How Greenhouse reaped a 281% surge in new product ARR using Gong’s AI

One of my favorite things to do is spend time transforming my yard with gardening. Gardening is challenging, rewarding, and requires a lot of planning. You have to amend the soil, place plants in the right place, water and fertilize as required, pull weeds, and then you still have to patiently wait for everything to grow and blossom. A garden is always a work in progress, and making changes to optimize the results is half the fun.

Sales enablement is a lot like gardening. I get to help Sales Reps blossom! I dig deep to find tools that will help individuals grow and reach their full potential, and I strive to make teams more productive, aligned, and strategic in their work. And I get to do it for a company called Greenhouse, which is cool, considering my hobby. Greenhouse is the hiring operating system for people-first companies. Our hiring software streamlines the recruitment process for employers and job seekers, from sourcing all the way through onboarding. We do much more than track applications. Our platform helps companies live their values by embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) within their hiring practices and providing guidance as well as software that helps folks mitigate unconscious bias.

I started as a sales rep and worked as an account executive before switching to sales enablement when it was a relatively young field. Before joining Greenhouse, I spent 18 months at a learning technology company. It was there that I first encountered Gong, but it wasn’t until I leveraged the platform at Greenhouse that I saw how much we could accomplish with it. 

Gong harnesses our customer interactions and provides the insights we use to accelerate rep productivity and revenue growth. That includes a 281% increase in new product ARR, a 456% boost in attachment rate, and more. I’m pleased to share the story of how we achieved such outstanding results, as we expanded our use of Gong.

Greenhouse is a fully remote, global business. Our growing, global account management (AM) team comprises some of the most inspiring, motivated, and target-driven individuals and leaders I’ve ever worked with. This team of professionals works alongside our customer success (CS) colleagues to strengthen client relations and grow the partnership with our users by upselling products and services.

Even with the best sales team, there are always hurdles to overcome. One of my first projects as an Enablement Manager at Greenhouse was to help reinforce the training for a new product that had just been launched. Despite an appetite from our customers for this new solution, we simply weren’t seeing the upsell numbers we had projected. After a series of discovery discussions with the account management leadership team, we identified three key areas that needed attention: discovery, objection handling, and next steps.

We all agreed on a need to improve our AMs’ performance in these areas, and wanted to find a way to address the challenges in line with Greenhouse’s work culture.

Gong immediately came to mind. The platform captures customer interactions, then leverages its proprietary AI model (built exclusively for sales teams) to analyze them. It identifies key trends inside those customer interactions and reveals what works and what doesn’t as our reps conduct discovery, handle objections, and set next steps. 

We were already using Gong when I joined the company, but in a limited capacity. Upskilling our AMs allowed us to break new ground with the platform, as we sought ways to align around engaging content that worked.

The NFL season was just around the corner, so we decided to use a football theme when we launched our bi-weekly “Game Film” series. We created it to build alignment around messaging and improve rep productivity across the board.

Inspired by the way sports teams analyze game footage to improve player performance and execute new plays, our program uses actual customer interactions captured and analyzed by Gong to help our teams learn from customer conversations. We worked with our Gong CSMs to build a learning plan that taught our AMs and their leaders how to effectively use the following Gong features: streams, call search and filters, points of interest, hashtags, the Call Library, and the Gong app for Zoom meetings. 

We then developed a Game Film playbook and launched it with an instructional “Training Camp” activity that preceded sessions dedicated to discovery, objection handling, and sales next steps. To complement the training sessions and rollout of the Game Film series, we created a Slack channel specifically for Game Film questions and wins.

The only way to make this series successful was to boost our Gong adoption. We have a culture of feedback without judgment, and we wanted to build on that by developing our confidence and trust in each other — and in a platform that was new to many people. Fortunately, we had already scheduled an in-person event in Denver shortly after the Game Film rollout. It was my first time meeting the team in person and an opportunity to address employee concerns.

Using feedback from the remote Training Camp session, we created an in-person game using 24 sticky notes on a whiteboard. Every AM chose a note at random and addressed a question about Gong and our new product. We incorporated role-playing, knowledge checks, and questions around discovery, the theme of our first Game Film. This informal and fun in-person exercise helped our AMs connect and become more comfortable with each other. At the end of the event, we walked away with a new slogan: Growth only happens when you get uncomfortable. 

We really pushed the football metaphor. We labeled our ongoing Game Film series, “Fantasy Gong Ball,” and after every training session, we selected an MVP for giving the most valuable feedback. It was a great way of recognizing people’s contributions to these team exercises. Our account managers love this format and have embraced Gong, with 84% rating their comfort level at four or five on a scale of five after the first session. After the second session, 100% of them expressed the same comfort with Gong.

We launched our Game Film series at the beginning of Q4 and were able to compare our numbers to the previous quarter. In terms of Gong adoption, we saw a 147% increase in the number of reviewed customer interactions, a 360% rise in the average number of interactions with feedback, and a 30% uplift in interactions with comments.

Our sales expansion figures also rose significantly in Q4. While many factors came into play, our Game Film series contributed significantly, resulting in a 281% increase in new product ARR, 312% more new product attached to renewals, and a 456% boost in attachment rate. Our AMs gained the confidence to effectively sell and upsell our new product. We couldn’t have done it without Gong.

Using Gong gives us visibility into everyone’s customer interactions, and we use its insights to help our reps tweak their talk tracks and reposition parts of their sales pitches. By adding personalized coaching opportunities to our bi-weekly Game Film series, we created even more possibilities for individual development and collective improvement.

Some of Gong’s simplest features have had the most impact. One of my favorites is Call Snippets, a feature that lets us highlight key moments in a conversation. When our CSMS speak with a customer and hear something that suggests an upsell opportunity, they can highlight the interaction in Gong and comment to their Account Management partner(s).

After launching our Game Films project, we transitioned ownership to a committee comprising members of the account management team. Now, the Game Film meetings are completely self-managed. The new team even devised a way to run the sessions, inspired by NCAA March Madness brackets and the friendly competition of sports betting pools. That’s the power of Gong. Once people learn the basics, they discover new ways to leverage the platform to sell and execute better.

We recently rolled out Gong Deal Boards to our CSMs and AMs. This powerful feature integrates seamlessly with our Gainsight customer success platform and Salesforce. We can pull any metric from Gainsight and Salesforce, feed it into Gong, and our CSMs can see the health of client accounts, send leads to AMs, and point out upsell opportunities. Having deep visibility into customer interactions and deals in progress allows us to make better and more strategic decisions.

We have a saying at Greenhouse: “What got you here won’t get you there.” Gong certainly proved that point. We’re headed somewhere new, and Gong is the platform to take us there! Once we embraced and maximized our use of Gong, we began to see results. Gong has now clearly taken root.