New kind of cloud solution introduces AI to improve B2B-sales conversations
Palo Alto, Calif., and Tel Aviv, Israel (June 21, 2016) – Gong.io, a SaaS company pioneering the B2B Sales Conversation Intelligence field, today emerged from stealth mode and announced $6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners and Check Point Co-Founder Shlomo Kramer. Gong uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help B2B sales teams win more deals by recognizing effective patterns from tens of thousands of hours of spoken sales conversations.
Gong is led by a strong team of executives, scientists and engineers. Serial entrepreneurs Amit Bendov and Eilon Reshef co-founded Gong to fill a significant void they noticed in the market while managing some of the most successful hyper-growth startups. Previous companies where Bendov served as CEO and senior executive (Sisense, Panaya, and ClickSoftware) have grown from zero traction over $1B in combined value. CTO Reshef previously co-founded Webcollage, a SaaS used by over 1000 of the world’s top brands.
“We believe Gong’s technology is the most significant invention for sales since the invention of CRM,” Amit Bendov, Gong CEO and Co-Founder. “Trillions of marketing dollars have been poured into reaching, nurturing, and contacting leads. But 80% of those hard-earned leads are lost after the first few phone conversations with a sales person. Gong solves that problem, pioneering a new category of solutions.”
“There’s one big gap with current business intelligence solutions: analyzing unstructured data from conversations such customer communications, job interviews and company meetings. Gong aims to lead this new category using cutting-edge technology.” said Dror Nahumi, General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners. “The first opportunity for Gong.io is B2B sales, where optimization via analytics results in higher conversion and huge ROI.”
B2B buyers rate their direct conversations with the sales team as the most significant factor influencing their buying decisions. Yet, these sales conversations are nuanced, complex, and hard to master. If buyers are from Venus, sellers are from Mars. This communication challenge often leads to a frustrating buyer experience and lost sales.
“The average B2B sales conversation runs 6000 words per hour, sales people hold around 20-30 conversations per week, and managers are often responsible for 6-12 reps — impossible math if you’re trying to gain a deep understanding of all those calls,” says Amit Bendov, Gong CEO and Co-Founder. “Gong provides visibility so sales executives and reps can understand what’s happening on every single call.”
Gong analyzes spoken conversations from most audio sources, and web conferencing platforms such as Cisco WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Zoom. It then ties the results to CRM systems such as Salesforce.com. Gong is delivered as cloud software and users can get started in under five minutes.
For sales teams and their managers, it’s a guessing game to understand what went wrong on the way to closing the deal: Are we presenting properly? Are we being good listeners? What do our buyers say about our competitors? What are the top objections? How do our customers react to our pricing?
“In our competitive industry, a great buyer experience is key to winning the business,” said Chris Hardeman, VP of Sales at Act-On Software. “Gong has already helped us identify dozens of sales coaching and development opportunities to help us deliver better experiences for our buyers, and now the technology is at the top of our sales stack.”
Over the last 9 months, while still in stealth mode, Gong has developed and deployed its Sales Conversation Intelligence solution in dozens of organizations and already has significant sales.
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