Gong’s CRO on Win-Loss Analysis and Revenue Intelligence

Gong’s CRO Combines Win-Loss Analysis and Revenue Intelligence to Drive Change Management

Shane Evans, Chief Revenue Officer

Shane Evans and Clozd co-founder Spencer Dent discuss how Gong uses win-loss analysis to broaden their perspective and capture better data. By providing broad access to win-loss insights, teams throughout Gong’s organization—from sales to product—are empowered to drive meaningful, customer-centric change.

Spencer Dent from Clozd explores win-loss analysis integration with Shane Evans, CRO of Gong. Shane describes his role overseeing global go-to-market teams and reflects on the complexity of modern revenue management involving various departments. He highlights Gong's mission in revenue intelligence, including integrating AI to streamline market approaches. Shane values real-time insights over delayed feedback, emphasizing the importance of cross-functional collaboration and rapid adaptation in today's fast-paced market. At Gong, win-loss analysis integrates deeply across departments, fostering broad engagement and driving substantial business change. Shane appreciates Gong's unique culture that focuses on customer outcomes. He observes the need for deeper win-loss data beyond surveys, requiring holistic understanding. He praises Gong's co-founder’s proactive involvement, enhancing the effectiveness of the win-loss program by conducting their interviews, and underscores the significance of executive sponsorship.

For effective win-loss programs, Shane emphasizes:

1. 1.Exec Sponsorship: Empower the program with support from influential leaders.
2. 2.Cross-Departmental Engagement: Ensure widespread adoption and integration.
3. 3.Quick Action on Insights: Leverage early wins to maintain momentum and confidence.

Gong found opportunities to retain customers by improving market communication about existing and upcoming functionalities. They also uncovered insights about diverse usage patterns across different customer personas, informing future strategy. Shane discusses leveraging Gong's existing tools to enhance win-loss analysis, achieving higher response rates, and more actionable insights.

Finally, Shane advises peers to ensure executive sponsorship, broad organizational engagement, and prompt action to drive meaningful impact from win-loss programs. This approach helps overcome indecisiveness, maintaining efficacy in go-to-market strategies and product development.

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Q&A

Spencer: Today I have the pleasure of speaking with the CRO of Gong, Shane Evans. We're going to talk about how Gong and Shane, in his role, combine win-loss with the conversational intelligence and revenue intelligence they capture within Gong to drive value for their organization. Excited to jump into this. Shane, how are we doing?

Shane: 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, so I’m looking forward to the conversation. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for doing it. Here we go. 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 have the opportunity to work globally with our go-to-market teams.

I think a lot of organizations have been on this journey, driving significant transformation within their companies. Revenue has really expanded the conversation beyond what historically was just sales as a siloed team. In this market, we’re facing macroeconomic challenges, new competitive threats as growth becomes more scarce and challenging, and a lot of claims being made. Internally, customers don’t want to navigate through multiple departments and teams.

My job leading revenue has become much more complex. I need to be connected across all departments and teams and ensure I have my finger on the pulse of what’s happening with customers in real time. It used to be that we could wait a quarter or two to gather insights and drive more collaboration, but the pace of change has accelerated dramatically.

In this role, the average tenure is about 18 months, which means we need to have a big impact very quickly and work cross-functionally at a high level. So that's a little bit about my role today.

At a high level, Gong operates in the revenue intelligence or revenue orchestration category. We help companies reimagine what the entire process I just described could and should look like. With the introduction of artificial intelligence, teams now have the ability to use data and insights to make their work simpler and more productive.

There’s a lot of change happening, and we’re helping companies redesign, rethink, and reimagine how they can go to market and succeed. Gong is at the forefront, working with organizations to make that vision a reality and deliver great outcomes from these opportunities.

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, basically. This is a great question because when you hear the term Chief Revenue Officer or Head of Sales, it means different things to different companies. For Gong, what it means today is that my direct team handles everything except for marketing. This includes pre-sales, sales, implementation, post-sales, support, partnerships, and the ecosystem. So, it's about 600 people today. We work very closely with our counterparts in marketing to drive the top of the funnel, but for us, it's everything outside of that. It's interesting because every company defines these roles a little differently, but for today, I think it’s helpful to understand the scope I oversee 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.

Ok, so you step into this new role, it's obviously a very big role. Tell me 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 you 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 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 the company before and don't know the culture, is that it has an incredibly strong and very unique culture. One of the operating principles is to create raving fans. And what that means is we want to deliver great outcomes for our customers. Yet, in this market we’re in, there’s been a lot of confusion. I mentioned earlier that it’s very competitive, and a lot of companies claim to do everything. When I got here, I realized that we had some opportunities to help our customers better understand what we’re trying to deliver and how we’re trying to help them win on their end.

I’ve seen a lot of win-loss solutions and tools in the market and have used a number of them in the past. What I realized very quickly is that we needed to go deeper on the win-loss process than just a survey. We needed to understand more holistically what was happening out in the market. We also needed to do this in a comprehensive way. By comprehensive, I mean all of our stakeholders inside Gong—including our product and engineering teams—needed not only access to the information, but for it to be front and center. They needed to be the ones conducting some of these interviews to truly understand what was happening from the customer’s perspective.

One of the powerful parts of conversational intelligence is that our product and engineering teams are plugged into what customers are saying every single day. But what they didn’t have was the ability to really go deeper in those interviews and inspect the areas they wanted to explore further, to fully understand the customer’s perspective. So instead of treating this as a one-time project, like a short-term initiative, we needed to make this part of our culture and part of our fabric. One of the great things about partnering with Clozd is that we now have the ability to set up different product leaders inside our company, and they’re the ones conducting some of the interviews, in addition to the work the Clozd team is doing for us. Now we’re able to compare the two side by side.

This brings me to the third area: we needed to scale. We had to gather surveys and ongoing input and feedback, but in addition to that, we needed much more of the qualitative information that we could dive into deeply. Spencer, I’ve worked with your team at previous companies, and when this challenge surfaced, I reached out to you and said, ‘Hey, I think we have an opportunity here. Let’s go test this out.’ What I didn’t expect was how much our co-founder and a product leader would embrace this process. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but I just hadn’t experienced it in the past. Now, he’s living in the tool, going through it, doing his own interviews. Every time we get an interview, he’s tagging it, and we’re gathering all the themes that come along with it.

When I talk about collaboration and scale, I just wanted to provide a little more context about what needed to happen so we could get the information we need and respond very quickly.

That's awesome. It's really cool to hear about all the different ways people are engaging. I'm going to ask you more about how the product team is getting value, because that's a really cool, unique way 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 you’re seeing in the win-loss program?

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

What's been really fun is allowing some of our leaders to embrace the idea that they now own this. In the past, we've had people look at feedback and results from a win-loss perspective, but when they're the ones conducting interviews and seeing the tags come up, it creates a different level of engagement. Now, they are the ones who have to take ownership of it.

It's interesting because it sounds like a simple thing—having your product leaders actually conduct those interviews—but it changes the dynamic. They feel a lot more invested in what we're trying to create for our customers as we work toward building raving fans.

Let me ask you this—so people can understand how your program works.

So, Gong is integrated with Salesforce. As opportunities come through with Clozd, we get that data into Clozd. From there, the Clozd team conducts a sizable portion of the interviews, and the data is then shared broadly. On top of that, this uncovers certain pockets—especially within areas of product that are interesting to the product team. The product team then does additional follow-up interviews with different folks around those topics, so you're expanding. You're basically using the Clozd platform in a DIY fashion to collect more feedback than what they would get from their core program. This allows them to answer those third- and fourth-level questions that product teams have, which is awesome. It's such a cool application of our platform and, frankly, one that I love seeing happen.

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

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

We're actually using some of this not just for win-loss. The biggest reason we don't win deals today is still ‘no decision.’ It's not necessarily a loss to a competitor. Yet, that's an opportunity where we're not able to engage with these prospects in a way that creates value. 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 number of reasons why the opportunity goes to 'no decision.'

However, when you have a product leader reaching out from a company you decided not to engage with and they're saying, ‘Hey, I'd love to spend some time and chat with you to get some feedback,’ it's different than just receiving a blind survey or a random email saying, ‘Hey, give us some feedback.’ 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 the response rate is much higher because of the mechanism we're leveraging with your solution. What's been interesting is that it actually leads to more dialogue. In cases where things potentially went to no decision, it gives us an opportunity to not only get good feedback but also keep the conversation rolling. Even if they don't end up purchasing or partnering with us now, it sets the tone for how we want to build the relationship. To your point, it's more personalized, it's more value-add, and we get a great amount of feedback to know how to take that information and push it back into the revenue intelligence cycles. This allows current team members working with customers to have a better chance of creating another raving fan.

Sometimes we talk about insights, but there's a lot of actionable opportunities here when you look at the full lifecycle and how win-loss fits within revenue intelligence, playing out day in and day out. Totally, totally. I always think of revenue intelligence as an end-to-end workflow—or a sales process. The final step is the feedback loop: What happened and why? It's so powerful to feed everything you're learning back into the process.

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

There's one thing we didn't talk about before we get to how we've driven action: executive sponsorship is one of the keys. I have to give credit again to our co-founder and product leader here. He's living in the tool, and every time he does an interview—or one of his teams does an interview—he's tagging other folks in those calls to say, 'Hey, not sure if you saw this, but this is something we need to act on.' That level of engagement from his role sets a different tone. It shows the level of importance from someone who is building the product every day and designing the experience our customers are going to have.

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 others look up to and think, ‘If this is important to them, it's probably something I need to pay attention to as well.’

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