Stacey Justice runs enablement at Gong using Gong, which means she's customer zero for the very platform her reps are selling.
When Gong launched Gong Enable earlier this year, Stacey was the one rolling it out to the sales team, running without a services playbook, figuring it out in real time.
That inside view of what Gong's AI actually does for an enablement team is what makes this conversation so valuable.
In this episode, Stacey joins Alex to walk through exactly how Gong uses Gong for enablement—the specific features, the real workflows, and the results, including:
Enjoy the show!
Alex Kracov: All right, Stacey, I'm super excited to talk to you today. I've been interviewing enablement people all month and everyone mentions Gong as their favorite, their number one tool for enablement. So excited to talk about all things Gong today. It's going to be a fun conversation.
Stacey Justice: There's no better way that I would love to start this conversation off with than you telling me that everyone's talking about Gong. So I'm excited to talk to you.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's literally a meme. I asked people like, what's your favorite tool? And they're just like Gong, Gong, Gong. So it's awesome. So you joined just about two years ago as the VP of go-to-market enablement. Can you talk a little bit about what the function looked like when you first arrived and how it's kind of transformed in the last couple of years?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, so just over two years and I think it's changed a lot. I think Gong was in a really different place two years ago. The enablement program really focused on really great training, but it was very siloed. So one of the things that was happening at Gong at the time was everything was leader led.
And so different segments were doing different things and there was no consistency across the different teams. And so what we really focused on across the board in go-to-market but also in enablement is driving a lot more consistency. So my team is structured and aligned across the go-to-market to drive more repeatability, more predictability. We're organized around outcomes. So think onboarding, product, leadership enablement, performance enablement.
And then we're specifically aligned to business impact — win rate, ramp time, productivity expansion. So we're getting out of the check-the-box training completion silo-driven approach to enablement and more into the revenue workflow to drive much more of a standard operating rhythm across each of the different segments and align the teams on what they need to know.
Alex Kracov: Super interesting. And then can you talk, just to give the audience a sense, what's the scale? How many sellers and go-to-market folks are we talking about? How many enablement people are supporting them?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, we've grown a lot. We're talking just over a thousand across the go-to-market, and that includes enabling across everything from SDRs all the way through to support. So all of our customer-facing teams, and we've got a global team. We have five different hub offices in North America right now. We've a large EMEA presence. It's one of our fastest growing markets right now, and also opened in Singapore. So we have a fully global approach.
Alex Kracov: A lot of our conversation today is going to be about using Gong at Gong. There's this super interesting meta dimension to your job — very much like us at Dock, you're using the platform all the time that your reps are selling. So how does that change how you work?
Stacey Justice: It completely changes how we work. From an enablement perspective at least, because it's like this whole meta sort of approach. At the most meta experience, we just recently rolled out Gong Enable, and I got to enable using Gong Enable on Gong Enable. It was kind of a joke — how many times can you use the word enable? But it's really magical, and I think you guys probably see this as well, because you get to do things like enabling on the product.
And so you're teaching them how to sell it, which is usually the typical approach — that's typically what you do in enablement when you're not selling what you're selling, you're not using what you're selling. But then we also get to train them on how to use it. And I think that's a huge thing that has changed over the course of two years at Gong. We are customer zero. We are Gong first in everything that we do. So when we're rolling out a product, we're teaching them how to use it as much as we're teaching them how to sell it. And that drives so much more confidence, so much more knowledge around it.
I also think it speaks to the value of Gong, because I think that's absolutely led us into some of the performance and just some of the stickiness that we've had with it.
Alex Kracov: Does it create any weird challenges? I imagine sellers have tons of feedback. They're going through it, they're using the product all the time — that's probably good for the product team to hear. It's an interesting dynamic.
Stacey Justice: There are definite challenges and definitely different things to have to deal with. So one thing — we get in and we use the product early. We start using like alpha code, beta code on different things. So it might mean the product's not ready. So the field has to be a little more accepting of things that are happening in the product and realize that it's just like any other software development program — you're probably going to use something that's still early.
There's always feedback, there's always different things, but then there's also the pressure that you've got a services team that is out there implementing Gong to all of these customers and you're running without a playbook a little bit because you're kind of leading the way on how it's going to go. As much as I'd love to say our services team is helping my team implement Gong, we're kind of out here on our own and driving a lot more accountability to how we're using it. So we're running without a playbook, which is fun. We get to really try and push the boundaries a ton.
Alex Kracov: Can you talk through how you actually use Gong to run your enablement programs and what does that look like day to day?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, and I'm going to start with saying core call recording and conversational intelligence — when that came out, and I mentioned this to you, I bought Gong in 2018, that was game changing for me as an enablement professional getting in and understanding what's happening. And to me that's still so hugely valuable.
And then from an enablement perspective over the course of the pandemic, Gong really focused on products like Gong Forecast and Gong Engage. Those are really important tools for the revenue workflow. But I will say it's been in like the last 12 to 18 months that the functionality within Gong has truly changed the game for me and for my enablement team.
We use an enablement flywheel that we actually use in-house. The concept is: Detect — identify what's actually happening in the field. Understand what gaps you have in skills, what's not happening, what competitors you're actually seeing. That's leveraging the AI in the system — Ask Anything, the AI theme spotter — to go in and actually identify what's going on and identify those gaps. To me, that's so fundamental in terms of actually connecting to the field.
The next step in the flywheel is Prescribe — that is where you start to create the targeted content. That is functionality like AI Builder. It's probably my favorite feature right now.
Alex Kracov: I don't know if I knew about this one.
Stacey Justice: AI Builder is inside of our foundational product. You can go into AI Builder and say, create a battle card for me against X competitor, or create discovery questions for Gong Enable for a sales professional, and it will build the content for you. It's probably accelerated the workflow of my team by weeks — you're not starting with a blank page, you're going in, you're pulling insight from what's actually happening in the conversations and customer engagements and then being able to create content, create job aids, create lessons, create whatever you need from an enablement perspective.
Then it gets into AI role play, which is part of our new Gong Enable SKU. This has changed the game for us. To me, this is actually what scales enablement to be able to drive that consistency I was talking about and connect theory to reality.
AI Trainer includes also these micro lessons. You can create the job aid, you can create the AI role play. The AI role play is building off of your own system, so it's directly related to what's happening in the field, directly related to what's working. You can build that, you give your reps and revenue professionals in general an absolute opportunity to practice based on what's happening in their market.
And then the final thing — this is where I live — is being able to validate that it's working. Things like automated scorecards. Getting in and actually attaching these AI-driven automated scorecards and call reviewers into the calls, so reps and CSMs have no idea that they're actually being rated, but I'm getting all this visibility to understand how is this actually working? Is this being adopted? Are they actually doing what we asked them to do? And where do I need to now go focus to help them get better?
Alex Kracov: Super interesting. The product has changed quite a bit. I didn't know about the content generation side of things. That's amazing.
Stacey Justice: Yeah, and I think the thing about it — I did a webinar last week at Launch and Gong Enable, and one of the questions that came through was, isn't this just going to replace enablement? And my answer to that is no, absolutely not. I think what it's finally doing is getting enablement to a place where you're much closer to the field, you're creating content that is actually going to impact the business, and I think it's what's been expected for enablement to do. We just didn't have the tools at our fingertips to do it.
Alex Kracov: And it just gives you higher leverage. There was no way before you could listen to a thousand calls from the field and connect those patterns across. Now you can do that instantly and then get those insights or create content based off it.
Stacey Justice: You can use AI theme spotter, go in, ask what are the biggest objections that are happening — the AI theme spotter will actually pull it up and give you the biggest objections, and then it will tell you how many opportunities it's impacting, how much ARR it's impacting. You can actually see the impact of the list that's in front of you based on the impact on the business.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, that's amazing. And that obviously feeds the product roadmap too. I think it's so interesting how the call itself has become such an important artifact in the world of AI. Even at Dock, right — we have a great integration with Gong where we can build business cases and things, but that fundamental data is the call itself and all those different conversations.
Stacey Justice: And it's being able to leverage all of that unstructured data. I think the big thing there is how do you use it? And to me, that's where it's all coming through from an enablement perspective — to give you exactly what you're talking about, the trends that you want, the insight that you need. If you think about enablement going from one to many, that's why you need those trends. You need to understand what's actually going on. The individual call is great and sales managers and customer success managers get so much value from that. But from an enablement perspective, I want to see the trends.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, totally. In one call you might get wrong data — maybe it was just a bad sales rep handling objections really poorly. But if you can sum that up across a thousand reps, then it's really interesting data.
Stacey Justice: Yep, exactly.
Alex Kracov: Let's talk a little more about Gong Enable because I think it's super interesting. The AI role play space is heating up — I was at an enablement conference a couple of weeks ago and everybody was talking about AI role play. I'm curious how you think about it because there is some skepticism: God, I'm talking to the AI, is this the same? Am I going to game it? Is it good for all types of sales reps? Is it only good for SDRs? Would an enterprise AE even use this thing?
Stacey Justice: You know, in all of this I have never thought would my enterprise rep use it — maybe that's because I'm sitting at Gong. I think that Gong's AI role play is so tied into what's happening in the business that I think it's relevant for anyone.
My approach to enablement — and it's always been this, pre-Gong — is how do you connect theory to reality? It's really great to go in and teach someone concepts, teach someone a methodology. And then typically you're creating mock scenarios and having them go through role plays, whether that's in person or whatever. But I think what it's been missing is being connected to exactly what's happening.
So to me, the biggest game changer within Gong Enable is the ability to actually create content and create these role plays that are absolutely connected. Let's say, for example, your enterprise team is really struggling on negotiating against procurement professionals. The ability to go in and basically set it up so that you can say — I'm going to build out this negotiation role play, the persona's going to be procurement, and we're going to use all of the insight and the data from all the calls that we've had with procurement professionals where we've done really well, or we'll find the toughest procurement persona that we've ever come across and use that for them to practice on before they go into it.
That's what changes the game. Because it's not Stacey over in the corner creating a mock scenario that I think is what's happening in the field. It's actually pulling from those conversations they're already having. So the credibility goes up completely because it's literally what's happening inside of their accounts.
Alex Kracov: So you take all the data from the calls with those scary procurement people, and that builds the model of the AI role play procurement person. So it makes it more real.
Stacey Justice: Yeah. To me, it's like a no-brainer. No matter what level you're at, if I can use this in a way that's actually going to reflect what I'm going to get on the call, why wouldn't I want to get better?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, and it's so much better than a lot of role play software I've seen where it's really just like prompts — you're building workflows over here and there's no real underlying data to the thing you're talking to.
Stacey Justice: It all comes back down to that data and what you do with it. AI role play within Gong is one way that we're using that data to create a more realistic scenario. I will also say — even before we had AI role play — I'm a big fan of making sure that when we're doing a certification, we're not just doing the role play side of it, but then connecting to real customer calls. So in our certifications, I actually require two customer calls showing that behavior. I can see the adoption metrics, I can see all of that in Gong. But that gives me an AI assist scorecard where our managers have to go in and score two customer calls for each one of their reps in terms of the certification. So I can see how they're actually performing with real customers.
Alex Kracov: Makes sense. Yeah, the role play is just the starting point. They get on a real call and then the manager can reinforce and validate that they actually learned the behavior. Makes a ton of sense.
Alex Kracov: So how do you think about legacy LMS systems? Part of Gong Enable is structured learning, micro learning, different things like that. Is there still a place for e-learning training courses — kind of what enablement training has been for the last 10 years?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, I think for most teams, LMS will stay. Inside of Gong, you're right, we have a lot of capability to do what I would consider micro learning. Lessons you can go through — maybe it's teaching the methodology around that negotiation. So you can have them go through two or three different pages of lesson and then get them into the role play, and I think that serves itself really well.
But there are things you still want to teach. Maybe you're rolling out entirely new messaging and you want them to understand why certain decisions were made. Or you want them to take a test that demonstrates they know what's going on. That's going to happen in an LMS. So I do think LMS systems are still there and still play a role.
What I find to be most valuable though is literally how I can actually track behavior change. And so I'm tending to move much more toward the micro learning concept, but I still do find reason to actually train in a longer-form way.
Alex Kracov: And I've also heard you talk about this continuous enablement flywheel versus one-time training — that more traditional LMS model where you just check the box and move on. Can you talk about that and the relationship between continuous enablement and micro learning?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, so I'll give you an example. One way that we run our field enablement — which is really our skills-focused team — is we separate our programs into mountains, rocks, and pebbles. The mountain is where we really focus on a big skill. So let's say in Q2, we're going to focus on negotiation. That's our big skill. And 80% of that core skill we're building out is the same for all of the different segments. But that happens in Q2.
It's big and we run a big program. There can be role play in that, we can do certification, whatever. But let's say you start at Gong in Q4 — that mountain isn't happening right now. So one thing we're doing is taking these big core mountain programs and breaking them into micro learnings that we can use for continuous enablement or that we can arm a manager with. When they sit down and have performance conversations they can say, "you're really caving on all those discounts — we need you to go in and actually practice this," and that content is there in a format that matches what we're driving.
The second side of that is the concept of call reviewers — constantly looking at results and saying, okay, we've got this negotiation, we've trained on it. Now let's get these automated AI call reviewers going so that in stage six of the sales process, whenever a procurement person is there, we're scoring it based on the rubric that we created. We can give it a quarter and go in and understand where folks are working well, where the gaps are, and then do really laser-focused enablement to help improve those gaps.
Alex Kracov: How do you think about enablement's role in coaching and working with managers? Managers are a super important part of the reinforcement side of things. There's no Gong call recorder in the manager's one-on-one with their team — or is there?
Stacey Justice: You do that. Yep.
So I have a dedicated leadership enablement manager and a dedicated focus on that. We've integrated and worked directly with our field ops team and strategy team, and we've built out a really in-depth manager operating rhythm, which focuses on 13 activities that we know our managers have to do. That includes things like forecast inspection, pipeline inspection, one-on-ones, deal reviews, and so on. And at Gong, it probably won't surprise you, but we do record all of our calls.
We've actually built our leadership enablement program into this Gong workflow where we have the skills. So let's say it's pipeline inspection — we've identified that activity and the skills that are required within it. We built micro learning so that second or third-line leaders can use that to drive self-enrollment and help them improve based on the calls that we've had. We do score them, and that's actually how we help take the skills of the managers up. We have a whole enablement program focused on those things, a monthly cadence on that, and by putting it into AI role play it actually helps to drive more adoption across the leaders too.
Alex Kracov: I feel like that's how organizations will be in the future — all the calls and things said in meetings just become such a central part of AI and we want to use that more. It might feel kind of weird and uncomfortable for some organizations, but it definitely feels like it's the future.
Stacey Justice: We're just actually in a performance review cycle. And it's like, you know, we're recording all of our calls now so that, for example, if I'm having one-on-ones, I can pull up those one-on-ones and go to AI Builder and say, what's the most important thing I need to focus on with this person right now? And you can mark calls private in Gong — so let me just put that out there. But I do think that's actually starting to change the game as it relates to even internal management.
Alex Kracov: Switching gears a little bit — I read on Gong's blog that you recently rebuilt your onboarding program and AI played a really big part in that. Can you talk us through what you built and how you transformed the onboarding program?
Stacey Justice: We actually had a massive success with our onboarding program last year. A few things we did. First, we moved from a presentation-and-output-only live sessions approach to flipped classroom. We really drove this on-demand concept — if you're going to learn something, you're going to log on, learn something, and then come together and workshop it. We now use role play integrated into all of that.
We've also — working with the strategy team — identified five KPIs that work across all of our sales team. Things like going on calls and listening, book tiering in terms of prioritization, number of customer emails, number of customer calls. And we've now started to incorporate scorecards and activity into their overall comp strategy. So our new hires get comped based on how they're achieving each of their different KPIs. That's actually been amazing and we've built our program around driving to those metrics.
And then I think the final thing — and I don't think this is undervalued, but sometimes I think it's overlooked — is that we have worked directly with our managers in terms of ensuring that they're coaching to their success. Leveraging dashboards that show all of that KPI data, they're critical, and we're enabling them all the time on how they're coaching their new hires so that their new hires will get to be productive as fast as possible.
Alex Kracov: And if I'm an AE who's joining Gong, does enablement lead a bunch of classroom trainings before I actually get on the phone, or am I working with managers from day one?
Stacey Justice: It's all happening in parallel. And I think that's actually the coolest thing we've had. We have aligned, for example, the date that our new reps get their books to the date that they are trained on how to tier them. Managers actually are given a debrief before any new hire cohort starts. They've got their direction. They're in there. We're doing both AI role play as well as manager certifications throughout the entire program. So we're tightly connected throughout the whole thing.
It's not like we just take your reps out and say, we're going to have your reps for two weeks and you're not going to see them. We fully integrate their workflow in with the managers. In fact, in some of our segments, they actually have to have three to five qualified opportunities before they leave their first month. So we're working fast.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, they get on the phones real quick. And then obviously with Gong, you can kind of see how well they're doing, which is amazing.
Alex Kracov: We've talked a lot about enablement's relationship with managers, but I'm curious how you think about your relationship with sales leadership. A lot's changing, there are a lot of different priorities. How do you build trust with sales leaders, come up with the program and roadmap, and handle prioritization with so many requests coming at you?
Stacey Justice: So one thing I will say — and I will applaud Gong for this — I am part of the revenue leadership team. I sit on that with all the senior sales leaders and customer success leaders with the CRO. So I have a voice and a seat at the table first and foremost. I know from the get-go what's important and what's not, and that helps us to prioritize.
I think the second part of that is I've looked from the very beginning of starting here at how this actually drives business impact and how are we actually inside of that revenue workflow. And I think that matters — it actually helps to drive and build credibility because I'm looking at what's in the sales process and connected with that.
And then third, it's listening to them. You can't always do everything. I am not the type of leader who's like, yes, we're going to do that for you, yes, we're going to do that for you. In fact, I probably say no more than I say yes. But I think that actually helps me to build a lot more credibility with them because I'm trying to get down to what's actually going to matter to their business — not to overwhelm them with enablement. And I think that's a huge part of it.
Alex Kracov: And what about the marketing team? Obviously marketing and product marketing works really closely with enablement to deliver the training. How does your team work with the product marketers as you launch new products or go into new segments?
Stacey Justice: I probably have a really strong connection there. I actually come from product marketing — that's where I spent a lot of my career. And I also will tell you that the biggest lesson I learned in my career was when I moved from product marketing over into sales. I understand the difference and I get the challenge — as much as product marketing really wants to be part of that sales team, it's hard. So I do find myself as the bridge between that.
I work incredibly closely with our product marketing team, as well as our CMO. I have a weekly one-on-one with our CMO. I'm really focused on rolling out what we would call sales plays so that we can activate our programs, and to me that's an integrated approach with product marketing, demand gen, enablement, and sales strategy.
I will say this comes back to something we talked about earlier. We're the buyer, right? We're also a key persona for marketing. And I think that helps us to drive a tight relationship with them as well.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, they must want to talk to you all the time — like, does this messaging work? Will people like this billboard?
Stacey Justice: If no one likes the messaging, they can all start to blame the personas here.
Alex Kracov: One thing where I assume there's a lot of overlap is competitive intelligence programs. Gong is in a category that's consolidating fast — Highspot and Seismic just announced a merger, Clari and SalesLoft merged last year. How do you keep reps sharp when the competitive landscape is shifting so quickly?
Stacey Justice: So I actually own competitive enablement. I have someone on my team who is dedicated to that, which is great. When I look at this — and I worked collaboratively with the CMO to move this and make it happen — there's a lot of strategic competitive research that goes into product and into messaging. There's a team that does that. My competitive enablement programs are completely tied to win rate. We are looking at: how do we get insight to the field as fast as we possibly can?
Gong helps with that. Just last week there was a sales leader who went to the executive team — and I know every enablement leader or competitive intel leader has gone through this — where they say, this competitor is coming up and of course I get hit. And you go to the system and it's like, one account, one opportunity. Right? So that's the power of Gong. And that's exactly how we start to keep our team up to speed.
We have a number of AI agents that we use to give real-time information. We use AI Builder to go in and get real-time insights. We're constantly mining the data in there and constantly working to get insight and intel out to the field. I think one thing that's changed a lot in competitive intel is — gone are the days of creating battle cards that you update once a month, once a quarter. The market's moving so fast and there's so much consolidation that you're just constantly moving and you have to stay on your toes.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's crazy how much it's all evolving. Our head of marketing has built a crazy Claude Code thing that's scraping our competitive websites to update battle cards pretty automatically. It's a crazy different world than when I was running marketing at Lattice and had to really hand-curate all that stuff.
Stacey Justice: We've just created inside of Gong, using AI briefs — when we have a competitive deal that's won, it automatically goes into an AI brief, that AI brief is then sent over to our competitive intelligence person who's able to go through that and then turn it into a podcast just like that.
Alex Kracov: One really interesting thing — which I've always admired about Gong — is it seems like you've always opted to build your own products versus buy products and stitch them together. Can you talk about why that's a better approach?
Stacey Justice: So one reason I'll just say the obvious is that we're not sitting here worrying about how do we integrate systems that were built on completely different tech stacks, completely different foundational elements. And I think that's been a really, really important thing for the integrity of the product. Nothing that's been built in the product is being kind of cobbled together in order to make it work.
The other thing I'll say — and I started as a design partner with product back in 2020, well before I ever worked here — I've had experience working with them and working with product. And I will tell you, I've never worked with a product team who is more on top of the market need, more ahead of the game in terms of how they're designing the technology, and that moves faster. So I think there's a core confidence in this company around what product can do and how they can do it — and even having hindsight in terms of how can we do it better than how it's been done by other companies. And by building it, it gives us that competitive advantage to do things a little bit differently.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, companies with product at the center are always the best and most successful in my opinion.
Alex Kracov: All right, we've talked a ton about Gong and how you use Gong, but I got to ask — is there any other tools in your enablement tech stack that you use and rely on?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, so it's funny — any vendors I talk to, I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm probably the hardest person to sell to because we do have a Gong first approach. We do have technology and we look to technology that we can ultimately embed into our workflow in Gong. So that would include data enrichment things that we leverage, a digital sales room that we incorporate and integrate inside of Gong so that we can actually have a single source of truth for customers, things like that. Where we can, it's Gong first.
We take a very basic approach to content management. We're leveraging Google to do that and then we've got Glean search on top of that. My philosophy on some of that is that content management is moving away from navigation-based into search-based and I think it'll even move into real-time creation and things. So we kind of try to stay fluid on those things and look ahead in the market and say, where are we headed?
Alex Kracov: All right, back to Gong. I'd love to talk more about how you think about selling AI, because obviously you're selling AI products to enterprise buyers who are both excited and cautious. How do you train reps to have that conversation and explain how Gong AI is different?
Stacey Justice: I think it comes down to outcomes and showing the value of that. One of the things that AI is producing is a lot of hype — oh my gosh, it's AI, it's AI. But it doesn't matter that it's AI unless you do something with it. So I think we focus on outcomes: how are you driving ramp time, how are you improving productivity, how are you improving forecast accuracy? Because that's actually what the AI will do for you, versus just kind of leading with AI.
To me, that's the biggest thing that we really focus on. Yeah, there's a lot of really fun, cool AI functionality that we can do inside of Gong, but ultimately what matters to the customer and what's actually going to deliver value is — how are you actually helping me do this in my business? And it's really focusing on the productivity and the value that's coming from that. That's where all of our enablement and all of our focus centers.
Alex Kracov: And where do you think this is all heading? If you're telling another enablement person how they can leverage AI in their business, how should they sift through all this? What technologies should they be investing in? How do they think about their AI tech stack both today and in the future?
Stacey Justice: Well, you should be leveraging Gong. Just kidding. So one of the things — I was just talking to some reps today about this — we're really looking at this world of human-assisted AI. It's not that everything is going to be automated, but man, we're going to be able to automate a lot of stuff.
To me, I think that might even center some of the importance and strength of how a go-to-market organization functions even more so into that RevOps function and into that enablement function, because the heart of how you're actually operating a go-to-market could actually settle in how those workflows that you're creating and the prescription that you're giving in terms of what's working and what's not.
And so from an enablement perspective, it's truly getting around and getting as much insight as you can around what's actually happening in your market, what's actually happening in the business on that front line — so that you can actually create the prescription that the field needs and that's actually going to help drive the needle.
Alex Kracov: And how do you help the sales reps themselves — not just the enablement folks — leverage this technology? I feel like I've seen emails from my sales reps where they dump it into ChatGPT and it's clearly an AI-generated email. Are there programs at Gong that help AEs figure out what's the right way to use this?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, one thing that I think enablement folks don't get to see when they're using Gong is the value that comes to the rep. Inside of Gong, the workflows — the information that comes to the rep in terms of not just the research that they can do, the pushes that they can have, the nudges that come with things — but the way that it actually tracks, here's the next thing that you need to do, hey by the way have you done that next thing, the generation of email that is automatically done by AI — here's your follow-up email that you should send and you can send that in like 15 minutes after you get off that call.
The quality of all of that inside of Gong is just continually improving to the point that it's like, this is amazing and it's giving me such solid insight. I think the way that reps actually get to use this and get stuck on it is seeing just how much it automates and optimizes the overall workflow and makes their job easier.
Alex Kracov: One great hot take you shared right before we started recording was that enablement is your least favorite word. Can you share why?
Stacey Justice: I hate it. It's my least favorite word in the dictionary. Try talking to someone and telling them what enablement means.
Try going into an organization as an enablement leader. Even if you're looking for a job and you're talking about it — enablement means something different to every single company, even to every single person that does it. And there's some benefit to that. But I think it quickly became my least favorite word because I think you have to step back and say, okay, what are we truly trying to accomplish when we're talking about an enablement program? What are we truly trying to do?
It gets you into those conversations, it gets you into really setting the stage. But it's just a word that means so many different things to so many different people. And I think that's actually led to some of the challenges that enablement as a profession has faced in terms of actually defining the value that they're bringing to the business.
Alex Kracov: Do you have a better word for the industry?
Stacey Justice: No, I've tried. If I could, I would name my team something else. I've seen different things come up — transformation, productivity, acceleration — but I can't. I feel like I'm criticizing something without a solution. I get that.
Alex Kracov: But fair enough. I mean, I feel like now the hot words are like AI orchestrator, sales orchestrator or something. But that only captures a little part of the job, right? It's not the whole thing.
Stacey Justice: Someday I will figure it out.
Alex Kracov: One day. All right, I think a great place to end this podcast — what advice do you have for other enablement folks who are maybe earlier in their career and kind of want to get to where you are? If you look back on your career, how have you gotten here? What advice would you have?
Stacey Justice: Do lots of things before you get into enablement. I know that sounds weird. If I were to go back in my career — my career spans being an investment banker, being in communications, being in marketing. I've done a lot of stuff. And I think my perspective on every single role that I've had brings my perspective to how I approach enablement, and I think that actually helps to drive the value and drive that perspective.
So my advice, especially if someone's starting off in enablement, try lots of different things. If you're already in enablement, try product enablement, try field enablement, try all of these different things so that you can expand your perspective and your experience. Go carry a bag for a while, go be a CSM. All of that strengthens your ability to do incredible things as an enablement leader or manager. And I think that's really important in terms of driving the success of your role.
Alex Kracov: Thank you so much for the time today, Stacey. This was a really fun conversation.
Stacey Justice: Thank you, Alex. It's been fun.
Stacey Justice is the Vice President of GTM Enablement at Gong, where she leads a global enablement function spanning over 1,000 customer-facing team members across five North American hubs, EMEA, and Singapore.
Since joining in 2024, she has delivered measurable results: in the first six months of an AI-powered onboarding overhaul, her team increased ARR sold by new hires by 53% and decreased time to ramp in the commercial segment by 2.7 months. She has also shown that win rates doubled when reps used new messaging—results she tracked using Gong's own Initiative Boards.
Earlier in her career, Stacey worked across investment banking, communications, product marketing, and sales before moving into enablement—a deliberately wide path she credits as foundational to her effectiveness as a leader.
Stacey Justice runs enablement at Gong using Gong, which means she's customer zero for the very platform her reps are selling.
When Gong launched Gong Enable earlier this year, Stacey was the one rolling it out to the sales team, running without a services playbook, figuring it out in real time.
That inside view of what Gong's AI actually does for an enablement team is what makes this conversation so valuable.
In this episode, Stacey joins Alex to walk through exactly how Gong uses Gong for enablement—the specific features, the real workflows, and the results, including:
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Alex Kracov: All right, Stacey, I'm super excited to talk to you today. I've been interviewing enablement people all month and everyone mentions Gong as their favorite, their number one tool for enablement. So excited to talk about all things Gong today. It's going to be a fun conversation.
Stacey Justice: There's no better way that I would love to start this conversation off with than you telling me that everyone's talking about Gong. So I'm excited to talk to you.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's literally a meme. I asked people like, what's your favorite tool? And they're just like Gong, Gong, Gong. So it's awesome. So you joined just about two years ago as the VP of go-to-market enablement. Can you talk a little bit about what the function looked like when you first arrived and how it's kind of transformed in the last couple of years?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, so just over two years and I think it's changed a lot. I think Gong was in a really different place two years ago. The enablement program really focused on really great training, but it was very siloed. So one of the things that was happening at Gong at the time was everything was leader led.
And so different segments were doing different things and there was no consistency across the different teams. And so what we really focused on across the board in go-to-market but also in enablement is driving a lot more consistency. So my team is structured and aligned across the go-to-market to drive more repeatability, more predictability. We're organized around outcomes. So think onboarding, product, leadership enablement, performance enablement.
And then we're specifically aligned to business impact — win rate, ramp time, productivity expansion. So we're getting out of the check-the-box training completion silo-driven approach to enablement and more into the revenue workflow to drive much more of a standard operating rhythm across each of the different segments and align the teams on what they need to know.
Alex Kracov: Super interesting. And then can you talk, just to give the audience a sense, what's the scale? How many sellers and go-to-market folks are we talking about? How many enablement people are supporting them?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, we've grown a lot. We're talking just over a thousand across the go-to-market, and that includes enabling across everything from SDRs all the way through to support. So all of our customer-facing teams, and we've got a global team. We have five different hub offices in North America right now. We've a large EMEA presence. It's one of our fastest growing markets right now, and also opened in Singapore. So we have a fully global approach.
Alex Kracov: A lot of our conversation today is going to be about using Gong at Gong. There's this super interesting meta dimension to your job — very much like us at Dock, you're using the platform all the time that your reps are selling. So how does that change how you work?
Stacey Justice: It completely changes how we work. From an enablement perspective at least, because it's like this whole meta sort of approach. At the most meta experience, we just recently rolled out Gong Enable, and I got to enable using Gong Enable on Gong Enable. It was kind of a joke — how many times can you use the word enable? But it's really magical, and I think you guys probably see this as well, because you get to do things like enabling on the product.
And so you're teaching them how to sell it, which is usually the typical approach — that's typically what you do in enablement when you're not selling what you're selling, you're not using what you're selling. But then we also get to train them on how to use it. And I think that's a huge thing that has changed over the course of two years at Gong. We are customer zero. We are Gong first in everything that we do. So when we're rolling out a product, we're teaching them how to use it as much as we're teaching them how to sell it. And that drives so much more confidence, so much more knowledge around it.
I also think it speaks to the value of Gong, because I think that's absolutely led us into some of the performance and just some of the stickiness that we've had with it.
Alex Kracov: Does it create any weird challenges? I imagine sellers have tons of feedback. They're going through it, they're using the product all the time — that's probably good for the product team to hear. It's an interesting dynamic.
Stacey Justice: There are definite challenges and definitely different things to have to deal with. So one thing — we get in and we use the product early. We start using like alpha code, beta code on different things. So it might mean the product's not ready. So the field has to be a little more accepting of things that are happening in the product and realize that it's just like any other software development program — you're probably going to use something that's still early.
There's always feedback, there's always different things, but then there's also the pressure that you've got a services team that is out there implementing Gong to all of these customers and you're running without a playbook a little bit because you're kind of leading the way on how it's going to go. As much as I'd love to say our services team is helping my team implement Gong, we're kind of out here on our own and driving a lot more accountability to how we're using it. So we're running without a playbook, which is fun. We get to really try and push the boundaries a ton.
Alex Kracov: Can you talk through how you actually use Gong to run your enablement programs and what does that look like day to day?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, and I'm going to start with saying core call recording and conversational intelligence — when that came out, and I mentioned this to you, I bought Gong in 2018, that was game changing for me as an enablement professional getting in and understanding what's happening. And to me that's still so hugely valuable.
And then from an enablement perspective over the course of the pandemic, Gong really focused on products like Gong Forecast and Gong Engage. Those are really important tools for the revenue workflow. But I will say it's been in like the last 12 to 18 months that the functionality within Gong has truly changed the game for me and for my enablement team.
We use an enablement flywheel that we actually use in-house. The concept is: Detect — identify what's actually happening in the field. Understand what gaps you have in skills, what's not happening, what competitors you're actually seeing. That's leveraging the AI in the system — Ask Anything, the AI theme spotter — to go in and actually identify what's going on and identify those gaps. To me, that's so fundamental in terms of actually connecting to the field.
The next step in the flywheel is Prescribe — that is where you start to create the targeted content. That is functionality like AI Builder. It's probably my favorite feature right now.
Alex Kracov: I don't know if I knew about this one.
Stacey Justice: AI Builder is inside of our foundational product. You can go into AI Builder and say, create a battle card for me against X competitor, or create discovery questions for Gong Enable for a sales professional, and it will build the content for you. It's probably accelerated the workflow of my team by weeks — you're not starting with a blank page, you're going in, you're pulling insight from what's actually happening in the conversations and customer engagements and then being able to create content, create job aids, create lessons, create whatever you need from an enablement perspective.
Then it gets into AI role play, which is part of our new Gong Enable SKU. This has changed the game for us. To me, this is actually what scales enablement to be able to drive that consistency I was talking about and connect theory to reality.
AI Trainer includes also these micro lessons. You can create the job aid, you can create the AI role play. The AI role play is building off of your own system, so it's directly related to what's happening in the field, directly related to what's working. You can build that, you give your reps and revenue professionals in general an absolute opportunity to practice based on what's happening in their market.
And then the final thing — this is where I live — is being able to validate that it's working. Things like automated scorecards. Getting in and actually attaching these AI-driven automated scorecards and call reviewers into the calls, so reps and CSMs have no idea that they're actually being rated, but I'm getting all this visibility to understand how is this actually working? Is this being adopted? Are they actually doing what we asked them to do? And where do I need to now go focus to help them get better?
Alex Kracov: Super interesting. The product has changed quite a bit. I didn't know about the content generation side of things. That's amazing.
Stacey Justice: Yeah, and I think the thing about it — I did a webinar last week at Launch and Gong Enable, and one of the questions that came through was, isn't this just going to replace enablement? And my answer to that is no, absolutely not. I think what it's finally doing is getting enablement to a place where you're much closer to the field, you're creating content that is actually going to impact the business, and I think it's what's been expected for enablement to do. We just didn't have the tools at our fingertips to do it.
Alex Kracov: And it just gives you higher leverage. There was no way before you could listen to a thousand calls from the field and connect those patterns across. Now you can do that instantly and then get those insights or create content based off it.
Stacey Justice: You can use AI theme spotter, go in, ask what are the biggest objections that are happening — the AI theme spotter will actually pull it up and give you the biggest objections, and then it will tell you how many opportunities it's impacting, how much ARR it's impacting. You can actually see the impact of the list that's in front of you based on the impact on the business.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, that's amazing. And that obviously feeds the product roadmap too. I think it's so interesting how the call itself has become such an important artifact in the world of AI. Even at Dock, right — we have a great integration with Gong where we can build business cases and things, but that fundamental data is the call itself and all those different conversations.
Stacey Justice: And it's being able to leverage all of that unstructured data. I think the big thing there is how do you use it? And to me, that's where it's all coming through from an enablement perspective — to give you exactly what you're talking about, the trends that you want, the insight that you need. If you think about enablement going from one to many, that's why you need those trends. You need to understand what's actually going on. The individual call is great and sales managers and customer success managers get so much value from that. But from an enablement perspective, I want to see the trends.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, totally. In one call you might get wrong data — maybe it was just a bad sales rep handling objections really poorly. But if you can sum that up across a thousand reps, then it's really interesting data.
Stacey Justice: Yep, exactly.
Alex Kracov: Let's talk a little more about Gong Enable because I think it's super interesting. The AI role play space is heating up — I was at an enablement conference a couple of weeks ago and everybody was talking about AI role play. I'm curious how you think about it because there is some skepticism: God, I'm talking to the AI, is this the same? Am I going to game it? Is it good for all types of sales reps? Is it only good for SDRs? Would an enterprise AE even use this thing?
Stacey Justice: You know, in all of this I have never thought would my enterprise rep use it — maybe that's because I'm sitting at Gong. I think that Gong's AI role play is so tied into what's happening in the business that I think it's relevant for anyone.
My approach to enablement — and it's always been this, pre-Gong — is how do you connect theory to reality? It's really great to go in and teach someone concepts, teach someone a methodology. And then typically you're creating mock scenarios and having them go through role plays, whether that's in person or whatever. But I think what it's been missing is being connected to exactly what's happening.
So to me, the biggest game changer within Gong Enable is the ability to actually create content and create these role plays that are absolutely connected. Let's say, for example, your enterprise team is really struggling on negotiating against procurement professionals. The ability to go in and basically set it up so that you can say — I'm going to build out this negotiation role play, the persona's going to be procurement, and we're going to use all of the insight and the data from all the calls that we've had with procurement professionals where we've done really well, or we'll find the toughest procurement persona that we've ever come across and use that for them to practice on before they go into it.
That's what changes the game. Because it's not Stacey over in the corner creating a mock scenario that I think is what's happening in the field. It's actually pulling from those conversations they're already having. So the credibility goes up completely because it's literally what's happening inside of their accounts.
Alex Kracov: So you take all the data from the calls with those scary procurement people, and that builds the model of the AI role play procurement person. So it makes it more real.
Stacey Justice: Yeah. To me, it's like a no-brainer. No matter what level you're at, if I can use this in a way that's actually going to reflect what I'm going to get on the call, why wouldn't I want to get better?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, and it's so much better than a lot of role play software I've seen where it's really just like prompts — you're building workflows over here and there's no real underlying data to the thing you're talking to.
Stacey Justice: It all comes back down to that data and what you do with it. AI role play within Gong is one way that we're using that data to create a more realistic scenario. I will also say — even before we had AI role play — I'm a big fan of making sure that when we're doing a certification, we're not just doing the role play side of it, but then connecting to real customer calls. So in our certifications, I actually require two customer calls showing that behavior. I can see the adoption metrics, I can see all of that in Gong. But that gives me an AI assist scorecard where our managers have to go in and score two customer calls for each one of their reps in terms of the certification. So I can see how they're actually performing with real customers.
Alex Kracov: Makes sense. Yeah, the role play is just the starting point. They get on a real call and then the manager can reinforce and validate that they actually learned the behavior. Makes a ton of sense.
Alex Kracov: So how do you think about legacy LMS systems? Part of Gong Enable is structured learning, micro learning, different things like that. Is there still a place for e-learning training courses — kind of what enablement training has been for the last 10 years?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, I think for most teams, LMS will stay. Inside of Gong, you're right, we have a lot of capability to do what I would consider micro learning. Lessons you can go through — maybe it's teaching the methodology around that negotiation. So you can have them go through two or three different pages of lesson and then get them into the role play, and I think that serves itself really well.
But there are things you still want to teach. Maybe you're rolling out entirely new messaging and you want them to understand why certain decisions were made. Or you want them to take a test that demonstrates they know what's going on. That's going to happen in an LMS. So I do think LMS systems are still there and still play a role.
What I find to be most valuable though is literally how I can actually track behavior change. And so I'm tending to move much more toward the micro learning concept, but I still do find reason to actually train in a longer-form way.
Alex Kracov: And I've also heard you talk about this continuous enablement flywheel versus one-time training — that more traditional LMS model where you just check the box and move on. Can you talk about that and the relationship between continuous enablement and micro learning?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, so I'll give you an example. One way that we run our field enablement — which is really our skills-focused team — is we separate our programs into mountains, rocks, and pebbles. The mountain is where we really focus on a big skill. So let's say in Q2, we're going to focus on negotiation. That's our big skill. And 80% of that core skill we're building out is the same for all of the different segments. But that happens in Q2.
It's big and we run a big program. There can be role play in that, we can do certification, whatever. But let's say you start at Gong in Q4 — that mountain isn't happening right now. So one thing we're doing is taking these big core mountain programs and breaking them into micro learnings that we can use for continuous enablement or that we can arm a manager with. When they sit down and have performance conversations they can say, "you're really caving on all those discounts — we need you to go in and actually practice this," and that content is there in a format that matches what we're driving.
The second side of that is the concept of call reviewers — constantly looking at results and saying, okay, we've got this negotiation, we've trained on it. Now let's get these automated AI call reviewers going so that in stage six of the sales process, whenever a procurement person is there, we're scoring it based on the rubric that we created. We can give it a quarter and go in and understand where folks are working well, where the gaps are, and then do really laser-focused enablement to help improve those gaps.
Alex Kracov: How do you think about enablement's role in coaching and working with managers? Managers are a super important part of the reinforcement side of things. There's no Gong call recorder in the manager's one-on-one with their team — or is there?
Stacey Justice: You do that. Yep.
So I have a dedicated leadership enablement manager and a dedicated focus on that. We've integrated and worked directly with our field ops team and strategy team, and we've built out a really in-depth manager operating rhythm, which focuses on 13 activities that we know our managers have to do. That includes things like forecast inspection, pipeline inspection, one-on-ones, deal reviews, and so on. And at Gong, it probably won't surprise you, but we do record all of our calls.
We've actually built our leadership enablement program into this Gong workflow where we have the skills. So let's say it's pipeline inspection — we've identified that activity and the skills that are required within it. We built micro learning so that second or third-line leaders can use that to drive self-enrollment and help them improve based on the calls that we've had. We do score them, and that's actually how we help take the skills of the managers up. We have a whole enablement program focused on those things, a monthly cadence on that, and by putting it into AI role play it actually helps to drive more adoption across the leaders too.
Alex Kracov: I feel like that's how organizations will be in the future — all the calls and things said in meetings just become such a central part of AI and we want to use that more. It might feel kind of weird and uncomfortable for some organizations, but it definitely feels like it's the future.
Stacey Justice: We're just actually in a performance review cycle. And it's like, you know, we're recording all of our calls now so that, for example, if I'm having one-on-ones, I can pull up those one-on-ones and go to AI Builder and say, what's the most important thing I need to focus on with this person right now? And you can mark calls private in Gong — so let me just put that out there. But I do think that's actually starting to change the game as it relates to even internal management.
Alex Kracov: Switching gears a little bit — I read on Gong's blog that you recently rebuilt your onboarding program and AI played a really big part in that. Can you talk us through what you built and how you transformed the onboarding program?
Stacey Justice: We actually had a massive success with our onboarding program last year. A few things we did. First, we moved from a presentation-and-output-only live sessions approach to flipped classroom. We really drove this on-demand concept — if you're going to learn something, you're going to log on, learn something, and then come together and workshop it. We now use role play integrated into all of that.
We've also — working with the strategy team — identified five KPIs that work across all of our sales team. Things like going on calls and listening, book tiering in terms of prioritization, number of customer emails, number of customer calls. And we've now started to incorporate scorecards and activity into their overall comp strategy. So our new hires get comped based on how they're achieving each of their different KPIs. That's actually been amazing and we've built our program around driving to those metrics.
And then I think the final thing — and I don't think this is undervalued, but sometimes I think it's overlooked — is that we have worked directly with our managers in terms of ensuring that they're coaching to their success. Leveraging dashboards that show all of that KPI data, they're critical, and we're enabling them all the time on how they're coaching their new hires so that their new hires will get to be productive as fast as possible.
Alex Kracov: And if I'm an AE who's joining Gong, does enablement lead a bunch of classroom trainings before I actually get on the phone, or am I working with managers from day one?
Stacey Justice: It's all happening in parallel. And I think that's actually the coolest thing we've had. We have aligned, for example, the date that our new reps get their books to the date that they are trained on how to tier them. Managers actually are given a debrief before any new hire cohort starts. They've got their direction. They're in there. We're doing both AI role play as well as manager certifications throughout the entire program. So we're tightly connected throughout the whole thing.
It's not like we just take your reps out and say, we're going to have your reps for two weeks and you're not going to see them. We fully integrate their workflow in with the managers. In fact, in some of our segments, they actually have to have three to five qualified opportunities before they leave their first month. So we're working fast.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, they get on the phones real quick. And then obviously with Gong, you can kind of see how well they're doing, which is amazing.
Alex Kracov: We've talked a lot about enablement's relationship with managers, but I'm curious how you think about your relationship with sales leadership. A lot's changing, there are a lot of different priorities. How do you build trust with sales leaders, come up with the program and roadmap, and handle prioritization with so many requests coming at you?
Stacey Justice: So one thing I will say — and I will applaud Gong for this — I am part of the revenue leadership team. I sit on that with all the senior sales leaders and customer success leaders with the CRO. So I have a voice and a seat at the table first and foremost. I know from the get-go what's important and what's not, and that helps us to prioritize.
I think the second part of that is I've looked from the very beginning of starting here at how this actually drives business impact and how are we actually inside of that revenue workflow. And I think that matters — it actually helps to drive and build credibility because I'm looking at what's in the sales process and connected with that.
And then third, it's listening to them. You can't always do everything. I am not the type of leader who's like, yes, we're going to do that for you, yes, we're going to do that for you. In fact, I probably say no more than I say yes. But I think that actually helps me to build a lot more credibility with them because I'm trying to get down to what's actually going to matter to their business — not to overwhelm them with enablement. And I think that's a huge part of it.
Alex Kracov: And what about the marketing team? Obviously marketing and product marketing works really closely with enablement to deliver the training. How does your team work with the product marketers as you launch new products or go into new segments?
Stacey Justice: I probably have a really strong connection there. I actually come from product marketing — that's where I spent a lot of my career. And I also will tell you that the biggest lesson I learned in my career was when I moved from product marketing over into sales. I understand the difference and I get the challenge — as much as product marketing really wants to be part of that sales team, it's hard. So I do find myself as the bridge between that.
I work incredibly closely with our product marketing team, as well as our CMO. I have a weekly one-on-one with our CMO. I'm really focused on rolling out what we would call sales plays so that we can activate our programs, and to me that's an integrated approach with product marketing, demand gen, enablement, and sales strategy.
I will say this comes back to something we talked about earlier. We're the buyer, right? We're also a key persona for marketing. And I think that helps us to drive a tight relationship with them as well.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, they must want to talk to you all the time — like, does this messaging work? Will people like this billboard?
Stacey Justice: If no one likes the messaging, they can all start to blame the personas here.
Alex Kracov: One thing where I assume there's a lot of overlap is competitive intelligence programs. Gong is in a category that's consolidating fast — Highspot and Seismic just announced a merger, Clari and SalesLoft merged last year. How do you keep reps sharp when the competitive landscape is shifting so quickly?
Stacey Justice: So I actually own competitive enablement. I have someone on my team who is dedicated to that, which is great. When I look at this — and I worked collaboratively with the CMO to move this and make it happen — there's a lot of strategic competitive research that goes into product and into messaging. There's a team that does that. My competitive enablement programs are completely tied to win rate. We are looking at: how do we get insight to the field as fast as we possibly can?
Gong helps with that. Just last week there was a sales leader who went to the executive team — and I know every enablement leader or competitive intel leader has gone through this — where they say, this competitor is coming up and of course I get hit. And you go to the system and it's like, one account, one opportunity. Right? So that's the power of Gong. And that's exactly how we start to keep our team up to speed.
We have a number of AI agents that we use to give real-time information. We use AI Builder to go in and get real-time insights. We're constantly mining the data in there and constantly working to get insight and intel out to the field. I think one thing that's changed a lot in competitive intel is — gone are the days of creating battle cards that you update once a month, once a quarter. The market's moving so fast and there's so much consolidation that you're just constantly moving and you have to stay on your toes.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's crazy how much it's all evolving. Our head of marketing has built a crazy Claude Code thing that's scraping our competitive websites to update battle cards pretty automatically. It's a crazy different world than when I was running marketing at Lattice and had to really hand-curate all that stuff.
Stacey Justice: We've just created inside of Gong, using AI briefs — when we have a competitive deal that's won, it automatically goes into an AI brief, that AI brief is then sent over to our competitive intelligence person who's able to go through that and then turn it into a podcast just like that.
Alex Kracov: One really interesting thing — which I've always admired about Gong — is it seems like you've always opted to build your own products versus buy products and stitch them together. Can you talk about why that's a better approach?
Stacey Justice: So one reason I'll just say the obvious is that we're not sitting here worrying about how do we integrate systems that were built on completely different tech stacks, completely different foundational elements. And I think that's been a really, really important thing for the integrity of the product. Nothing that's been built in the product is being kind of cobbled together in order to make it work.
The other thing I'll say — and I started as a design partner with product back in 2020, well before I ever worked here — I've had experience working with them and working with product. And I will tell you, I've never worked with a product team who is more on top of the market need, more ahead of the game in terms of how they're designing the technology, and that moves faster. So I think there's a core confidence in this company around what product can do and how they can do it — and even having hindsight in terms of how can we do it better than how it's been done by other companies. And by building it, it gives us that competitive advantage to do things a little bit differently.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, companies with product at the center are always the best and most successful in my opinion.
Alex Kracov: All right, we've talked a ton about Gong and how you use Gong, but I got to ask — is there any other tools in your enablement tech stack that you use and rely on?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, so it's funny — any vendors I talk to, I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm probably the hardest person to sell to because we do have a Gong first approach. We do have technology and we look to technology that we can ultimately embed into our workflow in Gong. So that would include data enrichment things that we leverage, a digital sales room that we incorporate and integrate inside of Gong so that we can actually have a single source of truth for customers, things like that. Where we can, it's Gong first.
We take a very basic approach to content management. We're leveraging Google to do that and then we've got Glean search on top of that. My philosophy on some of that is that content management is moving away from navigation-based into search-based and I think it'll even move into real-time creation and things. So we kind of try to stay fluid on those things and look ahead in the market and say, where are we headed?
Alex Kracov: All right, back to Gong. I'd love to talk more about how you think about selling AI, because obviously you're selling AI products to enterprise buyers who are both excited and cautious. How do you train reps to have that conversation and explain how Gong AI is different?
Stacey Justice: I think it comes down to outcomes and showing the value of that. One of the things that AI is producing is a lot of hype — oh my gosh, it's AI, it's AI. But it doesn't matter that it's AI unless you do something with it. So I think we focus on outcomes: how are you driving ramp time, how are you improving productivity, how are you improving forecast accuracy? Because that's actually what the AI will do for you, versus just kind of leading with AI.
To me, that's the biggest thing that we really focus on. Yeah, there's a lot of really fun, cool AI functionality that we can do inside of Gong, but ultimately what matters to the customer and what's actually going to deliver value is — how are you actually helping me do this in my business? And it's really focusing on the productivity and the value that's coming from that. That's where all of our enablement and all of our focus centers.
Alex Kracov: And where do you think this is all heading? If you're telling another enablement person how they can leverage AI in their business, how should they sift through all this? What technologies should they be investing in? How do they think about their AI tech stack both today and in the future?
Stacey Justice: Well, you should be leveraging Gong. Just kidding. So one of the things — I was just talking to some reps today about this — we're really looking at this world of human-assisted AI. It's not that everything is going to be automated, but man, we're going to be able to automate a lot of stuff.
To me, I think that might even center some of the importance and strength of how a go-to-market organization functions even more so into that RevOps function and into that enablement function, because the heart of how you're actually operating a go-to-market could actually settle in how those workflows that you're creating and the prescription that you're giving in terms of what's working and what's not.
And so from an enablement perspective, it's truly getting around and getting as much insight as you can around what's actually happening in your market, what's actually happening in the business on that front line — so that you can actually create the prescription that the field needs and that's actually going to help drive the needle.
Alex Kracov: And how do you help the sales reps themselves — not just the enablement folks — leverage this technology? I feel like I've seen emails from my sales reps where they dump it into ChatGPT and it's clearly an AI-generated email. Are there programs at Gong that help AEs figure out what's the right way to use this?
Stacey Justice: Yeah, one thing that I think enablement folks don't get to see when they're using Gong is the value that comes to the rep. Inside of Gong, the workflows — the information that comes to the rep in terms of not just the research that they can do, the pushes that they can have, the nudges that come with things — but the way that it actually tracks, here's the next thing that you need to do, hey by the way have you done that next thing, the generation of email that is automatically done by AI — here's your follow-up email that you should send and you can send that in like 15 minutes after you get off that call.
The quality of all of that inside of Gong is just continually improving to the point that it's like, this is amazing and it's giving me such solid insight. I think the way that reps actually get to use this and get stuck on it is seeing just how much it automates and optimizes the overall workflow and makes their job easier.
Alex Kracov: One great hot take you shared right before we started recording was that enablement is your least favorite word. Can you share why?
Stacey Justice: I hate it. It's my least favorite word in the dictionary. Try talking to someone and telling them what enablement means.
Try going into an organization as an enablement leader. Even if you're looking for a job and you're talking about it — enablement means something different to every single company, even to every single person that does it. And there's some benefit to that. But I think it quickly became my least favorite word because I think you have to step back and say, okay, what are we truly trying to accomplish when we're talking about an enablement program? What are we truly trying to do?
It gets you into those conversations, it gets you into really setting the stage. But it's just a word that means so many different things to so many different people. And I think that's actually led to some of the challenges that enablement as a profession has faced in terms of actually defining the value that they're bringing to the business.
Alex Kracov: Do you have a better word for the industry?
Stacey Justice: No, I've tried. If I could, I would name my team something else. I've seen different things come up — transformation, productivity, acceleration — but I can't. I feel like I'm criticizing something without a solution. I get that.
Alex Kracov: But fair enough. I mean, I feel like now the hot words are like AI orchestrator, sales orchestrator or something. But that only captures a little part of the job, right? It's not the whole thing.
Stacey Justice: Someday I will figure it out.
Alex Kracov: One day. All right, I think a great place to end this podcast — what advice do you have for other enablement folks who are maybe earlier in their career and kind of want to get to where you are? If you look back on your career, how have you gotten here? What advice would you have?
Stacey Justice: Do lots of things before you get into enablement. I know that sounds weird. If I were to go back in my career — my career spans being an investment banker, being in communications, being in marketing. I've done a lot of stuff. And I think my perspective on every single role that I've had brings my perspective to how I approach enablement, and I think that actually helps to drive the value and drive that perspective.
So my advice, especially if someone's starting off in enablement, try lots of different things. If you're already in enablement, try product enablement, try field enablement, try all of these different things so that you can expand your perspective and your experience. Go carry a bag for a while, go be a CSM. All of that strengthens your ability to do incredible things as an enablement leader or manager. And I think that's really important in terms of driving the success of your role.
Alex Kracov: Thank you so much for the time today, Stacey. This was a really fun conversation.
Stacey Justice: Thank you, Alex. It's been fun.
