
Episode 169 | May 05, 2025
Gong's Udi Ledergor shares why bold, courageous marketing—not best practices—is the secret to building iconic brands and winning customer loyalty.
What if the very thing holding you back from extraordinary marketing success is simply following the rules too closely?
That’s the bold message Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist at Gong and author of Courageous Marketing, shares in the latest Insights Unlocked episode. In conversation with UserTesting CMO Johann Wrede, Udi explains why courageous marketing—not tired best practices—is the key to standing out, winning trust, and driving real business results.
If you're ready to break free from the "sea of sameness," this is the episode you’ve been waiting for.
One of the most striking ideas Udi brings to the table is that best practices can often do more harm than good.
"By the time something becomes a best practice, everybody’s doing it. It becomes a sea of sameness," Udi said.
Following what everyone else is doing leads to ordinary results. If brands want to differentiate and achieve extraordinary outcomes, they need to be willing to break from convention—and that requires courageous marketing.
Instead of chasing trends, Udi urges marketers to deeply understand their customer needs, their competitive landscape, and then craft a crisp, unique point of view that truly resonates.
ON-DEMAND WEBINAR
Courage doesn’t just happen—it’s built intentionally. Udi explains that one of his secrets at Gong was creating an environment where marketers had permission to take creative risks.
Udi's advice for leaders looking to nurture bold marketing strategies:
"Once you create that environment, creativity starts flowing. That’s when people start paying attention because now you’re different," Udi said.
This philosophy helped Gong build a brand that has become one of the most recognizable names in B2B sales tech today.
While creativity is critical, Udi emphasizes that marketing and sales alignment is the foundation that enables great marketing to truly drive business results.
"Marketing’s job is to make sales easier. If you do that, you're already ahead of 95% of marketers," Udi shared.
He explained that marketing leaders must tie their efforts directly to metrics that matter to sales—like qualified pipeline and revenue—not vanity metrics like MQLs that sales teams often find irrelevant.
Tips for strengthening marketing and sales trust:
When marketing operates with empathy for sales—and both teams aim at the same revenue goals—magic happens.
Many marketers shy away from bold brand initiatives because they're harder to tie directly to ROI. Udi’s take? That fear holds companies back.
He offered a smart approach to balancing risk and measurement:
"If a campaign works off the charts, you won't need a dashboard to prove it—you'll feel it everywhere," Udi noted.
A key example he shared was how a major sponsorship on Michael Lewis’s Against the Rules podcast led directly to a measurable spike in demos—validating a bold brand move many marketers might hesitate to make.
If you’re a marketing leader with limited budget or a small team, Udi’s advice is clear: Focus is everything.
Rather than spreading your resources thin across many marketing channels, pick one channel where your ideal customer profile (ICP) hangs out—and go deep.
At Gong, that focus was LinkedIn. They studied the algorithm, optimized content for engagement, and dominated their niche.
How to win with a focused channel strategy:
Udi even shared a fun story where his team created a "Where’s Waldo" style post featuring Gong’s bulldog mascot Bruno—specifically to optimize for LinkedIn’s dwell-time algorithm. The result? Huge engagement and brand amplification.
ON-DEMAND WEBINAR
Another critical theme from the conversation: Content quality matters more than content volume.
Rather than investing heavily in paid ads early on, Udi’s team focused on producing organic content so good people wanted to share it.
The Gong Labs series, for example, offered sales reps data-driven, actionable insights into their own behavior—like why swearing strategically on calls could boost close rates.
"Would you pay to access your content? If not, why would anyone else?" Udi challenged.
By prioritizing helpful, unique, and highly relevant content, Gong earned trust, built loyalty, and created organic momentum that paid far more dividends than traditional lead-gen campaigns.
Udi closed the conversation with powerful advice tailored for marketers at different career stages:
"You have to understand what your customer’s top three problems are—and solve one of them. That's how you become the hero," Udi said.
Today’s marketing landscape is more competitive and more crowded than ever. Simply being good isn’t enough anymore—you have to be courageously different.
By embracing creativity, aligning closely with sales, taking smart brand risks, and relentlessly focusing on customer problems, marketers can break out of the noise—and build brands that endure.
As Udi perfectly summed up, "If you want extraordinary results, you need to give yourself permission to do something different."