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Amit Bendov

CEO & Co-Founder, Gong

Search every verified Amit Bendov interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Amit Bendov, co-founder and CEO of Gong, discussed the company's origins and his views on sales and AI in several podcast appearances. He described experiencing a difficult sales quarter as CEO of a previous company, which he said led to the creation of Gong, an AI-powered revenue platform that he stated has grown to over $500 million in annual recurring revenue. Bendov argued that CRM systems are not a reliable source of truth about customer deals, as they rely on manual data entry, and he advocated for using AI to automatically capture and analyze customer interactions from meetings, video, voice, and emails to guide sales representatives. In other interviews, Bendov addressed the role of AI in business operations and company structure. He suggested that AI could enable less specialization and better manager span of control, potentially allowing employees to handle more tasks with AI-provided skills and knowledge. Bendov also discussed Gong's challenges, noting a rough patch in 2023 due to post-COVID customer financial stress and competition consolidating products. He cautioned against overreacting to AI hype, advising companies to make a bet and continue, while emphasizing that competitive advantage comes from customer context, proprietary data, and operational complexity rather than code alone.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“Three out of four marketing dollars and sales dollars are going to waste. You're paying them not to sell. So huge inefficiency.”

“I think there is a real opportunity to rethink our structures with AI, maybe like better span of control for managers, maybe less specialization. So if like five people like each one doing a step of the process we could blend it all together, everybody's doing like everything right with if AI provides the skills and the knowledge and people have like more opportunities to do like more things. So there is an opportuni”

“We did have like a rough patch in 2023 because that was the post-COVID growth, right? The hangover. A lot of our customers have over-hired people and got into financial stress. So, we saw like higher churn. We also had competition that went in and and bought like a a bunch of competing products and they're going to our customers and consolidating. They said, 'Oh, we're going to do like all three or four products in o”

“So if you look at uh B2B sales alone, the kind of the complic more complicated sales, uh there are 10 million sellers um worldwide, give or take. Each one of is costing $250,000 a year. So that's two and a half trillions. Threearters of this is like to not sell. And then what they're selling, let's say at $600,000 uh dollars a year a quarter or a million. It's like six to trillion uh six to10 trillion dollars of reve”

“So, three out of four dollars, uh, you're paying them not to sell, right? and the in the dollar that you're paying into sell, they only win like 25 to 10% of the opportunities that you're you're spending so much. So sales and marketing is probably the largest expense for most companies. 80% of it goes to waste by definition.”

“We find in most cases the win rate is better when you leave pricing discussion towards the end of the call; it's a poor buying signal if a customer brings up pricing early, because that often means they're more focused on price than solving a problem.”

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →