Spotlight on Sales: Aligning Your Team Around Revenue Excellence
Revenue Excellence is a critical function within modern revenue generating organizations, driving revenue growth and strategic alignment across departments. Hear from two experts on how to approach your H2 planning through the Revenue Excellence lens.
Welcome everybody to pipeline summit summer 23. My name is crax went through
founder and CEO of qualified and today
I'm joined by a very special guest oody letter gore who was marketer number one
at gong served as CMO as the company went from
Zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and now serves as chief
evangelist oody. Welcome to the pipeline
Thanks for having me Craig. Absolutely. Well, I mean, there's probably no one
better better than you to give us a
perspective as we start out
What is going on right now and B2B marketing from your perspective? What are
you seeing out there?
Well, we talked to CMOs every day. I'm on calls every day with CMOs and I see a
few patterns happening right now
Everyone's tied on resources
The best cases are teams that are not growing as fast as they did last year
The worst cases are team being cut down and budgets being cut down
So I think what everyone is being forced to do right now is focus on the
essential few things that they have to do to create
Pipeline to support the sales team and do them better than we did before yeah
focus obviously is really key, you know
I listened to a speaking engagement that you did a while back and you said hey
Yeah, back at that time you were the CMO of gong you said as a CMO the thing my
CEO and my board cares about is number one
Am I hitting the pipeline number number two?
Do we have our corporate narrative straight like our story and what we do and
why we're different?
And then if you get those two things right you kind of have a leeway to do
everything else is
His pipeline from your perspective speaking to CMOs out there's pipe one so the
number one priority right now
It is it is those priorities. I think are kind of timeless and they always hold
true
There's definitely less fun money these days. That's why we're seeing less
billboards and television and radio and all those are to measure
Brand awareness campaigns that everyone was doing two years ago
I think there's also a new focus on keeping our existing customers happy
because many SaaS companies who did not have a churn problem and retention
With sky eye are seeing problems now and marketing team is getting involved in
keeping those customers happy keeping them loyal because we all know
It's far more expensive to get a new customer than to keep a customer in place
100% I think for the first time a lot of CMOs out there in their careers
Maybe you're thinking about customer retention and marketing to existing
customers absolutely very first time great insight
You know, I was talking to Sarah Franklin who's the president CMO sales force
Just a couple months back about pipeline challenges and she said
5x is the new 3x when it comes to pipeline
Coverage and she talked a little bit about how she sex those targets and stays
aligned with their CRO
What's your advice for marketers out there right now about pipeline coverage
and how they should be working with sales?
Well, you always want to focus on both the quantity like Sarah talked about 5x
is fantastic if you can get it
But also on the quality because you only need one good lead to close one good
deal
But we all know that it's usually gonna take more than that
So in good times it might be two or three good leads to close one now and might
be four or five
But there's still a lot that marketing teams can do working with ops and the
sales team to increase conversion rates from one point to another
So if you're targeting the right leads if your website experience is converting
the right leads
If you're using the right sales engagement system and the right sales platform
to convert those leads and actually book the meetings
Get them moving down the opportunity journey
Then you don't need a huge amount of pipeline
So quality is probably even more important now than ever before it's a really
fair
Hoyts. I mean, you know usually sales teams always talk about coverage coverage
coverage coverage coverage
But I always one more lead what you were saying is that not all
The not all stage one pipeline converse at the same rates and what are you
doing throughout the funnel?
So I mean, I think that that insight as far as marketers having deep insight
into the conversions down the funnel and not just staying at the top of the
funnel
as a really strategic insight
What are the priorities of gong if I might ask in the second half of the year
when you guys look to generate pipeline?
You're famous for doing so so many amazing things
I mean obviously everybody talks about the Super Bowl commercial, but I see you
guys all over
YouTube your launch and new products you have killer content marketing kind of
Where are you placing your bets in terms of pipe gen as you look to the second
half of the year?
So it's a this year and the second half especially is the culmination of the
last couple of years efforts
Which happened to time perfectly with what's happening in the market right now
and this year's
main theme for gong is going from a point solution for revenue intelligence or
some people still call it conversation intelligence to a
complete platform that allows full cycle revenue teams from SDRs or BDRs
through AEs and customer success
managers to manage their entire day and
This aligns perfectly with what's happening right now in the market as everyone
is talking about tech stack consolidation
So going from maybe half a dozen point solutions to our fewer platforms
Actually hits the mark on three different metrics that everyone cares about
right now
One of them is lowering the cost of your tech stack because we're all crunched
on budget
Number two is providing a better seller experience because the number one
problem
We found 30% of sellers complain about is having to switch between 10 different
systems throughout their day number three
Everyone wants to provide a better buyer experience
Which will increase the conversion rates?
So we talked about throughout your funnel and by having everyone on your team
aligned on one platform you can provide a better buyer experience
So lowering your tech stack better seller experience better buyer experience
that aligns perfectly with what we're doing
And so you're gonna see in our marketing efforts in our product efforts in our
training efforts
We're going from promoting the point solutions that we have until recently to
the full platform that we now have
Everything from aspecting to deal close to renewals and expansions. Well, most
CMOs are I see a lot of CMOs pulling back
Right now
but you guys just kind of went aggressive with this big product launch of of
gone engage and
And now you're a you're a more broad solution. I think
Vender consolidation is the name of the game right now. There's no doubt about
that
But let's talk a little bit about AI because AI is you know
I think when you launch gong engage this you know the slogan was sales
engagement reimagine with AI
But you know that's not a buzzword, you know for you guys you guys have been at
the forefront of using AI for
sales intelligence for some time whether you call it conversation AI or revenue
revenue intelligence was actually the category that you guys coined
What are you seeing out there regarding other groundbreaking technologies other
than gong? Of course?
How should CMOs and heads of demand?
Gen be thinking about AI for pipeline generations or any kind of anything you
've seen that you can tell us about yeah
So like you said Craig gong has been in AI for over seven years now a week
before our parents started texting us about this new AI stuff
And it's super cool that everyone's talking about it right now
Which is why we're also bringing it to the forefront
I think AI is going to change how marketing and sales and many other
professions and teams work
Moving forward there are going to be some low-level tasks that can be fully
automated right now
We're seeing that with sales teams like getting a nudge that someone is back
from out of office
We're sending a templated email that you promised to send there's no need to
hire a very expensive salesperson to do that
Automation can do that with AI right now, but I think for many of these
professions
AI is not going to take our jobs away AI is going to help us be better and go
deeper and spend more time doing the things
We are uniquely qualified to do as human beings
And so if you embrace AI in that way you don't shy away from it say oh, this is
gonna take my job away
No, AI is your friend. It's not your enemy and we're gonna see people embracing
AI from everything
Like editing if you think about marketing teams, right?
They're starting to look at AI and I think the search engines are going to
completely change how they treat organic content because there's no more
Barriers to creating an incident amount of content just prompt the chat GPT and
you've got content like
Till the cows come home, but good content is still gonna require a human being
who has a point of view that might be controversial
Was chat GPT is not because it kind of averages out everything that it was
trained on so it's never gonna have a controversial
Holorizing counter to the point of view that's number one - it's not gonna have
the unique style or voice that a human marketer can have
So you need to inject those things then you can definitely use chat GPT or
other AI products that are helping marketers to fill in the blanks
Once you have a point of view and a tone of voice chat GPT can help you do that
So the human writers are actually moving more into an editor position
But we're nowhere near not needing those people and then if we go to the sales
profession again
Writing the same email over and over 5,000 times
Chat GPT can do that for you
Although I will say that this comes with a big bit warning and there's a reason
why many companies are banning their teams from using these open code open
source
Generative AI systems and the reason is that they do not have enterprise-grade
security
They were not trained on your product or on your customers
They were trained on everything from Super Bowl commercials to Shakespeare
plays
But they don't understand your product
You know how to sell it so what you want to look for your team is a platform
There was purpose built an AI platform purpose built for your sales team that
was trained on billions of sales conversations and not TV commercials and and
scripts
So that's kind of where we see things going well
Generative AI is clearly the term to sure. There's no doubt about that
But one of the things that's fascinated me about what what you've done since
the earliest days of GONG is
Is you've used AI to surface up insights that no human would otherwise find and
then you use that as the basis of your content marketing?
Strategy so you know back in the day you guys launched GONG Labs and you were
serving up insights that were
Fascinating to me where you were telling us all hey
Here's how you win do this on calls don't do this on calls
Hey, when you see this word or don't say this word and then you use that as a
basis of your content marketing
That was the first time that like I was captivated by GONG years ago
What's your perspective today on content marketing and most people think
content marketing in pipe
Gen they'll content marketing might be at the top of the funnel
It's not directly related to demand gen but kind of give it your perspective as
a master content marketer
How do you think of content marketing as a protease of pipe gen?
so content marketing is the base of GONG's
demand-gen strategy and has been for the last seven years and we are bringing
it forward to help
marketers and salespeople use all the AI tools that they now have at their
disposal to do better
Prospecting to do better marketing. I'll give you an example from a GONG Labs
article the most recent one
We just published that was about different types of personalization for
prospecting and creating pipeline
And we found as one example of the many insights in that research piece
We found that SDRs and AEs who use personal
Personalization if I were trying to get to you Craig and I say hey Craig
I know this you were on this podcast turns out you don't care about that as
much as an entry level
Professional if I were trying to hit someone in ops that would actually work
But for sea levels what actually works like three times better than touching on
something that you personally did is if I talk about something your company
Is concerned about right now. I just read in your recent earnings call that you
had a problem in that region
I think we can help with that so turns out sea level execs are former
interested in what their company is up to then what they're personally up to
and
those types of personalization work better and now salespeople have
Generative AI tools to quickly personalize that but that insight is not
something that chat GPT could give you
That's something you have to go to GONG Labs because we analyze over one
billion sales calls and over ten billion sales emails
Chat GPT is not so making the marketing always relevant and allowing sales
professionals to use the latest technology
With these insights is the winning combination and I'll say one more thing you
touched on our recent launch of GONG Engage
Which looked like we poured millions of dollars into it. I'll let you in on the
secret
We did not we did not we rely on doing things smarter in organic ways that don
't cost a fortune
I'll give you two quick examples one we have about 1200 employees at GONG
Or GONGsters as we fondly refer to them. We got about 800 of them
To share the news in one form or another on the day of the launch that kind of
publicity would cost me millions in
Purchased media and I got it free by
Rallying up the team getting everyone excited and getting 800 GONGsters
Even if you assume that every one of them only has like 500 connections just
imagine the reach through the map
It's incredible millions of eyeballs saw the launch tens of millions actually
and that didn't cost anything another example is
We created such interesting news about the launch that tech crunch and venture
beat and and the new stock exchange
Everyone wanted to write about it. That doesn't cost anything if you create a
newsworthy story and the final example
I'm running an influencer program. So we got 20 industry influencers
You know everyone where Lars Nielsen is running the fantastic BDR team at Snow
flake to Jocko Banda Koi
He was running winning by design and other aids the lenses to share the news
without spending a dime on it because we're
Advancing the state of the art of what salespeople can do and everyone in the
industry is excited about it
So when marketing teams plan and create newsworthy stories
You can get hundreds and thousands of people to share without spending the dime
on need you
Well, I think that's a really good segue to my next question about brand
awareness and obviously you just tied a killer product launch back to
Demand J and content marketing, you know back to pipeline generation
Let's talk a little bit about brand awareness in today's world. Obviously
everybody is
Running out of shoestring budget and we're all wondering how we hit our targets
It used to be that when we have larger budgets
We would maybe allocate a percentage of our buzz budget to brand awareness and
you know percentage to demand generation and percentage to something else
But now that we have a tighter budget. I think a lot of CMOs are out there, you
know
Stressing about
Where do I where do I point my dollars?
How do I hit my targets? How do I get my brand out there?
You obviously just gave a couple great examples
But if you were to allocate, you know a percentage of your budget to A B or C
How would you think about it right now if you're speaking to the world's
leading B2B CMOs?
So I've I've often talked about this in the past when I ran the marketing
budget
I had anything from 10 to 15 percent of the budget allocated to marketing
experiments or brand awareness campaigns that we knew
We couldn't get very accurate measurement on and that budget a lot of it has
gone away now
Just like many companies who are trying to save on their marketing budget and
be more precise with what they're doing
But that forces us to be a lot more efficient on
the remaining 85 percent of the budget
How do we get more of that and the time being behind all the things I just
talked about getting your own employees to advocate
And getting influencers interested and getting media interested. There's one
common theme tying all those things together
Focus on what your customer would get excited about and what would add value to
their day
And then you don't really just spend so much money shoving the news in their
face because they will pull it from you
We we got over a thousand demo requests on the day of launch because everyone
got so excited
There was very very little paid advertising involved in that very very little
if I took it away
It wouldn't materially change the results, but we created a story and we
focused not on oh look at our new version 3.2 4.5
It's got all these new bells and whistles
It was no it was here's how sales people can become more productive now and do
something that they care about and that their managers care about right now
And when you always start with what does the customer care about how can we add
value to them in every link in the chain?
How can marketing tell them a story that they can't wait to download just like
the personalization tips that I gave you
There's dozens of those or hundreds on the gong blog salespeople download every
day
I don't have to pay them to do that
I don't have to pay again in front of them because I'm adding value to their
day
And then our customer success managers are working with those customers every
day to show them how they can get more value and get better at their craft
And for the leaders get better in their business by using the insights that
they can gain from gong
So if you always focus on that instead of what many companies do who are
product focused
Oh, everyone needs to know about these new bells and whistles even already
cares about them
No focus on what your customer cares about you will always win even when there
's no budget
It's a timeless message for B2B CMOs focus on what your customer cares about
Udi it's been a pleasure hosting you today at the pipeline summit. Thank you so
much for having me
Cheers
[BLANK_AUDIO]