Asia-Pacific Archives - Gong

Canva’s 6% revenue boost: How using Gong transformed their strategy

Hannah Hapin — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 20:20:36 +0000

Canva’s 6% revenue boost: How using Gong transformed their strategy Deal Execution Engage Forecast Enterprise Asia-Pacific Europe/Middle East/Africa North America Software 6% increase in revenue 60% increase in rep capacity The challenge Reps and managers on Canva’s EMEA sales team found it difficult to get insights into their customers and book of business. That meant pipeline decisions weren’t always market- or data-driven — all of which made it tough to grow the business. The outcome Canva used Gong Engage and Gong Forecast to bring innovation into their sales process, experimenting with messaging, tactics, and strategies that respond to the market. This improved productivity, and secured more accurate forecasting. It enabled a 60% boost in rep capacity and a 6% growth in the team’s revenue. Headquarters Surry Hills, New South Wales founded 2012 company size 5,000+ industry Software Development There’s astounding growth happening at Canva, the global visual communication platform. They’re a “name to know” if you have an eye on powerful and transformative platforms. (And we do!) Behind the scenes, one of the tools Canva’s EMEA sales team relies on to drive growth: Gong’s Revenue Intelligence Platform. Moving the team into Gong’s unified platform has boosted innovation across Canva’s sales process while also creating operational rigor for their sellers — they can drive predictable revenue and create pipeline growth. Canva’s EMEA sales team adopted Gong after bumping up against the all-too-common frustration of needing better deal, workflow, and customer interaction insights to support productivity and growth. Given the company’s dedication to innovation and creativity, they recognized Gong as a kindred platform — one with the power to transform its users. Gong Engage enables a 60% jump in rep capacity and unleashes revenue growth Jorge Bestard, Canva’s Head of Sales and Success EMEA, wanted his team to easily surface insights from frontline customer interactions. Today, Gong AI insights are critical to multiple functions at Canva — product, marketing, SDRs, account executives, and managers. Since adopting both Gong and Gong Engage — a sales engagement solution that pairs with the larger platform — Canva’s AEs and managers have seen a 60% increase in their capacity to manage their book of business. This is driven by insights that are gathered through conversation intelligence and surfaced using Gong AI. The team now uses Gong and Gong Engage to create efficiencies throughout the sales process: “When our reps speak with customers, it’s very important that we get all the insights from those interactions and use them to give guidance on how to personalize at scale. With Gong Engage, we’re able to do all of that with ease.” —Jorge Bestard, Canva’s Head of EMEA With this type of support from Gong, the team is able to manage more accounts more efficiently, which has led to a 6% increase in revenue across the sales region. Enhanced forecasting leads to predictable revenue “Gong’s insights are incredibly important to our projections.” —Jorge Bestard, Canva’s Head of EMEA With Gong Forecast, Jorge’s team automatically receives insights into what closes deals and what doesn’t, alongside continuous forecast updates. These insights are a foundational part of Canva’s three-pronged forecasting approach. This approach begins with an AE’s sense of a deal, which is important, but can only take Jorge and his team so far. That’s why he turns to the Gong metrics that reflect Canva’s chosen sales methodology, and data signals that Gong surfaces automatically from SDRs’ and AEs’ customer interactions. Jorge says this third aspect, in particular, is what really solidified accuracy in the team’s forecasting. “It’s what makes everything whole,” he says. “We can’t compare it to anything we’ve used in the past.” This predictability and accuracy helps Jorge and his leadership team make smarter, data-based decisions about where to focus their resources, how quickly to scale their teams, and more. His managers also use the metrics and data signals from Gong for highly targeted coaching. “The AI insights our first- and second-line managers get from Gong’s Ask Anything, and the AI insights that come from Gong automatically, allow us to forecast and coach more effectively.” Fueling innovation at Canva with Gong’s insights “Gong’s AI is my chief of staff.” —Jorge Bestard, Canva’s Head of EMEA The teams in Jorge’s sales region connect with customers in more than 20 languages, and Gong captures and translates them all with industry-leading accuracy. Access to these regional market insights has improved the team’s operational excellence across the board. Managers can surface best practices in any language using Ask Anything — a generative AI feature that answers any questions about a contact, deal, or account — then tailor and test those practices in their own region. “Gong has also become the platform where we go to do sales experiments around new messaging, tactics, or strategies,” says Jorge. If the team wants to try out messaging for a CIO versus a CTO, they test it in Gong. Jorge says that before Gong, it was like managers were in a black box, just hoping their new messaging would work. But now they know exactly what their reps say and its effect on win rates. “Our managers used to have to sit in on too many calls to get a sense of where their reps needed coaching. Today, they can easily sift through market trends and manage 60 to 70 deals at once.” These managers use what they learn to shape their team’s sales messaging, go-to-market strategies, and even which products they talk about — leaning heavily on Gong’s customer insights and the ability to surface analytics from their experiments. “Gong has also enabled our product team to get a lot closer to our customers. When they think about a new feature, they actually go to Gong first.” The product team regularly listens to key moments from sales calls — moments where customers talk about their greatest pains and what they really crave in a design solution. That allows the product team to respond directly to customer needs and create moonshots that customers don’t even realize they need. Jorge says it’s clear that the entire revenue team is able to make better decisions. From deciding where to invest human capital, to which markets to go into (and why), to considering price sensitivity in certain countries or regions, Gong AI enables it all. Canva is equipped for a data-driven future “Having our data all in one platform, at each step of the process, means we can make better data-driven decisions to really drive our region into the future,” says Jorge. Gong has become an essential platform in shaping the team’s go-to-market strategy. They’re now able to manage their pipeline 60% more efficiently and are seeing a boost in revenue, starting with a 6% increase on the EMEA team. “Gong has been a great partner because it has gotten us closer to our customers than ever before.” Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one How Gong Helped Zillow Thrive During a Global Pandemic Enterprise Coaching Strategic Initiatives North America Real Estate Gainsight’s CEO uses Gong to better understand the true market Small Business Coaching Global Software How Gong helped Docebo become an efficient revenue team Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Software

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How Funnel Increased Messaging Adoption by 76% Across Global Teams with Gong

Hannah Hapin — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 18:42:40 +0000

How Funnel Increased Messaging Adoption by 76% Across Global Teams with Gong Strategic Initiatives Small Business Asia-Pacific Europe/Middle East/Africa Business Services 76% increase in new messaging adoption The SUMMARY Funnel, the world’s leading Marketing Data Hub, wanted to revamp how it ran its strategic initiatives — specifically sales process adoption and messaging initiatives — across its sales organization. They used Gong’s Revenue Intelligence Platform to prioritize better decision-making and pivots during rollouts and improve their alignment and new message adoption across globally distributed teams. HEADQUARTERS Stockholm, Stockholm County FOUNDED 2014 EMPLoyees 300+ industry Advertising Services A 76% boost is a reason to cheer, especially if you’re Funnel’s Sales Enablement team. That’s the astounding jump they experienced in sales calls that mention Funnel’s new messaging, thanks to Gong. It’s the result of a strategic initiative designed to align their globally distributed teams around new messaging. Funnel is a Marketing Data Hub that connects multiple platforms and allows marketing teams to assess their performance. It’s truly a global organization, with headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden; offices in Boston and Dublin; and Australia. When Katie McCullagh, Global Sales Enablement Manager (Dublin), and Angela Baldacci, Global Sales Enablement Manager in the US were asked to run a strategic initiative promoting Funnel’s new messaging to globally distributed — and quickly growing — teams, they leaned into Gong. Funnel was at a critical juncture in its growth and faced some challenges in adopting and standardizing new messaging, all of which are typical of fast-growing and globally distributed teams during rollouts. These included working across multiple locations and time zones and in numerous languages and dialects. Based on past challenges, Katie and Angela’s top priorities were: Gamifying the uptake of strategic initiative rollouts: This would result from tracking the new messaging’s adoption, then pivoting based on adoption-related insights. Greater business efficiency: They would achieve this through global alignment around new messaging that worked. Gong’s Initiatives board and Smart Trackers made tracking adoption easy Gong’s Initiatives board and Smart Trackers made tracking adoption easy Gong had already streamlined and improved Funnel’s coaching, onboarding, and skills development for the sales team. Now, Katie and Angela were keen to test out the benefits of its Initiatives board for rollouts. This feature was built to track the adoption of strategic initiatives like this new messaging rollout, so decision-makers could steer the initiative in real time based on its adoption and results in the field. Gong’s Initiatives board made it easy for Katie and Angela to iterate and pivot quickly during the rollout based on their ability to filter adoption rates for any team, individual, or time zone. Gong’s Initiatives board kept them focused on adoption metrics and helped them bypass the issues that typically result in misalignment on global teams (location, language, etc.). Angela describes the Initiatives board as, “So powerful. Incredible from a data visualization perspective — a single click shows us how our initiative is performing. No exporting. No manual calculation.” They also set up Smart Trackers — Gong’s AI-powered way to pick up on themes or topics within calls, not just keywords — to track conversations that indicated adoption, no matter the language or dialect. “Going through the process of creating a Smart Tracker is really fun for the person creating it, and it’s amazing to see how Gong’s AI constantly learns to detect unforeseen challenges we’d otherwise miss,” says Angela. They had all the adoption information they needed to pivot quickly, in real-time, and in one place. “Gong gamification” helped achieve a 76% boost in new messaging use Katie and Angela added some healthy competition to their strategic initiative. They hoped a little gamification would inspire widespread message adoption and align global team members around consistent use of the new messaging. “Gong helped us drive a strategic initiative and align global teams around new messaging in a way that was engaging and insightful,” said Angela. With a 76% increase in the number of calls using the new messaging in just one month, their plan paid off. Here is how they gamified their strategic initiative using Gong’s Smart Trackers and Scorecards: Goal: They aimed to incentivize new message adoption and align globally distributed teams around a strategic initiative. Process: They created a scoring system using Gong’s Smart Trackers, whereby salespeople earned points by using the company’s new messaging on calls, and managers earned points by assessing those calls using Gong’s Scorecards to rate customized criteria and highlight where calls needed improvement. Results: Within one month, 76% more of the 1,000+ customer interactions across the revenue org mentioned the new messaging. Bonus: New messaging was top of mind for every revenue team member in the org. This approach helped solidify the use of Gong by both managers and reps during new strategic initiatives. The winning team’s manager scored more than 80 calls! Funnel forever reshapes its strategic initiatives “With Gong, there’s infinite flexibility and possibility when we roll out critical business initiatives.” Angela finds that every time the Global Sales Enablement team hits a potential roadblock, there’s always a way to use Gong to solve the issue. She found it wasn’t as easy to remain flexible with other software. “Gong has been an incredible platform … Even the different language versioning has really helped in our tracking.” In short, says Angela, “I love Gong and will advocate for the platform every day.” Kaite agrees. “Even if we weren’t global, Gong has been so pivotal to the success of a sales org to see what team members do, how they excel, and how they learn from each other.” Today, the Global Sales Enablement team relies on Gong during the planning and execution of its strategic initiatives, wherever they take place around the world. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one ComplyAdvantage uses Gong to decrease ramp time by 50% Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Europe/Middle East/Africa Software Hear.com used Gong to generate a 45% increase in its close ratio Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Global Hospitals & Physicians Clinics How Elsevier lands 45% larger deals using Gong across its NOAM sales team Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Global Business Services

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simPRO Empowers Hybrid Sales and a Culture of Accountability in a Global Workforce

Hannah Hapin — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 21:51:43 +0000

simPRO Empowers Hybrid Sales and a Culture of Accountability in a Global Workforce Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Small Business Asia-Pacific Software The challenge With the impact of COVID-19, simPRO needed a way to strengthen and develop their new remote sales process. The outcome With Gong’s deal dashboard and call library, simPRO gained valuable insight into the customer journey, increased collaboration across employees around the world, and streamlined onboarding while respecting the constraints needed to stay safe during the pandemic. Read article Download PDF Headquarters Eight Mile Plains, Australia Founded 2002 Employees 300+ Industry Computer Hardware & Software Gong helps us track customer journeys across the entire sales process, establish pain points, determine winning strategies, and identify ways to improve our reps’ performance through coaching and mentoring. Ricky Sevta Global Chief Revenue Officer Technology is transforming how people monitor and improve their performance. Sports superstars like LeBron James analyse game footage to adapt their playing style and learn from their mistakes. Legendary sports teams like New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby squad bring tape into the locker room to prepare for championship games. The old adage is true: seeing is believing. This approach has trickled down to the business world, and I now review video conference footage with members of my sales teams, who switched from in-person to remote sales meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m the Chief Revenue Officer at simPRO Group. Our cloud-based platform is a single-stop service, project, and maintenance management solution used by more than 6,000+ trade and construction companies in field and office environments. Our customers include electrical, plumbing, HVAC, security, and fire protection service providers in the US, the UK & Ireland, Australia, and here in New Zealand. Restructuring Along Functional Lines In the past, our company structured along geographic lines, with offices operating as independent units. Last year, we decided to restructure our business units along functional lines. Instead of having separate teams in each territory, we moved to centrally-managed departments that brought together colleagues from around the world—regardless of location. We were ready to switch to this new way of working, but COVID-19 forced us to put these plans on hold. At first, we thought the lockdown would last a few weeks, and the construction industry would stall. But neither of these realities proved to be true. Although New Zealand and Australia have opened up a lot since spring of 2020, the US and UK have yet to return to normal. After an initial disruption, the construction industry returned to pre-pandemic levels, and our sales reps are keeping busy despite the challenges to their workflows. In Q2 of last year, we transitioned to the new business structure, and I was put in charge of a global sales team. This team consists of multiple internal functions and roles: our partner managers bring in highly-qualified leads; our inside sales team handles the early prospecting phase; our business development managers connect with the trades, construction, and facilities management community; and our account managers people handle the post-implementation customer journey. Investing in Our Future and Visibility When our senior management team realised that thepandemic was here to stay, they decided to move forward with the reorganisation and invest in our future. They asked me to augment our technology stack to bolster collaboration and transparency. They wanted insight into the remote sales process, including intel about our customers’ needs and our reps’ performance. I found that solution in Gong, and our executive team approved my choice. Gong captures customer interactions across calls and remote meetings, providing unfiltered visibility into the activities of my sales team. Gong’s proprietary AI identifies what’s driving effective sales discussions and what’s holding our people back. Rolling Out Gong and Powering Past Resistance I initially rolled out Gong to our US sales team. I was its interim manager during the transition from geographic to functional business units. I wanted to see if practises that worked well in Australia & New Zealand would translate into successful American sales. The pandemic made it impossible to travel to the US to make these changes and coach our teams in person. So, I used Gong to see whether these new sales strategies impacted our bottom line. Instead of guessing whether our sales reps were more or less effective based on numbers alone, I could now analyse their conversations to see what was working and track the point where prospects were converting on the customer journey. There was some hesitation at first. Employees don’t want “Big Brother” watching them, and we had to push past their negative perceptions. Once our reps realised it wasn’t humanly impossible for me to eavesdrop on every minute of every conversation, they loosened up. Instead of thinking of Gong as a way of spying on them, they saw it as a solution that could help them fine-tune their sales process and increase conversions. Sales tools can help fine-tune your sales process and increase conversions. They say that success breeds success. When our other teams saw US sales increase thanks to Gong, they wanted a piece of the action. We rolled it out in other countries, and our sales leaders started to use the Gong deal dashboard to see a clear picture of their pipeline and improve sales forecasts. The numbers speak for themselves. Our US team doubled its sales figures this quarter, and all of our sales leaders are now within 5% of their monthly forecasts. Ricky Sevta | Global Chief Revenue Officer Empowering Alignment from Afar When we moved from a geographic to a functional corporate structure, we had to realign how we shared our vision and goals with employees around the world. I believe in empowering our people to be accountable and in creating a culture of openness and transparency. But it’s hard to do that when you can’t sit down with team members for a heart-to-heart talk. Gong helped me build collaboration into our sales activities and streamline onboarding while respecting the constraints needed to stay safe during the pandemic. It showed me that just because you can’t physically be close doesn’t mean you can’t stay aligned. Even across the globe, sales teams can stay aligned through openness and transparency. With Gong, more of our new hires meet their sales targets within their first quarter at simPRO. After four weeks of onboarding, new reps move to self-directed learning activities and one-on-one coaching through Gong. They can shadow established reps, listen to recordings of their own calls, and work with managers to find ways to perfect their sales technique. Gong has also helped senior reps find their footing during the pandemic. When our BDMs transitioned from field sales to video calls, many of our established employees were thrown off. They assumed they couldn’t be themselves because they had to get straight to the point. There was no way to gauge the room, so to speak; they couldn’t get real-world context for a conversation by driving to a customer’s site and noticing the number of vans/trucks in the parking lot, seeing how the offices were laid out, or observing the dynamic in the office. The only way they could get a feel for a new prospect was by online research, which often presents an incomplete picture. After listening to themselves and their peers in Gong, established reps found ways to adapt their natural charisma to virtual sales. They were not alone in learning from the new platform. All our reps can benefit from Gong’s analytic tools to see interaction rates and analyse how they’re building rapport with their customers. We also use Gong’s trackers to scrutinise customer journeys and break down the sales process. Among other things, we can teach them repeatable steps to follow during the typical two-week sales cycle and how to time discovery questions. Learning from the Customer Voice The pandemic has robbed us of face-to-face interactions at customer sites and industry events like trade shows. Gong has given our executive team the ability to be as close to the customer as possible. Ricky Sevta | Global Chief Revenue Officer We may not always have the capacity to sit down with our clients for a one-on-one pulse check, but we can listen to their interactions with our reps and apply Gong analytics to everything they’re saying. We receive so much valuable data from Gong that we’ve created a Revenue Operations role dedicated to analyzing the information and presenting it to the C-suite. This addition will help us better translate the insights we can glean from Gong’s AI-driven dashboards into actionable strategies to increase sales. Hybrid Sales Amid COVID-19 and Beyond The pandemic forced simPRO to move to a hybrid sales model. We went from face-to-face meetings and handshakes to video calls and e-signatures. This transition could have spelt disaster, but Gong helped our people thrive in this time of crisis. After a brief pause at the onset of the pandemic, we saw trade, construction, and facilities management resume in full force. Meanwhile, our teams in Australia and New Zealand have regained some mobility, but our UK & Ireland and US offices remain in lockdown. We’ve been able to keep pace with our customers, despite the various locations of our employees. Like world-class athletes armed with game footage, simPRO can now learn from the past. From our successes to our slip-ups, we can adapt and get better. There’s no telling when we’ll all hit the road again, but Gong has given us the tools to create a consistent, repeatable remote sales process that will continue to serve us long after the pandemic is a thing of the past. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one LinkedIn Achieves Revenue Success with Gong Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Media & Internet ServiceTitan Gains Higher Close Rates with Gong for Deals Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Business Services Hear.com used Gong to generate a 45% increase in its close ratio Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Global Hospitals & Physicians Clinics

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Watch Appen use Gong to onboard CSMs 4 months faster

Hannah Hapin — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 18:41:36 +0000

Watch Appen use Gong to onboard CSMs 4 months faster Coaching Deal Execution Small Business Asia-Pacific North America Business Services 4 month reduction of time to onboard a new CSM The challenge Appen’s Customer Success team was looking for a more efficient way to manage their communication with customers. The outcome Enabling Gong has not only allowed the CS Team at Appen to easily access all calls and emails for the entire lifecycle of an account, but has also reduced customer churn. Download the PDF Headquarters Chatswood, AU Founded 1996 Employees 800+ Industry Artificial Intelligence What I noticed, especially from the newer CSMs, was that my time to onboard began to significantly decrease. Our onboarding time was shrinking from six months to five months to four months. Ultimately today, I’m able to onboard a brand new CSM within just over two months down from six months pre-Gong. Vaishali Reed Director of Global Customer Success & Programs Operations “I saw Gong and I loved it immediately.” That’s what Vaishali “Shali” Reed said when we asked her to share her reaction to hearing the word, “Gong.” Shali is the Director of Global Customer Success & Programs Operations at Appen, a publicly-traded company that provides data used for the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence products. The Appen platform collects and labels images, text, speech, audio, video, and other data used to build and continuously improve the world’s most innovative artificial intelligence systems. They are helping create the technology of the future — working on a wide ranging span of projects from autonomous vehicles, chatbots, to ground-breaking robotics. Sounds complicated? It is. Put simply, they give companies the confidence to deploy world-class AI by providing intelligent solutions for all their data-labeling needs. And Shali’s job at Appen covers a lot of ground. She manages a team of customer success managers (CSMs) across SMB, mid-market, enterprise, and strategic accounts as well as a team who run Programs Operations. Her day-to-day is focused on building strategic processes and workflows to facilitate existing user onboarding, identify and implement CSM coaching tools (including Gong — of course!) and optimize Gainsight, Salesforce, and the entire tech stack at Appen. And if that’s not keeping Shali busy enough, she also develops the new hire onboarding and promotion pathways. Her team focuses mostly on adoption and utilization. “We’re the platform experts that onboard users. We ensure users have all of the knowledge they need to be able to launch jobs on the Appen data labeling platform.” Prior to Gong, Shali often engaged in the “fun” game of Telephone. And by fun, we really mean frustrating, inefficient, and often a huge waste of time and effort. Telephone game example: Manager: “How did your customer call go?” CSM: “Great. Here are my four most important takeaways.” “But what if the CSM leaves out that fifth point — and it turns out to be invaluable feedback?” inquires Shali. “There was no way to go back and validate what was actually said in the call.” The “game” ended up being a huge pain point for the CSM team. Gong, the “super-smart, intelligent tool,” changed everything for Shali. “Not only does Gong help me understand what our CSMs are doing but it also eliminates objectivity in the telephone game.” With Gong, Appen can “see the full story, not just the four points the CSM thought were most important.” THE GONG ONBOARDING “TIPPING POINT” 6+ months. That’s how long it took Shali to onboard a new CSM in a LBG (“Life Before Gong”) world. “The first three months for a new CSM were reserved for just learning about AI, learning about data labeling, learning about machine learning, and really getting up to speed with the industry,” said Shali. “The next three months were spent learning the different use cases on the platform.” “The onboarding process was completely inefficient.” And painfully long. A new CSM was not able to ramp up for six full months. Two full quarters. It was impossible for Shali to measure the “ROI” of a new hire. And, even if she could come up a number, the investment in time, effort, resources, and money was already a sunk cost. One of the first things Shali did after deploying Gong was to build the customer success library. She began creating playlists and critical areas to help with the onboarding process. According to Shali, the “Gong Tipping Point” for Appen was about six months after the CS library was up and running. Gong forever changed — and improved — the CSM onboarding program. This fact almost had Shali speechless. “Amazing,” she said. “I can have a fully productive CSM managing a full book of business within their first quarter. That’s unheard of for most really technical companies with a complex platform and product.” FOUR KEY ADVANTAGES GONG OFFERS CUSTOMER SUCCESS TEAMS Gong offers Customer Success leaders like Shali several key advantages: Shared Memory: All calls and emails for the entire lifecycle of the account are recorded and easily searchable. Reduced Churn: Gong’s insights help teams uncover the lead indicators of customer churn — quickly and efficiently get alerted on critical renewals for competitive and market-risk accounts. Drive Upsell Opportunity & Growth: Easily monitor leading indicators of customer growth Voice of Customer: Share the true voice of the customer with the product, product marketing, customer education, and operations teams. Appen is currently taking advantage of all four of the above. 1. Shared Memory Shali’s weekly one-on-one meetings prior to implementing Gong often consisted of her team voicing frustration and confusion. It would not be uncommon for her to hear a team member say, “I’m doing so many things and I don’t know where to focus. I’m trying to take notes via notepad on my laptop. I have a physical notepad (with a piece of paper and pen) as well. I’m trying to take notes — I really am — but I know I’m missing a lot of critical details or discovery questions I could be asking customers.” “Now that Gong is recording all of those calls,” said Shali, “we are able to not only do all of our prep work ahead of time in terms of discovery, but we’re also able to really get on the conversation and truly listen to the customer.” “It’s amazing. CSMs are no longer listening to talk; they are actually listening to LISTEN.” Also pre-Gong, CSMs approached calls with their agenda — a list of questions they “had to get through.” It mattered less what the customer was saying and more that they needed to ask their key questions and capture their answers. That’s not listening to learn. That’s not listening to understand. It’s simply listening so you can talk (again). With Gong’s “infinite memory,” a CSM steps into a call with a rough agenda and asks the customer to let them know where they want to spend a little bit more or less time on various action items. CSMs can now “peel the onion back” where it’s most needed. “Gong has helped Appen take the subjectivity out of conversations,” said Shali. Now, when a CSM asks a manager to listen to a call they think had some risk, an experienced manager can go into the call and pinpoint exactly what the customer said and when. Talk about a coachable moment! Not everyone comprehends the same word or phrase in the same fashion. Tone matters. Context matters. Gong eliminates potential confusion and ambiguity. Shali: “As somebody who has been in a customer success role for 10+ years, I can read between the lines better than my associate CSMs, who are often fresh out of college.” Again, Gong serves up incredible teachable moments. 2. Reduced Churn Today, thanks to Gong, Shali can check on the health of a customer relationship proactively. From a renewal perspective, she can see all communications nested under one account, which helps her sniff out if there are any signs of an account churning, and take appropriate actions to prevent it. “If I don’t see any activity on that opportunity for 45 days and my CSM is telling me there’s no risk associated with that renewal, well, I’m kinda looking at them sideways.” Enter Gong: “Let’s review the data!” Shali says that Gong allows her to hold her team accountable vs. just taking them at their word. 3. Drive Upsell Opportunity and Growth No doubt about it: acquiring new customers is a challenge. That’s why tapping into your existing customer base for expansion is crucial for success. A wise company tracks and makes the most of these opportunities to grow within a single customer account. After all, your existing customers know and trust your product and your sales team. Appen is ahead of the pack. Shali and her team began sharing CSM calls with the Sales team: “Listen to this Gong snippet. It sounds like a great expansion opportunity” or “This snippet suggests a new team that’s potentially interested.” With the CSMs and sales teams working together, they are able to maximize an account’s value. 4. Voice of customer Today, Appen is at the point where different teams are involved with Gong — and the entire ecosystem of Gong users in the company benefit from the customer insights that can be gathered from the product. CSMs are usually the closest people to a customer after the ink on a contract has dried. They are the partners that make or break the bulk of the customer’s journey. Through countless conversations, they are privy to tons of feedback, requests, and use cases that many other parts of an organization are hungry for. But with Gong, the other teams at Appen are not as dependent on Shali’s CSMs to interpret a customer’s reality for a particular account. They can listen to the calls themselves, and focus on what’s important to them. Gong helps share the true voice of the customer with product, product marketing, customer education, and operations teams. They are empowered to review and listen to entire calls (or pull relevant snippets). And if they need to have a follow-up — more in-depth conversation — it’s easy! Shali is excited to continue evangelizing the platform. She is thrilled to see how other teams at Appen will leverage the power of Gong. When we asked Shali if Gong was a “nice to have” tool, she emphatically replied, “NO!” followed by, “Gong is NEED TO HAVE.” We are happy you feel that way, Shali. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one Leveraging Revenue Intelligence to Drive Conversions and Build a Growth Mindset Small Business Coaching North America Software Hello, new reality: How Gong helps Apptio keep their field sales team engaged Small Business Coaching Deal Execution North America Software How Temp Staffing Firm Kelly Services Got a 36% Lift in Placement Rates and 50% Faster Ramp Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Global Staffing & Recruiting

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