Agentic Attention Strategy — Fireside Chat with Udi Ledergor & Russell Scherwin

Julia Nimchinski:
And excited to welcome Russell Sherman, Facilitator at Force Management, ex-CMO at IBM Watson Commerce, and Udi Ladrigor, Chief Evangelist at Gong, with this phenomenal book, Outrageous Marketing. What a treat. Welcome to the show, Russell and Udi. What’s in your agenda CoS? What tools are you using? OODI, Gong. What else?

Udi Ledergor:
Oh my god, you don’t need anything if you already have gone. But seriously, Gong has evolved in the last 18 months so much beyond the revenue AI system that salespeople know, and now if you’re a marketer, a product leader, an account manager that you’re not using it, you’re absolutely missing out. I know we’re going to talk about that a lot more.
Glad to be here, Russell, and thanks, Julia, for the intro.

Julia Nimchinski:
Thank you so much, Russell, take it away.

Russell Scherwin:
Awesome, awesome. And, Udi, so great to chat with you. Yeah, I’m excited to get into this. I got this here book, Courageous Marketing, I read a bit ago, so can’t wait to dive in with you, Udi. Udi, if you wouldn’t mind just giving the audience an introduction beyond the fact that you’re a great author.

Udi Ledergor:
Of course. So I’m Udi, originally from Tel Aviv, Israel. I’ve been living in San Francisco for the last 8 years. I’ve… led 5 marketing teams at different startups. For the last 10 years, I’ve been with Gong, where I was employee number 13 and marketer number 1. I led Gong’s marketing team for the first 7 or so years, growing my team from 1 to 60 marketers.
And seeing our customers grow from 11 to, I think it’s about 5,000 now. In the last 3 years, I’ve been the chief evangelist at Gong, which means I get to do a lot of great speaking opportunities, like, to our audience here today.

Russell Scherwin:
I love that, I love that. It’s great once you, you know, have the operational control that you can just get out and talk and communicate without the overhead of having a team. For those who don’t know me, Russell Sherwin, from… originally from Jamaica, Queens, go St. John’s.
I’m currently helping clients with their go-to-market strategy, execution, and messaging while teaching in the MBA program at UGA, and really focusing on being a great dad. Previously, I’ve been a Chief Revenue Officer, Vice President of Sales for PE-backed organizations, private equity-backed, and as well as the Chief Marketing Officer for Watson Commerce at IBM.
As well as, technically, I was one of the architects who built a product called WebSphere back in the 90s, which was a blast. Getting into it with you, Udi. I know you like to talk about the concept of AI slop. I want to preface this or set some context with another great book that maybe some of y’all have read. It’s called positioning. So in this book, I’m going to quote Jack Reese and Al Trout.
They write that today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the kind of advertising that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise. They speak about an over-communicated society. They did this in 1972. 1972. Now, let’s fast forward to today, AI marketing slop, and you discuss, Udi, the importance of the human voice in this world.
When you say… when you… when you say that. What are you seeing that concerns you?

Udi Ledergor:
What I’m seeing is that there’s no more barriers to the quantity of content that we can create. That used to be a barrier. We used to have to pay a pretty penny for good content writers to create our content, or less than a pretty penny for bad content writers to create content. Now it’s practically free. You hit a button, and you can just get content for days.
And that’s a problem, because… we’re all lazy by nature, and we want the easy way out, and we’re always looking for a hack, and I think lots of folks are using that to create a lot of bad content. And not only are they making the bigger problem even greater, because now it’s hard to make out what should I be focusing on? What should I be reading?
They’re also making it harder for their audience to discover what they really have to say because of the sheer quantity of dad content happening.

Russell Scherwin:
Yeah, so… so there’s so much content. I mean, the barriers to entry are nil. Anybody can create content, which means there’s a lot of bad… even far more noise out there. So, what can great marketers do To rise above the noise, when it’s so easy to fall back into just bad, bad habits.

Udi Ledergor:
You know, the answer is so… old, like in your 1972 book, that… that I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but it has to be Quality over quantity? And it has to have the human voice coming through it. I don’t care about your M dashes, and I don’t care about your perfect grammar. Like, do all of that if you want to.
I swear I wrote the 40,000 words in my book, and there are probably a few M dashes in there, because they actually make sense sometimes. None of them were written by ChatGPT, so I’m not afraid of the M dashes. I’m afraid of everything sounding So robotic, so agreeable, that it doesn’t… stop you in your tracks for a moment.
I say this often on content marketing, if you’re writing something, as often content writers do, that is so agreeable that you’ve wiped out anything that could be the slightly bit offensive to anyone.
you’ve probably made it so bland that nobody’s gonna get excited about it, and that is literally the only way that AI knows how to write, because if you think about how it was created, it reads all the content out there.
gets trained on it, and now you’re asking it to write about a topic that it knows something about, it will just autocomplete words that have already been written in a perfectly grammatical, sensible way. But it’s so agreeable, so bland, so trivial that nobody’s going to get excited about it. So, let’s talk about practicalities.
people want to listen to what you have to say as a person or as a brand if you have something interesting, new, novel, and exciting to say. They don’t need you to tell them something they could have Googled or they’ve read on 20 different news feeds and newsletters that they’re already on. And if you’re using ChatGPT or Claw or Gemini, we love them all.
If you’re using them to create your content and ideate. You’re giving them what they can read in 20 other places. You’re completely wasting your real estate on social media, or a newsletter, or on a stage where you’re speaking.
Instead, if you actually have a brilliant new idea, and I can explain how to systematize that, because we don’t all wake up in the morning feeling like Hemingway, and we’ve got this muse, and we can start writing poetry. You can systematize a lot of this. that is when you might actually command attention.
That is when someone will read it and say, whoa, I’ve never thought of it that way, or that’s a really hot take, I’m going to share that, it’s going to make me look cool, it’s going to make me look informed. So how do we do that?
So, over the last 25 years, I’ve created, and my teams have created thousands of pieces of content, and in my head, I’ve kind of arranged them in this three… Step hierarchy of what makes truly amazing content, what makes very good content, and what makes okay content with some potential. So, here’s my lettergoer ranking of content.
So, right up at the top is if you have exclusive insights that you can package in an actionable way that your audience can do something with this. They can… you can make their day easier, you can help them achieve their goals, you can help them tackle their challenges. Here’s some examples.
If you follow… if you follow Peter Walker from Carta, he is putting out there absolutely golden nuggets every single day that interest founders. and equity holders and advisors. For those who don’t know, Carta is an equity management platform.
Peter is their head of insights, and they have these exclusive insights because they manage thousands of companies cap sheets on their platform, they can tell you, how multiple founders or co-founders typically split up the equity between them. Don’t you want to know that? I want to know that, even if I’m not currently a founder.
If I’m an advisor at startups, Peter has put out comparison charts showing how much equity advisors get at each stage of the company that they might join. What do the first 10 employees typically get in equity? You want to know this stuff. You want to know if you’re being paid fairly, if you’re the one giving out equity to others. You want to know if you’re treating your, early employees, fairly.
So this is the type of insights that helps people achieve their goals, helps them solve challenges, and is truly exciting because you can’t get this anywhere else, not to mention that Peter wraps it up in a really easy-to-consume, fun-to-consume way. So that’s one example. Another example, of course, is from Gong Labs.
For the last 10 years, we’ve been putting out content that shows sales professionals what actually works in sales. How should you open the conversation to keep the caller online? How should you end with next steps that make sense? How do you get that meeting booked without being too pushy? when you should swear on a call to increase your win rates.
All these things are fun, entertaining, educational, and genuinely useful. ChatGPT could not come up with any of them before Gong put them out, because that was the first time they came out. So that is the highest level of content that I can think of, which is unique insights packaged in an actionable way.
The second rung on that ladder, right beneath that, is if you don’t have those unique insights from your systems, like CARDA or Gong, what you can do is you can collect them in a survey. Now, everyone can run a survey. The bar is very low, you just have to do the work.
And if you run a great survey, you can come out with the state of AI, or the state of revenue, or the state of marketing, or whatever report you want to do. for that audience, and here’s my tip on doing these surveys, start with the press release.
What do you want the press release that you release on the day that the report comes out to say, and then go back and ask the questions that will get you that sensational news. Here’s an example for you. At a different company many years ago, I ran a survey on salaries of SAP using… professionals using SAP.
And I knew that a good headline would be, if I find that the gender gap persists between men and women’s salaries. So I made sure to ask that question, collect that information, and unfortunately, I found what I suspected. There was, like, a 30% gap with women earning less than men. So I could use that as my headline, and it made the news. So that’s the second level of content.
And then very quickly, the third one is, I’m a guy with an opinion. So that is the third level of content. Now, everyone has an opinion, and without data, like in the first two rungs that I talked about, you’re just another guy with an opinion. If you want to get news and earned media with your opinion. It really has to be out there.
You can’t just agree with everything that’s happening around you, because then you’re just another one of thousands of people with that opinion. Think of… Trump, think of Elon Musk, those are people with a very strong opinion that is so out there that they keep getting on the news every day.
Now, I’m not saying I endorse them or I don’t endorse them, that’s up to every one of the people listening to us to decide for themselves, the point I’m making that you can’t argue with is that they make it to the news headlines every single day.
And that is because they’re not just with this, I guess, agreeable opinion that nobody can argue with or nobody can find offensive, they’re almost doing the opposite. They’re saying something that’s so offensive to so many people that we have to be talking about it, whether or not we like giving them the attention or not. So, to summarize.
unique, exclusive insights, make… package them in an actionable way, that’s the highest level. Second rundown is run a survey, collect primary data that others have not gone to the effort of collecting, and then package that in a useful way.
Number three, you can have an opinion if you don’t have the data, but make sure your opinion is so different, such a hot take, that people will actually be forced to talk about it.

Russell Scherwin:
I love that, Oodie. And let’s, you know, Udi’s three steps. Number one. Exclusive insights, and I love that, because I still quote, when I do sales trainings, the, you know, the percentage speak time that a great, successful rep has. I mean, you talk about great content, I’m sticking with that one. You produced that 6 years ago, probably.
collecting insights via surveys, and perhaps, you know, lead the witness through the questions you’re asking by knowing what the outcome needs to be, and then put an original opinion out. When I really synthesize what you say, Udi. It boils down to a juxtaposition around humans being thoughtful or insightful or provocative with something original.
Versus what AI is meant to do, which is regress to the mean. Literally, that’s the algorithm, as you know, behind AI. It’s about regression to the mean, which is never going to be provocative or insightful. So, what do you believe that humans can do, and should do. That robots should not be doing, and what should humans stop doing?

Udi Ledergor:
Humans… can come up with an original way of looking at something that hasn’t been done yet. I think AI will get there at some point, but the state of the art is that AI is usually regurgitating what has already been done and thought of and said. And so, for now, we have the advantage of out-thinking AI when it comes to the original ideas.
If I had asked AI to come up with an original idea for Gong content based on what’s already out there, it could not have come up with the idea of checking how salespeople swearing on sales calls affect their win rates before Gong put that out there, because that was a very original idea, and AI had nowhere to extract that from.
once we put it out there, of course, it’s going to suggest it, but now it’s not an original idea again, so you’ve got to move on. I think AI is great at taking your content and reformatting it, and repurposing it, and regurgitating it in all the different ways that we need it to.
If I write a 2,000-piece blog post, and I want to chop it up and optimize it for 4 different social platforms, and I want to create a podcast script from it, and I want to create an e-book. AI is amazing at doing that. You cannot compete with it in speed, and accuracy, and that’s wonderful. But here’s the thing, going back to… What are we humans… better at.
We’re better at making mistakes and spotting mistakes. Every salesperson worth their salt knows that the best way to get a lead to confirm their home address, if you want to send them a package. is to send them a mistaken address.
Like, even if you know for sure where they live, Russell, if I know you live on 400 Market Street, I will send you saying, hey, Russell, I’m sending out a package, the address I have down for you is 500 Market Street, is that correct? You are almost guaranteed to respond to that, because that mistake really bugs you in the eye, and a computer would not have made that mistake.
You know it’s human, and you want to correct me. You cannot overcome that urge. If I send you the right address, you might ignore it because you don’t really want to get a package from me, but if I send the wrong address, you will correct me. And, people have seen that work in every context.
Like, if you want someone to answer a question you have on an online forum, rather than asking the question, which might solicit just a few responses, write a wrong opinion and just sit back and watch how many people stand there to correct you, because we can’t stand saying something wrong like that.
And that is a unique human quality, when we understand that, when we know what aggravates people enough to get them to respond, we can make that happen. AI doesn’t do that well. By design.

Russell Scherwin:
I love that. So, for what humans should be focusing on are… is the creative aspects, which we’re still ahead of the machines, and we should pretty much be outsourcing the production of those ideas, the slicing and dicing into many short-form, long forms. Great, great answer, great guidance, Udi. I’m gonna pivot a little bit, and I’m going to tease out something that you shared with me privately.
And the question being, you know, what mistakes do you see people making with AI, and how can you kind of reverse that and correct that? And I’m thinking about an example you gave where sometimes people try to ask AI for originality, and you use that against themselves, use that against the machine.

Udi Ledergor:
So this is a great example I stole from my friend Kyle Lacey, the CMO at Toshibo, and it goes like this. Let’s say we’re getting a team together in a room to come up with our next billboard campaign. And, the natural thing for teams to do at this point is to open up ChatGPT or any one of the other AI tools and ask for 10 ideas for our next billboard.
Now, here’s where the great teams do something different than the mediocre teams. The mediocre team are going to take those 10 ideas and start narrowing them down, saying, oh, I really love number 4 and 7, we should work on a version of that ourselves.
But… the great teams understand that those 10 suggestions that ChatGPT just spewed out are the 10 most obvious and overdone ideas that have been done so many times, and that ChatGPT has trained on, that they’re now suggesting them, because you can’t go wrong with them. Or can you?
Because they’ve been done so many times, they’re unlikely to draw attention, be seen as innovative, or get people to share them, because they’re so cool and new.
The great teams, they take those 10 ideas, study them for a couple of minutes, and then say, great, now that I’ve solved the blank page syndrome that we all suffer from, and there’s no reason to suffer from it anymore, because ChatGPT has solved that completely.
Now that I’ve got the creative juices flowing, and I see these 10 ideas, I’m gonna take all these 10 ideas off the table, and that becomes my elimination list, because those are the most obvious, overdone ideas. Now, let’s come up with ideas number 11, 12, and 13, That are different, that haven’t been done yet.
And now we can pick something that is probably going to delight and surprise our audiences, because they haven’t seen it a million times yet. So I think once you understand how… what AI was designed for, you can realize that it’s really, really useful, sometimes for helping you do the work, sometimes for telling you what work not to do.

Russell Scherwin:
So, here’s what I really love about that answer, Udi, and it’s deeply personal for me. And that is, what your real message is, is where AI will normalize what’s worked in the past and what everyone else has access to. What you’re really telling the world is, if you want to win, you need to be original and perhaps have the courage put originality forward within the right context.
And for me, it goes back to the late 90s. I joined a company called Arthur Anderson, and we had just produced a book called Best Practices. And as an innovative engineer coming in to learn a little bit about business. I remember being horrified by the concept because, well, if everyone else is doing this, how are we supposed to help our clients win? Aren’t we just checking a box here?
And I think what you’re telling marketers today is, if you want to win. You need to have the courage in your convictions to go about executing on first principles, which in marketing is Know your audience? Know what they care about, know where they are, and then have the courage to have the right message that attracts them where they happen to be. And…

Udi Ledergor:
Yes, I would add to that, I’m… I just wrapped up, reading a book very interesting book. It’s a bit of a challenging read to get through. It’s called, The Siren’s Call, and it helped me break up what we’re trying to do in marketing And in most cases, you can divide it into really two… a two-stage process.
The first stage is trying to grab attention, which is increasingly harder in this really, really noisy world. And that’s what I just talked about, of where you need those original ideas, because if it’s not original, it’s probably not going to grab attention. The second part is persuasion. So once you’ve grabbed the attention, now you need to keep it with persuasion. When it comes to persuasion.
you actually have a wealth of established best practices that you can use. I always go back to Robert Cialdini’s Six Pillars of Persuasion in his book, Influence, which, if you haven’t read, it’s required reading. But that’s… That’s what you can use to create a persuasive argument. He talks about reciprocity and likability and authority and all these things that still work to this day.
He wrote that book in the 80s. It took it a while to take off, if you can believe that, but it’s become a classic for a good reason, because human psychology has not changed in these last 40 or 50 years. These things change over… millennia, not decades, which is just a speck of dust in the history of the human psyche. So you can still go back to these principles, and if you understand them.
you know how you can influence people. But where the originality truly matters is in that first part of grabbing the attention. And once you kind of break up the process of what are you trying to do. You realize that following the best practices might be helpful for the persuasion, but the quality of your persuasion doesn’t matter at all if nobody’s paying attention.
And for paying attention, you have to do something original, which, following best practices, will rarely get you to.

Russell Scherwin:
So you gotta command someone’s attention by standing out, being original. However, what you’re saying is, the tactics, the strategy must be original, the tactics that follow that’s tried and true, because we’re based on our biology.
I’m gonna pivot using that into biology a little bit, if that’s okay, and it sounds like you got the sirens, we got your courageous marketing book, I’m talking positioning. Maybe we’ll start Oudi and Russell’s book club over here. I’m gonna talk about… another old book.
It’s called The Red Queen, and for… I know I mentioned this to you, I’ll mention this to the audience, the Red Queen is a concept that comes from Alice in Wonderland, Lewis and Carol’s, you know, Through the Looking Glass, where the Red Queen, as a character. Says, it takes all the running you can do simply to stay in the same place.
The concept itself actually comes out of evolutionary biology, which basically says that species must consistently adapt and evolve and proliferate in order to survive the species while being pitted against pathogens and other opposing species. In the world of technology, clearly, it’s about new technology drivers are gonna raise the bar on what the art and the possible happens to be.
And if we think about our world today, AI, which is both increasing our capability to be productive. While raising the expectations on both us as individuals who compete with our peers, as well as us as agents of organizations who operate in incredibly dynamic competitive marketplaces. you know, we might be running faster than our biology permits, but that’s neither here nor there.
My question to you, Udi, is as the bar keeps getting raised and raised and raised for productivity. And our ability to ignore it becomes less and less. How do you suggest Us as marketers, and us as marketing or go-to-market leaders. Ensure that we’re playing offense with both our careers As well as our company’s future. As opposed to, you know, just playing defense and getting stuck in yesterday.

Udi Ledergor:
The answer, as in biology, is that it’s not the strongest, or biggest, or heaviest species That survives and evolves. It’s the one who’s most adaptable. And if you want to go down that rabbit hole, I’d recommend lots of Richard Dawkins books, like The Selfish Genes and others. Big fan. I actually heard him in a talk here in the Bay Area a few years ago.
He’s brilliant and interesting, as you would expect. But going back to the business world, if you look at the companies who’ve survived COVID, the companies who survived the last economic downturn, the companies who are surviving the AI revolutions, they’re the ones who are adapting the fastest. And not everybody wants to do that, not everyone can do that, and that’s okay.
If you look at the personal level, I know folks who were marketing and sales leaders at some of the best-known companies 5 years ago, and today they’re running a fishing pro shop. They’re managing a golf club. They’ve opened an Airbnb because they just wanted out of the rat race.
They realized that the profession they joined 20 years ago and were successful in up until about 5 years ago has changed so much that they’re not having fun anymore. They… they didn’t sign up for this crazy AI world. They signed up for something else, where the pace was different, the skills were different, and they just wanted out. They didn’t want to keep up with the rat race. And you know what?
That’s absolutely fine. I totally respect that. I totally respect that. I know that I enjoy what I’m doing now. Will I still be a marketing executive in 5 or 10 years? I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I’m seeing the pace of change around me so much, and the skills that we all need to adapt to just to stay in place, as you said. are such that I don’t know if I’m gonna like doing this in 5 years.
So, I think we… we’re at a moment of reckoning where we all need to be honest with ourselves. Just because we chose a path as a sales or marketing or other track 20 years ago or 10 years ago. doesn’t mean that we’re committed to doing this for the rest of our lives.
In fact, if you look at what’s happened to human professions, my… my parents pretty much chose a profession and stuck with it for 30, 40, 50 years, and that generation typically did that. As the generations move by, people are having multiple careers in their lifetime, and our current generation is having more careers than any generation before it. Why?
Because we can learn new skills and… in an agile way that our parents could never do. Like, if you wanted to, I don’t know, learn, how to lay down railroads, that took a while to train you on it, and it was hard to switch to another skill. If you wanted to be a really good farmer, that took time to learn how to do. Today, you can learn a lot of skills very quickly. not all of them, right?
If you want to be a good doctor, a physician, you still have to go through years of training. But for most of us in the information age, we can switch skills and careers pretty quickly, and I encourage people to at least consider that before, Kind of concluding that they’re stuck in their current path.

Russell Scherwin:
All right, cool, let’s keep going on adapt and evolve, and couldn’t agree more in terms of learning. One of the reasons why I took a role with University of Georgia is, frankly, to figure out, is it worthwhile to send my kid to college or not?
It’s, you know, what we learn, how we learn, how we apply that to being productive members of society and contributing to a societal vision, which is getting rewritten daily, it seems, is… is near and dear to the heart. But let’s talking about adapting, evolving, let’s close out on the relationship between sales and marketing.
another topic that I know is near and dear to your heart and gong’s heart. If I think about myself, in 2017, I was a sales leader of a large part of the Watson ecosystem. I had a large team across the country, had to rebuild that team, did such a good job rebuilding the team. that I realized where I really can help the people I hired is by building the pipe.
And I realized we had a challenge in pipes, so someone said, why don’t you go take on marketing? And one of my edicts became Align Sales and Marketing, which we all know has historically been a challenge. What would be available to me today that better align sales and marketing that was not available to the market in 2017?

Udi Ledergor:
You know, less than a year ago, my book, Courageous Marketing came out, and the last chapter of the book is all about sales and marketing alignment, which I co-wrote with Ryan Longfield, my longtime CRO at Gong.
And it talks about the softer side of alignment, how to make sure you’ve got the right data set, and the right dashboards, and the importance of meeting regularly, and there’s a fun little test I encourage my readers to take. Do you know how your… if you’re a marketer, do you know how your CRO takes their coffee? And if you don’t, you’re doing it wrong. You’re not aligned well enough with them.
Since that book came out, which is less than a year ago, the AI has advanced so much that sales and marketing can and should be way more aligned now than they ever could be before.
And companies using AI tools like Gong are now using it To completely understand what is happening in their markets, what their buyers and sellers are talking about, which competitors are eating their lunch, what… market needs are changing on a daily basis, how their pitch is landing with customers, all of that is completely changing not only how we’re collecting the intelligence, but then using AI to quickly build the tools that our sellers need for that alignment, to make sure that their competitive battle cards are up-to-date, to make sure that they’re on message at every single moment.
So, I encourage everyone to go look at those tools. Within Gong, we have AI Theme Spotter and AI Builder. There’s plenty of others. Happy to continue that conversation, but I know we’re running out of time.

Russell Scherwin:
Okay, very cool. And I just got a note, Julie said, let’s see if we can go a little longer here, so, I’m excited, because there’s a lot of threads I want to pull here. First of all, I just want to say. Probably the thing I miss most about having an operator role right now is I would love to be able to pull from Revenue Intelligence. I’m gonna call out two use cases that absolutely blow my mind.
Every CMO knows that attribution is the bane of our existence.
And one of the things in your book that I want to talk about, Udi, is how when you stepped forward and were able to convince Amit to run the Super Bowl ad, you were able to use intelligence from the platform To see how people were talking about it, and how that ad was directly correlating 2… you know, pipeline and awareness, which I think is brilliant because there’s always been this huge gap between brand building, you know, brand building budget activities and performance management… performance marketing budget.
So clearly attribution is one of the use cases that are on the table. And clearly, not enough marketing and product management leaders are thinking about how to use the intelligence that lives in the aggregation of every conversation or every digital conversation your teams are having.
How should non-sales executives be thinking about leveraging an investment in revenue and conversational intelligence?

Udi Ledergor:
Yeah, I think the moment you understand that all the information you need is out there, and a lot of it is happening in these thousands of daily interactions between buyers and sellers. You realize you can’t really continue living and working without them.
To double down on the example that you gave, when I got buy-in to do a Super Bowl commercial, we actually didn’t expect to be able to measure any sort of short-term impact on it, and we were okay with that.
And I talk about in many places, including my book, about how I secured an experiments budget, and when the main effort of hitting your numbers, typically for pipeline and demand gen, are going well.
you get a lot of wiggle room to do some fun experiments, and even if they don’t all succeed, there’s no expectation that you see short-term impact on all of them, but I don’t think that should stop us from doing what we believe could be the right thing for the business, just because we have a measurement challenge.
But, at the same time, I also knew that I have this tool called Gong, which, even in its very nascent format 5 or 6 years ago when I ran my first Super Bowl commercial, I could use to see where is that commercial coming up in my customer conversations.
And I could see that during the week of Super Bowl, there were hundreds of conversations talking about Super Bowl, of course, because that’s what people talk about. But I could drill down and see which one saw my commercial, which one… what were they saying about it? Did they like it? Did they hate it? Did they get it?
And I think that’s a… unorthodox approach to measuring things that a lot of marketers just assume if it doesn’t appear on a neat dashboard, it’s not worth doing because I can’t prove the ROI, I can’t talk about it, and that really narrows what we can do. Because the neat dashboards are mostly for fully digital experiences, but you can’t capture people who saw your billboard.
You can’t capture people who saw your TV commercial. You can’t capture people who read your print advertisement. You can’t capture people who saw your booth but didn’t agree to be scanned as a lead. All these things do show up in customer conversations.
And even if they don’t, I think we all intuitively understand that they’re helpful in creating awareness, they’re helpful in creating, brand, they’re helpful in creating a pipeline that will convert further down the line. So, I guess my bottom line here is. You should advocate for things that you feel are strongly correlated with your business needs, even if they don’t appear on today’s dashboard.
And at the same time, look for innovative ways of measuring that are beyond first and last touch attribution. Looking at revenue intelligence is a great way to start.

Russell Scherwin:
What about, I’m in product management now, and you know, product management, the dream would be to cut through, you know, sales being the filter, so they could bias their own views on what the roadmap should be. How can I, in product management, use revenue intelligence To create a roadmap that is… Based on primary research and aligned with true demand.

Udi Ledergor:
You know, one of the most common pieces of feedback we get from our 5,000 customers is that they can’t believe the pace of innovation in the Gong product. It seems like they’re hardly thinking of a new capability they want, and the next time they open up Gong, they see that capability in there, and they don’t get how that’s even possible.
And the way it’s possible is because we drink our own champagne. Other companies might eat their own dog food, we drink our own champagne, and by that I mean that our product team is sitting in Gong all day. asking questions, both at the individual account or deal, or call level, but more interestingly, in aggregate across all of our customer conversations.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations that happen every week, just on our Gong instance, because we have 5,000 customers, so that’s a lot of conversations. And the product team can now go in and ask sophisticated questions, like, what is the number one security capability that customers are missing according to in Europe, based on the latest GDPR, I don’t know, Compliance update.
And Gong will search through all the calls that happened in that region, in that time frame, will search for anything that was said around GDPR and sounds like a request, and will surface that in an easily comprehensible brief to the product manager, who can then turn around to the engineers and say, can we build this this week? And then they build it.
And teams who are not operating that way are just not up with the times, because they’re… customers are going elsewhere to look for solutions that they need, but they told you what they need.
They might have told a support engineer while they were waiting for them to resolve a ticket, they might have told an account manager that was doing their QBR, but if the product team isn’t using a system like this to Collect and surface all these requests, then what are we even doing here?

Russell Scherwin:
Yeah, what… I’m gonna make a statement, which I believe is true, you can either feel free to correct me or… or not, but I think it’s a really important statement about the role of marketing, frankly, the role of human leadership in today’s world. Like, I know a lot of customers who use Gaunt. Or other revenue intelligence platforms, for that matter.
And not enough Of your customers are using the macro level of intelligence to drive that sort of insights. And so I think that goes back to, in an age of AI slot, call it what you will, in an age of humans versus machines, it goes back to a point you made 25 minutes ago, Udi.
Insights, originality, frankly, the ability to ask the machines the right questions and organize that neural network of data is ultimately what’s going to differentiate us, because I guarantee you that your customers, or your competitors’ customers. Who are thinking in an original way about the insights in your platform.
Are the ones who are ultimately going to win, which still means us humans who can lead, perhaps think bigger, and then execute on that thought. We’re still the ones who are gonna win. I can see, Manny, you’re on. Oudi, anything you want to share with the audience before we turn it back to Julia, Manny, and Doug?

Udi Ledergor:
No, just hopefully we’ve… we’ve given hope to folks here that, you still matter, we all still matter as human beings. AI is not out there to eat us up. It’s not gonna take our job unless we want it to. It’s the humans using AI and adapting to their customers’ needs, to the market needs, those are the ones that are going to win.
To learn more about how to use your human voice for the things we’re still uniquely qualified to do, go check out Courageous Marketing. It’s available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold, and I would love for folks to follow me on LinkedIn to read more about what I’m up to these days. So thanks for having me, Russell.

Russell Scherwin:
Awesome, and I’ll close out with just my own thoughts, and that’s this. I think we all as humans have a choice. We can either A take our own original insight, as Udi said, and use AI as a tool to help us be more productive and better. Or we can be lazy and become AI’s tool. And again, you know, where you can help me out is follow me on LinkedIn, like Udi and, Julia.
Both us and Udi, we appreciate y’all having us.

Julia Nimchinski:
What if an.

Udi Ledergor:
Over to you, Doug, Julian, and Manny. Thanks for having us.

Julia Nimchinski:
Thank you so much, Uri. Thank you, Russell, and we now welcome…