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It's time to Accelerate. Hi friends, this is Andy. Welcome to episode 461 of Accelerate, the sales podcast of record, where I hold in-depth conversations with today's leading experts in sales, marketing, and leadership six days a week. Couple of quick items for you before we meet today's guest, Amit Bendov. Amit is the CEO and co-founder of Gong.io. Gong.io is also one of the proud sponsors of Accelerate. It's a great tool to use to up the effectiveness of your sales coaching, which will lead to more sales. So you need to check it out at Gong.io. Hey, if you like the show, it'd really help me out if you subscribed and left a review for Accelerate. You can do all that from your podcast app on your phone that you're using to listen to this podcast. So go ahead, hit pause, subscribe, leave a quick review, and then come right back. I'll be waiting for you. So friends, if you want some new ideas on how to amp up your sales, then go to accelerate.fm/spark and get my free ebook, How to Spark a Sales Turnaround. It's based on my interviews with over 300 sales experts about how they would boost their sales if they slowed down. And I've compiled all the recommendations into a practical, step-by-step guide that you can use to accelerate your sales today. So don't wait. Go to accelerate.fm/spark to get your free copy of How to Spark a Sales Turnaround. Again, I'm excited to be joined on the show by Amit Bendov, CEO and co-founder of Gong.io. He's had over 20 years of senior leadership experience in hyper-growth technology startups, managing R&D, marketing, sales from small startups to global corporations in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. And his track record includes taking companies from zero sales traction to successful exit, and from small teams to large organizations, and from obscurity to white-hot companies. So Amit, welcome to Accelerate.
Hey Andy, it's a pleasure to be here.
Great, great. So we're glad to have you here. So take a minute, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit of how you got started in business and sales, and then what was the impetus to start Gong.io?
Okay, so I've been most of my career in sales and marketing positions and leadership positions. I have a short period where I've been guilty in playing with technology. I do have a computer science degree, just out of intrigue, and I did manage R&D teams for a while. But as soon as I got the hang of it, got back to sales and marketing. Gong is the fourth company that I'm leading. I've been in leadership positions in three companies that have achieved over a billion dollars in shareholder value to date.
So which ones were those?
First one was ClickSoftware, mobile workforce automation, traditional enterprise software. I was GM of North American operations, brought it from zero to an IPO on NASDAQ. Second company was a SaaS company called Panaya. I was VP Sales and Marketing and later CMO. SaaS to automate ERP changes, pretty boring but lucrative space. And that was sold for a quarter of a billion dollars. Then I was CEO of a company called Sisense in the business intelligence space. Grew it from 20 to over 150 people and tens of millions of dollars in sales. That has not exited yet but doing great. And I got the idea for Gong out of desperation. I had a really shitty quarter and I had no idea what's going on. We had an incredible marketing operation, both of the companies we've built incredible marketing machines, and we're throwing millions of dollars and they're generating a lot of leads. And we had a great sales team and for some reason, sales were taking a nose dive. We started to analyze what's going on. Do we have enough leads? Are people putting in the calls? And it was very difficult to understand what's going on. And the only way to find out was actually listen to the call. It wasn't so much about the quantity of calls but about the quality of the conversations.
So what you're saying though is that your sort of conventional KPIs and metrics you're using that you might use to measure effectiveness of your sales weren't giving you the clues you needed to find out what was really happening?
Yeah, we had leads, but the sales... yeah, we have leads but they don't have a sense of urgency. How do you go about that? So we had to listen to a lot of calls and that's a tall order. First, you can only listen to a handful. Each one of them is an hour and you know, we're doing thousands of calls a quarter. So your evidence is anecdotal at best. Plus it's extremely time-consuming to management and the salespeople. And I realized there are a lot of things that we don't want to listen to. It's just not a very efficient use of the time. And that's how I got the idea for Gong. I started looking what's out there and couldn't find anything. They either had human transcription that was pretty expensive, not economical to do on a scale, machine transcription wasn't great and accurate enough. Plus we didn't really... we didn't have time to read transcripts either. I mean it's faster than listening but I just wanted to get like the key facts. You know, what our customer is saying, what are we asking, how are we positioning the company, what are the next steps, is there a sense of urgency. Really the key parameters that you want to know about a deal.
And I also presume you lose a fair amount of the nuance if you're just reading it as opposed to actually hearing it?
You lose a ton of nuance just if you just look at the text. In an average one-hour conversation like we're having right now, there's an exchange of about 6,000 words. Speaking pace about 150 words per minute, right? So in an hour you get about 6,000. What ends up in Salesforce or CRM is 30 words. 'It was a great call, they're excited, they want to move forward, talk next week.' And then the customer evaporates and you have no idea what's going on, right? And that's all that information, 99% of the information is lost as soon as you hang up the phone. And yeah, so it's a losing proposition. CRM is blind to the things that really matter: the tonality, what's being said, the nuances, and a ton of other information just right there.
Right, there's too much. So interesting that it covers sort of phone-based communications, but then how are you addressing or what was your thought about, gosh, you got field sales force when you got the same thing going on?
Well, we'll be getting there. So if you look at Alexa, I mean think about Alexa for field sales. It's not uncommon, actually a lot of our customers are asking, 'Okay, can I open my laptop when I have a meeting with a customer in the field?' So that's coming up. We just started with what's easier right now, but we'll definitely get to field sales as well.
Got it. So in your mind, and before we jump more into Gong, so what is the single biggest challenge you see that faces sales reps today or managers for that instance?
Well, I think they face the same challenge. There's so much activity that nobody has the time to really coach the salespeople and help them. Sales is rarely easy, right? And there are a lot of nuances that it's very hard for a new salesperson to figure out. And they usually learn the hard way by trial and error. Sure, if they're lucky they're successful, and if they're not as lucky then they're not successful and they get fired. And the challenge is managers don't have time to really listen to what the reps are saying, coach them, and provide some good advice. And the reps don't have it either. So the knowledge is in the organization. Some of the better reps, every rep knows like bits and pieces that other people don't. And managers definitely have the information, but there is no exchange of information because nobody has the time.
All right, so how are you helping address that?
So Gong makes it easy for people to listen to each other and provide coaching advice and other advice and to share knowledge. So you're recording outbound phone calls?
We're recording all calls.
Okay, automatically without the rep or anyone needing to take any action. We automatically transcribe them, index them, and share them with the right people. We highlight the interesting parts about every call. Okay, so you don't need to listen to a full hour. You just say, 'Okay, what were the pain points? Which questions were asked? What's the next step?' Usually in two to three minutes you can understand the gist of the call. Ask for help from your manager, or your manager can listen to the call and provide some advice. Very, very easy. And it's without changing the way that they work. So we offer organizations the ability to share that knowledge and share field intelligence without changing the way that they work.
Okay, yeah, I want to get back to that last point about not changing the way they work because I actually think it could be an impetus to change the way they work, actually. But so you talk, you record phone calls, you record GoToMeeting sessions, any sort of customer interaction that you have with the prospect?
Okay, that's interesting that you use the conferencing platforms and so on.
So most of the substantial conversations happen over tools like GoToMeeting or Zoom. So discovery calls, demos, negotiation, trials. And phone is mostly used for shorter calls like, 'Hey, I've sent you this proposal, you know, should get a response.' So there's less substance on those calls. That's why we started with the tougher stuff, right? Plus there's a video that you spoke about, the nuances, you're seeing faces or screens or demos that capture some additional information. So we started with the stuff first.
So some systems that are sort of in this field seem a little more focused towards the SDR, where it seems like you've sort of started at the other end, more at the account executive, the higher order sale as opposed to the initial proactive outbound call.
Absolutely. First, the higher value calls. It's the higher value calls and they're the more challenging calls. SDR calls tend to be more repetitive and I wouldn't say scripted but they follow a very similar pattern. There is still work to be done over there, but if you think about the discovery call, it's much more complex, goes in all sorts of directions, it's not scripted, it's long, and the value is much higher. Just think about the cost of the opportunity or the value of the opportunity is much higher. So it's an easier sale, easier problem.
Well, it really is in my mind, it really is the decisive call in the whole sales process. So if you mess that up, your opportunity is out the window. So why transcribe the call?
We transcribe the call to provide the AI the ability to understand what's being spoken on a call, to identify which patterns, how much are we talking about pricing, in which segment are we talking about, are we seeing objections, which products are being mentioned, what questions are being asked. So transcribing is kind of like the basic information for all of that. But we don't necessarily show the transcription because people do not want to read. They just want the distilled information from every call.
The second capability that you say, when you say distilled, so you transcribe but you don't actually provide a summary description of the call?
How many questions were asked, listen-to-talk ratio, objections that were raised, competitors mentioned, how much time was spent on each part of your playbook. So you spent 20% on pricing and it happened early on in a call, and these are the features that were discussed, here are the features that were not discussed, what are the next steps. So everything is analyzed by Gong and presented as a summary to both the rep for self-coaching and the manager to get better visibility to the deal.
Okay, so when you're doing that summary and you're saying, you know, questions asked, competitors mentioned, so does every one of your customers then have to basically go through a training with the system to teach it, 'Hey, here are our competitor's names, here are terms that are unique to us' and so on?
No. The system, we designed it from day one for salespeople with very little attention span. So our approach is you do absolutely nothing. The system automatically identifies topics that are repeating themselves on your calls, machine learning, and then it starts highlighting them as you go. You can, if you do want to, list, 'Okay, these are the three competitors that I want to get alerted every time that they get mentioned on the call,' you can do that. So you set rules, okay? But basically you don't need to do anything on the call.
So basically it's learning through repetition, assuming that what's repeated most frequently is important.
Yes. And you can tweak that, but most people just don't touch the system. You turn it on, usually we turn the system on on the first demo. It takes two to three minutes to set it up and customers are live on the first call.
Interesting. You said it looks for linguistic cues, that was another thing sort of interesting. So what do you consider a linguistic cue? What's it looking for?
Okay, so let's look at questions for example. Identifying how many questions and what type of questions were asked. I mean that's more complex than what you would initially think. So it seems very complex, you would think about, 'Okay, let's look for wh- questions,' right? Wrong. So first, people don't follow correct grammar when they speak, right? Written text is one thing and conversational is a totally different ball game. And plus I can say, 'Here's what I said to you last time we spoke,' okay? I did use the word 'what' but it wasn't a question. So looking at both the linguistic, you know, grammatically what people are saying, but also the exchange of information. For example, you've asked something and then the ball moved to the other side, other court, and then there was a response and certain type of response. And that's how we identify questions. So we look both at the audio signal and the questions themselves to identify the constructs. Then you can start asking some higher order questions: how many questions, how many open-ended questions, how many closed questions. And that's, you build based on those low-level building blocks.
So how are you determining, and this is just from an interest from a technical standpoint, how are you discerning the difference between an open-ended question and a closed question?
Well, that's part of the secret sauce. I can't reveal it, but we have linguists and data scientists working on exactly that problem and similar problems to identify. And there are several cues and hints that we look at from audio and the text to identify. So one of the things is to look at what answers are being provided, the whole exchange of information, and then you can understand what kind of questions were asked.
All right, so you've got this, get to the meat of the matter. You've recorded a call, you've got a transcript. So now what happens? You know, let's say you and I just finished a call, I was calling you. How long does it take for the result of that call to be available? And you know, do I get notified? Does my manager get notified? How's that process work?
Usually within 5 to 10 minutes your call is ready and you get an email. 'Hey, here's your call with so-and-so. These are the key issues. You can click here to listen and view some vital information about the call.' And the manager gets notified as well.
So the summary says this is what you talked about, this is a summary of what you talked about, right?
Right. And that's, to my knowledge, Gong is by far the fastest platform out there in terms of its processing power.
So it's very, very quick. If you can read email, you can use Gong because everything gets to your inbox and you could just look at what's interesting and ignore what's not so interesting to you. You can see it in Salesforce. And the other things I want to mention, you asked about the transcription, one of the other capabilities that it provides is the ability to search through all of the calls. Okay, which is very helpful to managers and sometimes product managers.
Meaning when you say search through all the calls, okay, so we have thousands of calls, show me all those that the competitors were mentioned in a positive light, okay? Or all those where pricing came up early in the call and took more than 10%?
So you could search and find the interesting calls.
