Smooth Scaling: Revenue Leader Interviews from Insight Partners

Founders and revenue leaders get never-before-heard best tips from interviews with leaders at the fastest-growing software businesses today. Hosted by…

Mar 2nd, 2023 | 15:13

Launching a self-service upsell engine with Eran Aloni at Gong

Jeremey interviews Eran Aloni, EVP Ecosystem and Business Development at Gong, about scaling expansion revenue by implementing self-checkout for customers.

Learn more about Gong: gong.io

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Podcast: Smooth Scaling

Episode: Eran Aloni

Welcome to Smooth Scaling, the podcast from Inside Partners that helps revenue leaders scale their softwares at every stage of growth. Today, host Jeremy Donovan speaks with guest Eran Aloni. Eran is the Executive Vice President of Ecosystem and Business Development at Gong, whose mission is to accelerate revenue team productivity. Eran was the seventh employee at Gong and was their Chief Customer Officer until recently, where he was responsible for customer success, customer report, professional services and customer training.

To kick off the conversation, Jeremy asks Eran to identify a customer sales initiative he was involved with which had a major impact on revenue performance. Launching a self service portal for customers to expand their subscription was huge for Gong. Until 2 years ago, the only way customers could purchase more from Gong was by speaking with a sales person. With this, the Gong team recognized how much revenue they had that was untouched. They began the process of getting the product team to build the self checkout feature, integrate them into sales operations and make sure to measure the impact of that motion.

They saw no friction in this self service implementation whatsoever with their customers. Internally, however, there were lots of questions around if this was really a good idea. There was concern that they may lose out on opportunities by not directly interacting with customers. They addressed this issue with data and by listening closely to the concerns of the team and addressing them directly. The data and operations team took cohorts of similar customers, enabling self checkout for one cohort and disabling it for the other. After just a few weeks of launching the test, they saw that they were getting more revenue from the customers who had self service ordering enabled than they were from the customers who ordered from a sales representative. The biggest way they were able to get the sales team comfortable about this new method was by avoiding channel conflict.

Before wrapping up, Jeremy asks Eran if there is anything he would do differently if given the chance to repeat this process over again. His team underestimated many of the complexities of working with the operations and finance teams when launching to a wider audience. This ultimately slowed them down in the long run. If they had engaged with stakeholders sooner, Gong could have rolled the self service option out to a larger cohort of customers faster. Finally, they engage in a lightning round of questions. Hear his best advice for a scale up CEOs building out a customer success function for the first time. Then, he identifies something he put in place at Gong to ensure that every team had an aligned interest in customer success.