Gong pioneered the revenue intelligence category. Starting in Tel Aviv in 2015, it went from $0 to a $7.3 billion valuation in 5 years [1]. Now with over 4,000 customers, including the likes of ADT, Indeed, LinkedIn, Snowflake, and Zillow, they’re a leader in their space and customers rely on Gong to help them generate and accelerate pipeline, boost productivity, and improve sales processes [2]. In 2023, Gong's revenue run rate hit $178 million [3] and they’ve amassed over 240,000 followers on LinkedIn [4].
In the last few years, Gong has turned to community to scale its go-to-market initiatives across the business. In this deep dive, we take a look at how Gong kickstarted its community, how its program has evolved as its impact has spread, and the frameworks it uses to tie community outcomes back to business results.
✔️ Origin Story: How Gong and its Visioneers community got started.
✔️ Cross-functional Impact: How its program delivers impact across the business.
✔️ Showing ROI: The frameworks they use to track and report on ROI.
✔️ Return on Community: The value it creates for members and derives for its own business.
They’ve created a ton of value in a short space of time - let’s take a look at how 💥
Gong was co-founded by friends Chief Product Officer Eilon Reshef and CEO Amit Bendov [3]. It has grown quickly, capitalizing on the move to digitize sales processes. This created an opportunity to leverage AI to analyze customer conversations for insights and optimize sales processes and team performance [3].
Amit’s idea for Gong came about when he realized that sales teams didn’t really know why they lost deals. Sales reps would be encouraged to spend hours adding notes to a CRM, but when trying to understand why a deal didn’t close, much of it was still guesswork. So Amit and Eilon set about creating an AI-powered platform to capture customer interactions and analyze them at scale [5]. It works by enabling teams to record emails and video or phone calls and then generate insights about markets, deals, and employee skills, suggesting the next best steps [3].
Its platform has developed over time and now includes multiple products that extend use cases to include sales forecasting, workflow automation, and more. It's used by teams of all sizes, including small, mid-market, and enterprise pre-sales, sales, and post-sales teams. It’s a horizontal tool, too, being used across industries, including financial services, media, staffing, technology, hospitality, and real estate. Use cases are spreading beyond sales to include marketing (to evaluate messaging and positioning), finance (for revenue projection), product (for customer feedback), and others [3].
Gong has a SaaS subscription-based model, with a platform subscription fee (around $5K) and a per-user cost (around $1,400). Revenue jumped from $5M ARR in 2018 to breaking $100M in 2022. It's well-loved by teams with an NPS score of 72 (for comparison, the iPhone scored 66 at launch) and spreads within a company, boasting best-in-class net dollar retention of over 150% [6].
Gong started in a category known as Conversation Intelligence. “That category served us well for about three years,” says Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist at Gong. Then “Other players emerged in the market, and their vision and product for conversation intelligence was much narrower than ours was, and we felt that we had outgrown the category” [7]. So they created their own: Revenue Intelligence. Udi explains that “We needed to find something that the CRO cared about” while “differentiating ourselves away from the competitors” and Revenue Intelligence delivered on both [7]. It was first announced at their conference in October 2019, kicking off a ‘lightning strike,’ or synchronized set of marketing efforts, that included an out-of-home ad campaign to spark awareness of the category and the problem it’s solving [7]. Category creation is “painful, it's expensive, it's laborious, it takes a really long time,” says Udi. They’ve run quarterly strikes around the category ever since [7] led by then Senior Director of Marketing, Sheena Badani [7].
A big part of their category creation strategy has been content. In many ways, this is how Gong started to build their community [8]. Many sales folks are on LinkedIn all day long, so that’s where they put their focus. For a long time, their blog had a CTA in the footer to ‘Follow us on LinkedIn’ because it was so core to their strategy [9]. It was a cross-team effort, with staff being encouraged to post on LinkedIn about how data and AI make them better. Or when someone from Gong published an article, the entire company was pinged on Slack to go like, comment, and share the post [1]. Through this, several people within the company built their own large following on LI, with Udi and former Head of Sales Chris Orlob gaining tens of thousands of followers for their meme-filled takes on sales and marketing topics on their company page [9].
They weren’t creating low-quality clickbait, though. Their most popular content came from the Gong Labs research blog. Here they use their own tool, and its proprietary database of millions of sales interactions, to uncover insights across specific sales scenarios [10]. Their post on how Gong uses sales analytics internally has become a universal set of KPIs that teams measure [9]. While its post ‘The Startling Truth: How Cursing Impacts Sales’, garnered over 930 reactions and 340+ comments [11]. This data-led approach grabbed a lot of attention. As former Head of Content Strategy, Devin Reed says, “We try to be the most engaging. We want to win the minds and hearts of our audience” [10]. And it worked - they now have over 240k followers on LI [4], known as the Gong Mob [12]. Now whenever a sales leader asks about sales tools on LI the mob “is tagging Gong because they love the brand so much,” says former Head of Customer Enablement Sumeru ‘Sumo’ Chatterjee [12] and hundreds of comments come flooding in [1]. In response, Gong began shouting out these community members on LI, sending them swag, and putting them on its billboards. This is what led to Gong building a movement around data-based sales which helped to cement themselves as category leaders [1].
So when Nisha Baxi joined Gong to build out their community program, they already had a foundation to build on [13]:
“The first week that I joined, I got two emails… where a customer had literally emailed and said, ‘do you have a community yet?’,” says Nisha.
So armed with that momentum and demand, Nisha set about creating a programmatic wrapper around it [8]. Gong likes to say it has raving fans, so “I built a place for fans to rave,” says Nisha [13]. “We've already achieved product market fit. We have hundreds of thousands of customers and now those customers want to learn from each other.” So they set out to create a space where they could connect [14] and “help each other grow and use Gong in the best way that they possibly can” [8].
The Gong community is now a little over two years old and has over 5,500 members [15]. Plans for the community began within its Customer Success (CS) function. A typical Customer Success manager may have 5-10 calls with customers per day, so as Gong’s customer base grew into the thousands, they needed a way (beyond just hiring more CSMs) to provide that sense of support CS provides but at scale [13]. They also saw content as just one element of category creation. “It's really important to have relevant content”, says Nisha. “But then that audience wants to learn and talk about it to each other” [17]. What’s more, they knew that Gong is a really flexible tool. “You can use it for almost anything,” says Nisha, and so they knew they had to support people with use cases they hadn’t even thought of [18] and that went beyond what their docs could cover. However, this wasn’t the first time Gong had tried to leverage community. A few years prior, they had established a Customer Advisory Board. “Someone thought, wow, I bet if we just put everyone in a Slack group, they would all get connected… and it would just run on its own,” explains Nisha. This “did not work” [16] and so they were determined to do things right this time.
Nisha lays out an 8-stage process they followed in creating their community and they pulled it off in an ambitious timeframe: 90 days. Why 90? According to Nisha, “Everything that we're doing is constantly an experiment. So the faster that you're able to get something out… the faster that you're able to learn and continue to grow the community” [19].
The first thing is to establish executive-level buy-in. The goal here is to understand whether you have the core foundation to make your community initiative a success. That ranges from having the right people and resources to getting other execs on board to support the program, aligning on the objectives of the community, and deciding on the prioritization of which should be tackled first [20]. When Nisha started, a lot of this thinking was already in place. Nisha’s boss, then CCO, Eran Aloni had been leading on this for several months prior, learning and understanding what was necessary [22]. He’d even gone so far as to select the community platform, InSided (now known as Gainsight Customer Communities) [21].
So step 2 is where Nisha really got started. This involved establishing a core team of internal partners you need to get things done. She reached out to key people in Sales, Marketing, Product, Customer Success, and Support, because Nisha knew she would need their help to put the program in place [22]. She’d tell these people how community would benefit them to get that alignment. Nisha met with these folks once a week to keep them in the loop and to try and turn that interest into internal champions [20].
Nisha says “Community is actually a product in and of itself.” And like any good product development plan, you need to do discovery. So it was time to get out of the building. That included getting a “good understanding of what the competition is doing and what can be done better or differently,” says Nisha [20]. Then most importantly, talking to prospective members who would make up the planned community.
“I found our top 100 customers and I interviewed all of them, either on the phone, one on one, or sent them a survey,” explains Nisha [23].
Those top customers were identified based on a list of ten different criteria [17]. They included those who gave Gong the highest NPS scores, those buying more and growing faster than other accounts, people who attended and gave high ratings for their events, as well as those writing glowing reviews on sites like G2. She also reached out to those who had problems with Gong or had left - “I took as many viewpoints as possible,” says Nisha [18], and then “I messaged every single one of them” [22]. She’d ask them these core questions [22]:
The information gathered from this gave her insights into what the community program needed to do, what members were looking for in a community, and ideas for the specific initiatives needed to deliver on that. Plus, that outreach “ended up becoming its own word of mouth marketing channel about this community,” too, adds Nisha [18].
Two things came out of this. The start of a detailed community plan, and a roadshow deck, detailing the key elements of the plan, which was a necessary resource for the next step.
Armed with a plan and a deck, Nisha set about establishing the community concept and understanding how it would work with the rest of the business: aligning responsibilities, workflows, and KPIs [18]. “It was all hands on deck,” says Nisha. “100 Gongsters were involved throughout the process,” or about 20% of the company at the time [18]. Those 100 hundred people included ”every single person that I wanted to talk to to get buy-in,” says Nisha. The aim was to get as many of them on a call as possible, so her request was for just a 15-minute slot. Nisha says ”Almost every single person was able to slot me in that week,” when it was a quick chat like that. “I had a spreadsheet of what I was hoping to achieve from that call,” adds Nisha [22]. It could be to ask them questions or to contribute a piece of content to seed the community. Some needed to build out an entire section of the site, while others just had to turn on an integration - but there was an ask for everybody [18]. Nisha advises that after any such call, you should “Always leave with an ask and always leave them with the material that you pulled from your roadshow deck” [22].
For those she couldn’t get on a call with, she sent a survey asking “What do you want to see in a community? What would be beneficial to you? How can it help you?” [18], deliberately keeping the questions open-ended so she could understand their wants [20].
Through that process, Nisha got cross-team alignment, gained some advocates, and rallied a small army of helpers. She kept the enthusiasm for the project going by adding folks to an internal monthly newsletter where she caught folks up on progress, and they could opt to follow along more closely in a Slack channel, too [22].
Note, though, that this process is something that Nisha recommends you carry out on an ongoing basis, and not just as part of an initial launch. “I would actually recommend that every six months,” says Nisha. As the company grows and changes, “that means more people, different new department heads, changes in leadership. It's so important to have those conversations” [18].
Based on this feedback, as well as that from the prior discovery phase, Nisha reverse-engineered it all into a growing community plan [20]. She didn’t create this plan structure from scratch, though, she used one created by Brian Oblinger and Erica Kuhl, which is shared on the In Before The Lock podcast tools and templates page [22]. In some cases, she would then create short videos to summarize the plan and share how it would impact key players [20].
Finally, it’s time to build out the actual community. So Nisha set about structuring the experience within InSided and calling in those requests for content creation and support from colleagues.
When it came to launching the community, there were two phases:
Promotion of the community fell into two buckets: communications to make existing customers aware of it in the short-term. Then creating opportunities to redirect new and existing customers to the community from within other parts of the customer experience, which would promote the community in the long-term, too.
For example, they followed up with an additional email to all active customers in the last 60 days. Then Nisha worked with those in charge of their Help Center and Academy properties to get links added in the top nav bar of those sites [24]. As well as with Product, too - so there’s a link to the community from the help tab within the Gong product [19]. “I also equipped all of our CSMs with a single slide… when they're onboarding their new customers,” says Nisha [24]. Later, Nisha worked with the Gong education team to add links and references to the community into their certification programs [25]. As members complete modules in the Academy, they use InSided’s embeddable widgets to pop up with relevant community content curated for that user [32].
Launch promotion proved successful and they surpassed 1,000 members within two months [26]. Within a year, they had 3,000 members, covering 36% of customer accounts [19] and they had racked up 12,000 unique visitors to the community site, too [20]. This initial success encouraged them to iterate on the community concept and embed it further into its customer strategy [21].
The initial community was a post-sale community for customers only. Five months out from launch, in December 2021, they added a public-facing component, as well [27]. The thinking here was to enable ways for people curious about revenue intelligence to participate and “bring them into the fold,” says Nisha [28]. Prospects can then connect with others 1-on-1 [13] and learn from customers who are further along their journey with Gong [14]. This then becomes a destination that they can drive people to who they’re reaching through their content [19]. It has proven to be an effective addition - “People would actually go to the community and learn about it” and often then “become customers 6, 8, 10 weeks later,” explains Nisha [14].
They’ve continued to iterate on the community concept since, re-branding to become “Visioneers” [29].
Visioneers was launched in October 2022, a little over a year out from the initial launch of its customer community. This wasn’t just a re-brand, though. Visioneers is a full customer hub - a one-stop-shop that combines its Gong Academy, with its Help Center, the community, and its related programs [29]. It was intended to be the first touchpoint for all new customers [21] and a resource that remains useful to them throughout their whole customer journey, serving up events, content, and programs that make sense for them [28]. It was the result of a joint collaboration that saw Nisha and her community team join forces with Head Of Customer Marketing Jane Menyo [18].
“It's kind of like the one single source of truth for our customers,” says Nisha. “Whether they need Q and A or… help center articles or educational materials or onboarding materials, whatever, it's all there. They don't need to look in different kinds of things, have several logins, just one” [24]. It’s also under one search interface, too. Leveraging the federated search capability in Gainsight, users can search across multiple sources including the community as well as external content in systems like Zendesk to find what they need. “I don’t care if it’s not in the community, as long as they’ve found it,” says Nisha [21].
These changes are in line with its wider account-based experience (ABX) efforts says Corrina Owens, former Senior ABM Manager at Gong. According to Corinna, account-based marketing or ABM “has become synonymous with technology” and oversaturated as a channel [30]. So they’re seeing community as a way that they can “stand out a bit differently” by taking a more human-centered approach [31]. Ultimately, they see community as “the third place for the customer,” says Nisha. “You’ve got your CSM, you've got your product, and then you've got your community” [14].
Beyond the core InSided platform, the Visioneers community incorporates several programs. These programs help support members along each stage of the customer journey [19].
Meetups
They have a member-led meetup program, which enables people to connect with others in their industry, with similar interests, or in their location. Members manage all aspects of these events from planning and organizing the meetups and finding attendees to promoting them and hosting them on the day. This started with 3 virtual meetups, one for women in revenue, an EMEA meetup, and another for Gong admins [33]. The Women in Revenue group is run by two Gong community members who met through another Gong program and became friends. They proposed the group and it has now grown to over 190 members, with a monthly meetup to discuss the challenges they face as women in the industry [28].
They’ve been able to leverage some of these meetups as part of their account-based marketing efforts. They have been effective in helping to “build those soft touchpoint relationships that can help you break open into accounts,” comments Corrina [30]. For example, they picked up on a prospect who enjoys encouraging women in sales. So they invited her to be a speaker at a meetup and later she became a customer [30].
Despite this success, they soon found that the meetup organizers needed the support of Gong staff. In response, they’ve put together a playbook of lessons learned. So now when a member raises “their hand and says, ‘I want to lead a meetup’” they can say “Here's everything that you need to do that,” explains Molly Kipnis, Community Manager at Gong [33]. They’ve also created “meetup pods,” pairing organizers with two Gongsters. They then collectively help get the meetup off the ground by sourcing topics, finding the right people to attend, and making sure everyone has a great experience [33].
Networking
That other program where the Women in Revenue organizers met? It was Gong’s peer-to-peer matching program. Using Commsor’s Matcha (formerly Meetsy) to run it, it connects people with shared interests and profiles for 1:1 chats [30]. Nisha explains how it works [28]:
“People are now saying who they are, where their role is, what they're trying to achieve, who they want to meet, where they live. And then based on an algorithm… it now connects people every week.”
Within the program there are three different types of matchups [34]:
They say option 2 has been particularly beneficial for Gong where they’re matching prospects with experienced customers as a way to replace the typical customer reference process. The traditional way this works is with the vendor’s sales rep connecting a prospect with reference customers. But as Corrina points out, “There is a lot of distrust put into that.” People would prefer the vendor to not be involved. So with this matching program, “We're completely removed from the process. All we do is we send them to the community” [30].
This program grew quickly with 600 introductions made in the first year [34], and that was up to 1500 by January 2024 [17]. “We have nothing to do with it,” says Nisha. “We just set it up, step back, and let people share the magic” [13].
Member Recognition
They also run a few member programs, including an advocacy program known as the Influencer’s Club. Through a private community of other advocates, they offer up speaking engagements and the chance to participate in video content. This can be for either individuals or to showcase your team’s success with Gong, promoted through social channels and other content. In return, members can influence Gong’s product and messaging, as well as earn points that they can redeem for merch, gift cards, and other rewards [35]. This gamification is built into their community platform and enables members to unlock different badges for completing certain tasks and also to level up ranks [16]. They’ve gamified its referral system, too, by tracking and rewarding customer referrals [38].
They also recognize members in a few ways. They feature members in case study videos as part of its Lumineer Champions [36], highlight members on LinkedIn [17], and they also run the Golden Gong awards - highlighting the contributions of individuals and teams who have used Gong to drive business impact [37].
Product Feedback
One last thing, which isn’t a program, but an interesting aspect of their community is how they capture member feedback for their products. Nisha isn’t a fan of idea forums where people suggest and vote on ideas. “I don't know your reason for upvoting or downvoting something,” explains Nisha. “So what we have within the community is we have just a simple Google form… and they can make a feature request and they share who they are, what feature they want and why they want it” [19].
This might not sound revolutionary, but by capturing the role and company name alongside the feature request, their product team says “it's actually the most valuable information… that they get when they're deciding what they want to build” [17]. They’ve had over 1,000 requests and since the request is tied to a specific person, the quality is high, so “roughly 10% of our feature requests that come in through the community end up in the product, which is huge,” says Nisha [17]. Once it has been released, they’re also able to thank the community member by attributing the new feature to them in a post and emailing their manager [19]. They also have a small number of members who are design partners - a pool of people whom they share in-development features with that provide feedback [19].
When the Gong community launched, the community team, along with Customer Success, Education and Training, Solutions Strategy, Support, Professional Services, and Customer Success Operations, all sat under the Chief Customer Officer [32]. That structure has evolved since then, however, the community program has remained just as collaborative. Nisha remarks “We have support goals, product goals, we have sales acquisition goals, content goals, engagement within the community, and then success as well” [14]. Nisha highlights that the Education and Training team has been one of its strongest partners finding the Gong Academy to be a natural fit with community [32]. They also work closely with customer marketing and their Ops team [28]. It’s cross-functional by design - “To give a great community experience, you need to work with your internal stakeholders that touch every single part of the customer journey,” says Nisha [21].
However, with so many team members from outside the community team contributing they’ve had to establish some rules and a course that guides people through engaging in the community. Most importantly, no prospecting is allowed - there are “serious ramifications” for those using the community for prospecting [23]. So the course was aimed at the Sales org primarily explains Molly [33]:
“We wanted to make sure that we were giving everyone the right tools and also letting them know that community is not a space where you can prospect, where you can go find people to sell to.”
That course gets assigned to all new hires in Sales, and it's optional for new joiners in other parts of the organization, too. It aims to ensure everyone is comfortable in knowing how to engage with the community, how to share their knowledge, and who to ask if they have questions [33].
They track two levels of metrics, business level and community health metrics [17], which they also approach cross-functionally. Rather than using the SPACES model as a way to classify their community, they’ve used it to make sure they have a KPI associated with each value type [17]. That framework works well in reporting in a way that “executives really understand and… tie into our high-level goals,” notes Nisha [22]. So they measure case deflection for support, product ideas, new customers, quantity of user-generated content, churn reduction and customer retention, as well as active users in programs.
While in terms of community metrics, they look at things like new community signups, as well as engagement levels, return rates, and referral rates, too [33]. “I built a framework called CRAINS,” explains Nisha. It “ladders nicely into the SPACES framework so that you can measure the success of the community” [22]. For that, they track the number of discussions and 1:1 connections made, new badges, and product feedback submissions, as well as an engagement score and scores to the prompt ‘How helpful was this answer?’ within their community [22].
To make sure they could instrument tracking all of these they worked closely with Chris Fernandez, former Success Business Systems Manager at Gong to get all of their systems talking to each other [27].
Although the community program isn’t intended to be revenue-generating, they make sure to track a number of metrics that impact it. For example, Nisha notes that case deflection is a good business metric to track since it has a dollar amount attached [27]. It’s easily tracked, too, because they’ll leave a topic open in the community and only turn it into a support ticket if no member has answered within 48 hours [24]. They leverage SEO here, with people searching for answers via Google and then being brought into the community [19]. “We really have helped scale CSM in that way,” notes Molly [25]. To boost that further, they ran an engagement campaign. They asked CSMs what are the most frequently asked questions they get, and they put those out in the community for members to respond. They incentivized this by giving out a pair of vintage logo Gong socks (”You would not believe how much people want these socks,” notes Molly) and time with the leadership team at Gong [25].
Other revenue metrics they track include net-dollar retention impact [32] and ARR influenced by community [14]. Nisha remarks “I have the dollar amount, which I'm not allowed to share… but it's significant enough to where this is something that we need to keep doing” [17]. For this they’re tracking when a non-customer joins their public community and later becomes a customer - they attribute them joining the community as a touch point in the sales cycle. They also track the impact on existing customers by looking at average upsells for those with and without community membership [33]. Nisha notes that “Active users upsell three times higher than people that aren’t, so we’re tracking those numbers and seeing higher retention rates, too” [21]. Overall, “We see that people buy anywhere between three to six times more if they're in the community” [17].
“If community is done right, it will scale your entire company,” says Nisha [16]. And that’s what they’re seeing at Gong. Through exceptional execution and a cross-team effort, Gong has turned its raving fans into a thriving community that is already having a huge impact on its business. As Eran notes, “We know customers engaged with the community are much more likely to grow with us, much more likely to stay with us and have a big impact on the broader community” of Revenue Intelligence professionals, too [21].
That’s it! That’s how Gong kickstarted its community to drive growth and scale its business. To dive deeper, check out the sources below. If you found this useful, please share it with friends and colleagues, and subscribe. ✌
