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How did Gong actually create revenue intelligence, step by step?

Gong started life as conversation intelligence and found that senior revenue leaders heard that phrase and mentally filed it under sales enablement, which meant no meeting. The product could already do deal management, forecasting and prospecting, so the category name was undersized rather than wrong, and in 2019 they renamed the space revenue intelligence to match the buyer they wanted. Then they spent years making the term unavoidable: original data research, an evangelist role, a consistent point of view about opinion based decision making, and a website that taught the category before it sold the product. The sequence is the lesson, product capability first, then a name sized to the buyer, then relentless repetition.

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The company's own account of why it moved from conversation intelligence to revenue intelligence, including the buyer problem that forced the rename. This is the primary source on the most copied category play of the last decade.

What is Revenue Intelligence? Why Gong Pioneered The Category in 2019

From Gong by Jonathan Costet 10 min read

  • Two thirds of buyers prefer to gather information on their own and 60 percent prefer not to talk to a salesperson at all.
  • Manual CRM entry loses close to 99 percent of the words actually spoken on a sales call.
  • Three quarters of buyers say their most recent purchase was very complex or difficult.
  • Gong's bet: teams move from intuition to data, replacing static playbooks with guidance drawn from real call data.
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The same ground, at another level

How category design reads from a different seat.

What does category actually mean in go-to-market, and why does everyone keep telling me to pick one? A category is the mental shelf a buyer puts you on before they judge anything else about you. The moment someone hears what you do, they reach for ... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → How do I test whether a category name lands before we commit the whole website to it? Put the words in front of real buyers before you put them in a headline. Run the line past twenty people who match your ICP and ask them what they ... Doing the work 4 resources → When is category creation the right call for us, and when is it just an excuse? It is right when your buyer feels a real pain that no existing category addresses, and when the existing frame is actively making senior people ign... Leading a GTM team 4 resources →

Terms in this answer

Sales Enablement

People also ask

What does category actually mean in go-to-market, and why does everyone keep telling me to pick one? 3 → Should we create a new category or just say we are a better version of something that already exists? 5 → How do I write the one line that says what category we are in? 5 → Buyers keep comparing us to a big incumbent. How do I even respond in a first call? 4 → How do I test whether a category name lands before we commit the whole website to it? 4 → We named the problem instead of the product. Is that a positioning mistake? 4 →

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