Growing a LinkedIn Following From 12,000 to 90,000 in Two Years With Devin Reed @ Gong

Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that enables companies to make informed decisions based on real-time data. 

As Head of Strategy at Gong, Devin Reed has helped hundreds of clients maximize their revenue. What’s arguably even more impressive is the fact that Devin grew Gong’s LinkedIn following from 12,000 to over 90,000 in just two years!

In this AMA, Devin shares his strategy for “taking over” LinkedIn and talks about brand building, social search vs organic search, and content repurposing. 

Gong on LinkedIn

Q: How come your biggest focus on LinkedIn was on your company page and not on profiles of individual sales reps?

A: Our strategy is both — building our corporate page and empowering our Gongsters (Gong employees) to build their own personal brand on LinkedIn

Q: What does your/Gong’s LinkedIn high-level strategy look like?

A: It’s super simple: create highly engaging content that our sales audience loves. 

That centers around: 

1. A casual, approachable tone that delivers 
2. Sales insights (data) and advice

The goal is to grow our following with “brand content” (no CTA) to earn trust and credibility, then sprinkle in demand gen content (gated, event sign ups, etc) to fuel pipeline gen

Q: What do the most successful social sellers on your team do differently from those that aren’t?

A: We don’t have a social selling program per se, but we do have LI messaging tied into our outbound prospecting strategy

Getting Your Team to Actively Participate in Brand Building

Q: Adopting LinkedIn content creation across the entire team – what did that look like? How did you enable and encourage the team to be active there?

A: It comes down to empowerment and enablement. 

Empowering the team comes from the top—our execs post on LI and support our Gongsters doing the same. There’s a clear culture of advocacy around it at Gong. And not just to support Gong initiatives and campaigns, but to be your authentic self and share whatever you’re into.

The enablement piece is more methodical. We host quarterly ‘LI best practices’ sessions for anyone who wants to learn how to use LI and/or build their brand on LI. We promote it periodically through company All Hands meetings, where I share Gong’s LI strategy at a high level – so people understand the WHY behind what me and my team do—then offer to help them individually.

Q: My team is busy doing their jobs, how do I hold them accountable to brand building on social?

A: You can only hold them accountable if:

1. It’s part of their job description OR 
2. If they are bought in but need a push. 

If employees are reluctant, they probably need coaching. If they need to be held accountable, they might not want to. That’s a whole different issue to address.

Q: What supporting systems are necessary in order to get busy people to be able to build their brand on social?

A: We have a LI enablement session as part of every employee’s onboarding to walk them through our strategy, answer questions, and provide some guidelines.

From there we use the My Company tab in LI to create post promo for them to edit and post. we update that on a weekly basis

Q: What has been the most effective way to inspire team members unsure about posting on social regularly?

A: Having leadership post—the importance of leading by example cant be overstated

Content Creation & Content Marketing

Q: Since Gong is obviously also a data collection platform, how long does it take you to assess the gathered data and then create content pieces from it?

A: Typically 4-6 weeks from idea to publication. Worth noting that’s with other projects running in tandem. Would be a shorted turn around if it was the only thing we work on

Q: What is your content distribution strategy? Is there a system in place or do you promote blogs on LI as you publish them?

A: We have a tiered system for company announcements, content campaigns, events, etc to decide which require/deserve an email campaign vs social, when we activate our Gongsters to help share the word, and so on. We’re very intentional about which content gets which distro channel and additional resources

Q: Can you break down Gong’s content strategy in pillars?

A: Sure! 

In no particular order:

• Organic social
• Email
• Sales research + LinkedIn articles (from my profile)
• Webinars/digital events
• Sponsored content (emails, LI, events, etc)
• Podcast
• Growth marketing

Q: How do you track your content marketing performance?

A: We split it between brand and performance marketing. Brand we measure podcast interactions (consumption across all major platforms) and LI follower growth. Performance = MQLs, SAOs, pipeline sourced and influenced across the entire sales org and each segment

Q: Devin, what motivated you to switch to a more content-oriented role?

A: That’s a long story. Short answer is that I knew I was good at sales, but wanted to know if I would be great at content creation. The challenge at first was going from one to one communication in sales, to one to many in marketing.

Q: Can you share a bit about the inbound vs outbound pipeline at Gong? What are you focused most on and what yields best results for you?

A: I’d say we’re focused on both equally, they’re just different. Marketing at Gong partners with Sales Dev – we have one shared goal.

Content campaigns are considered inbound marketing, but we also help create outbound messaging for the SD team.

Results vary. Can’t share too much but there’s a difference between deal size, segments, and win rates depending on inbound v outbound

Q: How satisfied are you with the Ghost CMS for your website & newsletter?

A: I like it a lot. A little finicky at times and a couple small limitations, but overall it’s an A-

Gong’s Superbowl Ad

Q: What did your gameplan for Superbowl look like? Can you tell us more about what you did on social and elsewhere to amplify the campaign?

A: Game plan – get as many eyeballs on the ad as possible. 

The ad itself was designed to be more informative comedic (which is common for SB ads) so we could reuse the content for outlets after the SB.

Gong’s Content Ops Software Stack 

Q: What’s your Content Ops software stack?

A: Let’s see… here’s our content and content ops tech (surely missing some pure marketing ops tech)

• SFDC
• Marketo
• Google analytics
• Sprout Social
• LI
• Casted
• Riverside.fm
• Asana
• Google Docs/sheets
• Streamyard (more content than content ops)

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