Conversational Intelligence delivers Revenue Reality - with Amit Bendov, CEO and Co-Founder, GONG

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Amit Bendov, co-founder and CEO at Gong IO. Today, we'll be covering four main topics with Amit. First, the vision behind moving beyond revenue intelligence to the reality revolution. Second, some of the most surprising foundings from Gong Labs. Third, accepting the losses, an interesting piece of advice from Amit. And fourth, Gong, beyond artificial intelligence to building the number one software startup per LinkedIn's top 2021 early stage companies. Amit, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**Amit Bendov** (1:19)
Hi Ray, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I'm Amit Bendov, co-founder and CEO of gong.io. We're a six-year-old company about getting close to like a thousand people based both in Tel Aviv, in the Bay Area.

**Ray Rike** (1:32)
Well, let's dig a little bit into Gong Ioke. So I take it for granted that everyone knows who Gong is, right? But a lot of our listening audience, this might be the first time to get a chance to learn a little bit more about Gong. So Amit, would you mind just giving us a little bit of background of the catalyst for the founding of Gong? Sure.

**Amit Bendov** (1:50)
So first, I thought about the idea for Gong about six years ago, my co-founder, Elon, and I was at that time was a CEO of a SaaS company, fast growing SaaS company called Sysense in the business intelligence space. And I realized how little we know about what's actually happening between our customer facing people and our customers, right? We relied on information that was like reported by the customer success people and the salespeople, either directly to the managers or being put in a CRM. And that was like very little and not very good, right? And I realized that the whole model of CRM is kind of like very outdated. It was built in the 90s for the leadership role, right? And people will fill in information and then we'll have to roll up our reports and know what's going on with our customers. But the customer facing people like actually don't get a lot of value from that. We're filling the data. They do it because we asked them to. And the information is not very good. So I thought, is there something that could do a better job rather than relying on secondhand information, get the information directly from the customer's mouth by reading emails, by listening to video or voice calls? I couldn't find it. That was the idea for Gong. So it's a system that automatically captures customer information without anybody having to lift the fingers. Think of it like a self-organizing customer management system. That was the idea. Interestingly today, Gong is a hot company, but at that time, like most people did not want to invest because it's not a good investment. But fortunately, we got to see it rounding and we took off pretty quickly.

**Ray Rike** (3:28)
Well, I think the momentum is pretty good with your most recent fundraising. Unfortunately, a lot of times we evaluate companies by how hot they are from an investment perspective. But I believe your latest round of investment was about 250 million out of 7 million pre, so 7.25 billion posts. Is that right, Amit?

**Amit Bendov** (3:45)
That is correct.

**Ray Rike** (3:46)
Well, congratulations. And one of the interesting things I've heard about your journey is that really necessity is the mother of invention. That kind of the catalyst for your thought process was a bad quarter at Slicense. And you were trying to figure out what's going wrong because all the metrics look pretty good. Is that correct?

**Amit Bendov** (4:06)
That is absolutely correct. We call it like the quarter from hell, right? It's like we're actually growing pretty quickly and things were looking really good. But all of a sudden we have like a really steep slowdown in sales in Q3, right? After like a fantastic Q2. And I started analyzing like the numbers, like we always do or treat it. Do we have enough leads? Do we have enough calls? Do we have enough people? Everything was good except for actual sales. And in my desperation, I started like asking salespeople, right?