How Gong Uses Gong with Brandy Ringler

Sean Lane: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hyper growth. My name is Sean Lane. A pretty common question I get is how does Drift use Drift at Drift? It comes with the territory, right? When you are a company that eats your own dog food, drink your own champagne, insert your favorite old adage here. And that's how it should be. We internally at Drift are the foremost consumers of Drift. And so that got me thinking, which tools do I use in my operations work where I should be going directly to the source? There are folks out there who are not just selling a product, but they are also the number one customers of that same product. Who can I ask the same question, how does your company use your company's product? Which led me to Gong. If you aren't familiar, Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that gives you visibility into customer interactions. Analysis and insights into the calls your sales team is having, the deals they're running, and the customers that you're working with. Gong is really good at what they do. In addition to raising over$ 130 million in funding, they are the category leader on G2 Crowd for conversation intelligence. Put in simpler terms, when I think of sales enablement, I think of Gong, which is why I'm thrilled our guest today is Brandy Ringler, the Global Sales Enablement manager at Gong. Brandy is going to help us to answer the question how does Gong use Gong? In our conversation, we chat about how to instrument Gong in the first place, how to leverage a tool like Gong for specific events, like product launches or messaging changes, and what ongoing sales enablement looks like at the ultimate enablement company. But first, Global Sales Enablement Manager is a pretty cool title, and every organization is different, so I wanted to understand what Global Sales Enablement means at Gong and where it sits in your organization.

Brandy Ringler: I think it's evolved a little bit over time. I report directly into our VP of Revenue Operations, but I also indirectly report to our VP of Sales and our CRO. So I work really closely with the three of them. Enablement for us is a few different things. So I own our onboarding program, which is two weeks for general onboarding across any go- to- market function that comes into the company. And then our sales onboarding program is actually four weeks in total. Beyond that, I also run ongoing trainings for our AE team and our SDR team. Typically those are biweekly trainings where I'm creating content and collateral. I'll sometimes run them, but oftentimes I'll be giving that information to the leader of either the AE team, so maybe our CRO will run it or VP of Sales and/ or our SDR leader will run it for our SDR Org. And then beyond that, I'm obviously working on different projects in partnership with product marketing.

Speaker 3: Awesome. And so we're going to touch on, I think, a whole bunch of more in- depth examples from some of those buckets as we go through our conversation today. And so we can kind of come back to that. The place that I wanted to start, though, is I want to make sure that both myself at Drift and any of our listeners who use Gong or a tool like it are set up for success from the beginning. Right? I think so many times we buy tools and we find ourselves, six months later, wondering why we're not getting value out of them. And it's because we didn't set them up the right way in the first place. And so can you help me and help others, if we're taking this thing out of the box, what is the right way to think about setting up Gong in the first place? And how do I instrument it to be helpful to me and to my sales team in the long run?

Brandy Ringler: Yeah, I think that's a fantastic question. I think there's a couple of things that I would say. Number one, out of the box, Gong doesn't really require any behavior change. So the moment it's plugged in, it is going to be capturing all of the go- to- market teams' customer facing conversations. But beyond turning on Gong to record and ingest that information, there's a couple of things that I typically suggest when setting it up internally. So the first thing is actually having a conversation, if you're Sales Enablement or if you're Operations, with your CRO or your Head of Customer Success and understanding what the initiatives are for that quarter. So those could be things like you've released new sales messaging or product messaging, you've updated your product offering so you're introducing new pricing to the market.. Whatever those key initiatives are, understanding what those are and then plugging in ways to track those in Gong. So we can very specifically see when those are appearing in the conversation, how much of the sales team is actually adapting to that change. So that would be the number one thing is making sure that you've set up a way to track each of the important initiatives. The second thing that I think is incredibly important is identifying who your top performers are. So most companies know inherently who those are. There's either numbers on the board to prove that, or you know that they're typically the quickest to adapt to changes, and following closely their behavior. So if there is a new change that you are pushing to market and those are the individuals that are typically the ones to make it their own and put the right twist on it, is listening closely and capturing how they're speaking about those changes to customers. And then quickly rolling that out to the rest of the team. So I call it, I don't know, kind of Game Time Listening, you roll out a plan to your entire Salesforce and then you know the people that are going to do the best at making it their own or making it natural. And you quickly listen to those conversations over the coming week or two weeks or however long that period is. And you, as a leadership team, review that content agree that, hey, that is the right way to message it and then bring that full circle back to the sales team or to the CS org. And the other thing is if you know that something is broken in your sales process... So for instance, I'll give you a real example in Gong. We know that the difference between our top performers and our newer reps is there seems to be a discrepancy in being able to take early stage conversation. So think conversations in the qualification and discovery phase and move those down the sales funnel into our presentation stages. Whereas reps who've been at the company longer seem to be able to bridge that gap and move the sales process forward. And so what we're actually able to do in Gong is to drill down into things like those rep conversations that are moving it forward and have our reps that are struggling with that listen to the calls that made it from early stages into later stages. So they can start to understand the questions that our more tenured reps are asking, and the way that they're framing how we typically take our prospects down the full sales cycle. So we're quickly able to adjust once we've identified that there's a problem in our selling motion.

Sean Lane: Two important things here that we can all take away and easily bring back to our companies: Number one, making sure you have a way to track all of the important initiatives you're launching. And number two, track your top performers closely. I really like Brandy's concept of Game Time Listening. It's like halftime of a football game, right? If you think back to why inside sales teams became so popular, it was due in part to the ability to make team- wide changes on the fly. This, to me, is like the next evolution of that. Brandy and the team at Gong can focus on the way top performers are messaging something to the market, figure out what works, and then make tweaks for the rest of the team. And now, of course, just instrumenting your tools is just the beginning. The real value begins when the learnings and insights and changes make their way back to the reps.

Brandy Ringler: So there's a conversation that happens at a higher level. So typically we all have conversations with the individual segments and there's different struggles that are happening within each segment. And so I'll take that information, I'll create some sort of plan, whether it's listening to those Gong calls that do actually make it farther down the funnel. And then when we have our sales leadership meeting, I will bring up those points in the sales manager conversation and say, Hey, this is what I've identified. Do we think that this is worth taking part in our sales training that encompasses the entire AE team? Or is this something that should happen in a team or segment- specific meeting where we give a directive or we do a mini- training within the hour that's already allotted each week. And so it's really me positioning that to the sales leaders and asking where they think their reps' time is best spent and they will typically articulate, Hey, that's important, but that's only important for our mid- market segment. It's not important for our commercial teams so we don't want to waste the entire AE team with that. Let's schedule that for next week during our team meeting. And we'll take 20 minutes to say, Hey, this is what we've identified. This is the ask from us over the next week or two, you're going to listen to X amount of these calls that we've identified do this well, that the entire team is struggling with. And then we're going to ask you to present back what your key learnings are or what the questions you are seeing are more tenured reps ask that you've self- identified you're not asking after watching these.

Sean Lane: I love that last part about having them kind of presenting that back to you, right? Because it's different from just saying, okay, these are the calls. Go listen to them. Somehow, through osmosis, absorb these skills versus them having to come back and actually regurgitate those learnings in a way that is going to cement it for them.

Brandy Ringler: Absolutely. I think that's the hardest part. When you have asked somebody to listen to calls, it's really hard. Even when I'm listening to podcasts, really, it's hard if you're not intently paying attention and doing active listening for you to really digest it. So we make it easy in Gong. We have them comment in on the calls at the moments that they learned something tag their manager or tag me. And then, yeah, the ask is to present back to the team so that there's some onus on them having come up with some learning or some key takeaway that they can share with everybody else.

Sean Lane: It's easy to gloss over all of the things that Brandy and the team at Gong are taking into account when they are looking for these insights and deciding the best method of communicating them back to the team. They consider the setting or the meeting routine itself; they consider which team or teams would find this content to be the most relevant; and they think about who is best positioned to deliver the messaging, or ultimately hear the reps present back on their learnings. Brandy and I already mentioned this, but it bears repeating how important that last step of presenting back the learnings is. It's pretty easy to get lazy and skip that part, but if you're going to do all of that work upfront, it's crazy to not follow up and confirm that these new concepts or skills are being retained. Okay. So these are all really helpful recommendations and instrumentation instructions so far, but they're also relatively broad. I wanted to get more in depth with Brandy and have her take me inside Gong for some really specific use cases that you and I can steal for our own companies. One of those use cases is preparing for and executing on a new launch. Maybe it's a new product that you're launching or new messaging. There are a lot of places for a team to screw up a new launch. So my question was, how does Gong use Gong to do this well?

Brandy Ringler: I can actually give you a really recent example. So we are, I think, most of us are in the midst of this drastic change to the way that we operate as companies. And we've all probably had to quickly adapt to these new market conditions. And so what we identified is our old value prop, or what we call our elevator pitch, seemed a bit soft to us- meaning that it was based on some nice- to- have elements and not need- to- have things that our product actually does, but that we weren't leading with. And we were noticing that because our conversations that were happening in the early stages were being pushed off, or prospects were saying, Hey, we're absolutely thinking about this, but with everything else that's going on, we need to push this conversation out and we need to refocus on some other things. Now, some were absolutely saying, Hey, this is the perfect time. But we looked at our pitch and we reorganized the way that we structured Gong's value to support the use case of remote work, to support leaders being able to get insight into their forecast. And the way that we deployed it to the team is we did a couple of things. So we did our standard large training that we did to all of our AEs and to all of our SDRs. And what I did in Gong is I set up keywords on the backend to make sure that we're capturing the moments that our new pitch was happening. So luckily for us, our new pitch changed some of the keywords that reps were asked to start saying. And so I implemented those key words. I let the entire sales team know, Hey, we're going to be tracking this, the adoption of this new messaging across the org. I'd like you to do a couple of things. A, we want you to change your pitch, but number two, for this next two weeks, until we do our next sales training, I want you to actually tag the moment in the call where you actually did the pitch, because we want to hear what the customer response is. So it was like hashtag new three pillars, which is our pitch. And so we had, I think, over 60 tags in Gong of moments that sales reps were iterating and using the new pitch. And so I was able to go through, listen to, and so were our sales leaders, listen to the way that the customers were responding to the way that we decided to go to market. And then secondly, I was actually able to see on a team- by- team basis, what the adoption level was of the new messaging correlating with each stage in our sales process. So how many times in a first meeting in a qualification or discovery call were they actually using the new pitch and send that information to the sales managers. If there was anybody that we saw, Hey, wasn't using it or was using it last, could you have a conversation with them, see if there's discomfort or why they haven't implemented the change?

Sean Lane: But you're asking those reps to actually be the ones who go back and tag that moment. And that is kind of like the input that you're looking for there?

Brandy Ringler: Yes. And they don't actually need to, I could have pulled that information anyway,. But the reason I ask for that is if they don't think that anybody is going back and trying to get some sort of information about how our market is responding, or they don't think that this is like a dire change that we're making, that they have a part in, then the adoption of it is going to be low. It also allows us for our call reviews on a team by team basis to listen just to those moments in the call. So what we did between that sales training and our followup two weeks later is each team has a call review each week. And they were actually in the call reviews playing those snippets and the customer responses so that the rest of the team could learn and give feedback on what they liked or didn't like about the pitch.

Sean Lane: That's interesting. So this is going to be one of my questions for you, actually, which is how do you frame those trackers and those key words in a specific enough way that you're zooming in on the thing that you're actually trying to learn about? And so it sounds like from what you're saying, there's a couple ways to do that. One is you guys had some very specific language that you were using. So you were trying to keep that as specific as possible. The second way is that you're having the reps go back and aid in that tagging and in that spotlighting. Is there anything else that we should be doing as we think about using things like trackers and key words? Because sometimes I'll go in there and it'll have caught way more than I would have wanted. And so is there a better ways that you handle that?

Brandy Ringler: Yeah, so that's actually a fair question. And it's funny, I think under each category, people get really carried away with all of the keywords you can implement for a specific tracker. My trackers, for the most part, contain maybe four keywords that I'm looking for. And I just create multiple for different things that I'm looking for. So for our new sales pitch, there's all this language that happens in between, but I'm looking for three things that I know everyone needs to say, which is market intelligence, deal intelligence, and people intelligence. And so those are the key words that I'm looking for. And I'm looking for those things in the first 10 minutes of a sales conversation. All of the trackers or all of the calls that are pulling for me when I implement those trackers have those three keywords are said within the first 10 minutes of the call and are said by the rep at Gong. And that really reduces the noise in that particular tracker. Another example is when we updated pricing, instead of I have a separate tracker for pricing, which is all things you would think like pricing, packaging, et cetera. But when I'm actually looking for the change that's taking place, I'm actually just looking for the key words that represent what that package is called at Gong or what that product offering is called that Gong. So there's just a couple of keywords where I'm noticing hey, they're talking about what I'm looking for. because otherwise, to your point, there are so many false positives. It's better to create multiple trackers and track, very simplistically, the moments that something is happening.

Sean Lane: A quick aside here on Brandy's approach. First, the clear takeaway for all of us is that we should be focusing on small, specific groups of keywords, not trying to capture every possible variation in the world. I've made that mistake. But also I love that Brandy and the team at Gong unapologetically asked their reps to get involved in the process. Do some manual tagging, even in situations when they know that the software could probably fulfill that task for them. We face this decision all the time at Drift. And of course, as an operator, you want to make your team's lives easier when you can. But to Brandy's point when there's a topic or a transformation that is really important, what better way to demonstrate that importance to your team then by asking them to truly spend time on it? Just because a tool can do the work for someone doesn't always mean that it should. And I really appreciate Brandy and the Gong team for reminding us of that. Okay. Back to the new three pillars of messaging that Gong is rolling out. I wanted to understand how Brandy and the team knew if all of this work they were doing was actually making a difference.

Brandy Ringler: So I think this is the hard thing for every customer. I mean, you think about any company that I've been at in the past is you have your senior leader, your CRO, your CEO, come up on stage and say, this is the new change we're making! Now go. And you have to just make the assumption that people are doing it and that it's working and that you made the right decision. You're kind of like tossing a coin, if you will. What we do at Gong, and not that it's perfect by any means, but I think one of the things that startup companies do is we all have this mentality, this maybe Facebook mentality of move fast and break things. But when it comes to messaging that resonates with your market, it's important to not move too quickly and just make a decision and stay with it. You have to continuously evolve. So we have released, in this example of our new pitch, this idea of what we believed was going to be the best way forward. But what we have done as a leadership team is we've decided we're not married to any change we introduce to the sales team if we hear from a top rep or we're hearing on the phone that something else is working, we'll adjust that in a couple of weeks from that initial messaging. So what we usually do is outside of saying how many people are adopting it on the sales floor, we look at a couple of things. So we always look at how our top reps, like I mentioned earlier, are massaging that messaging or changing it around. We look at the length of response that's elicited from the customers. So how long was the prospect talking after we pitch? What types of things were they saying? And then in those two weeks of the calls that contained that new messaging of those three pillars from that initial call, how many of those have moved down the sales process or the sales funnel and are still active opportunities? And so those are typically the three ways where we'll say, Hey, this seems to be working. We're getting a good response from our salespeople of the conversations we're listening to with important prospects, it seems like it's resonating well, or we're eliciting long responses. And number two, based on the last month when we were doing our last pitch and people were pushing us out, it seems like we've been able to move more of our conversations from that first call down the sales process. And so we're going to stick with this until we notice that it's either not working or we're hearing differently.

Sean Lane: I love the humility that Brandy has. She recognizes that they probably aren't going to nail this thing the first time. And they rely on the feedback from those top reps to nail down what works in the real world. What works on paper often isn't what actually ends up working on a call. Also, Brandy's suggestion to look at the length of responses from customers is something that we've already stolen and implemented at Drift based on her advice. It's such a small but powerful indicator of engagement that I wouldn't have otherwise thought of. Okay, now that we've looked at a specific moment in time, like Gong's messaging change, I wanted to learn more about the ongoing learning that Brandy and her team have put in place. Too often, we put all the emphasis on new hires and new hire onboarding and not enough on the ongoing learning and enablement of our go- to- market teams. That's not just sales reps, it's customer success or support, you name it. For Brandy, ongoing enablement has been a huge effort in her time at gong and it centers around some very specific routines.

Brandy Ringler: It's something that we are this year trying to put a major focus on. Last year I would say the focus was on building an onboarding program and making sure that that was set up well. This year, it is on ongoing enablement and education. So we have, as I mentioned earlier, a biweekly cadence for our AE team, which is about 50 reps, and a biweekly cadence for our SDR org, which is also about 50 reps. And within those sessions, I have a meeting with our CRO, our VP of Sales and any director levels for each of the segments where we strategize for 30 minutes about what the following training is going to look like. What are the biggest struggles that we're seeing with reps across the org? They give me the directive, which is, Hey, this is what we want the focus to be. And then I say, okay, great. Let's meet again in three days. So we have a reoccurring meeting on the calendar invite every two weeks for 30 minutes to do the strategy session. Three days later, we have a reoccurring meeting where we actually review the content that I put together and they give me final notes or adjustments before we do the live training. And in those three days, what I do is a big part of all of our sales trainings is incorporating Gong content. So we take snippets of reps actually selling, of doing a sales motion really well, depending on what that training is. And we actually ask those reps to set up the call. So on the sales training, they're going to explain what we're about to listen to. We're going to listen to the training. It's almost a little bit like a live call review, except there are specific takeaways that we're looking for. And we're only sharing snippets of content that we want the sales team to actually start putting into practice. And then it's typically run based on that content by our CRO or our VP of Sales in part with segment leader. So the idea is if it's done well, I should be in the background and I should have enabled them to have all of the content to have a very powerful training session, but it should be presented by our senior leader so that the sales team is actively engaged, expected to take the training seriously, and is hearing it from those that they respect most on the sales floor.

Sean Lane: And you mentioned something about segments inside of your description there. If we take the AE side, for example, you mentioned that there's 50 reps. Is this bi- weekly training for all 50 of them at once?

Brandy Ringler: It is.

Sean Lane: How does that work?

Brandy Ringler: Surprisingly, it has worked better now that we are a remote org than it did in- person. Surprise, surprise. We're all learning many things, aren't we? We asked for active engagement. So the reason it's really helpful to have the sales leaders run it and for each sales leader to present on a specific segment is we're asking certain sales reps to participate in the training. And then we ask to keep it collaborative. So number one rule is everybody has their video on during the training. The second rule of thumb is we ask for as much participation as possible that isn't disruptive. So we do sometimes have to say, Hey guys, we have to move on to the next section or we aren't going to have time. We used to worry that there wouldn't be enough engagement. Now we have to pull it back because there's so much engagement. But the reason we have everybody together is we still do the team meetings and we have individual call reviews, but there are things that our enterprise and strategic reps are doing that are really helpful for our younger salespeople in the commercial space to understand. And likewise, it's the only time that the entire sales group comes together and gives feedback or thoughts on things that are happening. And it's just so impossible to capture all of that knowledge in individual team meetings that are 12 people versus having our entire sales floor talk about things that are working versus not working. Which is why the focus for those sales trainings tends to be pretty broad. So it's either new messaging or it's something in the sales motion. Like, how do you negotiate? What do those conversations look like? And we try and get examples of each segment. So our commercial segment, mid- market, and then upmarket, so that it's engaging for everybody.

Sean Lane: Yeah. I love the idea that the cross- pollination there is actually an advantage as opposed to something that might not be applicable for some of the audience you're actually helping people play up. Right. I remember as a kid, people would always say like, if you play sports with kids who are older than you then chances are you're going to get better. And play with people at a higher level then they're only going to get better. So I think that totally applies here. I also love the fact that you have very specific routines and cadences around this. I would imagine that the first routine you mentioned, that strategy session between you and the sales leaders, it has got to be the crucial kind of like foundation of this entire thing. How do you come out of that strategy session with alignment on, okay, this is the next most important thing for us to talk about with the team? Because I'm sure the list is long.

Brandy Ringler: So it used to be, and actually let me clarify. So you mean the list is long in terms of what everybody is hoping to accomplish or long in terms of the items that I have to take away in terms of to- dos.

Sean Lane: I guess the list of options, right? The number of things that could be on the agenda for the next upcoming training session.

Brandy Ringler: So we've gotten really good at this. So the strategy session used to be more broad than it is today. So today it's actually only three of our sales leaders. It's our CRO, it's our VP of Sales, and it's our director of our largest segment, which is our commercial team and myself. And so there are four of us represented there. I'm there to help facilitate, but it's really their show to kind of talk amongst each other. And everybody knows that we have 30 minutes. So the setup of it is we have 30 minutes. We've been doing this for a while now, we need to decide on what I'm going to take away and have ready in three days from now. Surprisingly there is actually a lot of alignment. So there's usually three ideas that get thrown out and then they talk amongst each other. And they're like, no, I don't love that or that's not going to apply for this segment. And if we get to the end where we're feeling like there's not a lot of time, I'll usually say something along the lines of, since we only have 10 minutes and it's going to be impossible to find time across all of our calendars in the next few days, I heard these two things seem like the best takeaways. I know that I can take action on them. Meaning sometimes they'll throw out things and I have to be realistic and not be just somebody who says yes all the time and say, Hey, I don't actually know if I can find that. Or I don't know if I'm going to be able to get enough content for that to be a productive training. So based on the couple of things that you said, I can do one of these two things. Is there one that we're leaning toward more than the other? And they'll usually be like, okay, you're right, let's do this one. And then we're like, okay, great. We'll come together and we'll review the content. So I think keeping it small, obviously our CRO and our VP of Sales are the last say on it so they're making that call, but also me being realistic with them about what I can actually find and do that's going to be a training that our sales team likes is a key component of it.

Sean Lane: Well, I would also imagine too, that you're bringing a certain lens to the overall landscape that might be across the entire sales team at that moment in time, right? And one of the things that I find challenging is the variety of topics that you could bring to the table and that the number of things that you're trying to work on at any given time. Like you mentioned before, things are moving really fast. The company's got a bunch of different stuff going on. How do you, in picking those topics, avoid change fatigue amongst the team. Where you're not throwing, okay, this is another new thing at every single training session, as opposed to a balance of reinforcing some of the topics or skillsets that you've perhaps already covered in a previous session.

Brandy Ringler: I love that you brought this up because I'll be completely honest, we were not great at that until recently. So I send surveys to our sales team after sales trainings and I get a feel for, Hey, did we feel like this was a valuable time off the floor? Standard things like what could we have done to improve it? What would you like to see for future trainings? How do you think this fits into your overall picture of executing well in your role? And we were getting feedback that it's just a different topic, like every couple of weeks and how do we actually adapt and change quickly enough? So for our last couple of we've tried to really slow down and hone in on topics that can have a part two. So an example is we did an SDR training last week where we introduced the way to do an introduction. And so a big part of our SDR org and what we pride ourselves on is tailored research. So taking three pieces, like old school, three pieces of research that you find on a company or on their LinkedIn, and making sure that you're really tailored in your cold call and then supporting that with Gong use cases. And we were finding, because we had hired so many people recently, that there was that discrepancy. So we ran that training. It's been a week. We actually adjusted our strategy session yesterday with our senior director of SDR. And someone brought up, Hey, I think SDRs are having some trouble overcoming this objection of we're on hold right now, et cetera. And I actually had to pull us back and say, we just introduced what is probably the most fundamental thing to get right to the SDR org, which is how to cold call, how to do research and pitch on the phone a week ago. And now we want to move to objection handling in a week. We're just not there yet. Because they haven't even adapted to and had enough time to do this. We made a change, and I said, I actually think we need to do a part two of the training. We've heard some of our SDRs adapting to the messaging, but changing it and tweaking it in a way that's better than we presented it to them. Based on the script, I want to do a part two where we unleash the stripped down version of the script that people are doing well. I want to do call snippets. I want to do a breakout room role- play via Zoom. And then I want them to do a certification on our pitch. So effectively we will have spent three weeks to a month on nailing how to cold call and how to tailor our outreach because that's fundamental. And if we move too quickly through that, we can't go back. So I wouldn't say we're doing it. Well, I would say that we recognized we weren't doing it well. And now we've tried to slow that cadence to we're still doing every two weeks, but we're iterating on the topic that we previously spoke about.

Sean Lane: Well, and just the fact that you were asking your reps for that feedback, and that was how you identified that that was becoming an issue, right? It's like a perfect first step for anybody. The audience that you are literally in the process of trying to enable, hearing how they are receiving and taking that content I think is amazing. And then leveraging things like scorecards and certifications after the fact to see if that stuff is actually sticking, to me, sounds like you close the loop.

Brandy Ringler: Well, that's nice to hear. I think everything's a work in progress, but I think people, I would say companies often forget that their fans or the people that have to have the most buy- in are the reps. And if you get that buy- in, then the benefit is endless. If you don't and you're pushing changes just to push changes, the outcome is typically not good. And the respect that they have for senior leadership or for enablement is usually pretty poor.

Sean Lane: Before we go, at end of each show, we're going to ask each guest the same lightning round of questions. Ready? Here we go. Best book you've read in the last six months.

Brandy Ringler: Oh, you know what? I would say... This is going to be so embarrassing. I don't know that I've read an amazing book in the last six months. I'm more of a podcast listener. And is it bad to say that I am tapped into our Gong podcast? Not a great answer is it?

Sean Lane: Totally fine. Totally fine. You don't have like a true crime or like This American Life, like guilty pleasure on the side?

Brandy Ringler: So I will say this, and I'm not a huge TV person, but I'm really into dark TV ironically. And I just got into, this is not a book, but I just got into this new TV show called Dark, which is... I don't know if you've heard of it. It's a German TV show so you should watch in subtitles, but it's essentially one of those" who done it" murder mysteries, child goes missing. And I think I've watched every single one of those that exist out there. So those would be my guilty pleasures.

Sean Lane: I love it. Hey, you've got to have something in quarantine time. All right, next one for you. Favorite part about working in enablement.

Brandy Ringler: The ability to touch so many parts of the company and to participate in a part of each person's journey when they start the company. It's usually when people are most excited and most passionate. So I love being a part of that.

Sean Lane: Least favorite part about working in enablement.

Brandy Ringler: Same answer, all the people that you have to touch it across the company. And I think it's learning to say," No."

Sean Lane: It's an outrageously valuable skill, but much easier said than done.

Brandy Ringler: For sure.

Sean Lane: Somebody who impacted you getting the job you have today.

Brandy Ringler: Shout out to you, Brittany Manoppello. She is the Director of Sales Enablement over at Glassdoor and was a mentor of mine while I was an enterprise seller there and was the first person to shine light on the fact that enablement could actually be strategic and really change the journey in terms of me deciding to interview for these types of roles. So thank you, Brittany.

Sean Lane: All right, last one. One piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday.

Brandy Ringler: This might be a little controversial, but I think that the future of sales enablement should be fantastic sellers. So I would love to see enablement become a role in which you were an amazing sales rep- and by amazing, I mean like a top sales rep, you did things differently. You thought about the strategy of selling differently, and you actually want to take that and you believe that you can effectively orchestrate change in an organization. I think that's what I would love. I would love for sellers that are good at selling to actually believe that sales enablement is a respectful path. It's something that can make change. I know I used to not believe that, but I think that with the technology we have today, like Gong, there's just so much room to be good at that job. And then take that and bring it into an org.

Sean Lane: Thanks so much to Brandy for joining us on this week's episode of Operations. If you can't get enough Gong content, I just found out that our CMO Tricia Gellman interviewed Gong's CMO, Udi Ledergore on Trisha's new podcast, CMO Conversations. If you want to know what it looks like inside the minds of CMOs and how they think about their business, Trisha's show is amazing for that. If you like this show, make sure that you're subscribed so that we show up in your feed every other Friday. And if you're really feeling generous, please leave us a six star review on Apple Podcasts. Six star reviews only. All right, that's going to do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.