Spencer: Hi, how's it going? Welcome to Win-Loss Week. Today you have myself, Spencer Dent, one of the co-Founders and co-CEOs here at Clozd, and I have the pleasure of speaking with the CRO of Gong, Shane Evans. And we're going to talk about how Gong and Shane in his role combines win-loss with the conversational intelligence, revenue intelligence that they're able to capture within Gong to drive value for their organization. So, excited to jump into this. Shane, how are we doing?

Shane Evans: Doing great, Spencer, and thanks for having me. Really excited to talk to y'all about what we've been doing to help give us more insight into win-loss information, and so looking forward to the conversation. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for doing it. Appreciate it, man. Here we go. Let's just jump into it. So tell us a little bit about your background and your role at Gong.

You bet. So background for me, it's super simple. I've been in revenue pretty much my whole career, and I've been in a lot of different leadership roles. Today at Gong, I find myself having the opportunity to work globally with our go-to-market teams. And I think that a lot of organizations have been on this journey, driving a lot of transformation throughout their company.

Revenue has really expanded the conversation beyond what was historically just sales as a silo team, and in this market that we're in, there's all sorts of macroeconomic challenges that we're facing. There's new competitive threats as the growth gets more scarce and challenging. And so everyone's trying to do what everybody else is doing, there's a lot of claims that are out there that folks are making. And then internally, customers don't want to have to work with a lot of different departments and teams.

And so my job leading revenue has become a lot more complex, in that I've got to be connected across all departments and teams. I need to make sure that I've got my finger on the pulse as to what's happening with customers in real time. It used to be that we could wait a quarter or two quarters to get hands-on information and to work to drive more collaboration, but the speed at which change is being driven has really accelerated. And so you look at my job, the average tenure for someone like me is about 18 months in-role, which means that as we come into a company, we've got to have a big impact very quickly, and we need to be able to work very well cross-functionally. So that's a little bit about my role today.

If you look at Gong just high level, we're in the revenue intelligence or revenue orchestration category, which means we're helping companies reimagine what that whole process that I just described could and should look like. And then you've got the introduction of artificial intelligence and how people can use data and information to make everyone's lives hopefully simpler and more productive. And so there's a lot of change that's at the forefront. And we're working with companies to basically redesign, rethink, reimagine how they can go to market and be successful. And Gong's at the forefront of working with those organizations to figure out how to make that a reality and deliver great outcomes against those opportunities.

That's awesome, that's awesome. So in your role as CRO, when you say you own revenue, you own new logos, existing customers, renewals, the whole gamut?

Yeah, so basically, and this is a great question because when you hear the term Chief Revenue Officer or Head of Sales, it means different things to a lot of companies. So for Gong, what it means today is, my direct team is basically everything except for marketing. So you think pre-sales, sales, implementation, post-sales, support, partnerships, ecosystem. So it's about 600 people today. We work very closely with our counterparts in marketing to drive top of funnel, but for us it's everything outside of that. And it's interesting because every company defines that a little bit differently, but for the purpose of today, I think it's helpful to understand the scope that I have as we dive in.

I love it, and frankly, given the topic that we're going to talk about, it's awesome to see how... Sometimes when people think about win-loss, they think very much around product marketing or competitive intelligence, but obviously it's much broader than that.

All right, so you step into this new role, it's obviously a very big role. Tell me about the story of bringing win-loss into Gong. You're coming into this role, it's a turbulent economy, right? The last 24 months have not been easy for anybody in software. You're trying to understand why win or lose. Obviously you have all the contextual data that Gong is collecting, but there must have been a gap for you to think we should go do win-loss. So maybe give me that kind of background of, you come in, what made you realize the aha, we needed to go do win-loss, and we needed to go do it in a new or maybe different way?

Yeah, great question. So one of the things I'll say about Gong, if you haven't worked with a company before and don't know the culture, it's an incredibly strong and very unique culture. One of the operating principles is to create, rating fans. And what that means is we want to deliver great outcomes for our customers and yet in this market that we're in, there's been a lot of confusion. And I mentioned earlier that it's very competitive and a lot of companies claim to do everything. And so when I got here, I realized that we had some opportunities to help our customers understand better what we're trying to deliver and how we're trying to help them win on their end.

And so I've seen a lot of win-loss solutions and tools in the market. I've used a number of them in the past. And what I realized very quickly is that we needed to be able to go deeper on the win-loss than just a survey. We needed to understand more holistically what was happening out in the market. We needed to do that in a comprehensive way, and what I mean by comprehensive is, all of our stakeholders inside of Gong, and this goes even into our product and engineering teams, needed to have not only access to the information, but they needed to be front and center. They needed to be the ones doing some of these interviews to really understand what was happening from the customer's point of view.

And one of the powerful parts of conversational intelligence is our product engineering teams are plugged in to what customers are saying every single day. But what they didn't have the ability to do was to really go deeper in those interviews and inspect the areas that they wanted to really understand from the customer's perspective what was happening. And so instead of this being a project, like a one-time blip, we needed to make this part of our culture and part of our fabric where one of the great things about partnering with Clozd, we now have the ability to basically set up different product leaders inside of our company. And they're the ones conducting some of the interviews, in addition to the work that the Clozd team is doing for us. And so now we're able to compare the two side by side.

And this is the third area, we need to scale. So we needed to get the surveys and get the ongoing input and feedback, but in addition to that, we needed a lot more of what I'll describe to you as the qualitative information that we could go super deep on. And so Spencer, I've worked with your team at previous companies and when this challenge surfaced, I reached out to you and I said, "Hey, I think we have an opportunity here. Let's go test this out." What I did not expect was that our co-founder and a Product Leader would really embrace this so the way that he did. I should not have been surprised by that, but I just hadn't experienced that in the past. And now he's living in the tool, he's going through doing his own interviews. Every time we get an interview, he's tagging it. We get all the themes that come along with it.

And so when I talk about collaboration and scale, I just wanted to provide a little more texture there, as far as what we needed to really happen in order to give us the information that we need to respond very, very quickly.

Love it, love it. That's awesome, it's really cool to hear about all of the different ways that people are engaging. I'm going to ask you more about how the product team is, with the value that they're getting because a really cool, unique way that I've seen win-loss used.

‍When you think about running this win-loss program, you're getting different sources of value. What are some of the biggest sources of value that you guys are seeing in the win-loss program?

So I point to a couple of areas. The first one I mentioned already, that it's the amount of feedback that we're able to get from different individuals, and it's more like a real-time focus group in a way. And so it makes it more expansive and we're able to be very surgical in how we're diving in. And it's become now a part of how we operate and how we do business. And so when we get into now some of these decision points that we have to make as a company, we're no longer flying blind. We feel like we've got a better data set, a more comprehensive data set that we're able to look at.

And what's been really fun is to allow some of our leaders to actually embrace the idea that they now own this. And it's one thing in the past where we've had people who look at feedback and look at results from a win-loss perspective, but when they're the ones doing the interview and they're the ones seeing the tags come up, it creates a different level of engagement because now it's like they are the ones that have to take ownership for it. And so it's interesting because it sounds like a simple thing to have your product leaders actually conduct and do those interviews, but it changes the dynamic where they now feel a lot more vested in what we're trying to create for our customers as we roll down the path of creating raving fans.

I love it, I love it. Let me ask you kind of this. Maybe, let me give a little context to people listening in on this, so that they can understand kind of how your program works.

So, Gong is integrated with Salesforce. As opportunities come through with Clozd, we get those, that data comes into Clozd. From there, the Clozd team conducts a portion of the interviews, and I would almost call those as the... And it's a pretty sizable volume of the interviews that we're conducting, and that is shared broadly then. And then but on top of that, that uncovers certain pockets, especially within areas of product that are interesting to the product team, that then the product team goes and will do additional follow-up interviews with different folks around those topics so that you're expanding. You're basically using the Clozd platform in a DIY fashion to go collect more feedback than what they would get from their core program, which is allowing them to answer that third and fourth level questions that product folks have, which is awesome. It's such a cool application of our platform and frankly, one that I love seeing happening.

When you think about this rallying cry and the product team being engaged and you have other folks that are engaged, what tips would you give to other people about driving that tops-down sponsorship? Why were you successful? Because obviously, Gong had done some form of win-loss in the past like you mentioned it. They've tried other vendors, it felt kind of siloed, it felt kind of isolated to certain teams. What's been the key to getting that cross-functional engagement?

So, there's a couple of really simple things here that actually were a little bit surprising to me. And the first one is, we're leveraging Gong today, we have a feature called Smart Tracker, where anytime that there's a conversation that's occurring, if there's a certain competitor that's mentioned, if there's a certain product gap that is referenced, there's an automatic trigger that could be sent to different folks where they then can get engaged and go deeper.

And so we're actually using some of this not just for win-loss, the biggest reason that we don't end up winning deals today is still, no decision. It's not necessarily a loss to a competitor. And yet that's opportunity where we're not able to engage with these prospects in a way where we can actually go and create value. So in those situations, it's really hard. Most of the time with a survey, if you're on the other end and it's no decision, you're not willing to give feedback, there could be any one number of reasons why that opportunity goes to no decision. However, when you have a product leader reaching out from a company that you decided potentially not to enter in an engagement with and they're saying, "Hey, I'd love to spend some time and chat with you and get some feedback," it's different than getting just a blind survey or getting even just a random email about, "Hey, give us some feedback." And then that leads to a discussion. And so-

It feels way more intentional, right? It feels so much more personal, like I genuinely care about why you're making your decision and how I can make it more valuable for you.

Exactly, and so it's even the response rate is much higher because of the mechanism, which we're leveraging with your solution. And then what's been interesting is, that actually leads to more dialogue.

And so in cases where things potentially went to no decision, it gives us an opportunity to not only get good feedback, but keep that conversation rolling. And even if they don't end up purchasing or going down the path of partnering with us now, it sets the tone for how we want to build the relationship. So to your point, it's more personalized, it's more value add, and then we get a great amount of feedback for knowing, hey, how do we now take that and push that information back into the revenue intelligence cycles to allow current team members that are engaged with customers the ability to actually go and have a higher chance of working with that customer to create another raving fan? And so sometimes we talk about insights. There's a lot of action opportunity here when you look at the full life cycle and the way that the win-loss is working within the confines of revenue intelligence and how it plays out day in, day out.

Totally, totally. I always think about it as, if you think about revenue intelligence as an end-to-end workflow, right? Or a sales process, whatever, the final step is the feedback loop of, what happened and why? And it's so powerful to go feed everything else that you're learning back through.

Okay, so I want to cover something that's kind of interesting here because you're talking about how you're giving. You actually have people using the platform to go and help collect the data. We've hit on this a little bit, but now you have all of this insight and how you share it, and you get it broadly out to folks. What have you done, in terms of giving access to the feedback very tactically, that you feel like has driven the most value for Gong?

So there's one thing we didn't talk about, before we get to how we've actually driven action. I'm going to say exec sponsorship is one of the keys and I got to give credit again to our co-founder, product leader here. Because he's living in the tool and every time he doesn't interview or one of his teams doesn't interview or someone else, he's actually tagging other folks in those calls to say, "Hey, not sure if you saw this, but something we need to make sure we act on." That level of engagement from his roll down, it just sets a different tone. It shows the level of importance that is out there from someone who is building the product every single day and designing the experience that customers are going to have.

So, I can't emphasize enough that if you're going to do win-loss and do it right, you've got to have a champion and it needs to be someone who matters. It needs to be someone who folks are going to look to and be like, "Hey, if this is this important to this person, it's probably something that I need to pay attention to." So that's one aha that we stumbled into that I can't take any credit for that. I know you like to take credit for stuff all the time, but you don't take credit for that.

No, I agree with you. I actually think it's one of those things that's like, we see this time after time across our clients is, it's not so important who manages the day-to-day administration of the program, as much as it's important that you have the right folks in the organization engaging with it and driving the action off of it. And having a person who's a co-founder responsible for a product being a core stakeholder that's engaging in driving action is obviously incredible for helping get value out of it, because it's one thing if you hear from that person saying, "Hey, we're losing because of these things and we need to go change it," that's a little different than hearing from the junior product marketer. And not that the insight's any different, it's just the nature of humans and how we interact within org structures.

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One of the ways we've driven action out of that, we have a weekly huddle with our team as we work with larger organizations, you can imagine that their complexity is much higher and they have all sorts of customer requests that come up. We now have the ability in those meetings to pull up the feedback and even link right back to what the customer was saying within the revenue intelligence cycle and hearing their words again, like, this is exactly what they're asking for. That allows us to make decisions in a totally new way that feels much more real time with actual voice of customer, as opposed to it being a survey in writing or maybe a canned question that we had asked and there's a score that's quantitative. One person, like sample size of one, now we feel like we have all of those responses that we're able to aggregate by doing a quick query on, hey, when this comes up, who else is mentioning this and what is the way that they're describing it?

And so that's a way we've driven action into our weekly operating rhythm around how we're going to prioritize what features we look to build in our roadmap around customer requests that are coming in. And so it's been kind of fun to now have the information at the ready, as opposed to saying, "Hey, we need to go and actually do a deep dive in this area." It's allowed us to really be more intentional about how we're prioritizing different requests coming from customers.

Yeah, it's a funny thing. It's like, you and I can harken back 10 years ago when you would get feedback from a rep of, "I have to have this feature in order to win this deal." And then you'd go build that feature and you'd still lose the deal, but you didn't know how often that was coming up across other people. So a roadmap was kind of a guess of what you should build, versus now, I'm hearing these things over and over and I'm able to stitch together the value of actually going and working and putting engineering resources against them, which is super awesome.

By the way, I want to mention here, what hasn't changed is, I still on the weekly get a sales rep or a customer success representative who's working on either a new deal or a renewal come in and say, "I have to have this feature or else this customer is going to not sign or is going to potentially churn from Gong." And what's been beautiful is now I can do a quick query and say, "Is this real?" And I can even hear it from the customer of where it may actually have come up or it actually did not come up. And so I think that's where I'm empowered in a whole new way with information. Within seconds I can ask the platform, I can ask on all sorts of different opportunities, "What's the reality here?" And so I feel like I'm in the know, as opposed to being in a situation where I have to... I can actually trust and verify and make sure that it actually is legitimate, as opposed to just operating based on very limited information, which makes my ability to be effective much higher and be able to be a partner with the team as opposed to just being someone who is sitting in this tower somewhere that has a few bits of pieces coming up and being held hostage sometimes by a specific deal. That's not the case anymore.

Trying to make a decision off of one data point instead of 1,000 data points, which is... And that's kind of one of the interesting things too, about having the conversational intelligence alongside the win-loss because there will be times where something is not coming up in the sales cycle but is mentioned in the win-loss. Or it is coming up in the sales cycle, but the buyer's holding back their cards a little bit to where they're not fully expressing whether how important or not important that thing is to them, and you get that in the win-loss. But also, if it is coming up over and over and then it ends up being the punchline in the win-loss, you also learn that too. So having that full story stitched together, it's like watching the game and then watching the post-game interview and being able to, to your point, go and see, wait, is this really a thing and how big of a thing is it? And how much do I see it within deals and in the cherry-on-top feedback that we're getting at the end?

All right. This has been super awesome. You're super busy, I know you have a lot going on. Maybe just give me a rapid fire. What are some of the coolest insights for you that the program has uncovered?

So what's been really interesting is the idea that a lot of competitors or other companies out in the market are claiming to do what we do. And in the insights as we were diving into the data, we learned a couple of things. As a company, Gong has had a philosophy that we don't necessarily talk much about what's forthcoming, we talk more about what we've done. And so when we have a new feature or a new potential product rollout to the market, we've not been great about signaling to the market what's coming. Instead, we'll release it, and then six months after it's been in the market, then we then start talking about it. So think of messaging after the fact, once you know it's working. And there's a lot of merit to that and yet a lot of our customers had made decisions to leave Gong because they didn't realize that certain functionality, not that it was coming, but we already had it.

You already had it, it was already in the platform.

And there were a number of win-loss situations where we had talked to customers that ended up leaving Gong and realized in the interview, win-loss interview, I should say loss interview, that we actually had that functionality. And so that was a great data point or insight that was validated over many deals, where we realized we needed to work with both our product marketing, as well as our product engineering teams to make sure that we were signaling to the market what's coming and the timeline and where that was going to be delivered. And now we've seen a lot of opportunity in driving some of those discussions, as opposed to reacting to them by getting ahead of that. So it's a really good example of insight, action and then outcome, and it's had a big impact in our churn and retention numbers as a company, with that little nugget or that little insight.

The other thing that we learned through this process was the personas that we're engaging with our solution. We didn't realize how broadly Gong was being used. There were personas in product marketing and customer success that actually were getting and spending a lot of time in our platform. And when companies might say, "Hey, we're going to go to another alternative provider," and then they would leave, those other personas that were part of the engagement, were missing out on those opportunities because of the insights they were getting from our platform as well.

So, those are two really powerful ones that have been, what I feel are low-hanging fruit because it wasn't like we had to change anything. We had to look at how we were then rolling out new features, how we were enabling personas on our platform, and up our game and how we're then implementing new customers or when its coming time for a check-in to see how we're doing, making sure that we're incorporating what the roadmap is going to look like so people are aware of where we're going.

Yeah, again, make sure everybody is involved and make sure that the key people in the organization know who's involved. That's awesome, that's super awesome.

Okay, we've covered a ton, man. I really appreciate you taking the time. What haven't I asked you about that I should have asked you about? If you were advising one of your peers to get a win-loss program up and running, what would you tell them?

So we've actually talked about this, but I think it's worth mentioning again. The main thing is making sure that you have executive sponsorship. If you're going to do win-loss and really trying to understand from a competitive standpoint what you need to be doing differently, it's got to be... And when I say tops-down, it's not just about one persona, it's about making sure across the board that the company understands why this is important, what you want to do about it. So number one is executive sponsorship.

The second piece is, I would say you need to have this be a company-wide initiative as much as possible. And when we get into having our quarterly business review at the company level or we're doing our board review with our board, these insights are one of the key areas that we dive into to talk about what's happening out in the market. We've always had a metric around competitive win rate and tracking how we're doing. What we haven't had is the why, the reason as to why those things are happening. And so if you can get cross-functional visibility and adoption, it's going to allow you to move at a different speed. And so that'd be the second area.

And then the third piece I'll give you, and again, these are things that we've talked about, so I'm not offering anything and it's sometimes I think it's just a simple and try, just make sure you're doing it well. It's finding ways to be able to drive action and have an impact early. And so if people start to see that, hey, we had this insight, and then you don't act on it, then they're going to lose confidence that this is something that's important and it's going to have a big impact. But if you have that insight and you go drive action on it fairly quickly, it can actually have a real meaningful impact.

So those are kind of the three things that I would say, if you're going to do win-loss, make sure you've got executive sponsorship, make sure that it actually is cross-departmental, it's broad, and then that you have the ability to get early wins and drive action. And that will allow you to build on it as you go and roll and try and have a big impact on the overall company.

I love it, man. The punchline on that to me, is those three things all come down to being able to quickly make decisions and quickly move. You have the right people across the board engaged, ready to make decisions so that you can move faster. And what I don't think people understand is how much that quarter of indecisiveness, those two quarters of indecisiveness cost them from a go-to-market efficiency standpoint, from a product development standpoint, from across the board in the organization. So, love it. It's such a great... If I were to write the essay on how to get the most out of win-loss, I'd hit those three things. So, this is super helpful. Appreciate the time, Shane, thanks for everything. Wish you the best.

Hey, listen, we really appreciate the partnership. Thank you for what you and your team are doing and building. We love working with Clozd, we love the insights that we're getting. So, thanks for driving and challenging us on this journey. A lot of what we've discovered are because of the way that you and your team showed up as we had made this a priority. And we started like, hey, how do we dip our toe in the water? And we've been able to get wins and we've built on that. And so, appreciate the partnership and thanks for what your team's building.

Thanks, man, appreciate it. Have a good one.

Thank you. Take care.

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