Drinking our own champagne: How Gong uses Gong

 How do Gongsters use Gong?

Introduction to Gong’s Practical Uses

We get asked that question a lot. 

And it’s a fair question. As a SaaS organization, we have most of the same teams as the companies we sell into — Sales, Product, Customer Success, etc.

The people want to know: How do YOU (Gong) use YOUR PRODUCT (Gong)?

Spoiler Alert: We drink our own champagne. We eat our own dog food (don’t worry we save some for Bruno). We practice (and use) what we preach (and sell).

We sat down with a Gongster from 6 different teams to hear — and see — firsthand how they use Gong to help them become the best-of-the-best at their respective jobs. 

Watch all six videos or look for the one that is most aligned with your role.

Ready. Set. GO.

Account Executive Insights: Jared Nielsen’s Experience

Meet Jared, Account Executive (AE) at Gong since April 2019.

Jared is diligent, disciplined, enjoys coaching, and is a self-proclaimed Personal Finance Ninja (cool title).

Oh, and he’s an aspiring polymath (aka, “a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning”). 

Jared Nielsen is also an avid user of Gong, the solution he sells on the daily. Not surprisingly, as an AE, Jared is a heavy user of Gong’s Deal Intelligence capabilities.

Here is how Jared uses Gong to: 

• Manage follow-ups
• Collaborate with other Gongsters
• Manage deals
• Track history
• Stay in front of the customer
• Improve behaviors

Manage follow-ups: After every call, Jared uses Gong to listen to that call at 2x speed… 2.5x if he’s feeling a bit wild. Jared follows a pretty strict formula in his post-call follow-up emails and uses the recording to fill in holes and check himself. If there is a portion of the call Jared wants to highlight, he’ll use Gong to pull that call recording snippet and drop it into the email.

Collaborate: Jared finds and then shares call snippets internally — inviting feedback, asking for suggestions, and sometimes just telling his co-workers about an amazing call.

Want more Jared/AE insights? Check out his 8 minute, 53-second video.

Sales Development Strategies: Carolyn Dorricott’s Approach

Meet Carolyn, Senior Sales Development Representative at Gong, since May of 2019.

While not dedicating time and energy to her aspiring role as Chief Cheez-It Officer, Carolyn educates clients to help them realize the power of Gong’s Revenue Intelligence platform… so they can create better employees by having a true understanding of client conversations.

Phew!

Carolyn is good — like really good — at her job. Why? Because she uses Gong, of course!

Carolyn’s uses Gong:

• To ramp-up and to learn talk tracks
• To overcome objections
• To receive feedback
• To leverage past conversations

Gong Libraries are where Carolyn lives when getting up-to-speed on all things Gong.

Need a quick brush-up/refresher on Gong’s three pillars? No problem. Gong’s enablement team has a folder for that in the Library. Carolyn loves that she can listen to the “best of the best” calls and read through the transcripts — not only to memorize the pitch but also make it her own.

All SDRs spend a significant chunk of their day in “objection land” — you know, the world where your prospect tells you no in 42 different ways (or replies with, “Sure, but …”).

Top sales reps are also objection-handling pros. Gong helps up an SDRs game by enabling them to filter calls by a keyword objection and then further filter to objections that still lead to an opportunity — the objection was overcome!

This is just the tip of the Gong iceberg for Carolyn. Learn more about how Gong SDRs use Gong in Carolyn’s 6+ minute video.

Customer Success Management with Red Reddy

Meet Adarsh “Red” Reddy, an avid filmmaker, snowboarder, and part-time yoga teacher.

Red has been drinking the Gong champagne since November 2018, living in a world of Customer Success. As a Senior Mid-Market CSM, Red uses Gong for note-taking, quick (non-email) escalations, points of interest, and personal growth.

Pre-Gong, Red was a self-described “avid note-taker” — we’re talking old school pen and paper kind of notes. Filled notebooks stacked high While personally gratifying, the notebook method was not scalable and certainly not a time-saver.

In a Gong-world, the notebooks (and pens) have been replaced by, well, Gong.

Red starts by searching for the company he wants to dig into. From there, he searches for keywords that will help him recall the conversation. In a flash, Red sees all touchpoints — emails and calls — that include that keyword. If there is a call that mentioned the keyword, Red can click on it to quickly listen to the call snippet.

In a matter of minutes, Red is up-to-speed on that account. Bonus: He now has a clutter-free workspace — adios pens and notebooks!

TL;DR: Red reviews account for keywords to get up-to-speed on recent conversations and to stay sharp!

Red is also a big fan of the comments feature within a call. He’ll leave a comment to:

• Share a call snippet with his manager — to ask a question, follow up on a coaching skill they were working through, etc.
• Tag a product person for feedback — a feature request, an interesting talk track, etc.
• Create a support ticket — using the #supportticket tag automagically generates a support ticket.

The in-call commenting alleviates the need for (yet another) email where Red would need to (a) come up with a relevant subject line, (b) summarize the call in the email body, (c) add a link to the call snippet, and so on. Inefficient and a huge, unnecessary time suck.

The commenting feature also means Red can address an issue as it’s fresh in his mind, in realtime.

Watch the rest of Red’s 12 minute, 33-second video to learn how he uses Gong for “points of interest” and personal growth.

Devon Kirschmann: Leading Customer Success with Gong

Meet Devon, customer success’n since November of 2013 and Gong employee #37.

As the Manager of Gong’s Mid-Market CS team, Devon Kirschmann knows a thing or two about how to use Gong. After all, she spends her days (and sometimes evenings) helping Gongsters become the best customer success members they can possibly be. Along the way, she’s also helping Gong customers get the most out of their accounts.

Like Red, Devon spent much of her pre-Gong days buried in notebooks (and Evernote and Salesforce.com). She wanted to ensure every part of every customer conversation was captured.

Gong records (literally) everything Devon used to scramble to take down all of her notes.

No longer! Devon now uses Gong for notes and more. Specifically, she uses Gong to:

1. Validate and flag customer health;
2. Get up to speed on account escalations;
3. Anticipate new customer volume;
4. Track initiative adoption; and,
5. Coach her team.

The first three fall into what we call “Deal Intelligence” while the last two are “People Intelligence.”

Let’s look at how Devon uses Gong to validate and flag customer health. Here process goes something like this: 

STEP 1: Search for customer account in Gong — Wicked quick, realtime, auto-fill search results!

STEP 2: Review account interactions — A quick, visual scan shows Devon both the number and frequency of interactions. Is there a good mix of calls and emails? Are both parties communicating fairly equally or is it one-sided.

STEP 3: Dig into the details — Devon will leverage the search filter to only show interactions where, say, “business review” was mentioned. She can further home in on just the “business review” calls.

STEP 4: Dig even DEEPER into the details — Now that Devon is only looking at calls where “business review” was mentioned, she can (a) actually listen to the entire business review call, or (b) review the transcript highlights of the call, or (c) dig into the “top topics discussed” on the call. For Devon, the “top topics discussed” is really where the juicy intel lives. Gong not only lists the top topics, it also displays how long each topic was discussed. 

STEP 5: Check Account Status — A simple click on the “Account Status” button shows Devon the last call, the last email, and the next scheduled meeting. 

In a matter of a few minutes, Devon is up to speed — all without having to set up a meeting with her CS. Note: Devon truly enjoys meeting with her team in person (or via video), but efficiency matters! Also, if/when they chat, they can get right into the most important part of the conversation.

And that’s just the tip of the Gong iceberg. Watch Devon’s full 25 minute, 45-second “How I use Gong” video. 

Implementation Management Techniques: Hannah Finn’s Use of Gong

Meet Hannah Finn, Enterprise Implementation Manager at Gong since May of 2020.

Fun facts: Hannah is a former collegiate soccer star (GO BULLDOGS) and — in case you missed it — her first name is a palindrome!

“I literally do not know how I could do my job without Gong” says Hannah. How’s that for an endorsement?

Hannah uses Gong…

• Deal boards for forecasting/planning
• Call filters and alerts
• To review SE validations
• For managing internal handoffs
• To reflect and improve

Like Hannah does in her short video, let’s dive into the Deals tab on Gong. 

As a next-level, power user, Hannah has created several custom boards so she can quickly and efficiently zoom into the accounts that matter the most to her at any given time.

Hannah uses these custom boards to help manage her daily and weekly workload — Which deals does she need to jump into? What accounts are set to close (and when)?

She can then filter the Deal board even further to sort by expected close date, status, amount, and so on.

BONUS: Hannah’s custom Deal boards have replaced Salesforce.com reporting! 

Hannah also leverages Gong’s call filters and alerts functionality. She’s set up a number of saved filters and dips into many of them as part of her daily routine.

Additionally, Hannah uses these filters to review calls where sales engineers (SEs) were involved, with the intent of being better informed about a customer’s tech stack. This knowledge empowers Hannah to fully prepare her team as conversations around integrations and Gong usage arise.

Also, this data informs Hannah how SEs are positioning specific Gong products and features. This, in turn, means Hannah is more aligned with the new customer in a post-sale capacity.

But that’s not all Hannah uses Gong for. Not. Even. Close. Check out her 11 minute, 50-second video to see more.

Elvis Lieban: Product Marketing Management and Gong

Meet Elvis, or Elvi as his close friends call him.

As a Product Marketing Manager (PMM) since September of 2019, Elvis (err, Elvi) is well-versed in all things Gong. He’s on the front lines, if you will.

According to Elvi, Gong is powerful for PMMs for: 

• Research and strategy
• Messaging
• Go To Market (GTM) and enablement

His recipe for getting started with Gong is pretty straightforward: 

1. Find relevant conversations
2. Bookmark information
3. Distribute and share

And he follows these three steps pretty much every single day.

Starting on the calls page, Elvi enters a specific competition into the filter. From there, he looks at the trend (mentions) over time — raw number or percentage. These data inform the PMM team how seriously they need to take a competitor.

Elvi then filters down the results even further (advanced feature!) by toggling unchecking the “Gong” box to only see when a prospect or customer mentions that competitor.

Speaking of filters, Elvi suggests pulling the various levers to see how the data changes, to home into the true question you are trying to answer: 

• Date/time period: Maybe you only are about mentions this quarter
• Deal stage: Maybe you only care about mentions during the discovery stage

Elvi steps through several more examples of how he uses Gong in his 12 minute, 32-seconds of fame.

The Collective Impact of Gong

78.25 MINUTES OF GONGSTERS SHARING THE SAUCE

And there you have it.

Assuming my math is correct (#MathIsHard), 6 Gongsters shared a total of one hour, 18 minutes, and 15 seconds worth of how they use Gong in their respective, day-to-day jobs.

Feel free to watch all 6 videos or skip to the one that’s most relevant to your world.