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've 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 it. 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? How did the vision back then so early? Right.

My jaw dropped when I started thinking about. 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 I was starting to diagnose cancer better than a doc's doctor. So I said, like, how hard would it be to understand customers better than salespeople? Right. That was the idea. 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 out 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 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 is. 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 going to change the world, 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 five 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 right in time. But one of the things a lot of we're all thinking about in two 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 two 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 their customer facing, yes, 25%, sometimes even less. Sometimes we see two hours a week. Right. The rest is spent on filling in forms, one on one meeting forecast calls, sifting through leaks, 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. There will be no more SDR, CSMs, AES, BDR, XDRs. All of these. I see them converging into one role essentially as SaaS companies the last 20 years went hyper specialized with their 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 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 four years to get trained or something. Right. It's insanely hard to do that. Right. But you give someone an iPhone. Right. And 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 companies.

So just to unpack that a little bit on the life cycle 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 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 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 life cycle of the customer with AI they'll actually be able to follow up with a request deal with onboarding issues, deployment issues and all of that.

A lot of companies are moving to that direction. Just 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 could 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 will. If you see the AE 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, 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 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 there was the right here in England started the industrial revolution when there to manufacture goods which 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 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, not quite yet. But we need to look at the things that is actually that an 80% accurate job is. Is incredible. Right. I wouldn't put it like for things that are mission critical, that have to be 100% like. Like a Mars mission. Right. But there are so many things that if it works like any, it's way better than anything out there. Actually the one thing most people understand is actually it's not very smart. It's if you've read kind of the book like System one thinking, System two thinking. Right. So this is like AI generated value, System one 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 over promised. Right. So what are you seeing there with what they are asking for and what we're able to deliver? Is there a delta and what are you seeing?

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 a third degree level message in our marketing. We didn't want to talk about AI because it scared 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 earning 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 gone 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 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 and the bigger.

Customers in the enterprise when they're saying let's get some efficiency or some from. 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 expeditions that are going around and talking to 20 companies and 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 rev ops 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 resonate 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 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 it's hype right now and we're, we think humbly, we're like at least as other companies but you're always like solving like a real, real problem for customers. There is an opportunity that I would be way bigger than cloud. Right. I think we spoke about the humanity revolution. But let's look like enterprise software there are like three generation. The first was the on Prem enterprise like Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle. Then came the cloud. Right. Application, Salesforce, Workday, DHR 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 a much bigger than cloud because it touches into payroll. Right. It comes from a different budget. We're not quite there. Right. But think about if you go to a team, say I can do 70% of what your team is doing right now, automatically the fraction of the cost now you're taking like 70% or, 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'll 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 isn't that headcount reduction, isn't that where you get that, that access at 70% it's doing, it's get. It's doing away with 200, a thousand, 2,000 people that do road or mechanical work, isn't it?

Yes, we pay people like six figure salaries to do mechanical work but people like their roles like punching cars 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 and actually act on your behalf and remove the drudgery. So that's like a way bigger potential than 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. A 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 six months or eight 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. It was very challenging to most companies but it also bought 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. Wa it's not. It used to be like very easy to sell. Now it's 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 grows but definitely growth. Are we seeing in a very positive 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 rational. It's not okay, let's like nobody's doubling like very few companies are doubling year over year. That's triple double what they're. That's like the median growth 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 the year Mongo right. And UiPath are they're more pessimistic about the moment in time and next year than what you're seeing. Where's the disconnect you think, is it just that you'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 almost like a 25 billion. Right. It's really hard to drive that over 10% growth. Two and a half 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 some kind of like market saturation or a 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 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 is slows you down.

Yeah. It's one thing Salesforce, tableau, Slack and everything are still growing faster than the core which ended up I think being goodbyes. So let's. I want to talk about a topic that it's on a lot of folks, especially professionals minds, which is convergence in apps. You've got a whole enablement platform. It's grown. Talk a little bit about the journey from expanding from Corgong 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?

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 designed for system like prediction and engagement and enablement from early 2017. We 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 conflicting with each other. There's consolidation and innovation. Right. And it's important to keep keep your eye on both. Right. So we're when we started like some of the reasons investors didn't want to invest. Right. They say, oh, there are like too many sales tools. There are like a hundred at the time. Right. I says that's not in marketing. 10,000. Right. So they're not a lot, they're 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. 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 three more big apps, ideas that we still haven't started coding. Right. It's emotion that we consolidate 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 and become something that's like substantial to the customer, not just a feature otherwise over time customers might try to standardize on other things.

One year ago today, Parker Kronro was here at Rippling talking about building everything from day one. Yes. What you're looking back on it. Any learnings from that? We can't all do that.

It's a legit strategy and it's working. I know some companies 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 counter example, 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 have a user. It doesn't exactly work. It's not exact. 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 meat and 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 equipment, the materials. So the whole expansion of 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 five and product six and product seven. 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 experience. It's a challenge for most companies and.

I, 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, 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 change our old packaging and pricing model and we'll probably do it again in a year.

Now I may be, I may have, I may 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 the some base functionality but I know they don't have all the engineers and it's. I know it's not as good and even if it were, I know sale 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 parody? Like you can't be best of breed at everything when you're competing now in five or six elements of the category, maybe you do. What have you learned when you have to be parody 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. Some like the lowest cost and they're a successful company that are a low cost operator. It's a legit model. They could be like extremely successful. It quality is not the number one for us. It is Launch Engage which is like a customer engagement Solution. Like in March 28th they're already like 500 customers which like it's, it's a. It's faster than the original Gong. Way faster. And definitely the forecasting the reason is because people Think, okay, Gong is a quality product. They. 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 learning. You have to communicate with what it does the same what it does better and what it does less that you set the expectation. We're not better in everything but the few things that we do have to have a 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 minutes ago that some of this convergence in platform is not primarily about cost savings. It is. It's number two, but it's not. So unpack that a little bit. 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 two?

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 either operations or enablement or it. Which personally, I don't think it's like, it's a strong enough reason to do this, but these are people that own the budget, so I can't argue with that. 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 gonna three 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 it. Oh, I'm gonna click here and click there. That's according to me. Right? If I'm right, it's going away. Because I'm gonna say it's all gonna be like speech. I'M just gonna talk. We're gonna have a conversation. The apps are gonna run in the background and AI will orchestrate. You can see some of like Microsoft Pilot. That's their approach. There is no more like user interface. This is all chat GPT. 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 sales space is, but convergence 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 two companies. Right. And now they're like four or five or 20. If you expand the circles, I'm going to be happy with would 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 I always tell the employees like every two 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 is 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. 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 going it's with. Oh yeah, no you do.

You're integrating 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. I'll hear from customer. I. It's not since as far as I know 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. 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 let the people side of a harder environment?

It is harder, especially for most companies, but definitely fast companies. But it goes because people just bought, right? People just called you. Hey, I've like a hundred. I think next year we're gonna double. So I'm gonna 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 a roi. People said, oh yeah, we need that right now. There are more approvals in a cycle. The CFO would interest in. Why should I spend money on this? So every dollar is like actually the numbers we see orders with 37 seats. Right. Odd numbers. Right. Not 50. Right. 37. Oh, these people are not using it. 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 hard, 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 where people have been like in the crazy post Covid girls, like every. Everybody. We're gonna need to work harder. I'm responsible 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 medic 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 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 the reality. Right.

But it was a minority. Right. Like most people saw it, maybe they love it, but now they're. That they're hitting their numbers and they see the results. And you make it fun. Right. We don't love the competition. We just said last week there's like a shark tank where people do two weeks of just building pipeline. Salesforce, by the way, doesn't need 3x, more pipeline, better conversion. Just advice to Mark, probably, but Mark throwing more. You just do better work like it's selling.

I. Of course, I. He. I think he was trying to simplify, 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, 20, 25. Is it going to be. Is it getting A little bit easier in this core. B2B 2B. 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 I would mix conflicting forces. But overall we think that we're seeing growth in our numbers and our customers 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 will fool 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.com bust right. That was like a few. 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 there are like companies like pets.comtoys.com. there are companies like Amazon.com and netflix. Right. That were real companies and very accelerated. These are trying times, but you can make it.

All right, last question. We've just got two 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 a 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 gonna 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 Gen AI 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 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 rap in California and scare the hell out of them or talk to anybody. Nobody did anything. And yet I knew pretty much everything I need to build. That's a pretty exciting future.

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

2016.

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

I used to say, I usually say we're like a 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, Dong, thank you very much.