Canva’s 6% revenue boost: How using Gong transformed their strategy

There’s astounding growth happening at Canva, the global visual communication platform. They’re a “name to know” if you have an eye on powerful and transformative platforms. (And we do!)

Behind the scenes, one of the tools Canva’s EMEA sales team relies on to drive growth: Gong’s Revenue Intelligence Platform. Moving the team into Gong’s unified platform has boosted innovation across Canva’s sales process while also creating operational rigor for their sellers — they can drive predictable revenue and create pipeline growth.

Canva’s EMEA sales team adopted Gong after bumping up against the all-too-common frustration of needing better deal, workflow, and customer interaction insights to support productivity and growth. Given the company’s dedication to innovation and creativity, they recognized Gong as a kindred platform — one with the power to transform its users.

Jorge Bestard, Canva’s Head of Sales and Success EMEA, wanted his team to easily surface insights from frontline customer interactions. Today, Gong AI insights are critical to multiple functions at Canva — product, marketing, SDRs, account executives, and managers.

Since adopting both Gong and Gong Engage — a sales engagement solution that pairs with the larger platform — Canva’s AEs and managers have seen a 60% increase in their capacity to manage their book of business. This is driven by insights that are gathered through conversation intelligence and surfaced using Gong AI. The team now uses Gong and Gong Engage to create efficiencies throughout the sales process:

“When our reps speak with customers, it’s very important that we get all the insights from those interactions and use them to give guidance on how to personalize at scale. With Gong Engage, we’re able to do all of that with ease.” —Jorge Bestard, Canva’s Head of EMEA

With this type of support from Gong, the team is able to manage more accounts more efficiently, which has led to a 6% increase in revenue across the sales region.

“Gong’s insights are incredibly important to our projections.” —Jorge Bestard, Canva’s Head of EMEA

With Gong Forecast, Jorge’s team automatically receives insights into what closes deals and what doesn’t, alongside continuous forecast updates. These insights are a foundational part of Canva’s three-pronged forecasting approach.

This approach begins with an AE’s sense of a deal, which is important, but can only take Jorge and his team so far. That’s why he turns to the Gong metrics that reflect Canva’s chosen sales methodology, and data signals that Gong surfaces automatically from SDRs’ and AEs’ customer interactions. Jorge says this third aspect, in particular, is what really solidified accuracy in the team’s forecasting. “It’s what makes everything whole,” he says. “We can’t compare it to anything we’ve used in the past.”

This predictability and accuracy helps Jorge and his leadership team make smarter, data-based decisions about where to focus their resources, how quickly to scale their teams, and more. His managers also use the metrics and data signals from Gong for highly targeted coaching.

“The AI insights our first- and second-line managers get from Gong’s Ask Anything, and the AI insights that come from Gong automatically, allow us to forecast and coach more effectively.”

“Gong’s AI is my chief of staff.” —Jorge Bestard, Canva’s Head of EMEA

The teams in Jorge’s sales region connect with customers in more than 20 languages, and Gong captures and translates them all with industry-leading accuracy. Access to these regional market insights has improved the team’s operational excellence across the board. Managers can surface best practices in any language using Ask Anything — a generative AI feature that answers any questions about a contact, deal, or account — then tailor and test those practices in their own region. 

“Gong has also become the platform where we go to do sales experiments around new messaging, tactics, or strategies,” says Jorge.

If the team wants to try out messaging for a CIO versus a CTO, they test it in Gong. Jorge says that before Gong, it was like managers were in a black box, just hoping their new messaging would work. But now they know exactly what their reps say and its effect on win rates. “Our managers used to have to sit in on too many calls to get a sense of where their reps needed coaching. Today, they can easily sift through market trends and manage 60 to 70 deals at once.” 

These managers use what they learn to shape their team’s sales messaging, go-to-market strategies, and even which products they talk about — leaning heavily on Gong’s customer insights and the ability to surface analytics from their experiments.

“Gong has also enabled our product team to get a lot closer to our customers. When they think about a new feature, they actually go to Gong first.” The product team regularly listens to key moments from sales calls — moments where customers talk about their greatest pains and what they really crave in a design solution. That allows the product team to respond directly to customer needs and create moonshots that customers don’t even realize they need. 

Jorge says it’s clear that the entire revenue team is able to make better decisions. From deciding where to invest human capital, to which markets to go into (and why), to considering price sensitivity in certain countries or regions, Gong AI enables it all.

“Having our data all in one platform, at each step of the process, means we can make better data-driven decisions to really drive our region into the future,” says Jorge. 

Gong has become an essential platform in shaping the team’s go-to-market strategy. They’re now able to manage their pipeline 60% more efficiently and are seeing a boost in revenue, starting with a 6% increase on the EMEA team. “Gong has been a great partner because it has gotten us closer to our customers than ever before.”