Yung: Gong Beat Chorus by Hiring Senior Sales Reps With Higher Quotas
Jameson Yung · SaaStr CRO Confidential: Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond + Gong VPS Jameson Yung + Jason Lemkin · Dec 7, 2022 · at 11:24
Jameson Yung discusses the sales hiring strategy he used when building out Gong's early revenue team.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“You're talking to CROs and VPs of sales, like you can't have a really junior sales rep on the other end of the phone. And so raised quotas, raised OTE. And so I think the sales force that we built early on and the people that, that joined early to help sell were just a, I think we were outselling them.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jameson Yung
Yung: Gong Erred by Abandoning Pilot Sales Motions and Has Returned
“A year ago or whatever, if we were more established, we started trying to move away from that pilot motion or that business assessment motion, and honestly, it was a mistake, and we've gone back to it more heavily now, especially in the current environment.”
Yung: Chorus Won Early Deals Over Gong by Giving Equity to Advisors
“One thing that, that chorus did. Did better than us. Is they did a really good job of getting advisors pretty early. They, I think they got through giving them some equity, but they insert these like champions inside of decent sized organizations that would bl…”
Yung: Leaders Should Avoid Radical Quota or Compensation Cuts During a Downturn
“I think one of the most important things is just not to make some massive radical change, right? You still want to stabilize the team... We are trying not to kind of do anything that's really hard to undo, like changing people's quotas and changing comp plans …”
Yung: Gong and Chorus Were Initially Identical With No Clear Differentiation
“At the time I joined, they were pretty similar. Now they're demonstrably different and teams are different sizes, et cetera. But at that initial inflection point, when I joined, in fact, we didn't even really know what our differentiators were yet.”