Measuring Category Creation and Brand Awareness ROI - with Udi Ledergor, Gong Chief Marketing Officer

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up Podcast. Today, I am joined by Udi ledergor, the Chief Evangelist at Gong. Today, we'll be covering three main areas with Udi, including the early years at Gong, and the marketing secrets to really develop category leadership. How the marketing metrics evolved as Gong scale, and then how revenue intelligence can help to further align marketing sales and customer success, leading to even better revenue performance. So with that Udi, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming our guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Udi Ledergor** (1:16)
Thanks Ray for having me today. I'm Udi ledergor, I'm the Chief Evangelist at Gong. I've been with the company for over seven years. Most of those seven years, I was the Chief Marketing Officer, so I was the first marketing hire and employee number 13, and I've been fortunate to grow with the company to see us grow from 13 to 1,300 employees and go from about 4,000 to 4,000 customers, so it's been quite the wild ride.

**Ray Rike** (1:41)
Wow, what a wonderful journey, and I actually like talking to fellow Chief Evangelist officers because that's what I do here at BenchMarket, but it's a great story. It's also a story of creating a leadership position in a category, conversational intelligence, and then broadening and expanding that to revenue intelligence. Can you share a couple of key decisions that you remember when you were determining how to build category and category leadership simultaneously?

**Udi Ledergor** (2:12)
Sure. Category creation is one of my favorite topics really, because I think a lot of companies need a framework for how to think about it. In a nutshell, I'll say the biggest reason companies should consider building a category is if their buyer does not have a budget line item for what they're looking to sell them.
Eventually, if you want to scale a business, you need your customers to have a budget line item for the category that you're selling. If they don't have that, then maybe category building is right for you. Having said that, there's many reasons to be deterred and look for other options like squeezing into another existing budget item, which is a much faster and cheaper endeavor than trying to educate an entire market and spending years working with customers and analysts and other players to build an actual category until that budget line item exists. We did decide in 2019 to embark on a category building journey. Like you said, we were part of the conversation intelligence category before that for about three years, and it worked well for us. But we decided there are a couple of key challenges that we wanted to work through. One of them was that we wanted to differentiate ourselves in a bigger way from other players in the category. Most players in the conversation intelligence category, we're talking about recording calls, playing them back and using that for coaching. We had a much farther reaching vision of using what we had at the time that was still called conversation intelligence for deal inspection and later for forecasting and prospecting. Nobody was talking about that, and we were struggling to explain ourselves why this is so different from what people consider to be conversation intelligence. That was the main problem we're trying to solve. The other one was getting and keeping the attention of senior revenue leaders, and as soon as we said, we do conversation intelligence, it sounded to them like a tactical tool and we got bumped down to enablement or ops or someone like that. So a combination of those two problems led us to believe that a new category might be in order. I'll keep the story short, we went through a few months process at the end of which we decided to transition from conversation intelligence to revenue intelligence, more than a subtle change, because the word revenue is a lot more strategic than conversations, and if you're speaking with the Chief Revenue Officer, the word revenue is literally in her title, so she probably will give you the attention that you need to learn about how you can help her number one goal of increasing revenue, and it did serve the purpose that we were hoping of helping us differentiate against the smaller conversation intelligence players, and now we could confidently say conversation intelligence is great, it's just a very small part of what we do here at Gong. Let me tell you about the revenue intelligence category and why this is what you need. So that's the nutshell version of our category creation story.