Episode 215: Transforming Enterprise Sales: The Gong Story with Eilon Reshef
In this episode, Eilon Reshef, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gong, joins Melissa Perri to discuss the transformative power of AI-driven technology in sales and product management. As Gong revolutionizes the sales industry, Eilon shares insights into building tools that empower salespeople and help them succeed. He dives into the challenges of scaling Gong to $100 million in ARR and the crucial role of focusing on end-user value.
Eilon delves into how Gong captures and analyzes sales conversations to help teams close deals faster and increase revenue. He also reveals the unique organizational structure at Gong and the importance of design partners in their product development process.
Want to discover how to harness AI to improve your sales processes and drive significant growth? Tune in to gain actionable insights from Eilon’s experience at Gong.
You’ll hear us talk about:
10:31 - Prioritizing Seller-Centric Value
Eilon discusses the importance of emphasizing value for the end user, the salespeople, rather than just delivering organizational value. This approach has been critical to Gong’s success, helping build a product that sales teams love and rely on.
13:50 - Implementing a Customer-Centric Structure
Learn about Gong's unique pod structure, where product managers work closely with numerous design partners to receive continuous feedback and refine the product. This approach ensures that customer needs are always at the forefront.
26:54 - Embracing AI in Product Management
Eilon provides advice for product managers on how to integrate AI into their work. He emphasizes the need to practice and understand AI capabilities to effectively incorporate them into product offerings.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Eilon Reshef: We have to make the product really beneficial for the end user, for the same sales person who's on a call. So forget if the organization can get the value out of it, managers, leaders, blah, blah. As long as you don't make it valuable for the seller, the whole thing is gonna collapse. So we put probably over index towards value to the seller, which, I think, completely accidentally also generated eventually a lot of love towards Gong.
[00:00:22] there's obviously a lot of hype in the industry right now. But in more seriousness, I have no idea why. I think in nine out of 10 cases, not that there isn't a 10th, technology augments people. So it gives you more tools. It takes away a lot of the drudgery, increases productivity. I think ai, I mean, it does phenomenal things, at the same time, I don't think it replaced the cowork, which is collaboration in the case of product, working with customers in the case of sales coming up with the strategy in almost all business environments.
Intro
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[00:00:47] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
[00:01:16] Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:01:25] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Our special guest today is Eilon Reshef, the co-founder and chief product Officer of Gong, a revolutionary company at the forefront of AI driven sales technology. Gong is one of the fastest SaaS companies in history to reach a hundred million dollars in a ARR.
[00:01:43] He has over 4,000 customers and has been credited with helping sales teams increase their revenue by 29%. Today we're diving into his journey, founding and Scaling Gong, as well as how AI is transforming product management and sales. But before we talk to Eilon, it's time for Dear Melissa. So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions, and I answer them here every single week.
[00:02:06] Go to dear melissa.com and let me know what's on your mind.
[00:02:09] Melissa: Today's episode is brought to you by Liveblocks, the platform that turns your product into a place that users want to be. With ready made collaborative features, you can supercharge your product with experiences that only top tier companies have been able to perfect. Until now. Think AI co pilots like Notion, multiplayer like Figma, comments and notifications like Linear, and even collaborative editing like Google Docs. And all of that with minimal configuration or maintenance required. Companies from all kinds of industries and stages count on Liveblocks to drive engagement and growth in their products. Join them today and give your users an experience that turns them into daily active users.
[00:02:46] Sign up for a free account today at liveblocks. io.
[00:02:50] Melissa Perri: Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa
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[00:02:51] Melissa Perri: Dear Melissa, I've recently joined an organization as head of product where a lot of product decisions were always taken care of by the experts in the field and our B2B clients. We're now growing our product team and have five people. However, the business knowledge is lacking here.
[00:03:06] There is an established communication between field experts in tech, but the product team itself does not have the same knowledge. What are the best ways to add value as a head of product in this type of situation? So the most important thing that you can do in this situation is figure out what the product managers need to learn about the domain knowledge.
[00:03:25] And to do that, you're gonna have to build bridges between them and the experts in the field. So what can you do to have them go out and start to shadow these experts? See how they're actually doing their work and learn about that. That's going to allow them to make product decisions as well. So while not all product managers need to have robust domain knowledge, when they come into the job, you still need to learn it along the way. So you're gonna need to learn what's important about this domain so that I can build the best products for our customers. So your product managers should be curious. They should be asking, what are our field experts doing?
[00:04:00] What are our clients doing? How are they using our products? What works? What are their problems? How can I actually solve them? That's the mindset that you need in a great product manager. So as their leader, you want to. Implement ways for them to go out and learn the answers to those questions. So how do you get them curious about your customers?
[00:04:16] How do you also establish ways for them to go out and do good user research? Can you make programs where they can shadow people? Can you start to create, um, processes of discovery so that before they kick off every project, let's say they have to go out and do at least five customer interviews to get up to speed.
[00:04:32] Can you help go through their customer interview questions and make sure they're asking the right questions? Can you pair them maybe with a field expert? So maybe they have a buddy and this person is in charge of helping to get them up to speed and they talk to them at least once a week. As the head of the product, you put the structure in place that helps the product managers go out and do these things.
[00:04:52] So that they're forced to have interactions with their customers so that they're out there actually speaking with them on more of a regular cadence so that they can get the same kind of knowledge that their field experts have, and then also talk to the technical people, right? What do they know about the domain that can get them up to speed?
[00:05:10] When a lot of people walk into a more complex organization as a product person, they might not know everything about the domain, and that's okay. But again, it's that curiosity. So my question for you too is are, are your product managers actually curious? Are they wanting to go do these things? Are they wanting to learn?
[00:05:27] And if not, how do you either inspire them and encourage 'em to be curious? If they're not curious at all, then you might not have the right people in those roles. You might need to bring in people who are a little more curious. It's one thing to build a great product that scales, and I think that's a separate subject matter expertise than domain knowledge.
[00:05:45] But if you're not even curious about your customers, how can you build them the best product possible? That's why we have to inspire that curiosity. So in a lot of places, um, I have also had to go in and learn the domain. I, I can, I can help a lot with product. I know the structures, I know the cadences for that.
[00:06:00] I know, I know, you know, what different types of products we could build. But if I wasn't an expert on healthcare i'd, I'd go learn from the experts on healthcare. I would go, uh, talk to nurses. I would watch doctors use our platforms to get up to speed on that. And that's what you need to do. So for you as a head of product, how do you create that in learning environment?
[00:06:19] How do you create that structure? How do you create those processes and those cadences? That's really where I would be concentrating, and that's how you can add value. So I hope that helps. And again, if anybody has questions out there for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. Now let's talk to Eilon.
Gong's Founding Story
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[00:06:34]
[00:06:34] Melissa Perri: Welcome to the show, Eilon.
[00:06:36] Eilon Reshef: Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.
[00:06:38] Melissa Perri: I am very excited to talk to you about Gong. So you are the chief product officer and the co-founder of Gong, which has been really revolutionizing the sales industry. Can you tell us a little bit about what, what drew you to found this company?
[00:06:53] Eilon Reshef: Sure. So I actually had a previous company which I had sold back in, I think it was 2013, took a sabbatical, which I recommend to everybody. It's kind a fun time. I was becoming bored and my partner in crime, Amit Bendov, who's the CEO now, kinda. Approached me and he's he ran a company, he ran to this issue, which was, Hey, we don't know what's going, why sales aren't succeeding, et cetera, et cetera, and he was like, maybe and what they did was actually, they physically listened to hundreds of calls and they found root causes and he basically reached out to me. At the time, I was again doing nothing, actually took. AI courses. I bought Invidia stock. I keep telling people 2015 I bought nvidia stock 'cause I knew it was coming.
[00:07:29] And he was like, Hey, can you, well, I didn't sell them afterwards, unfortunately. But, so anyways it was like can we automate this? I'm like, I just went to this like deep learning course. I think we should able to do it. And what I love kinda enterprise software. I love B2B, I know nothing about B2C.
[00:07:44] So I'm like, alright, this is B2B. At the time there were barely any sales technology software and there was like. Thousands of marketing technology software. So I'm like, it's gotta be the same, right? If there's like lots of stuff that helps marketer, there's no reason why it should be helping sales. And I love working with salespeople, like love the domain, love the B2B, love enterprise, and there's gotta be a big opportunity out there. Let's do it. And that's how it all started.
[00:08:06] Melissa Perri: It's funny because a lot of product people don't love working with sales. So what made you really like working with salespeople?
[00:08:12] Eilon Reshef: First of all I like working with customers, which I guess starts, starts from there. You can the end of the day, we as product people, we gotta satisfy customers. Anybody who's Hey, I got an idea, I'm gonna build it. I think it's not like doing their job right, in the sense of talk to customers, see what they think.
[00:08:25] So my previous company also was like, we were very customer centric and working with customers. It's also working with the sales teams, coming up with an account strategy and how you win as part of, the whole social bank. um, love disengagement and again, haven't done B2C in my life, so maybe it's also good, but I have no idea.
[00:08:41] Melissa Perri: So when you look back at your time founding Gong all the way through, your impressive growth So far, what are some of the defining moments or challenges that stand out to you that say, these were critical times where it shaped my approach to product leadership.
[00:08:55] Eilon Reshef: So I think from a business perspective, the key challenge we had in the beginning was our thought process was this, Hey, the salespeople work based off a database. They call it the CRM. in the database is entered by people, which kind of means that AI is not gonna be successful because all it has is what people put into.
[00:09:10] It's okay, that's not gonna work. idea is: let's capture all of the information. In the days it was they didn't even call it video conferencing, it was called web conferencing. The first integration we had was WebEx. I don't think Zoom was, I don't know, might have been around, nobody knew who they are. And the idea is this is the primary place where you can start mining information. And the first concern we had was, our salespeople are gonna be willing to be recorded. 'cause somebody's, there's a big brother, or somebody's watching me now, salespeople eventually get that nobody wants to listen to their calls. It's like, why do you waste their time? But it's a concern. So I think one of the defining moments was realization that in order for us to even be successful, just people willing to record our calls. 'cause if they're not willing, they're not gonna do it, right? They're gonna be like, customers don't want it, I don't want it, it's not helping me, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:09:53] We have to make the product really beneficial for the end user, for the same sales person who's on a call. So forget if the organization can get the value out of it, managers, leaders, blah, blah. As long as you don't make it valuable for the seller, the whole thing is gonna collapse.
[00:10:07] So we put probably over index towards value to the seller, which, I think, completely accidentally also generated eventually a lot of love towards gong from actually the field. But it was gonna, it stemmed all from the notion that it's a survival actually. If you don't do this right, the company does not have the right to exist.
[00:10:25] Melissa Perri: What were some of those key things that really empowered the salespeople and made them say, Hey, I love this thing.
Empowering Sales & Key Lessons
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[00:10:31] Eilon Reshef: It is, it's for example, you can think in call center software, you record calls. The agents never listen to them. It's only the managers for them. The first thing after the meeting, we sent everybody an email saying, Hey, by the way, your meeting is done. It's being analyzed. Here's a few things you might want to know about it.
[00:10:44] At the time, there weren't LLM, so you couldn't provide a whole summary, but it was still like valuable. Even the fact that you can go back taking notes and whatnot. That just got to people's inboxes and then we gave them an ability to share it with their customers. And then what that meant is, and then we sent them an email whenever the customer opened that sharing.
[00:11:00] So finally, it's a way for them to
[00:11:02] speed up the deals, but even the the idea of getting to your inbox, the deal is like the meeting is ready now. It's like obvious everybody does it that way. But remember that was 2016. The Zoom did not have
[00:11:13] recording at the time. So it was a big thing.
[00:11:16] I remember as a product leader, all of my team were I had a small team at the
[00:11:19] time, but everybody was telling me, Hey, you can't just send people an email every hour, every couple of hours. It's like spamming them and they're gonna be, they're gonna hate gong. And then end up visiting a customer physically in California. And I was walking the aisles of the sales floor and asked people, what do you think? And I think several people told me at the time. We have one request. I'm like, what is the request? Could you please send those emails quicker?
[00:11:43] Melissa Perri: Oh wow.
[00:11:44] Eilon Reshef: to record, transcribe all of that stuff. And it's it's so not intuitive that people actually want the quote unquote spam into their inbox.
[00:11:52] But that's a good example of if you orient selves towards the seller, the organization gets tons of value, but the seller had to be in the center. Otherwise, I don't think Gong would've been successful.
[00:12:02] Melissa Perri: It's a great lesson too, where it's you don't, you're not your users, right? Like you're not the person actually on the end of it. You might think you know what they want, but in reality you gotta go find from them.
[00:12:12] Eilon Reshef: Exactly.
[00:12:13] Melissa Perri: So Gong has been attributed to, for helping companies raise their revenue growth over 29%, which is really cool.
[00:12:21] What do you think contributes to that in the sales process? What are your, you're making it easier to record, get those notes back. What are the other defining factors that help gong help organizations, let's say succeed?
[00:12:33] Eilon Reshef: I I think sales is misunderstood by many people. They think it's like a seller selling something. When, you talk about people outside tech, sometimes they even have this idea of a, I know salesperson selling your insurance, or, God forbid use cars. But in, in a sort of a B2B environment, there isn't a seller.
[00:12:47] There's a selling team. if the whole team operates as a one unit
[00:12:51] a lot of good things happening. If there are disjoint then it's basically random things happen. I think the first thing that Gong does, even before you get to upleveling the individual salesperson in terms of like
[00:13:00] their abilities or give leadership insights, is to connect those different kind of selling committee or selling team.
[00:13:07] So if I'm a sales engineer, I spoke with a customer, I get, nowadays it's easier 'cause we use LMS under the scene of course. So it's like I get a summary, I can send it to the manager, I can send it to the the other person I can share it with. Again, if you're in tech, the CSM or the post-sales person, you can ask a question.
[00:13:22] So just the fact that everybody's in the loop. wrapped up the call before this discussion with a customer. I'm gonna tag a lot of other people who are like, Hey, did you know the customer asked for this? Those things would've taken weeks and month, and if you can compress the sales cycle, if you can improve knowledge sharing, if you can really kinda listen to the customer, essentially serve the customer, good things, like you said, higher win rates faster deal cycles and essentially being customer centric in kind of full sense of the world.
[00:13:50] Melissa Perri: With Gong too. I've heard you mention a lot that you're going out, you're talking to your customers. What types of practices do you do within your product team to learn more about your customers? To see what kind of problems they have.
[00:14:01] Eilon Reshef: We are probably extreme in the sense of our structure. Our organizational structure is based on like pods, which is not extreme, just like product manager, ux and a bunch of engineers. But what's probably extreme is each one of those pods works with numerous design partners.
[00:14:15] So at any point in time, a PM is gonna have 10, 5, 20, 50, sometimes it's 50, it's crazy, design partners, like real companies using the feature that they're working on or the product or enhancing and you get continuous feedback.
[00:14:25] That, so s like forces that discussion initially. What, it wasn't necessarily so much ingrained. I actually forced people like a new pm had to go through 10 customer interviews before they got certified, so to speak.
[00:14:38] So that almost gave them the muscle, but once you get the muscle, it's so super easy. We actually have a whole operational rigor around obtain getting those design partners. We have a person who's like reaching out to them, sets up those meetings, et cetera, et cetera. So the meeting I was just told you about, it's a 1450 customer they're working with, design partner with one of my product managers, and they're like, oh, we asked for this thing,
[00:14:59] but it's already in. Like last week we asked for it. It's already in. The reason it's already in is because their design partner, they gave feedback, the PM went ahead and executed on it. So by the time I went up on the call, the thing is already in, in motion, which is nice to hear.
[00:15:11] Melissa Perri: That's really cool. So they're going out, they're working with the design partners. Do you have any mechanisms of collecting that customer feedback? Besides just like customer interviews, are you using any other types of tools?
[00:15:22] Eilon Reshef: I think we use the ordinary tools. We use Gong obviously to conversations. That's like an analyze them and whatnot. So it's all, there is a system of record. If my PM wants to share something with me, they can always tag me in a call. Obviously we use data, like product data to the typical analytics.
[00:15:34] How are people using the software, how much and stuff like that. I don't think you need something super sophisticated. You need just the skillset of listening to the customer. And then, people call it product sense, but just the understanding that you don't do what they tell you. They you have to understand the need, not the want.
[00:15:49] I think that's kind of part of what we what we interview for essentially when we bring product managers to go.
[00:15:54] Melissa Perri: And as a leader too, it sounds like your team's also sharing a lot of this customer research with you, and then you're going out and talking to customers. I've seen a lot of product leaders, especially as the organization scales. Where they are looking for a sense of, what's going on, how do I get the data, how do I keep on top of the trends and what people are asking for, and get a good look holistically around on what should we be concentrating on?
[00:16:15] What's your process to, to gather that data? What are you looking at and how are you staying in touch with it?
[00:16:21] Eilon Reshef: I think there's internal sources and external sources, right? Internally, obviously there's lots of, like my leaders working in my organization, we have continuous like discussions, brainstormings, offsites, around what are the key customer needs. We have pretty structured rigor around obtaining information from sales leaders, customer success leaders, support leaders and Hey, what are you hearing? Maybe it's something that we might not listen to. Day to day wise, we're spoiled because we use Gong internally Gong. Many product leaders don't know Gong 'cause it's like a sales kind of related or revenue kind of tool. But once everything is in there, it automatically creates this idea of sharing.
[00:16:54] Because if I have a product manager who gets a request, they don't know what to even do with it. It's like they would tag somebody else in this domain or they would tag me. We would go in, we'd collaborate. And so it kinda makes it the fact that everything is like automatically in the system, it's a good first step. Now, if the system already has summarizations in search, gives you all of the tools you need. It's not like necessarily quantitative data. I don't know how many specific customers ask for it. I can go and search it, but I more believe in this idea of listen to one smart customer and then make sure it's not their issue versus just like how many people mentioned the word X? Did they really need it? Did they understand what they're doing? So it's find the smart customers and then verify that these are the right requests.
[00:17:35] Melissa Perri: What I, I've always loved that part about Gong too, as I was saying before we jumped on here I used to go into these companies and do a lot of product ops work and a big part was trying to figure out what are customers saying in the sales calls, just like you were talking about. And there was really bad notes in Salesforce. Things were scattered all over the place. User research was never condensed. But the companies that used gong.
[00:17:56] We could pull all the notes out and actually be able to see like, why are they like why are we winning? Why are we losing what kind of customers were looking at us? And I was like man, this makes so much sense.
[00:18:04] Plus I could go watch the conversation And make sure, it wasn't interpreted differently or there was, some kind of why behind there that wasn't captured in the notes or captured in what the sales person was saying. And I always thought that was just so valuable to product people too, to be able to have that information right there and to have that link back to sales as well.
[00:18:22] Eilon Reshef: Yeah, I think it's critical. Like at some point you get spoiled. You just get to the fact like you have access to every single point of evidence and you can always like go back and listen to the tone or listen to voice or read it like very quickly. It's almost like hard for me to imagine going back to my
[00:18:36] previous way of doing business, which is like scheduled call with a customer.
[00:18:39] It takes three weeks and then somebody doesn't show up and takes another three weeks, et cetera, et cetera. So I probably meet customers less than I used to in my previous company, unfortunately. But it's balanced because, there's a lot of like you have access to those discussions, so you don't have to set up a whole meeting just to get the, a little bit of information.
[00:18:56] Melissa Perri: Yeah and I think that makes it powerful too, so you can actually see a ton of customers at scale and what they're saying, what they're hearing, and then you can figure out where to dive in from there.
[00:19:04] Eilon Reshef: Exactly.
[00:19:05] Melissa Perri: So W with Gong we've been talking about as well, you know how it uses AI to do a lot of this, and you've been leading the charge here for AI powered agents revolutionizing the sales side of this.
[00:19:16] Can you tell me about your vision for how you see that manifesting over time and where that becomes powerful?
[00:19:23] Eilon Reshef: Yeah, and there's obviously a lot of hype in the industry right now. So I think if I would read the national Enquirer, there's probably no people that are gonna ever do work again. It's all agents. I'm actually looking for an agent that's gonna help me do the housekeeping kind of stuff,
[00:19:35] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that'd be great.
[00:19:36] Eilon Reshef: not do my work stuff.
[00:19:37] But anyway, I. That one doesn't seem to be progressing anywhere. But in more seriousness, I think people just I have no idea why. Maybe it's just like controversial. So the media picks up on the idea of a digital worker, we're gonna replace this, and that. And I think in nine out of 10 cases what technology does, and this is like nothing new, it's been in the last 200 years, again, nine out of 10 cases, not that there isn't a 10th, technology augments people.
[00:19:59] So it gives you more tools. So I, I. I'm still, I studied my touch typing, my typing on a typewriter versus a word processor. I'm that old. it, it was middle school, but still like old. And obviously came word processor. Now it's much easier. Now we can delete, you don't need to use like like those kind of white kind of paint all over stuff, et cetera.
[00:20:17] So I think it's gonna happen the same for most of the knowledge work. It takes away a lot of the drudgery increases productivity. I think ai, I mean we all use like chat GPT or some other LLM. It does phenomenal things in terms of rewriting and reassembling and summarizing and expanding and analyzing text at scale.
[00:20:35] At the same time, I don't think it replaced the cowork, which is collaboration in the case of product, working with customers in the case of sales coming up with the strategy in almost all business environments. So both is gong as well as I think just the way work is gonna happen is we focus on trying to come up with agents or tools that aI focus to take away chunks and chunks of redundant work. A good example is briefer. If you can get a brief on the account, you don't need to spend 30 minutes harassing somebody for information and right? If you wanna understand, we just talked about searching stuff. If you can have the AI can analyze it for you, what are the top themes that takes away work a deal scoring.
[00:21:11] Again, instead of reviewing a call, you can score it. So what are those computing blocks that you can plug into some workflows? Take a lot a lot of work. So that's how we're thinking about it. The other thing I'm very convinced is that the future interface is not gonna be chat.
[00:21:24] GPT People are not gonna go all day chat instructions, what do I do now? Help me write an email. I think all of this idea of AI should be inter weaved with some workflow. I'm actually doing my pipeline review. I need to ask a question, or I'm in the product world might be I'm writing a spec now I need somebody to help me reformat it. Versus everything is becoming chat, do this. And then I think at the scale most companies work in enterprises. You also wanna have some consistency. So it's not about me saying, Hey, could you please summarize this account for me? It's like somebody pre-programmed the agent to follow the company's best practices or desired way of doing business. So augmentation I think is the thing. I think we have right now, probably 15 to 20 different agents that kind of automate different things. I think the number is gonna grow with technology and with our ability to innovate.
Vision for AI & Its Impact on Sales
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[00:22:08] Melissa Perri: I completely agree on the chat interface. I think everybody's saying, oh, we're gonna have no interfaces. It's just gonna be like typing a message.
[00:22:14] And I, it doesn't, that doesn't work. In like enterprise software flows, it doesn't work in a lot of flows, honestly. Because People are still visual creatures.
[00:22:22] Like we wanna, sometimes we wanna see a report, like I don't want to ask them for the data. I wanna visualize that data. I wanna see it do
[00:22:29] different things and I don't wanna have to ask for it every single time. What if You don't know, the question to ask if you are somebody on the receiving end of this?
[00:22:36] So I really love that you said that. 'cause I feel like people are harping so hard on, we're just gonna be chat flows. There will be no UI.
[00:22:43] Eilon Reshef: Yeah. And I think it's, the reality is AI is such a foundational shift. It has, it is so strong. It has So many capabilities that it's gonna vary our, to assume all sorts of things. It's and I think some are right, some are wrong. I think obviously we're betting on some things, and I think to your point, I don't think chat is the future interface of the world. I don't think those autonomous agents and go in a maverick way and do some stuff is the future of the world. But this idea of AI based automation is certainly, is super, super important. and I can't see my life already today not using an LLM because I use it for so many things that you just can't take that way.
[00:23:16] Melissa Perri: it's, definitely made my life easier too. There was actually an article yesterday I wanna ask you about to see what your perspective is. So Marty Cagan wrote an article yesterday about the future of product management and how AI is gonna affect that, and he said that he saw it approaching. a team of three where you're gonna have one product manager, one designer and one developer, and that's gonna be all of our squads for companies going forward.
[00:23:39] And I'm curious, like what your take is on that. Do you see it as we're gonna go that drastically down there? Or how do you envision what our teams are gonna look like?
[00:23:49] Eilon Reshef: we're seeing I want to say ask a few engineers. I think they're so far with existing tools, they can probably save somewhere around two hours in, in a week. So what is it? 5%?
[00:23:58] Maybe we get to 20 at some stage. I used to be an engineer so I get a sense for that. And I remember moving from, c to c plus and then from c plus to Java and then a smart id.
[00:24:08] There's like intelligent, like a super smart I each time you get like a 20%. Another 20%, another 20%. So I've had in my career, even before I moved to product management or afterwards when I might've done it for fun, like 20%, 30% increases, sometimes even two x. I haven't seen, I don't think this is like a 90% increase.
[00:24:25] So I don't think we can get away from engineering. I think time spent by an engineer, coding in a day is not huge. so even if you can take third away, half away, they're still gonna have to do debugging. They're still gonna have to do thinking, planning all of the stuff around it. I don't, I think it's probably over the power.
[00:24:42] We, it's been, what, 20 years and still there are no real autonomous cars. so things take
[00:24:47] Melissa Perri: Yeah,
[00:24:47] Eilon Reshef: time. It's not that they wouldn't be, but just take a lot of time.
[00:24:50] Melissa Perri: Yeah, I kinda see that too. And I think about like enterprise companies as well. And if you think about it, if all of your teams are three people, there, there's critical services where if they go out, down in the middle of the night, for example, who's gonna go fix it? and if we have all these teams where we don't have any redundancy or we don't have, a couple more people there to rotate through things. I don't think that becomes sustainable over time And I've also seen it where I feel like a great product manager can come up with, can help paint the vision for a product for a bunch of engineers to get done. But there's still So much thought that you said goes through actually doing the work in breaking it down and how do we structure it and how do we do this, that I don't see that being just, pure grunt work that can be automated away, very seamlessly.
[00:25:32] Eilon Reshef: Yeah, exactly. I think what's confusing here is that he can get from zero to one really quickly. It's oh, build me a prototype of an application that is, I, don't know, does something, I, dunno, plays back game or whatever. So the first version is really quickly, so you're oh, what if I can work at that speed?
[00:25:46] But the challenge is, this is not how you work. 'cause now V two LMS don't, do a good job in and now I wanna make it scalable and secure, blah, blah, blah. And now it's becoming like professional at work in the same way that we, are, like, write a spec for me or write a an account plan for me. You get like a first draft. but it's not that thing that you want in the end. and then you still have to spend a lot of time, getting it right. Now in engineering, you can't skip this other 20% because the software's just gonna break.
[00:26:10] Melissa Perri: Yeah,
[00:26:10] Eilon Reshef: there's a road ahead, but it's fun. It's fun being at the forefront of this technology. It's I think it's a change of a lifetime in the same way that maybe the internet was. So I think it, we should all be, excited about being part of it.
[00:26:20] Melissa Perri: I'm excited about it. I think there's so many cool things coming out there too, where I'm going, oh, my God, this saves So much time and it allows us to like, Be able to be in touch with our customers like, you're doing right much faster and easier ways. It is gonna help us build better products.
[00:26:34] When you look at your product managers, especially the ones working with AI, we always have questions about, what should I do as a product manager to prepare for this new world that we're in? What should I be concentrating on? Should I be doing anything differently? What becomes more important now than ever in the advent of ai? What would be your advice?
[00:26:54] Eilon Reshef: My advice would be as much as you can in your role, practice it in the sense of try to come up with some AI related features so you get your hands dirty. It's you can talk, you can read about it all day long. I can read about developing mobile applications, but until I've used like an I iPhone or Android, it's all just reading.
[00:27:09] So get your hands dirty. I think as part of you getting your hands dirty. I think there's few things you can teach yourself. One is get a good sense of what's possible using ai. Again, it's misleading because it's everything I, I heard. There's a new AI model that's gonna give me like back massage in the morning, still looking for it.
[00:27:27] but still I get a good sense in the same way that every product manager kind of has an intuitive idea that if you need to move a button, 30 pixels, that's easy. Or if you wanna have a forum, that's easy. But if you wanna have this, I don't know, sophisticated something that does something else is not as easy.
[00:27:40] So get the same intuition for ai. I think once you start getting your hands dirty,
[00:27:45] you learn there's a little bit more practices. 'cause in traditional software, you show somebody the software and they're like, looks good, looks bad. And it's like your research or feedback or validation, whatever cycle. I think with ai usually there's a piece of data to it. So yes, the chat looks great, but if the text is irrelevant and the UX is not the thing. The thing is like what kind of information is in, in the application. So you gotta develop your own muscle and practice around how do you start working with customers with real data, which goes back to design partners.
[00:28:15] You gotta have some real data to people are not gonna give you feedback until they are utilizing the this machine. 'cause on paper it all looks great. So knowing what AI can do practice with real data and go through the whole cycle of, oh, it doesn't work well, can I optimize it? Can I fix it? Did I get it to a point where people are thinking it's good? I think after a few times you become this really proficient. So that's what I would recommend. Pick something that works and just throw it into your product if you can afford it. If the product makes sense.
[00:28:44] Melissa Perri: You, you've mentioned your design partners, and you said that you have like team out there that helps recruit them and bring them in. What are the types of activities that product managers at Gong do with the design partners? What are they involved in? What's like the whole gamut of that?
[00:28:57] Eilon Reshef: I it's basically giving them access to the tool, teaching them how to use it. And again, when I say tool, it's a specific tool that they've built, right? Obviously not gong itself. They're usually a customer. Very rare cases. It would be a non-customer. I. So it's a person within a customer organization and they wanna try something as we have a new AI researcher, try it out. So you give them access, you show them how it works, by showing 'em how it works. You already get feedback. 'cause people are like, what does this thing do? Why do you call it this? I don't understand that. You watch them do it, you give them some time and then you set up some sort of a cadence, meet them weekly, biweekly, or sometimes it's asynchronous.
[00:29:31] And you continuously listen. To the point where you either hear silence, and that could be they've lost interest, not a good thing, or they're just using it and not realizing they're a design partner anymore, which kind of indicates the thing is very close to being ready for customers. So that's the cadence.
[00:29:46] I don't think there's anything super, super special about it. I think asking the right questions is the key. It's it's not just do you like it? It's more how much do you like it? How are you gonna use it? How does it, what kind of impact does it provide? What would I change if that can provide more impact, et cetera?
[00:30:02] Asking more if I need questions to just give me feedback, which usually is very tactical.
[00:30:08] Melissa Perri: I've had a lot of product people out there complain or say, it's really hard to get those people to be design partners. Or, how do I go out there and try to source these people to make sure that they wanna do this? Or what do I pitch them to make them wanna talk to me? How do you approach that?
[00:30:23] Eilon Reshef: So we're blessed. I wanna I'll say two things. First of all, don't, we're blessed because we're selling to sales people. Salespeople that you know, some are gonna listen to this, I'm gonna make fun of them anyway. They just love to talk, right? So you just bring 'em on the phone, they're gonna brag forever.
[00:30:36] And then they're gonna ask them, how's the tool? And they're gonna automatically sell it back to you. 'cause they're salespeople. It's oh, I've used Gong. It's great. It's the best thing. It does this and that. It's awesome. I didn't know we have this feature, but 'cause it's like the type of persona that, that we have the benefit of working with. And I think each company should benefit from their own advantages. And try to work around the disadvantages. One of our advantages as a vendor is our customers are willing to jump on calls. They're very communicative, usually extroverts. And if we were selling to developers, that might have been different.
[00:31:07] maybe it's more slack communication, maybe it's other things. But at the same time, I feel there's always people who are willing to talk. In my career I've had those like numerous times. I think it's a. It is probably not being afraid to ask the question. Coming into the meeting prepared showing genuine interest so people feel like you've listened to them and then they're willing to talk again.
[00:31:28] If you just come in as like a, oh, somebody made me do this. Yeah, for sure. At some point the customer's gonna check out.
[00:31:36] Melissa Perri: And then for these design partners, are they like your beta testers or you would you classify that in that category?
Working with Design Partners & Beta Testing
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[00:31:41] Eilon Reshef: I think it's the same. Yeah, we have like alpha, beta, all which we keep changing all the time. Like in naming wise, is it limited availability versus beta alpha or preview? As we mature, we tend to have refining those kind of steps, but in general it's all the same.
[00:31:53] It's like beta testers, but really early. I have a story about one of our, we have a product called Forecast and we was developed. I met one of my RPMs in the kitchen. He was like, I gave it to a design partner. And I'm like, you mean it's not ready? It's not even there's nothing in it.
[00:32:07] And he was like, yeah, but I gave it to him. And I'm like, we just started developing it. Turned, and he is yeah, I gave it to him. He hit the save button, he got an error. So it was at the point where the thing didn't even save anything and, but he felt confident enough to go to the partner and say, Hey, this is it.
[00:32:22] Like we're starting to develop it. Why do, what do you think here? What do you see here? as embarrassing as it was next week, the safe was working. And I actually spoke with a customer a few months later and he was like, that was a very good beta program for me. I felt like I'm giving feedback each week something got better. I felt I'm getting something out of it.
[00:32:38] So I'm giving you feedback, but then I'm getting a product that isn't my feedback. It's like a collection of people's feedback. So I'm actually learning. don't like, don't be embarrassed to work very early with customers and don't wait until it's beta just.
[00:32:53] As soon as you can. As long. As long as this thing just seems to work, just knock it off.
[00:32:59] Melissa Perri: I think that's a good lesson for people who are trying to polish everything up to a tee before they show it to anybody.
[00:33:03] Eilon Reshef: Oh no. We have a beta running right now with actually a very advanced feature where there is no gui. So basically the PM is like calling the customer is could you please tell me what? Think of a prompt as an example, right? It's not a prompt. Just could you please dictate it to me? I'll type it in the system and show you what it does.
[00:33:18] And the reason that you could still like interact afterwards, but there is no way to edit it even. But it provides tons of value because now you can start steps three to 10. And eventually we're gonna have a go for step one and two, but I think it's the right way to go.
[00:33:30] Melissa Perri: When you look at Gong, too, it's grown so fast over, the time that you've been alive, basically and kicking. What are some of the challenges that you experience with this hyper growth? And when you reflect on it. What would you call out as some like defining moments of that?
[00:33:46] Eilon Reshef: Growth is always hard. To be honest, like when the downfall of industry happened, was it two or three years ago? Whenever, and people started like stopping hiring and we have a significant portion of our customers are tech customers. We have many non-tech customers, but. that portion started like shrinking and we don't need that many licenses because we don't have that many salespeople. So it was already harder selling during that environment. obviously we also slowed orange grows. 'cause you didn't wanna pour money into sort of the company when you're not growing fast.
[00:34:14] It was the easiest two years in my life. You you could invest in, in people, existing people. You can fine tune, optimize the processes really focus on how to work well. you grow fast, it's much harder. 'cause you bring somebody in, by the time you train them, you bring somebody else in. So I think the it lesson for me is, you basically do your best and, just don't give up. But it's gonna much much harder to grow. Technically harder is when you don't grow, it's even harder because the business suffers. Personal ease versus company success is obviously an interesting balance.
[00:34:44] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's an interesting one too. I feel like during the phase when tech was crumbling for a little bit there, there was a lot of companies that had same problem, whether they're not being able to close the sales, but they still had that pressure, right? It's grow. You gotta keep going at 200% year over year, from the investors or from other people. As a co-founder, how do you also handle that conversation or think about your strategy in that time? Do you just say this is a blessing and we're gonna internally focus and look at that?
[00:35:08] Or are you placing bets? How do you communicate that?
[00:35:12] Eilon Reshef: So, look, I mentioned the typewriter thing, so I'm old enough that I've almost seen it. I don't wanna say seen it all, nobody's seen it all. But I've been through the 2001 downturn, 2009 downturn. So you know how it works. You you shrink a little bit, you have to go almost, we didn't let any people go,
[00:35:24] but the my past companies, It was the back. You you understand that it's a phase. You have to go through it and I think the first thing you don't like you don't put yourself into too much pressure. you, manage accordingly. You manage expenses. you
[00:35:37] already start planning for the rebound, which you don't know how's long gonna happen. the challenge is not everybody's made to like, work in such an environment. oftentimes what is people are like, oh, I came to, my hope was, I don't know, I'm gonna make of dollars and 30 days.
[00:35:52] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:35:52] Eilon Reshef: Start rethinking what do they want to be? Some went out of tech, relocated to some, I don't know, different countries.
[00:35:59] So you see some of that behavior, which is a little bit harder. Some people actually get stressed just 'cause they're per, they've made maybe make wrong financial decisions and suddenly they're like, oh shit, to pay mortgage. So you have to manage through people issues. But I think personally, as long as you understand it, it is what it is.
[00:36:14] It's how economy goes up and down. I think just like rationally, you have to go through this.
[00:36:20] Melissa Perri: It sounds too like you had still through that time, a strong vision for Gong as well, and I've seen other companies when, they're met with any kind of market friction, sometimes they'll abandon the vision or they're abandon the strategy and they start doing everything they possibly can just to like, grab a dollar.
[00:36:34] How do you think about, creating that stable vision over time, creating that strategy, and when is it time to, to pivot or persevere?
[00:36:44] Eilon Reshef: I think it's time to pivot if the strategy doesn't work right. I mean there's no, we haven't had a chance to do tons of pivot. I think we got lucky a little bit. But I think if you're focused on customer needs and you're like, yeah, I know that need exists, I know it's not gonna go away. I think that's a very good start version.
[00:36:57] I. Versus believing your own, like bringing your own Kool Aid is never a good idea or your investors' Kool Aid or the national acquirer Kool Aid. The other thing I think is a little bit of a strategy thought process where when we started Gong, Amit and I both said, Hey, we don't want to have just the gongs of the word as customers.
[00:37:13] Yes, we're very successful with tech. Long is the branding with tech companies. But we don't wanna have just those customers. So nowadays we have customers, medical, like healthcare and whatnot. Even though I must admit that it wasn't like a big success from the beginning.
[00:37:26] It takes a long time to cultivate these domains that you're less familiar with and get the trust and get the initial like cohort of customers that makes other customers wanna buy. It's always been in our mindset. So I think it also helps a little bit in the sense of you're less exposed to technology, but also gives you confidence that you're not just relying on one sector and then you know that people are still gonna buy groceries. Almost any economy people are gonna buy medication, med like medicine in almost any type of economy. Lots of things that are less dependent on the tech boom being successful.
[00:37:59] Melissa Perri: What made you want to do that too? Was it because of diversification at the beginning or did you have another reason where you said, we don't wanna build it just for the gongs, we wanna also go after some of these old companies?
[00:38:09] Eilon Reshef: I think we tend to, especially people in the Bay Area I'm not, I don't live in the Bay Area, but obviously I live the Bay Area, we have offices in San Francisco and whatnot. I think they tend to be centralized around the Bay Areas of the world and there's not too many tech companies in the world, right?
[00:38:23] So when we started, we were all like, Hey, we're only gonna sell to software companies, almost like, in the Bay Area, right? Only selling B2B in English to the united States, blah, blah, blah. Maybe 5,000 companies worldwide. But if you do the math, it's 5,000 times whatever people pay us. It's not like a huge company.
[00:38:39] And even if you take all tech companies in the world, it's still like a niche. A big niche, but a niche. And you're never gonna sell to everybody. 'cause there's always gonna be, I don't know, some, don't know. Some customer will be like, we already have something. We build something, you have to, I dunno, migrate to my environment to do something, whatever.
[00:38:57] so I think if you want to think big, and that was our intent, right? Successful or not. I think you have to assume you're gonna be able to sell to more than twice, just one vertical. I'm trying to think if there's any like really successful top 50 software company that is just focused on one vertical.
[00:39:13] Maybe there is. I don't think there's too many.
[00:39:16] Melissa Perri: Probably not too many. Yeah. that's a really good foresight from the beginning right there. So we talked a little bit about, the future product management when it comes to ai. Can we talk a little bit about sales? How do you see like the industry of sales evolving over. Time we've got these different technologies, but just in general as well.
[00:39:34] Eilon Reshef: So I think the one thing that's gonna stay is the customer communication. There's bots now and agents and whatever, but I don't think people, buyers are gonna want to talk to a bot. I've seen companies try, that didn't work out. I don't think that's gonna change. I. So I think the key function, which is working with the customer, explaining, educating, creating the relationship that's gonna stay, I think it's an element of personal communication that's gonna stay.
[00:39:55] I wanna write you an email. I wanna do specific things I wanna say in the email, even if AI helped me write it. I think what's gonna go away is a lot of the drudgery. Entering data into systems CRM systems or whatnot. I think that's gonna completely go away. I think the idea of going out of a meeting and telling somebody else what happened in a meeting, kinda stuff will go away.
[00:40:13] Even preparation, if you have AI already, like brief you and create all of the information you need's, gonna go away. So all in all, I think it's gonna become a better profession in that people are focusing. We talked before about like salespeople wanting to talk and being extrovert.
[00:40:28] What salespeople, the reason they like their job is the interaction with customers. I'm yet to see a salesperson who's yes, I had to enter five fields into the CRM that made my day. So I think it's gonna take away all of the stuff they hate and keep them with the stuff they like, and it's gonna make them also more productive.
[00:40:43] Unfortunately for this professionals, I think it's probably means like larger quarters in, I know, two, three years, you're gonna be held accountable to produce more. I think for now the, we are all kind of living in the AI is optimizing, but people don't know how to hold us accountable to that optimization. But all in all, I think it's gonna be a much better profession.
[00:41:00] Melissa Perri: Yeah, and it sounds like the relationships is gonna be the core of it.&
[00:41:04] Eilon Reshef: I, I think relationships and again, some people have the idea of a used car salesperson as a mental model of a salesperson. But the true in a B2B environment, essentially a good B2B seller is a trusted advisor. It's a cliche, but the good ones are, so they have a relationship with a customer.
[00:41:19] They get what, and then they can recommend guide um, systems. Cause if you just go to a spec you can compare gong with maybe, I don't know, dozens of tools that do something in the sales domain and they're gonna probably have a check mark next to each feature that Gong has. Whether it's true or not, or whether just, but obviously the output eventually those tools can provide is not the same. And the reason there's a little bit of like specificity around what does it mean to have a capability? What does it mean to roll it out? How can it work within an organization? And I I think that's the role of a salesperson to mediate that, that capability, not just in software. It could be for, uh, heavy machinery, it could be for medical devices, it could be even for insurance. It's you need this versus that. I don't think that one will easily go away.
Reflections on Product Leadership
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[00:42:03] Melissa Perri: Yeah, definitely. So Eilon. One question for you before we leave. When you look back on your product management career and your product leadership career, what would you tell your younger self?
[00:42:15] Eilon Reshef: Oh, there's so many things like, look, my previous company was a debacle. Not debacle, but we sold it eventually, but we didn't even give the investors their money back. So I think we made every mistake in the book, all the way from not focusing on the right customers, to, really kinda not listening to the Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm, which is focused. And like I mentioned in Gong, we focused on this very small segment and went up. I think my previous company we had Estée Lauder or Cisco and American Express's first customers. It's like there's no way for you to scale that thing. so it's the strategic element of understanding how to do strategy, more than anything else.
[00:42:50] I think the other thing is, we talked about market size. I think probably. Thinking about what the market size is like super important because we all like ideas. Oh, I want to build something that does something, how many companies are need that or how many people need that? So more like if you kind of shoot in the right direction initially. So maybe the thing I would tell myself is, do those kind of things. listen to other people and actually follow this. And then at least if you are in a, in the right market, that's good enough, it's growing, it's then you can kinda find your spot. Even if you're not a huge success, if you go after a small market or in nonexisting market or something that isn't like a real ICP.
[00:43:30] Think there's too much likelihood to succeed. There's exceptions to everything, but we don't wanna be the 1% of this difference.
[00:43:38] Melissa Perri: I think that's great advice for people out there who are getting started or even product managers working at companies. Pay attention to your customers really really look at the market there. Great advice. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. If people wanna learn more about you, where can they go?
[00:43:51] Eilon Reshef: The easiest is ping me on LinkedIn, I tend to be way more responsive than what, what may expect. So any questions? Any thoughts, ideas, also hiring if you want, come work for Gong. Same idea.
[00:44:00] Melissa Perri: Excellent. We will post all of those links on our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com with links to talk to Elon. We'll post about gong and hiring as well, and we'll post all of those things there, so go to productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next week with another amazing guest. And in the meantime, if you have any questions for me, go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are.
[00:44:21] We'll see you next time.