October 27, 2025

Courageous B2B Marketing

By the time you implement “best practices,” they’ve become boring practices, and B2B sure doesn’t mean boring to business.

In this episode, Drew talks with Udi Ledergor (Gong), author of Courageous Marketing, the book that challenges B2B marketers to stop playing it safe. Together, they explore what it means to lead with creativity, confidence, and courage. Udi also shares how Gong earned attention by building an audience that wanted to engage, not just be targeted. With every executive, from the CEO to the CFO, invested in the story, marketing became a company-wide advantage instead of a department.

Three B2B Marketing Traps Udi Warns Against: 

  1. Following industry best practices instead of breaking them
  2. Letting marketing own brand alone 
  3. Hiring for experience over potential

Plus: 

  • The punch-above-your-weight framework that makes a startup look enterprise-ready 
  • Why brand must be led by the CEO and modeled across the exec team 
  • How to hire for curiosity, learning speed, and potential 
  • How to sell the 95–5 content mindset to your CEO and CFO 

If you’re done blending in, this conversation will remind you why courage still wins in B2B.

Udi will be speaking at the CMO Super Huddle in Palo Alto on November 7th, 2025. All attendees will receive a complimentary copy of his book, Courageous Marketing, and can get it signed in the morning! 

Renegade Marketers Unite, Episode 486 on YouTube

Resources Mentioned 

Highlights

  • [4:00] Stop following business best practices 
  • [5:06] Stop making marketing own brand 
  • [8:38] Stop hiring people with the right experience 
  • [13:08] Udi’s “Punch Above Your Weight” framework 
  • [18:24] Growing a social following 
  • [21:09] B2B content that’s NOT boring 
  • [29:07] Your job as a marketer is… 

Covered in the rest of the episode: What works at events & trade shows, when category creation makes sense and when it doesn’t, how to foster a culture of experimentation, and more.

Highlighted Quotes  

“I did a Super Bowl commercial for less than 5% of what people assume it would cost because instead of getting the national spot, I got a regional spot where my actual audience was.” —Udi Ledergor, Author

“That 95%, if we want to engage them and nurture them and have them subscribe and follow our content, we need to provide something valuable that doesn't involve selling our product.” —Udi Ledergor, Author

“If you say something so agreeable, so trivial, nobody has anything else to say about it, why would anybody share it or tag someone or comment on it?" —Udi Ledergor, Author

Full Transcript: Drew Neisser in conversation with Udi Ledergor

   

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th in Palo Alto. We're excited to have five flocking awesome founding sponsors: HG Insights, Boomerang, Webless, Firebrick, and Webflow, and an amazing VIP dinner sponsor with Vidoso. Last year, we brought together over 100 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and this year we're doing it again. Same venue, same energy, and same ambition to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. Tickets are now available at CMOHuddles.com. Do yourself a favor—check out some of the speakers and experts we have. It will blow you away. You can also watch a video that I am confident will get you pumped up, and it also shows what Gen AI video can do right now. Grab your ticket before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's gonna be flocking awesomer!

Welcome to CMO Huddles Quick Takes, our Tuesday Spotlight series where we share insights you can use right away. In this episode, we're joined by Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist of Gong, to talk about his new book, Courageous Marketing. Udi shares how bold ideas, creative risk-taking, and a refusal to play it safe help Gong build one of the most talked-about brands in B2B. He'll show you why it pays to challenge convention, trust your instincts, and lead with courage instead of consensus.

By the way, you can meet Udi at the Super Huddle on November 7 in Palo Alto, where he and I will continue this conversation in a no-holds-barred fireside chat about what it really takes to prove B2B doesn't have to mean boring to business. Make sure you get your ticket right away, because we almost have none left. All right, let's get into it.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello Huddlers, I am excited to introduce you to Udi Ledergor, currently Chief Evangelist for Gong and formerly their CMO. Udi has compiled his experience and that of other amazing marketers in a book called Courageous Marketing. Now, as an author of the book Renegade Marketing, you shouldn't be surprised that I enjoyed his book tremendously and share many of his core convictions. Today, we will be discussing why B2B doesn't have to mean boring to business as a preview to my fireside chat with Udi at the CMO Super Huddle in Palo Alto on November 7. By the way, we'll be giving all attendees a copy of that book at the event. So hello, Udi. How are you and where are you this fine day?

Udi: Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Drew. I am in San Francisco, where it's looking a little gray in my neighborhood, but the last few days have been beautiful, so I'm hoping this one clears up too.

Drew: All right. All right, yes. Well, so just in case our audience needs to leave early, or we need to give them reasons to stay, could you provide three things you think B2B marketers consistently get wrong, and just list them at first, and we'll go through them one at a time?

Udi: Yes, there's lots of them, but if I had to pick three to start this morning with, I would say, one, we follow industry best practices. That would be a terrible mistake. Two, we agree to own our company's brand. And three, we always hire people with the right experience.

Drew: Oh, good. I love it. All right, those are great. Let's go through them one at a time. Let's talk about best practices and why that's such a trap.

Udi: It is a trap because it seems like the logical thing to do. We're asked to come up with a new campaign or a new website, and what do we immediately do? We assume that people around us have figured this out. And so we look at competitor websites, or we look at peer websites, and we say, oh, okay, if everyone's using this type of blue right now, which was the case in 2018 when we launched Gong's first visual identity, then we should choose kind of a trendy blue right now in order to make sure we're not behind the times. What happens, of course, is that you blend in and you don't stand out. And the truth is that what we call best practices are, in reality, boring practices, because by the time everyone is doing them, they are boring, and they're only going to get you ordinary results at best. And the point which I argue in the book is that to stand out, you have to, most of the time, ignore those best practices and be different. And we can unpack that later, if you like.

Drew: Yeah, and I know we're going to go into great detail on just how you helped Gong be different. So let's talk about agreeing, you know, to agree to own the brand, and what that means and why that's so problematic today.

Udi: Yeah, so in my experience, and I've helped and talked with a bunch of marketers about their branding projects that have succeeded and failed, I am convinced that the easiest way for branding projects to go to hell is if marketing owns it in a silo and does not demand that the CEO own the brand and let it trickle down through the entire executive team to the entire company, because if marketing owns it, in a nutshell, what we're doing is we're putting lipstick on a pig. We're trying to make the company appear to be something that it is not necessarily. And the right way to do this is to realize that brand is too important to leave it to marketing. I'll repeat that: brand is too important to leave it to marketing. It has to be owned by the CEO and the entire executive team, and that is the only way that we stand a chance of creating the perception of who we are and what we want to be.

Drew: It's so important. It's funny. Prior to founding CMO Huddles, I used to run an agency, and over the last 10 years, we did B2B branding, and we wouldn't take an assignment where we couldn't talk to the CEO in advance. And I know Bob Wright at Firebrick feels the same way.

Udi: Just so does Andy Raskin, known for the strategic narrative. I've had CMOs call me and say, Udi, do you know Andy? He's being kind of a dick, because he won't take my project if I don't give him access to the CEO. And I said, yeah, he's not being a dick. That's exactly how it's being done. Pardon my French.

Drew: And I think the other part of this that's so important to it is, you know, you want to get out of the arts and crafts department. You want to be in the big, strategic thing. And in order to really make brand have value, it's a repositioning exercise, which means we're probably changing the product and the service. And for that, we need the CEO. If this is just about the three words you're going to use on your, you know, or it's insignificant, but you want it to be significant. Okay, so that was number two. CMOs do not own the brand. But it's funny. I thought you were gonna go in the direction, by the way, of, you know, where people talk about you don't own the brand. Your customer owns the brand. And you do cover that in your book, and maybe we'll get to that later.

Udi: Jeff Bezos famously said brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. But my interpretation of that is not that customers own your brand, but that you need to be very aware of what they're saying when you're not in the room, and all the different ways that you can influence that. And marketing alone cannot do that, cannot accomplish that. If your support engineers, if your recruiting coordinators are giving bad experiences to your prospects and your candidates, and marketing is going out hailing how wonderful we treat our customers, that's just not going to fly. I mean, just remember the last time you tried calling your cable provider and waited 45 minutes while hearing a recording saying how important your call is. How authentic did that experience feel?

Drew: Yes, and it's funny. In some research for my book, we did a study and said, everybody says internal, you know, selling it internally is really important. But then, when we asked them, how long did you give to the internal training before you launched it, it was less than three weeks, which means it was a, you know, again, lipstick kind of thing. It was insignificant training to do that, right? If you're really changing, you really have to spend some time with employees. Okay, the third one is about employees and hiring. And I really want to get into that a little bit—hiring for experience. And I see that a lot. I'm looking for a demand gen person who has done X, Y, and Z. Talk about why you took a different approach.

Udi: So I'll start kind of with the end. I found that the best balance for most teams is to almost evenly split the number of internal promotions, including stretch positions that you give someone who's never done that before, and bringing in people for their potential over their experience, and the other half should be people that you bring in with very specific experience. You know, if we look outside of marketing, a good example would be, if I need brain surgery, I'm not going to give a friend their first chance to do brain surgery, because I trust them and want to empower them. I want to go to the woman or the man who've done this 100 times before and can do this well. But fortunately, in marketing, the stakes are rarely that high, and I share in the book stories about positions I've hired with zero background in tech or in marketing who went on to become Gong's first social media manager, Gong's first and second content managers, Gong's first event manager. I hired all these people with zero experience in that role, in that role, and in our industry, and they crushed it because they brought such a fresh perspective, such a hungry mentality of I'm going to take my background and see what I can do with it in this new environment, and they were uninhibited by those best practices we talked about, which are in reality, boring practices. You know, when I brought Danny Huddle to manage our events, his background was selling merchandise for rock bands, and so he knew what a rock band experience show looked like, and he brought that into our otherwise boring corporate events. Vince Chan was selling burritos on his cousin's Filipino food truck before he got hired to manage Gong social media. So he knew how to create relationships and please customers and be authentic. He didn't know the first thing about social media, but he did a fantastic job for many years, and he's still on the team to this day, and so on. Chris Orlov and Devin Reed, who managed our content teams, had never done that before. I gave them their first marketing job, but I knew that they knew my target audience, the sales leaders, because they were salespeople themselves, and they could write in a more authentic way than I ever could. So it was easy for me to teach them how to tie their content into a demand gen funnel, but I could never teach them how to speak to a salesperson with the authenticity that they already came with.

Drew: It's so interesting, and it's funny because I know a lot of CMOs who are between opportunities are frustrated by this—companies only hiring for experience and not hiring for potential. And it's like, we're all smart marketers. We can figure this out and bring, you know, the discipline to it. But then they go into the company, and then they do the same thing. They hire for experience. I guess the question, because it's easier to hire for experience, how do you identify potential?

Udi: That's a great question. So to identify potential, first, I try to look at the human being as a whole. I want to understand what their hobbies or prior jobs and, I guess, pastimes were. I love things that show that they are fast learners, that they can quickly pivot and learn a new skill or a new domain. And if they've done that well once or twice before, there's a good chance they're going to be able to do that here. To be more practical, I love asking people like, "Who do you follow in the industry that you learn from? What's the last book that you read? Which podcasts do you listen to? Which newsletters do you read? Which people do you follow on LinkedIn?" I want to understand where they're getting their information from and make sure that they can learn a new skill. And you can be very explicit. You can ask, "Hey, tell me about the last time where you had to learn a new skill. Where did you go to collect information and resources? How did you go about it? How quickly did that happen?" If this is something that they haven't done for 15 years, then maybe they're not right for this job.

Drew: Yeah, I do think that—I mean, I think future hires, it's all going to be about hiring for curiosity, demonstrated curiosity, and then judgment, speed of learning, right? Because judgment is a tricky one, and that is going to be more important in the age of AI, which we'll get to. But I want to—now one of the things that you did that I think a lot of folks, and it came up in the conversation with Gabe Boko from NetApp, is, you know, in the book, you talk about punching above your weight. You talked about the Super Bowl ads and Times Square and you talk about sort of making it look like, "Oh my god, we're advertising on the big Super Bowl." But you had a nice little trick. Can you talk about that approach for the Super Bowl ads? And then we can get into the Times Square thing and why this is such an essential insight.

Udi: Sure. So take two steps back. The problem that we had at Gong, which, speaking to other startup founders and CMOs, I found is a very common problem, is that a lot of startups are trying to sell to large enterprises. But here's the Catch-22: most large enterprises absolutely do not want to buy from a young startup because who knows if they're going to be around in a year. Their product is probably not ready in terms of enterprise security and privacy and all the compliance regulations. They don't have enough reference customers. I want to see them use customers like me before I'm the first brave soul to go buy from the startup. And so that is a real problem. Now, for those of us who have read Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, you might remember he talks about the chasm between the early adopters and the early majority, and there are several ways of bridging that gap. One of them is in product. You can do a few things in the product that will help it be more appealing to the early majority. But he also presents a huge opportunity to marketers who can bridge that gap in several ways, and one of those ways is making your younger startup look like a much bigger company. And by doing that, appeal to larger enterprises. And so if we believe in that premise, and if we believe that if we look bigger than we are—call it a version of "fake it till you make it," if you like—if we appear to be larger than we are in the early days, then maybe larger enterprises won't be as afraid to buy from us. And I found that to be true. And to do that, I put together a framework. I can't say I invented it, but I pieced together things that I saw worked and tested so many times on so many mediums that I'm now convinced that it works. And I call it the "Punch Above Your Weight" framework. And the idea of "Punch Above Your Weight," for those who haven't yet read the book, is pretty simple. Number one, you pick a medium that is typically associated with a large advertiser. So this could be a Super Bowl commercial, a Times Square billboard, wrapping cars, doing a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. I give so many examples in the book of these mediums and why they work in this framework. Step two is you make very creative use of that medium. Again, not following best practices, but do something that would be surprising and different to your audience. Step three, assuming this is an offline kind of real-world thing, like a billboard or a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, you take good photos and even video footage of it if relevant. Then the final steps are to amplify that to your actual captive audience on social media, and by getting all your employees and potentially partners and customers to also help you share that. The one thing I missed when I was just detailing that is that you find a very affordable version of that medium that you can get away with on your budget, but it would still make you appear to be much larger. To make this pragmatic, for those who haven't read the chapter in the book yet, I talk about how I did a Super Bowl commercial for less than 5% of what people assume it would cost, because instead of getting the national spot, I got a regional spot where my actual audience was. I did the same thing with a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. Instead of buying the national edition, I bought the regional West Coast edition. And then with billboards, you can really have lots of fun because you can get a Times Square billboard that people will assume cost you six or seven figures. You can buy this for $500. It will only run for a few hours on one day, but that is enough if you follow my framework and you get someone to photograph it at the exact moment that it appears. And then you amplify that photo on social media and to your captive audience. You're creating the impression of a much bigger company and advertiser than you really are.

Drew: It's funny. Lisa Cole from—a CMO of 2X—is here listening, and she shared in chat that, in fact, having read your book, she took that play, did it in Times Square. And it's funny, Lisa, I saw your post on LinkedIn. That's very cool. I love that. Just in case you were wondering, if anybody reads and takes what you're saying seriously, they are here in CMO Huddles land, that's for sure.

Udi: You know, Drew, just a few days ago, I was at HubSpot Inbound conference here in San Francisco. I was signing books in one of the booths, and two gentlemen came up to me from another company, and they said, "Udi, we just came to say hi because we read your book, and we just launched a Times Square campaign." And they opened their phone and showed me the photos of their Times Square billboards, and they were so happy with the results. So yes, these things actually work. And once you realize the kind of inner workings of the industry and how you can get away with these things that make you appear so much bigger, but you can still do it on a startup budget, the world becomes your oyster. There's so many possibilities.

Drew: So I mean, one of the things that the link from these two big—sort of the perception of big—is that you have to be able to amplify that with employees and with customers and with prospects on social. And I know that that was a big part of your early play. So by the time you did the billboard, you had a large enough social footprint that you could amplify it. So talk a little bit about how you got there and what it took to build this sort of strong social following that could then sort of reinforce and make the Super Bowl or the Times Square thing really get a lot of sharing.

Udi: That's a great point. You know, timing is really important. And sometimes a young startup that's literally just getting started comes to me and says, "Hey, should I do a Times Square billboard?" I'm like, "No, you probably shouldn't, because you don't have a captive audience to share this with. You're still a no-name. Why would you do that?" And so you're absolutely right. We had built a really strong following over social media and email subscribers and other mediums. And to do that, I followed the old adage, which, again, I did not make up, but I'm a strong believer of, which is, "We're not big enough to be boring." And by that, I mean that we had to get really, really good with creating content that people would genuinely want to follow and consume, because we're not big enough to be boring. And so on the very small shoestring budget that I had for the first few years at Gong, we got very creative with creating content. And we can dive into as much detail as you want, but I'll skip the content creation part for a moment. What we did with distribution is because the content was so helpful and useful to our audience, without being overly salesy—we were not shoving our product in their face—they were more than happy to follow us on social media, subscribe to our emails, show up to our talks at events, and tag their friends and forward our content to their friends because they thought they should also be following our content. And so we were able to grow organically, which is the cheapest way to grow a following. We recently celebrated hitting 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, which anyone here from a B2B startup knows that's a pretty good number to hit for LinkedIn. So we crossed 300,000 followers on LinkedIn. We've got even more email subscribers. I've probably spoken to thousands of people at conferences that I did not have to sponsor to speak at because they actually invited us, including flying me there, because our content is so interesting and valuable to their audience. Their conference became better because we were there as speakers. So if you can create content so good people would pay for it, that is a really cost-effective way of growing your followership in the early days when you don't have a budget to extend your reach.

Drew: It's interesting. I was looking at the book last night, and I saw the email that you all did on compliance, which really cracked me up, and just a reminder that, you know, with a sense of humor and so forth. Talk a little bit about maybe some specific examples of content that was not boring, that was atypical for the industry, and that did help get this sort of reputation as an interesting company that you want to pay attention to.

Udi: Sure. So to explain my thoughts on content again, I have to take kind of a couple of zooms out to explain how we get to the tactics, first from the strategy. And the strategy is by acknowledging and hopefully believing and committing to the 95-5 rule. And the 95-5 rule, in a nutshell, states that only about 5% of your target market is currently in the buying zone. I like to give a simple example from our personal life to demonstrate what I mean. Let's say I'm looking to buy a new car in a couple of months. So for these next couple of months, I'm going to be scouring websites of car manufacturers that I'm considering. I'm going to be downloading their specs and color options, and maybe even reach out to a couple of dealers to see what's in inventory. I'm going to look at the YouTube reviews because I really want to see someone trying to squeeze into that third row that I need to see if teenagers can sit back there. I'm going to look at the car review sites and see the different rankings, and eventually I'm going to buy a car. Now, the moment I bought the car, I'm committed to it for the next three years. That's the typical time frame that I keep a car. But the car manufacturers who saw me visiting their websites are still retargeting me with sales and specs and why they're better than the competitor. Do you think I'm paying attention and clicking through those ads to go visit those car websites after I bought a car? I'm not, because I'm not in the buying zone anymore, and they should know that. Right now, if some of them were actually to give me useful content like how to better maintain my car, how to get more mileage out of it, how to drive more safely, interesting add-ons and accessories I could buy for the car, I might be reading that. But they're just all trying to sell me their cars, which I'm no longer in the market for. Now, let's think about our B2B marketing, right? That was, of course, an analogy. If you have a company in your target audience that is looking to buy in the next three to six months, by all means, you should be targeting them with your sales content, why your product is better. Show a case study of a similar customer in the same industry and geography that's making good use of your product. They're open to that. They're in the buying zone. But the 95-5 rule suggests that it's typically only about 5% of your market is in that zone because of the same business cycle that is similar to the car buying cycle that I described, right? A company might replace a large system, like a CRM system, every five years. And even that's being generous. If that's true, if they replace that system, if they're looking for your system to replace what they have every five years, that means only 20% of the market is looking to buy something this year. And if you break it down into four quarters, that's 20 divided by four. That's how we get to the 5% out of the 100. So it's 5% are in the market this quarter, the other 95% are not. And so if we believe in that and agree with that, we realize we actually need different marketing plans for the 5%, which we should continue targeting with sales offers, and for the 95%. If we want to engage them and nurture them and have them subscribe and follow our content, we need to provide something valuable that doesn't involve selling our product. And that's the premise that we took at Gong. And so when I sat down nine years ago to start developing Gong's content, I thought, well, what could the world—the sales leaders' world that we're targeting—use? And we figured that if we could show them what data says actually works and doesn't work in sales, that would put an end to a lot of arguments and discussions that they're having every day. How should I start my cold call? When is the best time of day to send that email? How should I act and speak on the call? How many questions should I ask? How long should I speak? And we found all these amazing nuggets, and we started putting them out there and giving very practical advice to people on what they should and should not do on sales calls. And they ate it up, and they started tagging their friends. You asked for some juicy examples. So there was a really fun one we did a few years ago where we found that salespeople who swear on sales calls—they use the S-word or drop an F-bomb—they have an 8% higher win rate, all other things being equal, compared to their peers who don't use that kind of language. And we backed it up with research.

Drew: Wait, no fucking way.

Udi: The shit is real, Drew. I'm telling you. Okay, and we showed how that works, and we published it without putting a dime behind promoting it. And here's what happened. Drew, FastCompany.com, the widely read news site, ran with that story, giving us free earned media. As soon as they ran with the story, my phone started ringing off the hook with radio stations wanting to interview me about the story they just read in Fast Company. Because how could this be? And this is like so unconventional, and that is a marketer's dream. You want people to talk about your content. You want to create some controversy, something that's counterintuitive, even polarizing at times, not for the sake of being annoying and not for the sake of causing controversy. But here's an important lesson. The worst enemy of your content is not somebody hating it. That's actually fine. You're going to annoy someone with almost everything you do, so might as well live with it. The worst thing that can happen is that you get indifference. Because if you get indifference, if you say something so agreeable, so trivial, nobody has anything else to say about it. Why would anybody share it or tag someone or comment on it if it's something so agreeable because you were afraid to piss off someone? So I'm never afraid to piss off someone. And I like to think that if I'm not pissing off anyone, I'm probably not exciting anyone either.

Drew: So funny. I write a rant every Saturday on LinkedIn, and I can always tell if there's a little bit of controversy in there, it causes engagement. If everybody's nodding their heads, it's just like—so there's a more important thought behind all of this, which is, you know, really, there's an exchange of value in any kind of marketing. And if you give value consistently over time for a specific group of people, you will build an audience. If you don't give value and you're just, quote, selling and say, "Hey, how about this product?" you're going to miss that opportunity. It's funny about the 95-5. We had Professor Byron Sharp and Aaron Burr Bass—they're the ones who came up with that research. And I said, "Can we just talk about that data? Everybody uses it, and like, I've never actually seen the research, and is it really relevant?" He said, "Well, maybe it could be 90-10. It could be 90—you know, it depends on the category," which I appreciated. I think in general, we all know that. I think the challenge for CMOs is the CEO will say, or the CFO or the head of sales, "Okay, fine, let's just focus on the 5% then, because we got to hit our numbers." And that's problematic, but that is a reality for CMOs. So if you're talking on behalf of CMOs to a CEO, and you know, we can say 95-5 till we're blue in the face, but they have quarterly goals. They have to meet with investors. How do we help them and arm them to say we've got to be thinking bigger than the 5%?

Udi: Yeah. So that's a very real discussion that all of us are having with our CFOs and CEOs and probably CROs as well, which is not to open another whole can of worms, unless you want to. But which is why I am vehemently against marketing reporting to the CRO, because they are very short-term focused. We can talk about that if you want, but here's what I do. First, it's our job as marketers to educate those that we work with. We need to explain how marketing works, because one of the problems of marketing, compared to, say, finance or legal or engineering, is that we speak plain English. And that's a problem in our job. Because we speak plain English, we don't speak in code, we don't speak in legalese, and we don't speak with spreadsheets. People think that they understand and know our profession as well as we do, and so they have an opinion about what we do. I've never been asked to come to a code review and comment on the Python coding of our engineering team, but surprisingly, the entire executive team seems to have an opinion on the colors of our website and the content that we put out there. And so that's a problem we need to live with every day. We speak plain English, so people think that they understand our profession, but they don't. And so it's our job to explain it with patience. It can be frustrating, but we need to explain it. Now, if you explain to a sound-minded CEO or CFO the 95-5 rule, and explain and show the data, show that, "Hey, I know we need more leads, but if everything we're doing is talking about our end-of-year sale and how good our product is, nobody's clicking on these ads. In fact, they're blocking us. They're unsubscribing. They're reporting us as spam. This is clearly not working, and here's why, because 95% of them are not in the market right now. But what if—crazy idea—we provided something they would be delighted to read? They would look forward to receiving in their inbox. They would create memory links between our brand and what we can provide them and be useful. And then six or 12 or 18 months from now, when they are in the zone, because as far as I know, we're not building the company for one quarter. We're building a generational company here. So in a few quarters, when they're ready to buy, who's going to be the first name that they think of? Oh, us, because we've been so helpful and useful with providing them valuable content. And if you let me experiment with this, I'll show you how it works." Now, having said all of that, there are some people that will not be convinced. There are some people that maybe think they know better than we do. And to us marketers, I would say, if you find yourself in an environment like this, and you've done all reasonable efforts to move the mindset of the people you're working with and explain how this works, maybe you're not playing the right game. Maybe you're not in the right place, and our lives and careers are way too short to work with assholes. So if you can make it work where you are, at some point, if you have the option, you should probably look elsewhere.

Drew: Okay, that's a wrap on this Huddles Quick Take with Udi Ledergor. In the rest of the conversation, Udi gets into how to balance data with creative instinct, protect bold ideas as the company scales, and build a culture that rewards experimentation. Catch the full discussion on the CMO Huddles YouTube channel. I'm Drew Neisser, and we'll be back soon with another Huddles Quick Take. Until then, keep on sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!