Gong: Conversational Intelligence with AI

Season 1 Episode 4
  • Host

    Zach DeWitt

  • Guests

    Amit Bendov


  • Date

    July 30, 2019

  • Duration

    39 minutes

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What is conversational intelligence and how does it solve real business problems?

Today we have a special episode as Wing Venture Capital founding partner Peter Wagner and your host Zach sit down for a candid conversation with Amit Bendov, the CEO and co-founder of Gong.

Listen to learn how Gong uses artificial intelligence to unlock conversational data and provide valuable insights for sales reps and managers to improve sales.

What is Gong?

Gong unlocks a unique data set by monitoring and ingesting call and email data and providing reps and managers with increased deal visibility from contact to close and valuable insights to improve sales.

Gong has over 500 customers using the product today. Their customers range from small companies like start ups with small teams trying to figure out their initial product market fit to customers like GE and LinkedIn who have thousands of sales reps.

Gong provides insights

One of the powers of Gong is that it gets rid of opinions, leaving you just with what the data shows.

There are multiple levels of insights customers can receive from Gong. At the most basic level, it tracks activity volume, such as how many calls and emails a rep has each day. The second is interaction skills such as patience, asking questions, and allowing the customer to talk.

Finally, for larger companies, over time Gong monitors conversations and outcomes in the CRM, and given enough data it will start providing insights on the winning patterns.

Three pillars of Gong

“I started Gong because I realized how little information we were getting from our CRM system,” says Amit Bendov, CEO and co-founder of Gong.

CRMs tell us who our customers are, how many deals we’re winning, and what our contract value is with each customer, but there are some fundamental questions that don’t get answered.

Gong wants to answer three of these questions: Why are some sales reps successful when others are not? Why are we losing some deals and winning other deals? What’s really happening in the market?

The three pillars of Gong, or the three applications are: people success, deal success, and strategy success.

People success is about improving how we operate. Deal success is about improving the win rate by understanding how opportunities behave in the market. And strategy success is about high-level product insights for senior management.

Key takeaways:

  • Gong is unlocking a unique data set and empowering sales reps and managers by providing them with more visibility into the deal process and making recommendations for improving their conversations;
  • Gong has invested heavily in its artificial intelligence, including its natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, but the company’s success can be attributed to Gong’s laser focus on solving a real business problem;
  • AI is helping Gong both improve its go to market strategy and providing unique insights and recommendations to its customers to help them win more deals

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