Gong is a San Francisco based tech platform and among the leading SaaS business in the fast-developing category of Conversation Intelligence.
It helps companies by offering sales representatives a new way to increase sales. It also enables sales teams to gain insights regarding the things happening to their employees working remotely. Founded by Eilon Reshef and Amit Bendov, Gong is also a cloud-based business and uses AI (artificial intelligence) to transcribe and analyze conversations from web-conferencing platforms, like:
● Cisco WebEx
● Zoom
● GoToMeeting
In August this year, as we already covered, Gong raised $200 million at a $2.2 billion valuation and indicated that its profits tripled because sales teams are now working from home during this global pandemic. This latest funding round was led by Coatue and later joined by Thrive Capital, Salesforce, and Index ventures. With other investors’ help, including Sequoia Capital, NextWorld Capital, and Battery Ventures, it brings Gong’s total funding to $334 million.
Amit Bendov, Gong’s CEO, indicated that the raised funds would be used to fulfill Gong’s products’ demands and boost the leadership of the platform as it invests in go-to-market, sales, long-term product, support, and engineering teams. This platform now boasts more than 1,300 clients, including:
● Zoominfo
● Shopify
● Paypal
● Slack
● Autodesk
Gong’s sales training software helps many organizations develop decisions based on reality, not opinions. With more customers, this software has a commanding advantage to adapt to changing trends and offer more pronounced recommendations, resulting in positive results for businesses. Gong also offers AI-infused analytics services used by B2B firms to help their sales representatives get more clients. It achieves this by recording customer-facing conversations to pinpoint improvement areas.
Moreover, Gong provides out-of-the-box integration with office suites, an extensible API, and cloud telephony systems, allowing it to be used with any legacy system. Usually, the process begins with Outlook 365 or G Suite calendar integration, which scans sales teams’ schedules for demos, calls, and upcoming meetings. A bot also joins every scheduled call to record the session’s video or audio, which it uploads to AWS (Amazon Web Services) after encryption.
For instance, Gong may know if reps need to spend much of their time to explain the advantages of their organization’s products. This service flags more specific products of interest so that a particular selling point can improve the chances of sealing deals quickly.
Another instance is revenue forecasting. By using the information, it gathers from customer interactions, Gong’s service offers details regarding how effective negotiations are. Gongalso indicated that its algorithms might flag potential issues, making clients not to purchase products.
The Bottom Line!
With sales teams grounded because of the foreseeable future and global sales representatives shifting to remote work, many businesses are leveraging technology to increase their profits and navigate the ever-changing industry. For the third time now since February last year, Gong has raised a significant amount of money. Last December, it raised another $65 million. Today, it has raised a total of $334 million, and according to Bendov, the round confirms Gong’s legitimacy in the market