How Gong got every Pigment Department on the same team

Tools that get you closer to the customer

Pigment is a business planning platform for Finance, Sales and HR teams that’s rapidly scaled since their inception in 2019. Every team, from Sales, to Marketing, to Product was in need of a way to better communicate relevant messaging in order to make business decisions that were based on real customer feedback. 

“One of our values at Pigment is ‘go direct and to thrive together,’ and I really see Gong as a way to bring people together and to be more customer-obsessed,” says Pigment’s Head of Business, Julien Lesaicherre. “Gong definitely helped to accelerate this change in the organization.” 

From onboarding, to forecasting, to communicating across departments, here’s how Gong helped change the way Pigment works for the better.

Building a collective memory

Creating transparency between teams is one of the keys to maximizing feedback and creating a more seamless customer experience.  “In the old days, we would waste a lot of time asking people questions, collecting information, trying to make sense out of the information,” says Lesaicherre. Moving all teams onto one platform made sharing information easy and natural, and each team could get what was needed from a call or a product demo to move forward with their goals. 

“With one way of doing things, we can move faster to execution,” he says.

Creating a collective memory for the entire company to work with doesn’t just improve internal relationships, it makes work more productive and more relevant and keeps everyone aligned with the needs of the customer. “It has really helped us close the gap between our internal teams—we got closer to sales, closer to Customer Success, to our BDRs, to our Account Executives,” says Regina Croda, Head of Product Marketing.

And because adoption was swift across the board, transparency increased right away. “I knew that Gong was working well for us when people started tagging me on things they thought I might be interested in listening to without me explicitly asking,” she says. “Everybody across the organization started better understanding what our company’s priorities were.” 

Alexis Valentin, Pigment’s Head of BDR sums it up nicely: “It gives a chance to non-customer-facing employees to really understand how people use our product and what they expect from such a tool. I think you know a tool works well when you get requests from different teams to access the platform, even if you didn’t think of giving them access in the first place.” 

Getting a reality check

With the voice of the customer now moving freely between teams, Pigment was able to plan with greater accuracy and prioritize the voice of the customer.

“We know the reps don’t always have time to capture everything because they should really focus and interact with their customers as much as they can during a call.” said Valentin. Because reps and managers can use Gong to review calls, all the data you could collect is available to anyone who wants to listen in.

“We are now capable of capturing market signals that are not possible to capture by humans at scale,” says Valentin.

For the marketing team, Gong was an effective tool in helping them pressure-check their messaging. “It really allowed us to have a reality check,” says Croda. “Our ambitions are really large but we also need to meet buyers where they are. You have to move fast to be able to bring that signal that you’re hearing directly from your customer base, and utilize that to advance faster in business and product goals.”

From supporting marketing efforts to influencing the product roadmap, Gong provided a single source of truth that always keeps the customer at the center and business decisions grounded in reality.

Onboarding many teams onto one page

In the last year, Pigment experienced multi-fold revenue growth, and with that kind of growth comes the need for change. “One of them was the challenge that comes with bringing the best people in and making sure they’re onboarded in the right way,” says Lesaicherre. 

“Gong is actually a fantastic solution for that as you can learn about your own mistakes and wins, but you can also learn from all the people around,” he says. “Each time they have a meeting it’s like you’re sitting next to them, even if you’re not actually in the meeting, which is an increased value, especially for new joiners.”

Pigment uses Gong to create a directory of the best calls and demos so new hires from any department can access real-life relevant examples, make comments, and get answers to their questions in a self-serve way. 

The method has proven invaluable to Pigment’s onboarding process. “Metric-wise, I can see a direct correlation in terms of Gong usage and adoption,” says Valentin. “That is, a correlation between people who watch Gong videos in the first 90 days and their performance as a new joiner—it’s incredible. They are just learning faster than the others and can deliver above expectations.”

When a tool exists to serve many teams, it not only brings departments together, it clarifies purpose, goals, and future plans. “Gong is clearly the crossroads of many teams,” says Lesaicherre. “At the end of the day, it’s all about the customer, it’s all about the product, it’s all about how we can help them to fix those issues.”

“It’s not the sales topic. It’s a company topic.”