A masterclass in making your brand stand out

Ryan Barry:

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Inside Insights, a podcast powered by Zappi. My name is Ryan and I'm joined as always by Patricia Montesdeoca, my co-host, and our producer. Producer, producer, producer, whatever you want to call her or produce-her, Kelsey Sullivan.

Patricia Montesdeoca:

Woo-hoo, Kelsey.

Ryan:

And my producer was a little slip on my part because I was going to crack a joke about the great state of Rhode Island, where both Kelsey and I are from. And instead of cracking a joke, I just let my Rhode Island accent slip out so you got that going. Yeah. What's up ladies? How you doing today?

Patricia:

Doing good, doing good. It's fresh this morning, it rained all night, which is I love it when that happens, when it rains all night and then you wake up and it's fresh and sunny. I love that.

Ryan:

Spring is here. Although I skied in Vermont this weekend, actually at the poster behind me, Stowe Mountain Resort, favorite place. And there was two feet of fresh snow, which was wonderful. But I'm ready for the spring, my friends.

Patricia:

Frederico skied this weekend too. 

Ryan:

A lot of snow in the mountains this weekend.

Patricia:

He went skiing, and now he's in the Dominican Republic. So he did a swing.

Ryan:

Ooh, that's a-

Patricia:

He has a rough life, I feel so bad for him. Don't you?

Ryan:

Yeah, it sounds like he's very stressed and doesn't have enough time for himself to have fun. Wow.

Patricia:

He deserves it. He deserves it, he's the best.

Ryan:

That's right, you got to enjoy your life. The other thing the ladies and I were just complaining about is daylight savings time. It was created for farmers, and I'm pretty sure most farmers now have a smartphone so they know when it's going to rain and when the sun's coming up. And I'd like to make a request to any of our listeners who think daylight savings time creates any value whatsoever to email me and tell me why. If you have a credible reason, I will ... I don't know what I'll do. I'll put a post out there celebrating your creativity.

Just to let you know what you're up against, I think it's utterly useless. My children have gotten less sleep the last three days, which means I'm a little more grumpy. I'm having an even harder time scheduling calls with Europe. It's already hard enough, thank you very much. Instead of having five hours of overlap, I only have four. And I rant about this topic twice a year.

And so this is the first time I've ever been able to publicly rant about it because it's my fucking podcast and I can rant about things if I'd like to. Daylight savings time, you got to go. Of all the things that got to go, this is one of them. But seriously, if you have a credible reason, particularly if you come from a farming family and you think your family still needs it, I want to know about it because I just don't see it guys and gals. I just don't see it.

Patricia:

I'm kind of with you because you know I'm in Colombia right now and I'm off your timing now. I used to be on EST, Eastern Standard, now I'm not.

Ryan:

See.

Patricia:

It's so confusing. I have to always be checking the clock twice, but there you go. But Kelsey and the team keep me honest.

Ryan:

Just what we need, more acronyms and more confusion in our emails. Yep, it's really quite annoying. Anyways. We're not here to listen to me complain about this, although it was quite cathartic so thank you everybody. You've gotten to know that I think daily savings time sucks.

But we're actually here because we have an exciting interview. We are going to be interviewing today Udi Ledergor, who is the Chief Marketing Officer at Gong.io. Gong is I'm pretty sure the fastest growing software company on the planet, they're certainly the most well-funded. And they've taken the SaaS industry by storm with their platform, which Udi will explain better than I will, but it is my favorite technology that Zappi buys.

For those of you working in big restaurants, big soda companies, big tech, big telco, you might not know who Gong is because they sell to companies like us for the most part, but they're a platform that allows you to listen to your customers at scale. I listen to our customers every day, thanks to Gong. And that gives me some joy. But so that's reason number one. I think they're probably one of the best-kept secrets in consumer insights that nobody and consumer insights knows about.

But I also think that there's a lot of lessons that software companies can teach big businesses and vice versa. And so we wanted to talk to Udi about how he builds brand, what that means to him, but also what he's learned through two back-to-back years of investing in the Super Bowl, but also having the benefit of having consumer data. I'm a bit of an Udi fanboy. I think he's an incredible marketer, so it was an honor to interview him. I think we should just get to it, what do you ladies think?

Patricia:

Let's do it, let's do it.

Ryan:

I'm very excited for this conversation with Udi. Udi, thank you for taking the time to join me today.

Udi Ledergor:

My absolute pleasure.

Ryan:

So Udi, I know that people really like to get you on their podcast. So I'm going to spare you the question a lot of people do, which is what's your story. I want to start by saying I love Gong. I believe I remember having dinner with Amit many years of go and he said to me, my only goal is to create raving fans. At the time, I was like, what a hard-to-attribute OKR, but seriously, the business, the brand that you folks have built is incredible. A lot of people in my audience here may not yet know Gong. You know, people that are listening to this are insights and marketers, marketing people at kind of Fortune 100 brands, but in your words, tell us a little bit about Gong, which everybody is, by far my favorite software application that we buy and we buy a bunch of them.

Udi:

You're too kind, Ryan. So Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that unlocks reality to help people and companies reach their full potential. What that means is that we capture all of our customers, customer interactions, we use AI to analyze what's happening in those interactions and then we surface actionable insights that our customers use to replicate what their top sales people are doing, to get informed when a deal is going south, that they can intervene in and in general switch from making business decisions that are based on opinions and gut feelings to making business decisions that are made on reality and insights based on hard data.

Ryan:

Seriously folks, if you are not including Gong in your intelligence stack, this is a podcast about insights. So it's a sales intelligence tool, but I have to tell you Udi, one of my key applications is I just listen to Gong and a lot of times I skip our sales people, I just want to hear what my customers say and the amount of strategy and product development we've been able to inform, from all of us in our AirPods, being able to tap into hundreds of customer conversations a day, is incredible. So anyways, we, this is not a sales pitch about Gong, but Udi was gracious enough to give us time and I'm seriously a huge fanboy. And so I wanted to at least give everybody the awareness of what Gong is.

So Udi, B2B sales and MarTech, probably the most cluttered space on the planet. Very, very, very few companies, I would say, have invested at the level you have and put the time in to build a distinctive brand. It's something that obviously has separated you. So I'm just curious, what are the pillars of brand building you follow as a CMO? How did you think about the intention of building the brand from day one and what are some of those frames that you used?

Udi:

Sure. So one of my favorite quotes and I always forget who to attribute this to on brand is that, "Brand is way too important to leave it to marketing." And it's a really good one And I see that as a marketer. I don't create the brand. I don't own the brand. I'm a steward of the brand. My team are stewards of the brand and I've been very, very fortunate at Gong to join a company as employee number 13, with 11 customers, at that point, we have 3000 plus now.

Ryan:

Wow!

Udi:

And it was clear from day one that customers are treating our software with a fandom that is usually reserved for few consumer products. We like boasting that our, our average NPS is higher than what the iPhone had in its hey-days. People are truly passionate about using Gong, you can see that in the NPS surveys, you can see that in the G2 reviews, you can see that in our C stats scores, you can see how people go on social media, unsolicited by us, and just share their raving fan experiences with our product. People are sending us videos of themselves, mowing the lawn with while listening to Gong calls or, or telling us that their wife hates Gong because instead of listening to her over dinner, they're listening to Gong calls. This is real.

Ryan:

And so I'm not going to lie to you, I cook dinner at night and that's when I listened to Gong calls and Gill is always like, "What are you doing, man?" I'm like, "Oh, listening to Gong calls."

Udi:

I will remember to send Gill some flowers, but that is the point when that is your starting point as a CMO, when you join the company, that's your starting point that you have true raving fans, everything is infinitely easier from that point and that makes it super easy because I've worked at companies where I did not have this raving fan experience and the challenges I had to solve, they were completely different from the starting point and the challenges that I haven't Gong. So going to a company where I have these raving fans, it was pretty obvious that we need to take these stories, amplify them and continue adding fandom to our user and prospects’ experiences in ways that marketing can do so. So we do that by having a very conversational, approachable tone of voice and brand look and feel. So our website looks very different from most B2B websites. One of my team members, Danny, coined the term “Series A Blue,” which most companies use in their early stages. Right? You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Ryan:

I think I might even be guilty of that shit.

Udi:

I did not look at your website today, right? I don't want to put you on the spot, but so many companies use Series A Blue. They couple really well with whites and greys and that's what most companies use in early start. I apologize if I just described your website, but...

Ryan:

No, ours is coral. We're good. But we're past the Series A that's why!

Udi:

Good. Now you're in Series B Coral, but this is what companies do and we don't, we go for screaming, bright pinks and purples and we have a talking bulldog, which is the chat-bot who's booking hundreds of meetings on the website every quarter, because people find it a different, fun experience and if you read our content, it's never stuffy like a salesperson in a suit, sweating, trying to tell you to come to our next webinar. No, we're actually sharing everything from sales memes to really valuable content on what's working and not working in sales. And people love that stuff. And that creates raving fans. And when we provide value, 90% of the time that earns us the right to come back 10% of the time or less, and ask you to sign up for our next webinar or come ask for a demo or check out this new product feature.

Udi:

We do that in a very measured way where I think other companies err often is they make their social feeds basically a billboard or for their product brochure. And it's all about check out our new version, check out our new feature. Nobody wants to check out our new feature. I mean, there's a tiny subset of people who care about that new feature, but if you want to build an audience and have them coming back, you need to earn that right. And to do that, you've got to provide something that's valuable to most of them all the time. You can't, it can't just be about you, right? If you go to a party and someone's just talking about themselves, you're not going to hang around there for long. You're going to go get a drink at the bar and never come back. So you want to be that friend that people gather around because they're interesting and funny and self-deprecating and actually providing you value, which could be entertainment, education, a combination of education and entertainment, distraction from your day on your LinkedIn feed.

Like how much can you read about company awards? I do that too, but it's not the only thing I do. I post fun things that people actually want to follow and engage with. So that's kind of at the high level of the brand that I took under my responsibility. And again, as a steward, not, not an owner or a builder of the brand, and we decided to provide valuable content, valuable assets that could be a cheat sheet or a template or something that you can immediately use as a prospect or a customer at Gong. Even if you never buy our product, that's fine. I still want you to follow us on LinkedIn, subscribe to our email and I will send you, every week, very valuable content, even if you never buy from.

Ryan:

And there's, there's a lesson here, I think particularly those of you listening that are working for big mass marketing brands, one of the things, and Udi's being modest here. One of the things Udi does is he knows his persona really well, sales leaders, sales people, all of the content that you see… I mean, I think you guys do social probably better than anybody I've ever seen but all the content speaks directly to something that your persona cares about. I remember seeing something, "The Ideal Sales Deck," now you could be listening to this and sell cheeseburgers, but I want you to think about what does your persona actually give a shit about, if you use their words to them and give them things they care about, a lot of the marketing stuff gets easy. And Udi, I think you folks have done it really well. I want to give a shout-out, who runs your social media accounts?

Udi:

So Devon Reid runs our content and social media team specifically, and Devon is an ex salesperson. He was one of the first two mid-market salespeople of Gong for two years before he infiltrated into marketing and he started moonlighting for us writing blog posts, after his long day in sales, he started writing blog posts and speaking at our events. And at some point he said, okay, I'm ready to transition my career into marketing. And it was a very natural move for him because A, he's a salesperson so he speaks sales, that is so important, I never understood marketers who outsourced their content writing to some offshore agency that knows nothing about their business or their audience. How could that ever work? How can you expect that to create compelling content? I took a salesperson who not only knows the persona, because sold it at three different companies, right?

But he actually knows our product really well at our domain because he's been at Gong for a couple of years and he was not even the first. Before him, I had Chris Orla who was a salesperson prior to gong@insidesales.com. He was then on my marketing team and then went on to manage a sales team at Gong. So these are people who live and breathe our buyer persona. I don't know how you can create convincing valuable content without doing that. And then one more shout out since you ask for it is Vince Chan on our content social team. He is usually the human brain behind Bruno bots and so many of our fantastic social posts. So shout out to Vince

Ryan:

Vince! Stud! Love it. I'm a big fan of Devon's as well, but I think for those of you listening, do you have somebody in the room when you're coming up with strategies that actually is from your persona-set that actually knows them? If not, you better be listening, but it's, I think it's such a simple hack that so many businesses forget is, if you say things that your persona cares about, they're going to care about you and then eventually they'll probably buy from you. All right. So while we're talking about brand, so I've been a customer of Gong for, I think five years now, I've seen three brand evolutions from you. Yeah. How do you know when to evolve a brand as distinctive as iconic, as you have become in such a short amount of time and how do you go about doing that without losing the essence of everything that you just said as the steward, as the shepherd of the brand?

Udi:

Yeah, that's, that's a really fun topic that as you can imagine, I enjoy talking about, so when I came into Gong, I inherited a very, very, very simple website, no brand that anyone really thought about. It was, it was grey and white and it was like, I don't know. I think we had six total webpages on the website and it was super simplistic. The logo was literally created in PowerPoint by someone because there was a conference to go to and we needed a logo that day. And we lived with that for a while. And then I joined the company between the Seed Round and the A Round. And I remember my beloved CEO, Amit, asking me pretty early on, "So do you think we should start with the branding project?" And for those who don't know Amit, I have to say he is my long lifetime mentor on marketing and leadership.

He is the most brilliant marketer that I've ever worked with. He was a CMO in previous companies when he hired me to work under him and this is our third company working together.

Ryan:

How cool.

Udi:

So he, he knows his marketing, and I use that to preface what I'm about to say, so when he came to me and said, "Udi, should we get started with branding?" I said, "No, I think we should wait because I think there's a crucial point where the company starts forming its own story of who we are, what do we sell? Who do we sell it to? What problems do we help them solve? Unless you have the basics of that story, but really have them not, not what you put in your marketing fluff, but really validated that you now have a significant number of customers who would use similar words to how you are describing the value that you described.

Before you have that story, I don't think you should go and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in your brand because you might have to throw it out six months later. So I told him, "Amit, I don't feel we have our story yet. Let's wait a little bit longer, stabilize this." We did persona research. So Chris Orla, who I mentioned earlier, was on my team. The first project he took on in his first two months, he spoke to 40 customers and prospects of our different bio personas to really understand and capture the words that they are using on Gong, obviously. How do they describe their challenges? How do they see a solution, like Gong, helping them? If they're already using it, how exactly are they seeing the value? And then you start seeing patterns. Oh, okay. They're all talking about alignment. They're talking about getting the data and the insights versus opinions and gut feelings.

Okay. Now I'm starting to see what people are talking about, and that really helps you form your whole product marketing strategy and your brand. What is your story? What does it look like? What does it feel like? And there are decisions that we made looking at our brand and any good branding agency you go to will put you through a similar exercise as one way or another of understanding if you were a person, would you be older, young, would you be fun or boring? Would you be highly accessible or, or just barely approachable? There's so many different aspects to a brand and a person's personality that you have to figure out if you want to understand how you should look like, how you should sound like. And I think a lot of people jump to the end, oh, I like Gong's color and we should also have a dog as our robot. But how does that work with your brand personality? Right. If you're trying to be an IBM, they probably won't have a talking dog on their website, right. Because they're IBM, they're, they're trying to portray something else. It's not them, but Gong, we decided early on, and I won't walk you through like the eight or so attributes, but the two very important ones that we married together that I don't see in many other companies are on the one hand, being very trustworthy and authoritative on our domain, which almost everyone would say they want to be. But here's where most people, I think mess up: they confuse being authoritative and trustworthy with being boring and stuffy. And we decided, no, we're going to do that while being the friendly guy or gal that you go to, when you have a question or you need help, so we're going to be approachable.

And then we married those two things together, probably better than most other B2B brands. And we ended up being recognized as absolutely the category leader in everything we do around data-backed sales insights. But we do that with bright pink and a screaming dog on the website, and nobody sees the conflict there. So, so that is how we created that first brand personality and I'll give credit to our branding agency that we used a few years ago, Atreaoi they're based out of Israel, where, where I'm originally from and about four years ago, we embarked on our first serious branding journey. So that would've been the second iteration of the Gong brand, where we switched from the blue logo to the first white, pink and purple logo, that was way more refined. And we chose a whole visual language of custom photography.

That's another thing that we decided early on. I didn't want to use any stock photography on any of my websites. Never have, you won't find a single stock photo on my website because the world doesn't need another two people in business suits in a well lit meeting room, shaking hands. We just don't need any more of those. They say nothing unique about your brand. So why use it in the first place? Just don't put any images on there if you don't have anything meaningful that adds to your message. So we commissioned all of our photography for that brand look and feel. We picked the cast of seven or eight of the original cast members were actors and one dog. So for the role of Bruno the dog, there were six other dogs who auditioned for that role and Bruno got the role and we built a portfolio of photographs for him and he quickly became our mascot. That was a pleasant surprise that we didn't figure out early enough how people are going to get so excited about the dog. None of the other characters made it to our current brand, but Bruno's the only one that we couldn't imagine leaving behind. So all the other humans that were part of the brand are now somewhere in a WordPress archive, but Bruno made it all the way to the current brand and he's still on a bunch of our swag and stuff. So, so that was, that was the second phase when we got serious about, okay, we now know who we are. We want to portray that. And then fast forward to the most recent brand that we launched four months ago in October.

So for the last year or so that we were carrying our older brand, we had felt that we had outgrown it. And how did we know that we outgrew it? Because when we launched that brand in 2018, we were still a very young startup vying for attention and trying to scream off the rooftops. Look at us, we're here, we're different, cutting through the noise. Obviously it worked because we grew to a pretty formidable company anyway you look at it. Number of customers, revenue, team size, valuation, whatever. And now we were going after much larger enterprise customers. And we had been getting anecdotal evidence that our look and feel might feel a little bit too maverick and startup-y for some of our enterprise customers, we're now selling to Fortune 50 customers. Not all of them are going to go with what looks to be like a young startup that's looking for attention.

We wanted to keep the bold and daring look and feel and tone of voice that got us to where we are, because it served us really, really well. We didn't want that to go away, but we did want to add a level of maturity and sophistication to our brand that would remove any friction from the enterprise buying process and tell all of our customers: this is a company you can trust. This is a company that works with the world's biggest brands, and yeah they look can sound different, but that's why you should buy from them. It's not something that should keep you away. 

And that's when we launched our new enterprise-worthy brand a few months ago, we did keep the pink and blue colors. We changed everything from the logo who continued to evolve. The typography changed. We did away completely with commissioned photography, not to go to stock photography, but to commissioned illustrations. So now the whole website is full of beautiful custom illustrations, which I love the style. We found the studio in Spain who does these for us. And so all of our sort of characters and look at the career page. We took this as a great opportunity to showcase a diversity and inclusion that we're building within Gong and had all these wonderful, diverse characters illustrated. So we're having a lot of fun with that. And this, this brand has been received really, really well by our customers.

Ryan:

That's fantastic. Thank you for sharing that journey. I mean, it's interesting to follow the life cycles that you're going through, but, but also the intention of who you are and then using that to form the base point. I do have to tell you, I have a three year old son named Cal who still has Bruno in his bed. Bruno, you know, when Bruno came to my house, I think it was when one of your SDRs was still calling on us and he had a t-shirt, t-shirts gone by now. 

Udi:

The stuffy? 

Ryan:

A stuffy! Yeah, it's a Bruno stuffy, but now it's just looks like a normal dog. So I know who he is. It's awesome. You know, it's funny. I went through something similar. So our, our business is directly pointed at large enterprises. And when we did some early branding work, we went and talked to a bunch of customers, novel concept, and they started to archetype us with being a rebel and a magician. And then I remember the creative director was looking at Steve who's, our CEO and I being like, you know, he's kind of loud and swears a lot and you come up with these crazy ideas and the tension that I remember, we've been going through for the many months is, we still want to keep the essence of that similar to what you were doing. But now we're asking for 10 million dollar orders, it's different. Right? And so the example that I remember sharing is a little off color, was like, we need to be fun on a Friday night, but be welcome for dinner on Sunday with mom. Right? And it's like that it's an adolescence moment for a business as it's growing. I recognize it's an off color joke, but it's the truth. Like how do you actually keep the essence of your culture by also recognizing we're in the big leagues now, it's a different type of stage for your company.

Udi:

It's well worth going through that effort otherwise, if you just play it safe, just like my joke on the Series A Blue, if you play it safe with other aspects of your brand, then you're just not going to stand out. You're going to look like a million other brands. So what, what, you know, you or your CEO or your board might think is what an enterprise company looks like, you can go much deeper than that and really understand. "Yeah. But what do we look like as an enterprise company? Because we don't look and feel and act like other companies and our brand should showcase that."

Ryan:

That's right. It's, it's about authenticity. So nobody on this call is going to be Gong. And the reason that you're distinctive is because you're Gong. It's a really interesting thing. So everybody has to look at themselves. And I think, I think as big businesses are starting to realize that they're not just talking at consumers any longer, there is a degree of really needing to keep it real with the persona and understand how they think of them.

Udi:

That word that you used, authenticity, is one of the most common words that we hear our customers use to describe our content when we send them an event invite or a new blog post or social media post. They often describe that we know they're human beings like Vince and Devon creating that. It's not some blank corporate logo that's talking at us. They're real human beings that we want to interact with. And, and that's how we've gotten to, I think we're now over 120,000 followers on our LinkedIn page, which is not an easy feat.

Ryan:

No, no.

Udi:

And they're all organic, Ryan. They're all organic people voluntarily hit the follow button because they want to hear from us. They enjoy interacting with that content. And you'll regularly see posts that have a four figure engagement metric on them. And it could be something as simple as, as you know, a Friday meme about sales or some new stat factoid that we pulled out of a Gong labs research. But we present it in a fun, approachable way as if we're here to help. Not because we're all these high and mighty and important. No, we want to talk to you. We want help.

Ryan:

And it also proves that long term game builds business. I mean, for those of you who haven't read about Gong's success, do yourself a favor. I think they've grown faster on every metric, raised more money than any software company in the last decade, at least. And all right, So talking about being bold and distinctive and authentic, you've done something in the last couple of years that very few people in your peer group have done, most B2B CMOs are demand gen engines, even if they do brand well, it's mostly social content, paid digital ads, get the SDRs, come in, get the leads in, do discovery, sell. You're on billboards. You're doing out of home. You've now been on the Super Bowl twice.

Udi:

Indeed.

Ryan:

What led you to say, you know what, let's try these channels versus just what's in the playbook for B2B marketing. And obviously you've been a B2B marketer for a very long time, but what was the original impetus besides saying, and I hate to use traditional media, I'm doing it with air quotes for those of you…

Udi:

Yeah. That's well, they're not so traditional for B2B, are they?

Ryan:

Yeah, exactly. They're atypical for B2B.

Udi:

So I'm a big believer in different being better than better and by that I mean, doing things just a little bit better than everyone else is very hard and doesn't really help you stand out but if you do things very different from what everyone in your space is doing, that's how you stand out. And you can see signs of that in our brand colors and the look and feel and tone of voice. It's just very different from B2B. So I don't think we're doing it better than others. We're just doing very differently from others. And that helps us stand out. And I look at media channels in the same way. So what's everyone in B2B doing, We're all on LinkedIn, we're all on Google. Great. So are we, and we're doing it pretty well at that, but I'm not going to stand out by doing just that.

So a few years ago I started thinking, well, what's nobody or very few people doing in B2B, and billboards was not something that people in B2B were doing a lot of, and radio and television and all those fun things that our grannies used to watch, not many B2B brands are using. So I started looking for creative ways of doing that and I've still got some other crazy ideas that I haven't been able to make happen yet so I won't share all of them, but just think about what B2C brands are already doing so well and creating experiential campaigns that B2B just don't do a lot of. And so I'm looking for all those ways. 

And then last year, just about six months before the Super Bowl, I learned about the option of going regional with a Super Bowl broadcast. So rather than spending the five, six, seven million that the national spot cost, which is still above my budget, I found out that I could go for much lower and experiment with regional broadcast and just pick the regions where I wanted the commercial to air and then make it way more affordable while hopefully still enjoying a lot of the buzz that comes with being a Super Bowl commercial advertiser.

So that's, that's what piqued my interest. And I made my case to my CEO, which was pretty easy, because he is a marketer at heart and he got very excited above sort of up-leveling our advertising and marketing to that league of Super Bowl advertisers and so it wasn't as hard as some people imagined to get that internal approval. We positioned it as a long term brand awareness play that may or may not have some short term impact, but we're not guaranteeing anything around that. And that's how I got the green light.

Ryan:

I love it. I love it. And it's worked for your business so much that you did it two years in a row, to the extent that if you want to share any highlights, I'm, I'm happy to give you the platform to do it but I also know it's early days, the Super Bowl was… time of recording this was, I think, what about two weeks ago, if that?

Udi:

Not even yeah. About 10 days ago.

Ryan:

Yeah. My Patriots suck now, so I'm not really paying attention anymore, but I'm happy to see the ad. It's, you know, we were talking about this off air, I mean a lot of the big companies that are advertising, it's purely an awareness play, but B2B has a different degree of, "Hey, we're looking to add a recurring revenue. That's a big part of what we're trying to do". And, and so what were some of the learnings that you had about kind of the experience that you went through with the Super Bowl experience?

Udi:

So last year, we definitely got the awareness play that we were looking for. We used our own tool Gong to measure how many sales calls talked about the Super Bowl around the actual game. And there was a crazy spike. I showed it to you earlier, before we started recording. I showed you the crazy spike in hundreds of sales calls where the customer talked about the Super Bowl right after seeing our commercial. So that was an easy way to attribute some of that brand awareness effect to a Super Bowl commercial, which is traditionally hard to do. So that was just one aspect of it, other aspects were we saw record traffic to the website on Super Bowl Sunday and in the week that came after, we saw a ton of engagement on social media. I shared our Super Bowl commercial on the day of the game last year on Sunday morning, a few hours before the game And I told people that if, if they share our commercial, we'll send them a special edition Bruno t-shirt in a football helmet and hundreds of people shared the commercial. So just imagine if each of those hundreds of people has only 500 contacts on LinkedIn… how many people saw my commercial last year just by social amplification? So that was, that was really a good campaign for, for brand awareness and social amplification.

Now we got fortunate and looking at the pipeline, the business pipeline that we created during Super Bowl week, it was our record pipeline week for the company during Super Bowl week. So when we saw that, we're like, okay, we weren't expecting any short term business benefits, but this thing actually worked right. And then six months later, those opportunities created through Super Bowl week translated into significant incremental revenue. So when I took those numbers to the board six months ago and said, "Hey, Super Bowl is coming up again. Here are the numbers from last year. I'd like to double down this year. What do you guys think?" I got three yeses from the board members within the hour saying, "Yeah, go for it, Udi." So this year I invested even more in the Super Bowl. And at this point, I can say that we saw the brand awareness metrics relatively to last year. We got even more traffic. We got even more brand awareness on social media. We got a lot more press coverage this year. And overall, I just think we upgraded the whole campaign this year.

It is a little bit too early to see what pipeline and definitely what revenue contribution this year's Super Bowl had on us. But we'll be tracking that. I don't know if this is going to be a long term thing for us. I think there's a reason why I can't name a single B2B company that comes back year after year to the Super Bowl.

I do have a few friends, CMOs in the space, like Wix and other companies, Fiverr, who did last year's Super Bowl; they didn't come back this year. They've had enough. And you know, one of the CMOs who's done the Super Bowl in the past told me, I just found better use for that money. So I don't know that we'll be there every year. The brand play can get a little bit old at some point and in B2B, we are looking for attributable performance metrics, where we can find them on a very big part of my budget. It's not a hundred percent of the budget, it's maybe 80% of the budget, but there's only so much I can spend on brand awareness stuff before people start raising eyebrows like, "Udi, is that really where you want to spend all that money?"

Ryan:

Right? No, that makes sense. All right. So the last question, and we have only two minutes because Udi and I both have meetings after this, but I wanted to share this. So Udi has, has shared a lot of gold with you folks. He's no stranger to listening to his customers. We've had the pleasure of letting Udi use the Zappi platform for both of these Super Bowl experiences, as a CMO in a B2B space, what did consumer insights data help you do through the process of being ready to make those ideas as the best they could be, but also be confident like this is going to work? Because I had a lot of fun helping you, but what, what were some of the things that you could share with other marketers of how that helped?

Udi:

So, so first of all, thank you Ryan, for your generosity and letting us use the platform both last year and this year, I think last year was you reached out to me saying, "Hey, I going to be doing the Super Bowl. We can help. And, and I really appreciated that. I'll say two quick things. One, my, my biggest regret is not coming to you sooner, including this year. I mean, last year, shame on me. This year extra shame on me because I didn't come sooner to you. And I wish I had, because that would've allowed us to take some of the learnings from the consumer data research and turn them into something actionable.

The second part is maybe even better news this year I used your platform to test two versions of the creative that we were going to consider for the Super Bowl and the main difference between them was the call to action at the end, right? Being B2B and trying to drive traffic to my website. I wanted a call to action that would guarantee that people would go to my website and I tested two different calls to action. One of them, I'm happy to share this with, with audience. It's not a big commercial secret. One of them was “get a demo at Gong.io” and the second one was “get started at Gong.io.” Now for, for various reasons that don't really matter. My intuition said that the "get demo” would work better, but the research data showed the exact opposite in a very clear and statistically significant way that folks who saw the version of the creative with “get started at Gong.io” were much more likely to go visit my website than the folks who saw the second version of the creative.

Not only that, and that's a part that really blew me away, they were not only more likely to take action, but their whole perception of the commercial, likability and clarity changed because of that simple call to action and end. And that was, that was just crazy looking at the data from, from every direction and seeing that there, there is no dimension where my intuitive version of the creative actually won. So we ended up going with the second version based on the consumer data that we got from Zappi. So thank you for that, Ryan.

Ryan:

Oh, it's my pleasure. Udi, thank you so much. It's been really fun. I can't wait to keep following your brand and learning from you and keep using Gong because it's amazing. Udi, thanks for your time. Have a wonderful day.

Udi:

Thanks for having me.

Ryan:

My pleasure.

Ryan: 

I apologize everybody for the uncharacteristically short interview. The punchline is I actually was talking to Udi for 30 minutes before we hit record about marketing metrics and how much of a mess marketing attribution is. And he was also giving me a glimpse into some of the data that he sees off the back of the Super Bowl.

You got a shortened version of Udi, but I really enjoyed the conversation. I genuinely believe he just gave you a 15 minute masterclass on how to build a brand. So I hope you picked up a few nuggets. But if you didn't, Patricia is going to remind you of those nuggets as she always does. Patricia, what were your takeaways?

Patricia:

Oh man. You know what? I think it wasn't a short, it was a concise and incredibly focused masterclass. I didn't feel that it was short. I didn't feel like it was missing anything, because he just knows this stuff so, so tightly that he just went duh, duh, duh. And we were talking about brand building, we were talking about...

But at the end of the day, he gave us eight pillars of brand building. Instead of putting the questions that you ask, the way that I structure this is to put the actual pillars that he's teaching us. So that on Monday morning or whatever day after you listen to this, you can start working on it.

The first one, love this, brand is way too important to leave it to marketing. I love that he's starts with that. It just shows how he approaches life. He doesn't take things too seriously, especially himself. He talks about marketing being stewards of the brand. Immediately he says the word stewards, and you can see that it's all about service to him. He's at the service of the brand.

And so I like that, it touches a chord to me because I've always told people, "What are you doing for the brand? Did you do something for the brand today?" Every single day, everybody, from the person who opens the door in the office in the morning to the person who locks up at night, everybody has to understand that they're for the brand. They don't create or even own the brand. It's not my brand, it's the brand. I'm here for it.

And stewards, he says, you have to continue adding fandom. So it's not about resting on your laurels and having a great brand and like, "Woo-hoo, look at me. I'm so cool." No, it's about continuing to add to the fandom. I didn't even know that was a word by the way, I learned that one today, I had to look it up, fandom. Through communication that generates different experiences, fun experiences, valuable experiences. You're going to hear that word “value” a lot, don't get tired on me. He says that the tone of voice of the brand-

Ryan:

Big fan of value, keep it going.

Patricia:

Keep it going. He says that the tone of voice and the brand, look, and feel need to match the user base. Now that's rocket science, but it's worth repeating again and again, because we have to make sure to be consistent because we have to be layering the information. And he says something really cool. He says, "Provide ..." This is a formula, write it down. You got a pencil, write it down. "Provide relevant value 90% of the time so that you earn the right to ask for anything 10% of the time."

So simple. 90% of the time you give them something, something fun, something exciting, something new, something interesting, so that you can 10% of the time say, "Are you interested in learning about my demo? Would you like to see my new product? Are you interested in coming on my website?" But that's 10% because you can't be that person at the party that just talks about themselves, because you're going to be talking to the plant or the waiter because nobody's going to want to talk to you. Be that friend that's interesting, funny, that entertains and educates. A friend worth following, to use today's words because I'm so cool.

The first one was a big one so that one takes a lot of chunk. The second one, know your customer very well. Not so well, not a little bit well, very well, so that you can ensure that all the content that you're giving them is relevant. Big word, relevant and valuable. Because if it's valuable but not relevant, oh yeah, cool. I mean, whatever. You and your team, the whole team, everybody who has anything to do with the customer have to live and breathe customer. They have to know what they really care about. What language, as in vocabulary, they speak. Where and how they live their every day.

Because if nothing, you're not going to be able to give them anything relevant or valuable. And you're not going to be able to speak to the things that they care about. If you show them respect and love, this is all about respect and love, they will care about you and probably, not always but probably, buy from you. So if you want a running chance at this game you got to love, and love authentically because they're going to know if you're bullshitting them.

Number three, do external and internal research before you start developing your persona. Your company persona and the brand. You have to know the answers to who are you as a business? What do you sell? Not just, "I sell a thing ..." And Gong is not a machine that records meetings, they're a revenue intelligence platform. It's very different. You got to know what they actually truly do and believe in. Who do they sell to and why those people?

Persona research, if you don't have any of this, was going to really reveal patterns. And with those patterns you're going to be able to know what the different aspects of your brand persona is so that you can speak to the customers, you can separate profiles out. Because not all your customers are created equal. You can use their vocabulary, know how they describe their challenges so that you can give them an answer to their challenge. And you can confirm, this is a big one, how they measure value. This is not about the metrics you decide or make value. It's about the metrics they decide create value, because that's how they're going to measure you.

Number four, choose the right time to evolve the brand. This is not a six-month exercise or a 12-month exercise or an 18-month exercise. This is when your brand and your customers are ready. This is, you can't be changing your persona willy-nilly, that's a very technical term, because then you're going to confuse everybody. You have to know, I'm going to give you four questions. If your answer is no to any of them, you're probably outgrowing your persona.

Ask yourself, are you the same company as when you launched? Is your business model exactly the same? Do you have the same exact customers? Is your message the same one? If your answer to any of these is no, then Udi recommends you start thinking about what you're going to do with your persona. And it's all about evolution, not revolution. Go talk to your customers, go talk to your salespeople, formally and informally, more informally if you can. Define what aspects of the brand persona they think should stay, which should be modified, and which should be thrown out because you've outgrown them.

The case study that he explained was so beautiful about Gong. They kept the really cool colors, but they matured as a company. I love that. So that he kept their essence and authenticity, you need to do that. So you have fun with it, but don't ever play it safe because this is not a play-safe long term game.

Number five, define. Now that you know your persona, you know your brand, you know all that, define your media plan with that persona and the competition in mind. Remember a couple of sentences, if not more than a couple, I said to you, know where they live? This is what I mean. Because you can't be putting things on billboards if your customer works from home and never goes out and sees a billboard. You can't be putting things on bus stations if they never even passed by a bus station. What good would that do? Or airports if they don't fly. So you need to know how they live and breathe.

The same goes for any brand or service, know where they live so that you can do. And he said something really cool, "Different is better than better." I can just taste the number of times I'm going to be using this nugget of insight. Doing things just a little better than everybody else on the same channels, yeah, that's good. People expect that. That's like playing the price game, the war, the pennies.

Ryan:

Right.

Patricia:

That's not going to help you. But if you know where your customer lives and breathes, then you're going to be able to see a different aspect of their life and go do something. Do something different from your industry so that you can stand out.

Now you have to really know your people then. That's why he went on TV. That's why he evolved regional because he knew his stuff. He knew. And there are some that are musts, like category antes, you can't live without them. For him it was LinkedIn and Google, he can't exist without being on those two. But he created new ones like billboards, because he saw that. They did radio, regional TV, the Super Bowl. It gave bragging rights, that gave him so much clout. And he said that he was really clear when he went in that he was looking for long-term brand awareness with possible, not definite, but possible short-term impact and attracting revenue, recurring revenue.

So he was clear on the priorities of his action standards, as in why he was doing this. He was investing a bucketload of money, but he needed to know so he could go up to his senior management, his board of directors and say, "This is what I spent, and this is why, and this is the results."

Now number six, this is one that's near and dear to my heart, hard as hell. It's an important one. Choose the key metrics and track them so that you can determine failure and/or success and their causes. Because if you don't know why you succeeded you're not going to be able to replicate it. If you don't know why you failed you're going to fall in that same hole again and again, he chose one, three, six, 12 months. He chose awareness, engagement, website traffic, social amplification, learning. He chose those. You choose the ones that are important to you.

Number seven, we're almost finished, respect the role consumer insight data plays in your journey. Why do you even need consumer insight data? Because it gives you data points to learn and improve from. How are you going to improve if you don't start from the consumer's perspective, both ground zero and going forward. Also provides facts, what you can share with your company and whoever the decision-makers are. Not everybody's going to be the CMO like Udi is. Somebody will not be and so they have to make sure that they sell what they're wanting.

This is not about personal opinion, "My gut says this." I love the fact that he admitted on the interview that the research that he did with the consumer so freaking proved him wrong. He was, "My gut was wrong. I had it very clear, I was absolutely dead set. I knew so this is where it was going." And the research said, "Udi, you suck, you're wrong." And he was perfectly fine sharing this. And I love that because he felt comfortable with the research, the validity, the robustness of the research. It gave him confidence, the ideas are going to work, even if it disproved him, which is great.

And the last one, involve that consumer in your creative process early. Because if not, you're not going to learn from your past. Start from the past and grow on it so you make different mistakes. That's one of your favorites, Ryan. Life is short, make different mistakes. And it also helps if you bring them early to validate and optimize new ideas, so you can see what nuggets you need. And to confirm if the persona has been correctly and adequately evolved.

Ryan:

Yeah.

Patricia:

Amazing nuggets.

Ryan:

Really good nuggets. And you're right, it is a passion point of mine. I mean, it's useful to talk to the consumer before you ship creative, before you launch a new product, because you can avoid a mess. Or going left with my CTA is better than going right. It's a lot better for the creative process if they're part of it.

Patricia:

Yes.

Ryan:

And I've seen the data to back this up. If you bring consumers in, when you're developing campaign ideas, creative territories, the positioning of the idea itself, the rough, raw storyboard execution. When you have the $150,000 production meeting and you pay a bunch of money for a celebrity and you do all the other shit that you need to do to create your spot, if you do what I just said you'll be already confident in that investment. Because as much as I think there's all this bullshit in marketing attribution, if you do marketing that is on-brand, that speaks the language of your persona, you will build brand and create sales.

And I've seen this from the thousands and thousands and thousands of ads our company's tested. The brands who learn from consumers versus test, they sell more stuff, they build bigger brands and they also get to win awards at Cannes. And so I think Udi's reflection was, "I just wish I did it earlier." And I appreciate his vulnerability on that, because we could have helped him more, meaning the consumer could have helped him more, if the ideas weren't as baked.

I think what happens a lot of times is, because of the way market research has been for a very long time, because of the way the ad agency sector has been for a very long time, you end up with this strategic dissonance of, grade my homework or the creator's just want to be told they're right. Neither party's wrong. A hyper creative person doesn't want to be told something that they just spent eight months on is ugly, they want advice to make it better.

Patricia:

Exactly.

Ryan:

And the more legacy market research professional wants to help the brand do well, and knows that the customer buying into the brand means they'll buy the brand.

I think it's one of the main reasons why I get so excited about what Zappi and many other companies are doing, is we can change accessibility problem. And then it's just about the behavior change of actually seeing the value. Anyways, yes, you struck a chord with me.

Patricia:

Before you, I let you go on that topic, thinking about real life and how consumers interact with research. When you present afecto complejo, a finished product, something that's polished, beautiful, ready to go, consumers, human beings are less likely to criticize because they feel bad for you because they know another human being created that.

It's similar to when I come out of the bathroom, ready for a big evening with my boyfriend. And my hair's done, I got makeup on, I got a new dress and the high heels. And I say to my husband, "How do I look?" He's only got one option. He's only got one option.

Ryan:

Yeah. 

Patricia:

He's going to say, "You look great." So if I want a real option, I show him the shoes and the dress before I got in the shower. "Do you think these shoes match with this dress? Are these the right earrings? Do you even like this dress before ... These are the two options, do you like ..." Because if not, then he's going to have nothing to say. And if he tells me when I come out of there all voo, voo, voom, "I don't like any of it." I'm going to cry, ruin my makeup. It's going to be a bad night.

But if I know that I've shown him the shoes, I've shown him the dress, I've shown him the earrings. He likes how it looks, yada, yada, yada. I walk out of that bathroom, I don't even have to ask him how I look. I look at him and I twirl and he goes, and then there's no words because it's done.

Ryan:

Yeah. That's right, that's right. If you're listening to this, chances are I'm preaching to the converted, but you can forward this rant to somebody who needs to be converted and make me the bad guy.

For those of you who just got the forwarded version, if you listen to your customers, your budgets will grow, your brand will grow, so will your top line. I promise you, and now with technology you don't have to stop what you're doing and wait for a red or green score on your link test. You can actually get it done in stride.

Patricia:

Oh gosh.

Ryan:

This was a fun interview. We've got a lot of great stuff coming up for the balance of season four. Our next episode is with somebody who I have a ton of admiration for. I'm going to say something bold at the risk of offending any other guest we've had, I personally enjoyed this conversation more than many other interviews and I've enjoyed all of our interviews. But I just think Tony's leadership, the fact that he's so visionary but yet so pragmatic, and that he sells beer, is a beautiful thing.

We'll be interviewing Tony Costello, who's the Global Head of Insights at Heineken. Obviously an extremely iconic brand. Tony's a good dude, he's worked at a lot of great businesses. Learning, as he'll share with you in the interview, learning the rules so he learned how to break them. And I really hope that you enjoy the interview.

We've got some other incredible sessions coming up. If there's anybody that you think we should be talking to, or if you got a story you want to share, let us know. We're nearly, believe it or not, done shooting season four. But I don't know if you heard, we're going to do season five and season six and season seven, we're going to keep this thing going. So we have a lot of people we want to talk to.

If you are listening to this, we would really appreciate if you could tell your friends, or you could give us a rating. We are now live on YouTube. So if you want to look at any one of the three of us or stare at the Tom Brady Sports Illustrateds I got behind me, yes, he came out of retirement 40 days later. Yes, I think it's annoying. Not annoying enough to get rid of these Sports Illustrateds. But we are available on YouTube so you can check us out.

And that's all we got for today, so thank you for listening everybody. Thank you, Patricia. Thank you, Kelsey. Appreciate you all.

Patricia:

Bye, Kelsey. Bye, Ryan.