Justin Geller. Good to see you, my friend. How you doing? I’m doing well, man. How are you? Yeah, good, good. I was excited about this one, namely because I’ve known you for about 10 years, give or take, at this point. Yeah, yeah, it’s been a long time. Yeah. First, and we’ve got a lot of mutual friends, connections in the- in the industry, so to speak.
And what a meteoric rise you’ve had. So yeah, I don’t know, just for those maybe that don’t know you, if you could just give us a rundown of kind of how you got to where you are today. Yeah, for sure. Cut my teeth in sales at LinkedIn where I spent about four years pre IPO through the IPO, which was a great experience and in a lot of ways taught me about great culture and what building a people centric business looks like. From there, I made the jump over to Zenefits, which was one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world at the time, maybe still holding some records in the growth categories.
And then spent a couple of years there. That was my first foray into leadership and then bounced around across a couple of startups and also Salesforce for a couple of years. And then eventually my network led me to Gong. And that was six years ago. I joined as the first sales manager.
And we were only about gosh, probably like 20-ish people in go to market and 20-ish people in the U.S. And today the company is obviously several thousand employees. I’m now our VP of corporate sales and I run an organization that’s roughly, I don’t know, call it 130 people across reps, managers, and directors.
So yeah, it’s definitely been like a huge highlight of my career and definitely a journey that stretched me, challenged me, and been wildly fulfilling. Yeah, very cool. One of the benefits of being in recruiting and in recruiting for some time now as you get to see people’s careers play out almost in real time. And so knowing you from back then to now, it’s a phenomenal sort of a sight to observe because you know, you’ve done exceptionally well for yourself.
So kudos to you mate. So, okay- so you’ve been through Gong’s sort of hyper scaling and growth. How many people have you hired at this point, sort of directly and indirectly? I mean, directly it’s in the hundreds, most likely. And then I’ve done thousands upon thousands of interviews. So yeah, I think I’ve got the Rolodex of interviews at this point.
And the hiring has been constant over the last six years. In fact, right now we’re hitting a point of acceleration at Gong and I’m starting to do a bunch more hiring and a bunch more interviewing, which has been exciting. Yeah. So lots of interviews along the way. To get to those interviews though, you’ve got to be pretty good at sourcing
talent. And I know Gong first hand has a high bar, right? You put some great, great people through over the years.
What’s your sort of secret to gaining and sourcing top talent for Gong and along the way, maybe in other roles too? Yeah, for sure. So I think there’s a few things. Number one is if you can make your people wildly successful and wildly fulfilled, they will want to bring their network and their referrals into your organization.
And so referrals has been a huge source of talent for us. And in my opinion, it’s one of the best. It’s really hard to vet talent. And even if you’re phenomenal at it, you have, you know, still a 50 percent chance of getting it wrong. And so anything that you can do to mitigate that risk is a huge benefit to the organization and also the people that you bring in. And referrals are obviously pre-vetted and people within your org are saying, hey, this person would be a great fit.
So that’s been a huge source of talent for us. It only works, though, if you create a successful, happy, and engaged population that’s willing to refer people. So that’s one. And then two, so I sit at a third line level today at Gong. I still do my own sourcing at the rep level, at the manager level.
That’s me actually like going out into the LinkedIn world and messaging people cold. And so there’s no substitute to doing the work. It’s similar to in sales, like you have to outbound and generate pipeline and you got to do that on your own. It’s no different with hiring. You have to go after the best people.
They’re usually not looking and you have to take it upon yourself to get them engaged. Yeah, no substitute for doing the hard work. I love that. That’s a yeah, it’s a line. I’m going to have to steal that one from you.
So weirdest interview moments. Lots of interviews along the way. Hell of a lot of interviews on the way, it sounds like. Do you have a weirdest interview moment that stands out to you, Justin? Yeah, I think so, for individual contributors for account executives, the biggest inflection point in our interview process is we do a mock sales call.
So we give the candidate a scenario, and they come in, and they do a disco meeting with us based on the scenario. And we had a candidate who came into that meeting and basically said, I’m good. I don’t, I don’t think I need to do this mock. I’ve done plenty of these calls over the lifetime of my sales career.
So we can skip this stage in the process. To which we said, you know, thanks, but no thanks. And obviously we didn’t hire this individual. But that was definitely the strangest that I can think of. It’s bold. It’s bold. Bold, bold is right. Bold is right. Oh man. Never ceases to amaze me on some of these things.
I think an interview setting is just a kind of a strange experience in some senses anyway, and this just sort of confirms the add to that. So anyway.
What about interview questions? Do you have a unconventional one that you like to employ? Yeah. I mean, I’ll go back to the mock for a second. I don’t know if it’s unconventional, but I’d say 50 percent of the companies in my network that I talked to,
they don’t do a mock sales call or a presentation and I think it’s wildly important. It’s really hard to assess sales talent. Their job is to drive confidence, right? Like that’s what we do every day, is we sell. And so salespeople are really good at selling you on themselves. And if you don’t have a moment to see them in action,
it increases the likelihood that you’re going to hire somebody that may not be a fit for your organization. And so not unconventional, but I do think wildly valuable is the mock process that we take candidates through. I’ll also share, I won’t share the specific questions that I use to uncover this part, but I do dig into grit and resilience a ton.
Being a salesperson is really, really hard. It’s especially challenging today given the market dynamics and all that’s going on in the world. And if you’re not an individual that has a strong why, a strong purpose, a strong work ethic, and the ability to get up after you’ve been knocked down a few times, it’s likely that you won’t succeed. And so I spend a lot of time digging into that with people that we hire. Nice.
What about the most important piece of wisdom on hiring you wish you’d known earlier?
Yeah. It’s a good question. I think there are three things. Number one is you have to trust your gut and that’s like really cliche. Everybody will say that. But every time I’ve hired somebody and I’ve had a gut feel that there’s something I can’t put my finger on, but I don’t think they’re going to be a great fit. Like
98 percent of the time that individual doesn’t work in the respective role that we’re hiring them for. And I wish I would have trusted my gut. So I think you have a gut and a gut feel for a reason. Like we should be listening to that as hiring managers. Not only do we owe it to our companies, but we owe it to the candidate as well.
If we bring a candidate into a role that’s not a good fit for them, that’s a terrible experience for the candidate too. Two is, you have to be brutally honest with the candidates. I think early on in my tenure, I leaned too far into the selling side of the conversation. And that led me to misrepresenting the situation that we were in.
Not that we were in a bad situation, but there have been times where maybe I could have been more clear about outbound pipeline generation expectations and the candidate comes in and they’re like, wow, this is much different. And so you want to highlight the great things about your environment.
But you also want to be perfectly honest about where people may be challenged and where you’re still working and growing on things as an organization so that they’re walking in eyes wide open and they’re running towards something not away from something. And then lastly, hire people for the right reasons.
I think you want to hire people that are super excited to join you in the mission that you’re on and to build something special. You want people to join for something deeper than like comp. They really have to be bought into you as a leader, the company vision and everything else that you’re driving towards.
Very cool. And you mentioned you guys are hiring. So wanting to sort of put this out there to the top performers in my network. What’s joining Gong today like, and who should they be reaching out to? Yeah. So I’ve been at Gong for six years. And I’ve seen us scale again from, I don’t know, call it 50 people now to several thousand.
I think we are in the most exciting growth chapter that the company has ever seen. We’ve moved from single product to multi product. There’s obviously a huge tailwind in the market, given all the buzz around generative AI. And Gong is the only AI first company in the go to market landscape. And I think our best years are in front of us.
So life at Gong is very good. The team is performing exceptionally and we are growing like crazy. If you are interested in joining us, all of our open roles are posted on the website. We have a maniacally focused recruiting team who keeps everything super up to date and they’re super responsive. And so if you see something that you’re interested in, apply and our team will get back to you.
Appreciate it. This was fun. Thanks, Tom.
