I got the wonderful opportunity to sit down with Udi Lederger, the Chief Evangelist at Gong. We spoke about how AI is finally solving for sales and marketing alignment (amongst other things). 

The sales and marketing alignment problem isn’t new. It’s just old enough that most of us stopped expecting a fix.

Udi Ledergor has been in the room for this conversation for two decades. Former CMO at Gong, now Chief Evangelist there, author of Courageous Marketing, and someone who has talked to more CMOs about this exact frustration than almost anyone. So when he told me he wanted to talk about alignment, I figured we’d cover the usual ground.

We didn’t.

Why sales and marketing alignment never got solved

For years, the diagnosis was relationship. Build a better one with sales. Sit in their pipeline reviews. Buy them coffee. Udi wrote a whole book about that version of the answer. It helped but didn’t fix it.

The deeper issue is that marketing was building messaging in one room and sales was using it in another, and nobody could measure what happened in between. CMOs would ship a new deck at sales kickoff, watch reps clap politely, and have no idea three months later whether anyone was using it or whether it worked.

Udi puts it bluntly:

“Sales thinks marketing sits in their ivory tower, creates their shiny new decks not necessarily based on what sales is hearing in the field. These materials sometimes sound tone deaf. At best reps deliver them once. Then they abandon the material marketing worked so hard to create.”

Marketing lost its seat at the table because marketing couldn’t prove the seat was worth anything.

Why AI is the first technology that actually closes the gap

AI listens. That’s the unlock.

Every customer call is now a data source. The exact words customers use to describe their problem. The objections they raise. The questions they keep coming back to. Marketing can build messaging from that primary source instead of from a Notion doc and a vibe. Then they can watch what happens when reps deliver it.

Udi’s been seeing the numbers play out across Gong’s customer base. Reps using the new messaging close at 30% higher win rates. Cycles shorten by 20%. Deal sizes grow by 30%. Not because the messaging is better in the abstract. Because for the first time, the company can actually run the test.

“This is the first time sales and marketing can do what marketers have been doing for years. We call this A/B testing of subject lines, of landing pages, of ads. We can finally do this across the entire sales team with their messaging.”

The natural experiment is built in. Half the reps adopt the new language on day one. Half don’t. You see the gap inside two weeks.

Sales enablement finally has a number to defend

This is where the second shift happens, and it’s the one most people miss.

Sales enablement has been one of the hardest jobs to defend in a budget meeting. Hardworking teams, often ex-top reps, stretched thin, asked by a CFO every quarter to prove ROI on a function whose entire output was qualitative. They couldn’t.

Now they can. The same agents that track whether reps are using the new messaging can tell enablement which interventions moved which numbers. The conversation with finance changes from “trust us” to “this cohort, this quarter, this lift.”

Udi also walked me through something at Gong called the AI Trainer, which felt like the most underrated piece of the whole conversation. Reps don’t have to burn live leads practicing discovery questions anymore. The agent listens to their calls, identifies the gap, drops them into a simulator, scores the practice, and sends them back into real calls with the gaps already worked on.

Every rep gets a coach. Enablement gets a scoreboard.

The two buckets shaping the next five years

Udi’s frame for where this goes is two buckets.

Bucket one: things AI does instead of us. Logging CRM activities. Drafting follow-up emails from call summaries. Pulling commitments out of a transcript. None of that should be on a human calendar in 2026.

Bucket two: things AI guides us through but humans still do. The customer conversation itself. The judgment call on a deal. The unique POV on the market. AI’s job there is to free up the time and surface the next right move, not to replace the move.

Reps currently spend somewhere between 16% and 20% of their time actually in front of customers. The rest is grunt work that AI is rapidly absorbing.

“Imagine the possibilities. That’s how we’re going to build companies doing a billion dollars with very few employees compared to today’s numbers.”

Revenue per employee. That’s the metric Udi keeps coming back to. It’s also the metric a Revenue Creator should be watching.

The takeaway

For two decades, marketing tried to earn its seat at the table by being more strategic, more visible, more aligned. None of that worked at scale. The seat got handed back when marketing could finally walk in with a number and say: this messaging, in this deal stage, with this rep cohort, lifted win rate 30%.

Alignment was never about relationships. It was about measurement.

What’s the messaging gap your team can’t currently measure?

- Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist at Gong

Want to learn from more Revenue Creators like Udi? Join the RevGenius community and be part of the movement rewriting the GTM playbook.

Upcoming Events

The New Buyer Doesn't Want Your Demo

Today's buyers have already made up their mind before your rep gets on the call. They do not want the pitch, the deck, or the discovery process. They want to move at their own pace and buy on their terms. In this webinar, Rex Galbraith and Betty Mok from Consensus break down how to sell to buyers who hate being sold to: who not to chase, why gating content kills pipeline, and how to map the full buying group before they ghost you.

Al Outbound Was a Mistake. We're Going to Say What Everyone's Thinking

AI outbound promised more pipeline. It delivered more noise. In this no-holds-barred panel, sales leaders get honest about what went wrong: why AI-generated outreach all sounds the same, why buyers are tuning out faster than ever, and what it actually costs when you stack tool on top of tool chasing a problem that technology alone cannot fix. More importantly, what smarter AI adoption looks like when the conversation stays human.

Funding Announcements

• Sierra raises $950M Series E for AI customer service agents

• Hightouch raises $150M Series D to build AI platform for marketers

• Mosaic raises $18M Series A

• definity raises $12 Million Series A

GTM Hot Jobs from RevOps Pipeline

• Sr. Manager, Revenue Operations - Informed K12 - $120K - $140K - Apply

• VP, Marketing - Tomorrow.io - $195K - $250K - Apply

• Compensation Manager - SoSafe - 60K- 75K EUR -  Apply

• VP of Sales - Stack AI - $250K - $350K - Apply

• Sales Strategy & Operations Manager - n8n - $160K - $208K - Apply

• Sales Development Director - LangChain -  $250K - $315K - Apply

• Senior / Staff SWE - Owner -  $240K - $250K - Apply

Are you hiring and want your job featured? Submit a role here.

Want to get your brand in front of 60,000+ revenue leaders?

Partner with us and put your name at the center of the conversation.