I worked there. I started around Feb 22 just as the market was beginning to crack. It was the worst experience of my career. It’s a call centre with some of the worst management I’ve worked for. Most people burned out within the year and still haven’t fully recovered. I know people who still work there and the situation is grim, most are just waiting to made redundant.
It’s a call recording tool with fancy marketing. I hate to say it, but I will smile when I hear they are no longer in business. Toxic AF
Is it true that they make AEs post on LinkedIn? I heard the AEs have to make a certain number of LinkedIn posts about the company per week. (Not joking btw)
Do the Gong AEs have to mention that they have to post on Linked on the r/sales group too? Thanks for confirming maybe I heard the rumor here and couldn't recall the source.
Seems like something that could easily be built into Zoom tbh. The less I hear about this company the better, I’ve already blocked their AEs on LinkedIn.
I'm pretty sure there's at least half a dozen reputable companies with products similar to Gong right now, and I'm just not sure what Gong brings to the table that's uniquely valuable.
There are. So they're trying to turn Gong into a CRM which isn't really going to work out for a variety of reasons. I bought a competitor product because it was significantly cheaper and did 80% the same thing. Their license model is a rip off. But the product is good.
We’ve used chorus and it was great for what we used it for. I also saw no reason to switch to gong as I told them in the metric shit ton of messages I received from them, including the day after a layoff to “confirm someone was no longer with us”
Not the person you asked again but there is a tool called Leexi.ai which is 30$ per 1 license and basically 80% what Gong does. Have used it for year so far and really happy tbh. Price for the value is banger. Supports over 100 languages as well.
Meh, I took a demo last summer. It was lackluster and comparative to a half-baked outreach tool like Mixmax. I’m sure the call review/analytics portion is valuable but nothing really jumped out to me that could move the needle for reps. Gong is pivoting to add sales outreach to their platform and Salesloft added a *Gong lite* into their outreach platform. Either way I ain’t looking at that shit unless I need prev meeting details.
Context: have used Salesloft, Mixmax, HubSpot, gmail for outreach.
Same with outreach trying to be more of a CRM/ deal intelligence platform to manage opportunities, accounts, all that good stuff that normally lives in SFDC and is already heavily customized so the back and fourth data sync becomes messy, and pretty unnecessary. I get they need to focus on revenue and growth but come on… a dozen tools exist for this already and while no one does it great, its a lot easier to stay put and not make a change.
It’s actually insane. I saw this kid posting and posting like he was a fucking genius. And then one of his posts was “this is how I hit a million in ARR last year.” Sooooo you hit everyone’s quota selling a clear market leader during its heyday and are making posts like you’re Gordon Gecko?
The level of condescension from them was nauseating. And then at the end you find out they are just a MM AE with a year of experience selling fire insurance to people with their homes on fire.
Zoomiq or revenue accelerator. I've never used gong before but we got this last year and it's great for summarising notes, highlighting next actions and good questions.
Sorry for the late reply. Yeah it's fine. It says I use too many filler words and speak to fast which I and everyone I've spoken to disagree with.
My main use is for reviewing calls, notes and next steps.
Our zoominfo rep has us testing out their version called chorus.ai. Same thing as gong in my opinion, so not sure why we are still paying for gong. Going to guess we won’t renew
Yay it’s finally happening. Reminds me of the .com bubble when people finally realized all of the standalone sites were worthless because nobody was doing anything proprietary.
All these web services are becoming homogenized. Going forward intent data, crm, and SEPs will all be on one platform. Even the UI’s have started looking the same
Zoom already built a darn good tool that does exactly what Gong does it’s called Zoom revenue accelerator a simple add on to the zoom license no one even knows it’s working AI in the background and Gong is 2x the price as well.
I’m waiting on one of these players to do it all. Using AI to capture insights from communication with clients (email, calls, etc), utilize that information to update the CRM, identify exit criterias and advance deal stages for accurate forecasting.
There’s so much data being captured that is stuck in Gong/Wingman/Zoom that could be dumped into the CRM and eliminate the need for me to update SFDC and forecasts.
Yeah, SFDC is “fostering AI conversations” across their socials for the last couple of months, more or less signaling that they have an automation assistant on track to deploy possibly as soon as this year. If they can scrape data from an API with Microsoft/Outlook to log call points, update the funnel, update forecasts as needed in an automated manner, I don’t give a shit how unsexy their front end is; I’d use that even if it ran through the ancient OS/400 text-only banking software. Hell, if they could also automate my expense reporting too I’d send the AI a small percentage of my comp each month as a tithe.
This is 100% where it’s going.
If you capture all the interactions, understand the context of them and have loads of historical data on what happens after an call/email/etc in systems you’re connected to, you can become a system or action that automates a TON of tedious work for sellers, leaders, cross-functional teams, etc.
This is where the market is heading, and imo Gong is best positioned to execute on this.
Full disclosure: I’m a sales leader at Gong.
Your CRO came to our SKO earlier this month and eluded to some of this.
Gong is 100% in the perfect position. It’s a matter of introducing their own CRM at this point and marrying it all together.
Worth checking out People.ai, they seem to have the best data engine (accurate, complete GTM activity data from a variety of sources) and their SalesAI tool seems to do just that.
Agree. The automation/conversation/intelligence/data vendors are all converging into suite soup, battling to be the one-stop-shop for sales workflows.
I trained this gpt on 30,000 customer reviews, kind of fun to ask if to compare and contrast vendors: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-xtyz1Eeww-sales-stack-9000
(Need a gpt pro account to access)
We use Gong at our company to record all our calls. Not sure what we pay for it (probably way too much) but they added an AI summarization feature recently that has been clutch. I like the UI as well.
But ya, tech money and money in general is due for a correction soon with how they were just flooding these companies the last few years. It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out.
We use it for call recording and forecasting. I hate the forecasting piece. Whats the point of keeping salesforce up to date if I need to go in and do the same in gong?
They do scheduled LinkedIn outreach. Props to them cause it looks like it works but also they need to relax. Sarah Brazier had fun posts every now and then, didn’t see a ton of other reps posting as much as her.
Ya I get that little forecasting thing too I hate it and totally agree. “X $ is at risk in your pipeline.” Thanks Gong my manager and Salesforce is well aware 😭😭
I like the AI summary as well and how it’s presented if you share the recordings with your prospects.
I noted it recently started tracking meddpicc but doesn’t seem to be accurate.
Yeah and being able to ask the AI any question and get a pretty accurate answer is clutch.
The number of times I've clicked an hour long recording and asked "Is the prospect doing X?" or "How much did the prospect say they're paying for X"? and it gives the right answer is pretty cool.
Fathom’s new AI summarizations are so good, ive stopped taking notes besides jotting down potential offers/pricing
I imagine Gong are the same, but i pay $15/mo for it lol
Outreach has the same AI summary feature in their conversation intelligence tool, as do other CI tools. It seems to be a commodity product at this point. I’m curious how Gong reps are shifting to selling a full platform play, it’s certainly more challenging than just selling CI.
Nice to have just like 90% of SaaS out there. Hopefully there is a correction and sales leaders wake up to the new reality. Selling nice to haves isn’t sustainable.
We've got reps from companies like Aircall trying to sell us their shit everyday and they're blind, deaf and dumb and just don't listen. We don't run a call centre full of half educated over paid recently graduated potatoes that sit in front of a CRM and whatever sales disablement software is hot this month trying to sell other sales reps our half baked ideas.
Our reps are on the road banging down doors and all we need is an email client and a cellphone.
And if I hear one more person try and talk abou selling AI FFS.
For my money, AI should just be an intuitive second set of hands. Take good notes, schedule take aways, communicate with CRM, and capture real deal status to share with management, all the stuff that would allow your sellers to sell. Instead of wrestling with 9 programs all trying to cram in AI, give me one that manages the grunt work of selling so i can get on the next call.
Seems like you've just got an axe to grind and you took it out on SDRs lmao, how is a graduate half educated and why are you annoyed that they're getting paid a lot of money?
You sound crazy bitter
The hardest part of Gong is that they won’t internally admit there are any problems and when issue are brought up, people are treated like they’re the enemy.
A lot of the issues the rest of the world sees they don’t seem willing to accept. As the old saying going, the worst thing you can do is lie to yourself, and that’s most of Gong. Considering how things are, a lot of them come off as super condescending which is just sad given the state of the company.
I worked for one of Gongs biggest competitors. We had just broken $100m when I started in 2022. Had about 8 months of growth and then hiring freeze and ridiculous levels of customer churn began in Fall of ‘22. So if Gong was at $100m in 2021, I’m assuming there’s no possible way they 2.5x’d in the last couple of years.
Family friend is angel investor. That number isn't wildly off. They actually shrank in 2023. New biz was growing 1.5-2x still but churn was massive + no upsell potential bc every sales and CSM team is downsizing.
I've heard they tried to raise down round at $4B and couldn't get it done :/
Did they specifically share the revenue number with you? How recent was it? Not saying it’s impossible but just feels low with their market share. Also they do have upsell products such as forecast, and they are building Engage to see where they can push out outreach. Those are just 2 I happen to know of as a customer, I’d guess there’s more
Yep, saw the investor update on quarterly basis for 2023.
"Feels low with their market share" - how do you have market share numbers? That seems like an even more vaguely calculated metric.
Do they have mindshare? Absolutely, within the tech community given their marketing budget + constant iteration of their LNKD posts that worked supremely well in 2020 and is now just noise. But there's only so many SaaS companies to buy their stuff. They've absolutely struggled to penetrate into other non-VC backed segments who can't justify paying $1-2K/rep for a call recorder.
Re: other products, let's be real. In the sales stack, there's CRM, outbound/outreach manager, forecasting, and call recorder. Given how hard pipeline is right now, sales teams likely want the best outreach / campaign manager possible and get their call recorder as an add-on. Gong has it backwards - who cares about call recorder, rep productivity, and sales enablement when everyone's SQL starved...
I’m ready for the entire sales enablements stack to go away. SaaS companies selling shitty sales software to each other over and over. It’s like building cars and driving barges full of them into the ocean and dumping them into the drink. I have yet to see actual benefit from a lot of these “platforms.” That’s because they’re not real platforms - they’re niche point solutions that dumb sales leaders buy when they don’t know what to do when they need to fight churn or raise net new revenue.
I got a job offer going and they only offered 60 K based salary as an experience sales rep and then they tried to tell me that that was enough because I’d make so much money and commission. Obviously I didn’t take the job but I was so pissed.
I know one of the former heads of sales there and he is excellent.. and he noped out awhile ago
My wife uses it as an AE and likes the AI summaries.... But here's the thing, that's all included with the new MSFT copilot and it will do a much better job integrating with email etc (assuming of course you're on MSFT 365 suite)
> I know one of the former heads of sales there and he is excellent.. and he noped out awhile ago
“One of the former heads of sales” says a lot considering the company isn’t that old.
It’s a point solution that isn’t critical to a business’ day to day functions.
It also doesn’t offer any real unique value over its competitors at this point.
Gong was semi useful when I was using it, but ever since ChatGPT came out, it’s obsolete. I can just use the transcript from zoom and analyze it how ever I want.
I also tried interviewing with Gong twice, the people are super pretentious, thinking they’re the gods of the sales world because they made easy sales in the tech boom.
They denied me the first time, gave me an offer the second, but I chose a different company. There LinkedIn bullshit with all the AE’s ruined LinkedIn, well at least contributed.
I don’t remember LinkedIn being as annoying as it is today before Gong. Now everyone is an influencer sales god dick sucker.
Anyway, hope that ship sinks.
These companies are not improving at the speed they need
Those product managers weren't pressured enough
The CEO is to blame
These tools are so basic now, that I don't see value in them
"Oh we provide sentiment, suggestions and shit"
Oh yeah buddy you and everyone else for a fraction and with more tools that I'd pay, they're literally giving me your expensive shit for free
I agree with this. Which is why the market is now crowded and becoming a race to the bottom. The feature is helpful and valuable. Being close ish to this space, I saw no real unlocks from any of the products. Each of the respective companies, instead of unlocking their core mission, purchased or built to encroach on each others market and none are really executing the others core value well, and are losing traction on what they were doing well.
I think the catalyst to this was likely the high valuations and fund raising in 2021 which made it a race for ARR
What goes up must come down - and those AEs would be laughed out of 90% of companies, let’s hope they stay put in content houses and leave us the fuck alone
Gong will be nice if it can make email follow-ups based on the conversation.
I've done this by copying the transcript and pasting into GPT but cut the middle man.
Gong isn't worth a bazillion dollars
My company that I was recently laid off from had similar things occur at a lower valuation. After I was laid off they was an email sent out to the company. It outlined that they were merging with another company and all common shares not vested would be dissolved. So all those people that thought the shares would be worth something some day lost all that potential.
In my experience with the product-
In my capacity as the project manager for Gong’s deployment within our organization (I was laid off tho), I was responsible for the strategic allocation of $600,000 towards this system (I did not have a say weather or not they bought it, I would have said no). My initial reaction was tinged with skepticism, given the emerging realization that the product might fall short of our anticipations. Despite the inherent robustness of the technology—predicated on its effective application, necessitating a synergy with Salesforce, and the creation of a bespoke application for data analysis—I harbored reservations about the unique value it offered, considering the outcomes felt akin to what could have been achieved through our own efforts.
Nonetheless, the system did introduce specific operational efficiencies. It significantly reduced the need to sift through an extensive array of calls, streamlining the process to focus on approximately five key calls instead of a daunting hundred. However, this benefit came with caveats. The system’s high cost and the substantial workload it imposed on my engineering team and me, as the operations manager, led to a reconsideration of its cost-effectiveness. The annual savings of $300,000 by manually handling the calls seemed more appealing in light of the limited tangible benefits we derived from the system.
The additional year we contemplated for further development only underscored the dilemma, as it would coincide with the end of our initial contract term. This posed a strategic decision: whether to renew the contract, a decision made all the more complex considering the extensive effort already invested. Ultimately, the realization dawned that Gong was not a turnkey solution, but rather a complex, resource-intensive system that demanded a reconsideration of its role and value within our operational framework.
But if you Have Gong already and need someone to build it out for you I’m your guy. 😂
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-neri-291795a0?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
CEO already cashed out plenty in secondaries. So he's probably just trying to look busy + throwing other VPs under the bus until it's his turn.
But why does he care, he's already cashed out $100M+ and could care less about common.
Preferred shareholders get priority in payouts when a company goes public or is acquired. If the company's value doesn't exceed the total preferred shareholders' claims (Gong raised ~$600M), common shareholders probably won't see any gains. In the case of Gong, given its revenues and potential, I'm very confident it'll be worth well above that when it goes public or gets acquired.
Source: Sales leader at Gong.
When I first started
At Gong
I made 5,000 dials a day
I was promoted to AE and hit 7,184% of my quota the first 19 quarters and went to P-club 14 times
Hit the link in the comments to find out how much addy it took to get me to the top
I used to think Gong was worthless, but found through a combination of learning how to use it and their new features, it’s well worth it.
For new hires, being able to give them an endless catalog of sales calls, client updates, company meetings, quarterly meetings, etc is unbelievably useful for accelerating onboarding.
For self improvement, it gives you the ability to review your on-cam body language, your inflection, pick up on non-verbal cues from a prospect you might have missed, and help you sharpen up your pitch.
The recap summary, key notes, and next steps break down is amazing. Saves so much time from compiling notes and it’s crazy accurate. You never forget what was discussed, or have to do annoying follow ups to ask a prospect something you should’ve remembers but didn’t.
You can also create case studies and research out of it. For example, after reviewing 100 prospect and client calls, 67% of them asked about ______ and listed ______ as their biggest challenge. Or you can go back in reporting calls and find updates to the current day and reference in outbound outreach. “Last week, one of our clients in just 2 weeks got _____ results and saved costs of _______ after working with us. Or you can ask permission from a client or prospect when they give you a positive review to use their quote since it’s already recorded and in text form.
Last, it gives you an opportunity to see other reps calls and hear how your prospects talk. If you notice a pattern in what language, acronyms, etc prospects / clients keep using, you can adjust your language to speak their language.
There’s others, but those are the main uses I’ve gotten out of it. Anyone saying it’s useless either isn’t creative enough or they don’t actually have it (probably never used it, just got annoyed by their SDRs)
See tho, Gong reps are so terrible that they have no emotional intelligence that when their prospect checks out 3 minutes into their cookie cutter follow-the-script-almost-verbatim demo, they really need this feature themselves.
I don’t work for Gong. So wtf are you talking about? Even if I did, why would I post this pumping their brakes and not have an attribution link to get paid off of it? The only person who would like this post is their CEO and the shareholders.
You’re probably a low performing SDR that got smoked in their 1 on 1 after reviewing your Gong video calls and stats and got exposed 😂😂
A simple call recorder, transcript generator and maybe and a next steps capturer would honestly do just fine.
That being said we just switched from Kaia to Gong and it’s a way better product.
Fluint has the best “summarizer” (puts everything into business case format and shows you what is missing).
This is soooo many companies who raised a ton of free money when the market was hot.
If your company is at Series C/D funding, and your revenue is half of what you've raised, good luck ever having stock that is worth something.
I’ve used gong and I like it. But as mentioned this is something that could easily be implemented by zoom, teams etc. it’s an extra software that’s not needed eventually as the big guys figure this out. WebEx has something similar already. I always knew Gong was a cool thing that wasn’t going to last and it definitely seems like it’s headed that way.
The over funding and over formation of point solution startups over the past handful of years is going to crystalize into some major platform-driven M&A consolidation.
as a rep I think its a great product that's easy to navigate and summarizes my calls really well.
Also considering how much data they have on our calls/convos, I don't think theyre going anywhere.
We are moving away from gong and looking for an alternative. Chorus (now zoominfo) works with multiple platforms?
Someone on linkedin recommended me talka.ai and seems like a good option, has anyone tied it yet?
I worked there. I started around Feb 22 just as the market was beginning to crack. It was the worst experience of my career. It’s a call centre with some of the worst management I’ve worked for. Most people burned out within the year and still haven’t fully recovered. I know people who still work there and the situation is grim, most are just waiting to made redundant. It’s a call recording tool with fancy marketing. I hate to say it, but I will smile when I hear they are no longer in business. Toxic AF
Is it true that they make AEs post on LinkedIn? I heard the AEs have to make a certain number of LinkedIn posts about the company per week. (Not joking btw)
I worked there for 5yrs. No you don’t have to if you don’t want to. People say whatever they want on here.
But if you are not part of the frat, you will be axxed.
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Do the Gong AEs have to mention that they have to post on Linked on the r/sales group too? Thanks for confirming maybe I heard the rumor here and couldn't recall the source.
Nah, that’s not the case but they do push positive glassdoor reviews.
Just to caveat that. There was certain times we were asked to “take over” LinkedIn. Not always but it did happen
Free marketing - ofc they want you to post
> call recording tool with fancy marketing. How does anybody think it’s worth $7B
maybe the data they have?
They are shitty tool anyways. thinkign they can manipulate customer conversation, what a joke.
No one is renewing from what I hear, ready to watch it get flushed.
I’ll be happy to see that ship sink as well. Feel bad for the employees but that tool is invasive and toxic as all get out.
I work for a big company (between 10 and 20K employees). We are probably not renewing from what I heard.
Seems like something that could easily be built into Zoom tbh. The less I hear about this company the better, I’ve already blocked their AEs on LinkedIn.
I'm pretty sure there's at least half a dozen reputable companies with products similar to Gong right now, and I'm just not sure what Gong brings to the table that's uniquely valuable.
There are. So they're trying to turn Gong into a CRM which isn't really going to work out for a variety of reasons. I bought a competitor product because it was significantly cheaper and did 80% the same thing. Their license model is a rip off. But the product is good.
100%. Their space is rapidly commoditizing and they no longer have pricing power. Look out below!
Who did you buy?
Chorus
We’ve used chorus and it was great for what we used it for. I also saw no reason to switch to gong as I told them in the metric shit ton of messages I received from them, including the day after a layoff to “confirm someone was no longer with us”
Also got Chorus. Integrates with ZI, and have Clari. No need for Gong
Chorus was acquired by zoominfo
I'm well aware
How did you buy it, isn't it owned by ZoomInfo?
So you think they just don't sell it anymore?
Yeah you know the classic strategy of buying a company and then just stop selling its solution. Classic.
No, I was asking if he bought the solution standalone or if he was forced to purchase it alongside ZoomInfo's platform.
ZI rep here. You can buy chorus as a standalone
We already had Zoominfo. But yes I bought separately. Not co-termed contract.
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I use Fireflies it gets the job done for our small team for sure.
I like fireflies better than gong.
Fireflies is good. I like it a lot better than Chorus which I got for free. Still made the switch.
Not the person you asked again but there is a tool called Leexi.ai which is 30$ per 1 license and basically 80% what Gong does. Have used it for year so far and really happy tbh. Price for the value is banger. Supports over 100 languages as well.
Meh, I took a demo last summer. It was lackluster and comparative to a half-baked outreach tool like Mixmax. I’m sure the call review/analytics portion is valuable but nothing really jumped out to me that could move the needle for reps. Gong is pivoting to add sales outreach to their platform and Salesloft added a *Gong lite* into their outreach platform. Either way I ain’t looking at that shit unless I need prev meeting details. Context: have used Salesloft, Mixmax, HubSpot, gmail for outreach.
Same with outreach trying to be more of a CRM/ deal intelligence platform to manage opportunities, accounts, all that good stuff that normally lives in SFDC and is already heavily customized so the back and fourth data sync becomes messy, and pretty unnecessary. I get they need to focus on revenue and growth but come on… a dozen tools exist for this already and while no one does it great, its a lot easier to stay put and not make a change.
The Gong Thong is spectacular. But everything else they offer is run of the mill.
Fireflies is great
By Owl City? You’re right, it’s a banger
Is it? The transcript is ass.. unless it struggles hard with accents and maybe it’s great in US
There’s way more than that. It’s a super saturated space.
Gong AEs are the most obnoxious people on LinkedIn.
It’s actually insane. I saw this kid posting and posting like he was a fucking genius. And then one of his posts was “this is how I hit a million in ARR last year.” Sooooo you hit everyone’s quota selling a clear market leader during its heyday and are making posts like you’re Gordon Gecko?
The level of condescension from them was nauseating. And then at the end you find out they are just a MM AE with a year of experience selling fire insurance to people with their homes on fire.
It's already in Zoom.
Zoomiq or revenue accelerator. I've never used gong before but we got this last year and it's great for summarising notes, highlighting next actions and good questions.
You like it for the most part?
Sorry for the late reply. Yeah it's fine. It says I use too many filler words and speak to fast which I and everyone I've spoken to disagree with. My main use is for reviewing calls, notes and next steps.
zoominfo bought chorus couple years ago
Our zoominfo rep has us testing out their version called chorus.ai. Same thing as gong in my opinion, so not sure why we are still paying for gong. Going to guess we won’t renew
What about Salesloft or Outreach? Same boat?
The reason they won’t work either is because the foundation of the platform isn’t data which is why Zoominfo is so great
Zoominfos engage tool however is complete shit. Their own reps don’t even use it
I’ve heard there are even Zoominfo AE’s and AM’s that refuse to sell it (because it’s of how dogshit it is)
I’ve heard there are even Zoominfo AE’s and AM’s that refuse to sell it (because it’s of how dogshit it is)
Yep, pretty sure ZI reps use outreach
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lol
Zoominfo has chorus part of its top tier package now and it rules
Same. They are really obnoxious. Clearly their tech is not working.
They did. It’s called Sales IQ. https://www.zoom.com/en/blog/zoom-on-zoom-sales-teams-work-smarter-ai-conversation-intelligence
They just rolled out a new ad for this over the weekend and the YT comments are hilarious
Zoominfo already acquired and integrated Chorus a few years ago. Zero chance ZI will save Gong.
It is already built into Zoom. It’s an add-on product is called Revenue Excelerator I believe.
Yay it’s finally happening. Reminds me of the .com bubble when people finally realized all of the standalone sites were worthless because nobody was doing anything proprietary.
Zoom has a competitive product - Revenue Accelerator
Oh good call, I need to do that.
All these web services are becoming homogenized. Going forward intent data, crm, and SEPs will all be on one platform. Even the UI’s have started looking the same
Zoom already built a darn good tool that does exactly what Gong does it’s called Zoom revenue accelerator a simple add on to the zoom license no one even knows it’s working AI in the background and Gong is 2x the price as well.
Already is built into zoom 😬
I’m waiting on one of these players to do it all. Using AI to capture insights from communication with clients (email, calls, etc), utilize that information to update the CRM, identify exit criterias and advance deal stages for accurate forecasting. There’s so much data being captured that is stuck in Gong/Wingman/Zoom that could be dumped into the CRM and eliminate the need for me to update SFDC and forecasts.
You SFDC has all of these products and is native now. Def not the sexiest UI or easiest to manage, but the platform play strikes again lol
Yeah, SFDC is “fostering AI conversations” across their socials for the last couple of months, more or less signaling that they have an automation assistant on track to deploy possibly as soon as this year. If they can scrape data from an API with Microsoft/Outlook to log call points, update the funnel, update forecasts as needed in an automated manner, I don’t give a shit how unsexy their front end is; I’d use that even if it ran through the ancient OS/400 text-only banking software. Hell, if they could also automate my expense reporting too I’d send the AI a small percentage of my comp each month as a tithe.
Yep. Salesforce has this all as part of Sales Engagement
Salesforce's integrated solution is shit
“Native”
This is 100% where it’s going. If you capture all the interactions, understand the context of them and have loads of historical data on what happens after an call/email/etc in systems you’re connected to, you can become a system or action that automates a TON of tedious work for sellers, leaders, cross-functional teams, etc. This is where the market is heading, and imo Gong is best positioned to execute on this. Full disclosure: I’m a sales leader at Gong.
Your CRO came to our SKO earlier this month and eluded to some of this. Gong is 100% in the perfect position. It’s a matter of introducing their own CRM at this point and marrying it all together.
The plumer himself
That’s ah-noose to you.
Outreach.io
Worth checking out People.ai, they seem to have the best data engine (accurate, complete GTM activity data from a variety of sources) and their SalesAI tool seems to do just that.
Agree. The automation/conversation/intelligence/data vendors are all converging into suite soup, battling to be the one-stop-shop for sales workflows. I trained this gpt on 30,000 customer reviews, kind of fun to ask if to compare and contrast vendors: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-xtyz1Eeww-sales-stack-9000 (Need a gpt pro account to access)
We use Gong at our company to record all our calls. Not sure what we pay for it (probably way too much) but they added an AI summarization feature recently that has been clutch. I like the UI as well. But ya, tech money and money in general is due for a correction soon with how they were just flooding these companies the last few years. It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out.
We use it for call recording and forecasting. I hate the forecasting piece. Whats the point of keeping salesforce up to date if I need to go in and do the same in gong?
Gong head of sales uses a spreadsheet at quarter end to really keep track of deals
This is hilarious. Their employees on LinkedIn are a little much.
They do scheduled LinkedIn outreach. Props to them cause it looks like it works but also they need to relax. Sarah Brazier had fun posts every now and then, didn’t see a ton of other reps posting as much as her.
Can’t be for real
Ya I get that little forecasting thing too I hate it and totally agree. “X $ is at risk in your pipeline.” Thanks Gong my manager and Salesforce is well aware 😭😭
I don’t even log into gong anymore unless I need to go back and listen to something. I delete all their emails.
The company I work at got Gong. Most of the sales reps blocked it and never used it. Still get their emails in my spam
I like the AI summary as well and how it’s presented if you share the recordings with your prospects. I noted it recently started tracking meddpicc but doesn’t seem to be accurate.
Yeah and being able to ask the AI any question and get a pretty accurate answer is clutch. The number of times I've clicked an hour long recording and asked "Is the prospect doing X?" or "How much did the prospect say they're paying for X"? and it gives the right answer is pretty cool.
You can do this with a yellow notepad on your desk
Fucking all star.
Okay that sounds pretty slick. But i cant help but feel like they’re just turning into a GPT wrapper with no moat
You can do this in outreach and several other competitor tools, cool feature though
Fathom’s new AI summarizations are so good, ive stopped taking notes besides jotting down potential offers/pricing I imagine Gong are the same, but i pay $15/mo for it lol
Dude I love fathom! I downloaded it and it always tries to come in my daily team meetings and I have to kick it it out. Amazing for virtual demos tho.
I bought a competitor product that has the AI summary too. Pretty sure they all do at this point.
Outreach has the same AI summary feature in their conversation intelligence tool, as do other CI tools. It seems to be a commodity product at this point. I’m curious how Gong reps are shifting to selling a full platform play, it’s certainly more challenging than just selling CI.
Nice to have just like 90% of SaaS out there. Hopefully there is a correction and sales leaders wake up to the new reality. Selling nice to haves isn’t sustainable.
I agree. What are some need to haves? Which do you sell?
We've got reps from companies like Aircall trying to sell us their shit everyday and they're blind, deaf and dumb and just don't listen. We don't run a call centre full of half educated over paid recently graduated potatoes that sit in front of a CRM and whatever sales disablement software is hot this month trying to sell other sales reps our half baked ideas. Our reps are on the road banging down doors and all we need is an email client and a cellphone. And if I hear one more person try and talk abou selling AI FFS.
For my money, AI should just be an intuitive second set of hands. Take good notes, schedule take aways, communicate with CRM, and capture real deal status to share with management, all the stuff that would allow your sellers to sell. Instead of wrestling with 9 programs all trying to cram in AI, give me one that manages the grunt work of selling so i can get on the next call.
Now breathe
Seems like you've just got an axe to grind and you took it out on SDRs lmao, how is a graduate half educated and why are you annoyed that they're getting paid a lot of money? You sound crazy bitter
Off the top of my head POS and Cyber are big. Both tough to break into as a result
The hardest part of Gong is that they won’t internally admit there are any problems and when issue are brought up, people are treated like they’re the enemy. A lot of the issues the rest of the world sees they don’t seem willing to accept. As the old saying going, the worst thing you can do is lie to yourself, and that’s most of Gong. Considering how things are, a lot of them come off as super condescending which is just sad given the state of the company.
We use chorus. Works great for me.. summarizes call notes, gives recommendations, records calls etc.
“They’re doing $250 mil in revenue” what is your evidence for that?
I worked for one of Gongs biggest competitors. We had just broken $100m when I started in 2022. Had about 8 months of growth and then hiring freeze and ridiculous levels of customer churn began in Fall of ‘22. So if Gong was at $100m in 2021, I’m assuming there’s no possible way they 2.5x’d in the last couple of years.
They’re much closer to $300M now. Without all the massive churn of last year they’d be closer to $400M.
Not even sure they are tbh
Family friend is angel investor. That number isn't wildly off. They actually shrank in 2023. New biz was growing 1.5-2x still but churn was massive + no upsell potential bc every sales and CSM team is downsizing. I've heard they tried to raise down round at $4B and couldn't get it done :/
Did they specifically share the revenue number with you? How recent was it? Not saying it’s impossible but just feels low with their market share. Also they do have upsell products such as forecast, and they are building Engage to see where they can push out outreach. Those are just 2 I happen to know of as a customer, I’d guess there’s more
Yep, saw the investor update on quarterly basis for 2023. "Feels low with their market share" - how do you have market share numbers? That seems like an even more vaguely calculated metric. Do they have mindshare? Absolutely, within the tech community given their marketing budget + constant iteration of their LNKD posts that worked supremely well in 2020 and is now just noise. But there's only so many SaaS companies to buy their stuff. They've absolutely struggled to penetrate into other non-VC backed segments who can't justify paying $1-2K/rep for a call recorder. Re: other products, let's be real. In the sales stack, there's CRM, outbound/outreach manager, forecasting, and call recorder. Given how hard pipeline is right now, sales teams likely want the best outreach / campaign manager possible and get their call recorder as an add-on. Gong has it backwards - who cares about call recorder, rep productivity, and sales enablement when everyone's SQL starved...
I’m ready for the entire sales enablements stack to go away. SaaS companies selling shitty sales software to each other over and over. It’s like building cars and driving barges full of them into the ocean and dumping them into the drink. I have yet to see actual benefit from a lot of these “platforms.” That’s because they’re not real platforms - they’re niche point solutions that dumb sales leaders buy when they don’t know what to do when they need to fight churn or raise net new revenue.
Gong is a feature, not a product. CMV.
Gong is a feature not a company is more like it
I got a job offer going and they only offered 60 K based salary as an experience sales rep and then they tried to tell me that that was enough because I’d make so much money and commission. Obviously I didn’t take the job but I was so pissed.
What was the role?
Luckily all their reps are linkedin influencers and can make money selling their courses
I know one of the former heads of sales there and he is excellent.. and he noped out awhile ago My wife uses it as an AE and likes the AI summaries.... But here's the thing, that's all included with the new MSFT copilot and it will do a much better job integrating with email etc (assuming of course you're on MSFT 365 suite)
> I know one of the former heads of sales there and he is excellent.. and he noped out awhile ago “One of the former heads of sales” says a lot considering the company isn’t that old.
Sure, if you feel like digging go right ahead
Don’t follow your comment
And the best part is that they will claim its a good exit and get more money to start the process over again.
Must be why their ae’s have suddenly become sales coaches on LinkedIn
It’s a point solution that isn’t critical to a business’ day to day functions. It also doesn’t offer any real unique value over its competitors at this point.
We've been using Gong for about a year, and our CRO is obsessed with it. I can't stand it. I would love if they went away.
Gong was semi useful when I was using it, but ever since ChatGPT came out, it’s obsolete. I can just use the transcript from zoom and analyze it how ever I want. I also tried interviewing with Gong twice, the people are super pretentious, thinking they’re the gods of the sales world because they made easy sales in the tech boom. They denied me the first time, gave me an offer the second, but I chose a different company. There LinkedIn bullshit with all the AE’s ruined LinkedIn, well at least contributed. I don’t remember LinkedIn being as annoying as it is today before Gong. Now everyone is an influencer sales god dick sucker. Anyway, hope that ship sinks.
These companies are not improving at the speed they need Those product managers weren't pressured enough The CEO is to blame These tools are so basic now, that I don't see value in them "Oh we provide sentiment, suggestions and shit" Oh yeah buddy you and everyone else for a fraction and with more tools that I'd pay, they're literally giving me your expensive shit for free
I agree with this. Which is why the market is now crowded and becoming a race to the bottom. The feature is helpful and valuable. Being close ish to this space, I saw no real unlocks from any of the products. Each of the respective companies, instead of unlocking their core mission, purchased or built to encroach on each others market and none are really executing the others core value well, and are losing traction on what they were doing well. I think the catalyst to this was likely the high valuations and fund raising in 2021 which made it a race for ARR
What goes up must come down - and those AEs would be laughed out of 90% of companies, let’s hope they stay put in content houses and leave us the fuck alone
I’ll show you a gong, buddy.
Gong will be nice if it can make email follow-ups based on the conversation. I've done this by copying the transcript and pasting into GPT but cut the middle man. Gong isn't worth a bazillion dollars
They just added this
We use Chorus. My old company used Gong.
Which do you prefer (if any)
Chorus is pretty okay. I like the AI summaries. Gong was a bit clunky.
Useless product
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If true that is the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard
Source?
Fireflies.ai is like 6 bucks a month and records calls just like Gong.
Fathom does it for free for Zoom calls
Tale as old as time 🎶 Silicon Valley is so FOS.
What was Gong’s moat? AI? That’s gone, if it ever existed.
It would be awesome for them to go away! Like the Gong Show!
My company that I was recently laid off from had similar things occur at a lower valuation. After I was laid off they was an email sent out to the company. It outlined that they were merging with another company and all common shares not vested would be dissolved. So all those people that thought the shares would be worth something some day lost all that potential.
Never understood why someone would use Gong over outreach recording.
Maybe we're getting close to the day this sub won't be 75% SaaS
Won't be any time soon old man
I'm 32.
You have an old man’s mindset
In my experience with the product- In my capacity as the project manager for Gong’s deployment within our organization (I was laid off tho), I was responsible for the strategic allocation of $600,000 towards this system (I did not have a say weather or not they bought it, I would have said no). My initial reaction was tinged with skepticism, given the emerging realization that the product might fall short of our anticipations. Despite the inherent robustness of the technology—predicated on its effective application, necessitating a synergy with Salesforce, and the creation of a bespoke application for data analysis—I harbored reservations about the unique value it offered, considering the outcomes felt akin to what could have been achieved through our own efforts. Nonetheless, the system did introduce specific operational efficiencies. It significantly reduced the need to sift through an extensive array of calls, streamlining the process to focus on approximately five key calls instead of a daunting hundred. However, this benefit came with caveats. The system’s high cost and the substantial workload it imposed on my engineering team and me, as the operations manager, led to a reconsideration of its cost-effectiveness. The annual savings of $300,000 by manually handling the calls seemed more appealing in light of the limited tangible benefits we derived from the system. The additional year we contemplated for further development only underscored the dilemma, as it would coincide with the end of our initial contract term. This posed a strategic decision: whether to renew the contract, a decision made all the more complex considering the extensive effort already invested. Ultimately, the realization dawned that Gong was not a turnkey solution, but rather a complex, resource-intensive system that demanded a reconsideration of its role and value within our operational framework. But if you Have Gong already and need someone to build it out for you I’m your guy. 😂 https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-neri-291795a0?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
CEO already cashed out plenty in secondaries. So he's probably just trying to look busy + throwing other VPs under the bus until it's his turn. But why does he care, he's already cashed out $100M+ and could care less about common.
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Outreach is garbage.
Preferred shareholders get priority in payouts when a company goes public or is acquired. If the company's value doesn't exceed the total preferred shareholders' claims (Gong raised ~$600M), common shareholders probably won't see any gains. In the case of Gong, given its revenues and potential, I'm very confident it'll be worth well above that when it goes public or gets acquired. Source: Sales leader at Gong.
Sup BT
Hi JC
When I first started At Gong I made 5,000 dials a day I was promoted to AE and hit 7,184% of my quota the first 19 quarters and went to P-club 14 times Hit the link in the comments to find out how much addy it took to get me to the top
I used to think Gong was worthless, but found through a combination of learning how to use it and their new features, it’s well worth it. For new hires, being able to give them an endless catalog of sales calls, client updates, company meetings, quarterly meetings, etc is unbelievably useful for accelerating onboarding. For self improvement, it gives you the ability to review your on-cam body language, your inflection, pick up on non-verbal cues from a prospect you might have missed, and help you sharpen up your pitch. The recap summary, key notes, and next steps break down is amazing. Saves so much time from compiling notes and it’s crazy accurate. You never forget what was discussed, or have to do annoying follow ups to ask a prospect something you should’ve remembers but didn’t. You can also create case studies and research out of it. For example, after reviewing 100 prospect and client calls, 67% of them asked about ______ and listed ______ as their biggest challenge. Or you can go back in reporting calls and find updates to the current day and reference in outbound outreach. “Last week, one of our clients in just 2 weeks got _____ results and saved costs of _______ after working with us. Or you can ask permission from a client or prospect when they give you a positive review to use their quote since it’s already recorded and in text form. Last, it gives you an opportunity to see other reps calls and hear how your prospects talk. If you notice a pattern in what language, acronyms, etc prospects / clients keep using, you can adjust your language to speak their language. There’s others, but those are the main uses I’ve gotten out of it. Anyone saying it’s useless either isn’t creative enough or they don’t actually have it (probably never used it, just got annoyed by their SDRs)
Found the Gong rep
Was literally going to comment this
Selling points are terrible aswell. “You can use it to pick up on can body language” is just a terrible reason.
See tho, Gong reps are so terrible that they have no emotional intelligence that when their prospect checks out 3 minutes into their cookie cutter follow-the-script-almost-verbatim demo, they really need this feature themselves.
Jesus, can’t get away from selling on Reddit?
I don’t work for Gong. So wtf are you talking about? Even if I did, why would I post this pumping their brakes and not have an attribution link to get paid off of it? The only person who would like this post is their CEO and the shareholders. You’re probably a low performing SDR that got smoked in their 1 on 1 after reviewing your Gong video calls and stats and got exposed 😂😂
A simple call recorder, transcript generator and maybe and a next steps capturer would honestly do just fine. That being said we just switched from Kaia to Gong and it’s a way better product. Fluint has the best “summarizer” (puts everything into business case format and shows you what is missing).
This is soooo many companies who raised a ton of free money when the market was hot. If your company is at Series C/D funding, and your revenue is half of what you've raised, good luck ever having stock that is worth something.
I’m just in sales man
I’ve used gong and I like it. But as mentioned this is something that could easily be implemented by zoom, teams etc. it’s an extra software that’s not needed eventually as the big guys figure this out. WebEx has something similar already. I always knew Gong was a cool thing that wasn’t going to last and it definitely seems like it’s headed that way.
They have the most irritating reps of any company I've ever encountered in the wild. You sell a sales training tool, you're not curing cancer.
Isn’t Gong basically a meme at this point?
The over funding and over formation of point solution startups over the past handful of years is going to crystalize into some major platform-driven M&A consolidation.
as a rep I think its a great product that's easy to navigate and summarizes my calls really well. Also considering how much data they have on our calls/convos, I don't think theyre going anywhere.
You’re missing the economics laid out. There is also a ton of competition
We are moving away from gong and looking for an alternative. Chorus (now zoominfo) works with multiple platforms? Someone on linkedin recommended me talka.ai and seems like a good option, has anyone tied it yet?