The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 239: How To Raise Prices and Still Leave Money On The Table, How To Analyse The Pros and Cons of Monthly vs Annual Deals & The Leading Indicators That Your Sales Machine Is Working with Amit Bendov, Founder & CEO @ Gong.io

Jun 3, 2019

Amit Bendov, Founder and CEO of Gong.io, shares insights from his journey in SaaS, emphasizing the importance of validating ideas through customer conversations. He discusses pricing strategies, including the right time to introduce charges and the balance between customer expectations and actual payments. Amit also explores the complexities of sales technology and the essential roles within sales organizations. He underscores resilience in entrepreneurship and the significance of connection in building a brand.

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Intro

00:00 • 4min

From Audio Sales to SaaS Innovation

03:49 • 6min

Navigating the Complexities of Pricing Strategies

09:39 • 14min

Navigating Sales Technology and the CEO's Time Dilemma

23:39 • 2min

The Essential Roles in Sales Organizations and Resilience in Business

25:20 • 2min

Lessons in Entrepreneurship and the Power of Connection

27:15 • 4min

Amit Bendov is the Founder and CEO @ Gong.io, the startup that provides you with powerful visibility into your customer conversations with conversation intelligence. To date, Amit has raised $68m in funding for Gong from the likes of Norwest, Battery Ventures, Cisco Investments and Wing Venture Capital just to name a few. As for Amit, prior to founding Gong, Amit was the CEO @ SiSense BI software that enables business users to connect to multiple databases of any size. Before that Amit was the CMO @ Panaya, helping companies that use SAP or Oracle to reduce 80% of their ERP upgrade. Finally before that Amit was the Founder & CEO @ SparkThis, an outsourced marketing and sales service for cloud companies.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

How Amit made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found Gong, the leader in conversational intelligence driving deal conversion and rep success?
How does Amit approach the process of idea validation? What can founders do to make sure their idea is a hit before they start work on it? How many customer conversations should they have? What questions are crucial to ask? What are the answers they want to hear? What is enough proof that there is a ready and willing customer base for this idea?
With many products starting as free, how does Amit think about when is the right time to start charging for your product? What does Amit think about the differing variable price mechanisms that one can choose? How does one have a variable pricing mechanism without disincentivizing users to use the product? What does Amit advise founders should charge in the early days? Should they leave money on the table?
How does Amit think about monthly/vs annual deals? What are the core benefits and drawbacks of each? How important is it that multi-year deals are paid upfront? What must you account for with regards to multi-year deals? How do you know when you have the right pricing mechanism in place from the sales cycles of the reps?

60 Second SaaStr:

What does Amit know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?
The hardest role to hire for today?
The hardest element of Amit’s role as CEO of Gong?
SDR is the most important function in the sales org, agree or not and why?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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