Catchiness strategy

“We could have called it ‘strawberry intelligence.'”
– Gong CEO Amit Bendov

What Amit meant by that statement, per Andy Raskin, is that rather than “invent” the category of “revenue intelligence“, as Gong did, they might just as well have invented the category of “strawberry intelligence“.

The idea being that Gong’s enormous success didn’t have to do with making up a “____ intelligence” category.

So the category name didn’t move any needles, according to Raskin and Bendov.

Instead, apparently, what people cared about was the Gong company/product story – not their cool “revenue intelligence” category.

Story strategy, you might call it. Like with Storybrand.

Maybe that’s true of Gong but I wouldn’t take it as gospel for any firm.

The thing is, there are good stories and there are boring stories. BTW, here we’re using ‘story’ to mean an account of how a company’s leadership discovered and moved toward their positioning and started creating win-win value in their market.

Anyway, my point is that story strategy only works some of the time.

And I do think the category name “revenue intelligence” made a difference for Gong.

Here’s what I think happened – in the first place, someone in marketing at IBM came up with “business intelligence” back in the 1980’s. And tech companies have been running with it ever since, including Gong.

Why? Because business intelligence or revenue intelligence, or whatever, is an easy to grasp idea that has a nice ring to it – and can be easily riffed on in your sales an marketing materials.

It doesn’t have to be logical, it just has to be non-illogical – and catchy.