Gongification of SaaS

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Gong is a sales tool that analyzes your customer interactions across phone, email, and video to deliver sales analytics and insights.

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#b2b

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Jan-Erik Asplund

Published Nov 10th, 2023

TL;DR: Gong built a $285M annual recurring revenue (ARR) business by recording and storing every sales call for rewatching. Now, every sales SaaS tool has a little Gong in it—and increasingly, so do SaaS tools that have nothing to do with sales. For more, check out our report on Gong (dataset).

Key points from our report:

Pre-COVID, 61% of B2B companies sold in-person and over email/phone—post-COVID, that fell to 29% while the number selling through video calls rose from 38% to 53%. Over the same period, we saw the percentage of B2B buyers willing to make >$50K purchases entirely via remote methods hit 70%, with 27% saying they would make >$500K purchases remotely.
Gong launched in 2015 as pair programming for sales teams, giving reps instant video replays of their sales calls for peer coaching—today, it’s the place where every customer call at a company gets stored for rewatching. With the dramatic rise in sales video calls post-COVID, Gong expanded from a 1:1 coaching tool to a 1:many data store and system of record for sales activity in a company.
Sacra estimates that Gong hit $285M annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2023, up 43% from $200M ARR in 2022 for a 25x forward revenue multiple on the $7.5B valuation they raised at in 2019. Compare to Outreach at $250M ARR in 2023, up 11% from $225M ARR in 2022 for a 17.6x forward revenue multiple on their $4.4B valuation (June 2021), and Apollo at $96M ARR in 2023, up 100% from $48M in 2022 for a 16.6x forward revenue multiple on their $1.6B valuation (August 2023).