A-Player Analytics

Pete Thornton 00:00
All right Hello SaaS ramp audience, this is your host podcast Pete. Thanks for tuning in. Again, I got a really interesting show for you today. I think you’re really gonna like this slightly different than the norm. Not a sales leader, not an enablement leader, certainly an amazing leader. This is going to be Or Farber coming to you from Gong, this is the Senior Product Manager. And specifically in charge of Gong Data Cloud, if you are a gold customer, or if not like either either should be interested to kind of understand what comes out of revenue intelligence, what they are picking up from all the different deals, customer conversations, and how they’re going to make that available to you as a customer, other revenue intelligence platforms, perhaps will as well this is particularly gone because Gong is my favorite. So what was kind of unpack for us is what has been unleashed from Gong recently. It’s a lot of functionality that’s come out recently, I’m sure you’re only scratching the surface, if you’re anything like most of the customers I speak to, and then also what Gong Data Cloud can kind of provide, like, why is it beneficial? Who is it for? What examples are being utilized so far? And, and what might it mean for you, so if you’re going customer particularly, or you’re interested in AI and revenue intelligence as a whole, please tune in, I think you’ll love it. And now work from the sponsor. This is brought to you by rampid gong.io. services partner ramping is a gong certified services firm driving revenue enablement automation. The fit here is for sales or enablement leaders and high growth tech, leveraging gong for revenue intelligence and sales engagement. If you’re seeking a gauntlet enablement strategy to achieve measurable increases in deal size, deal velocity and or win rates, then random offers a 16 week revenue ramp Bootcamp for a limited number of Golang customers. Next available cohort kicks off May 1, that’s Monday, May 1 2023. If you’re listening to this later, if you’re interested to learn more connect with Pete at rampant DOT cloud, Pete at rampant DOT cloud. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming. Welcome back ramekins to The SaaS Ramp Podcast. I’m your host podcast Pete welcoming Farber to the show today or as the Senior Product Manager at Gong. Welcome to the show or

Or Farber 02:31
Hi Pitts , happy to be here.

Pete Thornton 02:33
Really excited to have you been watching everything that Gong has been pushing out for four years, really, but the last 18 months have been kind of spectacular. And I know you have a lot to do with it more recently here. So welcome to the show. And please kill us.

Or Farber 02:49
So I’m or I’m product manager here at Gali, based in Israel. I’m a product manager, the insides group, and I work on analytics. So my job is to provide Golang customers with easy access to growing data. And also help them get from data to insight to drive impact for the business.

Pete Thornton 03:07
Yeah, we love that data to insight. So, you know, like speaking kind of like, frankly, from a sales revenue enablement leader like everyone, we’re trying to talk about what things to bring on whether it’s content management, learning management systems, or like revenue, intelligence, sales, engagement, whatever it happens to be, we always run through all the different, all the different organizations. And then the thing that kind of does make Golang stick out, it does tend to be towards those analytics pieces, like some of the AI and some of the analytics, those are the things that are a little bit differentiated on Golang from a years ago that have become very differentiated, and more recent times. So it’s really cool. That’s kind of some of the pieces you’re driving. Thank you. I know we’ll be able to kind of unpack a little bit of that, or I’d love it if we could, but maybe for those who are more in the technical space, or just kind of like have gone are interested in what’s going on who’s kind of leading the roadmap charge and everything. How did you find your role at Gong? Like, what were the personal professional experiences?

Or Farber 04:11
Yeah, so I’ve been in tech for a few years, I’ve actually started as a startup founder and that’s where I really fell in love with the product professional taking a product from inception to impact on the market and on the users. So that’s sort of where I started as a product manager. Then I moved to another startup in the FinTech domain, where I was introduced to Golang as a product manager actually. So they told me this company is using a Golang guy. You have the sales calls recorded. And from this point, I just, I started using Gong very heavily as a product manager to to to learn about the customer to learn about the market to get insight that you know, I couldn’t talk to hundreds of cars timmers, but Golang could just give me the insights on what I was looking for, to drive the product according to the customer’s need. And that’s where I actually decided that I must work and getting this product was incredible. So here I am. I’m lucky to be here. And I’m happy to be here.

Pete Thornton 05:17
That is very cool. So that’s interesting. So you are kind of already utilizing gong to scratch your own itch. Actually, let me backup a step. Your startup founder, startup founder. We talked about you being a startup founder. I thought I scoured your LinkedIn. Yeah, yeah.

Or Farber 05:34
Yeah. The startup wasn’t the HR tech domain, it was an AI for people analytics. Helping companies retain employees for longer.

Pete Thornton 05:46
Yeah. Okay. Very cool. And co founder, of course, you were Yes, right there. That’s interesting, I really like that background, when you can take that skill set and become a very true intrapreneur. Because you’ve held multiple functions. And now when you move into an organization, just have that maybe they call it like a 3000 foot view, you know, that an organization is looking for even outside of your specific domain, if you’ve niched down a little bit on that to be, I find that to be fascinating. And I find that a lot of really good intrapreneur leaders have done that before. And so I don’t know, might recommend it over an MBA these days.

Or Farber 06:27
Yeah, for sure. I think that’s the best score you can get. And I also think, founding a startup. And being a product manager has a lot to do like a lot in common. So yeah, I enjoyed being a founder, and then joining being a product manager.

Pete Thornton 06:43
And then what did you do with it? Like, how did you leverage it, because that use case that you’re talking about from product management is something that we have, we’ve done it to organizations, and it was one of the earlier things we did, but it doesn’t feel common that you know, the product management or like the, you know, even like getting calls to engineering is the first or second thing people do with Gong, but it sounds like it’s your previous organization that was kind of high on the list.

Or Farber 07:09
Yeah, I was just, you know, listening to a quote, I was listening to the speeches done by AE, I was talking, I was listening to customer success managers describing the feature and our relief, anything, the feedback of customers, and then I got here to Golang. And I realized that, you know, there’s so much more you can do as a product manager. I think, you know, the product managers here are just using Golang. All day, we’re tagging each other, we’re communicating collaboratively on customer feedback, we’re communicating with the go to market team, where they can tag us on valuable problems that the customers have, or needs or pains or feedback on our feature. And we’re even tagging, you know, we have a special tag label for a feature request directly from a call that gets to our product board. So it’s a full cycle. And, you know, I truly believe in the value of going for product managers and for many other professions, as well.

Pete Thornton 08:09
Yeah, and not to go too far down this rabbit hole like, but since we’re talking about it like in highly recommend doing that, for engineering teams, marketing teams, customer success, Customer Success feels like people understand that use case, but I don’t think they understand like how much that can help that customer journey and the smoothness of it. But for engineering teams in particular, we started doing it a previous organization, I was at postman, there was a lot of people are familiar with postman and the more technical world and, and so we broke out all the micro services squads into the key words and phrases, just four to six, four to six key words from prices per micro service. And then we created a Slack channel forum, Gong tracker, and just sent them the voice of the customer straight over to get everybody engaged with Golang. For the first time, those licenses were free. There were collaborator licenses, it really added on, we had a lot of the customer facing team in the US and EMEA, we had the engineering team in Bangalore, India, for the most part. I mean, there were definite differences there. But so we were, you know, that voice of the customer was traveling around the globe and doing really well. And it’s something that not a lot of customers have at the forefront. So if you listen, you’re going to definitely give that one a shot. Your engineers will be glad not to hear about their product, fourth hand, you know, hearing it from sure how much more powerful?

Or Farber 09:26
Yes, definitely.

Pete Thornton 09:30
Well, yeah, so that’s been around for a long time. You could do that for years and years. But the things that are coming out now, it’s just his hand over fist what’s coming out through Gong, it’s like it’s almost overwhelming, but it’s really good to know. So what’s new, what’s new on the roadmap? Maybe let’s just say like what’s rolled out recently? It’s more digestive. Yeah.

Or Farber 09:50
So we have our forecasting tool rolled out. This is a really big thing for Golang. But I think it’s also a natural development, natural evolution. And to be able to answer more use cases to give more value based on the same reality, right, we have our unique way of gleaning to reality. And forecasting can benefit from that, though, we rolled out our forecasting tool, and we have a lot coming up, we know around prospects in your own sequencing, we have our Assist, which is available. And a lot is coming up there. We have many interesting use cases, and capabilities around summarizing and highlighting and getting what I like to call. So, so many things are coming up. And they’re exciting. And of course, we have the Golang Data Cloud, which I’m working on, which is also, at least for me, very exciting. And I think that for many customers, it will be exciting as well.

Pete Thornton 10:48
Okay, very neat. Yeah. That I know about each product as it’s in beta first, and it comes out and like you can you trial it, whatever it ends up being like six months or a year forecast was really interesting to see. And I have a number of customers now who are both like Golang standard and Golang forecast customers is really interesting, because it kind of spins together the analytics you provide with some of those more actionable insights, like that’s different. Usually you look at a forecasting tool more traditionally, it might give you a dashboard that you haven’t seen before. But then you have to go elsewhere to do something with it. Yeah, really helpful in sales, especially when you have so many tools you’re always dealing with to have it in one place. So I’ve enjoyed that. When you said prospecting and sequencing, are you referring to this as a referencing assist, like Gong assist, or are there other things in the works that I’m less familiar with?

Or Farber 11:39
Greg is just the first step in this direction. But there’s a lot coming up, that I hope will be revealed soon, which will be really revolutionary. For SDR,

Pete Thornton 11:52
I made my transition into becoming an SDR from becoming an educator and a coach. So anything that can make that a little bit more streamlined, everybody considered an SDR, such an entry level position. But it is hard. It’s not hard just because you might have to face rejection from whoever you’re calling your ideal customer profile. Not everybody wants to hear from you all day, every day, as the job requires. But it’s also the number of tools you use, and like having to move from one task to the next repeatedly over and over. So I will keep an eye on what comes out for that. I know we have lots of SDR teams that could use some help. And the third thing you mentioned was summarizing and highlighting. Ahmed had an OD, OD hosted Ahmed bin CEO didn’t ask me anything yesterday is really insightful around AI. A lot of people had questions around things like call summaries. And there’s just a lot of banter about that. So would that be what some of those might be like? Kind of like, what you’d consider topics right now, but like on steroids, kind of?

Or Farber 12:58
Yeah, I think on steroids is an understatement. There’s a lot coming up in this field, you know, getting more summarized insight, on calls, and really pinpointing what’s important in them in terms of the action items in terms of what customers really means, what they’re asking for, and really digesting the long transcripts and in very short texts. So there’s, I think it’s going to be super exciting.

Pete Thornton 13:30
That’s an excellent use of AI. Because it’s, it’s very true, like, you can record them all. But if you have to listen back to Everything is probably not going to happen. So any kind of pieces that summarize right now, those action items, places are kind of saving everybody, I still take notes, like because I’m a note taker, that’s kind of how my brain works. But the action items and Gong like, that’s the confirmation. I’m like, I have this, what did it do here? And it’s kind of like having a buddy system right there on the call, which is cool. Well, this is not what they are like, these are just things that are overview. I know, I know, you’re an analyst. So the last one you mentioned is probably the, you know, the day to day the love of your life. Will you tell me more about Golang Data Cloud or the analytics piece?

Or Farber 14:17
Yeah, for sure. So, you know, Golang it’s all about reality. There is a treasure trove of data underneath Golang collected from your communication across channels, and with many insights from Golang. And, you know, we’re exposing that to our UI. But there’s so much more you can do with Golang. Each business has its question, and we have a lot of customers who want to get Golang data in their head and really answer questions that are unique to their business and dive into the data in a way that fits their business. So this is why we’re creating Go Data Cloud Golang Data Cloud is a central place where customers can get access to Golang data in a very analytics friendly model that will be built specifically for analytics use cases. And on top of that, we’re also going to provide many pre-built queries, dashboards and cookbooks, and recipes on how to get insights from Golang data. So it’s really exciting. And the first step that we’re going to release soon is our Snowflake data share. This was the first feature in the Golang Data Cloud, a lot more coming after that. But if you have a Snowflake data warehouse, we are already able to share data within minutes, no code, very minimal, technological work around that. And then you get data that is easily digestible, and very valuable.

Pete Thornton 15:51
Yeah, that’s excellent. Excellent. Of course, I attended how I met you. I attended a Community Meetup in which you were hosting. And that was the first time I’d not heard of it, I saw the Snowflake integration release back in late November. And that was exciting, but to hear you speak about it, and some of these pieces that were pre built, like a cookbook, like things where you could get your hands on more data, it was tremendously exciting, because one of the things that helped at a former Oregon to help them was we’re turning over sales leadership, like adding layer over layers is adding not turning over actually growing very rapidly. And one of the things we were able to do for the sales leaders at the time was extremely manual, that is still helpful, because the analytics were there, to a degree, we just had to go and bring it to and build a boardroom decK, like just a boardroom blueprint for them so that they could see revenue data alongside behavioral data. And they’ve like, Where’d this come from? How’d you get this? We want this every time like, yes, indeed. Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am. And we bring it to them. And they really loved it. And so they’re hungry for more at that point. And this would be how you can get more? And then how can you outside of the standard UI, which still provides exceptional, like analytics, but outside the standard UI? How would you take the next steps? So when I saw it come out as like, Ah, I think that’s how you take next steps, something that was previously available? So really excited about that?

Or Farber 17:20
Yes, exactly. This is, there’s so much potential there are so many different stakeholders who can benefit from our data. And we hope and believe that this will make it much easier to get to create the impact that can be created.

Pete Thornton 17:38
Because of that experience, that particular experience years ago, like I have an idea of who would benefit from your standpoint, like Who were you thinking of? Who were the avatars as you kind of picture that we were rolling it out?

Or Farber 17:51
First of all, I think it’s the decision makers, right? It’s executives in revenue and sales organizations who want to make their strategic decisions based on reality. And this is a big component, you know, Golang has the reality Golang data is a unique glean into reality. So first of all, those people who want to make decisions based on the actual reality of the market of their customers, as of their organization. So this was the first one. And then there are many other stakeholders, from different level managers in the in sales organizations who can benefit to the refs themselves from time to time who can get some insights from their data teams. And of course, we have all the people working with data. So we have, and we have analytics, analysts, and we have bi and data teams, all of those can benefit. I think rev ops and analysts can benefit from very easy to work with data analytics friendly models that are well documented with dictionaries, and also with some ideas that we provide for what can be achieved, right? You don’t always know what to ask and you feel that there is a lot of value in the data. But what do you ask? So we have a lot of experience from our different customers that we’re going to provide as materials to rev ops and analysts who can take inspiration, and you know, take it from there. And also bi and data teams who have the task of gathering all the different data sources in the data warehouse. So Snowflake data share takes minutes. Really, this is a no brainer for them and saves a lot of time.

Pete Thornton 19:39
Yeah, that’s great. So yeah, it kind of it feels like it is moving from people trying to like action, the data all the way down to people who live and work in data all day, every day, the analyst ops, bi teams, everybody Reb ops, who would actually love to like be able to configure it and structure it much more easily. That seems like the place that they would live. And I like what you said too about the examples, it is nice to know because there’s kind of endless, like once you start creating like the permutations, like if you even just start to think about all the information in CRM, all the information in revenue intelligence, and then the cross referencing between those, and then the different ways that you can present it, like, it becomes closer to endless. So even some of the examples you had shared in the meetup, I was like, Ah, that’s a great idea, like these productivity charts. That’s kind of like Coach’s Corner, kind of look and feel some of the things that had shown up there, I was just like, Oh, it’s a great idea. It’s perfect. You know, I’m sure our community will continue to resonate on that and share back and forth the QCon community as well,

Or Farber 20:41
for sure, I think the community will benefit a lot, I will contribute a lot to this initiative. And yeah, I think you know, there’s such a long chain of people who are involved in getting the data and getting insights and then acting on them. There’s a lot that can go wrong in the way. If it’s too complicated, if it’s hard to understand, if you don’t know what to do with that. Or if it’s not where you live, like, right? There’s great data, but it’s not where you live. You can’t achieve anything. So this is what we’re trying to solve. We’re trying to solve for every part of the chain, from easy access to great usability of the data, to education about what you can do to impact and make decisions.

Pete Thornton 21:25
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it like that. If we had the visuals, we would move straight to a flowchart without one, for sure. So there’s a couple different ways I know because we do one traditionally, to gather data, there’s a view I’ve seen before, of course, everybody’s more familiar with the Golang view if they’re gone customers, like, what are the mechanisms at this point that people might utilize? Or like, how would they go about this? Essentially?

Or Farber 21:56
Yeah. Are you referring to the Snowplow to integration to the Golang, Data Cloud or to other methods that we have now in place? Yeah, it’s,

Pete Thornton 22:05
if it’s accessible already, like Gone is already gathering the data. I guess what I’m asking maybe a better question is like, why is it important? Why is it important that you soak, you get it through like a Data Cloud, as opposed to checking it out? You know, checking out the UI and the Deals tab only for, etc? For sure.

Or Farber 22:25
So yeah, there’s many insights in the current UI. And it’s, you know, we have a lot of customers benefiting a lot from working with the UI alone. But then there are three main reasons why customers would want to get data in their data warehouse. One, is that, you know, as much as we’re investing in the UI, we’ll never answer all the questions. Some businesses have their own unique circumstances, their own unique characteristics, and their own unique questions. And without wanting to limit our customers, just to what we have in the UI, because, as I said, we have so much potential in this data. So exporting data and having it in your hands to answer your own question. This is one. The second is, you know, there’s an ecosystem of tools that sales organizations will usually work with, from CRM to gong to prospecting, to knowing Gainsight, anything. And you need to combine those sources to get a holistic view of the world, right of the reality. So exporting data from Golang, and then combining it to other sources will have the potential. And also, there are many stakeholders who can benefit from growing data and gathering insights, but they’re not living in Golang. They don’t have time to go into Gong, like, even the CEO, don’t expect them to go into Gong every day and get the insight. So getting the data into the rev ox. And into that I was told where they can create dashboards and put them wherever the executives live, or even create presentations and get insights to them in meetings. We want their insights to flow, and customers want them as well. So these are the three main reasons why think, and customer think this is really valuable.

Pete Thornton 24:25
Okay, that makes sense. And kind of felt those use cases as well. Depending on the scenario. Yeah, that’s helpful to know. Then, I know it’s early days, as far as this particular integration that you’re talking about. And I haven’t you know, of course, there’s a personal example here, but like, how are you seeing other cars utilizing this today are some examples that you’ve seen to date?

Or Farber 24:48
Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of different business questions and use cases, the data helps so this is it starts from activity tracking, you know, you want to see how much your rep How much time your reps are spending with customers? With all the customers or which specific one? So this is what they want to see activity by. Do you want to, you know, make sure that you are communicating with all the relevant customers all their rights Caden, then we have efficiency and productivity questions that gold data can help with? Are we investing in the right opportunities? Do we spend our time with those deals, those prospects who have the potential to be bigger, or more likely to close? Are we spending time on over invested opportunities, spending time on smaller opportunities that are not likely to close. So this is another one win loss analysis, right? What’s contributing to our winning a deal, or to progressing stages, it can be by track or it can be by you know, certain concepts that come up in cold, it can be by activity, it can be by the different personas who are participating in a deal. So with this data, our customers are correlating behavior and character characteristics of communication to the actual outcome, which is cool. We have use cases around coaching right you to disinvite other use cases, the common in Golang, you want to see that managers are listening to the right call that are giving feedback and they’re impacting deals. Right. So this is another one, what top reps are doing this comes up a lot, right? They constantly ask question, now you can do that you can correlate any type of behavior to the success of the rep to help other improve and adopt, you know, the best practices, and competitive analysis and initiated tracking and even you know, health, the health of an account, so much to do with the data. We’re learning from our customers every day.

Pete Thornton 26:59
So it is so interesting, like these different ones as you go through it. Well, okay. And then yeah, you brought up our kind of like specific use case, we were always curious, like, how are we going to roll out enablement month over month, quarter over quarter as things change so rapidly, and then what you brought up about the top performers, top performers versus average performers, and then being able to find those impact behaviors in between, there’s there are literally 60 correlations that you can make every single month between the between a top performer, middle performer per business segment. And then before, that is just a deep dive as a deep dive every month, you’re looking through the common UI, and maybe making the exports grabbing your CSVs. Gong li enables you to have that. And now it can be done seamlessly, very quickly. And it’s interesting, because you’re only looking for a couple of diamonds in the rough as well. You know, 60 correlations, there’s probably three per month per business segment. And so it’s all we want. But previous, it was, it was a huge load of work again, sales leadership and decision makers love that because you can roll that up to them. But on the backside, if you’re a business intelligence team ops, Team enablement team, and you’re trying to derive these, it’s a large swath of work that’s now kind of, you know, with a clicker to have the button like, ready to say, so I love all these use cases, like it kind of inspiring me on some of the things we might want to do for our customers as well.

Or Farber 28:24
Yeah, as I think that, as you said before, the customer community here, the user community that you’re starting to build, and we’re getting a lot of traction in interest there can be instrumental to the success and to sharing knowledge between Gong customers, right, between analysts. This will be super cool. I’ll be so happy to see that.

Pete Thornton 28:47
Yeah. plug for the visioneers community right here because that is again how we got kind of bumped into each other and initiated an amazing job over there, Molly, many others. I’m sure I’m less aware of you. So let me ask you one, just a little pivot away. And this is like being brought up a little bit just because of having founded a SaaS company being in a department now and you don’t do these things alone. Nobody ever does. And now Golang is a large organization now larger than they were just five six years ago. What do you have a favorite leadership moment? By chance are something that you’ve seen or experienced at going or not like anything like that? Because this product world is different from the sales world or enablement world that is typically asked about. So I’m curious if it differs at all.

Or Farber 29:34
Yeah, you know, our founders are an inspiration. I think, you know, Amita Leyland are both super inspirational. And, you know, a meet has those moments where he’s deep diving into product questions for specific customers. We have a Slack channel with him. He, you know, brings out film ideas from a customer you know. They live on the ground in reality, and this is really inspiring.

Pete Thornton 30:04
That’s awesome. Yeah, yeah, they’re both. I mean, it’s like a profile. He’s got the shades on. So I already knew I wanted to be that guy who helped me with the product and everything. And yeah, and Elon, the same as that’s wonderful. Okay, appreciate that. All right. We had a question for all the guests. And it’s just because this is an astronaut podcast. But this will be very interesting because I was a product leader. Think of this one. So if you had to guess there’s no right answer. What does SaaS ramp mean to you?

Or Farber 30:34
Yeah. For me, I’m thinking about taking you to the next level, right? maximizing your potential as a staff company, and as an individual in such a company to make the most impact on your company and your customers. And just maximize your potential.

Pete Thornton 30:52
maximize your potential. It’s good, it’s good. That should be probably everybody’s answer. That’s just like a bumper sticker. Yes, the person who’s been plugging in your analytics for the last good chunk of time, and we’ll be doing so for the next good chunk of time here at Gong says taking it to the next level. Yeah, that’s a fantastic answer, or I really appreciate your time. This has been really fantastic for me, I know my audience appreciates it as well. So thanks again for your participation today.

Or Farber 31:20
Thank you. It was a pleasure and I’m excited to talk to you and to talk to them.