Over the past five years, Gong’s Customer Education program has evolved from an initiative built to get valuable content in front of users faster into a true lifecycle growth engine. Today, education powers onboarding, drives adoption, supports enterprise rollouts and helps teams get ahead of renewal risk.
In a recent Thought Industries webinar, Gong leaders Mark Banuelos, Sr. Manager of Education Services and Tim Halter, Instructional Design Manager, shared how they built a scalable, outcome-driven learning strategy, and how they unlocked the data to transform education into a business lever.
From “Getting Content Out” to Driving Outcomes
Mark explained that when he started at Gong, education was just about getting content out. Early efforts focused on instructor-led training and self-paced assets designed to help new users hit the ground running. Short videos helped different personas understand what they needed to know and how the product was going to help them. And that approach worked, for a while.
However, as Gong expanded from a single product into a multi-product platform, and began serving customers with more complex needs, education could no longer be one-size-fits-all. To understand what needed changing, the team looked to leadership goals. “Our education strategy doesn’t really exist in a vacuum,” said Mark. “It’s built directly in response to the business needs as our overall Gong business grows.”
Tim and Mark sat down with leadership and identified four shifts in their business environment which would have a direct impact on their learning initiatives:
- Multi-product: Gong had moved from a single product to multiple products which were being continually improved and iterated. Keeping content current, as well as aligning different workflows was a huge new driver of education.
- Customer segmentation: Instead of focusing on introductory, one-size-fits-all training, Gong realized they needed to segment customers by needs. Smaller customers would onboard for a specific tool, while larger customers had different expectations for what training would look like.
- Upmarket excellence: These enterprise customers also had a different gold standard. Creating a white glove experience demanded a rebrand, and the customer education team became education services, while trainers became customer learning consultants. “It’s not about semantics,” said Mark. “It signals deep, consultative partnership to make sure customers are getting the level of service they expect.” Included in this offering are extras like SCORM Connect (content syndication), translation offerings, and an hours-based approach to scoping training where necessary. “Customers now have a strategic partner, and we’ve got so much feedback saying that they love it” said Mark.
- Partners: Gong believes that to get further, you have to go together, and one key to that is its partner ecosystem. That gold standard of service needs to be established through all segments, so regularly meeting with partners and supporting their needs is crucial.
Designing Learning Across the Entire Customer Journey
Fast forward five years and, with these drivers in mind, today Gong offers live training offerings across multiple tiers, shares more than 300 assets centered around specific outcomes in its Academy, and has built five customer-facing certifications, plus a partner certification. The team has built learning paths for specific personas, based on analytics which helped them to understand what was moving the needle for its learners, and where they needed more guidance.
The Gong Academy has three main goals:
Early learnings: A lot of the training is focused on onboarding customers, tied to a nurture campaign which reaches out to new users and automatically enrolls them into a learning path to help them get started. “This is about getting your feet wet,” Tim said. “It’s maybe 30 minutes of seat time, just to get them up to speed with what they need to know on day one, or in that first week.”
Deeper engagement: Next, Gong looks at how to bring learners back to help them dive deeper and grow engagement. “The further they go into these features, the more they rely on them, the more they use them on a regular basis, and then when it comes to renewals time, the easier the renewal will be,” Tim continued. Here, Gong moves away from prescriptive training and allows users to filter based on modality, outcome or persona to focus in on what they want to learn about.
Certifications: The last piece of the puzzle is certifications. When users are ready to take their learning deeper, Gong has five customer certifications, one in person and four self-paced, and currently certifies 600 users in a single year. “Certifications really took our game to the next level,” Tim said. “We have a full badging system that’s running behind the scenes with Accredible, and we’ve seen really great growth in this area, extending the learning life of our users beyond the implementation time period.”
Education Meets Analytics
Once the team made sure that they had created valuable resources in the Academy, they could start to analyze and iterate.
By combining the data from the learning platform with the data from in-app or in-product, Gong could see how education was making the difference for chosen business outcomes. “I think everyone already knows that learning improves performance, that it improves adoption,” said Tim. “But the question is — how much?”
By correlating that data from both sides, Gong found that 95% of new users who took just one course became what the company calls frequent users of the product. They were 3.8x more active in Gong per day over the next quarter, and for certain personas they were 167% more active than users who were untrained. You can see additional stats across other cohorts below, but this data spoke for itself.
“That is where the light bulb went off, and where other teams were really starting to get interested,” Tim said. “They would say, ‘Wow you’re telling me someone is going to be four times more active the next quarter if they take a course in the Academy?’”
Mark discussed how that data can then be shared across the business, socializing the information to get additional buy-in and support. Whether it’s to prove ROI to the C-suite, or to encourage cross-functional collaboration, we agree with Tim that “It’s tough to argue with teams that have a vested interest in those outcomes once you’ve seen the data!”
Education Embedded in the Lifecycle
Having the data for cross-functional alignment means that customer education doesn’t sit downstream of the customer journey at Gong. Instead, it’s intentionally embedded at every stage, starting even before the deal closes. Mark shared that education is part of the pre-sales motion itself, with the education team actively involved when learning is discounted or removed from a deal. This creates an opportunity to reframe training not as an optional add-on, but as a value driver tied directly to outcomes. “Education really isn’t an afterthought, it’s baked into the overall sales story,” Mark explained. That mindset carries forward through implementation and customer success, ensuring customers have a clear learning strategy in place from day one.
Beyond onboarding, Gong uses education data as an early signal across the post-sale lifecycle, particularly when it comes to adoption and renewal risk. Mark described how customer success teams review education consumption alongside product usage many months before renewal conversations begin, allowing them to intervene earlier if engagement is low.
If customers aren’t consuming education or adopting the platform, that’s a warning sign, not something to address at the last minute. By operationalizing education in this way, Gong helps customer teams move from reactive training requests to proactive lifecycle management, making renewals easier and positioning education as a long-term growth lever rather than a last-ditch effort.
Learn More from Gong’s Success
This webinar was so packed with insight, we can’t get through it all! Watch the full session to learn more about how Gong:
- Uses the Thought Industries Customer Learning Maturity Model to align leadership around a long-term vision for education.
- Continuously evolves its Academy, deciding what to archive, what to refresh, and how to avoid overwhelming learners.
- Runs customer education like a business, from shadow P&Ls to capacity planning and executive reporting.
Connect with our team today to see what this looks like for you.
