2022 Golden Gong Awards showcase companies using Gong’s automated insights to deliver strategic business results
Gong, the Revenue Intelligence leader, today announced the winners of the third annual Golden Gong Awards, which recognizes companies using Gong to help their sales teams drive efficient revenue growth.
Ten companies were selected as winners based on their use of the Gong Reality Platform to increase sales productivity, improve deal execution, and help ensure the success of strategic initiatives, especially as market needs change. Gong supports revenue teams’ most critical workflows in one platform to understand pipeline risks and opportunities, and prompt revenue teams to take action accordingly. With this understanding, organizations can increase sales productivity and pivot their revenue strategies to better address changing market needs.
“More companies are choosing to consolidate their sales technology stack on the Gong platform because of its ability to increase revenue teams’ productivity, improve decision making, and drive efficient growth,” said Bríon O’Connor, CMO, Gong. “This year’s Golden Gong Awards recognizes the companies that have adopted this approach to transform their revenue organizations and grow strategically despite economic challenges.”
The 2022 Golden Gong winners are:
- The A-Team (NEW) – Best Use of Gong Across Your Organization Story: Alpine IQ
- The Captain – Best Gong for People Story: Greenhouse Software
- The Globetrotter (NEW) – Best Use of Gong Across Countries Story: Mimecast & Indeed
- The Innovator – Most Creative Use of Gong Story: Datarails & Demandbase
- The Most Valuable Player (MVP) (NEW) – Best Use of the Entire Gong Platform Story: DemandScience
- The Powerhouse (NEW) – Best Gong for Performance Story: Andela
- The Strategist – Best Gong for Strategy Story: MasterClass
- The Visionary – Best “We Switched to Gong” Story: Rollworks
The Golden Gong Awards is an annual initiative to recognize companies leveraging revenue intelligence in an innovative way. This year’s winners were selected from 183 total nominations across 101 customer accounts.
Quotes from the Golden Gong Award Winners
Alpine IQ initially started using Gong solely for their customer success team and later brought Gong into the sales and marketing team.
“Gong is a pivotal part in Alpine IQ’s day to day operations. Our marketing team uses Gong to improve sales’ materials by listening to demos and pulling keywords for company-wide materials. The sales team save and share demos through Gong as well as use interaction insights to better improve sales calls,” said Alesia Anderson, Marketing Brand Manager, Alpine IQ. “Gong was instrumental in Alpine IQ’s 74% growth in recurring monthly revenue in 2022.”
Greenhouse Software used Gong to help reinforce the training for its sales force (Small Business and Mid-Market Account Managers) around a new product that had recently been launched.
“At Greenhouse we strive to create a culture that fosters innovation and encourages our employees to think differently,” shared Jessica Clay, Senior Program Manager, Sales Enablement, Greenhouse Software. “Last year our Small Business and Mid-Market Account Management teams took a new approach to a product launch and we developed a biweekly game-film series using Gong. Gong provided a practical approach for managers and peers to discuss new ways of positioning the value of our product. This out-of-the-box thinking led to a significant improvement in our feedback loop and contributed to more than doubling our product revenue.”
Indeed – the #1 job site worldwide – decided to roll out Gong globally because they needed a solution to help them understand and serve the diverse needs of their international audience. Indeed’s global mission is to help people get jobs, and Gong has given the company the ability to capture calls from different countries and understand the unique cultural contexts of each region.
“We have used Gong.io’s advanced analytics to optimize our sales process in different regions, tailoring our approach to fit the specific needs and preferences of our clients,” said Nathan Davison, Manager, Learning and Development, who leads the continued education support at Indeed. “This has been particularly useful since we launched the ‘Indeed Way Methodology’ to Sales and Support to over 6000 reps globally in the past two years across all of our markets, and Gong has given us greater insight into what is working well, who is doing it best, and how we can model and evolve our approach based on this new level of insight.”
Mimecast has deployed Gong in nine different countries, all of which have a high adoption rate of the platform. It has helped the team provide a consistent Mimecast story when engaging with customers in each of their global theaters.
“Last August, we announced our new Work Protected branding and messaging, and it was extremely important that reps across all our locations were using it consistently in all customer-facing content. With Gong trackers and call filters, we have been able to set up saved searches to highlight examples of when new messaging has been used effectively and also flag when old messaging or content is used,” said Ian Gwynne, Technology Enablement Architect, Mimecast. “This helped us identify that we needed to provide better hands-on training in regions where time zones are difficult to manage, which led us to hire an enablement manager in a specific region to ensure that we are providing consistent support.”
Datarails put Gong data at the center of its unique marketing campaign, where it had celebrities recording quotes from real Gong calls to show the problems that CFOs and Financial Planning and Analysis teams face on a daily basis, but do not talk much about.
“Getting celebrities from shows such as The Sopranos and The West Wing to narrate real-life problems of financial planning and analysis, as recorded on Gong calls, helped to show us a human brand who deeply understand the challenges of our target market,” said Jonathan Marciano, Director of Communications, Datarails. “Content such as this helped enable Datarails to grow at 3x ARR last year.”
Demandbase’s enablement team recently began hosting bi-weekly knowledge-sharing sessions they affectionately call, “Gong GOATs Live,” showcasing the best sales tactics captured by Gong.
“Each week we take a section or subsection of our playbook and focus on improving that specific skill,” said Jay Tuel, VP GTM Strategy, Demandbase. “For example, one month, we focused our Gong GOATs Live on learning to do outstanding discovery. The following month, we saw conversion rates to pipeline improve 8% for new business and 26% for upselling.”
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DemandScience uses Gong to tie their revenue intelligence all together. While they initially switched from an alternative solution to Gong, they immediately observed greater benefits beyond the initial use case of getting conversational insights.
“We use everything from trackers to understand trends with our prospects and clients, but also market trends to help our product and marketing teams understand some of the sentiment in the market around certain initiatives. It’s helped lead our product development and get ahead on certain decisions,” said Eric Choronzy, SVP, North America Sales, DemandScience, “We’ve also onboarded Gong Forecasting globally as we finally made forecasting a priority going into 2023. Additionally, we’re beta users on Gong Assist, and see that as something we may onboard as well in the near future. Basically, we’re a full blown Gong shop over here, and are happy we made this decision.”
Andela is the largest flexible network for on-demand, high quality remote digital talent leaned in heavily to its use of Gong in 2022, and saw its go-to-market organization transformed.
“As a fully remote company, we were looking for ways to improve our ramp times for new hires. We leverage various platforms to help facilitate a remote onboarding experience, but once we implemented Gong everything changed. As we implemented new offerings, we needed a way to quickly share strong examples of top reps pitching the offering in order to ensure reps could perform at their fullest potential” said Kieran Smith, Senior Manager, Revenue Enablement, Andela. “Since leaning into Gong, we have reduced our time to ROI to 12 weeks, shortened sales cycles by a third, and shrunk the time between onboarding an SDR to booking their first meeting to just 16 days.”
Initially, RollWorks used a conversational intelligence solution to record its sales calls. Over time, they realized the need for a platform to deliver more deal insights around how activity was impacting pipeline and renewals, and made the switch to Gong.
“In 2022, we focused most of our enablement around up-leveling and up-skilling our reps. With the macro-economic impact on the MarTech industry, it was important to ensure our Sales and CS teams were properly showing up to customer conversations as advisors and leading with value,” said Cheryl Bisram, Sr. Director Revenue Enablement, RollWorks. “With Gong, we have seen an increase in productivity and a 57% increase in average contract value in 6 months. We have also seen an increase in our appointment to qualified conversion rate from 34% – 50% amid 100% Gong adoption from all AE, AMs, and CSMs.”
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RollWorks was also able to migrate their entire post-sale and renewal forecasting process to Gong boards. With unified Dealboard data, CRM data, and Gong’s AI trackers, they were able to analyze new product launch pitches as well as competitive conversations. It helped the team stay organized and focused on future quarters, helping improve their Net Dollar Retention 31 percentage points QoQ.