Wendy Harris joined Gong in June 2021 to lead their global expansion as Head of EMEA. Gong is the revenue intelligence leader leveraging artificial intelligence to transform revenue teams.
Prior to this, Wendy led European sales at CarGurus for over three years and before that, she was the Head of EMEA enterprise sales at Dropbox. She also spent over a decade working in financial services as a trader for Goldman Sachs.
RECRUITERS’ Marketing Manager, Andrew Sheehan, sat down with Wendy to discuss her experience of leading this global expansion to Dublin during a global pandemic coupled with a work-from-home experiment the likes of which nobody has ever witnessed.
From setting up bank accounts and IT services to hiring lawyers and new staff, setting up a new operation can be logistically difficult. How did your previous experience prepare you for doing it all again, during a pandemic?
"When companies are setting up in Europe for the first time, it makes sense to find a local hire with access to a large business network. I knew I could simply reach out to the contacts with whom I've worked in the past for names and recommendations of service providers that we could then use when setting up here.
However, coordinating these recommendations with my teammates in the US and Israel was important at each stage. I’m not an HR, finance or legal expert, but I knew my teammates had the expertise in their functions to ultimately make the best decision, which enables me to keep moving forward.
I also had excellent support from public bodies such as the IDA. We linked in with them pretty early on and they supplied a large batch of resources and contacts for me too. But ultimately, I think it's leveraging your network and getting more than one recommendation because what's right for one company at one stage, won't be right for another company."
What was your motivation behind taking on such a task with Gong and during such uncertain times globally?
"It helped that the product is insanely good as I need to believe in what I sell. I describe it as a tool that once you see it you can’t unsee it. A tool like this comes around once in a lifetime and I've never been more passionate about selling something.
Secondly, it came down to the way the world has changed and how well Gong fits in with this. Our new hybrid world combined with Gong has opened up so many possibilities that I’m excited to explore with the team. In the past, the problem was that you had no visibility into the front-line.
Finally, the leadership team is excellent and Gong is backed by really smart investors. At the end of the day, I knew that being number one on the ground in EMEA with an already established brand and a validated solution was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a real privilege. I feel very lucky. conversations that your team was having and no idea why some reps succeed and others don't. Gong unlocks that black box and gives you this visibility and I knew how powerful this would be for businesses going forward."
What challenges did you face when communicating and strategising with your colleagues in the US and Ireland remotely? Do you think it impacted your strategies at all?
"While remote work has its challenges it has also helped in certain scenarios. Everyone had to adapt to the new normal and learn the importance of web conferencing. I was used to being the only one dialing into physical meetings in the US. Often the people in the room might forget about you or forget to turn the camera on etc. Remote work helped raise all of our virtual meeting etiquette for the better.
In the past, you may not have been able to get to a meeting but now it doesn't matter if you're physically present or even in the same building. You can still be present, have fun with your colleagues, and have an impact from anywhere.
However, my preference for collaboration with people will always be in person. I feel you get more done if you're in person and you get to know people better and thrash things out properly. Virtually, things can sometimes get lost in translation over the likes of Zoom or Slack."
What was your first hire at Gong EMEA and why?
"I hired an Account Executive to drive new business revenue. There was a large pull from the local market and we needed to bring on AEs to service that demand with people who are in the same timezone and who had local market knowledge. Since then, we have added Customer Success and Marketing. Now we’re looking at more Sales Engineers, Product Marketing and Support. But the wheel has to start with Sales and get some money on the board. Then, all of these other pieces fit around that."
Were you nervous about facing the new world of recruitment?
"I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it because ultimately, you can still have good quality conversations with people online and that’s the main thing when it comes to hiring for me. Gong recognised people's work/life priorities and moved to cater for these people, opening up new pools of talent. We now have remote job postings in the US and we've opened up hubs in various locations where people wanted to live during and since COVID.
I’ve never met anyone that I work with at Gong in person which is very weird. When hiring, it’s easier to get a measure of somebody in person, however, the world has changed and employers have to adapt. Like it or loathe it, there’s no denying that hiring has become more efficient through virtual meetings – just take the time saved from walking people in and out of the building alone!
I'm really confident about the hires that we've made so far and they're ramping up really well in our new working world."
What has Gong done specifically to overcome the challenges of onboarding new hires remotely?
"We're in a great position to use our own product to help us overcome the challenges of onboarding new hires remotely. Key to onboarding at any company is training and upskilling the new staff as quickly as possible, but the process of learning by osmosis is now out of the window for most companies.
With Gong, we already have a massive library of best-in-class calls with incredibly rich data to share with new staff meaning they ramp more effectively.
It has been a powerful tool for ramping up our new starters quickly and has also meant that our top performers (who would usually do the onboarding and upskilling) can stay focused on what they do best. Most importantly, it’s provided a much more enjoyable experience for starters as they can listen back to the videos on the job or when they’re out walking through our easy-to-use App."
A trusted recruitment partner of RECRUITERS, Gong unlocks reality to help people and companies reach their full potential. The patented Gong Revenue Intelligence Platform™ empowers customer-facing teams to take advantage of their most valuable assets – customer interactions, which the Gong platform automatically captures and analyzes. Gong then delivers insights at scale, empowering revenue and go-to-market teams to determine the best actions for winning outcomes.
