How Amit Bendov Created and Scaled Gong.io (Revenue Intelligence Platform)

Hey, excited to be here, Vlad.

The origin story. So in 2015, I was a CEO of a software company here in New York City. And we were doing pretty well until we had one quarter that I call the quarter from hell, right? Sales were taking a nose dive and I was trying to figure out what's going on as the CEO of the company. What is happening? Is it the competition? Is it our sellers? Is it the marketing? There was a lot of finger-pointing within the company, right? Marketing, sales, product. And it was really hard to know. In my desperation, I sent my product manager to sift through CRM notes. We were using Salesforce at the time, to see what he can glean out of that. He spent a couple of weeks, came back and said there's nothing there, right? Which didn't make sense to me at all. I'm a former engineer and I like to understand data and I like to rely on facts versus just asking people, like asking the sellers why did you not close a deal, or what's wrong with the leads? And I then came to the realization that people at the time were looking at CRM as their single source of truth. And the only thing that was true over there was who are the customers, who bought, who didn't buy. What it didn't have was the more interesting things like why are we losing customers? So if you lose nine out of 10 opportunities, what happened to the nine? And all it had was things like no budget, no decision, and very little information. So we had some sellers that were doing pretty well, some sellers that were not doing well, right? And it was impossible to tell why we're winning, why we're losing, which is obviously the key to improving anything in the company. So when I thought about it some more, I realized that CRM is based on people telling it what happened, and they don't have the time. Sellers can't go in and fill in forms even if they had the time, and they just don't always know what's going on. So the thought was instead of relying on people to tell the CRM what happened, or an abbreviated version of what happened, can we capture information directly from the source, which is customer emails, Zoom meetings, in-person meetings, everything that happened, the customer conversations? And 2015 was the year where DeepMind was already beating the world champion in AlphaGo, right? And the question I asked, how hard would it be for AI to understand customers better than salespeople? So that was the origin story. The vision was an AI system in 2015 and 2016. Right now, everybody talks about AI, but we're, I think, the first AI-native application where AI is the vision. We envisioned an autonomous system that wins customers, grows customers, and reduces much of the labor that customer-facing people have to do. Today it seems very obvious, but we invented the category of revenue AI, and that was the origin.

Well, there are many use cases, both for coaching, for forecasting, for engagement. We'll speak about them, but at the core, the way that the system works, it has three layers. First is the data layer, which captures information directly from all customer communications, all channels, meetings, email, messaging, in-person meetings, captures all of that. And then uses AI to glean insights out of that: what is going on, what are the customer concerns, who are the competitors, which product, what are the offers. And then there's the application that are built as a third layer on top, both for AI-based forecasting to tell you what your revenue is likely to be based on AI and not just based on sentiment of people. We have AI engagement that communicates with the customers directly, it'll write the emails, it'll prepare the phone calls, and AI enablement that helps the sellers win more deals with advice from AI.

Oh, that is very easy. These are massive problems, like sales productivity. Sales productivity is notoriously low and there are two components with that. First, it's very difficult to win deals. Most companies lose four out of five deals or nine out of 10, so win rate is between 25% to 10%. So all those things that are going to waste, companies don't really know why. They blame the sellers and they say, 'Oh, he wasn't good or not a good fit.' And they replace the sellers 25-30% year-over-year. So 50% of sellers don't make their quotas. Problem number one. Problem number two is they work extremely hard to get there. So 75% of a seller's time is not customer-facing. It's updating CRM, it's preparing forecasts, it's sifting through lists, researching information, updating their managers, 1-on-1 meetings, training, all of those things. So companies are paying them to not sell. Three out of four dollars, you're paying them not to sell, right? And the dollar that you're paying them to sell, they only win 25 to 10% of the opportunities that you're spending so much on. So sales and marketing is probably the largest expense for most companies. 80% of it goes to waste by definition. That's the problem we're solving. It's a massive, massive market opportunity. So if you look at B2B sales alone, the more complicated sales, there are 10 million sellers worldwide, give or take. Each one is costing $250,000 a year. So that's two and a half trillion. Three-quarters of this is to not sell. And then what they're selling, let's say at $600,000 a quarter or a million, it's six to ten trillion dollars of revenue. Also, a lot of it is going to waste because half of them don't make their numbers. A lot of the leads don't convert, which the company is spending on. So it's a massive market opportunity, a massive problem for companies that nobody's addressing. CRM is kind of tracking who are your customers and what are they paying you, but it doesn't help you win. It doesn't help you grow customers and retain customers. That's the opportunity for revenue AI.

So first, you got to have a real value proposition, right? That's something that they understand and care about and could do. But actually, our salespeople at Gong love selling to CROs. And again, good game recognizes good game, right? So it's actually pretty fun when you're negotiating. You both know that the other party knows exactly what's going on. So it is not for everybody. We know that certain types of sellers tend to succeed at Gong. In the early days, there were some that did not succeed. You're talking clear type-A's that are shrewd buyers and negotiators, but they appreciate when they see a good sales motion. I get a lot of emails from prospects, 'Hey, we just bought Gong. I have to tell you the sales process has been the best that I have seen and I actually forwarded it to my people so we can learn from you.' So, Gong, we actually find ourselves showing up at sales kickoffs, which we never planned on doing, but actually training some of our customers on what we do at Gong to show up in a professional way. And we obviously have the technology, right? So Gong helps us bring our A-game to most of the interactions.