Celebrate ’24 recap: A better way to revenue, AI innovations, and winning with Steve Young
December 4, 2024
Senior Global Event Marketing Manager
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Gong News
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Senior Global Event Marketing Manager
Here at Gong, a core operating principle is to create raving fans. Whether it’s through our platform or event experiences, we strive to equip our customers with the tools they need to succeed — their wins are our wins.
That’s what Celebrate ‘24 was all about. On November 21 and 22, we brought together revenue leaders from enterprises across all industries to discuss what it takes to build world-class go-to-market orgs. Attendees had the opportunity to connect with peers, engage in breakout sessions, and help us define the future of revenue.
For our attendees who want to look back as well as anyone who missed the live event, let’s revisit some of the key moments and big announcements from the event.
Watch all of Celebrate ‘24 on-demand here.
The future of revenue
When asked about the top challenges impacting their productivity, sellers who responded to Gong’s State of Sales Productivity, 2024 study said they spend 61 percent of their time on administrative tasks. They need a better way to revenue — one that’s not constrained by siloed solutions or administrative-intensive processes.
So it was fitting that our very own CRO, Shane Evans, kicked us off by reflecting on how productivity and growth constraints are tied to the lack of consistent, contextually rich data — and the ability to turn it into insights, actions, and decisions.
Our CEO, Amit Bendov, then joined the keynote stage to delve into Gong’s past, present, and future. “Our vision is an autonomous revenue management solution,” he said. “You’ll just talk with customers and the system does the rest. It provides automation and insight — you’ll know a lot more without having to rely on drudgery.”
Amit then introduced our next steps on the road to that fully autonomous future – the next evolution of Gong’s Revenue AI Platform. He unveiled five new AI capabilities:
AI Brief
Get anyone up to speed on the relevant account, deal, or call context. Define structured templates to standardize and streamline how knowledge is shared.
AI Scorecard Answers
Take the burden out of scoring your reps by pre-populating your coaching scorecards with AI-suggested answers.
Pre-Trained Smart Trackers
Monitor common revenue concepts, such as competition, budget, and decision-makers, across your team’s calls and emails without having to train AI yourself.
Revenue Analytics
Gong Forecast customers get access to configurable analytics, customizable dashboards, and centralized target and metric management.
Gong Anywhere
Available now for Gong Engage in the Chrome store, Gong for Gmail and Gong for Salesforce both bring Gong AI directly into your most-used tools.
Check out our full product announcement blog for the full list and more details.
Finally, Amit welcomed Bradford Jordan, Head of Sales and Partner Performance at Reddit, on stage to learn about Reddit’s business and revenue transformation — and Gong’s role in it.
“Our first goal was to deliver value to sales without asking for anything in return,” Bradford said. To do that, it’s helpful to create champions throughout the business who “fundamentally care about giving more power to sales.”
Rather than filling reps and managers with as much information as possible, Reddit thinks of enablement as “training pilots” and “designing airports.” That’s where Gong comes in.
“Gong unlocks intelligence for our cross-functional teams, ensuring we’re pulling from the same source of truth and keeps us all on the same page,” he said. Alignment comes in tandem with speed, too. “Gong at Reddit is a place where you can find guidance, insight, and answers faster than was ever possible before.”
A live customer panel with Amazon, LinkedIn, and Workday
In a lively conversation moderated by Dana Feldman, revenue leaders from LinkedIn, Amazon, and Workday shared best practices for operationalizing revenue AI across GTM functions to increase productivity, drive better decision-making, and close more deals.
Highlights included:
- Find simple AI wins: “What are the one or two simple, habit-changing things we can encourage our teams to find in the next six months? We’ve looked for those wins as part of our strategy.” — Kate Ahlering, VP, Sales Solutions North America, LinkedIn
- Enablement is not the initiative, it’s the outcome: “My role is to identify what we want our sellers to know, feel, and do based on a directive or initiative. I often joke that we’re the Rosetta Stone between corporate initiatives and the field.” — Sara Anderson, Principal, Global Sales Engagement, Workday
- Sales is an art and a science: “We should help with that balance where we can. We can do things to automate workflows, sales motions, and data entry, but what are we doing with that extra time that you’re helping your reps be balanced sellers?” — Jo Ann Bercot, Principal, 3P Tools Strategy and GTM, Amazon
Learning to drive key outcomes across your GTM org
After the morning keynote, in-person attendees were able to join breakout sessions specific to the problems they wanted to solve. Broken out by three categories — productivity, predictability, and growth — the breakouts focused on a variety of key outcomes for teams across GTM orgs, spanning enablement to post-sales and beyond.
The breakout sessions included revenue leaders from these incredible Gong customers:
Combining good coaching and data with Steve Young
We were fortunate enough to be joined by NFL Hall-of-Famer Steve Young, who closed out the event by sitting down with Shane for a great conversation about meeting adversity with great data and determination — as well as a willingness to do the unexpected.
Highlights included:
- Overcoming adversity: “I walked into BYU thinking I was going to be the guy. On the first day, I saw a paper in the locker room with a list of eight quarterbacks — and I was eighth on the list. At first, I thought it must be alphabetical. Then I realized it meant I was eighth string.”
- Don’t have a dream, have a plan: “Dreams have a one percent chance of happening. You want to have a plan. So I decided to go get my law degree and in law school, they do not care that you’re in the NFL or that you just played in the Super Bowl. But I loved how different it was.”
- Data makes all the difference: “Bill [Walsh] challenged me and everyone else. On Wednesday you get the playbook, and what Joe [Montana] and Bill taught me is that the detail of the data is how you play well.”
- Salespeople are the wide receivers of the business world: “What I love about business is seeking ways to elevate and find ways to do more than keep it transactional. I’m in private equity because I’m around people who I see are changing the world and I want to be a part of it.”
Fun in the Southern California sun
When in Orange County, you do as the Californians do — and our 200 in-person attendees did just that. They played golf at the Monarch Beach Golf Links, participated in a wine tasting and charcuterie board workshop, and ventured on the water to spot some cetaceans in Dana Point, 2021’s Whale Watching Capital of the US.
New resources & upcoming thought leadership
Our commitment to revenue teams around the world isn’t limited to our annual event. We continuously offer new resources aimed to equip our industry with the information that helps revenue leaders and sellers alike keep pace with change and learn best practices.
Some recent highlights:
Dan Morgese, Gong’s Director of Content and Research, presented several exclusive insights from our new State of Sales Productivity report during Celebrate. The report takes a look back at how revenue teams performed in 2024 and previews how leaders plan to grow revenue in 2025. For example, top performers were 2x more likely to use AI to automate data entry, but only 32 percent were using AI solutions that are part of their organization’s current tech stack.
We spoke to seven Gong customers who have successfully leveraged revenue AI to improve processes across their GTM organizations, including Square, MadKudu, Intercom, and Datarails.
Find these can’t-miss resources, plus more practical advice, data-driven insights, and trending topics for revenue leaders on The Edge.
What’s next?
Whether you joined us online, in person, or are just catching up on the event now, we want to express a resounding thank you!
Now that Celebrate is in the books, we look forward to continuing to work with our customers and other revenue leaders to build unstoppable GTM organizations. While Celebrate is a blast every year, we don’t only strive to address your needs and pain points once a year. That’s why we keep building on the Gong Revenue AI Platform — and we’re so excited for what’s still to come.
Ready for a better way to revenue? Get started with Gong today.
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