Gong's Amit Bendov on Powering Your Company Brain

One thing I am fascinated to start with is you have always said that the CRM is a lie.

And I think a lot of folks are starting to realize that.

But you realized that in 2015.

Well, I didn't say it's a lie.

That's a bit harsh.

I said that it's not the source of truth for what's happening with customers.

So there are things that are true in CRM, like who bought from you, who your customers are, what they're paying you.

That is all true.

So it's not a lie.

interesting question and I was asking like well why are we losing like so many deals like you know every company's conversions like one out of five deals or one of ten whatever it is right what happens without a five and why are like usually like half the sales people don't make their numbers or are they like is it like them is it us or training and the answers were not in the CRM so I said like people think of this source of truth so it's I think more accurately it's a source of a truth but CRM is depends on people telling it what happened and they don't do it right because just there's not enough time and they don't always want to do it and everybody hates doing it so the idea was can we retrieve that information uh from elsewhere taking people out of the equation that seemed crazy like uh when we announced gong in like 2016 i said this is like The biggest invention since the introduction of CRM 20 years ago.

And everybody said, oh yeah, right, there's another delusional founder.

But now this doesn't seem crazy, right? People see that the majority of the information does not exist in the CRM.

Yeah, I mean, it's been fascinating to watch my own transformation in using these tools, where, you know, I rely just as much, if not more, on the Gong transcript than I do the CRM.

Yeah, I personally have not logged into a CRM, like, in years.

All I need to do is, like...

Hey, what's the status of Zapier right now? And it tells me everything.

Obviously, you talk about the transcript, but the emails, all the interaction with the account, everything that's happening, it's a much richer data set.

Yeah, I mean, you say, hey, I have not logged into the CRM.

Same here.

I would say my usage of the CRM has gone through the roof, though, in the last 12 to 24 months.

I'm using it more than I ever have, even though I've not actually touched it.

Is that a trend you're seeing consistently across your customer base? I would have to think so.

Absolutely.

Even Salesforce, I mean, very smart.

They embraced it rather than fight it.