Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that enables revenue teams to gain unfiltered truths about their customer interactions. Companies use Gong for many different use cases—from onboarding and coaching sales reps, to pipeline management, to measuring the success of strategic initiatives.
In late 2020, Gong's key planning meetings were fast-approaching. Collecting use case data at scale and trying to identify customer references manually with spreadsheets had become increasingly painstaking and ineffective. The company needed a fast and reliable way to better understand its existing customers’ use cases. At the same time, it also had to find a faster and easier way to gain customer reference support for a wide range of sales and marketing initiatives—which could previously take hours of back-and-forth conversations between customer marketing, customer success, and sales teams.
Gong implemented TechValidate and within 2 weeks, the company sent Gong-branded and customized feedback surveys to their customer base. The surveys included a series of questions that captured both use case data and information regarding customer satisfaction. Hundreds of customers responded, yielding Gong a staggering amount of insight in less than 48 hours. Plus, TechValidate auto-generated case studies based on the customer feedback, which provided Gong with approved customer references in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches to case studies.
“We can measure what was immeasurable, find the ideal quote, introduce the customer, and win new business through an auto-collected reference,” said Sheena Badani, Senior Director of Marketing at Gong. “We’ve gotten significantly more value than what we paid for TechValidate.”
Gong’s newfound ability to delve deeply into its customers’ evolving needs and levels of satisfaction has spurred further uses for TechValidate. For example, with TechValidate’s seamless integration with Salesforce, Gong plans to roll out a learning management system so that the company’s sales professionals have a central source to easily access all the customer information they need, including use cases and their associated references.
A new category leader
In late 2020, Badani faced her own customer information challenge. Responsible for thought leadership, AR, PR, and customer marketing, Badani needed a fast and reliable way to understand Gong’s existing customers better and gain reference support for sales and marketing efforts. She wanted to segment them by use case and capture powerful customer references that aligned with each use case. “Unfortunately, we weren’t collecting much use case-specific data. For those we did have, a couple people were manually sifting through spreadsheets,” said Badani. “With over 2,000 customers, Gong needed a more scalable way to know how customers were using their solutions and to capture references.”
After reviewing several service providers, Badani’s team hit upon the SurveyMonkey TechValidate solution. TechValidate’s ability to capture and transform customer feedback for multiple uses ideally suited Gong’s needs. Badani’s team would be able to sort feedback for use case segmentation and rely on the solution to auto-generate case studies, testimonials, reviews, and presentation-ready content. The product marketing team could take advantage of the use case data generated from TechValidate for presentations and sales decks. The simple integration to Salesforce and other enterprise systems would also give Badani the flexibility to adopt new marketing tools over the coming years.
Gaining end-to-end customer visibility for multiple uses
Implementing TechValidate was quick and easy. Upon completion, Patricia Bautista, senior customer marketing manager at Gong and a lead on TechValidate, immediately began conceptualizing a customer feedback form. Prior to sending the survey via TechValidate’s automated system, her team sent a pre-email that included Gong branding and tone as well as a participation gift offer. They followed that with the TechValidate feedback form that also displayed Gong branding.
“It really humanized the experience for people, and they were happy to complete the automated form from TechValidate.”
Patricia Bautista, senior customer marketing manager at Gong
Within 2 days, Gong received hundreds of customer responses and validated “Deal Execution” as their top use case. Next, they took advantage of TechValidate’s data sorting and relational features to segment the results for use by sales leadership. Not only did TechValidate segment the customers by use case and provide Gong with use case percentages, it also yielded business impact results. “Segmenting use cases and ‘the why’ behind them became simple,” added Bautista. “For each of our use cases, we could say ‘this is the percent of the respondents and what impact they saw.’”
Encouraged by the high response rate and data quality, Gong’s marketing team sent out a second customer feedback form and received hundreds of additional responses. With several hundred responses aggregated in TechValidate, Badani looked to the system to auto-generate case studies. TechValidate automatically captures thousands of Gong customer quotes, and the Gong marketers pick those that are on message, edited, and even approved by the customer. “TechValidate lets us know, ‘everything’s okay, so you can take this customer reference and run with it’,” added Badani. With TechValidate integrated into Gong’s Salesforce CRM, sales reps and others within Gong have ready access to customer-validated information and quotes.
Gong’s marketing team has expanded the use of their TechValidate data to support the sales team. The company invests a lot of time and energy to create “second call decks” that are targeted at specific use cases which interest a Gong prospect. Badani’s team pulls case-specific customer impact data and statements from TechValidate and incorporates them into the decks. This makes it easier for sales reps to demonstrate the value of Gong around a single customer’s most profound needs.
Streamlining tactical wins while gaining strategic insights
Using TechValidate, Gong has achieved the customer information goals it established in late 2020. The marketing team has identified, validated, and rank-ordered their key customer use cases while appending each with high-value customer references. In addition, TechValidate has made the process of capturing customer references and quotes much faster than traditional means. Badani particularly notes the easily accessible and searchable TechValidate data repository.
The customer segmentation data revealed by TechValidate has increasingly turned Badani’s team into a strategic information source for the company. Not only does the data serve as the basis for many aspects of Gong’s marketing and sales, it underpins executive keynote presentations, website copy, and even new product development decisions.
In the future, Gong plans to implement a learning management system integrated with TechValidate so that Gong sales professionals can access all customer data in one place. The company also has a significant new product launch scheduled for later in 2021. Badani already plans to leverage TechValidate to support that launch with more use case data and customer references.
Learn how you can improve your customer marketing program with TechValidate.
