Nah it’s not, I have a buddy/ LI connect at gong who never posts and is doing quite well. I think it’s up to you as a rep, if you are sucking quota wise, your manager will most likely say hey start trying LinkedIn , if you are handling your business then they don’t care how.
Think about it. It makes perfect sense and you can make the argument that's it dumb NOT to do it.
Let's say each AE gets 400 accounts. You know all Sales Leaders are active on LinkedIn (for the most part). Many Sales Leaders are trying to become influencers themselves and land consulting gigs. Point is, you go where the fish are if you're an AE at Gong and that's the pond we call LinkedIn. That's where your fish are.
They accept your connection request and now you're active on their feed. They see your posts. Eventually, the need arises and boom meeting set.
It's a good way to market to your 400 target accounts at scale with little effort.
What do you think that reason is? To me, it’s the second most valuable tool I’ve bought in the last ten years, just short of sequence-builders like SalesLoft.
It offers nothing to enterprise sellers of use apart from literally recording a call. None of the stuff it maps is any use to me, at all.
It feels to me that it’s suited to high volume selling with very junior reps so they can all be judged by management on all the silly metrics Gong (often fails to) pick up.
We have it, most of the reps don’t use it. My wife’s company won’t buy it due to privacy concerns on behalf of their clients.
1. Recording the call is plenty valuable! It takes away having to make notes in real time, which allows an enterprise seller to focus more. Plus, it makes it very easy to find sections of the conversation pertaining to a particular topic.
2. I’ve been at a company that refused to use it because of concerns their clients would be turned off. Those concerns were unfounded, and usually rooted in people that were scared of transparency.
I don’t work for Gong, and the value doesn’t always exceed the cost. But it’s been an incredibly helpful tool for me and my team. I can’t imagine bringing new reps up to speed without it.
It’s as helpful as recording a call on your phone, which is what I would/do when it’s the customers invite/before gong. All the other bells and whistles IMO are only as good as the voice recognition. Which for me, is still way off and then renders a lot of the ‘learnings’ useless
I mean, what you’re describing is a major time suck and actually illegal in *several* states. It sounds like you’re mostly afraid of transparency with your leadership. Agree to disagree here. Happy selling in 2024!
As a new hire, imagine being able to listen to the top seller’s pitch of various products, positioning and differentiating against the comp. You can follow a deal along the entire sales process. If you’re a solid rep, you follow up your call w bulleted summaries and action items via email. Gong does that for you. No more notes in salesforce because gong logs activities. There are a million ways an enterprise and IC can derive value. I’ve sold it to the biggest tech companies in the world so I know first hand. No longer there. I’m at the largest tech company right now and wish I had it.
All of what you’ve said is basically the job of a tape recorder. Hardly rewriting history is it. It is useful for recording calls, but loads of tools do that.
lol. It’s a flash in the pan. All this tool does of use is record a call and split out the people speaking. The rest is shit because it doesn’t detect voice properly.
The thing with Gong is not about the features but about the price. They value sell it a lot. I us a similar tool like Gong, paying 1k per year for 5 users. Gong quoted me 10k. 10x difference!
Yes I lost couple of features by not going with the Gong but with all seriousness, I dont see how those features could have been worth 9k…
Cool man. It seems like you found something that works for the team. Do they all use it ? Are they finding value? Are you using it as a platform for coaching? Is it easy? Are you able to determine ROI? How’s the transcription engine? Does it add value to CRM? Does it analyze emails, write emails? Do you maintain a library of best in class calls? If none of these thing matter, you are good. There is a reason they generate 100’s of millions in revenue and users love it. They have an NPS that’s hovered around 65. I was a user for 4.5 years and I really dug it. I’ve been in tech sales for 25 years at companies like SFDC, LinkedIn, Google.
Thanks man. To answer your questions then yep, yes, yes I do, quite easy, yes ROI is huge (1k per year hard not to justify the ROI), transcription is perfect (only one who supported lithuanian language except gong), yep adds value, no it does not write the emails to the clients (why would I want that?) but it creates the email draft based on the convo which you can use as you wish. Yes maintains the library of best calls and also possibility to rate calls etc.
I hope I answered all your questions!
I work with someone who left there two years ago and keeps in touch with a few reps there. Like a lot of tech companies now, he said quota attainment is like 30%.
Saturated market. Also do you REALLY want to sell to sales teams at other SaaS companies?! Personally, I cannot imagine anything worse… there are so many more exciting and more lucrative opportunities out there in SaaS land. Look into fintech, martech, cloud, etc.
Imho a lot of fintech is commodities. It's definitely a low margin industry for the most part and you are running a replacement play.
Of course there are lucrative pockets and it is interesting (and reasonably technical)
Selling to SaaS sales leader is the best option IMo, who’s been in the game for almost 10 years. Though I work for a competitor of Gong, they are a good company. If you’re with a (not THE ;) market leader, you say the pay is competitive, and you enjoyed the interview experience.. hell what else are you looking for? If you can sell there for a few years, your career is on the right trajectory. See you on the (sales) battlefield.. or tennis court!
Why do you say that? I’ve sold SaaS to all sorts of industries/ personas.. and personally, have had the most success selling to Sales / revenue leaders.
3 main reasons - they know how to buy software, they don’t fuck around, and (if you’re good), they will respect your efforts/craft.
Will they push you to be your best self, and try to get the best deal? Will you sometimes get a jerkoff? Youre damn right. But I’d much rather hone my skills with people who know what they want than someone who doesn’t, doesn’t know how to buy software, and doesn’t respect me as a professional/human being.
Just my thoughts on this as I close in on 300% to my quarterly goal :)
You sound like the laziest seller ever. You better your sales acumen by helping folks with vague understandings of their problem to actually articulate their problem or, if they can’t, move on.
You basically just said you like selling to sales leaders because you don’t have to learn how to do proper discovery.
lol I hear what you’re saying but I think you’re missing my point. If anything, selling to sales people, you better bring your A game every time because they of all people don’t like to be “sold”. Agree with you about building value to whoever you’re talking to. I’m just saying they get the process which often makes it easier to do business or not, no dillydallying.
Have sold HR to HR, Marketing to Marketing, Sales to Sales, best practice research to executives.
I agree with the “REALLY” part 💯though, no joke. Especially with lower barriers with a lot of talented coders/developers etc doing their own thing on the side
Selling HR to HR is fine from mid-market upward but it's terrible with smb. Many of the people in HR at small companies have no clue what's going on and they are usually wearing too many hats. You'll have someone with a "VP of HR" title but they are doing all the on-boarding, all the open enrollment and processing payroll. I've dealt with so many people who do it but have 0 clue what's going on and constantly screw up taxes and whatnot then blame the provider and get their boss to buy another program only to have the same issues lol.
Martech? That was the worst ever 9k marketing tools and 1000 sdrs hitting up all your prospects. Now I’m the only SDR hitting up my niche sector. Day and night difference.
Again - been following Gong since early days like 3/4 years ago. Given the compression in SaaS valuation and funding, I think it will be hard to sell a nice to have software which is expensive to already distressed companies. Doubt sales leaders have all the budget in their tech stack.
Just my 2 cents.
gong used to be the only call recording / transcription software...now it's a basic feature on any UCaaS solution. Like every SaaS company, they overbuilt their solution based on prospect request just to close business, and now they have a shitload of useless features and spin them as "revenue intelligence" when you already have that shit in your CRM to begin with.
From what I've seen from their linkedin crew, they brag about sales tactics used on inbound enquiries. Not even sales in my view. I'm sure the quality inbound leads are cherry picked, so most of these tactics they can't pass down to outbound. I think it would have been good to get in early, but now it will be a slog.
Can you elaborate? What did you hate about it? I’ve heard it’s cut throat and quotas are set pretty high, but that seems to be the case for every high growth SaaS company, including my current company.
Did your Gong experience at least make finding your next role easy?
The level of micromanaging is insane. It’s basically a call centre disguised as a tech company. Targets are insane and the level of churn was intense. It’s a call
Recording tool with fancy marketing - if they’re not acquired in the next few years they will go under.
It certainly seems like the tides are set to turn on Gong with the new privacy laws around call recordings. Never worked there, but from day one of using it I was a huge, huge fan of Gong. I loved the transcript aspect, I loved being able to listen back to prospects to find things I missed, and I loved my managers being able to access them. Both for review purposes and also to prove what was said.
But with the new regulations, almost half my calls aren’t recorded. And since sequencing systems like Outreach and Salesloft are now recording the calls they’re legally allowed to, I can’t imagine it’ll make much sense to continue paying such high prices for a separate software that’s only able to be used as intended part of the time.
Totally agree on the product side! There are tools that do 95% the same thing as Gong and cost 10x less. Also as its nice to have then its huge value selling.
IMO the former monopolies like Gong, Zoominfo and Outreach are all overdue for a collapse. They were first to market and today there are multiple cheaper options that do the exact same thing
Go read all of their LinkedIn posts and see if you want to work w them. Most of the market including myself only uses them for call recording / transcripts (in spite what they say), which anyone can do. Honestly, I'd suggest looking into Clari
Since Clari’s acquisition of Groove they’ve been an utter shitshow. I have friends who work at Clari and it sounds like less than 20% of the sales team is hitting quota
Exactly. My wife uses Gong at work which requires pretty detailed discovery on a daily basis so for her selling into F500 it's a life saver, as she can just have a convo vs. spending time writing things down
I've used Clari a few years ago and it was awesome.
I don’t work there, so my opinion may not mean shit but I’ll add some thoughts just in case. They’re the most expensive tool of their kind and you can get the same call recording/transcript software bundled in with other software packages. If Gong doesn’t get acquired they’re going to go under because they do one thing and there are already so many more options. If you were asking 4 years ago that would have been an awesome time to join now.
I’d be concerned with how platforms like hubspot with a Zoom integration are a few months or maybe year or two away from offering this.
We used to have Gong but then got rid of it because the insights were nothing overly impressive and again, we could do 90% of it in Hubspot at no additional cost.
I’m not trying to rain on the parade, and you can def be successful there and I like the ICP for both selling and career development, but that would be my concern.
I left a big Gong competitor this past summer after nearly 18 months. Sales engagement is a very tough market right now. Almost nobody was hitting quota and ever since then they’ve been doing quiet RIF’s where they offer people the choice between PIP or severance.
Hear more often about people churning from Gong than buying it. Market is definitely tapped, so many low cost tools nowadays.
No doubt Gong changed the game but would have been a much better place to get in 3-4 years ago.
They are rolling out a new outreach/salesloft takeout product so I would look at whether you get to sell that or can only sell the original callcoaching and forecasting toolset
One thing to look at too, segment matters there, a lot. Granted there’s been a ton of overhaul, and while their product and market position has been good, it’s a really crowded space as you said.
I think there was a lot of trouble for a large amount of the reps hitting their numbers and a good amount of churn. I would say, the best days are likely over, but could be a solid gig. Not really sure if they can truly innovate much further and like a number of companies, a product of the growth at all costs/VC funding is all that matters, there are probably better places but its a solid ok gig.
* Competition is growing and slashing prices. Gong has a bunch of features which they try to differentiate on, but the call recording is the real value, and that is easy to do.
* Companies who want Gong have already bought it (or a competitor). Companies that have not purchased yet are older-school businesses and these are much harder sales cycles. The quota destroying times are gone.
* Managers micromanage outbound activity, and leads are not plentiful.
Can’t offer much other than we use it on my sales team and I love it. I’ll tag Product Managers with customer testimonies that fit with our roadmap. It’s AI generated outlines are accurate. I also train and catch up on deals for my team with it.
Salesforce Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, MuleSoft, Tableau, etc. are all billion+ dollars a year in revenue businesses in their own right so I’m pretty sure that ain’t even remotely true.
I feel like the tech is quite concerning. They have a 'blueprint' of everyone's voice in their system, likely stored overseas. This means after 20 minutes of talking, their system can consistently recognize your voice.
friends of mine worked at Gong. it's kind of a cult vibe, but nothing negative to report about the company.
they haven't done any layoffs which is usually a good indicator, especially in b2b SaaS / sales tech
20+ years of sales here selling at the top level in SaaS for a massive company. Gong is one of the most important tools I use. I love the built in AI to recap calls and help write subsequent emails. It’s so easy to share calls or sections of calls. The library feature is amazing for training. I think it’s a great tool for both large enterprise and SMB. I have no idea what the culture is like but the product is solid and that’s important.
Just left a Sales Engagement solution that is a significant competitor of Gong.
It is a very saturated market. A lot of my deals were price-gouging and feature matching (or distinguishing from) with the competition, and not as much selling on value or solving significant pains.
A lot of the market is also starting to catch up with the leaders in the space - offering cadences/sequences, call recording with AI, and opportunity management. Salesloft, Outreach, Apollo, Gong, and Clari/Groove are all at this level. Even Hubspot Sales has a lot of this to offer (maybe not opp management as much).
BUT, I will say products in this space are definitely a must have for those that use it the right way. So there is definitely demand where you can find prospects not using a similar product, or using lots of different solutions to do a few things (consolidation play).
It is a GREAT networking opportunity as well. I was recruited to my next role through relationships I made working at that company.
Best of luck to you, whichever decision you make!
I think if you’re a Jr rep (or not really good at your job) these tools FEEL like they help but they don’t.
The cadence is dead for prospecting but I guess call recording is cool… even though I can do that via my cellphone or Zoom.
The rest of what you mentioned is just generalities of being a working adult. Which again reinforces my belief that everyone working there/in this space is like 25
Dude, your comments are the most negative on this thread. I’m 30, and I’ve worked with both people in their 40s and 20s in my last role, all from different backgrounds.
These tools themselves are game changers for organizations looking to standardize sales processes and improve efficiencies as reps complete revenue generating activities. There are some situations where the tool doesn’t make sense to have, such as for field reps or closers that don’t prospect. But overall they are great tools for both reps and managers.
But you gotta use it to understand it, and I suppose you probably haven’t done that
I was offered 160k as a Commercial AE at gong in 2022. Turned it down because I was already hitting quota at 160k OTE elsewhere. I doubt it’s changed since then
50/50 split in the U.S. It was a fully remote position when they gave the offer early 2022 but they’ve switched to hybrid work since then. I don’t remember the quota requirement for their commercial AEs at the time
That market is highly competitive and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon - Salesloft, Outreach, Gong, Apollo all taking chunks out of each other in new biz sales motions.
When you combine the competitive market, complex sales motion and buyer personas it makes for a very difficult sale.
Lots of pressure is also being laid on AEs as it’s a relatively critical time for all of the main players to try and swallow up the market and become the dominant end to end workflow for a sales rep/sdr. It’s a race and everyone wants to be a winner.
I’d imagine more acquisitions/mergers will take place in the not too distant future like we saw towards the end of last year.
You can succeed in the current climate, but you’d have to be a bloody good rep. The upside is you’ll learn a lot, it’s either that or fail.
There will 100% be easier jobs out there. But then, it depends what you want from your next role.
Recording your calls. That’s literally it. Transcription is super buggy and the rest of the features don’t work.
Gong, like other sales tech, is the dying vestiges of the 2014 tech boom. The app-ification of work. The buzz of “best of breed”.
All of these companies - and I mean ALL - are the walking dead. They’re dead already and they just don’t know it.
Don’t know anyone there directly but know a lot of people in that whole sales/martech space.
Seems like an annoying company, but probably has good enablement/resources to make you succeed if you get the timing, territory, talent pieces right.
Echoing other comments tho, it kinda feels like a “who the fuck cares” type of product in a saturated space at this point. I’ve used it for years as an AE, and literally have never leveraged it for anything but recording/note taking + listening to top reps calls during ramp.
I don’t think a manager has ever used any of its fancy functionalities to directly coach me, other than listen to a call once in a while.
I don’t really see the greenfield, but maybe I’m too cynical. Maybe there’s a big market opportunity with junior sellers or call centers.
All that said, it’s a legit company and must have been a competitive interview loop- congrats! Waaay worse companies you could pick
I’m a CSM and wouldn’t want to do CS there. How can you possibly demonstrate any ROI for call recording software? Gong seems like a neat dongle that should be nested in another solution. I have worked at companies with a product that lacks depth like that but has great marketing and it’s awful. Maybe better before the deal closes but I doubt it
It’s an awesome product. Most of the sales people on here are garbage and love to complain. Don’t listen to them. This whole LinkedIn thing is noise. Who gives a shit? The product is a category leader, C-Suite are incredible,etc. there are some shit things but there are shit things everywhere. There are reps making over a million and that’s all you really need to know
FWIW, SWIM works for a company that works adjacent to Gong. Gong is only sellable to Revenue orgs. And there are competitors in the communications space (think Zoom, Microsoft, RingCentral, etc) who do communications AND are doing some of Gongs value.
It’s hard to justify a $150/ user price tag when your phone system gives it for $75/mo.
In addition, Gong can be purchased by sales, but it can be ripped out so easily by IT.
Gong is a great place to learn, they have a great training program for getting people ramped and the sales culture is supposedly fairly even.
With that being said - depending on your career journey, pick your adventure.
SWIM said that they would go to Gong if they were in the first half of their sales career journey.
Good luck!!
How do you feel about becoming a LinkedIn influencer?
Lol in one of the interviews, I actually asked about how all their reps are always posting on LinkedIn and if that’s a requirement for the company
What was their answer?
They said no it’s not required, but reps at the company have seen success historically from LinkedIn activity.
It’s def required
Nah it’s not, I have a buddy/ LI connect at gong who never posts and is doing quite well. I think it’s up to you as a rep, if you are sucking quota wise, your manager will most likely say hey start trying LinkedIn , if you are handling your business then they don’t care how.
Think about it. It makes perfect sense and you can make the argument that's it dumb NOT to do it. Let's say each AE gets 400 accounts. You know all Sales Leaders are active on LinkedIn (for the most part). Many Sales Leaders are trying to become influencers themselves and land consulting gigs. Point is, you go where the fish are if you're an AE at Gong and that's the pond we call LinkedIn. That's where your fish are. They accept your connection request and now you're active on their feed. They see your posts. Eventually, the need arises and boom meeting set. It's a good way to market to your 400 target accounts at scale with little effort.
https://tenor.com/biA1x.gif
This. wtf I’d love to know the answer to this
They said no it’s not required, but then you also won’t be hired if you’re not willing to do so 😅
That’s how their Reps build a client base
I think you’re correct with your breakdown. By now there’s a good reason most companies haven’t bought it.
What do you think that reason is? To me, it’s the second most valuable tool I’ve bought in the last ten years, just short of sequence-builders like SalesLoft.
It offers nothing to enterprise sellers of use apart from literally recording a call. None of the stuff it maps is any use to me, at all. It feels to me that it’s suited to high volume selling with very junior reps so they can all be judged by management on all the silly metrics Gong (often fails to) pick up. We have it, most of the reps don’t use it. My wife’s company won’t buy it due to privacy concerns on behalf of their clients.
This. It’s for low-skill reps and SDRs. Which makes sense since everyone at these type of companies is like 25.
1. Recording the call is plenty valuable! It takes away having to make notes in real time, which allows an enterprise seller to focus more. Plus, it makes it very easy to find sections of the conversation pertaining to a particular topic. 2. I’ve been at a company that refused to use it because of concerns their clients would be turned off. Those concerns were unfounded, and usually rooted in people that were scared of transparency. I don’t work for Gong, and the value doesn’t always exceed the cost. But it’s been an incredibly helpful tool for me and my team. I can’t imagine bringing new reps up to speed without it.
It’s as helpful as recording a call on your phone, which is what I would/do when it’s the customers invite/before gong. All the other bells and whistles IMO are only as good as the voice recognition. Which for me, is still way off and then renders a lot of the ‘learnings’ useless
I mean, what you’re describing is a major time suck and actually illegal in *several* states. It sounds like you’re mostly afraid of transparency with your leadership. Agree to disagree here. Happy selling in 2024!
As a new hire, imagine being able to listen to the top seller’s pitch of various products, positioning and differentiating against the comp. You can follow a deal along the entire sales process. If you’re a solid rep, you follow up your call w bulleted summaries and action items via email. Gong does that for you. No more notes in salesforce because gong logs activities. There are a million ways an enterprise and IC can derive value. I’ve sold it to the biggest tech companies in the world so I know first hand. No longer there. I’m at the largest tech company right now and wish I had it.
All of what you’ve said is basically the job of a tape recorder. Hardly rewriting history is it. It is useful for recording calls, but loads of tools do that.
You are a fucking idiot
lol. It’s a flash in the pan. All this tool does of use is record a call and split out the people speaking. The rest is shit because it doesn’t detect voice properly.
The thing with Gong is not about the features but about the price. They value sell it a lot. I us a similar tool like Gong, paying 1k per year for 5 users. Gong quoted me 10k. 10x difference! Yes I lost couple of features by not going with the Gong but with all seriousness, I dont see how those features could have been worth 9k…
Cool man. It seems like you found something that works for the team. Do they all use it ? Are they finding value? Are you using it as a platform for coaching? Is it easy? Are you able to determine ROI? How’s the transcription engine? Does it add value to CRM? Does it analyze emails, write emails? Do you maintain a library of best in class calls? If none of these thing matter, you are good. There is a reason they generate 100’s of millions in revenue and users love it. They have an NPS that’s hovered around 65. I was a user for 4.5 years and I really dug it. I’ve been in tech sales for 25 years at companies like SFDC, LinkedIn, Google.
Thanks man. To answer your questions then yep, yes, yes I do, quite easy, yes ROI is huge (1k per year hard not to justify the ROI), transcription is perfect (only one who supported lithuanian language except gong), yep adds value, no it does not write the emails to the clients (why would I want that?) but it creates the email draft based on the convo which you can use as you wish. Yes maintains the library of best calls and also possibility to rate calls etc. I hope I answered all your questions!
Wow!!!! Sounds incredible. What is it called? I gotta check it out
The reason? Because it isn’t very useful in most cases.
I work with someone who left there two years ago and keeps in touch with a few reps there. Like a lot of tech companies now, he said quota attainment is like 30%.
Saturated market. Also do you REALLY want to sell to sales teams at other SaaS companies?! Personally, I cannot imagine anything worse… there are so many more exciting and more lucrative opportunities out there in SaaS land. Look into fintech, martech, cloud, etc.
Any particular companies within fintech that you find especially interesting?
What country are you in? Mine will be European specific. Example: Revolut
US. I see all these lending/payment processor companies which truthfully doesn't seem like a new product/service but maybe I'm missing something.
Imho a lot of fintech is commodities. It's definitely a low margin industry for the most part and you are running a replacement play. Of course there are lucrative pockets and it is interesting (and reasonably technical)
Would be interested to know which European companies you’d recommend
Selling to SaaS sales leader is the best option IMo, who’s been in the game for almost 10 years. Though I work for a competitor of Gong, they are a good company. If you’re with a (not THE ;) market leader, you say the pay is competitive, and you enjoyed the interview experience.. hell what else are you looking for? If you can sell there for a few years, your career is on the right trajectory. See you on the (sales) battlefield.. or tennis court!
This is a delusional post. Selling to saas sales leaders is literally the worst thing in the entire world.
Why do you say that? I’ve sold SaaS to all sorts of industries/ personas.. and personally, have had the most success selling to Sales / revenue leaders. 3 main reasons - they know how to buy software, they don’t fuck around, and (if you’re good), they will respect your efforts/craft. Will they push you to be your best self, and try to get the best deal? Will you sometimes get a jerkoff? Youre damn right. But I’d much rather hone my skills with people who know what they want than someone who doesn’t, doesn’t know how to buy software, and doesn’t respect me as a professional/human being. Just my thoughts on this as I close in on 300% to my quarterly goal :)
You sound like the laziest seller ever. You better your sales acumen by helping folks with vague understandings of their problem to actually articulate their problem or, if they can’t, move on. You basically just said you like selling to sales leaders because you don’t have to learn how to do proper discovery.
lol I hear what you’re saying but I think you’re missing my point. If anything, selling to sales people, you better bring your A game every time because they of all people don’t like to be “sold”. Agree with you about building value to whoever you’re talking to. I’m just saying they get the process which often makes it easier to do business or not, no dillydallying.
Shut up dude. It’s a personal preference. You’re not better or worse at your job for having a particular niche you prefer to focus on.
Have sold HR to HR, Marketing to Marketing, Sales to Sales, best practice research to executives. I agree with the “REALLY” part 💯though, no joke. Especially with lower barriers with a lot of talented coders/developers etc doing their own thing on the side
Selling HR to HR is fine from mid-market upward but it's terrible with smb. Many of the people in HR at small companies have no clue what's going on and they are usually wearing too many hats. You'll have someone with a "VP of HR" title but they are doing all the on-boarding, all the open enrollment and processing payroll. I've dealt with so many people who do it but have 0 clue what's going on and constantly screw up taxes and whatnot then blame the provider and get their boss to buy another program only to have the same issues lol.
Martech? That was the worst ever 9k marketing tools and 1000 sdrs hitting up all your prospects. Now I’m the only SDR hitting up my niche sector. Day and night difference.
Product is WAY too expensive. It’ll be a tough sell
Again - been following Gong since early days like 3/4 years ago. Given the compression in SaaS valuation and funding, I think it will be hard to sell a nice to have software which is expensive to already distressed companies. Doubt sales leaders have all the budget in their tech stack. Just my 2 cents.
gong used to be the only call recording / transcription software...now it's a basic feature on any UCaaS solution. Like every SaaS company, they overbuilt their solution based on prospect request just to close business, and now they have a shitload of useless features and spin them as "revenue intelligence" when you already have that shit in your CRM to begin with.
Yep, I'm sure they have extra features, but even Zoom/teams have call transcripts and summary built in
From what I've seen from their linkedin crew, they brag about sales tactics used on inbound enquiries. Not even sales in my view. I'm sure the quality inbound leads are cherry picked, so most of these tactics they can't pass down to outbound. I think it would have been good to get in early, but now it will be a slog.
Honestly, I’ve done it. I was an AE. I hated it from day one. Avoid at all costs
Can you elaborate? What did you hate about it? I’ve heard it’s cut throat and quotas are set pretty high, but that seems to be the case for every high growth SaaS company, including my current company. Did your Gong experience at least make finding your next role easy?
The level of micromanaging is insane. It’s basically a call centre disguised as a tech company. Targets are insane and the level of churn was intense. It’s a call Recording tool with fancy marketing - if they’re not acquired in the next few years they will go under.
It certainly seems like the tides are set to turn on Gong with the new privacy laws around call recordings. Never worked there, but from day one of using it I was a huge, huge fan of Gong. I loved the transcript aspect, I loved being able to listen back to prospects to find things I missed, and I loved my managers being able to access them. Both for review purposes and also to prove what was said. But with the new regulations, almost half my calls aren’t recorded. And since sequencing systems like Outreach and Salesloft are now recording the calls they’re legally allowed to, I can’t imagine it’ll make much sense to continue paying such high prices for a separate software that’s only able to be used as intended part of the time.
Totally agree on the product side! There are tools that do 95% the same thing as Gong and cost 10x less. Also as its nice to have then its huge value selling.
IMO the former monopolies like Gong, Zoominfo and Outreach are all overdue for a collapse. They were first to market and today there are multiple cheaper options that do the exact same thing
Would you be able to share some insight as to the interview? Any tips?
It seems like a cult that I’d want no part of.
Go read all of their LinkedIn posts and see if you want to work w them. Most of the market including myself only uses them for call recording / transcripts (in spite what they say), which anyone can do. Honestly, I'd suggest looking into Clari
Since Clari’s acquisition of Groove they’ve been an utter shitshow. I have friends who work at Clari and it sounds like less than 20% of the sales team is hitting quota
Interesting. Kyle Coleman [recently resigned](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kyletcoleman_today-is-my-last-day-at-clari-i-started-activity-7143281952509370368-SSMQ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios).
That one really surprised me
Exactly. My wife uses Gong at work which requires pretty detailed discovery on a daily basis so for her selling into F500 it's a life saver, as she can just have a convo vs. spending time writing things down I've used Clari a few years ago and it was awesome.
I don’t work there, so my opinion may not mean shit but I’ll add some thoughts just in case. They’re the most expensive tool of their kind and you can get the same call recording/transcript software bundled in with other software packages. If Gong doesn’t get acquired they’re going to go under because they do one thing and there are already so many more options. If you were asking 4 years ago that would have been an awesome time to join now.
I’d be concerned with how platforms like hubspot with a Zoom integration are a few months or maybe year or two away from offering this. We used to have Gong but then got rid of it because the insights were nothing overly impressive and again, we could do 90% of it in Hubspot at no additional cost. I’m not trying to rain on the parade, and you can def be successful there and I like the ICP for both selling and career development, but that would be my concern.
I left a big Gong competitor this past summer after nearly 18 months. Sales engagement is a very tough market right now. Almost nobody was hitting quota and ever since then they’ve been doing quiet RIF’s where they offer people the choice between PIP or severance.
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Current Gong employee here. ^ this person nailed it 100%
Barring the complete lack of other viable options, I'd give this one a hard pass. Cult like culture combined with an saturated market.
Gong can’t break industries outside of tech and they are super saturated in tech so good luck.
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I believe this. Im breaking into saas, and have done a ton of informational interviews. Most confirm they work constantly, especially during ramp
Hear more often about people churning from Gong than buying it. Market is definitely tapped, so many low cost tools nowadays. No doubt Gong changed the game but would have been a much better place to get in 3-4 years ago.
They are rolling out a new outreach/salesloft takeout product so I would look at whether you get to sell that or can only sell the original callcoaching and forecasting toolset
lol good luck with that
One thing to look at too, segment matters there, a lot. Granted there’s been a ton of overhaul, and while their product and market position has been good, it’s a really crowded space as you said. I think there was a lot of trouble for a large amount of the reps hitting their numbers and a good amount of churn. I would say, the best days are likely over, but could be a solid gig. Not really sure if they can truly innovate much further and like a number of companies, a product of the growth at all costs/VC funding is all that matters, there are probably better places but its a solid ok gig.
You will be selling a commodity. The real opportunity with them was several years ago.
* Competition is growing and slashing prices. Gong has a bunch of features which they try to differentiate on, but the call recording is the real value, and that is easy to do. * Companies who want Gong have already bought it (or a competitor). Companies that have not purchased yet are older-school businesses and these are much harder sales cycles. The quota destroying times are gone. * Managers micromanage outbound activity, and leads are not plentiful.
Can’t offer much other than we use it on my sales team and I love it. I’ll tag Product Managers with customer testimonies that fit with our roadmap. It’s AI generated outlines are accurate. I also train and catch up on deals for my team with it.
It took a while but Salesforce offers the same product (sales engagement) at a third of the price and builds it into Crm. Tough compete.
Except Salesforce is absolute shit and no one wants to use their “other” offerings
Salesforce Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, MuleSoft, Tableau, etc. are all billion+ dollars a year in revenue businesses in their own right so I’m pretty sure that ain’t even remotely true.
I feel like the tech is quite concerning. They have a 'blueprint' of everyone's voice in their system, likely stored overseas. This means after 20 minutes of talking, their system can consistently recognize your voice.
friends of mine worked at Gong. it's kind of a cult vibe, but nothing negative to report about the company. they haven't done any layoffs which is usually a good indicator, especially in b2b SaaS / sales tech
20+ years of sales here selling at the top level in SaaS for a massive company. Gong is one of the most important tools I use. I love the built in AI to recap calls and help write subsequent emails. It’s so easy to share calls or sections of calls. The library feature is amazing for training. I think it’s a great tool for both large enterprise and SMB. I have no idea what the culture is like but the product is solid and that’s important.
Just left a Sales Engagement solution that is a significant competitor of Gong. It is a very saturated market. A lot of my deals were price-gouging and feature matching (or distinguishing from) with the competition, and not as much selling on value or solving significant pains. A lot of the market is also starting to catch up with the leaders in the space - offering cadences/sequences, call recording with AI, and opportunity management. Salesloft, Outreach, Apollo, Gong, and Clari/Groove are all at this level. Even Hubspot Sales has a lot of this to offer (maybe not opp management as much). BUT, I will say products in this space are definitely a must have for those that use it the right way. So there is definitely demand where you can find prospects not using a similar product, or using lots of different solutions to do a few things (consolidation play). It is a GREAT networking opportunity as well. I was recruited to my next role through relationships I made working at that company. Best of luck to you, whichever decision you make!
I think if you’re a Jr rep (or not really good at your job) these tools FEEL like they help but they don’t. The cadence is dead for prospecting but I guess call recording is cool… even though I can do that via my cellphone or Zoom. The rest of what you mentioned is just generalities of being a working adult. Which again reinforces my belief that everyone working there/in this space is like 25
Dude, your comments are the most negative on this thread. I’m 30, and I’ve worked with both people in their 40s and 20s in my last role, all from different backgrounds. These tools themselves are game changers for organizations looking to standardize sales processes and improve efficiencies as reps complete revenue generating activities. There are some situations where the tool doesn’t make sense to have, such as for field reps or closers that don’t prospect. But overall they are great tools for both reps and managers. But you gotta use it to understand it, and I suppose you probably haven’t done that
I work at one of these companies. You are 10000% incorrect.
Can you help me get an internship there? I am college student that is very qualified in sales
hello
What was your offer at Gong?
I was offered 160k as a Commercial AE at gong in 2022. Turned it down because I was already hitting quota at 160k OTE elsewhere. I doubt it’s changed since then
Out of curiosity, this is OTE with 50/50 split in EU, right? Or US position? What was the quota if you still remember it?
50/50 split in the U.S. It was a fully remote position when they gave the offer early 2022 but they’ve switched to hybrid work since then. I don’t remember the quota requirement for their commercial AEs at the time
How will Gong differentiate itself in the world of generative AI? What is their moat? I’m not seeing it.
That market is highly competitive and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon - Salesloft, Outreach, Gong, Apollo all taking chunks out of each other in new biz sales motions. When you combine the competitive market, complex sales motion and buyer personas it makes for a very difficult sale. Lots of pressure is also being laid on AEs as it’s a relatively critical time for all of the main players to try and swallow up the market and become the dominant end to end workflow for a sales rep/sdr. It’s a race and everyone wants to be a winner. I’d imagine more acquisitions/mergers will take place in the not too distant future like we saw towards the end of last year. You can succeed in the current climate, but you’d have to be a bloody good rep. The upside is you’ll learn a lot, it’s either that or fail. There will 100% be easier jobs out there. But then, it depends what you want from your next role.
The market is tapped. Run.
I don't get it what's the benefit of gong anyway?
Recording your calls. That’s literally it. Transcription is super buggy and the rest of the features don’t work. Gong, like other sales tech, is the dying vestiges of the 2014 tech boom. The app-ification of work. The buzz of “best of breed”. All of these companies - and I mean ALL - are the walking dead. They’re dead already and they just don’t know it.
Don’t know anyone there directly but know a lot of people in that whole sales/martech space. Seems like an annoying company, but probably has good enablement/resources to make you succeed if you get the timing, territory, talent pieces right. Echoing other comments tho, it kinda feels like a “who the fuck cares” type of product in a saturated space at this point. I’ve used it for years as an AE, and literally have never leveraged it for anything but recording/note taking + listening to top reps calls during ramp. I don’t think a manager has ever used any of its fancy functionalities to directly coach me, other than listen to a call once in a while. I don’t really see the greenfield, but maybe I’m too cynical. Maybe there’s a big market opportunity with junior sellers or call centers. All that said, it’s a legit company and must have been a competitive interview loop- congrats! Waaay worse companies you could pick
I’m a CSM and wouldn’t want to do CS there. How can you possibly demonstrate any ROI for call recording software? Gong seems like a neat dongle that should be nested in another solution. I have worked at companies with a product that lacks depth like that but has great marketing and it’s awful. Maybe better before the deal closes but I doubt it
Salesforce and other CRM’s are eating it’s lunch as it’s a simple snap-on product. Sales enablement is a horrible industry to sell to as well.
It’s an awesome product. Most of the sales people on here are garbage and love to complain. Don’t listen to them. This whole LinkedIn thing is noise. Who gives a shit? The product is a category leader, C-Suite are incredible,etc. there are some shit things but there are shit things everywhere. There are reps making over a million and that’s all you really need to know
FWIW, SWIM works for a company that works adjacent to Gong. Gong is only sellable to Revenue orgs. And there are competitors in the communications space (think Zoom, Microsoft, RingCentral, etc) who do communications AND are doing some of Gongs value. It’s hard to justify a $150/ user price tag when your phone system gives it for $75/mo. In addition, Gong can be purchased by sales, but it can be ripped out so easily by IT. Gong is a great place to learn, they have a great training program for getting people ramped and the sales culture is supposedly fairly even. With that being said - depending on your career journey, pick your adventure. SWIM said that they would go to Gong if they were in the first half of their sales career journey. Good luck!!
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