It’s a familiar tale for many of our readers in Sales. Sales figures are falling, and fewer deals are being won by reps known to be good performers. Revenue levels are stagnating, and growth figures make for miserable reading. Times are tough in just about every industry, and the CRM reveals far too many entries along the lines of “No Decision” or “No Budget.”
Of course, the present economic slump affects every company and, therefore, every sales department. But not all lost revenue can be attributed to the macro-climate, and the real reasons for a deal not progressing are complicated. Sales reps’ entries in win-loss fields are often incomplete or include a biased opinion, e.g., “The product lacks functionality,” or “Our price was too high.” Can results be attributed to an individual rep’s performance, or have competitive pressures changed? Until now, the answers have been conjecture at best.
The real reason for sudden drops in revenue was what Amit Bendov was looking to unearth back in 2015. Amit was then the CEO of one of the hottest enterprise analytics startups, and he did what any serial entrepreneur does best: he tackled the problem head-on.
By listening to his company’s customers and prospects, he found the answers he needed that explained sales trends: every peak, every trough, success and failure. The voice of the customer helped him see the reality of what was happening in the business.
However, Amit found the way he’d gathered, collated and processed these customer insights wasn’t scalable. This was the germinal impetus behind Gong, a platform that started as a conversation-intelligence tool and one that’s since evolved to become the market’s leading Revenue Intelligence Platform.