This is part 5 of our 12-part series “This is Product-Led,” inspired by our conference for Gainsight PX users, Pulse for Product.
If you’ve ever watched an older sibling play a video game and cried, “Watch out!,” you know the vicarious thrill of being a video game spectator. Streaming networks like Twitch have proven that watching and commenting is a billion-dollar market, and now it’s a billion-dollar business in sales too.
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that helps companies understand all the conversations its salespeople have, and to draw out insight. Like spectators, sales leaders can jump in with timely advice. To watch the watchers and ensure users evolve into raving fans, Eilon Reshef, Co-Founder, and CPO of Gong, relies on product analytics.
How to Create Raving Fans
“We have seven operating principles,” says Eilon. “These are core to the company. We apply them everywhere and they’re very useful for keeping our users’ interests in mind—especially the principle, ‘Create raving fans.’”
Gong measures fanhood using NPS surveys, and by all measures, they’re doing a great job: Their NPS score is 79, compared to an average of 20 for similar software companies. A full 84% of Gong users say they’d avidly recommend it. Part of the reason they feel so strongly is Eilon and his team have decided to focus on the end-user at the expense of nearly everyone else.
“Very early on we asked ourselves, how do you increase the love people express toward your product?” says Eilon. “That led to a decision to focus more on the user than the buyer. They’re in there every day, whereas the buyer is in there a few times per month.”
Elion and his team studied their most avid fans—those who responded most positively to their NPS surveys, and who exhibited the most usage. They discovered an insight. Those salespeople often don’t like any of the other tools they spent most of their days using. The CRM, for instance, is designed for administrators. Salespeople may use it, but they don’t love it.
If nobody was building for ‘sales love,’ that was an opportunity for Gong. Eilon broke his product team into a squad system where independent and empowered units consisting of a product manager, a developer, and a designer, each asked, ‘How can we make this better?’ Then, each squad went about building what users wanted.
Each of those teams relies upon feedback from two types of embedded partners: Design partners and sales and success buddies. The design partners are groups of 5-10 customers assigned to each squad, who’ve agreed to help steer the product. The sales and success buddies are Gong’s own Sales and Customer Success people who’ve agreed to do the same. Each squad can run ideas by its partners to ask, “Is this going to sell? Do customers appreciate it?”
Then, they validate their assumptions with product analytics and selectively roll out updates until they receive unsolicited praise like the following:
Where Are Your Raving Fans?
Gong’s style of distributed product team “squads” is something every business can borrow. But product analytics isn’t, because not all systems are made equal. It’s only with a true product analytics platform like Gainsight PX—not just standard web analytics—that you’re able to sample sentiment like NPS at scale and trigger calls with the loudest raving fans.
Grab a free trial of PX for yourself today. Start talking to those fans, and see how, like Gong, you can create more of them.
