Gong Keynote: Go Beyond - Unlock Your Revenue Potential

Danny Wasserman: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Celebrate Beyond.

Audience: Whoo inaudible.

Danny Wasserman: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we originally had plans for a rockstar headliner to kick this thing into high gear, and in true rockstar fashion, he's running a little late. So as we say, the show must go on, and I'm thinking, is today the day that I get to live out my third grade fantasy of hitting that drum set in front of a live audience? Is this it? No one wants to see that. Nobody. So rather than desecrating that poor instrument, we'll come back to our drum solo finale later on today. But in the meantime, by way of introduction, wanted to introduce myself. I'm Danny Wasserman and I work on Gong's go- to- market enablement team. I'll be your host and MC throughout today. And to kick things off, I want to tell you a personal story. Let's rewind the clock. Let's go to April 11th, 1999. That fateful Sunday, I was 11 years old and I had just seen the matinee of the Matrix. Any Neo fans out there. Leaving that screening, this 11- year- old brain exploded. I'm sure we can all relate to those moments in life where you can't unsee something, you can't unhear or forget something. Go figure that. That movie depicts a seminal dilemma where Neo taking the red pill all of a sudden experiences a brand new paradigm of truth. Well, in my own career, 20 years after seeing that matinee, I too was brought to my senses. Seeing what Gong and a piece of technology could do to unlock reality has forever changed the course of how I operate in the world of business today. So at Celebrate today, it gives Gong tremendous pleasure to bring you the deepest bench of experts who are using reality to unlock their full revenue potential. Over the course of today, you're going to hear from Gong's president. You're going to hear from Gong's CEO. You're going to hear from Gong's Visioneers, those with the vision to not just unlock reality for themselves and their careers, but for their customers and their companies as well. In today's agenda, we have a fellow truth crusader in the house. The nerd in me is losing it because yes, we have podcast host, Extraordinaire, Guy Raz here, and you're going to hear from him this afternoon. We're then as I mentioned before, going to cap it all off with an actual living, breathing rockstar. Rolling Stone pegs this performer as one of the best drummers, not of 2022, not of the last decade, but one of the top 100 drummers of all time. So stay tuned for that. You're going to hear all throughout today about exciting announcement in Gong's technological innovation, ways that we are helping you improve your productivity, win more in sales, and yes, transform the ways you do business. A core operating principle that we have at Gong is act now. And if we're going to live up to that belief, we can't just take small modest steps in innovation. No. We are taking quantum leaps in how our technology pushes the envelope in allowing you and your teams to do more with less. So with four hours of edge of your seat content, strap yourselves in from whether you're in San Francisco or tuning in from around the world because here we go.

Speaker 2: Please welcome to the stage, Kelly Breslin Wright, COO, and President of Gong.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Hello, everyone. It's so good to see you here and welcome to Celebrate. Thank you all for joining. We have nearly a 6, 000 people scheduled to tune in from here in the room and from all across the globe. Today's theme of celebrate is beyond because we are all trying to constantly move beyond, increase our team's productivity beyond what we're already achieving, improve results beyond what we're already doing and push beyond to unlock even further potential. As we know this current climate that we're in right now, it's tough. It's a bit frantic and scary, can even be anxiety producing for our reps, for our teams, and for our entire go- to- market. There's budget cuts, layoffs, spending freezes. We're hearing about slowing top of funnel, longer sales cycles, increased churn and downgrade, and the list goes on and on. It's hard and that means that our results are suffering. In fact, according to a recent Bravado survey of 275,000 sales pros inaudible found 63% of reps missed quota in Q3. What that means is that only a third of our reps are on plan. Definitely not fun. So what are we doing? We're all focused on doing anything possible to help make our teams more successful. Yes, we're in a bad economic cycle and we've seen these cycles before. I mean, there's been many of them. The good news, the silver lining is that what goes down eventually most of the time does come back up. And this is true, especially for the best companies. What we have seen is in downturns is often when the best companies get so much better. Many of us have experienced these downturns before. I mean, I know myself, I've been through many of these cycles. I remember 2009 as feeling most similar as what we're in today. In 2009, I was running sales at Tableau and our reps and our teams, they were worried about the macro environment. They were stressed out by seeing the news and then watching the tumultuous stock mark that was going down and back up, but mostly down, down, down. But just like today, we realized back then, unfortunately we couldn't control the economy. So what do we do? We focused on what we could control. That was really all that we could do. So that's what we did. We focused on improving our own internal operations, on engaging more deeply with our customers, on better understanding our own data, and most importantly, a very deep inward look of figuring out ways that we could make our teams and our people more successful. The companies that best navigate these headwinds, those that pivot and adjust, those who dig deep to control what they can control. And we're seeing these words all the time these days, those that are really able to do more with less. These are the companies that are going to be even stronger when we come out on the other side. So how can we do this? Well, we need to empower our people and our teams to do more. And technology can help. Data can help. AI can help. The right technology can help us all to be more successful, can help our people and teams to win more, can help us navigate these tough times and of course, what we're all trying to do to help us achieve our sales goals. And I'm not talking about those tiny baby steps that just get incremental small results. No, that's not going to work for us now. I'm talking about true transformation, transformation that makes our sales teams way better. Transformation that enables us to better serve our customers and transformation that allows us to maximize every single revenue opportunity. Our sales tech should be helping us transform the way we sell, should be helping us to better understand what is really happening with our customers and in our pipeline. It should help us to up level our teams. It should help us to better serve our customers and should help us to drive more sales. So think about this. If your sales tech is not doing this, if it isn't delivering meaningful, measurable value, well then you are missing out big time. This is what our focus is here at Gong. This is what we're trying to do to unlock your revenue potential. And the Gong Reality platform has three main pillars that help us do this. Number one, reality- based. Companies of course want to be data- driven. They all do, but it's hard to collect data to wrangle and analyze all of that data and it's very manual and labor intensive too. And so what happens because it is so hard to get that data and understand the data, this leads people to instead of making data- driven decisions, to base their decisions off of opinions, instead of off of facts. Gong instead is reality- based. Gong collects all of your customer interactions, calls, web demos, emails, and more to give you a much more comprehensive and unified view of what is truly happening in your customer conversations. Number two, autonomous. Gong autonomously captures all of your customer interactions. And then AI, this robust AI helps you to autonomously diagnose and understand what's going on. And then even better than that, on the new arena of where we're going with tech, the AI helps to provide guidance with actionable insights on what you should do next. Number three, aligned. When people operate with the central view of reality with one shared voice of the customer, this improves the communication, it improves collaboration, and it makes us more aligned. Reality- based, autonomous, aligned, this is Gong. These fundamental pillars are part of the reason why over 3500 customers all around the globe are looking to Gong to help transform their go- to- market. One example of this Virgin Pulse. Virgin Pulse reps who are using Gong delivered 30% more revenue than those reps who were not. And what they did on top of that is they quadrupled their top of funnel, conversions. So do you want to triple revenue for all of your sales reps? Think about how that can help you and your teams to achieve more. And another customer inaudible is using our new economic pulse tracker to better understand how this current macro environment is impacting prospects and customers, helping them to identify risks that are happening much earlier. Gong is enabling Jess and her team to identify at risk deals early, providing ample time for her team to course correct before it's too late. The cool part about Gong though is that we collect all of this data, so much data and this data actually shows us what is happening when sellers leverage Gong versus when they do not. And when they're using Gong to have a better understanding of their customer's wants and needs. This data is quite compelling. The data shows, it shows that reps who use Gong are more successful than those who do not. It's literally that simple. In fact, in a study across 2, 519 companies examining well over a million distinct opportunities, the data shows that reps using Gong have a 23% higher win rate. Gong also helps accelerate deals, and we all know deals are getting much longer cycles these days. We are having more approvals and just the process is lengthening. So in a separate study of over 4, 000 individuals proved that reps using Gong have a 14% shorter deal cycle. We here at Gong are focused on making you successful, on helping you and your teams unlock your full potential. Our number one operating principle here at Gong is create raving fans. We love our customers. Our customers are, what? It's the reason we're here. We're here because of all of you. You've given us a net promoter score of 67, which is pretty fun because that's even higher than the iPhone. I though I love this because in your own words, you tell us that this score, this NPS score, it's not just because Gong helps you to improve your teams and close more deals. No. You tell us that Gong also helps you personally, helps you to improve, helps you to achieve better results, helps you to be more efficient. The cool part though is you're telling us that Gong also gives you valuable time back to spend on those most important areas which are most critical to you. Being part of this success and being able to do this, this is what fuels us. Knowing how Gong creates meaningful impact and value for you personally and on this personal level, this really inspires us. I know for me it really inspires me, but why hear this from me? It is much more impactful to hear from one of our customers directly. So here we go. And Maggie, take it away.

Maggie Hott: I'm Maggie Hott. I am a wrangler of chaos. What that means is I am director of sales at Web Flow. I'm also a mom to two little amazing girls, a six- month- old and a two- and- a- half year old. I'm a wife to a great partner Connor. We live here in San Francisco. So my life is really all over the place. Not any one day looks the exact same. What gets me up in the morning is to be able to go to work and be proud of what I'm doing and the role model that I'm becoming for my daughters. Okay-

Speaker 6: I'm a good movie.

Maggie Hott: And what that means is having a great career, but also being there for those special moments, for her very first time walking, for her very first time running, for her first words. And it's so important now more than ever before, to have tools and technologies that work for me and work within my schedule. Gong helps me achieve work- life balance because I no longer have to be physically there for every single customer call or every single customer deal. Every call that I listen to is via the Gong Mobile app. That's great. I was able to listen to one of his calls too. Completely agree with your assessment there. I think he does a great job... But listening to calls is just the beginning. So if you go into points of interest in Gong and you do the questions asked by Webflow, you can actually see where this is happening. Gong allows us to go so much deeper to give our reps really the deep coaching that they need. We're able to look at scorecards, we're able to have trackers proactively surface insights to us. Gong has impacted our product roadmap for FY 24. We were able to see all of these different trends that enterprise customers were asking for. Things like multi- language, things like enhanced CMS, things like branching. And because we were able to use Gong to quantify that impact that if we are able to deliver on this feature, we can approximate X many millions of dollars of revenue will be brought in the door. So what we've been doing is adding in all of these different calls, if there's any in particular for certain execs like maybe our VP of product where she cares a lot about things like multi- language, I will actually tag her directly in that call to listen to it. When there wasn't Gong, they would've had to join the calls, but now Yvonne commutes an hour each way into the office, so he has that dedicated time on his drive to listen to these different customer calls. Gong is a platform that both pushes and pulls coaching and insights to me and to my teams. And you're doing an incredible job with that. Your average question rate... Gong is a platform that allows me to get deep in the weeds while also still being able to articulate strategy and articulate customer asks to my executives and to our board of investors. Working with Gong has allowed me as a second line leader overseeing four different orgs. It allows me to be able to get close to the deals and to know what our customers are asking for. So that way I can take it and I can translate that to our broader exec team as we think about our strategy for the next one, three and five years. That's how I'm able to let tools and technology work within my life and being able to live in this remote environment now lets me be closer as a mother, closer as a working parent and also really accelerate my success and ways I've never been able to before.

Kelly Breslin Wright: It's inspiring, huh? Wow. What's the clapping? We actually have Maggie here in the room with us today, so thank you Maggie. That is inspiring, huh? I mean, I love that video because it embodies what Gong is really all about. We unlock reality to help people and companies reach their full potential. And spoiler alert, the Gong reality platform is becoming even more powerful for people like Maggie, for all of you and for all of our customers. Here to tell you more, please welcome up the one and only Gong co- founder and CEO, Amit Bendov.

Amit Bendov: Thank you, Kelly. Welcome, everybody. How's everybody doing?

Audience: inaudible.

Amit Bendov: Good.

Audience: Yeah.

Amit Bendov: And those in the chat online, I'm not seeing, but here we have people from Austria, from Spain, from Venezuela, from Turkey. Thank you all for joining us. We have some amazing development to announce today that I'm super excited about. We started the company based on an idea that is simple to explain, hard to execute. Unlock reality from customer interactions and then use AI to translate it into actions and insights that'll help you perform better. That was the idea and that was the reality platform. We have started with helping you up level your people with better coaching. That was the first application. It was a reality- based application. So before that you didn't know what was going on. You had to rely on reps. Now it's autonomous and it's helped you create better people. Second, we introduce deals, help you execute your deals a lot faster and a lot smoother. If something goes wrong, you know about it in real time. In June, we introduced Gong Forecast, which is the world's first reality- based forecasting solution. Unlike traditional solution that are just based on what the reps and what the managers are calling, which is okay, Forecast also provides the custom reality, what customers are saying. It's the first reality- based forecasting. And today, I'm excited that we'll be introducing a lot of big developments. Times are tough. Gong is actually doubling and triple inaudible engineering and expect a lot more from the Gong team. So now let's see what is Beyond. We're happy that 3, 500 companies are using Gong today. They all switch to reality- based revenue management. That's a huge number and I'd like to thank you all for supporting us, for joining the revolution and for helping educate other companies. A couple of weeks ago we've launched Visioneers. Visioneers is a community website where you can exchange ideas and learn from other people that are reality advocates, 25, 000 users had joined within a few weeks. I would encourage you all to join today at visioneer. gong. io. You can contribute, you can learn, and you can exchange ideas with the like- minded people. Now let's look at what is Beyond. I'm excited that we're helping in four areas in times like this to help you do more with less, more reality, more wins, more predictability, more pipeline, all with less effort, less cost. Let's see how we can do all of that. So we'll start with more reality. A few weeks ago we've launched Smart Trackers. Now what are Smart Trackers? Smart Trackers are the better way to understand the reality, what is being said on a conversation. Rather than rely on like a specific keywords, they actually understand the meaning of the conversation. It's a revolutionary technology. It doesn't exist not only in this space, like in the world, it requires special hardware. It's a big engineering problem. Let's look at a little example. Suppose that you're using Gong for your deals execution, which I hope so. And you want to be alerted every time that a customer is speaking about delays in a deal. That's kind of important, right, especially in times like this when sales cycles are longer. So traditionally you'd set up special alerts or trackers for the word delay, right? Now here is the challenge. If you set a tracker for the word delay, it'll also intercept things like, " oops, my flight was delayed this weekend. It ruined my entire vacation." It'll trap stuff like, " apologies for the delay. Zoom made me update. That's why I joined the call late." And it catches a lot of stuff that you're not interested in. It also catch stuff like, " this project is super important to us. My CFO said that we're not going to delay." All those things are the pitfalls of verbatim tracking of conversations, right? What we want is something that actually understands meaning, not literal, but actually what do we mean? And this is exactly what Smart Trackers are doing. They're three times more accurate than keywords. It's only available at Gong. It's a revolutionary technology. It makes everything better. Let's look at some of the applications because this may sound like pretty cool technology, but me, like why should I care, right? Here's why we should all care. It changes everything. Your pipeline reviews, now you know if there are objections, delay, churn, risk, all of that about it with a three times more precision. Your forecast are more accurate because it understands not just what people are calling but what customers are saying a lot better. Alerts, less noise, more signal. Reporting and analytics. If you want to understand like competitive mentions or objective in all your conversations with keywords, it's kind of a good indicator. Smart Trackers three times more accurate. Negative sentiment among our customers. I'm sure we're all getting some of that these days, right? No.

Audience: Yes.

Amit Bendov: Yes, yes. All right. Is it important to know about it, like early on if a customer is as likely to churn. Smart Tracker make everything better. Kind of like bacon or if you're vegan ketchup, right? So that's available. We launch it a few weeks ago. They're now about 500 companies using it. Their results are insane. It's magical. This is just one quote. Customers are saying, " oh, it's like a dream come true." It is available to you. So activate it, contact your customer success manager, try it out. It's unbelievable. So now that we have the capability to understand reality three times better, let's see how it makes everything better across all areas that we have discussed. First, how we can win more deals. So one way to think about a deal or an opportunity or an account is as a project, right? It involves numerous steps, dozens and multiple people on both ends, the customers and our sides. That's like one big project. And if I'm a salesperson, I'm probably managing at any given time 20 to 30 projects in parallel. That's a tall order. My inbox is overloaded. We're overwhelmed by what's going on. How hard is it to drop the ball on a project, which happens to be a deal? Well, turns out that it's not hard. Actually, it's like very easy. It's a miracle that we get stuff done. The data from Gong Labs, we actually measured how much of that is happening? 45% of reps, so one in two drops the ball on at least one critical activity per week. Now, it's not hard to imagine what that does to win rates. Now here's another example. So let's say you're having a conversation with a customer. It could be a discovery or negotiation call and you want to send a follow up email, like how soon do we want to get the email out, the thank you note?

Audience: inaudible.

Amit Bendov: Yeah, the best practice to do it like right away or within an hour, at least within the same day, right? Because that tempo actually sends them, signal to the customer. If you respond quickly, odds are they'll respond quickly. You respond is delayed, they'll take their time. So this inaudible the deal. It turns out that 50% of follow up email, call follow up, those thank you notes with next steps and summary are not sent within 48 hours. One in two of our deals were not doing what is like the best practices to drive the deals faster. Again, it's not surprising considering how much is going on, especially people on back- to- back calls and they spend a lot of time. The numbers from inaudible recent numbers shows that as much as 77% of the rep's time is spent on non- selling activity, this is the administrative chores. It's like anything from 101 meetings. inaudible enablement, it's training, it's sifting through lists, cleaning the data, updating records, updating the forecast, following up, scheduling, all of that. There are other numbers that are saying like 50%, 60%, it doesn't matter, it's a lot, right? So the reason that we're not following up on time that we're dropping the ball on critical activities is not because the reps don't know. I mean it's not rocket science. You need to follow up quickly. And it's not because they don't want to. They know that they should and they want to. It helps them. They're just busy. Assist is an AI solution that solves that problem. Think of it as a personal assistant for reps. It uses AI to track exactly what's going on in each and every deal and don't drop anything. It'll come up with a recommendation. It makes super easy to follow up. We announced Assist last May and I'm excited that today the beta is available. So if you want to get on a wait list, speak with your account manager, customer success manager at Gong. It's a revolutionary product and the responses so far has been unbelievable. It makes it so much easier to keep deals on track and it makes it so much harder to drop the ball on anything. All of that inaudible the fraction of the effort, it'll compose your thank you note for you. If you had a call, Gong already knows what was said on a call. So draft an email for you. Here's like who you should send an email. Thank you so much, Mr. so and so. Really enjoy the conversation. Here are the three action items that you discussed. Here are the pain points. Here's the next step. How does next Monday work for you? The rep can just review it, click send, maybe do a couple edits, done. Super easy. Email inspiration. If someone is ghosting you, it'll suggest some emails or templates or what other reps are using to win more deals. Task reminders. If you've sent an email and haven't heard back and it's been a couple days, it's very easy to lose that, Assist will remind you and actually create a nudge email for you. It'll confirm meeting. If you have a meeting in a couple days with the customers and they have not confirmed the meeting, it'll create a confirmation email for you, perhaps a reschedule email. All of that's like so much easier. You can update your CRM from Gong. If you want to change the amount or close it all of that, just click one button, it's done. Update your forecast. Move from commit to a pipeline or best case. Capture the activities. It saves a ton of time in 101 meetings because we don't need to discuss exactly who said what. It's all there. So you can win a lot more deals for a fraction of the effort. Our goal is that half of the time or 75% of the rep's time that is spent on chores, our goal is to slash it by half or ultimately altogether. Think of it, AI could do work that is a lot more efficient than what we're paying our people to do. This is just an example, we're going to see a demo in a few minutes, but you can see inaudible make super easy. inaudible should follow up with, there are no next meetings. So everything is super clear and super easy. This is for the account managers and managers also have access to their people's time, right? So you can see exactly click person by person and see what's on their plate right now. So you don't need to waste time in your one- on- one meeting. They're a lot more productive and efficient. So now that we have more reality, more deals, let's talk about how we can become more predictable. In June, we've announced Forecast, the world's first reality- based forecasting. I'm excited to update that within a 100 days, more than a 100 companies have joined the reality- based forecasting revolution. That's incredible and counting and the results are dramatic. Our customers report as much as 93% more accurate forecasting. Now what's the secret? The secret is simple. It's reality, right? It's not just based on what we think, especially in times like this, it's very hard to use trending from previous same quarter, like a couple years ago times were different. But if you use reality, you understand exactly what's happening right now in precision. And the best part, it's a lot easier to use. 66% of time saved, a lot easier, just quick updates. You see the reality. You don't need to go between different systems, a lot easier to use and there's more. Traditionally, it took two to three months to implement a forecasting solution with all the legacy systems. Now that means that if you bought something for a 12 months period, about 25% goes on implementation, right, you're not getting any value. Do you know how much time it takes to get forecasts up and running? Three hours. It's instant. It's 45 minutes for some configuration, another 45 minutes for training and education and let's say another hour for coffee or something. This is it. You're up and running. It's so easy. People don't believe. We said actually there's no implementation. It's just activation. You turn it on and you could get immediate value, especially in time like this you could be a lot more accurate for less, but we're just getting warmed up. This was kind of a still a young product. It's only a few months old and a 100 customers using, we're adding more. So we heard you what a lot of our customers said, " we want more analytics and more reporting." Well, we're getting more analytics and more reporting. It's available right now. So you can slice and dice your pipeline and forecast from all different direction, that's available in the upcoming weeks and it's already in beta. More configurability. And again, that kind of is hard to, that word may mean a lot of things, but here is what it does mean, right? We started with a very simple use case mostly for companies like a single line of products, a single line of business. But we know that many of you have more complex configurations, that they have multiple products and multiple SKUs and multiple lines of business that's inaudible. So you could tailor for more complex scenarios. And last but not least, HubSpot users, and we have 100s. We love you all. And the good news is now you have forecast for HubSpot as well until I worked with Salesforce rating like ultimately like every CRM out there. So this is available today. Please check with your Gong team. So now that we have more reality, more wins, more predictability, what else do we need? So what sales people like always say we need more of?

Audience: Pipeline.

Amit Bendov: Pipeline, right? Who doesn't want more pipeline? Well, I'm excited that we're helping with more pipeline. So first in May we announced partnership with two companies that provide contacts with Apollo and Cognizant and it's a special promotional pricing for Gong users. I'm excited that today we're adding a third option. Lead IQ is a fantastic vendor that our customers report is the easiest thing to use and has a comparable contact quality. It is available to Gong user at a fraction of the cost of what you'd be paying for traditional platform. So as they say, check it out, a 15 minute call might be saving you a $ 1000 per rep per year. That's huge. If it works for you, it's unbelievable. So check it out, contact your account manager and you can get it from Gong. But we have more leads, what do we need to do now to create more pipeline? People in the chat, feel free to chime in. We hear you. We need to engage those contacts and which brings me to probably the biggest announcement from Gong this year. Traditionally, we were using traditional methods to engage customers. We'll create sequences and cadences and basically we're carpet bombing a list to get one or half a percent response rate, which is not a great customer experience and not the most effective methods. And we're going to be using Assist to solve that problem. But you might be saying, " Amit, hang on a second. Didn't we just say that Assist is for closing deals?" Yes, Assist is a personal assistant for closing deals and we've begun to work to extend assist to be a personal assistant to creating more opportunities for the reps. Basically you think inaudible AI based system to do your prospecting for you, that's a dream come true and will be available in the next few months. So Assist that's available right now is for winning deals and Assist inaudible coming in a few months is for creating more pipeline. This is the world's first reality- based engagement. We spoke about reality- based coaching, we spoke about reality- based forecasting, we spoke about reality- based execution and today I'm excited to announce we're revolutionizing the world companies engage their customer. So at the crux of the system inaudible doing some only pretty fine workflows. I mean we're going to have some of those as well. Assist actually understands your emails, your calls, your LinkedIn messages, your texting, basically everything that touches the customer. It'll craft the precision approach to every prospect, the right message at the right time to the right person and does it automatically. It's a lot easier to use and way smarter. This is just a sneak preview. If you want to join the beta program or the exact partnership you're invited. There's still a way to enjoy the product today, but it'll dramatically change the way that you're engaging your customer. It create more pipeline at a fraction of the effort and it's a lot easier to implement. We saw that with forecasting implementation moved from three months to three hours. We expect the same thing with Assist, a lot easier than traditional solutions. So to summarize, we're going big to deliver more value, all based on the reality revolution with coaching, upleveling your people, executing your deals better, more predictable forecasting in these unpredictable times, and a personal assistant for closing deals and for creating more opportunities and more pipeline, all of that without anybody having to lift a finger. So you're doing a lot more for less and all under one platform. Thank you all so much for joining us. Enjoy the rest of the party. I hope we get some of the drumming going on. If not, I'm going to play the drums for y'all. And until then, I'm super excited to invite our very own Bryan Fong to show Assist in action. Bryan, take it away.

Bryan Fong: Hey, everyone, excited to be here. It's tough to follow with all of those exciting announcements and I'm really excited to continue on talking about Assist with all of you today here in San Francisco and those that are joining us from afar. As Amit said earlier, we're excited to announce today that Gong Assist is available as a free beta to select customers. So you can go to gong. io/ assist to join the waiting list to determine when it's ready for you. I've talked to sales leaders all throughout this year and they've told me, " Bryan," they're like, " one of the top pains of my sales reps is that they're just bombarded by the number of mundane tasks that they need to complete each and every day. And it's taken away from their selling time." And I think it's inaudible Amit and Kelly said earlier, there's a lot happening and I empathize with them and a lot of you live here in San Francisco and those joining us virtually, we're all trying to do more with less. It's tough. So I can't even imagine what all the reps are going through right now. They're stretched so thin that they're not even doing the small things that can make like the biggest difference in their deals. And this includes following up with customers and prospects in a timely manner. Gong Labs data has shown, you can see here that in a third of survey deals, salespeople don't follow up with the prospect email within 24 hours. But when sales people do follow up within that timeframe, win rates jump by 14% and sales cycles shortened by 11%. So just pause, think about that for a second. And this climate that we're all in, as Kelly mentioned earlier, it's very unsettling right now. Anxiety driven, every percentage point matters and the fundamentals of even a follow up can make all the difference. And that's why I'm super pumped, got even more amped after me, talked through all that in the last few minutes, that we're giving your reps a live list of recommended actions so they can know how to move deals forward. They don't need to go into their email inbox and unbury themselves with the hundreds of emails that they need to figure out where to focus their time on. They don't need to go under their CRM with the dozens of opportunities in their patch and figure out where, what do I need to do? Where am I going to make the most impact? Reps now, they have a single place where they can get delivered, where they should prioritize their time and where do they need to help them when their deals and meet their quota. So rather than jumping between their CRM and other sales tools, they can go and Assist and update CRM fields and add them on demand. Again, productivity savings is incredible. Giving them the time back to get in front of customers when customers need to be really given attention the most, especially these days. And let's not forget that winning takes a team and I'm really excited about Assist giving sales managers visibility into the deals of their reps so they know how best to coach, how best to collaborate to move deals forward. And I'm also excited to say that in the future account team members like your sales engineers, like your solution, like your customer success managers and others on the account team can collaborate with reps all in one place. Pretty cool. But as Amit says, inaudible have him talk about it, me talk about it, let's go ahead and see assist in action.

Danny: Arjun starts his day by logging into Assist and reviewing the key action items that are prioritized for him. He sees that he is a nudge to follow up with Tamika, a buyer at one of his open opportunities, Wonka Industries. She still hasn't emailed him back to discuss pricing after a call they had a few days ago. He pulls up an email template recommended by Assist, tweaks it and hits send. Tamika replies back an hour later appreciating the follow up and making an additional request for information about Acme's post- sale services. While still on Assist, Arjun quickly assigns a task to Stella from his customer success team to follow up with Tamika. Stella gets notified and addresses the request. Arjun then needs to log Tamika's post- sale services request in Acme CRM. So he quickly updates the notes field and assists without jumping into the CRM. Arjun never been more confident that his deal closing actions are on track. Responding quickly has a direct impact on his win rates. So Arjun never wants to miss an opportunity to send an email response or involve a team member in answering a buyer's request. Thanks to Gong Assist. It's incredibly easy for him and sellers everywhere to address critical action items for their deals, win more and grow your revenue with support from Gong Assist.

Bryan Fong: You saw there, Danny, he does so much for this company. He's on the demo video being the MC, he's the co- host of our Reveal podcast. Just want to thank him for doing what he's doing to help our company and he's just an overall good guy. We even had dinner last week, so just love the guy. Thank you for doing what you're doing for Gong. But as you just saw with Danny, what you just watched is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with the Assist and as Amit mentioned earlier, what's to come, So there's a lot more heading your way, but I'm really excited now to bring on stage Katherine Hutter, an account executive from Hotjar who will be spending a few minutes with me talking about Assist. She's one of our very early, early users and would love to hear more about her experience. So Katherine, welcome to Celebrate and please join me on stage. Well, thanks Katherine for being here.

Katherine Hutter: Thanks for having me.

Bryan Fong: I think you're from Portland, enjoying the weather down here. We got some nice clear skies in San Francisco.

Katherine Hutter: Yeah, it's nice to have some sun for a change.

Bryan Fong: First off, for those that don't know more about Hotjar, we'd love to hear more about the company and also your role there.

Katherine Hutter: Yeah, so at Hotjar we help companies doing business online uncover opportunities for optimization and spot problems in their customer experience. And I've been with Hotjar for a little over a year now as an account executive.

Bryan Fong: That's great. And as a Hotjar, can you talk more about what your day- to- day looks like, especially in this current climate that we're in right now?

Katherine Hutter: Yeah, definitely. So a typical day involves usually anywhere between two to five sales calls and following up with some of the 80 to a 100 opportunities in my pipeline. I'm updating notes in Salesforce for new opportunities, sending post call follow up emails, and just trying to move things forward.

Bryan Fong: Got it. So you have all those things happening. How do you manage your day- to- day task list per se, even before you start using Assist? Love to hear more.

Katherine Hutter: Yeah, definitely. So my kind of typical day in the life, I usually manage my tasks through just a simple checklist. Have I prepared for my calls for the day? Have I updated my notes after the call and sent a recap email, not to mention all the different emails I need to respond to. And then follow up calls with existing opportunities as well. So with this approach, my day can feel pretty fragmented. When I have a bit of free time, I really need to know what to focus on and it's easy to get distracted, kind of lose attention, lose focus on the deals that are going to move the needle forward for me, so.

Bryan Fong: Got it. Wow, that's quite a bit, I guess on your plate, the 80 to 100, I can't even figure out the four or five things I need to do as a rep, especially right now. It must be tough. What tools did you use to get yourself straight with all those things going on and what you needed to prioritize?

Katherine Hutter: Yeah, so the tools I used before Gong Assist were mainly my email inbox and Salesforce and I was thinking about it and it's quite daunting to look at a full inbox or a whole list of opportunities that I need to follow up with for the day. It's not very inspiring. So sometimes I try to just focus in on one area, like cleaning out my whole inbox when I really should be following up with the highest value leads and opportunities first instead of the ones that are just blowing up my inbox, for example.

Bryan Fong: Got it. With all these things, and like you said, the fragmentation, the overwhelm, the daunting piece that you're feeling emotionally, it's okay with the audience here and the thousands worldwide. You can, just want to know were there times where certain critical action items fell through the cracks? Are you okay to share that with us or feel free to-

Katherine Hutter: Yeah, I mean we've all been there as sales reps and, you have an opportunity that starts out really great. There's a lot of energy, they're really excited to make a change, but then they lose momentum. I've had deals where I forgot to follow up maybe on time and they start to lose their kind of momentum essentially. Yeah.

Bryan Fong: Got it. Well luckily, as I mentioned earlier, Katherine, you're one of our early, early users of Assist, so I would love to hear how it's impacted you as a rep in your day-to-day and how you kind of prioritize those key action inaudible deals.

Katherine Hutter: Yeah, so assist acts as my to- do list for the day now. Yeah, I'm managing so many deals, I'm always trying to keep the momentum high. So Assist helps me manage and prioritize my day into more friendly and easy to complete tasks. It really just helps me make sure that things aren't slipping through the cracks and I can just really see clearly what needs to be done.

Bryan Fong: Got it. With that said, is there to-do list, do you have a favorite feature? I know Amit talked a few of those earlier, but I wanted to hear from you, what's been your highlight so far?

Katherine Hutter: Yeah, my favorite Assist feature is the Nudge Assist. It helps make sure my prospects aren't ghosting me, which is quite common in this current environment. So it's often those deals that don't pipe up and ask you questions that you should be the most worried about, but we tend to react fastest to the ones that are blowing up our inbox. So that Assist has been super helpful for me.

Bryan Fong: Got it. And you mentioned there current environment, Kelly earlier talked about the headwinds we're facing, it's crazy right now. Want to hear more with Assist in how you're really leveraging the solution in this environment to help you kind of navigate the situation?

Katherine Hutter: Yeah, with the current environment, we've seen some drop in the volume of calls we're getting as a team, there's just less to go around sometimes, so you really have to capitalize on the ones that are coming to you, make sure that you're keeping the momentum high, moving them through the sales cycle because the longer the process takes, the more likely they could drop out. So keeping them engaged and excited is key.

Bryan Fong: Got it. Well Katherine, thanks again for joining us here in San Francisco at Celebrate. We really appreciate it. Thanks for being a raven fan and as Katherine mentioned, she is one of the early users, all of you at home can go to gong. io/ assist to join the waiting list to join the beta as well, get your hands on it. And again, we're really excited to continue to roll this innovation that's going to help you game change your sales teams and reps. So thanks again, but up next I'd love to introduce Sheena Badani, our head of product marketing who has, I think I got the sneak peek earlier, some amazing platform updates that's going to help change your strategic initiative. So Sheena, please come to the stage and thanks again, have a good inaudible.

Sheena Badani: Yeah, nice. Nice work. Thanks so much Bryan and Katherine, it was really fantastic to get a deeper look at Assist and specifically hear how it's bringing you back some more time, Katherine, and as we all know, time is money and we can all use a little bit more of that. So our team at Gong is always thinking about how we can really minimize some of the obstacles that are standing in between you and your revenue goals. With Assist, we heard about how we're helping reps be more productive and automate some of their tasks. We've also just released new technology to help sales leaders really better understand their business and their markets at scale so they know exactly where to focus their efforts. I am so excited to introduce Smart Trackers today, which gives customers access to a trainable AI system. It's easy to use, it's fast, it's accurate. Now customers can track what's most important to their business at scale and really spend their time on what matters most with this customizable AI model. Unlike any other solution in the industry, Smart Trackers go beyond keyword recognition to really understand the context of what's been said either by their own employees or by their customers. They pick up on the variety of ways you can say the same thing and phrasing that you may not have thought of before. This makes Smart Trackers three times more accurate than traditional keyword tracking because customers can track what's uniquely interesting and relevant to their business. And this industry leading accuracy unlocks unlimited use cases for customers and I am excited to highlight a few of those for you here today. So first of all, customers can accurately track the rollout of strategic initiatives. So think about some of the big efforts that your team may have rolled out recently, like a new sales methodology, new messaging, the rollout of a new product or even pricing. Now we've also introduced initiatives so customers don't have to wait a full sales cycle to see how some of these big bets are landing. You can actually have a bird's eye view into adoption over time. And adoption helps give a lens into what's actually working, where it's working, and where there's an opportunity to either reinforce or course correct before it's too late. Next, you can even start correlating some of these big bets to win rate to really start to understand the ROI of these big investments for your organization. With win loss, you can see if your new messaging or your new products are actually leading to improved wins and higher win rate across the team. And you can even segment this by business unit, by team, by sales stage at and much, much more. And finally, you can use Smart Trackers to get ahead of emerging trends. So for example, we've been talking about the economy and how there's so much uncertainty going on today With Smart Trackers, you can start to get an understanding of where there are risks and concerns coming up from your customer base and phrasing that you may not have thought of before. Ultimately, this gives you a lens into what part of your pipeline may be at risks because your customers are concerned about where the economy is headed over time. These are just a few of the ways our customers are using Smart Trackers today to impact their business, to better understand their customers and their market at scale. Because the system is customizable and it's trainable for each and every customer. Really, there is so much that you can do with the technology. Now you're probably wondering how does this actually work? I've heard so much about it today. Let's watch a quick video to see how Smart Trackers works.

Speaker 12: Introducing Smart Trackers from Gong, your very own trainable AI model that helps you better understand your business at scale. Smart Trackers work even when people use different words to say the same thing. Not all buyers use the exact same language. Some ask for a discount by saying, " how can we get a better price?" Others say, " can you go any lower?" Smart trackers eliminate the need for exact keyword matches. Instead, with Gong, you can now train your own AI model to listen for the most important concepts your team and customers mention. No need to anticipate the best keywords. Smart Trackers pick up on all variations, making them up to three times more accurate than keyword tracking tools. So how does this all work? First, define the specific concept you want to track. Let's say discounts. You can also track how your team handles competitive objections or a new product or pricing that recently launched. Next, select a few sentence examples that best represent this concept. Then train your model. Gong will recommend related sentences and you simply tag each one as yes, no, or maybe. After a few rounds of training, your Smart Tracker is customized, tuned and ready to go. The best part, the entire process only takes around 30 minutes. All that's left is to publish your Smart Tracker and start capturing these crucial moments. Then act on that information to ensure your big bets pay off by seeing if your team actually talks about relevant initiatives with customers. See how initiatives affect your win rates to prove ROI and spot risks in your pipeline, Smart Trackers from Gong.

Sheena Badani: Smart Trackers are truly game changing. I can speak from personal experience within our own product marketing organization, how we're using Smart Trackers to really understand how our strategic narrative is landing and where we need to focus down on our efforts by team. So if you're interested in checking it out and enabling it for your organization, just please reach out to your CSM, they can help you get going today. With that, I am thrilled to welcome Kelly Wright back on stage to help talk a bit more about how we're taking Gong Collective to the next level.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Thank you, Sheena.

Sheena Badani: Thank you.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Thank you. Aren't Smart Trackers, they're so cool and they're incredibly awesome. I really encourage you all to check them out. Smart Trackers, they're a game changer because they're much more, as you saw than your everyday tracker. They provide greater understanding of your customer's reality and it puts it back in the right context. So as you can see, our reality platform continues to expand. We're interacting with our customers in many different ways across many different disparate systems. And we know you're using many disparate systems yourselves, whether it's phone or web conferencing, email, Smart Trackers that we talked about. But there's also content and applications that you're using in many other places. And to integrate all of these different and disparate systems, we have introduced and created the Gong Collective. Gong Collective is a fast growing ecosystem of technology partners. Gong Collective already has over a 100 different integrations. Some of these include Slack, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Salesforce, and the list goes on and on. There are a lot of integrations. These integrations create a much more comprehensive view of your customer's reality because it's not reality if you just have little pieces here and there, you need to see the whole holistic piece. And so Gong Collective will help you to unlock even more powerful insights. At the same time though, if you're pulling in all these different systems and all these systems have their own data, oh, this is creating a massive amount of data. Our customers, all of you have been asking us and telling us that you want to have more data and greater insights. In fact, this is one of your biggest and most common requests. You are craving more insights from Gong. That's why I'm so incredibly excited about this next announcement. Today, we are announcing a new strategic partnership and this partnership will help you to harness even more value from Gong. So drum roll please inaudible thank you. Today announcing Snowflake Plus Gong. Whoo- hoo. It's exciting. You'll be able to access even more Gong data directly from Snowflake and this will happen in a matter of minutes. Absolutely no code required. Yes, this will be super, super easy. With this integration, you can access Gong data directly in Snowflake. Plus even better, you're not limited to Gong data, you can integrate data from all of your different systems too. Then you can leverage whatever BI and analytics tool you want. Whatever you please. This is huge. So you want to hear more? Well of course you want to hear more because this is totally awesome. And so we have a special guest to share more. So please help me welcome to the stage Snowflake, Chief Revenue Officer, Chris Degnan. Come on up, Chris. Hey, inaudible. As you can tell, I am so, so excited. So our customers inaudible craving more data. And Chris, I love having you here with us today. We're super excited about this. As you could tell, I'm super excited. So what's your take from the Snowflake perspective?

Chris Degnan: Well, I think I met Amit, I want to say, two years ago in the middle of COVID, we kind of had a lunch in San Francisco and we talked about the concept of this partnership and really we're helping customers create their own data clouds. And the fact that to your point, you made the point of having, allowing our customers to get fast access to this data in Snowflake is incredibly helpful. It reduces costs and we are, Snowflake is customer zero. So selfishly I couldn't be more excited about the partnership.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Yay, yay. I think excitement all around. So Gong and Snowflake, we're working together in many different ways. Obviously, we're doing this integration that we just talked about, but we're not only partners because we're also mutual customers. I mean, in fact, Gong uses Snowflake to house all of our own data, blend with all of our various different systems so that we can do analysis ourself. And it's been completely transformative for us. Makes things go much faster, easier, can integrate much better. And you're using Gong at Snowflake too, right?

Chris Degnan: Yeah, so last year we brought in Gong and part of the sales process that we went through of evaluating it was our corporate sales team, which is world class corporate sales team, has world class productivity coming out of the team. They really were looking at ways to scale faster. And one of the things that we had issues around was, hey, managers are expensive and we want more reps and less managers. And so Marc Wendling, who runs our corporate sales team said-

Kelly Breslin Wright: He's so awesome.

Chris Degnan: Yeah, he's the best.

Kelly Breslin Wright: The best, if you don't know Marc, he's totally great. So thank you Marc.

Chris Degnan: Yes. And so Marc really came to me and said, " Chris, I can actually, with Gong, I can actually hire less managers with a higher rep to manage a ratio allowing us to scale faster." And because he keeps growing, his org keeps growing so fast, I keep giving him more head count. And so I think There's two things that we kind of looked at and said, number one, we can get better ratios on the rep to manager ratio and we can actually enable our sellers faster, increase productivity. And then also there's a huge push from a competitive landscape. But we used to be the up- and- comer, Snowflake did, and now everyone wants to kill us. So I can tell you all the different competitors and what they say. So it helps a lot. It's actually, Gong has transformed how we actually do competitive training. And then as we also look at it, we also have really junior people. A lot of the folks that are in our corporate sales team, they're coming straight out of an SDR organization, typically snowflakes right into corporate sales. And when they do that, we're not certain that they actually understand how to forecast. And I think that's where the combination of having Zoom data, connecting it or Gong Data, connecting it directly into Snowflake with Seismic, connecting it directly into Salesforce data and doing analytics against it, that allows us to actually have better enablement, better forecasting, all of this stuff that we're doing together. So I think, look, I couldn't be more excited about how we as a customer using it. And I know that you want us to use it more across the organization and inaudible-

Kelly Breslin Wright: And you want us to use Snowflake more. So hey, that's why it's a great partnership.

Chris Degnan: Yeah.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Well, I mean you talked Chris about increasing ratios and just driving more productivity and that's what so much of the theme of today's world is about just doing more with less. But I love the fact that you're also using Gong in this way to better understand your competition. Hopefully, you'll start using Smart Trackers inaudible to go and help you to do that inaudible-

Chris Degnan: Let's do that.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Yeah. Yeah. We can help you with that.

Chris Degnan: Perfect.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Yeah.

Chris Degnan: Perfect, perfect.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Well, so we already have a great group of design partners going back to the integration because we're just getting this started, but some customers are already using it and we've been collectively working with some of them. And we have some of the biggest names in telecom and fintech and cyber who have already started to unlock the power of greater insights and analytics by blending Gong and Snowflake together. And by the way, for all of you out there and for everyone that's joining us virtually around the world, if you want to get started with this, then contact your Gong CSM or your account exec and we can help to get you started in this first phase. But Chris, I know that you've also been chatting with some of the customers and the design partners and I'm curious what you are hearing and what they're saying about the power of this integration.

Chris Degnan: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, like I said earlier is we challenge our data team to be customer zero. So Sunny Bedi, our CIO and chief data officer and Shweta, who is our VP of applications, I think they've partnered really well with you guys to help design this product. And I think that-

Kelly Breslin Wright: Oh, it's been a great partnership-

Chris Degnan: And I think that it starts with Austin and I think that's how we approach all partnerships is if we can use it then, and I'm the biggest advertiser for Gong now because I know how we're leveraging and how it's benefiting us. That said, we also look for large customers that have big problems, bigger than ours. And we have one of the largest telcos in the world and they're a customer. They've been a design partner, for example, they were a design partner when we did a similar integration with Salesforce. And they've done the same thing here with Gong and Snowflake. And one of the things that they pushed on was, it was really, it took a lot of time to actually get the data from Gong into their Tableau dashboard, which I think Tableau inaudible Yeah. And so now instead of going through this kind of clunky process and taking potentially up to hours to get that data into Tableau with the snowflake, Tableau and Gong integration, they actually get almost direct access to that data. And combining that with those other data sources allows this telco to make really smart business decisions faster. And that's really what we're getting from our design partners. We're listening to them, they're telling us the feedback they want, and we're building that in the product. So as we get more and more customers on this journey with us, I think we'll probably tweak it and change it based on the feedback.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Yeah. More insights faster, and being able to then port it to web whatever analytic product that people want to use it just, again, this is what really customers have been asking us over and over and over again. And Chris, I remember we chatted about a year ago and said, " Hey, wouldn't it be cool? Wouldn't it be so amazing if we could create this kind of integration?" And here we are. It's been a lot of work and very excited to be able to bring this all to you.

Chris Degnan: Well, thank you to you for actually sponsoring it-

Kelly Breslin Wright: Oh, well, thank you to you for sponsoring it.

Chris Degnan: Yeah.

Kelly Breslin Wright: So love going all around and hopefully you'll all love this integration even more. Well, so as we had talked about, we are just getting started. So much more is coming soon. We're going to be continuing to load even more data and making it easier for Gong customers, whether using Snowflake already or not, to get better access to your data and get even greater insights. So as we kind of start to wrap this portion, I'm curious, Chris, any other thoughts on where we're headed with this integration or anything else you want to share?

Chris Degnan: Well, no, I think it's just the beginning. I think there's so much opportunity, going back to when I first talked to Amit, is that, there's so much opportunity for us to partner. You are such a leader in the marketplace. We are a leader in the marketplace and building a Gong cloud, if you will. That's what we want to help you do is build a Gong data cloud. And I think that'll only benefit our joint customers. And so really what you guys are doing and the future of Gong is so exciting to watch from an outsider perspective and as a customer, we love it. So I couldn't be more excited about what's to come.

Kelly Breslin Wright: Yay. Yay. Well, it's always fun to talk to other data people because I'm clearly a data person.

Chris Degnan: Yes you are.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And you, Chris, are a data person.

Chris Degnan: Yep.

Kelly Breslin Wright: We have lots of people here are all data people.

Chris Degnan: Yep.

Kelly Breslin Wright: And I love that our long snowflake partnership is allowing people to dive deeper into their data to get a better understanding into what is really happening. Because that's what Gong is all about and Snowflake's really, really helping us to do that. So really exciting. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today.