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Gong is a technology that provides businesses with real-time insights into sales conversations and helps them adapt their revenue strategy for success. Their tools give businesses data on how customers are reacting to market changes in real-time and help to audit pipelines for heightened confidence in forecasts. 

Based on their company description, it’s no surprise that they’ve expertly responded to the coronavirus crisis and emergent #WFH work from home trend. They’ve even adapted their website:

YouTube: 12 mentions from 7 Thought Leaders

Podcast: 431 mentions from 24 Thought Leaders

Blog Post: 16 mentions from 3 Thought Leaders

Newsletter: 13 mentions from 9 Thought Leaders

They’re clearly concentrating on podcast, and it follows that their main content genres include business, tech, marketing, and sales. 

What’s the specific conversation? 

We have 29 pieces of content mentioning “webinar” or “livestream” coming from 15 of the content creators mentioning Gong. Both newsletter and podcast are spreading the message that Gong is providing a webinar. Gong is also sponsoring content mentioning other webinars, a crafty tactic to generate brand awareness toward their product. Gong’s software analyzes tons of conversations (including those happening on Zoom and Google meets) and provides insights to improve sales leaders, managers, and salespeople. Their product is more relevant than ever in this space, and they’re double-dipping with deeply engaging content like these examples:
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What’s most interesting about Gong’s mentions of “webinar” and “livestream” is - it’s not really increasing in relation to current COVID trends. They were ahead of the curve on this issue entirely, and the bulk of their webinar content occurred in 2019. Gong set themselves up for success by owning the webinar space, both through sponsoring content mentioning webinars, and through running webinars themselves. 

While they’re not sponsoring more content in proportion to WFH continuing to trend, they have absolutely adapted their website to respond to incoming traffic: 

They have separate but strong messaging directed towards every level of a business organization, specifically addressing operational and strategic concerns driven by coronavirus that are forcing the hands of many companies to adopt remote work models. 

Just as a reminder, coronavirus has driven a direct increase in Tech-related discussions around working from home. This graph shows mentions of “work from home” and “remote work” since last year: 

Gong was pre-positioned to respond to this shift in market trends, having already promulgated a strong presence in Tech and Biz publications prior to Jan 2020. 

They’ve dominated the same core of B2B podcasts while simultaneously testing and scaling their newsletter efforts. They certainly have more recent tests in newsletter, but are consistently sponsoring their favorite podcasts, as shown below:

When we sort by last mentioned, we see all their repeat podcasts at the top, with a scattering of blog and newsletter that are all new tests, with just 1 mention. 

What are other similar brands doing? Have they responded on the upswing of the work from home trend, or have they been driving webinar activity prior to 2020? ‍

Pipedrive shows similar results to Gong: they’ve been mentioned in 44 podcast, newsletter, and blog channels since 2016, with 18 of 92 total pieces of content mentioning “webinar” or “livestream” and Pipeline occurring in 2020 alone. 

What’s really interesting is Pipedrive was participating in this year’s ProductCon London Event, which normally is an in-person conference featuring the world’s best and most innovative ideas in product management. That event had to be converted to an online event last-minute due to flight suspensions globally in Jan and Feb 2020:

We have to commend Gong on their activity in comparison to Pipiedrive in the sense that with just 43 total content creators they’ve generated 9M in audience reach and 2M impressions, in contrast to Pipedrive’s 103 Thought Leaders, 27M audience reach, and 3M impressions.

Sure, they’ve gotten 1M more impressions, but they’ve had to spend across twice as many channels to get only ⅓ more on total impressions. 

Gong has a winning formula - conveniently for the B2B world, they’re also selling access to that data. Analytics and AI are proving ever-more essential for companies to weather storms like what we’ve seen with COVID-19. The general impact of sudden event shifts like this has been devastating, but there are brands out there leveraging the “new normal” - a life of Zoom meets to play cards with family during holidays; Google Meets for work group planning sessions; webinars and livestreams in place of concerts, conferences and Expo events. As we continue to adapt to a virtual lifestyle, these companies and the technologies they craft will become even more relevant, and we can see they’re already being proactive with using that very same format - the webinar - to succeed in driving the market in their direction.