When I entered my role as head of content in gong, I did not come with a decade of marketing experience. I came with a sales background and a whole lot of time to chase wires. This experience turned out to be my unreasonable advantage.
Here’s what I knew from the trenches: Most people are not ready to buy when you reach out. Most of them don’t care about your product, at least not yet. They do not wake up and hope for another cold E -mail or wonder if they should check one more demoside more. They are busy performing their jobs.
The mental model led me to a question that changed everything. What if we could earn attention before someone was in the market? What if we instead of trying to “catch demand” could create the?
That’s what we set out to do in gong. And we did it by turning the typical SaaS playbook upside down.
What is the 95-5 rule?
The rule of 95-5, popularized by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, came out a few years later and immediately validated everything we had done.
Here’s what it says: At any given time, only 5% of your total addressable market is buying actively. The other 95% is not.
Still, most marketing teams invest heavily in the lower funnel, high -intensive tactics that are targeted at just 5%. This approach is short -sighted and easily exhausted.
When I joined Gong we took a completely different way. In the first year we were top-of-funnel focused. So my team had a tough rule: No one is talking about our product. No. Zero. We would not write about gong, push features or create comparison posts. We left it for product marketing.
Instead, our mission was to produce the most engaging sales content of the planet. We fully focused on our audience and their problems and placed us as peers rather than suppliers.
If you only market to buyers when they are ready to buy, you are too late. The real option is to win Mindshare with the 95%that is not ready yet.
What gong did to get the most out of the 95-5 rule
So how do you actually implement this strategy? Here are some practical approaches we used on Gong, which are still relevant and effective today.
We were obsessed with knowing our audience.
We made a conscious decision to understand our audience better than anyone else in our category. Not only who they were on paper – job titles, business size, vertical – but how they thought what they were struggling with and what held them up at night.
At Gong, our audience was sales representatives and sales managers. And no surprise, their primary focus was to hit quota. So we started with this goal and worked behind. We mapped the whole journey to this goal and identified all barriers along the way:
- Creating pipeline
- Writing Effective Cold E emails
- To make successful cold calls
- Ongoing discovery call
- Handling of demos
Then we turned this sales process into a content schedule. We didn’t talk about gong. We talked about the daily friction points and pain of being in sale.
We focused on the problem, not the product.
This is where most saa’s saa companies are stuck. They are standard to write about their product. That’s what they know. Because it’s easier to say, “here is what we do” than to say, “here is what you are struggling with – and here’s what can help.”
But our faith was simple: No one is interested in your product before they think you understand their problem.
It meant to go deep on the “before” state -the messy, frustrating, daily challenges that reps face. And from there, offering useful, eligible guidance that made people feel and supported.
We asked ourselves:
- What are they doing today that no longer work?
- What have they accepted as “just as it is”?
- What assumptions can we challenge with a better way?
For example, most reps accept that a response to 1% cold E email is normal. So they send more E emails. That’s the “old way.”
We transformed it. What if you could improve your response rate and actually send fewer E emails? This story is instantly more convincing.
Even small details mean something. Using insider language signals that you really understand the audience – it is “pipeline”, not “pipelines” and “the end of the quarter”, not “at the end of the quarter.” These subtle differences make your content feel it is coming from a peer rather than a marketing employee.
They seem like little things, but they signalize insider knowledge. They tell your audience, “We are one of you. “
Tips to switch from lead to audience care
Switching from lead to gene to audience care is a significant mindset shift. You have to let go of short -term dopamine hits like MQLs and Attribution Diagrams and start thinking as a media company. Then ask, ”How do we make attention today to gain confidence tomorrow? “
Here are five things we did in gong to build future demand and grow a fire that scaled.
1. Create high -value content that solves real problems.
If you want people to be aware before they are ready to buy, help them. You need useful content that solves real, frustrating problems.
We mapped the buyer’s journey and zoomed in at all micro -mixture points along the way. Each was a chance to create something useful:
- How to write a better cold E email.
- How to run a discovery call that doesn’t feel like an interrogation.
- How to handle price questions without fumbling the agreement.
These were not functional pages in disguise. They were independent resources with high signal, and we often didn’t even mention our product.
Why? Because we Wasn’t trying to sell. We tried to earn confidence.
To do this well, you need expertise in the subject, either your own or from someone in your organization.
- What’s the matter really Hard about this part of the job?
- What do people get wrong with it?
- What are the advice you wish you had been given a year ago?
Use it as your starting point. And make your content feel it was coming from a practitioner, not a product market manager.
2. Use storytelling to create emotional resonance.
One of our flagship content series was Gong Labs Our original data-supported research on various aspects of the sales process. But rather than just presenting information, we focused on making it emotional resonance.
Source
This is something I see that many B2B companies fail because they will sound like the smartest in the room. Much of the content comes across for information, too dry, and it is not engaging or memorable.
So instead we took a page from Hollywood and used a screenplaying technique called “In Media’s res”, which falls the reader directly into the middle of a story. Instead of starting with “Here’s what the data says”, we would start with a relatable, high -voltage scenario.
- You are five minutes in a discovery call. Your buyer is on mute. You shrink through slides and wonder if anyone even listens …
Then we would ask the question, “Do you even have to use slides at all?”
This approach immediately copper readers and creates an emotional connection before providing the data. It makes your content memorable in a way that purely information content cannot match.
3. Shown consistently across multiple channels.
This one comes from my (short -term) teaching career: People learn differently. Some prefer to read. Some prefer to listen. Some need to see it.
Marketing is no different.
That’s why we emerged across formats:
- LinkedIn -posts and blog articles for readers
- Podcasts to sound-first people
- Webinars and short videos for visual students
This approach had two advantages:
- We reached more people by diversifying formats.
- Our biggest fans (we called them Raving fans) consumed content across multiple channels and elaborated their connection with our brand.
Not only did us help us to build a loyal audience, but it also made sure we had no weak spots in our content based on when and where you engage with us.
4. Measure success as a fire, not just a funnel.
Measurement of fire -impact can be challenging, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Instead of being obsessed with the attachment of last touch, we are traced:
- Audience Growth: LinkedIn -Angers, Podcast -Downloads, Newsletter —Bonners
- Direct Web Traffic: People who write our URL directly (a clear sign of brand -up -baking call)
- Incoming options: Offers that came to us without us chasing them
This approach requires documentation of your strategy clearly: who you help, what problems you solve, where you show up and how to measure progress.
5. Get buy-in to play the long game.
When stakeholders push back with questions such as “Is LinkedIn too saturated?” Or, “Reading someone still e -mail?” I turn it around: “When you are looking for new ideas or products, where are you going?”
The answer is almost always their network, LinkedIn, newsletters and podcasts – exactly where your buyers are already spending time.
If you get buy-in, you need a documented strategy. You must clearly define:
- Who you help
- What problems you solve and your influence on strategic priorities
- Where you show up
- How you measure progress
It becomes your armor when “What is ROI?” Questions roll in.
Create gravity, not just leads
Most marketers are fighting for leftovers: 5% of people already on the market. But if you play the long game and invest in 95%, you can build something better: a brand that earns attention before there is ever a sales conversation.
At Gong, this approach helped us grow our LinkedIn from 12,000 to over 220,000 followers. Our podcast crossed 100,000 downloads in the first 18 months. Webine registrations jumped from 500 to over 2,500. And we saw E -mail open prices hit 28%, with consistent inbound pipeline that helped and accelerated our sales outgoing efforts.
But the qualitative shift was even more significant:
- Sales representatives who told us they used our content in boarding
- Leaders who mention that our material was constantly divided into their relaxing channels
- Buyers who show up to demos who already thought we could help them
It’s the magic in Mindshare. It makes your marketing from an interruption to a Pull. From a transaction to a Relationship. From “Who are you again?” to “We’ve been following you for a while.”
And when urgent frames or when someone’s boss says, “We need a new sales tool,” or “Let’s reconsider our strategy,” you are the first name they remember.
It’s not luck. It’s a fire.
So if you’re tired of hunting leads, maybe it’s time to turn the script. Build content that helps. Emerging consistently. Talk to 95%.