How Avalara Uses Gong To Drive Cross-Org Efficiency

Revenue professionals know selling to existing customers is easier than landing new ones. Why? Better relationships, a more complete understanding of their pains and business goals, and established trust in the value of your solution. 

And in today’s tight macroeconomic environment, growing revenue efficiently is of the essence. Cross-selling and upselling are two key ways to drive new revenue without landing net-new customers — boosting your customers’ lifetime value, and maximizing revenue efficiency.

In order to cross-sell and upsell effectively, you need rich data, easily accessible and communicable to your whole revenue team. You need to know what challenges your customers are experiencing, when, and how to jump in with relevant solutions.

At Gong, we care deeply about helping our customers drive efficient growth: unearthing customer pain points, identifying best practices, empowering leaders to become better coaches, and ultimately, drive more successful deals and more efficient revenue. Across a study of 332 customers, we found that those who use Gong org-wide drove 11 percent higher year-over-year growth than those who don’t. 

A sterling example of this purpose in action is with Avalara, a leading tax compliance platform serving 30,000+ businesses and government customers in over 90 countries. Avalara’s mission is critical: they help businesses of all sizes, all over the world, in both the public and private sectors make their end-to-end tax compliance processes more efficient. 

Avalara is big, they serve a diverse range of customers, and they handle a wide array of customer needs. Amid the sector-wide shift to efficiency, Avalara needed a platform that would help them deliver as much value to customers as possible—and in turn, maximize the revenue value of each individual customer.

Avalara’s customer account management (CAM) team was the first to deploy Gong, back in 2021. By leveraging Gong Insights, the CAM team distinguished behaviors that produced growth from those that negatively impacted opportunities. This enabled CAM leaders to offer more personalized coaching on ways to improve the quality of customer interactions, communicate value, and help sellers improve.

Once that team had noted a measurable impact, Avalara deployed Gong across numerous other functions—customer success, customer development, product marketing, sales development, new business sales, and support. Gong became integral to their most critical workflows: building pipeline, closing new business, providing better service, and identifying valuable cross-sell opportunities.

This last piece is key. Meaningful cross-sells come from a deep understanding of customer needs and customer communication preferences. Knowing when customers are experiencing a pain that you can solve, and knowing how and when to broach the topic. Gong helps Avalara execute both, and then standardize best practices to take mystery out of co-sell opportunities.

Gong has done for Avalara what we do for all our customers: automate away administrative tasks, surface powerful customer insights, and empower revenue professionals to do what they do best. Humans are critical thinkers, strategists, and coaches. When we can automate the ingestion and analysis of vast volumes of customer interaction data, and automate legacy processes, we can focus on our strengths—and ultimately, drive more meaningful growth.

Gong enriches our customers’ understanding of their customers, their customers’ voices, and their needs. Avalara is a powerful example: Tax compliance is one of the most heavily regulated and scrutinized spaces, and Avalara’s customer base could hardly be more diverse—geographically, functionally, and linguistically. Even in the face of such high stakes and complexity, Gong has been able to drive efficient growth.

With Avalara as evidence, explore how Gong can power better decision-making and more successful business outcomes.