Episode 169 | May 05, 2025
Stand out with courageous marketing strategies
Gong's Udi Ledergor shares why bold, courageous marketing—not best practices—is the secret to building iconic brands and winning customer loyalty.
Why courageous marketing drives standout business results
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.
Best practices are holding marketers back
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.
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Tactical (and practical) tips to get fast feedback for better marketing
How to foster courageous marketing inside your team
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:
- Hire curious, creative people—and trust them
- Create a "permission to be different" culture
- Celebrate smart risks, even if they don’t always pay off
- Shift focus from best practices to customer-first innovation
"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.
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Marketing and sales alignment is non-negotiable
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:
- Measure success using sales-qualified opportunities or equivalent, not just marketing KPIs such as MQLs
- Celebrate wins that feel like wins to the sales team
- Frame brand investments as tools to make sales easier
- Collaborate closely on customer insights and messaging
When marketing operates with empathy for sales—and both teams aim at the same revenue goals—magic happens.
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Investing in brand marketing without losing ROI
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:
- Create a dedicated marketing experiments budget. Allocate 5–10% of your budget for testing new brand initiatives, without needing constant approval.
- Use creative measurement strategies. Udi shared how he used Gong to track mentions of big brand moments, like podcast sponsorships, within customer conversations.
- Focus on preventive strategy. Channels that work today won’t work forever—brand investments now create future demand.
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"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.
Start with one channel—and master it
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:
- Identify where your audience naturally spends time
- Learn the platform’s rules and quirks better than anyone else
- Create high-value content tailored to that audience
- Measure obsessively and iterate quickly
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
Unlock higher conversions: understanding what users really want
Great content beats big budgets
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.
Advice for marketers at every stage of their career
Udi closed the conversation with powerful advice tailored for marketers at different career stages:
- Early career: Focus on learning, not titles. Work for leaders who will mentor you and help you grow.
- Mid-career: Stay curious. Avoid falling into "copy and paste" marketing. Cross-pollinate ideas from outside your industry.
- Senior leaders: Double down on your strengths. Hire to fill your weaknesses. Craft roles and career moves that align with what you love and do best.
"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.
Courage is the new best practice
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.
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As Udi perfectly summed up, "If you want extraordinary results, you need to give yourself permission to do something different."
Resources & Links:
- Connect with Udi on LinkedIn
- Udi’s new book: Courageous Marketing
- Udi’s website
- Gong
- Connect with Johann Wrede on LinkedIn
- Making the case for content testing in your organization: This webinar discusses how to advocate for content testing within your organization, emphasizing the importance of customer-centric content strategies.
- UserTesting use case guidebook: Explore various use cases demonstrating how businesses utilize user insights to enhance customer experiences, reflecting on innovative approaches to marketing and sales alignment.
- Common usability testing questions: This blog post provides insights into crafting effective usability testing questions, a crucial aspect of understanding customer needs and improving marketing strategies.
