Gong — Making every sales rep your MVP
by Ben Fu and Sunil Chhaya
Top sales rep Jack just closed the biggest deal in the company’s history. It’s not long before word spreads through the organization. Now, his VP of Sales wants to replicate his success across the entire sales team. But, with only 30 words of notes in the CRM record, she is left with practically zero insights into any of his conversations and tactics — essentially all the key details that made the deal so successful.
Enterprise sales reps are spending countless hours conversing with customers, and with every exchange there is a treasure trove of valuable data that simply never gets recorded. In the case of Jack’s VP, she has to dig for key information about each stage of the deal including decision criteria, competitive mentions, objection handling, pricing dynamics, and any other key sales indicators that could surface the patterns behind Jack’s success.
This is exactly the problem that Gong is solving across the enterprise.
Gong’s B2B Sales Conversation Intelligence platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to extract various semantics across all sales calls. Gong records and analyzes conversations against outcomes so that sales managers and reps have a system of record and constant feedback loop about what’s working in real-time. Instead of depending on President’s Club sales reps like Jack driving most of the company’s deals, an entire sales team can now be given continuous feedback and trained with ongoing best practices to replicate top performers’ success. This isn’t periodic sales training at quarterly kickoffs — it’s ongoing and part of the daily workflow. Also, Gong isn’t limited to just improving sales processes and knowledge sharing within Sales — the platform delivers insights to the entire organization.
Time To Hit The Gong
Today, we are thrilled to announce our investment in Gong’s $20M Series A-1. We will be joining existing investors Dror Nahumi from Norwest Venture Partners, Check Point Security and Imperva founder Shlomo Kramer, and new investor Peter Wagner from Wing Venture Capital.
It’s exciting to be partnering with the amazing team at Gong; they bring together countless of years of enterprise experience, a patented technology and product that we believe far outpaces its competitors, and a sophisticated vision as to how they will own “Conversational AI” within the enterprise. Amit Bendov (CEO and co-founder) has run software companies both as a CEO and a C-suite executive. Prior to Gong, he served as the CEO of business analytics platform SiSense. Eilon Reshef (CTO & co-founder) previously co-founded SaaS content management platform Webcollage which was acquired by Answer.com in 2013. Together they have assembled a world-class team with exceptional R&D background coming from SiSense, Panaya, Webcollage, and ClickSoftware.
So Why Now? Unlocking A New Unit Of Data
An average B2B sales conversation contains 6,000 words per hour versus an average of 30 words in a typical CRM record. For years, the cost to record, store, and transcribe audio/video was simply too cost prohibitive. But with the relatively inexpensive (and declining) cost of storage and computing, Gong is now able to capture and unlock this new unit of data — “voice.” Sales reps can focus on their meetings without having to take detailed notes. Gong provides a full recording + transcript and its proprietary machine learning intelligently identifies important ‘moments’ and topics throughout every call. With its seamless integration with CRM systems, this provides a killer combination for the entire sales team.
But recording and transcription in and of itself doesn’t solve the whole problem. For example, if Jack’s VP of sales wanted to provide feedback to her reps, she would have to shadow them or listen to their recorded calls to be analyzed at a later point in time — a cumbersome, time-consuming process that results in a fairly subjective analysis. This is where Gong’s unique value comes into play.
Gong brings science to the “art of selling” by delivering qualitative and quantitative insights at scale. Through natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, it conducts both semantic and sentiment analysis — useful for assessing the prospect’s disposition and willingness to purchase. It also offers sales rep report cards, comparing performance metrics such as talk-to-listen ratio and overused words. Sales managers have full “x-ray vision” into every sales call, insights based on outcomes, and a centralized interface that allows them to provide contextual feedback and track the progress of every conversation at scale.
AI that sales reps are cheering about
As part of our due-diligence process, we spoke directly with multiple customers and received glowing reviews. It became very clear that Gong helped transform their sales organizations, making every individual better, more nimble, and armed for success.
“It’s literally the only solution you don’t have to beg your reps to use — they absolutely love it.” — G2Crowd Gong Review
“As Director of Product Management, Gong allows me to quickly and efficiently LISTEN to customers in calls I did not participate in and to hear the customer DIRECTLY instead of through a Sales Engineer or a Sales Person ‘translation’” — G2Crowd Gong Review
“I received more helpful recommendations from our sales person than from client success during implementation. Leverage the sales process to get solid recommendation” — G2Crowd Gong Review
Customers have rated Gong the highest amongst its peers with an impressive 98% user satisfaction on G2Crowd — see for yourself.
Extending Value Beyond Sales
While Gong is primarily used by sale organizations today, the value of the data extracted by the platform goes beyond sales into other lines of business. Remember our friend Jack who didn’t enter detailed customer notes in the CRM? Imagine if all his conversations — customer feedback, prospect objections, competitive insights — could be shared with Customer Success, Marketing, Product or C-suite when most relevant to them. There is a huge opportunity for Gong to extend value beyond sales and become the platform for all enterprise conversations — a new category Gartner has dubbed “Conversational AI” and named Gong.io a cool vendor for 2017. Example value-add capabilities described below.
Customer Success — Review important ‘moments’ and topics surfaced by Gong from customer conversations prior to purchase. This smooths the pre-sales to post-sales hand off by providing intelligent context about the customer’s stakeholders, technical environment, integrations, and success criteria.
Product — Uncover product insights around competitive intelligence, key bug fixes, or valuable features that customer need to guide product strategy and validate the roadmap.
Marketing — Reveal all key points in customer conversations where business value resonated with customers, or when details on the competition were surfaced. These insights can help tighten marketing’s message and deepen competitive intelligence.
C-suite — Extract analytics and intelligence across all sales calls to provide visibility into the market, customer needs, execution across the sales organization, and overall company strategy.
Don’t just take our word for it. Read the funding announcement and coverage in Techcrunch. We are beyond excited to be backing the Gong team and look forward to helping them become the conversational intelligence platform used by the largest companies globally.
*DISCLAIMER: The portfolio companies identified and described herein do not represent all of the portfolio companies purchased, sold or recommended for funds advised by NextWorld Capital. Certain portfolio companies may be kept confidential for various reasons, including contractual or subject to a non-disclosure agreement. The reader should not assume that an investment in the portfolio companies identified was or will be profitable.
Not all acquisitions or IPOs are profitable; the positions can be acquired at a price that is greater or less than the price at which NextWorld Capital purchased its interest for client accounts. The information is being shown to reflect the firm’s ability to select investments and not to reflect any positive investment experience.
