Spotlight on Sales: Aligning Your Team Around Revenue Excellence

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Welcome everybody to pipeline summit summer 23. My name is crax went through

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founder and CEO of qualified and today

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I'm joined by a very special guest oody letter gore who was marketer number one

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at gong served as CMO as the company went from

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Zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and now serves as chief

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evangelist oody. Welcome to the pipeline

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Thanks for having me Craig. Absolutely. Well, I mean, there's probably no one

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better better than you to give us a

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perspective as we start out

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What is going on right now and B2B marketing from your perspective? What are

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you seeing out there?

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Well, we talked to CMOs every day. I'm on calls every day with CMOs and I see a

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few patterns happening right now

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Everyone's tied on resources

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The best cases are teams that are not growing as fast as they did last year

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The worst cases are team being cut down and budgets being cut down

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So I think what everyone is being forced to do right now is focus on the

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essential few things that they have to do to create

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Pipeline to support the sales team and do them better than we did before yeah

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focus obviously is really key, you know

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I listened to a speaking engagement that you did a while back and you said hey

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Yeah, back at that time you were the CMO of gong you said as a CMO the thing my

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CEO and my board cares about is number one

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Am I hitting the pipeline number number two?

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Do we have our corporate narrative straight like our story and what we do and

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why we're different?

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And then if you get those two things right you kind of have a leeway to do

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everything else is

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His pipeline from your perspective speaking to CMOs out there's pipe one so the

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number one priority right now

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It is it is those priorities. I think are kind of timeless and they always hold

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true

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There's definitely less fun money these days. That's why we're seeing less

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billboards and television and radio and all those are to measure

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Brand awareness campaigns that everyone was doing two years ago

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I think there's also a new focus on keeping our existing customers happy

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because many SaaS companies who did not have a churn problem and retention

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With sky eye are seeing problems now and marketing team is getting involved in

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keeping those customers happy keeping them loyal because we all know

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It's far more expensive to get a new customer than to keep a customer in place

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100% I think for the first time a lot of CMOs out there in their careers

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Maybe you're thinking about customer retention and marketing to existing

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customers absolutely very first time great insight

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You know, I was talking to Sarah Franklin who's the president CMO sales force

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Just a couple months back about pipeline challenges and she said

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5x is the new 3x when it comes to pipeline

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Coverage and she talked a little bit about how she sex those targets and stays

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aligned with their CRO

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What's your advice for marketers out there right now about pipeline coverage

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and how they should be working with sales?

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Well, you always want to focus on both the quantity like Sarah talked about 5x

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is fantastic if you can get it

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But also on the quality because you only need one good lead to close one good

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deal

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But we all know that it's usually gonna take more than that

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So in good times it might be two or three good leads to close one now and might

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be four or five

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But there's still a lot that marketing teams can do working with ops and the

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sales team to increase conversion rates from one point to another

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So if you're targeting the right leads if your website experience is converting

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the right leads

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If you're using the right sales engagement system and the right sales platform

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to convert those leads and actually book the meetings

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Get them moving down the opportunity journey

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Then you don't need a huge amount of pipeline

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So quality is probably even more important now than ever before it's a really

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fair

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Hoyts. I mean, you know usually sales teams always talk about coverage coverage

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coverage coverage coverage

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But I always one more lead what you were saying is that not all

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The not all stage one pipeline converse at the same rates and what are you

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doing throughout the funnel?

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So I mean, I think that that insight as far as marketers having deep insight

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into the conversions down the funnel and not just staying at the top of the

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funnel

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as a really strategic insight

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What are the priorities of gong if I might ask in the second half of the year

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when you guys look to generate pipeline?

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You're famous for doing so so many amazing things

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I mean obviously everybody talks about the Super Bowl commercial, but I see you

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guys all over

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YouTube your launch and new products you have killer content marketing kind of

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Where are you placing your bets in terms of pipe gen as you look to the second

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half of the year?

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So it's a this year and the second half especially is the culmination of the

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last couple of years efforts

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Which happened to time perfectly with what's happening in the market right now

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and this year's

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main theme for gong is going from a point solution for revenue intelligence or

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some people still call it conversation intelligence to a

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complete platform that allows full cycle revenue teams from SDRs or BDRs

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through AEs and customer success

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managers to manage their entire day and

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This aligns perfectly with what's happening right now in the market as everyone

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is talking about tech stack consolidation

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So going from maybe half a dozen point solutions to our fewer platforms

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Actually hits the mark on three different metrics that everyone cares about

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right now

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One of them is lowering the cost of your tech stack because we're all crunched

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on budget

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Number two is providing a better seller experience because the number one

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problem

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We found 30% of sellers complain about is having to switch between 10 different

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systems throughout their day number three

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Everyone wants to provide a better buyer experience

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Which will increase the conversion rates?

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So we talked about throughout your funnel and by having everyone on your team

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aligned on one platform you can provide a better buyer experience

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So lowering your tech stack better seller experience better buyer experience

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that aligns perfectly with what we're doing

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And so you're gonna see in our marketing efforts in our product efforts in our

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training efforts

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We're going from promoting the point solutions that we have until recently to

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the full platform that we now have

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Everything from aspecting to deal close to renewals and expansions. Well, most

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CMOs are I see a lot of CMOs pulling back

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Right now

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but you guys just kind of went aggressive with this big product launch of of

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gone engage and

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And now you're a you're a more broad solution. I think

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Vender consolidation is the name of the game right now. There's no doubt about

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that

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But let's talk a little bit about AI because AI is you know

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I think when you launch gong engage this you know the slogan was sales

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engagement reimagine with AI

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But you know that's not a buzzword, you know for you guys you guys have been at

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the forefront of using AI for

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sales intelligence for some time whether you call it conversation AI or revenue

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revenue intelligence was actually the category that you guys coined

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What are you seeing out there regarding other groundbreaking technologies other

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than gong? Of course?

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How should CMOs and heads of demand?

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Gen be thinking about AI for pipeline generations or any kind of anything you

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've seen that you can tell us about yeah

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So like you said Craig gong has been in AI for over seven years now a week

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before our parents started texting us about this new AI stuff

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And it's super cool that everyone's talking about it right now

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Which is why we're also bringing it to the forefront

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I think AI is going to change how marketing and sales and many other

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professions and teams work

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Moving forward there are going to be some low-level tasks that can be fully

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automated right now

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We're seeing that with sales teams like getting a nudge that someone is back

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from out of office

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We're sending a templated email that you promised to send there's no need to

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hire a very expensive salesperson to do that

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Automation can do that with AI right now, but I think for many of these

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professions

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AI is not going to take our jobs away AI is going to help us be better and go

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deeper and spend more time doing the things

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We are uniquely qualified to do as human beings

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And so if you embrace AI in that way you don't shy away from it say oh, this is

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gonna take my job away

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No, AI is your friend. It's not your enemy and we're gonna see people embracing

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AI from everything

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Like editing if you think about marketing teams, right?

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They're starting to look at AI and I think the search engines are going to

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completely change how they treat organic content because there's no more

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Barriers to creating an incident amount of content just prompt the chat GPT and

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you've got content like

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Till the cows come home, but good content is still gonna require a human being

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who has a point of view that might be controversial

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Was chat GPT is not because it kind of averages out everything that it was

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trained on so it's never gonna have a controversial

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Holorizing counter to the point of view that's number one - it's not gonna have

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the unique style or voice that a human marketer can have

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So you need to inject those things then you can definitely use chat GPT or

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other AI products that are helping marketers to fill in the blanks

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Once you have a point of view and a tone of voice chat GPT can help you do that

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So the human writers are actually moving more into an editor position

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But we're nowhere near not needing those people and then if we go to the sales

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profession again

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Writing the same email over and over 5,000 times

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Chat GPT can do that for you

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Although I will say that this comes with a big bit warning and there's a reason

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why many companies are banning their teams from using these open code open

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source

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Generative AI systems and the reason is that they do not have enterprise-grade

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security

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They were not trained on your product or on your customers

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They were trained on everything from Super Bowl commercials to Shakespeare

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plays

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But they don't understand your product

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You know how to sell it so what you want to look for your team is a platform

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There was purpose built an AI platform purpose built for your sales team that

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was trained on billions of sales conversations and not TV commercials and and

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scripts

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So that's kind of where we see things going well

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Generative AI is clearly the term to sure. There's no doubt about that

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But one of the things that's fascinated me about what what you've done since

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the earliest days of GONG is

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Is you've used AI to surface up insights that no human would otherwise find and

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then you use that as the basis of your content marketing?

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Strategy so you know back in the day you guys launched GONG Labs and you were

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serving up insights that were

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Fascinating to me where you were telling us all hey

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Here's how you win do this on calls don't do this on calls

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Hey, when you see this word or don't say this word and then you use that as a

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basis of your content marketing

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That was the first time that like I was captivated by GONG years ago

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What's your perspective today on content marketing and most people think

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content marketing in pipe

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Gen they'll content marketing might be at the top of the funnel

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It's not directly related to demand gen but kind of give it your perspective as

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a master content marketer

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How do you think of content marketing as a protease of pipe gen?

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so content marketing is the base of GONG's

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demand-gen strategy and has been for the last seven years and we are bringing

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it forward to help

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marketers and salespeople use all the AI tools that they now have at their

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disposal to do better

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Prospecting to do better marketing. I'll give you an example from a GONG Labs

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article the most recent one

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We just published that was about different types of personalization for

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prospecting and creating pipeline

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And we found as one example of the many insights in that research piece

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We found that SDRs and AEs who use personal

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Personalization if I were trying to get to you Craig and I say hey Craig

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I know this you were on this podcast turns out you don't care about that as

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much as an entry level

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Professional if I were trying to hit someone in ops that would actually work

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But for sea levels what actually works like three times better than touching on

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something that you personally did is if I talk about something your company

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Is concerned about right now. I just read in your recent earnings call that you

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had a problem in that region

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I think we can help with that so turns out sea level execs are former

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interested in what their company is up to then what they're personally up to

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and

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those types of personalization work better and now salespeople have

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Generative AI tools to quickly personalize that but that insight is not

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something that chat GPT could give you

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That's something you have to go to GONG Labs because we analyze over one

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billion sales calls and over ten billion sales emails

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Chat GPT is not so making the marketing always relevant and allowing sales

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professionals to use the latest technology

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With these insights is the winning combination and I'll say one more thing you

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touched on our recent launch of GONG Engage

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Which looked like we poured millions of dollars into it. I'll let you in on the

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secret

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We did not we did not we rely on doing things smarter in organic ways that don

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't cost a fortune

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I'll give you two quick examples one we have about 1200 employees at GONG

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Or GONGsters as we fondly refer to them. We got about 800 of them

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To share the news in one form or another on the day of the launch that kind of

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publicity would cost me millions in

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Purchased media and I got it free by

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Rallying up the team getting everyone excited and getting 800 GONGsters

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Even if you assume that every one of them only has like 500 connections just

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imagine the reach through the map

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It's incredible millions of eyeballs saw the launch tens of millions actually

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and that didn't cost anything another example is

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We created such interesting news about the launch that tech crunch and venture

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beat and and the new stock exchange

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Everyone wanted to write about it. That doesn't cost anything if you create a

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newsworthy story and the final example

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I'm running an influencer program. So we got 20 industry influencers

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You know everyone where Lars Nielsen is running the fantastic BDR team at Snow

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flake to Jocko Banda Koi

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He was running winning by design and other aids the lenses to share the news

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without spending a dime on it because we're

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Advancing the state of the art of what salespeople can do and everyone in the

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industry is excited about it

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So when marketing teams plan and create newsworthy stories

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You can get hundreds and thousands of people to share without spending the dime

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on need you

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Well, I think that's a really good segue to my next question about brand

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awareness and obviously you just tied a killer product launch back to

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Demand J and content marketing, you know back to pipeline generation

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Let's talk a little bit about brand awareness in today's world. Obviously

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everybody is

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Running out of shoestring budget and we're all wondering how we hit our targets

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It used to be that when we have larger budgets

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We would maybe allocate a percentage of our buzz budget to brand awareness and

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you know percentage to demand generation and percentage to something else

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But now that we have a tighter budget. I think a lot of CMOs are out there, you

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know

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Stressing about

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Where do I where do I point my dollars?

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How do I hit my targets? How do I get my brand out there?

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You obviously just gave a couple great examples

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But if you were to allocate, you know a percentage of your budget to A B or C

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How would you think about it right now if you're speaking to the world's

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leading B2B CMOs?

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So I've I've often talked about this in the past when I ran the marketing

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budget

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I had anything from 10 to 15 percent of the budget allocated to marketing

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experiments or brand awareness campaigns that we knew

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We couldn't get very accurate measurement on and that budget a lot of it has

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gone away now

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Just like many companies who are trying to save on their marketing budget and

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be more precise with what they're doing

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But that forces us to be a lot more efficient on

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the remaining 85 percent of the budget

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How do we get more of that and the time being behind all the things I just

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talked about getting your own employees to advocate

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And getting influencers interested and getting media interested. There's one

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common theme tying all those things together

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Focus on what your customer would get excited about and what would add value to

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their day

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And then you don't really just spend so much money shoving the news in their

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face because they will pull it from you

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We we got over a thousand demo requests on the day of launch because everyone

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got so excited

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There was very very little paid advertising involved in that very very little

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if I took it away

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It wouldn't materially change the results, but we created a story and we

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focused not on oh look at our new version 3.2 4.5

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It's got all these new bells and whistles

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It was no it was here's how sales people can become more productive now and do

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something that they care about and that their managers care about right now

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And when you always start with what does the customer care about how can we add

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value to them in every link in the chain?

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How can marketing tell them a story that they can't wait to download just like

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the personalization tips that I gave you

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There's dozens of those or hundreds on the gong blog salespeople download every

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day

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I don't have to pay them to do that

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I don't have to pay again in front of them because I'm adding value to their

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day

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And then our customer success managers are working with those customers every

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day to show them how they can get more value and get better at their craft

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And for the leaders get better in their business by using the insights that

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they can gain from gong

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So if you always focus on that instead of what many companies do who are

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product focused

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Oh, everyone needs to know about these new bells and whistles even already

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cares about them

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No focus on what your customer cares about you will always win even when there

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's no budget

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It's a timeless message for B2B CMOs focus on what your customer cares about

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Udi it's been a pleasure hosting you today at the pipeline summit. Thank you so

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much for having me

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Cheers

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