within the first couple of months, she facilitated workshops where she suggested different new category titles with all their pros and cons and a bit of market validation on them. And we ended up at the end of that process peaking revenue intelligence as the new category. Intelligence was kind of the continuation of conversation intelligence. And at that time, our product was a single product that mostly provided insights, unlike today’s platform that takes action. So intelligence was kind of the word of that time. But then changing conversation intelligence to revenue intelligence, we hoped would solve the two problems that I talked about. And indeed, it did.
Udi Ledergor (00:17:09–00:17:57):
So A... It allowed us to much more easily differentiate by saying, you know, folks, conversation intelligence, that’s a great technology, but it’s only a very small part of what we’re building, which is revenue intelligence. And let me explain to you what that is. And then we went on explaining what revenue intelligence does and both at that moment and our future vision of which is not very dissimilar from where the platform is today, revenue AI and a system of action. And the second thing is once we got that meeting with the CRO and we said, we do revenue intelligence, she had to care about it because the word revenue is literally in her title of chief revenue officer. She can’t as easily delegate that. And so this was now, instead of a tactical system that enablement can choose, this was a strategic system that the CRO needs to care about because they run their entire team on it and it helps them achieve their most strategic business goals.
Brian Bell (00:17:58–00:18:08):
So that was kind of how we got started. Yeah, that’s awesome story. So thinking back to some of the bets that you made from a marketing perspective, were there any that felt risky at the time, but kind of proved essential?
Udi Ledergor (00:18:10–00:20:57):
All of them felt risky at the time. I think that’s what made marketing at Gong so fun. When Devin Reed was head of content marketing on my team, we used to joke that if our fingers don’t shake just a little bit, don’t tremble before we hit the post or send button on a social media post or an email, we’re not taking it far enough. So we were always walking that line. There were so many examples, gosh. I mean, one that we, I don’t even know that I call it risky. I don’t think we even anticipated all the responses that we would get and how colorful they were was when we published our research on salespeople who use swear words on their sales calls. They have an 8% higher win rate. That’s the TLDR of the study. And if you’re curious, hey, you can look it up, but it’s also kind of like a form of rapport building. You know, you’re kind of growing down with somebody and you’re kind of like, F this, F that. And it works especially well if you use it as a mirroring technique. So if your buyer is signaling that they appreciate that language and maybe she drops an S word or an F bomb and you respond in the same language, that’s when you maximize the impact of that technique. And it went viral as much as B2B content can go viral. So first it was picked up by fastcompany.com and they ran with that story, earning us more reach than I could ever afford. And when it went live on their site, I started getting calls from radio stations asking to interview me on air about the study because it was so interesting for their listeners. So again, the best type of media is, of course, earned media that you can’t buy this stuff. It’s perceived as more credible by the listeners and the readers. And the best part is you don’t have to spend a dime of your money buying these mediums. So that’s how it started. And then when we published it on social media, LinkedIn had an absolute field day. I mean, most of the responses were people using their most colorful vocabulary to say things like, yeah, this is the shit I’ve been talking about. Or Larry, come look at this. This is what we were arguing about in the office and seeing it. You should let me say all these bad words as much as I want because they’re increasing my win rates. And then there was a small but important segment of people who responded that they were appalled that we were suggesting using this type of language in a professional setting. But that is a marketer’s dream to actually create that argument, create a discussion. I think the lesson here is that some people are afraid that they’ll write something that might be the tiniest bit offensive to someone and someone might hate their content. And so they clean it up and they keep it so kind of goody two shoes and unoffensive. The problem was that if nobody ever could find your content the slight bit offensive or arguable, nobody’s probably getting excited with it either. And the worst enemy of your content is not someone hating it. It’s actually indifference. And so that content piece definitely did not get indifference. People either got a real kick out of it or they were appalled by it. But in any case, there was a discussion happening. And that was a really fun... moment.
Brian Bell (00:21:02–00:21:20):
That’s amazing. What a cool story. Yeah. And you have to, it’s a delicate balance. And I like that quote about the indifference, you know, trying to strike a balance of being useful and helpful, but also a little controversial. So it gets some impressions and attention without going overboard. So, yeah, it’s a tricky balance. Speaking of balance, you know, you guys were some of the innovators of making marketing and sales more data driven. How do you kind of balance the brand and creative storytelling with data driven decision making?
Udi Ledergor (00:21:32–00:23:39):
So that’s an interesting evolution. What happened there? I can tell you that for the first seven years or so, that, yeah, six, six and a half to seven years, we never mentioned AI in our marketing. If you’d looked, if you go, if you use the Wayback Machine, don’t take my word for it, use the Wayback Machine, go to the Gong website of three years ago, you will be hard pressed to find any mentions of AI. Because we made an early decision of focusing on the value as our buyers would perceive it. And I think that’s, again, a common mistake. A lot of product-led founders and marketers who are under the pressure of said founders, they end up showcasing the bits and the bytes without stopping to consider, is this even interesting or valuable to my buyers? Just because you got 14 patents on this really cool technology doesn’t mean that any of our buyers care about this at all. Tell me what’s in it for me. And since we were selling from day one to relatively non-technical business users, aka sales leaders, why would they care in 2016 or in 2020 about AI? That means nothing to them. And in fact, many of them are afraid of using bleeding edge technology because it sounds like it’s only half baked, it would be difficult to learn, maybe it won’t be supported in a couple of years. So instead we focus on the value. Early days was take your B players and turn them into A players. Clone your best players. Up level your entire sales team. Those were the types of messaging that we used in the early days. And then, of course, about two and a half or three years ago when AI became so dominant in our lives and it was clear that it was starting to be clear that it’s here to stay and it’s changing how everything is done, then we kind of lifted AI and took it out from under the hood where it was all these years. And we started showcasing that in our messaging, in our first call decks, on our website, as you would expect, it’s right there in the H1 now and everywhere else on the website, because if you’re not doing AI now, you’re backwards. But we had the opposite fear early on that we would look too forward thinking and too visionary if we showcase that early. So we just focused at any given time, what do our prospects care about? When they didn’t care about AI, neither did we. Now that they do care about, so do we.
Brian Bell (00:23:41–00:24:04):
So this podcast has a lot of founders listening to it and a lot of founders that we back come on the pod. What do you think early stage startups get wrong about marketing?
Udi Ledergor (00:23:50–00:25:07):
There’s a lot of ways I could answer that because there’s a lot of things people get wrong. The first would be a lot of founders, they just don’t know how to approach their first marketing hire. And I mentor a lot of founders. I do a lot of speaking in startup accelerators. I yours and many others that I work with, honestly, most of them, especially their first-time founders, they’re pretty clueless about what to look for in a marketer. And they just don’t even understand the language of marketing. And so here’s my 60-second framework in more detail about this in my book, of course. Here’s the 60-second framework on how to think about your first marketing hire. So in B2B marketing, most marketers will fall into one of four buckets of… The first is demand generation, also recently known as revenue marketing or growth marketing. Growth hacking. Yeah, not to be confused. I thought hacking was, we’re already rid with that horrible word. But if it’s still there, yeah. So all that growth stuff, especially for enterprise sales motions, that’s demand generation. The second bucket is product marketing. The third is brand and creative. And the fourth is comms and PR. So these are the four buckets of marketing. Now, as you start narrowing down, what do I need in the early days? Let me help you by first eliminating the last two. The last thing that you need for any B2B company that I can think of is brand, creative, comms, and PR. I can give you for reference where we were at Gong. When I hired my first creative director and when I hired my first PR person, we were well beyond 100 million in ARR. That’s how late I hired these people. They just cannot produce enough value in the early days. You’re small. You didn’t raise a lot of money. You don’t have marquee customers. There’s no story to tell that your PR person could sell to Wall Street Journal or New York Times. Why would you bring her on board. And same goes for brand and creative. Like you can hire an agency once, get over with your initial visual identity, and then you don’t have to keep paying this team to sit there and twiddle their thumbs. You can use very cheap contractor designers. That’s what I did today. Of course, you can use AI tools, but there’s no reason to build these teams and stand them up in the early days.
Udi Ledergor (00:25:07–00:27:19):
That brings us to the first two, which is demand gen and product marketing. Now, most companies do need both of them very early on. If you pushed me against the wall and said, okay, but which one do I hire first? Then I would ask these three questions to decide. A, are you selling to a highly technical buyer like engineering lead or, I don’t know, data analyst? Two, is your product very technical to explain its value? And three, is there another reason that causes an urgent need for messaging and narrative work? If you answered one or more of these questions, yes, you probably need a product marketer today. In Gong’s case, I actually answered all of those questions with a no. Think about it. Is Gong’s initial product technical? Hell no. I could show it to my mother and say, look, it records call and you can listen and search for a word that showed up. That’s it. Super simple. are we selling to a technical audience? Heck no, I’m selling to sales leaders, one of the least technical buyers there is. And three, is there another urgent need for narrative or messaging work? No, because we found it was pretty easy explaining the value as soon as I got 10 minutes to show you what this can do. And so I focused on demand gen. And that is kind of the decision tree that I think most founders can follow. Start with either of those two. And as soon as you can, bring on the second one. I will admit that I took too long in hindsight to hire that product marketer. It was years until we built a serious product marketing organization. And I probably waited too long, but I just focused on demand gen and it worked out pretty well.
Brian Bell (00:27:25–00:27:47):
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, when did you know you needed a product market or what were kind of the warning signs in hindsight where you said you waited too long, but when is the right time? Imagine you got the demand engine rolling, you got product market fit, you’re doing the triple, triple, double, double, double, whatever. As a founder, you know, hey. Getting even better.
Brian Bell (00:27:46–00:27:47):
Yeah, you’re doing better than that. But like, how do you know, like, ooh, now it’s time to really get that PMM and how?
Udi Ledergor (00:27:51–00:28:34):
So here’s where it shows up. If you look at conversion rates between opportunity stages, I’m getting very tactical for a moment. If you look at conversion rates of opportunity stages in sales and the sales team is pulling their hair out saying, We’re losing opportunities at every stage because our competitors are coming in and they’re out messaging us. They’re saying they can do everything we can do. We don’t have a clear talk track or demo track to show how we’re better. And when we start mumbling about these nuances of differences, we’re not doing a good job. We’re not doing a consistent job. That’s when we realized like, oh shit, we should have invested earlier in product marketing. We did need much stronger, coherent messaging. And that also went to sales enablement. It was also a function we stood up probably too late. So it’s that entire path of how do we enable the sales team to consistently crush it and win deals? And we knew that the product was better, but the messaging that we had was subpar for too long.
Brian Bell (00:28:46–00:29:14):
Is it kind of also like when you’ve kind of nailed that first couple segments, you know, kind of the early adopters and you’re hitting the early majority now, you’re crossing the chasm, and now the messaging needs to get more sophisticated to more sophisticated buyers?
Udi Ledergor (00:28:59–00:29:30):
I don’t know if there was that so much. I mean, a lot more competitors showed up as they saw our success, which happens in every field. And that’s good news, right? You don’t want to be a category of one. But lots of players saw our success and said, oh, we also want a piece of that pie or they think they could do better. And it’s much, much easier copying a successful product and coming up with a brand new product yourself. So at some points, we even had technological debt against some of these newcomers that just wrote something from scratch using newer technology. We needed some time to catch up on a few things. And great messaging could have been helpful in those times.
Brian Bell (00:29:33–00:29:40):
I want to talk a little bit about your book for a second, too. What was the impetus to write that? What were you trying to accomplish? And yeah, Courageous Marketing. Love it. Where’s the title come from? And yeah, tell us all about it.
Udi Ledergor (00:29:43–00:31:05):
Well, you know, even the title is kind of a fun story. I was working on this book for about 18 months. I had a terrible working title. I can share it with you as long as you promise not to tell anyone. The working title was B2B Marketing That Doesn’t Suck. And it was a working title. I thought it was okay. A little cutesy, but not very inspiring. And I wrote the entire book under that title with references to the theme and title. And when I was in one of the final stages of editing the book and I started, I was working on tying everything together because the chapters, each chapter in itself was pretty solid. The stories within the chapters were solid. But then that hardest level of bringing everything together is you want a coherent book that someone starts and hopefully finishes, and they went on a journey with you, and they have this big aha moment at the end, and they’re happy that they endured the whole book until the end. And I was struggling with that a little bit, as B2B marketing that doesn’t suck doesn’t give you a ton to work with. But then when I started reading a lot of the stories again, and mostly the stories about my different team members and experiments that they ran and the risks that they took, I realized what the book was about. The book was really about courage. It was courage in brand building. It was courage in hiring. It was courage in content marketing. It was courage in event experiences. It was courage in all of these different areas of marketing.
Udi Ledergor (00:31:05–00:31:28):
not just mine, but my team members’ courage. And then I had this aha moment of, wow, this is actually about courageous marketing. And I ran that by my editor and she said, God, I hated the last title. This is so much better. And so we did a very quick kind of rewrite of the references to need to be marketing that doesn’t suck. And it was so much easier and more inspiring to tie it into this theme. And I think the book is a thousand times better thanks to that.
Brian Bell (00:31:28–00:31:34):
Yeah, you should kind of frame it in the aspirational, the positive. Rather than.
Udi Ledergor (00:31:31–00:31:36):
Doesn’t suck as a very low bar.
Udi Ledergor (00:31:35–00:31:36):
Yeah. Doesn’t suck as a very low bar. And I’m hoping to inspire marketers to a much higher bar.
Brian Bell (00:31:39–00:31:47):
Yeah, I love that too. Somebody who’s done a ton of marketing and built marketing tools and, you know, Team Ignite, you could argue is just a marketing engine as well. What does courageous marketing look like in practice?
Udi Ledergor (00:31:49–00:35:32):
I already gave some of this away when I talked about earlier on in response to one of your first questions, I talked about creating an environment of psychological safety where people feel safe to fail and are encouraged to take risks and be edgy and walk the line, knowing that they’re going to cross it sometimes. Taking a step back even further from that, I would say that courageous marketing is all about having a unique relationship strong, unapologetic, differentiated point of view in everything that you do. One way that I learned to do this is even if you’re doing something that sounds trivial, like putting on a booth at an event or sending out a privacy policy update email, like stop and think before I follow the wretched best practices and make it a boring email or a boring booth that everyone’s seen, what’s a big idea that I can bring in that would make people stop in their tracks and talk about this for a day? And there’s almost always a way of doing that. There’s almost always a way of doing that. And once you get into the habit and you take your team on this journey with you of like, don’t ever do something on autopilot. Just think about what’s a big idea I can inject here that would make everyone come to my booth and stay at my booth. Or take that silly email and share it with others because it made them smile or they thought it was brilliant. One of the examples I give in the book is the privacy policy email. It’s a real email that every company has to send out once a year or so when they update the privacy policy. And we all know because we’ve already received these emails and probably sent a few of them. It’s the most boring email of the year. Nobody wants to read it. You send it because you have to, and you just move on with your day. But I thought we could do more. I thought this is a customer interaction, and I don’t waste any customer interaction because if I’m sending this email today, that means I can’t send another email today because... Now it’ll be too much and it’ll be spamming. So how do I make this customer interaction meaningful and maybe even delightful? And so when my team came to me, I think it was Devin Reed then managing the content team and said, Udi, what do we do with this email? I mean, we got the text from legal. It’s the most boring thing in the world. What do we do with it? And I simply said, don’t make it boring. Don’t make it boring. And I walked away. That was the last I heard of that email until it went out. And when it went out, I knew that it went out because people started posting it on Twitter and on LinkedIn. And one lady wrote an entire blog post about it on Medium saying, look how Gong took the potentially most boring email of the year and made it a moment of delight for all of us. So what my team did there in a nutshell is they used an alarming subject line. I asked other marketers, like, what do they expect to see for an email like this? For a good email, they expect to see maybe a 25% open rate. For a bad email or a boring email like privacy policy, you don’t really expect anyone to open it, right? We got a 39.5% open rate on that email, rounded up to 40. 40% open rate on a privacy policy email. The reason is the subject line was, our lawyers made us do this. So we sent that out. Obviously, all of our recipients were shitting their pants, wondering what they did wrong to get an email from our lawyers. And then once they opened it, the tone immediately changed to what they were expecting from Gong, which was tongue in cheek, making jokes about this obviously being 100th privacy policy email you’re receiving. Yes, we have to send it out. Turns out we have to tell you that we changed it and sent it to you. So here’s the link if you want to read it. We had a Britney Spears meme going like check and check there. And we asked people to just move on with their day. And it was just such a fun email, a moment of levity in the otherwise very, very boring emails like that that people were getting that people really got a kick out of it. You don’t expect your privacy calls email to go viral. You don’t expect people to write blog posts and post it on social media, but they did. And that’s proof that you can take potentially the most boring moment and turn it into a moment of delight for your customers.
Brian Bell (00:35:34–00:35:44):
That’s so many good lessons there. Amazing. I want to bring it back to founders as I do. How should founders kind of apply these lessons in building their touch points with their customers?
Udi Ledergor (00:35:45–00:37:40):
I think it starts by being very deliberate about not letting any of these moments go to waste. whether it’s an operational email of welcome you to a free trial or whatever it is, make it meaningful. Here’s a cool example from Slack a couple of years ago. They had an app update on the Apple App Store, and there was nothing exciting. It was mostly bug fixes. So they wrote a really fun, quirky message because you have to update the app description with every single update. And they really had no exciting features to announce. So they just wrote this really cool, chill message of like, I’m just hoping, sending you good vibes and hoping you have a great day. I’ve got nothing big to announce here. People loved that and it went viral and like they were sharing it like crazy. And I’m not even sure that documentation writer at Slack knew what they were doing or what to expect when they did that. But that was a beautiful moment of delight where you can see there was a human being there scratching their head. Like, I’ve got nothing to tell you. There’s nothing new here. But they just wrote a sincere, sweet message that people really connected with. And so I think if you think about that, there’s so many great examples of great onboarding emails and great messages from leaders on social media and in the product. That’s such a wasted medium many times. We get a lot of our event attendees to RSVP within our product because we found non-intrusive ways or not too intrusive ways to pop up when they’re in the right zone and invitation to our event while they’re using Gong the product. And I haven’t seen that happen in a lot of events, in a lot of products. I mean, I use a lot of products every day. I don’t see a lot of messages that are trying to pull me to do something else, maybe join our event or join this webinar or listen to this podcast or read this content piece. But when you do it in the right way, that’s not too intrusive. And you know that I have their attention now. They’re in the zone. I’m trying to give them a great experience. Why don’t we give them more value in the form of a great blog post that they might like to read? So I think that’s one thing that founders should keep in mind. And that means that everything is marketing.
Udi Ledergor (00:37:40–00:39:34):
The product’s error messages are marketing. When you search the Amazon app on your phone and it comes up blank either because of their error or something, there’s a cute dog that pops up on the Amazon app. So they don’t want you to get a 404 style message that makes you feel like you did something wrong. There’s like a poor puppy that’s looking apologetic and apologizing for not finding what you needed. And that’s a sweet moment. You can’t be mad at them when they do that. But that requires a mindset. You’ve got to be in that mindset. Which, by the way, we also did. Our mascot at Gong is Bruno the Bulldog. And he was very prominent on all of our marketing materials and swag for many years. Now he’s got a smaller role to play. But the first year we rolled him out, one of our enterprise customers sent an in-app message in the chat, in the help chat, saying, why is there an effing bulldog on my login screen? And I thought, okay, A, someone’s noticing, and B, we’re doing something different. So just keeping in mind that every moment matters. Everything you do is marketing. How your receptionist picks up the phone matters. How the recruiting coordinator treats your candidate matters. All of that is marketing. If you go to Gong’s glass door reviews, you’ll find candidates who did not get an offer from Gong, but still wrote a very positive review because they had such a great experience with the recruiting coordinator. They wanted to shout her out. You should be creating those experiences that spread. And then this candidate and her friends will want to still come back and interview for Gong. But if you give a bad experience and if you ghost your candidates and if you don’t treat them like human beings at difficult moments, like having to say no after five interviews, that’s a marketing moment that you might be misusing. And then you’re not going to like your glass door reviews. You’re not going to like the portrayal of your company that you can’t control anymore.
Brian Bell (00:39:38–00:39:44):
Before we close the segment on your book, I’d love to know if there’s any other stories or lessons that you want to highlight. I’m sure you have many.
Udi Ledergor (00:39:45–00:42:01):
Yeah, I think there’s a really sweet, fun one that I like, which is about some of my hiring experiences. So when we put on our first Celebrate event, this was Gong’s first customer event in 2019, we were short-staffed, as is still the case for every Celebrate event. It’s just a big undertaking, especially for a small team that we had at the time. Russell, who was managing Devangent on my team, said, Udi, there’s this dancer that they both danced in the same dance company after working hours. He said, I want to bring him as a temporary intern for three months to help us with some of the logistics of the event and run social media on the day of the event. I said, yeah, sure. I don’t even need to interview for an intern or temp position. We need another pair of working hands. Let’s do it. So he brought on this friend Vince. Now Vince, his day job was working on his cousin’s Filipino food truck at the time. So Vince was making the meanest California burritos. You’ve got to try them. If you’re in San Francisco, look up Senor Sisig. They make amazing Filipino food. And this is Vince’s cousin. So he was working on the food truck when Russell called him and said, hey, Russ, you know, hey, Vince, you know, the company I work for, Gong, we’re doing this event and I got approval to hire a temp for a few months if you want to come help us. And Vince said, sure, I’ll come help us. He had never worked in tech. He’d never worked in marketing. He joined us as a temp for three months and everyone on the team fell in love with him because he had this fresh, positive attitude. He said yes to everything he was asked and then did more than we expected. And by the time the event was over and he had done a fantastic job there, Russell came to me and said, what do you think about hiring Vince full-time to run our social media at Gong? And I said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Let’s just get through a formal interview, which we did. And we hired him as our first social media manager with no tech experience, with no marketing experience, and he absolutely crushed it. This was in 2019. Vince is still on Gong’s marketing team in 2025. He has been promoted multiple times and expanded his responsibilities to everything from building our merchandise store to managing marketing ops, a bunch of different things I probably don’t even know at this point. But I love that story of betting on potential rather than experience, which I’ve done repeatedly. And the vast majority of times, it worked really, really well.
Udi Ledergor (00:42:01–00:43:18):
The first events manager I hired, Danny, never worked in tech or in events. Both of the first content managers that were responsible for a lot of our early success, Chris Orlov never had a marketing job, let alone a writing job. Devin Reed was a salesperson until a day before I gave him his first marketing job. All these people worked out really, really, really well. And so my lesson here is that always look for opportunities to hire for potential rather than experience. Not only will you be giving someone the break that they’ve been waiting for, but you’ll get this really fresh perspective of people who don’t know the best practices, which in reality are so boring that nobody cares about them. And their fresh experience and their learning mindset is going to bring so much to your team. You know, to complete the picture, I will say that there are exceptions, of course. Right. Consider your personal life. If you needed brain surgery, you don’t want to take the guy from the food truck and give them their first chance to do brain surgery on you. They’ll probably go to the experienced surgeon who’s done this a thousand times. So in tech, the stakes are rarely that high, which is why we can use the potential over experience mode a lot more often. But there are going to be roles, like I would say, if you need a experienced product marketing leader, maybe that’s not something you give someone their first break in marketing to figure out. And if you need, I don’t know, something very technical, maybe you get someone with some of that aptitude to minimize risk. But for a lot of the roles, like events and social media and all the stuff that I talked about, yeah. Potential over experience can get you very far.
Brian Bell (00:43:41–00:43:49):
So let’s shift gears and talk about Beyond Gong, which kind of rhymes. So you’ve become an advisor, an investor, a builder. You’ve invested in many companies. What patterns do you look for when deciding to back a startup or advise one for that matter?
Udi Ledergor (00:43:53–00:45:10):
I would say, and this is probably very unsophisticated, but if it’s a startup that is doing something that I understand or can pretty quickly understand, and that’s either they’re selling to an ICP I know very well. So if someone is building something for sales or marketing, those are areas where I’m very knowledgeable. So I can look at a product and people come to me often say like, do you see the value in this? Would you use it? Do you know people that would use this? So if I see the value and I go, oh, this solves a huge problem, then that’s a good starting point for me to consider investing. Other times it can be using technologies that I understand, maybe something similar to what Gong is doing or other areas where I have a little bit knowledgeable. In the other cases, I’m going to trust others to make my investment decisions. So I invest in a small handful of funds where I trust the general partners and I know that they’re going to make the good decisions for me and I try to stay out. I’ll have questions occasionally. And of course, I’ll be a sounding board if they need me on things that I know anything about. But for the rest of it, I don’t pretend I can understand everything. Like I have no idea what’s happening with sustainable energy technologies right now or crypto. It’s just it’s not my field at all. And I’m not passionate enough to educate myself on them. So I don’t think I could make good choices to build my portfolio myself, which is why I trust most of my money with other people that I do.
Brian Bell (00:45:13–00:45:18):
What is the most underappreciated marketing channel in early stage B2B right now?
Udi Ledergor (00:45:18–00:47:16):
You know, it’s going to be such an old school answer. It’s almost comical, but I think it’s still email. Email is not dead. People have tried to kill it for many, many years, many, many times. Every one of the listeners to this podcast is using email, hopefully not at this moment, but every one of them is using email. So it’s not dead. It’s probably the only channel you’re all using. Like if I started talking about social media channels, like some of you are on LinkedIn, some of you are on some of you are on Instagram, but all of you use email. It’s not dead. Email is a magical medium because you cannot ignore any email. Like unless you’re a monster and you’ve got these like 25,000 emails in your inbox, that’s a different story. But most people, they will look at the subject line and the sender of every single email in their inbox. Just think about the power of that. There’s no other medium where you can achieve that. They’re looking at the sender and the subject line of every single email and they’re deciding, should I open that or should I delete that? And so you get an opportunity, you get an ad bat to actually get them to open your email and a good subject line will do that. And then within the email, if you write a first good line, they might read the second line. And if you write a great second line, you can bring them all the way to the call to action. And if that’s a good one, they might actually do what you ask them to do in the call to action, which might be to sign up for something, to read a blog post, listen to a podcast, whatever you want. There’s no other medium with that power and that sort of conversion rate. Anything you do on social media, only a tiny fraction of your followers are going to see it. And most of them are just going to scroll past it. So the great thing about email, it’s still essentially free. If all you need to do is get creative enough and deliberate enough about writing something that people will want to open and will want to read and act on, And I think with enough creativity and some hard work, you can do that. And you don’t need any money to run those programs. Unlike paid ads or print or out of home or all these things that cost a lot of money, email is there for you to use freely. I think the problem is most people abuse it and they’re just writing terrible emails or now even worse, getting AI to write terrible emails. Nobody wants to read that. And it turns out that nine times out of 10, if someone’s saying email is dead or email doesn’t work anymore, it’s because they’re writing terrible emails. It’s not because email doesn’t work.
Brian Bell (00:47:24–00:47:45):
Right. Yeah. And, you know, even me as a VC, I mean, I get a ton of cold inbound. And if it’s well written and it’s personalized, I’m going to read it. This cold, you know, cold pitch email. I can’t reply to all of them. I can’t look at all your decks. And sometimes I just send them to my A.I., intake form to process, because I’m just like, okay, this is a pitch. I don’t know this person. Go pitch me at this form. But I still reply.
Udi Ledergor (00:47:48–00:48:23):
Yeah. The good ones get a response. People ask me how I got some of the number one New York Times bestselling authors who endorsed my book. I’ve got Daniel Pink on front cover. I’ve got Robert Cialdini on the back cover and Nir Eyal, other bestselling authors. And these are people I did not know before. And other authors or would-be authors are asking me like, how the heck did you get these megastars to endorse your book and agree to be on the cover? I said, I send them a cold email. I send them a cold email. And it was good enough that they responded. They actually read the book and they actually gave me a quote I could use. Amazing. I just sent them a cold email. So email works.
Brian Bell (00:48:24–00:48:37):
I’m actually writing a book now, just a few chapters in. And I’d love to know anything that you learned in the process that you wish you knew when you started. Specifically on the book?
Brian Bell (00:48:33–00:48:34):
Yeah, on writing a book, yeah. Because it’s also a nonfiction book like yours.
Udi Ledergor (00:48:37–00:49:27):
So a sentence I heard probably late in the process, which is a good thing because if I heard it early enough, it would have probably deterred me from writing the book. And that is writing a book is hard. Selling a book is harder. And this is an ugly truth of the book world. Fortunately, I did not write a book even dreaming of making any money from the book because very, very few authors in the world can make money off their books. I created a book for completely other reasons, very selfless reason of trying to inspire as many marketers as I can to take boring out of B2B. And I do a lot of podcasts like this and I speak at a lot of conferences every week, but I wanted to find a way of scaling all of that. And I wanted to reach people in countries that I’ll never visit and conferences that I’ll never come to. And I thought that a book would be a really good way of doing that. So with that mindset, I set out to do it. So that’s just one thing to keep in mind.
Udi Ledergor (00:49:31–00:49:46):
nobody’s making millions from their books.
Brian Bell (00:49:33–00:49:38):
I have somebody who’s a bestselling author coaching me and he’s like, just don’t plan on making any money from your book.
Udi Ledergor (00:49:38–00:49:40):
There you go.
Brian Bell (00:49:38–00:49:40):
It’s like, that’s not the intention, you know?
Udi Ledergor (00:49:40–00:49:52):
Exactly. You can finagle it to not lose money if you don’t go crazy with, you know, PR and promotions. But yeah, it’s a very, very, very long shot to make any money from the book. I think another...
Udi Ledergor (00:49:52–00:51:00):
Another piece of advice that I heard on another author’s podcast, which I really, really liked was this one’s counterintuitive. He said, you know, when you sit down to write a book, a lot of times you’re thinking, well, how can I make this be as most broadly appealing as I can to a bunch of different readers and make sure I cater to all their interests and needs. And that is a terrible way of getting your book picked up and read a much smarter way. It’s a little counterintuitive is writing it for the tiniest audience you can imagine. But if you’ve been doing any sort of marketing, you know why this is a true truism, even if it’s counterintuitive, because nobody wants to read something generic that doesn’t feel personal. And if you write something for a very specific audience member, and I wrote my book thinking about an early stage SaaS marketer in B2B. And that’s been the majority of my readers. I’ve also found readers in investors, in CEOs, in founders, and in other folks who sales leaders, but the majority have been the B2B marketers. And I hear from them that they feel that this is the book that they needed to get them off their butts and try something new and be more courageous. And that was what I was hoping for. So that’s a good thing to keep in mind because I think it is something that authors struggle with because they go, I don’t want to go too narrow because then nobody’s going to buy my book. It’s going to be a book for four people, but that’s the way you actually get it picked up. If you write it too broadly, then nobody feels it was written for them.
Brian Bell (00:51:16–00:51:24):
Figure out your number one persona, the one person that you’re really, really writing it for. Focus on that. Yeah, and focus on that. I love that, man. We could talk for another hour but before I let you go what’s exciting coming up for you…
Udi Ledergor (00:51:28–00:52:45):
the next you know year two or three gosh well i’m still very excited to be with gong as their chief evangelist i’m seeing us break momentum records on a monthly basis and the company is doing better than ever so that’s super exciting i’m just seeing us completely take over this revenue AI space. And I’m excited for our upcoming product launches and a whole bunch of other milestones I can’t discuss all publicly. Two, I’m really enjoying my book tour. So the book was published less than six months ago, and I’ve really, really been enjoying touring the world. It’s brought me back to conferences in Tel Aviv and Atlanta and the Bay Area and Los Angeles and many other places where people want to learn. Turns out it’s not just the B2B marketing leaders that I thought of. I’ve been in front of marketers in food manufacturing, and I’m now talking to another area of marketing that’s not my core at all. But apparently they found a lot of value in the book, and that’s a wonderful thing to see, that they want me to talk about that. So I’m really enjoying that. Also enjoying some board work, so it’s nice to be on that side after years of being an executive reporting to a board. I now get to be a board member and hopefully help and encourage the companies I’m working with. And also the investing side is pretty interesting. So trying to have a healthy mix of all those things and considering all of them in one form or another for my next chapter.
Brian Bell (00:52:47–00:52:55):
Love it. Thank you so much for coming on. Learned a lot. The book is Courageous Marketing. Go buy it on wherever you buy books.
Udi Ledergor (00:52:53–00:52:54):
Exactly. Thank you so much for having me, Brian.
Brian Bell (00:52:55–00:52:55):
Thanks, Udi.
