Gong and revenue intelligence!

Increasing sales efficiency and predictability in revenue!

Many businesses would have heard about or used Gong. It is a 6-year-old $7.2 Bn valued business with ~$120 Mn revenue and ~2k customers. What do they do? They have created a new category in the last few years called revenue intelligence.

But what do they actually do?

What Gong promises to customers is to say, “Hey company, you have lots of people talking to your customers, salespeople, CS people, product marketing folks. There’s a lot of insight into how you’re selling, why you’re doing well, why you’re not doing well, why companies love you, why they want to buy from you, why they don’t want to buy from you in those conversations. We can get you really crisp clear intelligence based on those interactions with your customers and help you do a better job of getting more revenue, keeping more revenue, and being more predictable about when and how that revenue is coming in, all the while upscaling your existing team and making sure everyone’s learning from each other.”

Delivering revenue intelligence basically means that you’re looking at a few subcomponents of revenue intelligence.

• Deal Intelligence: Within a given pipeline that you have of potential revenue, what part of that pipeline is actually, do you think, likely to close vs what is not likely to close based on interactions and things that your customers are saying, not based on things that your account executives and reps are saying?

• People Intelligence: This part is around people and understanding what are your top salespeople doing differently than others and how can you share that knowledge in an effective way across the team as you grow?

• Market Intelligence: Figuring out what your competitors are doing and what the market is saying about your solution compared to your competitors.

  

Clari(~$2.2 Bn valuation) is another player in the space and has recently acquired Wingman to widen its set of offerings. The question for the customer while choosing usually is:

“Should I buy a best-in-class tech stack or should I just pay for one thing that does most of the stuff across the board?

How are these companies priced? Historically Gong has priced for recorded seats. However, they offer a few free seats to adjacent departments. You don’t get the full functionality before you start paying but the general idea is you land a smaller team, prove the value and then expand into other teams.

Gong had some advantages in terms of being first to the market but the reason it has done truly well is because of its differentiated GTM. Their marketing is very human- Go on their website, it’s purple puppies and dogs running around everywhere. Customers also find their buying experience with Gong more fun than an average SaaS company. Every employee is encouraged to build personal brands on LinkedIn and other social channels.

With the current environment, sales reps who loved the tool will keep endorsing it within the company while other sales reps who don’t like being monitored might find this as a way to get the tool out.

This category is though all the more important in the current environment and really helps one understand what they are doing well in sales, converting sales into more science than art. Now that the philosophy has changed from growth at all costs to growing sustainably, such tools can really help identify the company what is truly working and invest in that, thus increasing the overall ROI.

I will keep writing about more such tools in future posts to help companies takes better data-backed decisions.