How monday.com used Gong to align revenue teams around customers

Gong is a team unifier.

The revenue intelligence platform empowers many teams and individuals within a sales organization to come together and win as one team. It provides them with transparency, insights, and actionable next steps at every stage of the customer journey.

Monday.com is SaaS work management software that makes it easy to build, run, and scale workflows on a single platform. The company has enjoyed massive growth in recent years thanks to its agility and ability to work as a genuinely cross-functional organization.

Gong helped monday.com accelerate growth by providing valuable insights across several of its teams.

“I cannot say enough about the undeniable value that Gong adds not only to my role in Sales Enablement, but to our entire client-facing organization as well,” shared Dave Seugling, Director of Global Sales Enablement at monday.com.

Gong helped align the entire GTM team at monday.com. 

Dave used Gong to successfully implement a new GTM strategy, including updated messaging. Jason Miller, Director of Sales in North America, used Gong to drive more effective pipeline reviews and one-on-ones. And Cassie Vaughn, the Team Manager for Enterprise Success, exceeded her goal of upleveling client partnerships through more efficient Executive Business Reviews (EBRs).

Since implementing Gong, monday.com has: 

Moved away from assumptions and towards a reality-based world
Recognized the power of autonomous insights to guide its teams
Enabled truly cross-functional collaboration and alignment 

Read on to learn how monday.com leveraged Gong across its organization to boost alignment and accelerate the growth of its business, specifically its sales enablement, sales, and customer success teams.

How sales enablement measures GTM messaging

According to a recent Harvard Business Review study, people forget 87% of what they learn in training sessions after about 30 days.

That means your real challenge isn’t launching a new initiative or making people aware of the behaviors that need to change. That’s the (relatively) easy part. Rather, the hard part is everything that comes after the training and launch, like getting them to adopt and maintain those new behaviors.

monday.com recently launched new GTM messaging as it began serving as a Work Operating System (Work OS) for hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. This new GTM messaging needed to be rolled out across its sales team, its customer success team, and all the remaining employees at monday.com — no small task.

That’s when monday.com leaned heavily into Gong.

As monday.com’s Director of Global Sales Enablement, Dave helped execute this initiative. He led the sales team’s roll out of the new org-wide messaging.

Per Dave, “monday.com is a product that can essentially do anything work-related, but we were struggling to communicate that to our prospects effectively.” The new Work OS messaging was going to be a game-changer, but our team still needed to successfully train, evaluate, and certify the entire organization on the new messaging. Plus, they needed to be sure the new messaging landed as intended, and was adopted by prospects, customers, and the market at large.

Dave and his team used Gong to track the effectiveness of this GTM initiative, which included 100+ reps across the company, as well as other employees.

Gong’s platform helped Dave and his team easily understand which reps used the messaging and which ones needed more guidance. They used Gong trackers to see whether reps used keywords in customer conversations. Once a salesperson fully grasped the new messaging, monday.com changed that rep’s status to “GRADUATED” on a monday.com board. 

Transparency was essential and helpful, as everyone knew the expectations and where they stood.

Gong’s trackers didn’t stop with the new messaging. The monday.com team also set up trackers for other keywords reps used on calls, specifically flagging “filler words” … like, awesome, um, and great. The trackers uncovered which reps used filler words and how often. The goal was to minimize their use and focus instead on language that moves deals forward.

“Trackers have been a lifesaver,” said Dave. “The ability to jump to a specific section in a call is super-efficient … a big time-saver!

Another positive outcome of this initiative was the increase in peer-to-peer coaching. Reps who “graduated” with a full grasp of the new GTM messaging got to help out reps who were struggling. Students became teachers, which freed up more time for sales leaders, who could let coaching happen more independently on the team. 

How sales leaders drive effective pipeline reviews and one-on-ones

As the Director of Sales in North America, Jason Miller regularly thinks about sales process improvements. The main question is how he can get his team to overachieve month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year.

Jason was interested in creating real procedural change, specifically, driving more effective pipeline reviews and one-on-ones. He had three goals:

Ensure that his team was less reliant on salesforce.com field data and opinion-based sales rep input
Improve insights for managers so they could drive better conversations using improved coaching
Create more actionable outcomes in one-on-ones

Gong has also helped Jason “answer the whys” for his team. That means making sure reps know why managers coach them on specific things. Gong’s Deal Drivers, for example, are notifications that show him where reps have deficiencies in their process. Their managers can jump in and help the reps course correct immediately using data to clarify the issue.

Jason sees real value in understanding three key data points: 

The percentage of calls that don’t have a next step on the calendar
Which opportunities haven’t had any activity in a certain number of days
The instances when reps are ghosted, have single-threaded conversations, don’t get to power, or are stalled in a specific stage, etc.

Without Gong, getting this data can be a time-consuming process. Sometimes it involves reps uploading data into salesforce.com, or having managers search the data manually, or — worst of all — simply guessing  at what’s really happening after staring at endless numbers.

“Gong bubbles issues to the top, doing the automated work for us,” says Jason. “This allows monday.com to focus dedicated energy on helping reps improve. Our managers can add immediate value.”

Gong’s platform also helps monday.com reps and managers focus on being more aligned.

Jason knows Gong’s magic is working because reps can quickly and easily tell him the area(s) they need to focus on. “They recognize their areas for improvement thanks to Gong’s data and insights. This alignment on what needs fixing helps drive behavioral change across the entire team.”

Furthermore, Jason sees feedback in Gong call recordings as instrumental to helping reps develop. “Sales trainings where I included Gong call snippets — from actual calls — have been far and away the most impactful sessions.”

“Hearing a real buyer talk is way more meaningful than a sales manager telling a salesperson about the same thing. The more a rep hears someone in their seat doing something correctly, the more effective it is,” shares Jason. 

Jason’s key takeaway is this: Don’t boil the ocean. He highly recommends focusing on one — maximum two — key metrics until they’re fully dealt with.

Jason also had this to say about Gong:

“When I hear Gong, I generally think of call recordings. That’s where Gong laid its roots, where a lot of people use it, and  why a lot of people buy it. But it’s become so much more than that for us. As Gong moves more deeply into revenue intelligence, there’s a lot more data it now derives. The data comes from many different places, as Gong is plugged into our CRM, our Zoom, our emails, and our calendars. So it picks up a lot of automated data that Salesforce can’t or data that we used to rely on the reps putting in.”

How customer success uplevels client partnerships

Before 2021, the  customer success (CS) team supported the product and helped train customers for monday.com.

While those goals haven’t changed, they have certainly evolved. “We needed to pivot to upleveling our conversations with customers. We’re now more consultative and able to engage in true partnerships,” said Cassie Vaughn, Team Manager, Enterprise Success at monday.com.

The monday.com CS team aimed to uplevel client partnerships through Executive Business Reviews (EBRs).

However, they faced a huge challenge: CS team members had different levels of experience, especially when it came to EBRs. As a result, there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to help them reach their goals.

“We knew it was essential to take a data-driven approach to our EBRs,” shared Cassie. It was also essential to treat this as a cross-functional initiative and work with the Sales team and account managers. The CS team needed to be aligned with other teams in the monday.com organization. 

“Gong was the data-driven partner we needed to make this cross-team collaboration happen.”

Cassie and the CS team set some ambitious goals: 

Conduct 4 EBRs per CSM, per quarter
Initiate bi-monthly peer review sessions with the Sales team

CS launched new monday.com dashboards, presentation templates, and talk tracks, using Gong to provide data and insights on usage and effectiveness.

It worked.

In Q3 of 2021, monday.com’s CS team completed an astounding 100+ EBRs.

Gong helped make this happen, thanks in part to how easy it is to share lessons learned. “Reps were able to learn from their peers. They shared the highs and lows, what worked and what didn’t work, and that was extremely valuable,” said Cassie. In addition, the team was able to review Gong calls and truly dissect each EBR from start to finish, looking for key indicators of what a compelling call looked and sounded like.

Even better, the reviews weren’t limited to the CS team. Cross-functional teams listened to calls, left comments, collaborated, and ultimately helped everyone level up in a very organic and natural way.

Gong enabled real-time coaching through peer-to-peer comments and scorecards that managers used. These Gong scorecards comprised five to seven focus areas that helped management consistently track messaging as well as their own coaching. 

“The scorecards made us better coaches,” said Cassie. “Over time, we moved all our scorecards from private to public, providing full visibility and creating truly collaborative opportunities.”

Gong makes life easier at monday.com, one insight at a time

Products and brands evolve. (Read about Gong’s recent rebrand here!) 

When the team at monday.com underwent a global revamp of their mission and brand, they got things right because they used Gong and relied on data to see them through.

Gong unlocks reality to help companies and their reps reach their full potential.

Today, monday.com still relies on data to power its initiatives and improve its reps through ongoing coaching efforts. 

As Cassie said, “I’m not one to publicly rave about business products I love, but I can truly say the one piece of tech that has made life so much better is Gong.” (We swear we didn’t put her up to it.)

You got it, Cassie. Gong has your back with unstoppable revenue intelligence. We’re delighted to know it’s changed your world, and can’t wait to see where it takes your teams next!