Plate IQ shrinks ramp-up time from a year to a few weeks

Plate IQ is restaurant Accounts Payable made easy. Its technology saves customers time and money by managing invoices, vendor payments, and cost reporting.

Plate IQ, by its own admission, sells a pretty complex solution.

Their powerful technology is not something any account executive could pick up from day one and just comprehend entirely. There’s a lot of product and industry knowledge that needs to be learned and absorbed. In order to fully understand the product and successfully manage a pipeline, Plate IQ salespeople need to appreciate the infrastructure of where its platform lives in the marketplace.

This complexity and need for deep product and industry know-how mean longer than average ramp-up time for new salespeople. More often than not, it takes even a very experienced, senior account executive a minimum of 6 months, yet often closer to a year, before they start performing at their optimum level.

This six to twelve-month sales rep ramp time was pre-Gong.

Everything changed for Plate IQ in the post-Gong world.

That’s a game-changer.

“I have two reps who are a month on the job (not 6 months, not a year, but a MONTH) and they are already closing mid-market deals … which is insane,” Greg (rightfully) boasted.

The pre-Gong rep process went something like this:

STEP ONE: Reps would make notes about competitor mentions
STEP TWO: Sales managers would manually look at all of the call notes
STEP THREE: In some cases — if the call was recorded — they would listen to the entire call.

As Greg shared, the process was “not quite optimal,” but it’s really all they knew. “We could not even fathom a technology like Gong actually existed.”

But, it did — and, it does.

Enter Gong.

“I now have a greater reach. I don’t have to listen to an entire hour-long demo. With Gong, I just listen to the pieces that matter. Or, better yet, I can set up certain triggers for each rep, so I can determine what I need to hear and how they’re handling each call.”

But it’s not just the time saved listening to the actual demo, says Greg. Pre-Gong, sales managers would spend a few hours reviewing the call, taking notes, and timestamping everything.

Now, the process is 10-20 minutes all in.

To recap: Hours and hours of (wasted) time is now 10-20 minutes of specific, relevant time. That’s a heckuva lot of time saved! And in sales, time = money.

When Plate IQ originally purchased Gong, it was to help with sales — specifically shorten rep ramp-up time and make them more efficient salespeople.

An unforeseen benefit has been other team’s ability to leverage Gong — specifically, the product and engineering teams.

Engineers can now quickly and efficiently search in Gong for a particular topic. In the past, they’d have to listen to and transcribe hundreds of calls in hopes they found the information they were looking for.

“Thanks to Gong, we have completely pivoted our future product planning approach based on the information that we learned from the platform. We’ve changed our direction because of the rich Gong data we see each and every day.”

Case in point: Plate IQ was digging through some Gong data and noticed “expense reporting” — a feature they did not have — was mentioned by buyers “726 times out of 900 calls” (over 80% of the time!). This was not an anomaly. This was not a one-off. This was the real deal.

As a result of this rich Gong data, Plate IQ is now building an expense reporting product. “This product is literally going to be the future of our company,” said Greg.

“Gong is hands down the most valuable piece of technology we’ve ever bought as a company,” says Greg.

He continued, “It feels like we are a part of your company — almost like we’re a part of your success — every time Gong wins, it’s almost like we’re winning.”

Well, Greg, we plan on doing a lot more winning in the years to come. And, like Plate IQ, we hope our success translates to our customer’s success.