Revenue Reimagined #8: Mastering Product-Market Fit: Insights from Udi Ledergor

In this episode, Udi Ledergor, former CMO and Chief Evangelist at Gong, shares his unconventional yet highly effective approach to building a revenue engine. He challenges the traditional startup playbook by advocating for bringing marketing in well before sales. By establishing brand awareness and generating pipeline first, companies can avoid the vicious cycle of starving new sales reps and prematurely burning through cash. Ledergor emphasizes that marketing cannot function as a magic fix for a lack of product-market fit, which must be rigorously tested using user sentiment and retention metrics before pouring fuel on the fire. Beyond early-stage sequencing, Udi breaks down the true meaning of sales and marketing alignment. He moves past superficial buzzwords, illustrating how deep integration—where marketing leaders embed themselves into SDR and regional sales meetings—eliminates finger-pointing and accelerates growth. He also highlights the crucial role of Customer Success in the revenue cycle, pointing out that defending and expanding existing accounts is non-negotiable in the current economic landscape. Finally, Udi redefines evangelism not as a paid influencer strategy, but as the creation of a self-sustaining movement. He details tactical ways to mobilize an entire employee base to organically amplify company messaging, explaining how tapping into internal advocacy can yield results far beyond traditional paid advertising. The core takeaway is that a true go-to-market strategy requires a deep understanding of the product, authentic market engagement, and complete functional unity.

Discussed in this episode

Hiring marketing before sales to generate pipeline and brand awareness ahead of quota demands.
Using the 'disappointment test' to measure early product-market fit with a 40% benchmark.
Evaluating lagging indicators of product-market fit by turning off beta access and tracking conversions.
Aligning sales and marketing through unified leadership meetings and deep cross-functional empathy.
Embedding demand generation and ABM managers directly into weekly SDR and sales leadership meetings.
Treating Customer Success as a core revenue function focused on retention and account expansion.
Embracing a culture of marketing experimentation where rapid failures are preferred over delayed perfection.
Mobilizing the entire employee base to organically share company news and drive immense pipeline.

Episode highlights

0:00 — Introduction to Udi Ledergor
2:30 — Bringing marketing in before sales
5:45 — The coffee test for alignment
8:10 — Integrating Customer Success into revenue
10:25 — Defining early product-market fit
13:00 — Using the superhuman disappointment metric
17:15 — Embracing marketing experiments and failure
21:30 — Defining true evangelism and movements
23:50 — Mobilizing employees for massive organic reach
26:10 — Deeply understanding product to drive revenue

Key takeaways

Build marketing pipeline before hiring sales.
Validate product-market fit before scaling go-to-market.
Align sales and marketing at the executive level.
Mobilize employees for massive organic content reach.
Treat Customer Success as a core revenue engine.

Transcript

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to Revenue Reimagined. I am super excited to have Udi Ledergor, the former CMO and now Chief Evangelist at Gong. Master of all things marketing.

And transparently, one of the very first folks that I followed on LinkedIn, someone that I've looked up to for a long time that I'm stoked to talk to you today on the show with us. Udi, welcome. Thank glad to be here, Adam. Very excited to be speaking today.

Udi, thanks for uh, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it. So, we are uh, podcast called Revenue Reimagined. And so we'll start with a little controversy.

You're you're mostly in the marketing role and and as we'll talk about with the evangelist role an extension of marketing. If you were had to leave that role, what other role within the GD the revenue function would you go into? You know, after after a couple of drinks, I would consider taking on a broader go-to market leadership role like the CRO or COO, uh, or president type role at the right company. After building five marketing teams, um, some of them pretty successful like the one uh, I I've led until recently at Gong.

I think uh, I'm kind of done building marketing teams, uh, but would be interested in seeing uh, broader strategic challenges related to go-to market. CRO, interesting. Awesome. Listen, I love it.

As a as a former CRO, I think that when you look at, you know, the the CRO role and how it ties in, most CRO's, as you know, typically have that sales background, right? You they come from sales. I think it's a unique perspective when you have someone with that marketing background. Um, and that's actually, I think, a great place to start.

Like, when we look at kind of revenue and who's leading the revenue function, it's broken, right? Like, there's not a lot of companies that are doing it right. Some companies have a great brand, they have horrible sales. Some companies have a great sales team, but they can't get that brand right.

You have, you know, been part of building an empire. What you guys have done differently and how you think other companies can can learn from that? I I think one of the secrets of Gong's success and and not many people know this, but our CEO, Amit Bendov, uh, he was a career marketer for most of his career before he started Gong. And I've had the privilege of working with him on and off at three different companies over the last 25 years.

So, uh, if you do the math, we were clearly teenagers when we started. He had the foresight to bring me on board as employee number 13 at Gong, a full year before we hired our first VP of sales. And the reason he did that was he wanted to start creating pipeline and brand awareness and everything that marketing can create for a company well before he built a sales team and asked them to go sell. And I think most companies do that backwards.

They first bring sales, then they see sales getting stuck, which inevitably happens because they don't have enough pipeline and nobody's heard about them and cold calling sucks for both sides. And then they're like, oh, okay, shoot, we probably do need marketing. Let's quickly go build something. And then we bring marketing and then marketing is expected to do maybe too much in too little time with too few resources and then they inevitably fail and then they get into this vicious cycle, which we were able to overcome at Gong by doing it the right way.

Very interesting. So, and I and I bet you'd say the optimal way is actually raising them both up together, right? The tides raise all seas. Um, and so one of the things I I've worked in several startup organizations is the challenge becomes exactly what you're saying, like, we're running sales.

I think of marketing as like the 30,000 foot view, giving air cover, awareness, especially in the startup world, where the sales people are like, you know, hand-to-hand combat, like they're kind of getting in in the in the mix. But then what ends up happening if you don't bring them up together with the same philosophical space of the leaders in both of those, um, the the information doesn't flow back through. Like, hey, these leads may not be the best for us or, hey, this is this is really good, like, keep bringing me more of these. Um, how do you think what's the best way for that to work better together?

Like, how can we work better together and then extend that into customer success now because we're seeing in customer success, expansion is a big key. Absolutely. So there there's at least three issues that you raised to to unpack there. Let let's try and tackle them one by one.

One of them is the timing of the hiring and the building of the different function. The other is sales and marketing alignment, and the third is how customer success fits in. So, uh, I'll start with the first one, which is uh, when to bring them in because it kind of touches on what we talked about earlier. It's a fact of life that if you want pipeline created, you need to have started to create it before today.

If you want pipeline for today, if you want to close a deal today, you need to have created that pipeline before today. And if marketing is going to do what marketing is great at, which is helping or sourcing that pipeline, you need to start with that earlier. You can't bring in a sales people a salesperson or a sales team and say, okay, you've got to start closing deals this month if you don't have anyone creating pipeline before they showed up and before they inherited the accounts. So, I might be a little biased, but I've seen this work really well at Gong where we bring marketing in, start creating pipeline and give some time for that to happen and create brand awareness and create a content marketing engine and just create lots of raving fans of our content and brand even before we ask a salesperson to start closing deals.

Love it. So that that would be my preference if uh, if I have to call the shots on on the order and the sequence of bringing those functions in. That that's number one. I think the worst thing you can do is is what I talk about earlier, which is bringing sales with no marketing support, expect magic of them, and when that doesn't work, scramble to put some marketing together that is very short-term focused because you're going to have to rebuild that a couple of times before you get it right.

So that would be the last thing I would do. Let's move on to sales and marketing alignment and I do think that's another great secret of great company success like Gong. And I've wrote I've written an article and given some presentation about this where uh, I proposed the question to marketing leaders and you could ask the same of sales leaders, but uh, I came at it from the angle of marketing leaders. Do you know how your CRO takes their coffee?

If you don't know exactly how they your CRO takes their coffee, you're not doing sales and marketing alignment right. And this was probably more true uh during the pre-COVID in office era when when I came up with that sort of litmus test for sales marketing alignment but I'm sure you could easily find a 2023 version of that. Back before COVID, I used to go out once a week with my CRO for a walk and talk and we used to get coffee and we used to talk about what's challenging on our teams and what's working and what's not working and how we could be better aligned and what our people could be doing better together. And then we used to show up to the weekly uh revenue leadership meeting or or executive meetings as one front where we agree on the good news, we agree on the challenges, we've got an action plan for how to solve for it and we go ahead and and do what's needed to do.

And that allowed us to focus on actually solutioning and driving the business forward rather than finger-pointing and questioning each other and just by showing that showing our people that we are united and we trust each other and we're working together as one team, we're all in this one boat together. It it allowed the business to move so much faster and I've seen in other companies where sales and marketing hardly ever speak to each other, let alone go out for coffee once a week, and then there's the proverbial wall between sales and marketing where sales complain that marketing is just throwing the business cards they collected at some random fishbowl at a trade show expecting sales to sell to them, while marketing is busy bitching about how sales doesn't know what to do with all this gold and they won't follow up and they're not meeting SLAs, and who hired these clowns. So, we have very, very little of that at Gong because we're able to hire the right people, make sure they work together starting at the top and then our functions they they are completely embedded one in another, both in how they sit in the office and which meetings they show up to and the marketing leadership members, they they actually sit in the weekly sales leadership meetings. Our ABM program managers are serving the regional heads of sales and they sit at their meetings and our head of demand gen sits in the SDR meeting because they work so closely together and they all see themselves as part of the same team.

And in case you're wondering by now, uh, how Gong CRO takes his coffee, it was a trick question because he only drinks tea. So that that is the truth. I know that because I've of coffee meetings with Ryan, so I know he takes tea. He's recently started uh venturing back to decaf, but that's a different story.

That's on sales marketing alignment. And then uh, the third and and uh final topic you brought up, Dale, was uh how customer success fits in. I think especially now where uh many, many companies are seeing a lot of churn and retention is no longer guaranteed. Uh, once again, we're all reminded of the the old truth, which is keeping a customer is far cheaper than going out there and getting a new one.

And so customer success absolutely has to be seen as part of the revenue team. Um, I have specific thoughts on org structures and stuff like that, but it might get a little too tactical. But I do think customer success needs to understand uh from the leadership down, uh early on, they are not a glorified um technical support or or cheerleading team. They actually need to make sure that the customer stays happy enough to retain them as a customer and to expand them in any way that the company wants to, whether it's upsell or cross-sell or selling to other teams or licenses or additional products, whatever is is possible.

So, um, everything that applies to sales marketing alignment also has to apply to customer success and marketing alignment and needless to say, sales and customer success are essentially uh one and the same team. Wow. Like, mic drop. There's so much that I could unpack there.

Um, I I have interviewed with Ryan in the past. If I would have known he didn't drink coffee, that would have been helpful. You know, you would have just given that away. Little fun fact.

You hit on something that I think is near and dear to certainly my heart, but I think both of our hearts. You got to build the marketing engine first. You have to build the pipeline first. You can't tell marketing today to create pipeline for a deal to close tomorrow.

Yet, so many founders, and not even founders, so many companies broadly now, when there's a problem, it's, oh, just hire more sales reps. They'll just close more deals, right? Like, but we don't have the pipeline to fix that. We don't have the demand.

We don't certainly don't have the content. When you look at creating pipeline, a lot of people think it's, oh, you know, just hire BDR's or marketing just needs to, you know, go out there and throw up some like cool articles. It's deeper than that. How how did you guys kind of look at generating pipeline early in some of the untraditional ways that have made you so successful?

Yeah. So, I'll before I directly answer the question, I'll I'll add a couple of asterisks, you know, in my attempt to create some tweet this moments in in the previous answer. I oversimplified things as we like to do and I I think simplifying to an extent is is a really good thing because it helps people understand complicated concepts. Um, I think in Gong's example, bringing in marketing ahead of sales worked really, really well.

It's not always going to work that well. And here's an example. Uh, one of the reasons this works well at Gong is because we had ridiculously early product market fit. And when I came in, I did not carry the burden of finding product market fit or trying to tell a story to a market that we did not understand or that we weren't sure that we have a solution that they really need.

We were not a solution chasing after a problem. When Amit called me, Amit, our CEO and co-founder called me, he said, Udi, remember that crazy idea I told you about six months ago? We actually built it. We rolled out the product to 12 beta customers and three months later, we told them we're shutting off the beta and they should either shut the system off or become a paying customer.

And 11 out of the 12 beta customers became paying customers. That's why we think we have early product market fit. Could you come in and start marketing this thing? And I said, yes, I'd love to.

And that is a rare privilege that most marketers are not privy to. And so, I would say that early attempts at sales should really verify that you have that initial product market fit before you can expect a standard marketer, and I don't think I'm a brilliant marketer. I think I think I'm I'm a good marketer and I come in and I know how to scale something when we understand what value we're providing to what buyer. I think why many, many marketers are set up for failure is that they are brought in before minimal product market fit and the CEO or co-founders expect magic from them and they're like, go bring me 1,000 leads.

And then, of course, they fail to bring you 1,000 leads because the company hasn't figured out what they're selling, what value it provides, who is the buyer. And even those poor innocent souls that do come in as leads, they cannot be sold to because the company hasn't reached product market fit and then marketing gets the blame because they're not bringing in supposedly qualified buyers or they're not converting to closed one deals. So, you really have to notice this whether you're a founder or a sales leader or a marketing leader, don't set yourself up for failure by coming in, unless you know how to solve for product market fit. And some some marketers come with a strong product background.

I myself was a product manager for five years before I shifted full-time into marketing. But I still would not take on myself right now in a marketing capacity role the ungrateful task of reaching product market fit. If that's not what you're signing up for, make sure you understand that they have the minimal product market fit that you need to be able to tell a story that can generate meaningful pipeline and convert it into sales. So that's a like really important asterisk that that I needed to add.

And but but you're so right and I I don't mean to interrupt you, but having been a sales leader that has gone into orgs that haven't had product market fit, it it is a gargantuan task that if that is not your skill set and you're not prepared for it, holy crap. Like, you have no idea what you're stepping into. And it's interesting, everyone defines product market fit a little bit differently, right? I mean, the way Amit defined it was, okay, we have 11 we have 12 beta customers, we turn it off, if they if they come back to us, then we have product market fit.

So, it's it's an interesting like people are are really wanting it. Is that how you would define product market fit or is that just how he defined product market fit? So, so that's kind of a lagging indicator that we used. The leading indicators that we used were were NPS surveys for every user in our system.

We started pinging them with an NPS survey from day one. And now we use uh something else that's that's I I don't know the official name of the question, but it's a single question. Um, I think superhuman kind of made it uh famous when they used it to define their product market fit, which is asking your users, how disappointed would you be if we took this feature or product away? And if they say not at all disappointed or not disappointed, then you know you have a problem.

If you have at least 40% of users saying, I'd be disappointed or very disappointed, you know that you're on to something. And we've been using that in the last couple of years for some of the new products and features that we've been rolling out and it's it's very telling because when we see that we have, you know, overwhelming disappointed responses, which is a good thing in this context for those who are product. If people are going to be very disappointed if we take this product or feature away, we know that this has the potential to sell as a separate skew, we know we should continue to focus on this, we know there's a market for it. If people are kind of, man, maybe only 20% are saying that they would feel disappointed if we took this away, maybe we don't bet the farm on this product and we either go we either ditch this project and focus on something else or we go find out what it would take to make this a success that the majority of people or at least 40% would say uh that they would be disappointed if we took it away.

Wow, there's so many places I could go. Everyone likes to overcomplicate from what I've seen NPS, right? Like, I've got an NPS survey. Is there I've got like 10, 12, 14 questions that no customer's going to answer and how in the hell do you discern all of that data and distill it down?

I think that one question is important. What do you do if arguably it's a 50/50 split, Udi? 50% want to keep it, 50% say, I don't care. Where do you go?

You you go and do qualitative reviews and interviews to understand what what they're seeing that they like, what they're seeing that they don't like and and maybe the the problem that you set out to solve is not painful enough or the people who are experiencing it are not in a a buying position, although that's probably not what you'll find out in NPS because you're not asking them whether you're too expensive or whether they would pay. They're just you're asking them if they're disappointed if if you take this away. Um, but maybe the problem was not painful enough so your solution cannot uh become a must have if if the problem not painful enough or maybe your solution is too partial or it's too clunky or it's it's it's just not the right solution. So go talk to people and ask them like what could I do to make your experience better, what could I do to to make this uh happen.

You know, when when we run our NPS surveys to this day, uh for for those unfamiliar with NPS surveys, basically asking someone how likely you are to recommend Gong to a friend. And we ask them for an answer between 0 and 10 if I remember correctly. And if they answer nine or a 10, we say thank you so much and we might ask them to go write a review on G2 or someone else or somewhere else. But any answer that we get that's an eight or below, two things happen.

One, we ask them a second question, which we stopped asking the nines or 10s because we by now we don't learn a lot from those who are raving fans. We know they love the product and we have a pretty good idea why they love it. But if they answered an eight or below and we consider eight neutral and seven and below are detractors, not promoters. We ask them, what could we be doing to make your experience better?

And that's where we get a lot of really meaningful comments. And every one of those people can expect to get a call or an email from their customer success manager looking for ways to help them. Um, I get I still get a weekly report for the last seven years, I've been getting the weekly report of our NPS surveys. And you can easily see the themes.

So many years ago, the theme was the transcription was not good enough, so we made that better. And then there was some missing integrations, so we built those integrations. And now it's just random or not random problems that we see showing up like someone might not find something easily enough in our menus. So when we see that coming from 20 customers, you know you've got to go fix that.

So you've just you've got to seek out that feedback and not just assume that no news is good news because that is absolutely not the case with product. If you're not hearing anything back from your customers, it's not because they're raving fans, it's because they're not using it. And once you start asking, you will find out what's wrong and what they want you to improve. This so true.

We we talked a lot about a lot of successes. I'm curious where what's a failure that you've had, but it's gave you learnings to generate big amounts of revenue on the back side of it. So, you know, we've had successes and failures. I usually find that some of the failures I have are better learning experiences than the successes because it makes you really think, how can I tweak that?

How can I make it better? What's one of those times that you've had that you're like didn't work out so well, but in the long run it did. So, I won't dodge the question. I I will say that we have not had what anyone at Gong would consider a a dramatic or colossal failure.

We never launched a product that didn't succeed or or do something that completely caused us to mess up. And uh, some of it has has been luck, a lot of it of it has been having the right people in the decision-making seats who usually make good decisions. And that's allowed us to move faster than our competitors and just become the the successful company that we are today. So, uh, overall, if you have the right people in the right seats, you're probably going to make fewer mistakes than companies who don't.

So that's that's that. Yeah, that's right. recommendation but uh get get the best people in those seats you can. We we have seen tactical things happen where things like when do you release something, um, there's an old saying that if if you wait until uh, you're not embarrassed by the product you're releasing, then you release it too late.

So we subscribe to some version of that, but of course as a growing company with now 4,000 companies uh 4,000 customers, many of them large enterprises, we can't afford to break things and release things prematurely as we could five years ago. So obviously we're going to wait a little bit longer but we are not in a vacuum, we're in a competitive market where customers have other choices and we need to provide them value as quickly as possible. So sometimes we'll release things and it might have been a little prematurely and then we'll we'll do a postmortem analysis and we'll see what other criteria could we have introduced, what more testing we could have done that will not take forever because we're not looking for perfection, but we're looking to meet that minimum viable product that is worthy of general availability. So that that's something that we've seen happen.

Then in the marketing world, um, we've definitely do a lot of experiments. I mean our approach not only tolerates but encourages and requires a lot of experimentation and that means trial and error and that means lots of errors. Um, and when we put out content pieces or events or or anything that we do or advertising, you name it, a lot of those are going to be duds. Um, duds I I mean that they don't get the number of downloads that we expect.

They don't drive the amount of pipeline that we expected. And we try to learn, okay, is this a topic that is not as interesting as it thought it would be? Maybe it was interesting three months ago but by the time we got it out there, people had moved on to something else. What can we learn from this?

And we've got many tactical examples for for that and the the trick is really to come with open eyes, encourage the team to give an honest review of what worked, what didn't work, why we think it didn't work and what are we going to do or or what did we learn about it for next time and then just encourage them to go on with the next experiment. Uh, other teams might have a a culture that doesn't encourage experimentation and failure and then when everyone is so concerned about their jobs and success and they feel that everything they do has to be a winning success, what actually happens is that they slow down and take very few risks and now they want to work everything um at nauseum to perfection, which means instead of putting out a new piece every week, you're putting a piece out every three months or six months, it'll probably perform well, but if if you could put out a piece every every week and two out of three failed, you'd still be driving more revenue and more success than waiting three months to put out the next piece. Well, you guys swing for the fences with uh with some of your ads, so. Yeah, I mean we we try to experiment and try to put out things that look like they don't belong because those typically grab more attention and if they're interesting and relevant, they'll also keep that attention and and drive conversions.

So, absolutely, we consistently find that if you look at what everyone's doing on a network and then you kind of do the opposite, those are usually going to grab attention a lot more like if you remember a few years ago when everything on LinkedIn uh looked very polished and professional and done in studios, um, we started posting just, you know, uh videos that you could take on your phone and they looked like they belong on a TikTok or a Facebook or somewhere else, but when people saw them on LinkedIn like, oh, this is refreshing. This looks something authentic that someone just did because they've got an interesting message and they didn't need to cover it up with a polished video production, which is just going to be another sort of obvious marketing video. So, try to stand out rather than blend in, that that usually works better. So, that ties me into in the last few minutes, the role of evangelism in marketing, right?

And standing out. And I think there's a few companies that are starting to take this on and they have like, oh, we have evangelists. And I think having an evangelist is very different than evangelism. I'd love to know kind of your takes on what what's real evangelism and how does it partner with marketing to kind of shake things up?

So, evangelism and and you can find many, many definitions out there uh if you Google it, but my view is that if you can get people truly excited about what the company stands for. Not just the latest version 3.0.4.

5, but what what the company actually stands for, what teams they're helping do something better or what problem they're making go away. If you can get people genuinely excited about that, you have a wave of evangelism. It it reminds me of uh a great definition I I read years ago when we were creating the revenue intelligence category and we were researching what it takes to build a great category and movement. Uh, one of my favorite definitions of movement was, it's a movement if it keeps moving once you let go.

If you need to keep pushing it, that's not movement. And I think that's that's very similar to how I look at evangelism. Evangelism is when we are able to create truly raving fans that talk about Gong whether or not I'm incentivizing them directly, whether or not they're even using the product. I can't tell you how many times I've heard from people, oh, I'm a huge Gong fan, even before they ever started using the product.

Because they've attended our events, they've read our content, they've gotten a ton of value, they get the vibe and the energy that we put out there every day and they're like, I want to be part of that. I can get behind that. That is evangelism, that is a movement. And that's what we're trying to do and I've been doing it um almost for seven years as the chief marketing officer at Gong and more recently as a full-time chief evangelist.

We've got an awesome new CMO now who's taking the marketing team and efforts to the next stage where they need to go and I get to focus full-time on this beautiful patch of evangelism working with industry influencers, with our internal Gongsters, with our customers, uh with partners like you and spreading the good Gong gospel out there. So, as with most uh guests on on our podcast, uh, Udi has been has been very grateful and gracious to provide one of our listeners with a a set a session with you, a marketing session, um, to have uh some time with you to talk about strategy. Um, this would be really great for any of the founders out there, some heads of sales that want to get a marketing perspective on how things are running. So I I I'm putting my name in the drawing.

You are you are not you are not allowed to. You're automatically disqualified. And uh, to get it uh, just subscribe to the newsletter, take a look, we uh, we pick people at random. And uh, but we really appreciate uh, giving us some of that stuff and we will start wrapping this up with some rapid fire questions.

We got a couple of rapid fire questions for you. All right, Udi, what uh, what song would best describe your revenue strategy? Change the World, um, Eric Clapton from phenomenal. Nice.

Love it. I love it. Um, if you had a crystal ball, um, what one revenue trend or strategy would you predict would take center stage in the next 12 to 18 months? Oh, that's easy.

AI, of course. Uh, specifically, generative AI, it's way past the buzzword. It's actually real now and it's in product and and many of our customers are already using it as part of Gong's latest product offering. It's absolutely going to change the way sales, marketing, CS, everyone does their work.

All of us, our jobs are going to look completely different in three years from now, thanks to generative AI. Cool. I'm going to I I agree with you. I'm going to skip the question that we normally ask about whether you should focus on customer retention or customer acquisition because I think we addressed that earlier.

But, what is one lesser-known tip or tactic? Not widely known out there, but something lesser known that would make a huge difference, a surprising difference in someone's revenue outcomes. Learning how to mobilize your entire employee base as free marketing. Uh, this is something we did when we had only 12 engineers with a network of their closest relatives on LinkedIn and we're still doing it now when we have 1,200 employees with hundreds of thousands of people in their networks.

It is so effective. I could never afford the publicity that I get from mobilizing 1,200 Gongsters. In our recent uh launch of Gong Engage, our new AI-driven approach to sales engagement, we had almost 1,000 Gongsters spread the news and share their excitement and either write something personal or share something that marketing prepared for them and I could never afford that sort of publicity and I'm still in wonder and awe why more companies don't do this and drive their entire employee base to share a big moment of news for the company. Why would you not do that?

You all pioneered it. Like I I I I see it all the time. Like I I've I've known Sarah forever. I've known a few other Gongsters forever and like one person, it's not just one person who posts, it is hundreds, if not 1,000 people that are posting.

Um, so that's pretty cool. Yeah, people don't scale it very well. I I've seen people try to like start it up, but I think it's that passion, that burning that they believe in the product as much as as the founders and everybody else in the organization and that's a very interesting like to get that spark is a huge uh kudos to all the leadership at Gong for sure. I think that's where it starts.

I'll give a 30-second tip on on how to do that. You know, I often get asked, Udi, do you use some secret technology and and and to get people involved and and take over their LinkedIn profiles? I'm like, no, dude, like this is way more simple. All we do is we ask you nicely, we make it easy and I show them what's in it for them.

So, in Gong's case, uh, you mostly see our salespeople sharing the news. Why do they do that? Because I tell them, here's how the LinkedIn algorithm works. When we publish a piece of content and LinkedIn sees that 500 of you will like, share and comment on it within the first couple of hours, that tells the LinkedIn algorithm that this is a really great piece of news for salespeople like you and then they surface that and make it visible to your leads who are sales leaders on LinkedIn and then we in marketing bring those leads back to you as qualified leads.

You like pipeline, right? So 30 seconds, like, share and comment this piece of content, we will bring you more pipeline today. And they do. That's it.

Yeah. It's it it is as that simple and complex for people. So, I I so appreciate that. Yeah.

I so appreciate that. Okay, last one. So, earlier in the show, you said that if um, you would be in a different role, it'd be a CRO. So, if you weren't the chief evangelist, you'd be a the CRO.

It's tomorrow morning, first thing, what what's the first thing you're doing tomorrow morning? Uh, making sure that I have the right product that I can go to market with because as a go-to-market leader, I cannot fix or create product market fit. That's really the most critical thing. I mean, you can't get started with go-to-market in a meaningful way until you have that product market fit and I don't want this to sound like I'm complaining, it's the opposite.

I'm giving a ton of credit to Gong's product team who got us this ridiculously early product market fit that allowed our go-to-market motion to be successful almost from day one. So once we have that, figuring out who is our easiest audience to go to. It doesn't have to be the biggest one. It doesn't have to be the one with the most potential.

But who's the audience that stands to get the most value from us from day one and go full force ahead to get to that small pond and and knock down that that bowling pin first and then move to the next one next to it and then to the next one next to it. So focusing on a on a small audience where we can quickly become that big fish in the small pond and if all these analogies are are sounding familiar, many of them are from uh Jeffrey Moore's crossing the chasm. And once you establish yourself as as a big fish in one small pond, you can move on to the next one and next one until you can finally boil the ocean, but I wouldn't start from there. And it's it's in the one thing you said, I just want to say that I don't think enough revenue go-to-market leaders think about is injecting product into the revenue cycle.

Like, too many people like think of it as a side piece instead of like, that is the main piece that people are using the product and getting that feedback in, getting that feedback loop is super important for product market fit. So, I appreciate that a lot. Absolutely. I mean, um, I I just read a post from someone uh a respected leader in in the sales community today on LinkedIn saying that uh one of the actually it was Jason Lemkin from SaaS today.

He wrote today that he's seen many sales leaders and sales people fail because they didn't have a deep enough understanding of the product they were selling and you can get away with that for a short while a couple of years ago when products were practically selling themselves, but that's no longer the case. We're we're back to a sort of normal status quo now. And a good go-to-market team will deeply understand their buyers and the problems that they have and what they need to make their jobs better and equally understand the product that they're offering and how that directly maps to those needs and challenges that their marketers are having. And so once you truly understand the problem that you're solving and how your product solves that problem, then you can build a really successful go-to-market team.

I absolutely love it. You have dropped so much knowledge. I do have one more question. How do you take your coffee?

I drink single espresso several times a day, no sugar, no cream, nothing in it. No note to self. I uh, I am not the same. I need more sugar than you can uh, think about.

Udi, thank you so much, uh, for being so gracious with your time. Where can people find you? What's the best way to engage with you? It's your time to pitch whatever you'd like.

Yeah, so if you've been living in a cave and and have not yet experienced the magic that is Gong, please go to gong.io, that's gong.io and we'd be so happy to show you around, no strings attached, see what we could do for your team, if it's a good fit now, if it's a good fit later. Uh, we'd love to help your sales team consolidate on one AI purpose-built platform for sales that all the winning revenue teams are using these days.

So that's at gong.io. Um, I am thankfully the only Udi Ledergor on LinkedIn. So feel free to look me up there.

Uh, I have no competition for the name. So Udi Ledergor on LinkedIn would love to connect with all our listeners here and looking forward to giving uh one lucky GTM leader uh a free marketing strategy go-to-market strategy session on how to think about marketing for your product, for your company, what to look for in your next marketing hire, however I can be helpful. Thanks so much for having me today Dale and Adam, it's been a pleasure. Udi, thanks so much.

Awesome.