168. A Masterclass in Category Creation from the Leaders at Gong and Gainsight ft. Udi & Lauren

There are, you know, entire departments that need to shift and become from account management to now customer success. And what does that mean? You’re delivering on outcomes. So it was a lot of new language that we had to bring.

Udi Ledergor:
I think a lot of founders miss sometimes. It’s easier to get a large audience to agree on a common problem and on a common solution category than it is to create preference for your for your brand, brand. So if you can do that and then separately you can differentiate if you need to and promote your solution, that’s gonna work.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast Network. Lauren Ulrich helped create a category before she even knew what she was doing. A month into her job at a company called J. Barra Software, now called Gainsight, the team decided to throw a conference. They called it Project Pulse. The name stuck, but what started as getting Bay Area customer success practitioners in one room became the defining event for an entire profession. Udi Letargor did something similar at Gong, but he waited 3 years before touching the category name. First, product-market fit.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Then, when conversational intelligence no longer served them, he put revenue intelligence in 72-point font. And Gong in small print underneath. Both built companies, both built categories by putting community first and company second. Today, Lauren and Udi sit down to compare notes on category creation, content engines, and what happens when you let community define your brand. I’m Josh Schachter. This is Unchurned. Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of Unchurned. I’m Josh Schachter, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Market Development at Gainsight, and I am here today with two guests.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, two guests and like in half a co-host. So we’ve got Udi Ledergor. Udi is the Chief Evangelist at Gong, former CMO of Gong, and Lauren Olereich. Lauren is my guest/co-host. Lauren is the Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Gainsight. Udi and Lauren, thank you for being here. Welcome to the show.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Happy to be here officially.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Exactly. I’m really excited about this. I always say I’m really excited and most of the time I’m okay, like, meh excited, but I’m really excited because I’ve gotten to know you, gotten to know you, you know, a little bit, Udi, over the past couple of months. You wrote an amazing book called Courageous Marketing. You’ve got about 50 copies there. Is that the, the stock supply, Woody, in the background? But I reached out to you. I, as you know, I’m writing a book. We’ll see where that journey takes me.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And so you’ve been very helpful with your tips of the trade to how to write a successful book because yours has been successful. And I’m also inspired by your story, you know, with Gong being there from pretty much like the earliest days. Lauren has had a very similar path at Gainsight. So Lauren is a month away from anniversary number 13. I don’t know if that means it’s unlucky or not, Lauren, but, uh, maybe we should just skip that and go to 14. But, uh, yeah. And, and, and she’s been like the stalwart buttress of all of marketing for Gainsight, like coming up with Nick Meta and literally defining the category. And so, uh, of customer success.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So we have two category definers, creators here on the program and myself just going to try and figure out my placement in this. So that’s why I’m excited. Let’s see, where do we want to start? You know, Udi, before we go into the book, which, you know, Lauren and I were passing notes about last night, we both read it. We’ve taken tremendous copious highlights and notes in the margin and whatnot. Tell us about your journey with Gong. Where was the company? I think everybody here knows Gong, but maybe you can do like a 10-second pitch, but like, where was the company and marketing of Gong when you got started working there?

Udi Ledergor:
Yeah. So Gong is the AI operating system for revenue teams. Some people might know us in previous incarnations. We started out 10 years ago as a conversation intelligence Leader, which then morphed into Revenue Intelligence, the category that I helped create back in 2019. Since then, it went through one more metamorphosis into Revenue AI, and now more recently that’s been tweaked into the AI operating system for revenue teams. So it’s been a really, really exciting journey. This is my 10th year at Gong, so I’m coming up to my 10-year mark. When I joined, there were 12 other employees.

Udi Ledergor:
So I was employee number 13 and marketer number 1 at the company, which is a very special time to join. As many of our listeners probably know if they’ve ever joined a company sub-20 employees. I’ve, I’ve done that 5 times now. So it’s, it’s kind of the only thing I know how to do apparently. But it’s always a really exciting time because you really don’t know whether it’s going to take off and how it’s going to work out. Gong worked out pretty well. So it’s been a very, very exciting journey. I guess my first career hack for getting into a company like this at an exciting stage like this is that I had worked with Gong’s co-founder and CEO, Amit Bhandari, at two previous companies.

Udi Ledergor:
So we’ve been working together on and off now for 27 years, if I did my math correctly. Yeah, since about 1998.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And so, um, but you’re only like 37. So how does the math work out on that, Woody?

Udi Ledergor:
Exactly. We were all teenagers when we started. Um, but, but seriously, uh, I, I always say this to friends who leave either Gong or other workplaces, like never burn your bridges, always do it amicably, create raving fans, uh, around you, whether you’re staying or leaving, it doesn’t matter. It’s a really small industry. It’s a really small world and you never know where your next reference call is going to be, where the next back channel is going to be checked. You always want to leave raving fans wherever you go.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It’s like you always want to go out on top, right? Like a Super Bowl winner, Tom Brady style. Okay, so what’s the latest then? I don’t know if you call it the category, but you said the AI operating system for revenue teams. Is that the latest and greatest?

Udi Ledergor:
Yes. Yes, that, that’s what it is right now. Obviously Gardner calls it a slightly different name and Forrester calls it a slightly different name because they all need to create more categories. But the important thing is that we’re the number one leader in all of their categories as well.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That’s all that matters at the end of the day. You started out as employee number 13. Is that the right time for a company to bring on a marketer? And actually, as I say that, I’m like, well, you know, that was, that was 10 years ago about, right? So maybe times have changed. But when would be the right time to bring on your first marketer?

Udi Ledergor:
To quote Elad Gil, who’s written extensively about startup advice, he jokingly said the best generic advice for startups is that there is no good generic advice for startups. Um, but having said that, I think one thing that I’ve found, uh, true for me and for many other marketers is that we typically provide decent value, if not better than that, when there is some semblance of product market fit. And so when you ask about the best stage, is this too early? Is this too late to join a company? Um, if I had to pick one criteria, I would look into product market fit. If there is no signs of early product market fit, I think that is one of the top reasons. I believe that’s one of the top reasons that marketers end up failing and oftentimes at no fault of their own. They just come in, the founder tells their great visionary story, which is awesome, but the product is so early and customers or early users don’t see value. What is a marketer to do? If I came in with all my marketing skills, which typically mean there’s a product that provides some value to a known user who will admit to getting this value from the product. Now I can scale that and create demand generation, create meetings of lookalike people who want to get the same value that our first users have received.

Udi Ledergor:
And I can tell a nice story about that. But if there is no sign of product market fit, there’s very little that I and most marketers I know can do. The problem the company has at that point is not scaling marketing. It’s getting to product market fit.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
In one sentence, how do you know that you have product market fit?

Udi Ledergor:
You go talk to customers and early users. When you talk to a couple of people, which I could easily do at Gong because we were recording all of our early user calls and early sales calls. When I heard the calls and I saw, literally saw prospects’ jaws drop as they saw Amit present them with a very rudimentary demo saying, hey, we recorded a few of your calls and what’s the name of your number one competitor? Evil Corp? Look, I could just type in Evil Corp. And it shows you exactly where it shows up in the call and what your customer said about that. What? You can do that? And when I saw that, I said, okay, I see that they see the value. And if I’m being honest, when Amit called me in July of 2016, he said, Udi, remember the crazy idea I told you about? I told you 6 months ago that we’re going to record sales calls. So we built that. We got 12 design partners or beta customers, and within 3 months, 11 of those 12 wrote a check to become a paying customer.

Udi Ledergor:
So to me, that was the most resounding sign of product market fit I’ve ever seen at that early stage. Within 3 months, getting 11 out of 12 beta customers to become paying customers. So at that point, I realized that I could probably apply some of my skills and know-how to create demand gen and brand on something that, that has true value to customers.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
By the way, there’s also a lesson there in, in that story, 11 out of 12, because I’ve heard that story from Gong probably like 20 times. I have that like a, like a tattoo, like under my, my sleeve here about that. Like, so there’s a story about just like, say it once, say it again, remind people, right? Like imprint that founder’s story and that hero’s journey, which you guys are clearly doing with that. And I mean that as a compliment. Uh, Lauren. You joined about 13 years ago. What was the state of chaos? I mean, state of Gainsight when you joined the company? Uh, tell it like, like vividly paint us to that picture of what Gainsight was when you joined. And then we could talk about like, was there market fit at the time?

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Yeah, so I can’t match Udi’s employee number 13, but I was employee 25. I was the second marketer. So I came to work with Anthony Kenneda, who was my former manager at Symantec. And, uh, you know, on the question of product-market fit, we were trying to convince people that customer success was even a thing to care about at the time. There were very few, maybe like sub-2,000 people, that might be generous, uh, on LinkedIn with a career and a title that said customer success in it. And now, of course, if you go and you look on LinkedIn, you see tens of thousands of people with that title. So, our job in front of us was mighty, not only, you know, by what we’re selling, this software, but also customer success is real, it’s important, it’s a business imperative. There are, you know, entire departments that need to shift and become from account management to now customer success.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
And what does that mean? You’re delivering on outcomes. So, it was a lot of new language that we had to bring to people, but, ah, painting a vivid picture. So, we were in a office building above a bar on Castro Street in Mountain View. We had, you know, customer success heavyweights like Nick Mehta and Dan Steinman in the office. We had a big giant pink stuffed pig that we referred to as like the elephant in the room being churn. And then we turned that into an executive guide ebook to churn, and it was this pink elephant that was everywhere. So we had a lot of fun. We had churnbot costumes.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
We had wrote a children’s book about, uh, Sally and the Churnbot that we sent to a bunch of customers, and we had a packing party. This giant UPS truck showed up with boxes and boxes of books. We’re stuffing them into envelopes, finding where people lived, addressing them, taking them to UPS, and to send them out. So it was, it was a really fun time. And Gainsight’s changed immensely. Like, we now have around 1,200 employees. We’ve acquired several companies, and it’s The thing about Gainsight that has excited me and why I’ve been here for 13 years is, well, one, the people. I love everybody that I’ve worked with, but also how constantly it’s changing.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
I feel like every 3 to 4 years I kind of work for a new version of Gainsight, and I felt that when I moved in 2017 to London to work with Dan Steinman to open up our EMEA office. It was like, okay, wow, we’re back startup days. We have 5 people in our office. How do we grow this? How do we make the same impact that we did in 2013 in the US, now doing that across Europe. So, that was really a highlight of my time here at Gainsight.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
The Pink Elephant.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Pink Elephant.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That was always the club I couldn’t get into in Midtown in New York.

Udi Ledergor:
Hmm.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, for another time.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Okay.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Udi, you had ExecVision. ExecVision existed like early on. They were doing calls intelligence, right? Like when you guys started, maybe for sales and stuff like that. So, you, you weren’t like the very, very, very first to do this. How did you create the category? And, and mind you, this episode is gonna be less than 2 hours. How did you create the category? You’ll have to remind us what the first category is that you created, ’cause I know you’ve got a few there. Like, what’s the playbook? And then Lauren, I want to hear from you how we did it with customer success at Gainsight.

Udi Ledergor:
Yeah. So when, when we started out in 2016, we looked around us and we saw there were 2 companies doing something similar. There were ExecuVision that you mentioned, and Qorus, and they were very different. ExecVision had started as a consulting company, which developed a little bit of technology and tried to commercialize it to some success. Um, Qorus was a startup much more similar to Gong. They’d started literally a couple of months apart in the exact same two locations in Tel Aviv and San Francisco with a former Israeli founder. Um, so those companies were very comparable. And in the very, very early days, we were just focused on getting to that product market fit that I talked about.

Udi Ledergor:
How do we provide value to customers? And we weren’t too worried about category naming or anything like that. So when we saw that the other two companies were already using that name, conversation intelligence, we thought, well, that’s close enough to what we’re doing. Let’s just go with that to explain to customers what it is. It was such a blue ocean, like nobody was using any of these products anyway. Uh, so we just didn’t worry ourselves with category. Um, now we set out to win.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That’s it. That’s very, that’s very important. You did not like, it did not consume you having to create a new category. I feel like people nowadays, right? Like they’re consumed by that early founders. Oh, I need to create the category because there can only be one king. The VCs will only invest in one king, the kingmaker. Um, but so that wasn’t like, like consuming of you early on.

Udi Ledergor:
Not, not at all. And and I, I think even that, um, assumption by VCs is, is changing. Um, I just saw, I just read a newsletter this morning by Angular Ventures where one of the partners argues that that kingmaker hypothesis is quickly changing in the age of AI. And there can be more than one winner and you can absolutely disrupt an existing category and make it your own and expand it and stretch it in your direction. So there’s many ways of building a successful company. But back to our category story, and I will try to keep this brief as you asked to. So for the first 3 years, from 2016 to 2019, we, we operated under Conversation Intelligence and we quickly became known because of our product, because of our marketing, because of the content that we created, the event experiences, talks we were giving. We created a lot of valuable content that people found extremely valuable regardless of whether they used our product or not.

Udi Ledergor:
Um, so I’m referring to the Gong Lab series, which we may or may not go back to later.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh, we’re going to go back to it later. Lauren has a lot of questions about that.

Udi Ledergor:
Awesome. Um, so to focus back on your question on category creation, what happened in 2019 is that we realized that the conversation intelligence category was no longer serving us well and we had outgrown it. And when I say outgrown it, we have two specific problems we’re looking to solve. One, uh, deals were getting competitive. And when we showed up and say, hey, we do this conversation intelligence. So people said, oh, it’s like Chorus or ExecVision, right? You record calls and I can listen back to them. And we had to fight that narrative by explaining, no, actually we have a much broader and deeper horizon of what we’re doing and what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to help you inspect deals and we’re going to help you create pipeline and all these things.

Udi Ledergor:
That other players were not even talking about. But because we were pigeonholed as conversation intelligence, everyone thought, well, we’re all doing the same thing because they just said you can record a call, you can listen back to it, it’s really helpful. It is. So that’s one main problem we wanted to solve. There’s another little more niche problem that I think is a fun one to mention, and that uh, is, we’ve— we found out that in order to get a budget where none existed for conversation intelligence, we needed to get pretty high up typically to the chief revenue officer. And if we could even get a meeting with her, as soon as we said, we do revenue, we do conversation intelligence, she said, oh, conversation intelligence. That sounds like some tactical tool. Go talk to enablement.

Udi Ledergor:
I don’t deal with that. And then we, we ended up in this ping pong because enablement liked what they saw, but they never had a budget and the CRO already declined to give us her attention. So we thought, how can we solve this? And to make a very long story short, we thought, we hypothesized that if we created a new category name, it might be able to solve both those problems, make it easier to differentiate against smaller players in our industry and keep the attention of the CRO for longer. And so, um, a fun little anecdote there is that we were hiring at that time for a head of product marketing for our first head of product marketing. And one of the candidates for that role truly impressed us. Problem was she had no real product marketing experience. So we were kind of stuck thinking, well, we really like her, but she can’t be our first product marketer because we need someone who knows the craft and can teach us because I’m a terrible product marketer. I can’t coach a product marketer as well as I can coach someone in demand gen or events or content or brand.

Udi Ledergor:
And then, uh, talking with Amit, my CEO, we had the thought, well, what if we ask her to lead our category creation, just build a role around this? And I said, I think that’s a great idea. And I went to that candidate, uh, her name was Sheena Badani, and I asked her, Sheena, uh, we all loved you and were super impressed by your interviews, but you’re not going to be our next head of product marketer because you don’t have the the right experience, but if you would consider it, we’d love you to come in and help us lead this new category that it’s a real big problem that we want to solve. And she said something really, really brilliant that I think is a really good career lesson to everyone. She said she thought about it for a couple of days, then she said, look, the most important thing for me is not the title or what project exactly I’m working on. I want to make sure I’m making an impact. So as long as I know that what I’m working on is really important to the CEO, I will take the job. She wanted to make sure that what she’s working on is going to make an impact and something that’s in the top priorities of the CEO. And she knew that was the case because Amit was interviewing her and this was, this idea was coming from him and me.

Udi Ledergor:
And she knew that he was going to be very deeply involved in this new category creation. She said, yes, I think this is going to make an impact on the company. I’m going to get to work with Amit and with Udi and with other, sea levels. So, so she took the job and, uh, within a few very short months, uh, that we gave her to come up with the new category name, which was of course just the beginning of our category journey, she workshopped us until we landed on Revenue Intelligence. And, uh, the idea behind Revenue Intelligence was that the word revenue is a lot more strategic than conversations. And our hypothesis, our hope was that that would help get and keep the attention of the chief revenue officer because it’s literally in her title. She can’t delegate that as easily as she could conversation intelligence. And that by using a different term that has some continuity with conversation intelligence, because we kept the word intelligence at the time, we could more easily differentiate against our competition and say, well, conversation intelligence is great.

Udi Ledergor:
It’s just a small part of the technology of what revenue intelligence does., and then we could tell that story more easily. And, and we were right on, on both of those guesses at the time. Uh, and we crafted a really good story around revenue intelligence. We got some external help. Again, Sheena led this work. And then for the next couple of years, we worked on building the category. We created the Revenue Intelligence Podcast. Uh, we created the Revenue Intelligence Summit, which transformed into our customer event.

Udi Ledergor:
Um, we created all this content and marketing campaigns around revenue intelligence, which I think some of the best categories can pull off where they promote the category at the expense of their brand. Because here’s the thing that I think a lot of founders miss sometimes. It’s easier to get a large audience to agree on a common problem and on a common solution category than it is to create preference for your for your brand, brand. So if you can do that, if you can convince someone that they all have a problem they agree on and that there’s a general category of solutions, and then separately you can differentiate if you need to and promote your solution, that’s going to work. And, and one of the best examples I’ve seen outside of tech that, that have done this is in the diamond industry. And, uh, I often give the example of the, the old, uh, campaign, A Diamond Is Forever.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Uh, by the way, this is, this is, this is in your book. Lauren actually was just telling me yesterday, she’s like, oh my God. I, I called this out from the book, like, we need to think about this. Um, so read the book because it’s in there. Keep going.

Udi Ledergor:
When I made that connection, I was, I was very proud of myself because I, I came up with that and I thought, wow.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Um, well, De Beers came up with it, to be clear, but everyone who.

Udi Ledergor:
Studied marketing knows the campaign, A Diamond Is Forever. Um, it was created by, uh, um, by a brilliant copywriter, um, back in the 1950s, if I remember correctly. And, uh, she was tasked with pushing this stockpile of diamonds that De Beers had, and they couldn’t push them because nobody was buying diamonds. If you can believe it, just 100 years ago, nobody made the connection between diamonds and anniversary and love and commitment and proposals and all this stuff. And she came up with a diamond is forever, and they used that without any company logo. There were some legal reasons that they couldn’t even put their logo in the U. S. because of some trade restrictions, but never mind the technicalities.

Udi Ledergor:
The brilliance of what happened is that they convinced an entire generation, and for the last 100 years, um, we went from having a diamond in about 10% of engagement rings to having diamond in 85% of engagement rings. If that’s not category success, I don’t know what category success is. And, and the brilliance of how they did it is that they pushed the category. They didn’t say buy De Beers. They said a diamond is forever. And they put out buying guides. And they created the 4 C’s of diamond evaluation. So people could figure out how to buy a diamond and how to choose a diamond and how much money to spend on the diamond, all that crazy 2-month salary rule that was created by De Beers as part of their marketing campaign.

Udi Ledergor:
It was just plucked out of thin air. And so if they could do that and change the entire industry of how people propose to each other in one of the most important moments of their life, um, all of us can, can probably take a few lessons and, and do that as well. And so for, for 2 years, we put revenue intelligence in a much bigger font in all of our advertising materials, and it was powered by Gong. Just like in later years, the Diamond is Forever campaign evolved to De Beers, but, but it was always subtle. It was always, this is almost a public service that we’re doing. The beers almost appeared like, you know, some sort of consumer agency service, just helping you understand how to purchase diamonds for this most important moment of your life. So Gong was there to help you understand how revenue intelligence is going to cure all of your revenue problems. And, and we did that in a way that really helped promote us as an authority and avoided a lot of the friction of when you’re putting your brand in people’s face, they feel like they’re being sold to, and we try to avoid that.

Udi Ledergor:
By educating everyone on why revenue intelligence is the pro— is the solution to your revenue problems. And it happened to be powered by Gong. I’ll pause there.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh my, pause right there, Rudy. Uh, that, there’s so much to unpack there. I love it. Okay. First of all, one, um, you guys threw Sheena to the fucking wolves. Like you, like, like this poor woman, I imagine she was earlier stage in her career. Like come up with the freaking, you know, category redesign.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Um, no pressure.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
No pressure. Like, two, who is Sheena? And I’d like to have you and her back on the show, uh, so that we can talk through, like, go, like, unfurl that in detail if you’re up for it. Do you want to give her a shout out? Like, who, like, who’s, who should we follow on LinkedIn here?

Udi Ledergor:
Yes, Sheena Badani. There’s only one of them on LinkedIn as far as I know. So Sheena Badani, she was, she was on my team for many years. She evolved that role of category creation that then merged with product marketing and she went on to do great things for Gong for many, many years. Today she’s got her own business. She’s doing B2B events and other stuff that she’s crushing as always. So she’s a fantastic and very interesting woman to speak to.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay, Sheena Badati. Let’s all, everybody just go and like love bomb her on LinkedIn. Send her a message saying, hey, heard about you on the Unchurned podcast. She doesn’t even know what we are. Like, you know, congratulations on creating this amazing category. And then we’re going to get her on the show through that. Um, you talked about something at the very end that struck a chord with me is you talked about it was, um, revenue intelligence, you know, 72-point font, you know, powered by Gong. It wasn’t Gong revenue intelligence.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And I think there’s a few purple cows in Gong’s arsenal. One of which is your color of your logo and your brand, right? Maybe not by accident, but it’s the category design and it’s also your content. And we do want to go into your content because this is something that Lauren and I and the team are thinking very intentionally about. As you know, we just launched our Unchurned Substack, unchurned.substack.com or whatever. You can correct me on the domain, Um, Lauren. but, um, but the other, the other thing, uh, that’s been a purple cow for us at Gainsight and Lauren, you just like, this is timely because you just mentioned this yesterday. I had never even thought about it, but it dawned on me like, oh, you’re, you’re, you’re right, is Pulse, is our user conference. But it, it’s not a user conference.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It is the community conference for customer success for post-sales. It has become larger than life. I mean, Gainsight has so many things that it can kind of rest its laurels on, but like Pulse may be the biggest. So Lauren, when you hear Udi say giant font revenue intelligence, small font powered by Gong, it reminds me of giant font Pulse for the community, small font powered by Gainsight. Do you remember back in the early days of, of going through that creation, you know, in those choices that you made?

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
This is one of my favorite fun facts about Gainsight. So, Pulse actually predates Gainsight as it’s known today. When we were formerly known as Jbera Software, which is the company that I signed my employment letter with, the first order of business was, okay, yeah, we should think about changing the name because Jbera Software doesn’t really roll off the tongue, but also we need to get everybody together. There’s like this energy around the people who, at least in the Bay Area, really cared about customer success. So how can we all put them all in one room? Let’s, you know, run a conference. Why not? We’re only a month in, we might as well try our hand at that. So we launched a website to get people to sign up and internally we were calling Pulse Project Pulse. So that name just sort of stuck.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
And then we opened registration and about a month and a half into registration, we finally had changed the name to Gainsight, the company name. So then we started adding that little like brought to you by Gainsight, or the premier sponsor is Gainsight. So it was very lightly threaded, especially in those early years. And when our Chief Customer Officer at the time, Dan Steinman, took the stage in 2013 for the first ever Pulse conference, he said, I don’t work at Gainsight today. I work— I’m here to like, you know, just help the community of customer success and the people who care about what we’re doing here and, and their customers. And he repeated that phrase every time he took the stage at Pulse. So, for us, and it’s really important to me to like withhold the, the, um, the focus of Pulse to be on people in the industry who have interesting stories to share, who are really trying every day to further what they do, either as a CSM, as a director of CS, as somebody in CS Ops now, and now with community leaders, customer education leaders. People who care about the intersection between product and CS.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
So yes, I love that Pulse actually came before Gainsight. And still to this day, you know, thinking of the purple cow analogy that Udi writes about in his book, it’s not just Pulse for us that is our purple cow. It’s really like all of the events that we do. And that’s, I think, one of the biggest differentiators that helped us make the category of CS so successful in probably the first 3 to 4 years of Gainsight’s time. So, we were doing Pulse, we were doing Pulse Local, we were, uh, we started doing Pulse Europe, our European conference, 2 years into Gainsight. Um, we made sure to bring the goodness of our dinners and lunches. We just needed to get people together to share stories. And the great thing about people in customer success is they’re quite personable.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
They love to connect with other humans. It’s just by nature part of their job. So you get them in a room together and it just was so magical and we learned a lot. We were listening to what people were saying and how they were tinkering with their craft, and we turned a lot of that community-generated thought leadership into our thought leadership that Gainsight shared. Yes, to say, hey, you know, big font, customer success, little font, this white paper is written by Gainsight.. So a lot of parallels to what Udi shared, uh, with the Gong story.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Lauren, do you remember back to the category creation days? Was it as concerted an effort as what Udi described, or was it the category already defined then?

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
I mean, it wasn’t necessarily a concerted effort in the way that Gong experienced. I think customer success, the companies that were attaching themselves to that and, and hiring people to fulfill that job, namely through Salesforce. Salesforce was a big pioneer in adopting the CS title. We, we did latch onto that, but where we struggled was with analysts and getting the folks at Gartner and Forrester to take that category seriously. It wasn’t actually until I think 2 years ago when Gartner released their first ever Magic Quadrant for customer success management platforms, and we, we rejoiced internally in the office. We’re like, oh, we finally did it. It’s only taken 10 years. Um, but yeah, I think we benefited by, um, just more acceptance around the customer success term.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
I think now our, our challenge is to really prove that customer success exists beyond B2B tech. Uh, we did a great job in B2B SaaS. We’ve been successful in B2B tech, but now we need to kind of go out into other industries and verticals and prove that as well.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. You and I are both big fans of the content that Udi and his team have created over the years. We talk about Gong Labs and we’d love to parallel some of that stuff for Gainsight and the trove of data that we sit on, um, in very secure, sanitized, and, you know, data privacy-friendly ways. But, um, I’m going to put you on the spot here, Lauren. Like you’ve got the wizard in front of you. What do you want to know from Udi about how to create an amazing content engine?

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Yeah, Udi, something that you wrote in your books struck a chord with me and you were basically saying you want to create content that your audience actually will want to read about. And I’m just curious, like how you go about that process of getting into the heads of your audience and the different personas, because we now we’re catering to, um, a lot of different types of roles within the customer success, kind of like customer journey and lifecycle. And it’s definitely an exercise that we can try our hand at, but I’m curious, like how, how did you approach that at Gong and kind of keep raising the bar with your content?

Udi Ledergor:
I think you touch on a really crucial element that so many content teams miss and continue to miss. And here’s my very obvious solution that worked at Gong. And it’s obvious in hindsight in many ways, I’ll admit that. But if I look at the first 3 years at Gong, the content team was comprised of Chris Orlov. He was creating all the content. For the next 3 years, Devin Reed. Led the content team and quickly grew it as well as we expanded beyond written blogs to lots of video and the podcast and other, other things. Here’s what they both have in common and I don’t.

Udi Ledergor:
They are both ex-salespeople. They understand the domain of our audience. They could start a blog post in a credible way with a sentence like this. It was the last day of the quarter. I was $150K short on my quota. I didn’t know if I was going to make it. Then I had an idea and then they kept going from there. If you’re a salesperson, you’re already hooked to what they’re writing because you’ve been in that situation.

Udi Ledergor:
It’s like a thriller. You can smell the authenticity of it and you want to know what they did next because you might learn from them. I can’t write like that about the life of a salesperson because I was never a salesperson. I don’t want to invent that stuff up. I wouldn’t know how to. And if you look at a lot of just mediocre content out there, It’s these so-called professional content writers that maybe write about cybersecurity in the morning, agriculture in the afternoon, marketing content in the evening. It might be well-written content, but it lacks that authenticity and credibility that I talk about. Chris Orlov was not a professional writer.

Udi Ledergor:
Both of them, by the way, fun fact, both Chris and Devin got their first ever marketing job on my team. So I was confident enough that I could teach a good subject matter expert who could share real authentic, credible stories. I could teach them how to turn their content into part of a demand gen funnel and how do you get the people to convert from unknown leads to known leads. And we can talk about those mechanisms, but I can teach that to anyone in a few hours. I cannot teach them or myself. How to sound like a credible salesperson. And so I think that is the starting point that if you miss, there’s probably not a lot of hope of getting it right unless you’re in a super kind of non-technical domain that you can hire someone who quickly learns the domain and becomes so proficient that they actually sound credible. If you look at the best content that was created out there at HubSpot, it was folks like Ryan Bonici who was creating content for HubSpot.

Udi Ledergor:
He was a marketer. He understood marketers. Dave Gerhardt did this at Drift for many years, right? He was a marketer writing to product marketers. They got it. We read his content because it was authentic. And then we get the Chris Orlovs and the Devin Reeds creating content for salespeople. And guess what? They eat it up because they’re salespeople. So I think that’s the number one differentiator between teams that are creating really kick-ass content that people want to read and say, oh, this is actually helpful.

Udi Ledergor:
This is someone who understands me, who’s maybe a couple of steps ahead of me in their career versus getting some kid who wants to make it big in content, but they’re trying to write content for people twice their age and 20 years further down their career than they are. What are they going to teach them?

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Yeah. What made Chris and Devin want to join marketing? Like what, what drew them over to the dark side?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So clearly they’re going to make more money in marketing than in sales, right?

Udi Ledergor:
Absolutely not. I remember that. So fun fact, I hope Devin doesn’t kill me for sharing this, but we had a really fun conversation when, um, when Devin was ready to move on. He had been in sales. Uh, he was at companies like Eventbrite and then at Gong doing— he was one of our founding mid-market salespeople, one of the first two mid-market salespeople at Gong. That was a lot of pressure, as you can imagine. And at some point he started moonlighting for marketing. He came to Chris and said, hey, Chris.

Udi Ledergor:
What can I help you with? And Chris said, well, I’ve got this article. I’ve just got a skeleton, but you want to try fleshing it out? And Devin said, yes, give me, I want to do it. And so he started doing this for a few months. And then Devin heard that we were planning our first customer event or industry conference, Celebrate. And he said that that was our Pulse. And he said, um, he just met me at the reception area and he said, Udi, I heard we’re putting a conference together. Do you need an MC? And I said, yeah, you got the job. And so he was the MC of our first customer event.

Udi Ledergor:
And so he started embedding himself, infiltrating marketing. And at some point, uh, when he heard that Chris wanted to move over to the dark side and go back to sales to lead a sales team, Devin said, I want Chris’s job. And, and we made it happen. And then the, the funny part of the story that, that, uh, I’m sharing without Devin’s permission is uh, that, I, I went to HR and we looked at his And, salary. and, uh, of course, as a salesperson, he had a pretty fat commission, uh, above his salary. And I said, Devin, you’re going to have to take a hit on your salary. Um, so base is going to go up a little bit, but the, um, variable part is coming way down. And he said, without thinking twice, he said, I’ll take it.

Udi Ledergor:
He just was so relieved not to be under the pressure of the, the commission structure anymore and the quota, uh, knowing that he would probably crush his marketing goals, which he did, of course. So, I’m guessing on average his OTE did not change much, maybe even went up a little bit, but he didn’t have to worry about hitting quota so often. So, if you ask him why they moved over, he probably earned a little bit less or around the same, but it was a lot less pressure and he was doing something he loved.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Great. Okay, I can take that. I can go and talk to the people in customer success. Anybody feel like writing?

Udi Ledergor:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, I mean, Lauren, I was going to ask you, like, are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Let’s just start calling people out on the podcast. Like you, then me. Like, go. Who’s, who’s our, who’s our person?

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Well, I want to get Brady writing.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh, Brady Bloom?

Udi Ledergor:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Our product owner for Staircase. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But Brady’s so freaking busy. But he was Kalpana. Kalpana would be great. We’re just going to keep calling people out here.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Somebody else. But I mean, Brent would be like the one that we, I mean, we’ve already got him on our hit list, right? Um, but Brent Kremke is our CCO. Uh, Brent, Brent, I know you listen to this podcast, man. So, you know, we’re going to talk.

Udi Ledergor:
There just really is no substitution to that real life experience. If someone has been in the trenches, has been a customer manager, a customer success manager themselves, and working with customer success managers, and they understand the lingo, and they understand what are really the top 5 things that are driving them nuts. Like you and I couldn’t guess that if we didn’t do that job.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
You’re right. We’ve been thinking a lot about the evolution of Gainsight’s brand. And another thing that struck out or struck me when I was reading your book was how you were personifying Gong and you were trying to think about what kind of person is, are they gonna be? And you landed on mature and friendly, you know, at the time. What’s some advice that you could share about how whether it be, you know, us for Gainsight or anybody who’s listening, if you’re thinking about your company’s brand and how you can make that into kind of like a, a human that you can bounce ideas off of, I, I’m just very curious how, especially now with AI and every company is either trying to be AI first, AI driven, AI forward, AI native, what, what have you, like how, how did you maybe make this the newest evolution into the AI category that you described earlier? And how has that tweaked how you have personified the Gong brand?

Udi Ledergor:
Yeah, so we, what you’re referring to is a process we went through pretty early on, which is figuring out who are we if Gong were a human being. And I think the, the problem with skipping that is that you, A, lack consistency because if you’re, especially if you’re using freelance writers and you’ve got staff writers that come in and come out. They’re all assuming and making up different tone of voice and how serious they want to be. And are they writing in first, second, or third person? And is it funny or is it serious? And they’re all making it up if you don’t have guidelines for them. So one thing that you gain by going through this deliberate process is getting some consistency. Two, when you think about your brand as a person, you have to make some of these subtle decisions that you might not otherwise make. Um, am I going to be a funny guy? Uh, how funny? What do I joke about? What I don’t joke about? Um, am I one of the boys or the girls? So I’m speaking maybe in second person, talking about a you, or am I keeping it like— am I talking down to you like, like, like some almighty, I don’t know, big, big brain that’s figured it all out? And you, you see sometimes content that companies create where you wonder Who approved that? Like, did someone sit and say, this is what I want to sound like? And I’m going to give them the credit and the benefit of the doubt. They probably just never went through that process and never figured out what they want to sound like.

Udi Ledergor:
So this is what came out. And, and so we went through that process and, uh, again, to cut it really, really short, we started off where many, many companies start, which is we want to be a trusted authority in our field because who doesn’t want that? Nobody ever goes out saying, I don’t want to be trusted. I don’t want anyone to take me seriously as an authority. No, they all start by saying, I want to be an authority, but here’s where a lot of them veer right too quickly and they confuse being an authority with being very stuffy and boring and condescending because they want to sound like this all-important brand. You have to do this and you should always do that. And that becomes boring and condescending. But we decided we want to pair that trustworthiness with being a friendly guy or gal that lets her hair down or unbuttons their unties their tie and we’re just standing at a bar and we’re offering you advice and being helpful, not being obnoxious, talking about ourselves the whole time, because then you’re going to rush off to the other side of the room, but just being helpful and offering you advice. And so if you read a lot of our early day content, that’s the vibe that I hope comes out of it, of this is just a friendly guy who analyzed a bunch of sales calls, is now telling you that if you open a sales call by saying How have you been? You’re going to get a much longer call than if you ask, how are you? Because how have you been is a bit of a pattern disrupt and makes you think that you know this person already.

Udi Ledergor:
And we looked at the data and we saw that that works. Or the, one of the best performing pieces we ever produced showing that salespeople who swear and curse on their sales calls have an 8% higher win rate. And that’s something hilarious and also very effective. For salespeople, they— it puts an end to these discussions of should we occasionally use the S-word or an F-bomb. Yes, you absolutely should, especially if your prospect is using this first. Use that as a mirroring technique. It’s very, very effective. But not every company would even consider putting out that content because it might sound non-professional and like very audacious to even write about this topic, let alone recommend using this type of language in a professional setting.

Udi Ledergor:
But for Gong, it was perfectly on brand and people went berserk over it. They loved it. It went viral. They all commented using their most colorful vocabulary. It was picked up by fastcompany.com. Radio stations called me to interview me about it because it was really exciting, juicy content that was on brand for us, but might not be for anyone else. So to wrap it up, to answer your question, Lauren, I, I I highly recommend this exercise or workshop figuring out who our brand is if we were to describe them as a human being, which is a bit of a tricky exercise, but there are people who can facilitate this. I’m sure you can look up formats online if you want to do this, guide this yourself.

Udi Ledergor:
And once you know who you are, everything else derives from that, from the colors and fonts of your logo to the tone and voice of your content to what kind of event experience are you going to create? Is it going to be fine dining? Is it going to be taco truck? Well, that depends on what your brand is. Who are you? Are you a taco person? Are you escargot person? It’s really, really important to figure this out because it creates a more holistic brand experience with everything you do, from content to brand events to category. And I think that consistency compounds very quickly and allows you to make faster moves and grow more quickly while your competitors are still figuring it out and zigzagging and their booth looks different from their site, which looks different from their content. And, uh, it’s just not creating a holistic, consistent brand experience.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So much more to talk about. Udi, I cannot wait to do the sub-series, the pod of Unchurned, like Unchurned slash Courageous Marketing. We’ve got like 10 more episodes in us, right? Yeah. We’ve all got the book out here.

Udi Ledergor:
Hey, where’s the book?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Courageous Marketing. All right, hold on. Screenshot here. There we go.

Udi Ledergor:
Clearly have exquisite literary taste.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yes. Um, thank you for being— Udi Ledergor, um, CMO, former and, and, and Chief Evangelist Officer at Gong. Lauren Ulrich, my dear colleague, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Gainsight. Thank you both for being on the program.

Lauren Olereich [Co-host]:
Thank you.

Udi Ledergor:
Thanks so much for having me.