What is Gong's marketing strategy?
Gong, the sales-call recording and analysis company, made three marketing moves that its own blog documents: research mined from customer calls, a category name it repeated in its announcements, and Super Bowl ads bought only in a few cities. Each is dated below, with the Gong post that describes it.
| Move | When | What Gong did | Where Gong says so |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gong Labs research | Manifesto, November 2016 | Published findings from anonymised customer sales calls, with the method and sample size stated | Labs manifesto, 17 November 2016 |
| A named category | 2019, by Gong's account | Called its market revenue intelligence and put the term in its funding news and explainers | What is Revenue Intelligence?, 15 April 2022 |
| City-targeted Super Bowl ads | 2021 and 2022 | Bought airtime in chosen metro areas instead of a national spot | We Just Got Tickets to the Big Game, 12 February 2022 |
The common thread is a narrow audience: sales leaders. Gong's 2022 post says it chose the Super Bowl because many of those buyers are passionate sports fans. The rest of this post takes each move in turn, then turns it into a plan a small B2B team can run this week.
How did Gong Labs turn sales calls into research?
Gong analysed recorded calls from its customers, matched them to deal outcomes in the CRM, and published what separated wins from losses. Its research manifesto, published on 17 November 2016 under the byline of Chris Orlob, introduced the series as Gong Research Labs and promised new data every week. Gong's author page credits Orlob with leading the creation of Gong Labs.
The manifesto set out the method in four steps, and later posts repeated it:
- Pick a cohort of calls from a group of anonymised customers.
- Record each call, separate the speakers, clean it and transcribe it.
- Map each call to its CRM record, so it can be compared with win rates, revenue and sales cycle length.
- Run Gong's AI over the set to tag topics, key moments and seller and buyer behaviour.
The manifesto said the first cohort covered 25,537 B2B sales conversations from 17 anonymous customer organisations, and the second covered 21,427 calls.
A February 2017 post gave the details of that first study: calls from the first half of 2016, typically from mid-market SaaS companies, run on tools such as GoToMeeting, join.me and Zoom. These were account executive calls, averaging 43 minutes. Gong reported nine trends, including an ideal talk-to-listen ratio of 43:57, and that most reps speak for 65 to 75% of their calls. The post notes that this version was originally published on ThinkGrowth.org.
That format is the part worth copying: each post answered a question sales leaders argue about, gave a number, and stated the sample behind it. The manifesto itself refers to the many holy wars in sales over what works on calls.
Does Gong re-run its studies?
Gong has returned to some research questions with bigger datasets and published the new results. Two examples from its blog:
| Question | First study | Later study |
|---|---|---|
| How much should a seller talk? | 2016 data, 25,537 calls: ideal ratio 43% talking, 57% listening | 2025 update, 326,000 calls of at least 10 minutes: average 60% talking; reps talked 57% in won deals and 62% in lost deals |
| Which cold call opener works? | April 2018, 90,380 cold calls: asking whether it was a bad time had a 0.9% success rate against a 1.5% baseline | July 2024, 300 million+ cold calls: the same line at 2.15%; a permission-based opener at 11.18% |
Read the pairs with care. Each study uses a different dataset, and the 2024 post does not define its success rate, so compare each number only with its own baseline. For written openers, see our cold email opening lines.
Two details are worth copying. First, the 2025 talk-ratio post says it was originally written by Orlob in 2016 and updated with new data, and it sits at the address the 2016 manifesto links to. Second, the 2024 openers study was a joint series with 30 Minutes to President's Club, tied to the release of the book Cold Calling Sucks (And That's Why It Works). Gong's data became part of a partner's book launch.
Gong still describes Labs the same way. Its llms.txt file, checked 20 October 2026, calls Gong Labs a data research team that analyses tens of millions of sales interactions and publishes what separates top sellers from the rest.
How did Gong name its category?
Gong says it pioneered the revenue intelligence category in 2019, and it used the term in major announcements. A Gong blog post from 15 April 2022 tells the origin story: in 2015, Amit Bendov, then CEO of an analytics startup, saw sales falling and could not find out why from the CRM. Gong's post calls that the spark for revenue intelligence four years later. Bendov built Gong with Eilon Reshef; Gong's llms.txt names them as co-founders, CEO Bendov and chief product officer Reshef.
The name then appeared across Gong's announcements:
- Funding news. Gong announced its $250 million Series E on 3 June 2021 in a post titled Growing the Revenue Intelligence Category. Led by Franklin Templeton, the round valued Gong at $7.25 billion, and the post, signed by Bendov, says the founders left their day jobs to conceptualise revenue intelligence.
- Explainers. The 2022 post defines the category, and calls revenue intelligence software your reality platform. Gong's Super Bowl announcement that February introduced Gong as the reality platform.
- Today. Gong's llms.txt, checked 20 October 2026, still lists revenue intelligence as a category Gong pioneered in 2019, but describes Gong itself as a Revenue AI Operating System. A banner on Gong's blog pages, checked the same day, says Gong is a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration.
The names changed over time: Gong's own term first, then its newer Revenue AI label and analyst-defined categories such as Gartner's. The 2019 date and the pioneer claim are Gong's own account.
Why did Gong buy Super Bowl ads in only a few cities?
Gong bought Super Bowl airtime only in the metro areas where it expected to find its buyers, which cost a fraction of a national spot. Its post We Just Got Tickets to the Big Game, published 12 February 2022, explains the plan:
| Year | Markets, per Gong | Gong's account |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Seattle, San Francisco, New York | The ad "helped create the company's biggest-ever sales pipeline" and strong social media buzz |
| 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Boston | Chicago and Boston reflected a growing focus on new industries and geographies |
The post says a national spot can cost anywhere from 5M up. Udi Ledergor, then Gong's chief marketing officer, chose specific metro areas where Ledergor expected to find large numbers of target customers, and secured media for a fraction of the price of a national buy. Gong's reasoning for showing a B2B ad to the Super Bowl's 100M+ viewers: its buyers, sales leaders across industries, are competitive and many are passionate sports fans.
The 2022 spot was a 30-second comic ad made with the agency Barrett SF, built around gongs as the sound of winning. It first ran on 30 January 2022 during the NFC Championship game, and Gong backed it with posts on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. Gong's post does not give the price it paid.
Ledergor described the results to the Israeli business site Calcalist in an article published on 2 February 2022. Ledergor said Super Bowl week 2021 brought record website traffic that turned into new business opportunities and significant sales within a few months, and that for 2022: "We've doubled our investment in media this year, and tripled our investment on the creative side". Calcalist's own dollar figures for Gong's spend contradict each other within the article, so we leave them out. All results here are company-reported.
What a small B2B team can copy from Gong this week
A one-to-five person team can copy the method in a week: answer one question with your own data, publish the method with the number, and spend only where your buyers cluster. These steps are our advice, sized down from what Gong did.
Pick one question your data can answer
Choose something your buyers argue about, such as which first line got more replies across your last 200 LinkedIn messages, or how many days pass between a first reply and a booked call. One question, one number.
Write the method box before the findings
Copy Gong's 2016 format: how many conversations, from which dates, from where, and how you defined a win. Gong's first cohort was 25,537 calls from 17 customers; yours might be 214 messages from June to September. Say it.
Show counts when the sample is small
With a few hundred conversations or fewer, give the count next to the percentage: 9 replies from 120 messages (7.5%), not 7.5% alone.
Name the problem the same way every time
Gong used one term in its funding news and explainers. Pick the phrase your buyers already search, and use it in your title, your profile headline and your next ten posts.
Spend locally, on purpose
Gong chose metros. You might choose the one city, meetup or newsletter where your customers cluster, and skip the national version. Decide what result would justify doing it again before you pay.
Re-run it at the same address
Put a date on the post, then update it with new data in six to twelve months instead of writing a new one, as Gong did with its talk-ratio study.
If writing is the bottleneck, Siela's SEO Blog Writer checks search volume, the top 10 Google results and People Also Ask, writes an outline you approve, then drafts each section in your brand voice. It does not publish, so your numbers stay yours to check. For a wider plan, see marketing without a marketing team.
Frequently asked questions
What is Gong Labs?
Gong Labs is Gong's data research team. It analyses recorded sales conversations and deals from Gong's platform and publishes findings on what top sellers do differently. Gong's November 2016 manifesto introduced it as the Gong Research Labs series, and Gong's author page credits Chris Orlob with leading its creation.
Did Gong create the revenue intelligence category?
Gong says so. A Gong blog post from April 2022 is titled with the claim that Gong pioneered the category in 2019, and its llms.txt file repeats it, checked 20 October 2026. The claim is Gong's own. Gong used the term in the title of its June 2021 Series E announcement.
Which cities did Gong's Super Bowl ads run in?
According to Gong's blog post of 12 February 2022, its first Super Bowl ad in 2021 targeted Seattle, San Francisco and New York. The 2022 ad was set to run again in the San Francisco Bay Area and expand to Chicago and Boston, which Gong linked to its growing focus on new industries and geographies.
How much did Gong pay for its Super Bowl ads?
Gong has not published the price in the posts we read. Its February 2022 post says a national Super Bowl spot can cost anywhere from 5M up, and that buying only chosen metro areas cost a fraction of that. A February 2022 Calcalist article gives figures that contradict each other, so we do not repeat them.
What talk-to-listen ratio does Gong recommend?
Gong's 2016 data, from 25,537 calls, put the ideal at 43% talking and 57% listening. Its 2025 update, from 326,000 calls of at least 10 minutes, found an average of 60% talking, with reps talking 57% of the time in won deals and 62% in lost deals.
Sources
- Gong: We Just Got Tickets to the Big Game (published 12 Feb 2022, modified 4 Mar 2026)
- Gong: The science of sales conversations (Labs manifesto) (published 17 Nov 2016, modified 4 Mar 2026)
- Gong: Taking the guesswork out of sales effectiveness with AI (published 6 Feb 2017, modified 4 Mar 2026)
- Gong: Mastering the talk-to-listen ratio in sales calls (published 21 Aug 2025, modified 4 Mar 2026)
- Gong: Proven cold call opening lines that work (published 19 Apr 2018, modified 4 Mar 2026)
- Gong: The best and worst cold call openers (300M calls) (published 24 Jul 2024, modified 27 May 2026)
- Gong: What is Revenue Intelligence? Why Gong Pioneered The Category in 2019 (published 15 Apr 2022, modified 4 Mar 2026)
- Gong: Growing the Revenue Intelligence Category: Gong's Series E Funding (published 3 Jun 2021, modified 4 Mar 2026)
- Gong: llms.txt (checked 20 Oct 2026)
- Calcalist: Israeli tech unicorns are coming to the Super Bowl (published 2 Feb 2022)
- Siela: SEO Blog Writer (checked 20 Oct 2026)