Using revenue AI to achieve true customer centricity: Sharing MadKudu’s story

As the CEO of MadKudu — a platform that helps sales and marketing teams act on buyer signals — I help my organization navigate a shifting, fast-paced industry. In recent years, internal alignment around customers’ needs is one of the primary factors underpinning our success in a turbulent market.

As an AI-based company ourselves, we’ve embraced revenue AI’s capabilities, including its ability to analyze customer interactions, to center our strategy around customer centricity. As a result, we have an entirely new level of understanding of our customers’ needs, which has dramatically improved our marketing effectiveness as a result.

We use this capability to give MadKudu’s marketing and sales teams, in particular, a really clear view of our customers’ pain points and the market’s direction, so they can translate that understanding into effective and aligned messaging. 

This has played out in three transformative ways at MadKudu, and I want to share them with you.

In recent years, it became clear to me and marketing leadership that traditional methods of gathering customer insights — say through user surveys or interviews — were time-consuming and often failed to capture the full picture of our customers’ perspectives.

So when our marketing team was trying to figure out why we had only average conversion rates on our website, it was a relief to know that we no longer needed to rely on outdated techniques. Instead, we used Gong’s Revenue AI to capture and analyze six months’ worth of customer calls in just minutes, to pinpoint the reasons inbound customers turn to us. 

Our product and revenue teams can now confidently name the top problems people come to us to solve. This shapes our understanding of why prospects visit our site, and in turn, the messaging we craft for them.

“Magic happens when you understand what your customers care about, and can align that with what your go-to-market team talks about and what your product team ships.” —Sam Levan, Co-founder and CEO, MadKudu

This has revolutionized how we approach our GTM messaging. Rather than relying on assumptions or traditional user research, we’ve leveraged AI to analyze vast amounts of customer conversation data efficiently and effectively. We now understand — and can respond to — our customers with more depth than ever before.

Having these accurate, customer-based insights was a triumph for us, but the journey didn’t end there. Our sights were set on achieving better outcomes. Today, MadKudu is proof positive that the right revenue platform can be the bridge connecting information to action.

After using Gong to uncover phenomenal customer insights — most notably the top three pain points customers want us to solve — we aligned our revenue teams around them. We shifted our strategy, messaging, and product development entirely. Every change we made played to the pain points AI had uncovered in our customer interactions. The results of this shift astounded us:

“With changes to our online messaging, we doubled our website’s conversion rate and the revenue that comes from it.” —Sam Levan, Co-founder and CEO, MadKudu

We had anticipated the initiative would create a deeper resonance with customers, but we didn’t know it would double our conversions and create a new level of speed and growth for our org. Now, I use Gong every day to identify market trends and opportunities — and I have my team act on them immediately.

In today’s business environment, you won’t succeed if you simply pay lip service to “being customer-centric.” Still, many companies struggle to move beyond aspiration and actually integrate this approach into their business strategies.

At MadKudu, we’ve put customer-centricity at the forefront of our revenue strategies. We’ve used revenue AI to take otherwise indigestible amounts of data, analyze it, garner insights, then convert those insights into concrete actions that directly respond to our customers’ needs.

Our marketing and sales teams are more effective, in part because their messaging is aligned, and also because the sales team is able to easily share what they hear on the ground with the marketing team. That makes it easier to iterate and test new messaging while keeping our customers’ needs at the forefront of everyone’s work.

“Gong’s AI has become the customer-centric way to revenue at MadKudu, fundamentally changing how we understand and respond to our customers’ needs.” —Sam Levan, Co-founder and CEO, MadKudu

In today’s competitive landscape, having accurate insights into customer needs isn’t just an advantage, it’s a necessity. We’re now able to gather comprehensive first-party data signals and account information using conversation intelligence, which helps us strengthen customer relationships with more resonant messaging.

Now that we have the ability to understand our customers’ needs, we can act quickly and respond in a way that brings in more revenue. Having doubled our website conversion rates and the profits that accompany them, we’ve found our better way to revenue.

That’s why I spend more time in Gong than in any other solution. Its combination of AI-powered insights and the ability to analyze customer conversations at scale has made this solution indispensable to driving growth at MadKudu. In Gong, we’ve found a way to not just gather insights but turn them into tangible business results.