The Future of AI in Sales with Gong’s CEO and Co-Founder Amit Bendov

It is harder, especially for, for most companies, but definitely SaaS companies. But it goes because people just bought, right? People just called you, hey, I have like 100. I think next year we're going to double. So I'm going to buy a couple hundred seats and you bought it. You didn't have to be good. I think we're like pretty good, like in our people, but not necessarily the most. Didn't have like the rigor or put the legwork or—

Thank you so much for coming. This was great. There's a bunch of things I want to talk about. We're so lucky to have you here. The theme from the opening session, we talked about what's challenging, what isn't. Salesforce had a slightly rough quarter. I want to hear your thoughts. But before we go, I want to go partially back in time. I was reading on the internet your Series A press release.

Yes.

Gong raises $6 million in Series A, a big Series A in 2016, to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams. Context, did you envision where in this crazy AI world we're in today? What did— How did the vision back then— so early, right?

My jaw dropped when I started thinking about it. It was like 2015. And the stupid idea was like, that was the year where Google AI beat the world champion in chess. Oh yeah. Like easily humiliated them. Right. And, and AI was starting to diagnose cancer better than a doctor. So I said like, how hard would it be to understand customers better than salespeople? Right? That was the idea. I said that they're spending most of the time on drudgery that they hate, and we still don't know as leader what is going on. So the idea was an autonomous customer management system that automatically captures customer conversation, uses AI to understand what is going on, and turns it into insight and action. Believe it or not, we struggled to raise money because people didn't believe in the idea that AI is going to be big one day.

No, I believe it. I remember in the early days of Gong, when back in the days when we were acquired by Adobe, one of our guys, Sam Blond, who then became CEO of Brex, they gave us 20 reps. We weren't allowed to hire our own reps who never learned the product, never do anything. And he said to me, Jason, I'm banging my head against the desk. He's, they're saying the stupidest things. I need a way to listen to their calls. And then when Gong came out, everyone who went through that experience, who had to manage some mediocre reps, right? It was just the biggest game changer, right? So what— so that was the original vision to automate this stuff. For us bread and butter SaaS people, is the whole generative element— has it changed things? How does it change things from the Gong perspective?

Yes, we always felt that AI was, was going to change the world. Yeah, but we always had to work with the limitations and possibilities of technology. As founders, I'll tell you, don't build something that might work in 5 years. You always need to say what works today.

Yeah.

When we started, we understood what's the, what are the capabilities of speech technology and text technology. We didn't know exactly when generative AI will be successful, even to the extent that was, that's a positive surprise, but it is good and it's capable and definitely helps us fulfill much of the vision and it's getting better every day.

So let's, we're going to jump around in time, but one of the things a lot of we're all thinking about in 2 years or so, What does the AI-enhanced sales executive look like? How is it from your perspective in the trenches? No Sony, no baloney, but so close to it. What does sales look like in 2 years with AI?

Yeah. So first, no drudgery. Reps spend about 75% of their time on non-selling time. If you measure the hours that they're customer-facing. Yes. 25%, sometimes even less. Sometimes we see 2 hours a week, right? The rest is spent on filling in forms, one-on-one meeting, forecast calls, sifting through lists, all of that. Much of that, well, ideally all of this goes away, but if not, then even if we cut half, that's huge. The second, I think, is blending of a role. Uh, there'll be no more SDRs, CSMs, AEs, BDRs, XDRs, all of these. Uh, I see them converging into one role, essentially. SaaS companies, the last 20 years went hyper-specialized where there are very specific roles. Everybody has their own unique thing, which has its advantages. First, it's easy to train people on a small sliver of their job and it gives focus, but it also creates a not so great customer experience where they're being like handed over from one person to another. It creates inefficiencies in the company because it's hard to align the capacities of one group versus the other. But if you arm people with AI that can do a lot of the things, right? If you take a black cab here in London, right? It takes 4 years to get trained or something, right? It's insanely hard to do that, right? But you give someone an iPhone, right? And then all of a sudden they're a taxi driver, like overnight. They don't need to know all these things. So imagine if you equip like every customer-facing person with the capabilities, how to do prospecting, how to do proper discovery, how to manage customer success. I don't know if it's going to converge to one role, but there'll be fewer, which is a good thing for customers and for, for companies.

So just to unpack that a little bit on the lifecycle of sales, the classic SDR and BDR, do you think AI will fully replace a lot of the humans in that role?

I'm 99% convinced.

That's what we're talking about.

But again, nobody's— it's not that people are going to lose their— are going to be unemployed, but they will be able to do as a function, right? Those of you who've been like out there long enough, there are no like BDRs, right? Years ago, right? Correct me if I'm wrong. It's a new thing and it's mostly with tech companies. Most companies don't have it. It's the salespeople are doing everything. That's going to become easier. And just like you have like BDRs, they move to account executives right after a year or two or whatever. That's just going to be faster.

Yeah. And then replacing the CSM post-sales. I have a lot of thoughts on that, but you think that the sales executive is going to be able to manage the whole lifecycle of the customer with AI? They'll actually be able to follow up on the request, deal with onboarding issues, deployment issues, and all of that.

A lot of companies are moving to that direction, especially with the kind of challenging climate for a lot of the technology companies, that it creates like a better customer experience. It's not this fragmentation is hyper-optimized for hyper-growth, which is not happening right now. Now you can create like better relationship and maintain the customer. So there is a benefit. It's the same person that sold actually stays around to deliver and make sure that you're seeing. And it also gives opportunity to sell more.

And do you think the big— I think the big trend in AI really is a lot of it's driven around efficiency. If you see the AI being able to become full stack or become full stack again, can we get away with less sales professionals permanently? Will it be— we haven't actually seen a lot of this happen in software, have we? We think we could have less engineers and salespeople, but it hasn't happened yet. Will it happen with AI? Will a sales rep be able to handle a $2 million quota, $4 million, $10 million with AI?

Yes, because they're— With AI, we need to think about if we zoom out, this is the biggest revolution that happens to humanity, like in, in all history. It's just the first was the agricultural revolution. We learned to produce foods, which changed not just the technology to grow grain or livestock, but built like empire, civilization, cities. Then it was the right here in England started the industrial revolution. We learned to manufacture goods, which brought brought to globalization, urbanization, all those things. Now we're learning to manufacture things in our brain, ideas, solutions that they'll grow the GDP like by magnitude of order. So this is the potential. So we're not— I don't worry about the jobs. I'm sure that there will be more jobs and we'll give people more things. We can't predict exactly what it's going to be. There are jobs that exist today that no one could have envisioned like 20 years ago.

For sure.

But there will be other things.

Is there anything that you think— obviously you're a bull from the beginning, but is there anything you think we're too optimistic on in the near term, in the next 24 to 36 months, that we think AI can do that it's not going to do, that we're too bullish?

Yes, of course. First, we don't know exactly. This is evolving at mind-blowing speed. Like every week there are like new developments of the technology that are significant, not like small iterations, substantial. Each one is like more promising than the other. So it's hard exactly to predict, but we need to— AI is not 100% reliable. Everybody loves talking about like hallucinations or accuracy, which is a real thing. A lot of talk about agents right now that still don't work despite all the things. I think that they will, but don't work the autonomous engine, not quite yet. But we need to look at things that is actually, that an 80% accurate job is incredible, right? I wouldn't put it like for things that are mission critical that have to be 100%, like a Mars mission, right? But there are so many things that if it works like 80, it's way better than anything out there. Actually, the one thing most people don't understand is actually it's not very smart. It's, if you've read kind of the book like System 1 Thinking, System 2 Thinking, right? So this is like AI-generated value, System 1 thinking, right? It's not, it doesn't reason, it doesn't understand what it's telling you, just get the piece of text and generate another. It happens to have like incredible accuracy, but it doesn't reason, it doesn't understand, it can't plan. It's not a panacea to everything yet.

Got it. And one related question from what you're seeing in the field for your bigger customers when you're talking with CIOs and stuff. What are their expectations for AI today and how close is that to what we can deliver? What I do see in the support space, I think, is the furthest along, utterly changed it. But I also see a lot of vendors having overpromised, right? So what are you seeing there with what they are asking for and what we're able to deliver? Is there a delta in what you see?

It's incredible. It's incredible. And I come to think about, you mentioned we started by talking about the AI revolution, but actually it was like second or third degree level message in our marketing. We didn't want to talk about AI because it would scare the hell out of people. We sell to business users. We don't want to sound like too science fiction. Now we have customers are calling us. My CIO got, CEO got asked in an earnings call what I'm going to do with AI to increase productivity, right? Yeah. So the CEO, get me some AI thing, right? Do you have some AI, Gong? Right. Yeah, we have some. Here's two.

Here's our Series A press release.

People don't know exactly what it is, but they use GPT. They get pressure from the market.

Yes.

So they see the potential, they don't, and they look for, for opportunities, but specifically the areas where, at least in our world, there, there are areas in healthcare, there is like in support, but, uh, definitely sales productivity prediction with AI forecasting now, especially in these times, very hard. And, and scaling the team, that, that's a challenge that we see quite common.

Those in the bigger customers, the enterprise, when they're saying let's get some efficiency or some from AI, Is there such thing as an AI budget today or is it repurposed budget? What are you seeing in the front lines? And if there is an AI budget, how big is it really at customers?

Some of them have the CIO. So we at Gong sell mostly to the sales function. So they have their own budget and comes from existing budget. But CIOs also have budget to the large enterprises to try different projects and see what they can do. Sometimes they're like fishing expedition that are going around and talking to 20 companies and they see, okay, like let's see what can help our business with AI. So it is real and there is an opportunity for a lot of companies.

And is there— just because it's such— it is confusing where these budgets are coming from. So even though even in your bigger deals, I'm sure the CIO has to approve it, right? In a way. And the CFO, the way they didn't have to maybe a few years ago. But are you still coming from the same RevOps revenue CRO budget? Are you stealing from any AI budget? Does that— if you are, is it minor or is it impactful?

The thing is, we don't even think about— we use AI technology, we don't think of ourselves like as an AI company. We're a revenue AI company. So our goal is to increase revenue and improve sales productivity. And that's for the budget. So you have to show outcomes, especially these days. It's not easy to sell anything, right? Those days are gone. So you have to show here's the problem that we're looking to solve, right? Here's what it means to your business. Here's why and here's what it's going to cost. And you could do that with AI, right? Which resonates. Now people believe that it can work, but it's still the same thing. And there are a lot of tools out there right now in almost every category. With the rich funding, there are a lot of companies. Many of them are good, but some aren't as resilient. And people say, okay, let me show the things that are— people are actually using and can make an impact. And they move budget from from one solution to another. They try to consolidate a number of solutions together if they're not mission critical. So that's where the budget is coming from. But the IT budget is kind of like the same.

Got it. So you're not— it doesn't sound like in any way are you either cynically or optimistically jumping more on the IA bandwagon. Even with your street cred, you're not trying to attach to this wave more than you did 18 to 24 months ago.

You have— you can't sell hype. You have to sell like real business value, right? That's the long-term thing. Even though hype right now and we're, we think humbly we're like at least as AI as other companies, but you're always like solving like a real, real problem for customers. There is an opportunity that AI would be way bigger than cloud, right? I think we talk about the humanity revolution, but let's look like enterprise software. There are like 3 generations. The first was the on-prem enterprise like Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle. Then came the cloud, right? Application Salesforce, Workday, the HR apps. But that was an IT revolution. Cloud was an IT. When they said no software, it was like for the IT people, there's nothing to install, there's no infrastructure. That's true. And it moved to revenue. But IT budget is like 5, 6%, right? The third wave is autonomous application with AI. That's going to dwarf everything that— it's going to be like much bigger than cloud because it touches into payroll. It comes from a different budget. We're not quite there, right? But think about if you go to a team and say, I can do 70% of what your team is doing right now automatically at a fraction of the cost. Now you're taking like 70% or half of that, 35% of payroll, That's like a BPO, right, with AI. That's like a much bigger value potential for AI that will be bigger than anything that we've seen in cloud.

But implicit in that, and then I want to come back to the present, there is that headcount reduction. Isn't that where you get that access at 70%? It's doing, it's getting, it's doing away with 200, 1,000, 2,000 people that do rote or mechanical work, isn't it?

Yes, we pay people like 6-figure salaries to do mechanical work, but people like their roles, like punching cards or filling expense reports. And I don't think anybody should be filling in forms in a system, whether it's like after a job interview or a customer call and all of that. It's not why we pay people. And I think like in now I could just say, hey, it was like a good conversation and the AI kind of understand what's going on. And the world is moving towards applications are like a fly on the wall that understand what's going on and actually act on your behalf and remove the drudgery. So that's like a way bigger potential than we— everything we've seen with cloud applications.

Let's talk to the president. When we did our opener today, we looked at some folks that were crushing it, some Canvas and Toast and others that are more to the end consumers, Klaviyo marketing, but for— and then we did a little bit of a slide of our private of Salesforce, Mongo, and UiPath, which had a rough week. Right? And, but you may be 6 months or 8 months ahead of those earnings, which look back. So tell, tell us from the ground, what are you seeing? Classic B2B sales last year versus right now in summer of 2024. What do you, what's the pulse on the street?

We're actually seeing here was very challenging to most companies, but it also brought like a, I think a well-needed moment of clarity to focus on the things that matter and for companies an opportunity to get better. Wake up. It's not, used to be like very easy to sell. Now it's hard. Hard, which forces you to be like really good, right? When you go to the gym, the harder you work, the more pain and anger, the stronger you become. That's how you build the muscle. But now we're starting— we monitor how many upgrades and expansion we're seeing and how many versus downgrades and all of that. So we're seeing a positive trend, not 2021 like right after COVID growth, but definitely growth we're seeing in a very positive way. And quite a few companies are doing well.

And is it— was last year just the maximum energy into rationalization budgets and cuts, and folks are through that rationalization and now they have to get back to growth? Is that what's driving it?

Yes, I think companies have like overspent and overbought like in 2021 and maybe overcut and underspent in the following year. And now they're rationalizing. It's more rationalized. It's not, okay, let's like— nobody's doubling. Like very few companies are doubling year over year. That's just triple, double what they are. That's like the median growth, I speak for, you get from public companies like 20%. That's decent. Yeah, very few companies are over 20% year over year, but companies are growing. They're out of the shock, and the better companies that are working and are getting funded and are back to moderate growth.

But, and so just, just because it's really helpful to learn that the you know, Canva accelerating at 40% at $2.3 billion on the one end. But Salesforce said next year single-digit growth. Mongo, which to me it's— I know it's— to me it's almost like Gong, which is that it's beloved, would never let it go, never rip it out. They said they're going from 35%, I think, to 17% or 14% growth in a year. Mongo, right? And UiPath, are they more pessimistic about the moment in time in next year than what you're seeing? Where's the disconnect, you think? Is it just that your— they're big? Is it just being earlier or what is it?

They're at a bigger scale. It's hard. There are a lot of things happening in the world right now. There's elections in a number of places, like geopolitics. There's economy with like mixed signals. So it's hard. And, you know, some public companies have to be more cautious in their outlook. So it's hard to tell. Plus someone's like at $25 billion, right? It's really hard to drive that over 10% growth. $2.5 billion, right? It's like, how many—

It's only another $500 million. Yes.

So walk in the park. So it is getting harder. Maybe it has to do with some kind of like market saturation or maturity. If there is no innovation, right? And you don't have— you've maxed out your existing TAM or SAM, you'll start slowing down. You need to think about next move and going on. Some of these companies grew by acquisitions, right? That drives immediate growth, but then Whatever you buy also has to grow in 20%, right? If they don't, then if you buy a company that kind of slowed down, that actually the weighted average slows you down.

Yeah, it's one thing Salesforce got. Tableau, Slack, and everything are still growing faster than the core, which ended up, I think, being good buys. So let's— I want to talk about a topic that it's on a lot of folks, especially professionals' minds, which is convergence and apps. You've got a whole enablement platform. It's grown. Talk a little bit about the journey from expanding from Korgong, like in the old days, right? Standalone app that everyone listens to their reps to where you are today and like what you've learned about when different segments of the industry overlap and converge. What have you learned on all this convergence?

We— our vision has been all along to build like a platform. Of course, I think many people do. We aren't the only one. We started by understanding what is it can we do today, but where can it grow. We didn't know exactly the details, but I still have design for a system like Prediction and Engagement and Enablement from early 2017. We're really like screen designs. It took us like a few years to get there. But it is important. There are two things that are happening that are like conflicting with each other. There's like a consolidation and innovation, right? And it's important to keep your eye on both, right? So we are, when we started Like some of the reasons investors didn't want to invest, right? They said, oh, there are like too many sales tools. There are like 100 at the time, right? I says, that's not— in marketing, 10,000, right? So there are not a lot. I said, there are too few, right? The macro pressure right now, trying to see like how can we save both from a seller productivity? Can we have one or fewer apps that are doing more and also save cost, which I think is a secondary consideration. Obviously it's a good opportunity for us. But I think there's so much innovation out there. It's— we have on that 2017 design still like 3 more big apps ideas that we still haven't started coding. Right. It's a motion that we can sort of was there, but the eye is always keep innovating and keep creating new categories that, that don't exist. But it's a great opportunity. Again, if you have to think about how do you expand, become something that's like substantial to the customer. Customer, not just a feature. Otherwise, over time, customers might try to standardize on other things.

Well, I know one year ago today, Parker Kryner was here at Rippling talking about building everything from day one.

Yes.

What you're looking back on it, any learnings from that? Um, that we can't all do that.

It is, it's a legit strategy and it's working. I know some companies that have, that have started building something massive I don't have data, but it's an interesting question. I think that most of them have not succeeded. Now, this is a counterexample, a very good one. It's hard to— the key to app, something is like you need really to nail it, right? You can develop so much stuff and then you come to the user, it doesn't exactly work. It's not exactly— you need a lot of like fine-tuning iteration, right? And our approach, which I think most— it's not unique, like most companies that you start with one product, like really narrow. Make it really good and keep building from that. So one success follows another if you nail it right. We did learn that we're now at a scale. It's not just a meet in a lawn. Hey, why don't you add this feature? And tomorrow, like, our customers are using it. It's more— it's way more complicated, difficult to get like our sellers that they have a product that they know how to sell and they love and it's working well to get them to sell new stuff. Right, and to equip them with the materials. So the whole expansion to multi-product is a learning. Now we're at our third product and we see that it's actually getting better. We're still not great at it and you need— there's a good learning. So you should think about not just how to get the product out, but how as a company we learn to do like product 5 and product 6 and product 7. It's a playbook that you're developing. It's not easy. I spoke with a lot of founders like before that to learn about the experiences. It's a challenge for most companies.

And I should know this, but I don't, I'll admit. Are you selling them distinctly or are they all bundled primarily together?

Both. So there is a base layer, but then the others are add-on. And again, it's learning. We had one product and then another, and now we went a little more, did a more rationalization and understanding how people really think about it and had time to take a pause and take a look back at how we should— we changed our old packaging and pricing model and we'll probably do it again in a year.

Now, I maybe, I may have, I maybe have a slightly dated view, but when you're, when you start to have multi-product and compete with more vendors, but you have a core that is best of breed, like for voice, for others, I'm 99% sure even in 2024, Gong is best of breed. Others have some base functionality, but I know they don't have all the engineers and I know it's not as good. And I, Even if it were, I know sales leaders believe it's best of breed. Does the rest have to be best of breed? Does it have to be checkbox? Does it just have to be parity? Like you can't be best of breed at everything when you're competing now in 5 or 6 elements of the category. Maybe you do. What have you learned when you have to be parity versus who you are?

So at Gong, people call us and customers say it's the Apple of sales. So we have a brand, right, that is a quality product. Designed well. And that's what we sell. It's not for everybody. If some of them are like the lowest cost and they're successful company that are a low-cost operator, it's a legit model. They could be like extremely successful. Quality is not the number one. For us, it is. Launched Engage, which is like a customer engagement solution, like in March 28th, they're already like 500 customers now, which like it's faster than the original Gong, way faster. And definitely the the forecasting. The reason is because people think, okay, Gong is a quality product. They don't have a test, so we have a reputation, right? If we don't deliver, we're toast, right?

That's—

we have to make sure that now you can't necessarily compete with someone who's been something like 10 years and come up with a new product that'll be better in every way. So you have to— and that's also a learning— you have to communicate what it does the same, what it does better, and what it does less, that you set the expectation. You're not— we're not better in everything, but the few things that we do have to have substantial advantage and be compelling to at least some of the customers. You have to make sure you don't sell to everybody because some customers may not be like a good fit for you right out of the gate. But whatever we deliver has to be outstanding and create a high NPS score.

And you said really that you said a couple of minutes ago that some of this convergence in platform is not primarily about cost savings. It is. It's number 2, but it's not. So unpack that a little bit. What's— if it's not to save money, is it really just vendor fatigue or simplification? Because we've always had best of breed apps since you and I started. What did you really mean by it's number 2?

Yes. So people call it the swivel chair. If I have a role, let's say I'm a customer support person, which apps Do people like use, okay, my reporting is this, but my dollar is here and my forecasting is here. So that's, it creates some productivity loss for the people in the front. It creates like a big headache for the people that are in like in their operations or enablement or IT, which personally I don't think it's like a, it's a strong enough reason to do this. But these are people that own the budget, so I can't argue with that. It doesn't matter what I think, right? This is how they feel. Oh, I'm managing like 20 apps. I don't have time. I'm going to. 3. Now, right or wrong, it's, it's a brutal decision. I do think that there's something that people aren't thinking about today because it's still out there. But again, it's the AI revolution. People still think in terms of, oh, I'm going to click here and click there. That's according to me, right? If I'm right, it's going away because I'm going to say it's all going to be like speech. I'm just going to talk. We're going to have a conversation. The apps are going to run in the background and AI will orchestrate. You can see some of like Microsoft Copilot. That's their approach. There is no more like user interface. This is all ChatGPT. That, so it doesn't really matter. There's still some operational headache for people though to manage administration, users, all those things, but it's not huge.

I want to talk, I want to talk about people and knowledge workers in 2024, but one last question on convergence before we get there. And maybe this is less of a big deal given the way that Salespace is, but Coopetition. As you expand your surface area, partners become competitors as well. It gets confusing sometimes. What's the meta learnings about what you've learned and how to handle this sort of coopetition as you expand?

First, people ask, oh, now we have like more competitors, right? When you start, we're like 2 companies, right? And now they're like 4 or 5 or 20 if you expand the circles. I'm going to be happy we have like hundreds, right? It means that you have a category as long as the market expands, right? If you're fighting with like 500 people, who's going to dominate like a small hill, that's a problem because that's a zero-sum game. Nobody thinks so. As long as the market expands, yeah, let there be hundreds. Let a thousand flowers blossom. And I know that no matter what, and it's, I always tell the employees like every 2 years we need to be a new company. We almost have to assume that our products are no longer differentiated, no longer matter. There'll be people that will copy whatever we have, are doing is successful.

Yeah.

It's not hard to develop software today. The question like, what do you do? What are the ideas? What resonates with customers? And always have to keep moving and your competitors can help you if you both educate the market. Sure. You hate them. You want to strangle them. You want them to die, right? Naturally, that's a killer instinct. But they do help you to do make you better. And CRM, there are hundreds of companies, right?

Yeah.

If you look at the grid, it's like hundreds. But yeah, Salesforce still doing pretty well.

But for Engage, as you're rolling this out for your sales teams when they're out selling it, but let's say a big customer wants to use another vendor for Engage but loves Gong. And there's also a gray area in the middle. They're interested.

Yes.

But is it worth it? And if you push me too hard to go with Engage, I may— the apple may lose a little bit of its polish because, yeah, I'm with you, but I don't want to break. How do you handle that trade-off in there?

It's a natural tension, but we try, and I hope that we do a good job to help customers and do what's best for the customer. And that's the longer-term winning strategy. If it's us, that's great. If it's not, then not. But we do partner with pretty much everybody. Gong integrates with— Oh yeah, I know you do.

You're integrated with them all too.

I integrate. I speak with the CEOs of all my competitors. We have dinners and lunches and we know each other. They're good people. They're not evil, right?

But how do you manage the sales team? How do you get folks? Because they've got a national attention to maybe push it even further than they push, but hopefully as much as needed, but not an inch more.

That's why you hire great salespeople that you got to listen to their calls. I don't need to hear from I, I, I, it's not since as far as I know. Yeah. And I'm, I think I'm pretty knowledgeable about this. It's a non-issue. You just hire the right material. You repeat to them that they can hear my conversation with customers. They know how I look at it so they can learn.

Last one I want to talk about. Some of the stuff we've talked about is like what fills my LinkedIn feed. The other one that fills it is a lot of folks in sales I don't want to say complaining, but I mean complaining, stating, observing how much harder sales it is today, how much more work it is. In the opener, even Marc Benioff said they need 3x pipeline coverage now versus 2x 18 months ago. He just said that last week, which is interesting. You and I talked about you brought in a new CRO to help manage some of this change. What did you learn? What have you learned from this just being a harder— how do you deal with the people side of a harder environment?

It is harder, especially for, for most companies, but definitely SaaS companies. But it goes because people just bought, right? People just called you, hey, I have like 100. I think next year we're going to double, so I'm going to buy a couple hundred seats. And you bought it. You didn't have to be good. I think we're like pretty good, like in our people, but not necessarily the most— didn't have like the rigor or put the legwork or build like an ROI. People said, oh yeah, we need that. Right now there are more approvals in a cycle. The CFO would need to understand why should I spend money on this? So every dollar is like, uh, actually the numbers we see orders with 37 seats, right? Odd numbers, right? Not 50, right? 37. Oh, these people are not using it. They actually make it like 33, right? So people are very precise when they renew odd numbers that people just buy exactly what they need when they need. So it is. Harder, but it's not a bad thing. It just keeps it real. We did have, we brought a new CRO that told everybody that we had new people. We had people that had been like in the crazy post-COVID growth, like, uh, every, uh, everybody, we're gonna need to work harder. I'm responsible for making you sure you all succeed, but you need to put in the work. We put like weekly KPIs, right? And I'm very, how much activities, what needs to happen. Every deal we track, if you know what the metric is, like every deal. And some people saw it as an opportunity, some people don't love it and says, if you don't, we will not work together. But we're seeing the results like it is, it is working and it is what it is.

Got it. So a new CRO brought in this additional level of accountability for the team in tougher times and some folks didn't want to be in it. Some folks moved on and that's just, that's the reality, right?

But it was a minority. Right? Like most people saw it, maybe they love it, but now they're hitting their numbers and they see the results and you make it fun, right? We love the competition. We just said last week there's like a Shark Tank where people do 2 weeks of just building pipeline. Salesforce, by the way, doesn't need 3x more pipeline, need better conversion. Just advice to Marc.

Probably. But Marc, when you—

It's like throwing more, you just do better work. Like it's selling.

Of course. He— I think he was trying to simplify it, but it was interesting. He got on the analyst call and he interrupted and he said, we need 3x now. And every part of my sales org knows it's 3x, not 2x. But sure, converting better would help as well, right? Yeah. All right. Last thing I want to come to before we run out of time, even though we already hit it, I think it's so important. The 37 seats, the changes into next year, 2025. Is it going to be— is it getting a little bit easier in this core B2B2B? What is your— what are you seeing for next year? What are you seeing?

Yes, we're definitely feeling it and we're seeing customers that are buying and are growing. If they're adding seats, that's always like a good— we measure like how many companies add seats, right? So that's, that's a very good— and we also look at cohorts like when they bought so far. And again, we live in a very volatile world, so be cautious. There are a lot of things that are happening that are with mixed conflicting forces, but overall we think that, uh, we're seeing growth in our numbers and our customers, uh, signals. And as founders, obviously there's always like a good amount of optimism, right? You always, but it's hard to predict exactly how long this will take, right? But one thing for sure, like in, it's just a matter of time until the market bounces back. The AI is a massive opportunity that will fuel tremendous growth for many companies.

Yeah, it's just the weird— every little glitch or downturn we've been through, they're all similar but different, right? And I think for me, it's just the length of some of these challenges. That is, 2021 was also— we hadn't seen this, right? But the length— if you're in an impacted category, we're coming into a third year of challenging times. That's different, isn't it?

Yes. Yes. If you look at the dot-com bust, right, that was like few good years. It was like it took a few years for the market to, to fully, fully bounce. But that was separated the real businesses. They're like companies like pets.com, toys.com, and there are companies like amazon.com and Netflix, right, that were real companies and they accelerated. These are trying times, but you can make it.

All right, last question. We've just got 2 minutes, but what's on the roadmap for Gong for the next 6, 12, 18 months that you're most excited about? What's coming that gets you most excited as CEO?

I think we're actually within striking distance of our— remember our founding vision of an autonomous system for customer management that does most of the work that people do. You might not need— and again, these are all technically extremely challenging work that we're taking on. Not need to update your CRM at all, right? If you just— the system already understand it.

That will be great.

Get your— yeah, nobody's going to miss that. People does your prediction, will tell you and will guide, engage customers on your own. Today I'm actually using it. I don't write customer emails anymore. The GenAI is good and I have a unique voice. So usually in the past when I used it, you say, ah, that's not good. I have to write it or have my EA draft something. Now I just It's 90%, I just hit it and the system will start communicating with the customer on its own. That's, that's very exciting. The real-time interaction, the ability to just tell the system. I use the mobile app anymore and say, hey, what's happening with this account? I was like in Chicago at a conference a couple of weeks ago and I bumped into a customer that I didn't know who she was, or actually a substantial customer, and I was embarrassed. And I invited her to coffee the morning after. I said, hey Gong, I'm meeting Brandy for coffee tomorrow. Tell me what I need to know. And it created a brief for me. I didn't have to call the poor app in California and scare the hell out of them and or talk to anybody. Nobody did anything. And yet I knew pretty much everything I need to know. That's a pretty exciting future.

Let's see what the company was founded when? 2016, 2017?

2016.

Okay, so only 8 years to complete the 1.0 initial vision. That's not bad, right?

Where I used to say, I usually say we're like at 10% of our vision. Maybe now we're at 20%.

20%. All right, well, good. Let's break with that. This was so great. Thank you for coming. One of our hero companies, Gong. Thank you very much.