The Hype is Real - Amit Bendov, Gong | Episode 1

This is 'The Hype is Real' - the only podcast for revenue leaders, by revenue leaders. Each episode features founders and leaders who have created a stir in the startup world. In the first season, we talk to some big names like Gong, Clari, Gainsight about how they outplayed the competition and became successful with the next generation of customers. The hosts for this season are Laxman Papineni, the CEO and Co-founder of Outplay, and Jared Robin, the Co-founder of Revgenius.

Our first episode is with Amit Bendov, the CEO and Co-founder of Gong - a revenue intelligence tool that captures and analyzes interactions, allowing one to make data-backed decisions.

In this episode, Amit talks about:  

●      Key insights from the Gong growth story

●      How to win your first 100 customers

●      Three big reasons Gong has outplayed the competition

●      Common mistakes that revenue leaders make and how to avoid them

●      How to equip yourself to become a successful revenue leader

Transcript:

Laxman
Hey Amit. Welcome to the hype is real, with outplay and rev genius. This is season one of the podcasts where we talk to the real hype crazy growing startup founders like you to uncover what it takes to build such products, teams, and organizations as a whole when we say the hype is real, right. And Gong is one of those companies that we all love and follow. And happy to have you as our first guest. Thanks for joining us today.

Amit
Well, I am excited, then I love the name. The hype is real. So good. Great to be here. I am looking forward to it.

Laxman
So today, both Jared and I are hosting the show. My name is Laxman. I am the founder and CEO of outplay. It is a sales engagement platform. Oh, dear Jared.

Jared
Hey, I am the co-founder of revgenius. And I wear these sunglasses to try to be in line with you and me like you have such a cool brand for yourself and for your code. And I appreciate that.

Amit
You want me to get mine I got a new one that is more like pink to be like on brand. Yes. Yes. I get them

Jared
Absolutely. And yes, so I am co-founder of red genius. We are a community of sales, marketing pros, customer success pros. And we exist to bring, imagine, you know, inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals around the world. And it is exciting to be talking to you today. Because I know, your mission is pretty strong as well.

Amit
Well, I appreciate your mission. I mean, it is a good cause. And if I can contribute something that you know that I consider myself lucky.

Laxman
And Amit, for those who do not know who Amit is and what is Gong. Can we do a quick intro?

Amit
Yes, sure. So, Gong is a SaaS company that has like a revenue intelligence product that helps companies use reality to be better companies and better individuals to improve their performance, mostly in sales, customer success, and support. What the system does is, it understands what is happening between customer-facing people and the customers themselves. In a way, it is like unbiased and lossless right and turns into the insights that help companies become better.

Laxman
Wonderful. And so, is it like a middle of the night you just woke up and said, let us build Gong, or what's the story?

Amit
It was not the middle of the night, if I could use it was a shitty quarter at the beginning of Gong, so I was like, before Gong, I was like, a CEO of another company in a business intelligence space. So, we are actually growing pretty fast. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we had a really bad quarter. And I had no idea what was going on as a CEO. Right. So, you know, we looked obviously at all the metrics like everybody does from the CRM, do we have like enough leads enough calls and have people write in those were kind of like, okay, right. But so I realized that the quality, the issues, not like the level of activity or how much activity we are doing, but actually the quality you know, are we asking the right questions? Are we talking to the right customers or properly qualifying the opportunities? There are a lot of fingers pointing between marketing and sales and I was in the middle and could not understand what is going on? Is it that the leads are not good, or the salespeople are not doing a great job? And then it dawned to me, kind of like, you know, all we have is CRM, and CRM is kind of like this ease, okay, it is a system of record, but only told you like, like, who bought and who did not buy, right. And besides that, there is not much there, right. And everything else depends on the salespeople putting in the information, and they hate it. Right. And they just do not have enough time. It does not serve them in like, in a particular way they are doing it because we forced them, right. So, then I thought, like, you know, there has to be something that captures information directly at the source, right? Without putting the onus on the poor reps, right? Or the customer success. Also, you know, we also had like churn issues if we want to do to understand and I did not have time to ask around, people think of a Gong as a recording platform. We actually, at that company, were recording all the calls, but nobody had the time to go and listen to like one thousand calls or read one thousand transcripts. I mean, that was like, not what we are looking at. So, I wanted something to tell me quickly, like what is going on without going and asking around? And why did listening to like, you know, one thousand calls? That was the impetus.

Jared
You know that such a good impetus. And about 5-10 years ago, when I was in an AE, I was literally asking the interviewer, what is your biggest weakness? And my response was, I am like, do you know what, I'm gonna just give us guys, I'm gonna just shoot it straight. I said, admin work. And his response was, yes, I am not worried that all the best reps are bad at that, like in the interview. So, it is so funny. Now, that is no longer an excuse. But okay, so you have this idea? Gone, you want to make the recordings that you have more actionable. And you separate from this bigger company, you go off on your own, and now you are in founder sales, your first one hundred Customers like, or how does that go? You know, you are probably directly involved with the first one hundred. Walk us through how you went through this? Or do you have the time to listen to your own product on yourself? Are you? What is the Amit cold call Like? Like, how does that go?

Amit
So, the first the first. So maybe I will take a step back before we started, actually, like I had this idea, right? But the thing was being like you would practice actually called, like, 50, sales leaders or so before, and I told him that, hey, we're thinking about, like building this product that will tell you what's going on without anybody having to do anything, like what do you think, you know, it uses natural language understanding and like, just to kind of validate the idea, right? So because a lot of people have like great ideas, but then they find out that's, you know, they might be the only one in the world, or maybe there were a dozen others, but you know, the world, there isn't a market for that, or the market isn't willing to pay something to make a financial Bible. So that was like a first phase that we even like, before starting the company, my co-founder, and I did and that was like, that was a good indication. Because they said, yes, yeah, we want I'm like that we, it sounds too good to be true. You know, how would it work? Like, it is very nuanced. So, they had like, a good number of objections. But they said yes, right. And that, yes, is important to hear, because some people just rushed to start a company, and then ended up that there is no market for that. Right? So, we started a company, and then our first dozen or so customers were beta testers, right? And actually, for the first year, we were not planning to sell anything. We just wanted to train the AI model. And even that was hard. It was hard to get people to use the product for free as a design partner. But uh, you know, at that point, I did what every startup does, right? You beg steal and bribe, right? This is like, so it is like friends and family people that I know kind of owe me something used like emotional extortion, guilt, whatever, right? You just get them to do you a favor and use the product, right? People think because something is free, people are going to use it. No people's problem is time, not money. So that was it. So, we actually put it in the hands of about a dozen companies through our network, right, either me or some of the team members. And these were like a smaller SaaS company that were open-minded. And we will let them use it. And we are planning to run these for about a year. But then something strange happens, right after like three months. You know, we started getting emails, like from reps, right? That they are using the product, it says, oh, well Gong, did not record that call, or it was five minutes late, or if you stayed. And obviously, the engineers got a little nervous and said, you know, that is, that is great, right? I mean, because what's the worst thing, you know, what's worse than then people complaining? And it's people not complaining, right? When people complain, it shows that they care. Right? We actually did not think that the reps are gonna use it a whole lot, right. But then we started looking at logs. So, when they complain is actually like a very good signal. Right? Because they, they want it to work, right? And they care. So, we fine-tune the user interface, which we then find was a little clunky, and we got a little more engagement. And we find a little more, we kind of moved the buttons around and made the labels a little clearer. Nothing earth-shattering, but an engagement went up. And now so we launched like April, sorry, we launched like mid-January 2016, not launched a beta, right. And we told everybody can use it for a year for free. And then around April engagement was kind of interesting. So, at pure curiosity. Like I was telling my partner Elon, do you know what, let us do like a trial close. Let us see what happens. Right? And, and just, we wanted to know, if we have a product that if that has like enough value that people would be willing to pay. And, you know, we did not need the money, and we had money, it was just kind of to understand, do we have something as valuable? valuable enough? We assume that we do not. Right. So, we, and we thought actually, about the pricing. So, the pricing was around like 30 to 50,000 per company, which struck us is, you know, this was an experiment. So, if we have searched for a million, everybody who said Get the hell out of here, right? And if we charge like, one thousand, everybody's gonna buy and it is not gonna tell us anything. So, we, we wanted something is like, somewhat painful, but not overly painful, right? It is like a company can, you know, allocate that budget? So, we reached out to all our dozen buyers and said, like, hey, everybody, like, we are sorry, the beta is over, it is time to buy. Right? And everybody hated us. Right for doing it, which was good, right? And eleven out of twelve, bought within like, a month, I think by May, we got the first order by June, we had living paying customers. And then we are looking at each other. Elon and I say, Oh, wow. Like, this is beyond expectation. People are actually paying. despite us being annoying, it means that the product is like, it is something that looks like a maybe like a nice to have to remember when to beg people to use it like early on because it was hard to grasp. Like it does something that when you use it, you understand. But before that, it is hard to understand the experience. And then, just as a fun fact, like the twelve customers did buy a year later, actually for a lot more, but they felt it is expensive. At that time, eleven out of twelve says okay, like this is this is good, right? And so that is how we got the first customers, friends, and family, right? But we kind of like asked for their business like pretty early, just to see if we have something or not what we wanted, if people would say no, right? The important stuff was said like, okay, what do we miss? Right? Where is the gap in a product that people will get people to yes, that was like the real intent and kind of like a, but actually, it was more successful than we thought. I will pause here at that point. We had like no pipeline no marketing, which was it. We had like eleven paying customers but nothing else. 

Laxman
Twelve leads and 11 paying customers.

Jared
From 11 to 100. What did that look like? Was it being word of mouth or did you start building a pipeline or did you start hiring?

Amit
No, no, it was like there was elbow grease. So, there is no word of mouth. So, I did like two things. So, I hired like two or three friends as consultants who want to do marketing is like Linda Gore is now our CMO and says as we work together at like two companies says, hey, can you help me with some freelance work to run some lead gen campaigns for us. And these were like, people coming to our website, and you know, go we had like, like a Calendly kind of thing that will go directly to my website to my calendars. I was fielding the calls, and I get like, sometimes like a dozen a day. So that was good. And also hired. Brendan Cassidy, who worked with one of my executives to do some, some outreach and kind of SDR per hire, right? That did some lead gen for us. And that started like bringing some calls all these like three together, it got us with some, some kind of pipeline. It took us a while to understand, like, to whom are we selling? And so, we had like a great, great beginning, right. And then I started getting some calls, we did not know exactly first like how to pitch the product. So, because it has like a like one hundred mini feats, you know, it helps product it helps marketing and helps customer success rate of sales. Like he does this, right, you know, the explaining technically you do send a value, right? One is too vague. The other is too technical. So, define the kind of like the middle ground. And, and most of the leads that we got, were actually like sales, sales operation, people, which makes a ton of sense. But there was a big issue with that. None of them want. They will tell us like that. Oh, this is super cool technology. But we have two or three other projects right now. And, and so maybe talk to me, like in six months, in, which is kind of the kiss of death, right? This is like, and in plus, it is expensive, right? He was like, I think like $65 a month, right? At that time. That is what our asking price was and says it is like, it's too expensive. So those things are, you know, it is killing you to hear that, right. But fortunately, we had, we had Gong right. And we are getting in a matter of like, six weeks or so I remember it was still like in the summer. So, we got the first customer in June. And during the summer, we started getting those meetings, the right salesperson that was like very easy to get a meeting, because they're there, they'd be interested. But then we realize, okay, because we had like forty of these conversations in a period of about six weeks. And all of them kind of say exactly the same thing. This is super cool. I have two or three other projects, and $65 is a lot. Right? So, fortunately, we are able to see a pattern, right? And if you get one of those you do not know, but if everybody kind of says the same, it is, you know, it's just impossible that everybody has like two or three other projects and we said OKAY, we're kind of barking up the wrong tree. And then we realize that we need to sell to CROs we still just Do you know, we work like with sales operations like great today, but it is not our entry point. Because it is always like, and they are right. I mean, they are they have they are overworked they have like a lot more work than they can handle. They are the kind of the responsible people with a spreadsheet and a budget right and it's not and Gong is kind of at least like early on was kind of hard to get right you know do I really need this or not right and he knew that if you don't experiment Do you don't know that you need it?

Laxman
Was it more around good to have product was as a must-have kind of a thing that you faced?

Amit
Yes, it was so here's I think Gong is like a dishwasher, right? You do not need it right? I mean you could do fine without it but once it is in like you're not going back, right? So that was our challenge, right? That we knew how good it was people that use it you remember that the beta customer that kind of did us a favor we have to twist her arm to use the product they hated us for stopping the beta and actually paid substantial amounts right because they do not want not to have it right and to this day like you know we have very little churn right? Despite having like, you know there are cheaper options in the market. and all of that just you know, very few people just go back, and almost nobody goes back to nothing. Maybe they go for something way cheaper or free. But so that was clear. And we could not make that. At least we were not successful in convincing, like operations leaders that they always have. They are doing like the leader is setting the agenda and saying, you know, we need them, like a quota management system, we need a commission management system we need. We need a lead database, we were always like, we are not a priority. Because they did not necessarily own the number they didn't. The size and the nice to have, right? Today, it is somewhat different. But unfortunately, because we had Gong, right, we knew that actually, hey, wait a minute, we are getting a very consistent answer. Like it is literally identical. So, we knew, okay, we need to change, like who we are selling to. And, and it was harder, it is harder to reach out to a sales leader than a sales operations leader. But we said, okay, we are going to, we're going to make the extra effort. But once we started talking to CROs and Chief Sales Officer, from that point on, he was like, a lot easier.

Jared
Nice. And so, you had something sticky, and let us go into like the wow factor, right? Because you very much did create a category and you know, friend, Chris Luckey, who wrote a book I love to play bigger talks about when you make a category, this is the best marketing you could do. Right Salesforce, with software as a service, and then so on and so forth. Now, you started humbly as we all do, and now you're sitting at seven and a quarter billion valuation, 2000 customers, all of this, you know, what are some of the big reasons when, when all the competitors came in that you kept that advantage, and if there's any, like secret sauce, takeaways that you have, and I noticed, the branding and all that comes up, I see you have your head of content, saying he wants to be the first b2b marketer sponsored by a shoe deal you'll want from a really great product, or that evolve to a great product to a really great brand. And, and I would love to hear, you know, some of the secret sauces there that helped make that happen and help you maintain that lead when others came in.

Amit
Yes, it's not it's not a secret. I mean, these are pretty, pretty basic. Right? But I mean, it is harder, it's easy to explain, it's harder to execute. Right? So that is like that's the hard part. So, there are a few things where do I start? First is the determination like and like I actually like remember my story I was looking for something I wasn't looking to start a company I had to shoot a quarter and I was looking for somebody to give me the information I started Googling right and I couldn't find these things Hey, maybe there is a company here, we then validated and we did the beta right after we did that we found it actually well there are some others in the market or we're doing it right. And at that point, I remember was like January 17, we still have it recording and Gong was like all-hands call so well listen to companies with a revenue goal like which was like pretty ambitious. I said there is only one thing that matters by the end of this year. We are going to be number one, we're going to be the undisputed leader Right? Or personally, I am not interested in this company. Right, we will not be in a two-horse race so there are a lot of examples of companies like in a two-horse race was a hand up like nobody wins it's a race to the bottom they're cutting each other, and usually, the leader in SaaS takes like 60% of the profits right? It might be like a lower market share maybe you know Salesforce probably like 20% market share in CRM last time I have checked but in terms like the interesting revenue is theirs right. So, like we will be by the end of this year so the realization that you cannot be like in a two-horse race like no matter what definitely on a three-horse race right excuse like it says like as the infamous movie says there is you know the second prize is a steak knife, that’s is it. I am not working like 1617 hours a day for this right I'll work like 24 hours, but I want the grand prize. So, this is like the realization you have to break away fast. Right? And you could be whatever it is right could be like better easier to use you know different Mark better for a certain type of the population. But you have to understand your difference, right? We wanted to be the best right? Just absolutely the best. Others can be like the cheapest right now. And that has been like the realization number one, you have to be the leader fast, right? And it gets easier because it is some point where the difference is becoming clearer in the early days, it's not clear then more people want to buy from you. Right? Because okay, this is like the horse we are betting on this is what everybody the ecosystems are to develop and support, and it becomes easier. So, you have to work fight really hard so that's number one, you must be the leader known for something. Second, my approach is kind of like to our market and to out engineer everybody. So, the aim is to try to create a product that is so good that even a mediocre go-to-market team can push it and at the same time, create a go-to-market team that is so good that they can push a mediocre product. Right? And if you nail these two together, then you have something that is like explosive, right? And you know people think okay, Gong's marketing is amazing. And it is. It is not apologetic, like, but it's not the marketing. Because in the end, like, you know, everybody that buys Gong also looks at other options, right? If we were like, the better marketing that that what gets people to us, but in the evaluation, we would lose. So, the other options are cheaper, right? And if we are not better, like who in their right mind would buy, why would they buy Gong? Like, because of our cool logo, right? These are colors this is like, so you have to like out engineer and out market and focus on these two and you have like a good team and, and three is the caliber of the team is gone. So, this is my fourth company. Alright, I have not started for the first time. And I knew that when you grow fast, you need to hire like really great leaders. So, from early on, we bought like very senior people we had like a Ron who was like, COO at Adobe, Ron Longfield. CRO, who was like he managed like $300 million at LinkedIn. Right? And in the gang, we are like 5 million, right? Tim readers, our CFO, he mentioned, like a billion and a half. And, you know, we are, you know, we're probably like 9 million when I started talking to so you know, you try, again, sell the dream and get people to go back to like changing diapers, so they can build their organization fast and bring the talent. So, all these things, right, you the realization you have to be a leader. Like no matter what, second out market engineer 3d kind of the caliber of the team at fast growth is key. 

Laxman
Yes, wonderful. And those are the three key points. Thanks for sharing those. They are really awesome. And you said, like, we have to grow fast. That is what you did in the meeting. Right? And when you are trying to grow fast at the same time, I'm sure though you're a seasoned leader, there is a fourth company that has hired all the best people in the world. But still, you would have made a lot of mistakes on the way right. So, do you recall any of the one or two top mistakes that you kind of made? And if you go back probably, how would you correct them.

Amit
Okay, this is gonna sound unreal, we have made a lot of likes, small mistakes on some hires, and there we have not, we've not yet. We could, right we have not yet made a big mistake. Right? So, and I think it is like the credit goes to the team right at Gong, we have you know, we have a great team, you know, the adventure is when you sit around the table, right to make decisions, right? Then, you know, hopefully, there is enough CPU power around there. And a diversity of opinion, you weigh things like from all direction and then you make the right the right call. And this is important, I think we I think that we've made kind of the right decisions like it almost like any given point there is like early days, we actually like people think that transcription is like the key for Gong actually, transcription is not a core competency of Gong, we have our own but when we started we actually use something else. Right because a lot my co-founder he was smart enough and he said like listen like the difference between our own and like a Google is like, maybe like 7% Difference view for like, you know, 73% to 77% of accuracy, right? I do not want to They are serious a money on 7%. I mean, it was like 99%. That is something but it's not like a huge difference. So actually, the competition started to, you know, they created their own to spend time creating something. And we said, like, we just want to see what people will pay for first, right? And we actually like we actually, we didn't even show the transcript, right? Because we knew that once you see people see a lot of flows, it actually creates like a poor experience. If you show it. People see the flaws, you do not show it people Oh, this is amazing. So that was like a good call that we made early on, right. And at any given time, we actually decided we are not going to have our telephony system. Right. The others wanted to have their own telephony, they waste a lot of time, and engineering resources. So, I think in any junction, and if you look at most successful companies, right, whether it is by pure luck, or smarts, right, I don't know, but like almost any decision point, any junction, they kind of took the right turn, right. Google decided to build their own hardware, right, which is maybe could have been like a wrong decision, but it actually turned out, okay, because they could like scale. Right? And in companies like, you know, they can probably do like one or maybe like two major mistakes. This is it. Like from that point on that they may not die but will never be great again. Like it is hard. I am knocking on wood so far, I think the big decisions we kind of did, okay.

Laxman
That is a smart move, not to build and use whatever it is. And the and the better is not showing the flaws.

Amit
Right. Right. So, it is counterintuitive, but that, like, that's what a lot of people would do. We actually interviewed a lot of people like before that in industry, and they kind of gave us the tips we everybody, like when they think of something like ooh can you do it real-time? Right. Okay. And so did we, we did not send it, but we interviewed actually people to Congress. So, this is a selling feature, and nobody uses it. Because like, first you need someone who will monitor like fifty calls in real-time. Like, you know, managers really want that. And second, that the kind of value that you get you to know, the things that you can say in real-time aren't profound, right? And they are more of a distraction and value. So, we decided, no, we are not going to do real-time and others try to do it. And it did not work. Right. So, all these things, we actually took the time to study and understand what really matters to people, for what would they pay. And that was like, that was key to getting the traction early.

Laxman
On. That is a smart move. And going a little bit of the business side. Being a CEO of such a crazy growing company with almost one thousand employees, 2000 customers 500 million funding seven and a half billion valuation. How does your day look like I You're the crazy person that works 24/7 or you work nine hours?

Amit
Not twenty-four on seven, like nineteen seven. So, well. It is interesting. So first, like I do not sleep a lot, it has nothing to do with Gong, it just kind of like always to like on the move. And now kind of like my day is interesting because not everyone knows it. But our product team is based in Israel and our go-to-market team is in the US. We recently opened like an office in Dublin and we are about 20 people over there, which is great. I used to travel a lot, so I spend my time half and half like in San Francisco and half mentality with my family. Now it is kind of interesting, right? So, my mornings are two days a week I go to the office back to Israel to work with the r&d team. Again, not that I really need to be there but just kind of to show go like high five people and be present. But my work usually starts at like 5 pm whereas they used to like West Coast time. And until like midnight 1 am. I exercise a lot. So, I would do at least like seven or eight sessions a week, right? So, like definitely every day a lot of time like two and sometimes like three times three times a day. And this is usually during the morning time, so mornings are a little easier for me. I do wake up early, and I go to sleep late.

Laxman
Hmm, nice. So, you are still working? How many hours like more than 10 hours?

Amit
Yeah, I do not I don't necessarily measure I don't know. It is like it's 24 and seven. It is the mindset, right? You are always like the engine is always on. And like I have been you know, I go to like a Pilates class and my trainers who say I see where your head is like you're thinking All right. So, it is like it's always like, it's always on. But definitely like, the hours, I will say like two things. First, I have an incredible leadership team and incredible team, not just the leadership, right? I could take like, 30 days off, like off the grid. Right? And everything would work just fine. The team does not need me. So that is like a sign. And I tell it to my managers, like, if you cannot afford to take like, 30 days off, right? Something is wrong. You do not have the right people, we have not set the right process, so you're not empowering them.

So, you need to be able to take 30 days off, which is a good test, to see if you had a team. And so yes, I just really, uh, I'm blessed to have a team that allows me to focus on the direction of the company on business development on team development, right? These are the things that really are where I can make the biggest impact and all the nitty-gritty operational stuff. 

Jared
The team, the team, obviously came through multiple times, clearly, and it's funny when you when I'm thinking about how much I work, and I don't know, but I do know, between eight and 10 pm, every night, my partner said no phone, that that seems to be like a reasonable window, you know, get back from the office around eight, no phone during dinner, and watch one show. And then we could argue if I could go on or not, but you know, balancing is everything, but you know, being conscious of time here, no one understands the future of the industry from your point of view. What do you think the future of sales looks like? Because before you, y'all are part of evolving it, and you're at the forefront? What is next?

Amit
Right? So there, there are a few trends. First is obviously work from home or work from anywhere, right? We are going digital, right it's like a COVID has been like a kind of like a shock treatment for the world. Right? It looks all right, so inside sales, but now it's like, whether we like it or not, where do you think is good or not? Right? Either. Obviously, mixed views. This is here to stay right? It is not coming back. So, we have like Gong was pretty much everybody. Or most people were in San Francisco. I do not even know where people are today. Like I still go, and you know, so many people have kind of left in there. Some of them like moved outside of the city is still in the Bay Area. And some people are in Hawaii in Vermont, literally like in Chicago and Texas, right in, in Arizona. So, people are very, super appreciated. We have literally like digital nomads, where she so that's here to stay and everybody's been like selling you like in person right now needs to get to the user, you can be anywhere and it's not just a matter of what you want your customers, the people that you're selling to right, they're going to be everywhere. So, what is even if you still want to go to like the old, like let us go to like ballgames I mean, you might still get to do that, but it's definitely not to the extent it was before. So that is, that's your number one, the digital transformation and the flexibility work for a second. I already talked about the great resignation. You know, we spoke about the materials like, you know, we mentioned the minute reference to Glen Ross right it is kind of like a set of steak knives this is this is like changing because the workforce you need you to know, it almost like flicked right? You need to sell to come to people, they have a lot of other options there is a shortage of, of talent, right? And why should people work for you? Right? This is like you need to become the best you need to make them successful you give like a great environment. So, the onus is to companies to become like the talent magnet, right? And it is a real challenge because a lot of people don't need to don't want like the stress, right? And the and the frustration that in the suspense is not often like associated with sales. I mean, we know everyone loves the glory and the winning and everything but there is also a lot of likes, stress. And third, this is from a technology perspective, this is what we've been trying to do right is to create an autonomous system that takes away that work that you hate, right who's just like the administrator, you said that Jared right it's like and even like according to Salesforce like reps spend like half of their time on non-selling activities, right. It is like

updating their forecasts that they need records sorting and sifting through lists up their name managers, 101 pipeline reviews, all these things. You One of the things that they love, which is like talking with other people, right, talking with customers, talking with prospects, this is the stuff that they enjoy in what we are paying to do. So traditionally, like CRM, like as, you know, massive potential, it is great a system of record sales. Yes, who bought the phone numbers, their names or emails, right. But not everybody has them. It is definitely not a competitive advantage, not in the workplace, right and not in the marketplace, their system or workflow, and the new thing is a system of intelligence. And that kind of looks at what is going on automatically understands what people are saying, and then drives action. Based on that, when you want why people like Gong are not necessarily gone something like Gong because he does quite a bit for you, and does not ask you to do anything, right. All you need to do is just get on a call and he does the rest. So, it's a hands-free system, totally autonomous, and it'll get better over time. So, these three things, digital transformation, the war for talent and autonomous system, and actually destress is the system and takes the stuff that people hate.

Laxman
Wonderful, some good insights. And again, conscious of the time we will wrap up, wrap it up with the last question. I think we would love to have one more hour with you, but we will let you go because you had a hard stop. So, one last question. If you have to drop one name, who would be that one guest you recommend being on this show next.

Amit
Paul McCartney. Okay. All right. Well, if you get it, I like a good friend of mine like Andy Byrne from Clari, great company and great product and definitely like, I think it'd be great to get a call if you want, I can make the intro.

Laxman
Wonderful, wonderful that is even better.

Jared
Thank you for your time.

Amit
My pleasure. Thank you. It is a pleasure and good luck and congratulations. I love your name.

Laxman
Hi to Gong. We all love your marketing tactics and how you guys build.

Jared
We love Gong.

Laxman
Yes, we love Gong and I had to get the T-shirt.

Amit
I love your T-shirt.

Laxman
All right, thank you Amit. I really appreciate your time and all the best for the future of Gong.

Amit
Of Couse you too! 

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