Gong's Amit Bendov on Powering Your Company Brain

Well, I didn't say it's a lie. That's a bit harsh. I said it's not the source of truth for what's happening with customers. There are things that are true in CRM, like who bought from you, who your customers are, what they're paying you. That is all true. So it's not a lie. But your interesting question, I was asking like, well, why are we losing so many deals? Every company's conversion is like one out of five deals or one out of 10, whatever it is. What happens with out of five? And why are half the salespeople not making their numbers? Is it them? Is it us training? And the answer is, we're not a CRM. So I said people think it is a source of truth, so it's more accurately a source of a truth, but CRM depends on people telling it what happened, and they don't do it right because there's not enough time and they don't always want to do it and everybody hates doing it. So the idea was, can we retrieve that information from elsewhere, taking people out of the equation? That seemed crazy. When we announced Gong in like 2016, I said this is the biggest invention since the introduction of CRM 20 years ago, and everyone said, oh yeah right, there's another delusional founder. But now this doesn't seem crazy. People see that the majority of the information does not exist in a CRM.

Yeah. I personally have not logged into a CRM like in years. All I need to do is, hey, what's the status of Zapier right now? And it tells me everything. Not obviously you talk about the transcript, but the emails, all the interaction with the account, everything that's happening, it's a much richer data set.

Right. Is that a trend you're seeing consistently across your customer base? I would have to think so.

Well, what we're seeing, and that's a good thing, people look at the personal habits right now. Okay, we're going to automate meeting prep and here's my agenda. That's all good. But the powerful thing is what Gong has always been about, to get the insights on a global scale, to understand what are we doing right and what could we be doing better. I'll give you an example. At Gong right now, we actually don't have people writing battle cards and competitive information, even product documentation. It's all done by Gong and it's better and faster. So if you think about it, you just say, okay, create a battle card against Evil Corp, whoever your Evil Corp is. Before that, it was a product marketing team or enablement team spending weeks picking one competitor and writing what they've heard. And usually those are okay at best, and by the time they're out, nobody used them. They're in some content management system. Now, create a battle card. It'll sift through all the deals that we've won, not hypothetical, real stuff, all the deals that we have lost, and it'll create a three-pager. Here's who they are. Here's their strengths, truth. Here's their weaknesses. Here's why we lost to them. Here's why we won. Here's three customers that switched. Here's what they're saying they're seeing different. Exactly the information that salespeople want to see. It is better, faster, and cheaper. So the ability to get content is insane. People are creating marketing content from that. We have people that are automating entire onboarding. So if you think, all the information of the organization already exists in the collective brain and conversations, if you put it together, it's super powerful.

Exactly.

Right. The other is real intel, real time intel. So we launched a couple months ago, three months ago, a new product called Gong Enable. It's an agentic coach that coaches people. It is trending really well. If you look at the revenue numbers, they're great. It's our fastest growing product. So that's good signals, but I'm worried about the customer experience. Does it really work? Are there problems? It takes time for people to deploy. So I wanted to see how we are doing, what's the experience. So I immediately put an agent at Gong. It says, okay, tell me every time, every deal that we win, tell me was there a PC and what was the experience. And I can see in real time. Before that, I would have to go and start asking people and ask them to write reports. It is so easy right now. It's amazing that a new product launch can be tracked in real time and if there are issues, we can correct them in real time.

Yeah, it's definitely something that we encode internally to capture the organizational knowledge, but also something that we're building into the solution. It is shared with customers so they could get better and better over time.

Well, each team did their own. So definitely everything revenue and product is from Gong, but we also have other systems. We use it in legal, we use it in engineering. Obviously you build skills that have the coding conventions and the practices. So that builds the organizational brain.

Oh, no. Well, that's the way I understood it. That's the problem. No, use AI a lot. There's a lot of hype that people don't understand. Every day there's an, oh, I just vibecoded Monday.com as a weekend project. This is BS. Or even a year ago, people said, we hired our SDR and they even had a person named Fire SDR team and said this is BS. We knew it's not going to work.

And sure enough, it doesn't work.

That's exactly the problem. That's what we knew. I can tell you how Elon and I discussed this. Should we be in this? And we thought, this is not going to work, at least for now. It might work in the future. But we always tried at Gong, when Elon and I started the company, it was an AI vision. We wanted to build an autonomous revenue management system. This is like a self-driving Tesla, level five. But we also wanted to know, when we interviewed a lot of people from the industry, what works today. We wanted the state of the art, but not a vision or science fiction. We wanted to go with something that people can use today. So we've always been on this edge or frontier, something that actually works well today and can create value versus something that is going to be three years out that maybe would work one day. So we always try to ship something that people can really use. And now there's this expectation. So that's the hype. You know, I've just vibecoded something like a Workday. And a CEO a couple years ago said, oh, I dumped my CRM and we're going to develop it, which turned out not to be true.

Well, it's not centralized. We instilled it in the culture and the work practices. It's built by design of the company. There are two things. First, we have a research team. They're really thinking ahead, but it'll never be foundation level like quantum physics that might work on a quantum computer. We don't do that. We're not IBM. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just not us. So we think of things that might not work, but if they do work, they could add tremendous value to our solution. So we have a research team and that's what they do. They test concepts, but it's not a free check or free license to experiment with anything. These are things that we have a hunch might work and they're hard and they might fail. The other is we always test with customers very early. A product manager will talk with customers and say, we're thinking about this, and show mockups. Nothing really works, but first to see if there is value assuming this works. If it's remotely interesting, then they would try to put some data. Sometimes we decide to kill a project or change direction. What we thought is interesting is actually not so interesting. That's the hard part, to know what matters to customers and what can actually work. Then when we ship something, we try to see if it actually works. We know there's a cycle. We think about it, customers see the value, customers tell you that it's great, but then until they see it on their own data and say, why did you choose this deal? That doesn't make sense. Or this is bad data. That's the time. So we take those small steps that we can iterate really quickly and understand what actually works.

Well, it could be the right approach. What I said is not all things that are saying, oh, we're going to lay off half the company because of AI. That might be the truth, but maybe not the whole truth. The truth is a lot of companies overhired and sometimes find themselves with bloat, pardon me for using that term for dealing with people, and they want to streamline the organization and adjust it to reality, allow more agility. I think there is a real opportunity to rethink structures with AI. Maybe better span of control for managers, maybe less specialization. If five people each doing a step of the process, we could blend it all together. Everybody's doing everything with AI providing the skills and the knowledge, and people have more opportunities to do more things. So there is an opportunity to rethink structures and become more efficient. But a lot of these layoffs have to do more with, it could be because of AI because we need more budget for AI, so we're cutting elsewhere and we're going to redeploy that capital. But it's not necessarily that AI has already replaced half of my jobs and I'm replacing people.

Well, I think we're going to see people that are more multi-disciplined. They can help more. There was a time where there were only salespeople or account managers. That was the two roles you had, maybe one or two. Then 20 years ago or so started the whole idea of hypergrowth companies. The business was growing so fast you just couldn't hire fast enough. So we said, okay, we can't train a person on everything. So let's build almost like an assembly line. One person taking the inbound, the other one doing the initial meeting, the other one deploying, which created a reasonable fast growth model. But the problem it creates is a fragmented buyer experience. People don't like, I just told you what I bought, why I'm buying, and now I'm getting a different person. I want that trust, especially in enterprise. You want someone that has the relationship. It doesn't feel good that you switch people. And second, siloed flow of information. But now with AI, you could have one person do more things because the skills are now encoded in the system and it can walk someone with a brain and a desire and passion to do incredible things. So I do see that the roles start to merge back, and it creates a better buyer experience and more flexibility for the company. Also, when you create silos, it's very hard to balance. Sometimes you have too much of this and too little of that. There's always these mismatches. So I think it creates a better model for companies, unified.