Sybill's Bold Competitive Alternative Play: 80% Win Rate and Doubled ARR

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventure Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, Collin Mayjack.

I like to think of Sybill as a shared memory for all of your sales and go-to-market team. It captures everything from CRM activity to emails to all of your calls and pulls that into one memory or context layer that the whole team can pull from. AEs can figure out what the best reps have said to close a deal. The CRO can understand what’s actually happening in their pipeline with real-time insight instead of generic risk flags. Sales managers get the context they need from their best reps to coach others. We compete in the conversational intelligence category—the Goliath for us is Gong. When I joined Sybill we were in a transition: a lot of people still thought of us as a generic note-taker, yet we were built for sales teams and already seeing traction with companies switching from Gong because of discontent with Gong’s AI performance and insight accuracy. We compete for the same budget line most of the time; you’re usually going to pay for only one conversational intelligence tool.

When I joined, almost no one knew we existed. We had low brand familiarity while everyone knew Gong. We were seeing a clear pattern across deals: the ones we won most easily were when we were up against Gong, and attaching ourselves in people’s minds as a Gong alternative produced more traction than we otherwise got. At our Series A size there was heavy pressure to grow fast. Gong is a ~$300M ARR company; even capturing a slice of their churn (assume 10%) would be transformative for us. The risk was remaining invisible or forever boxed in as “just another note-taker” while fighting for the same budget against the market leader.