Why We Killed Our VP Sales

Five months ago we launched Gong's new brand identity.

The brand launch was a huge success that involved hundreds of people sharing our new website and commenting on our company, product, and brand. While 99% of the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive, there was a small but important handful of comments from women in sales who found our homepage hero image distasteful.

"It looks like the VP Sales, a white man, is dominating the image while the women and minorities are fading in the background,"

was one of the comments we received with on this image:

Diversity and inclusion are things we take seriously at Gong:

• We support and sponsor organizations like Women Sales Pros, #GirlsClub, and LGBTech.
• When we designed our recent brand, we made sure that three of the seven human characters featured on our website were female (one's an "it" - we ? Bruno the Dog!), that three of the seven were not white, and that not all were young Millennials.
• When we featured Gong employee photos on our Careers page, we made sure there was an even split between men and women.
• We have hired and promoted women into leadership roles and we are consistently proactive in asking placement agencies to help us find more women for these roles.
• We have changed language in our job descriptions based on feedback from women in sales who found previous language less appealing.

And there's a lot more we could and should be doing.

The VP Sales character on our website is actually a beloved actor we hired a year ago for our live-action Gong overview video. That video got such great feedback that we called him back to star in last year's holiday season video. When the new company branding started taking shape, it was only natural that we asked to include our fictitious VP Sales in the new look.

But as soon as we realized we had been insensitive to some, we decided to commission a redesign of our homepage hero image. We wanted to get it right this time. We wanted to celebrate the successful women in sales and especially those having better sales conversations through science.

And this is what our new homepage looks like now:

I want to thank the smart women who gave us important feedback on our homepage and encourage them to do so again if we mess up. I'd also love your help with recruiting talented women for leadership and individual contribution roles in Sales, SDR, Customer Success, HR, and Finance. Who wants to get on the Gong rocket ship? :-)

PS, I probably owe an apology to our real VP Sales, Jameson. I'm sure he skipped a heartbeat when he received this article's title in a notification this morning. We love you, Jameson!