Eilon Reshef | Gong | How Do You Build a Product for Sales Organizations

In this episode

• A product manager's number-one skill at Gong: sit with the customer, look them in the eye and understand what they need, why, and what they'll get from it, not just what they ask for. Otherwise you become a paper shuffler.
• Sell to whoever owns the money: Gong tried selling to Revenue Operations, and even Eilon's brother wouldn't buy. Once they moved to the CRO and talked about close rates, quota attainment and faster onboarding, selling became much easier.
• With AI products, show customers the output, not the UI: Gong sends customers real summaries and even spreadsheets very early, and runs 300-400 betas in parallel behind feature flags.
• Measure GenAI with an Elo rating: when two answers are both correct, people pick the better one, and each model gains or loses points as in chess. That yields a number that quantifies improvement between versions.
• An AI-first product organization: a dedicated AI group that both ships its own features and supports other groups, with one clear driver per shared feature. And every PM and designer did a GenAI exercise so they aren't afraid to run a first evaluation themselves.
• To bring AI into an organization, start small: a simple use case, a GPT wrapper, and see how customers react. "The appetite comes with eating," and customers can't imagine the possibilities until they see something.