YouSaid · the spoken record

Amit Bendov

lines on the record: 90
first: 2025-09-12
most recent: 2025-09-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“SDRs goes away. Yeah, it'll definitely not be a trend. And this is like independent of AR. A lot of companies like, yeah, is it even worth it? I see like how much revenue is generating versus like how many appointments a lot are moving. They still have SDRs. The value in SDR, they do generate some revenue, right? So if you're trying to scrape like every 5, 10% of extra revenue, that's great. But they become the best sellers. So we'd gone see like SDRs as sales school. And we get some of our most amazing sellers start like doing nine months as SDRs and then they move into sales and then they go to commercial sales and go to mid-market. Then some become like monster enterprise sellers.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self prospecting by AEs, that's the trend. Regardless of AI, I think the whole unit economics for SDRs don't work for hypergrowth companies, not for companies that are growing 10, 20 percent.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, most of our sellers are phenomenal at Gong. I kid you not. And it's not just sellers. Like, I mean, you know, someone in product marketing, I mean, it could be like anywhere in a company. It could be in IT. So it's across the company. And not necessarily gong, by the way. It could be like in any company. I call it the convergent mediocrity, right? That's like a big risk that you should pay attention. I get some work. Like sometimes you say, hey, was this written by an LLM? Because it looks like too sensible, right? Sometimes they're a little bit like...”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, like, okay, this is the competitor over here. Create a competitive strategy for me. That's like a simple question. That's what most people do. What you're going to get is not great.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, absolutely not. I review them all the time and they're okay. They're okay. But with OK, you do not create like an extraordinary business. You need the brilliance to spark, always like the angle that's unique. So yeah, if you want like an okay company, it's okay.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wrote a post that was real observation that, you know, people think like AI destroying the world, which is a real risk. I don't know. I'm optimistic by nature, but I think it can drive mediocrity. The way that LLMs work, they're very consensus driven. So they aggregate everything that they've heard and create something. It doesn't create great copy, for example. So I'm a pretty good writer, I think, maybe not the best, but pretty good. And whenever I try to say create something like wittier, it's not, it's okay. So the risk is I have someone at the company says, okay, come up with a strategy for this market. And they've actually used like one of the LLMs to generate the plan. That's a terrible idea because I could get like an average. It is sensible. It makes sense, but it's not the best plan, right? So how do I know that work, strategic work that done by people at my company is not like a product of LLMs?”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We dynamically switch between them. So sometimes they're good for one purpose or another. Costs are going down. Quality is improvements. Or we're also monitoring what's out there and what's the best that we could get.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bunch. First, like we have a lot of our own models. We have probably 40 or 50 gong models. And then we use like Claude. We use a or sonnet. We use like OpenAI.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's good. I think the first thing that will be replaced will be the transactional AI. If I'm selling phones, right, or cell phone plans, that's easy enough as long as there are guardrails and there is like, you know, I spoke with a customer that, you know, we're looking to do like AI that's supervising the AI. So it'll be like an AI coach for AI agents if you follow me. Yeah. You need to make sure because even if it works well, you know, there's this famous case of the Canadian airline. It was offering like free travel for life or something, right? AI, the agent offered it. They had to honor it. So it's a liability for companies.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Handle pretty well with AI. But this was like well ahead of its time. The technology is non deterministic. It's not 100% right. Now their tasks that's perfectly okay. If I want like an account summary and if it's not always right, actually it's not always right, but that's still okay. It's like a hundred times better. It's very difficult for a person to do that, right? It's very easy to do it with AI. The risk is not massive. So that's like a very great use case. But I wouldn't let it send a proposal for a million dollars. Who knows what it's going to put out there? Even if it works like 98% of the time really well, that 1% is a massive rate. So you wouldn't let it sign a contract. You wouldn't let it like fire people. So there are things that does it work.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a framework for categorizing and stack ranking where the AI opportunities. So one is like the difficulty of the task for humans and the other is like the risk. What happens if it goes wrong? Outbound calling is probably the most difficult thing for humans to do. It's like try to write a bull at the rodeo, right? People just want to shake you off their back, right? And just very few people are capable of doing it. So that's one. It's very difficult for it to do that, to keep someone on the phone. Second, the risk, right? What if it says something wrong? What if it's doing something unethical, like lying to people, right? You give it a goal, right? So the risk to the brand is massive. So you take on both dimensions like it scores like pretty poor. Now that said, I wouldn't write that direction off. I think certainly there are cases for inbound that can be.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a pretty stupid thing. Like, we knew it. And Elon and I, my, I said, What do you think? I said, This is not going to work.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A VC, we already are, so sometimes, you know, I was speaking with a CFO and it says, Oh, we don't have budget for a gong like it's $100,000. It's like, okay, like, how many starters do you have? A hundred. Now Steck ranked them. Surely there are two at the bottom that aren't going to come even close to quarter? You'd say yes. Okay, like two is 98, but given the technology to do it. So you're already like tapping into things. But if you're asking about usage, that's probably coming like next year. I think it's real. And again, it'll be applicable to companies that create a unique offering with strong modes that is not easily replicable by anybody else out there.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have not, yeah, so we're building the foundation. The key asset that companies have, especially in our domain, and they're even like in other domains, is the data that you're sitting on. Because you could go to any of the lambs, you could load a couple calls transcripts and tell what do you make of this? Help me sell, but it'll not and it'll give you an answer, but it'll not be like a good answer and you wouldn't even know it. The real answer, have you captured everything, what's in the emails, what's in the back channels, in Slack, what's like, and is it the right information? So the battle is now for two things. Data or in LLM world's context and the second workflow. Is it like something that is weaved into the workflows of people? That's where we spend like most of our effort. But future products that are coming will transition to more value-based pricing than per seet.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They might have little leverage if you're a thin wrapper. And I'll open them out of fending. I'm not using cursor. It's a great thing. But if what you do is a thin layer over LLMs, it's very hard because now there'll be others that are doing it and there'll be an efficient market. So the pricing will actually go down because someone can do the same thing better or as good but cheaper will not be competitive. So it's up to the company to develop the modes that allow it to capture the full value. If you're doing something trivial, then yeah, you're not going to be able to do the pricing.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think it landed, but it was obvious to me. If you think it's not gone, but AI is bigger than cloud, now people get it. Because cloud was an IT revolution. If I'm a seller, I don't care if I use Salesforce or Siebel. Yeah, one is a little easier than the other, but the IT is the beneficiary. It's true that there is no software. But as a user, you know, I feel opportunity feels like here and there. Curate opportunities here and there. I create quotes here and there. It's very similar, right? The benefit is the IT that there's no software, there's no upgrade, no infrastructure. But IT is 6% of company's budget. The biggest item is payroll. And AI taps into payroll. The 70% that people are spending on admin work goes away. Now it has to reflect the value. And that's why it's like it's a magnetic order bigger.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I have it in my peach deck from 2017. I said, like, revenue AI will be bigger than CRM, not because it has a big ego, but just the economics”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Needs to reflect the value. Usage is like one way to do it. Let's say that people pay, like, if you have one tenth of the seller, you increase the price per se at like 10x, right? So it's like 10,000 per seller, but there are 100 times more productive.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're roughly nine million sellers in the world. Let's say 10 just for, let's say that they're all on average and making like $150,000 a year. So that's like $1.5 trillion in cost. Remember, three quarters of that you pay them not to sell, but to do administrative work. So that's the opportunity now. That's the petty cash. So let's say average quota or average revenue per seller, let's say 700K a year. I'm just throwing a number. So that's like 7 trillion, 7 trillion dollars a year sold by the sales community. This is bigger. People talk about like, you know, cursor for engineers or Harvey for lawyers. Gong or revenue AI is for a seller. It's way bigger because not just the cost or the headcount. It's the revenue they're generating. It's like a magnitude of order bigger. This is a multi trillion dollar opportunity that AI can tap into.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. So salespeople are required. There'll be fewer sellers, I'm pretty sure. I'll give you some numbers to think about it, right?”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Variance between the bestsellers and the worst sellers. Just look at the graphs, right? Look at attainment graphs. Even the best sellers, right? Not like every deal to show it the best form. Just everybody, you know, LeBron has like a bad day, right? So the performance is very uneven across people within the same people. So AI can make sure that you show up in the best form, best shape every time, every game. And maybe some people shouldn't even be in a profession.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the art stays the art, the drudgery goes away. AI does not generate great art. You try it like with imagery, right? Or whatever with Sora or whatever. So art is created by our creativity and intuition that people still outperform AI. But the numbers are sellers spend 75% of their time on non-selling activities. This is insane. It's like updating forms. It's like the forecast calls. It's like one-on-one meetings sifting through list, running workflows, researching information, preparing for meetings. This is insane. You're paying three out of four dollars you're paying them is to do uninteresting work that can be decimated with AI and the salespeople would be willing to pay out of their own pocket for this because they hate it. That's definitely going away. The bigger thing is the sales effectiveness just to know how to sell. Like obviously there is a very big”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industry knowledge can be acquired like fairly quickly, and salesmanship is extremely hard and takes time. Now, ACV doesn't mean it's like, you know, between like 15 and 50k, there's no difference, but you're selling like, you know, seven figure deals, it's a very different ballgame than like 10k deals. One's like very high velocity and the one is like traditional enterprise sales. So that's these are the two categories like enterprise or transactional selling.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, your startup isn't shitty. Like, you need to sell the dream, right? Yeah, but you say, yeah, let's do a billion in five years, right? I mean, that's like first, you need to sell, hire the best talent, it's hard. Now it's not necessarily being like CRO at like three companies, but they've been like a seller at company one, crushed it. They've been like a sales lead at company two, crushed it and a director at like company three crushed it.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I wouldn't hire that hype pedigree VP from Salesforce or Adobe or whatever. Salesforce is a great team. You need someone who's still hungry, scrappy, and will figure out the playbook, right? That has like, I say, enough experience that have been successful, I'd say I did like two or three other companies. One company is a little dangerous. Maybe it's not a good simple size, but I've been successful in a number of companies I've seen because every company is different. Your company is probably different than the two or three others that your VPO sales have done before. So it's important to hire someone with a diverse experience.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just technicalities. It's like, you know, the call of presentation one presentation, two, some of them are kind of like more like customer milestone and activities. They're not the best practice, but they work well and it'll be like very difficult to change. It's not impossible. Maybe like one day, like if our sales team decides, they'll put the effort to put it in. So little things, nothing major. But, you know, fortunately after we started selling to Stranger, I brought like a really strong PPU sales and he started crushing and brought real professional salespeople and then the team took off.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are doing extremely well. But, you know, I think our sales stages, right? For example, at Gong, like don't make the most sense. They work, but they're created like in 2016 and”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, absolutely. It is very difficult to change things after that once you start bringing, like, we still have things gone that I said, I wish we've changed it because once you have the momentum, it's never like important enough to change things. Now, if you're like an extreme introvert engineers, maybe not. I think a mediocre founder can do probably the best job early on because you understand the picture, you have the passion, you understand, you know, you still don't have a playbook. So if you're an average communication skills founder, do it yourself. Just figure it out. Because you understand the vision and you understand what people understand, what they don't understand probably better than anyone else. You're not a better seller. But overall, I think it's a great experience.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so these are all like people that knew us, right? Friends and family, which is like stage one. Then the next step would be, can you sell like total of strangers? People that don't know like a meat or a lawn or aren't my cousins, right? So I went to this first conference in Chicago in 2016, April, and I present like, I still have the deck, like how AI will transform sales. And people's jaws dropped. You could see that, oh, wow, that's new. And right there, I got our first random stranger he saw. I showed him a demo. And he saw, I said, this is great. Like I need it. And month later, he bought. So that's how he started. So it's clear that the product market fit, we nailed it. And it was a hole in one.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like that, yeah. Wow, even less. Doesn't matter. We ask, maybe they pay less, we didn't care what it is, but you didn't want to be like a dollar because that wouldn't say anything or a million. It was just an experiment that works extremely well.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you just say, hey, are you ready to buy? And people say yes or no. If he's no, usually it's a no, right? But at least you know what you're missing. So we wanted to know, we didn't need the money, we didn't have like any revenue goals, but do we have something that is valuable enough that people would be willing to pay? We saw that they're using it, they're engaged. Is it like valuable enough? Because there are plenty of product people use and love when you go and ask for money. They're not willing to pay. So we didn't have a price lease, but we said, you know what? Let's start something like 30 to 50k, which is a non-trivial amount. We wanted to be like somewhat painful, but not outrageous. We had a dozen customers and we reached all of them and said, hey, sorry boys, the beta is over. It's time to pay. And they hated us. But 11 out of 12 bought. So within six months, we had like paying customers. And I said, okay, like that's really good.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know what's worse than no complaints? Silence, crickets, right? Means people don't care. The ideal of the product just works amazing and nobody complains, right? The reality most products aren't amazing, especially on. But when people complain, it means that they want it to work or that they care. So customer complains, most people panic. It's a phenomenal opportunity if you react. So people complained, which was good. Oh, gong was like five minutes late or like, you know, I was talking behind my manager's back. So all those things, right, the gong captured somehow. It was good. And then around April, I was telling Elon is my co-founder. You know what? Let's do a little experiment. Like let's do a trial close. The trial close in sales is like, you go and ask for the order. If you're working on a deal, you're going to ask for money. And it tells you where you are, right? You get a yes or a no.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're using the product, and we started tweaking the GUI a little bit, moved some buttons, relabeling. We thought people were going to search for keywords, like a competitor name. But that's not what they're looking for. They're looking like, okay, my customer name, right? Like, where am I calling the customer or like a person's name, like a seller's name? So we tweaked engagement improved. We started getting complaints, which is like a very good thing. People, oh, gong missed that meeting, like why he did this, which is a very good signal.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was insane. We raised the money, we started developing first year 2016. We haven't been planning any revenue. And we just coerced a few friends and family companies to try the product so we can get data so we can start training our models. We didn't plan on charging anything and people think, oh, free product people would be, you know, happy to try it out. No, like people don't want to waste their time, but we use anything from emotional extortion to bending people's arms. They just favor they tried it. So we started, like the system started work. I think it was January 2016. We launched like not even an alpha, kind of like, hey, kick the tires, tell us if things even make sense. And then we started seeing that the sellers are actually logging in, like engagement was not zero. Oh, that's pretty interesting. What are they doing over there? So we started looking logs. We saw what they're.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought that sellers are going to hate Gong because they're going to see it as a big brother, that Google and Amazon are going to own the AI technology. They're going to own this market, whatever it is. Legal and compliance reason said you can't really record like it's illegal, which is not true. It is legal, like as long as you have consent, everything is legit. One of the reasons like, oh, there's no company made it in sales tech. At that time, there are companies that most of them don't exist inside sales and clear slide. I know you might remember those. So it was like, you know, is this even worth an investment as a category, right? And these are not stupid people. These are smart people that I know, right? Personally, and to hear those no's was gutting.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he's doing the right thing. He's building agents. I think they also recognize the opportunity with AI and they need to move fast as fast as they can. So it's a formidable company definitely capable and it's impressive the way that they have done.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, who wants to fill in forms or flip through web pages? This is like people punching cars in the 70s. There's no doubt in a couple years at most, and I used to say like in 10 years, right now I say like in one to two years nobody's going to be feeling informed. Nobody's going to run those reports and go and update their managers and all of that. It's all going to be done by agents automatically with AI better, faster, cheaper than people.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were deep mind was already beating the world champion in chess, and AI was starting to diagnose cancer better than the doctors, the question I ask, like, how hard would it be for AI to tell us what's going on better than sellers? That was the insight that ultimately led to Gong.”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looked fine except for we weren't selling, so it dawned on me that the secret is not how much work we're doing or how many people we have, but it's like the essence of the conversations with customers. And I sent my product manager to sift through CRM notes and they spent a couple weeks, load everything to Excel. And they came back, said there's nothing there, I mean. I realized the problem is that CRM was built for the leaders to give them the information so they can roll the forecast and reporting based on sweat that people at the bottom in the trenches need to put in. They need to go in. So I met this customer. They're very excited with the demo when we're going to meet again next week. And then nothing happens and never really know why. So CRM tells you like, what do you want and how much they paid and what you've lost, but you never really know why. And it doesn't tell you how. This was 2015 for those who remember this was the...”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you take Peter Thiel, said great companies are built on secrets, right? Our secret was that everybody thought still do that CRM is a single source of truth. This is not true. CRM doesn't have truth. The only thing that's true out there is like who your customers are, what they bought, how much they're paying you, maybe their phone numbers. Everything else is not true. It's like information that sellers are bothering to put in. It's highly subjective. They put maybe like 1% of the information that actually happening. I experience it firsthand in 2015. I was like a CEO of a software company. We're growing really fast. And then all of a sudden, I had a shitty quarter that sales were just not just taking a nosedive. And I have no idea what's going on. I started digging like in our CRM, like, you know, do we have enough opportunities? Do we have enough people making enough calls, enough emails?”
2025-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source