Some companies sell sales software. A few of them also happen to be the best examples of revenue growth strategies you will find anywhere. Gong passed $500 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Clay hit a $5 billion valuation. Chili Piper built a whole category from scratch. None of them got there by buying more ads.
A while back we broke down the GTM strategies of Slack, Tesla and Apple. This time we are staying closer to home. These three companies sell to the same buyers you do: sales and marketing leaders who have seen every trick. That makes their revenue growth strategies worth studying in detail. If you can grow fast selling to professional sceptics, your playbook works.
Quick Summary: Revenue growth strategies from Gong, Clay and Chili Piper
Gong (over $500 million ARR, growing 55%+ year on year as of May 2026) grew by turning its own sales data into a content engine and getting its whole team posting on LinkedIn. Clay (valued at $5 billion in early 2026, on track for $100 million ARR) built a community of ‘GTM engineers’ before it built a big sales team, and its users now create its pipeline. Chili Piper invented the ‘speed to lead’ category and grew through its co-CEO’s personal LinkedIn presence, proving the product with results like a 70% lift in demo form conversions for Gong. The common thread across all three revenue growth strategies is they made buyers come to them by being useful and visible, then converted that attention fast. Any B2B team can copy the principles without the venture budget.
Why these three companies?
It is easy to admire Apple. It is more useful to study companies your own buyers actually talk about. Gong, Clay and Chili Piper all sell into B2B sales and marketing teams. Their buyers ignore cold templates, mute ads, and can smell automation from a mile away. Sound familiar?
Despite that, all three have grown at a remarkable pace. They did it with three different models: a content engine, a community flywheel, and category creation. Each one is a lesson in how modern B2B revenue growth strategies actually work, with numbers to back it up.
Let us take them one at a time.
Gong: Turn your own data into a content engine
Gong records and analyses sales calls. That product gave it something no rival had: data on what actually happens in millions of real sales conversations. Instead of keeping that to itself, Gong turned it into content. Posts like “the best time to ask about budget” or “words that kill deals” were findings, pulled from real calls.
1. Research-led content, not opinion-led content
Tactic: Publish original findings from your own data instead of recycled advice.
Execution: Gong’s labs team mined call data for patterns, then packaged the results as short, punchy insights. Every chart carried the unmistakable Gong purple. You knew who made it before you saw the logo.
Impact: Sellers shared Gong’s content because it made them better at their jobs, not because Gong asked them to. The brand became the default voice on how selling works. In May 2026, Gong announced it had passed $500 million in ARR with growth accelerating past 55% year on year. That is its tenth straight quarter of accelerating growth, with more than 5,000 customers including half of the Fortune 10.
2. The LinkedIn takeover
Tactic: Get the whole company posting, not just the brand account.
Execution: Gong coordinated moments where employees across every team posted on the same day, around the same theme. Each person reached their own network. Together, they flooded the feed. CEO Amit Bendov posts in his own voice too, and the team piles into the comments of anyone who mentions them.
Impact: A brand page might reach thousands. A few hundred employees posting at once reach millions, and with far more trust. People buy from people. Gong understood that earlier than almost any B2B company.
3. Sell the problem, not the feature list
Tactic: Make the market care about a problem only you can measure.
Execution: Gong’s content rarely talks about Gong. It talks about deals slipping, forecasts missing, and reps flying blind. Once you accept that problem, there is one obvious place to go.
Impact: Gong built demand for a category it leads. Its customer results then close the loop: Anthropic reported a 64% lift in seller productivity, and Canva a 60% lift in rep capacity, in Gong’s own announcements. The content brings buyers in, and the proof keeps them.
Clay: Build the community before the pipeline
Clay is a data enrichment and outbound automation tool. On paper, that is a crowded space. In practice, Clay barely competes in it, because it changed the conversation entirely. Clay did not sell software to salespeople. It created a new job: the GTM engineer.
1. Name a new role, then own it
Tactic: Give your power users an identity, not just a licence.
Execution: Clay championed the idea that modern outbound needs a builder: someone who wires data, signals and messaging together into systems. It called that person a GTM engineer, backed the title with content and courses, and built a community around it in Slack.
Impact: People now put ‘GTM engineer’ on their LinkedIn profiles and CVs. Job boards list the role. Every one of those job posts and profiles is free advertising for Clay, because Clay is the tool the role is built around. That is a moat no feature can match.
2. Let users create the content
Tactic: Reward the people teaching others how to use your product.
Execution: Clay ran creator and partner programmes that paid experts to publish workflows, templates and tutorials. Agencies built whole businesses on Clay delivery. The company’s job shifted from making content to amplifying its best users.
Impact: Clay raised a $100 million Series C at a $3.1 billion valuation in August 2025. By early 2026, employees could sell shares at a $5 billion valuation, with the company on track for $100 million in ARR by the end of 2026.
3. Prove it with customer pipeline, not promises
Tactic: Make customer results the marketing.
Execution: Clay’s case studies read like build logs. Intercom, for example, grew outbound-sourced pipeline by 140% using Clay-powered workflows, a story Clay tells in detail rather than in a two-line quote.
Impact: When your community shares real builds with real numbers, prospects arrive pre-sold. Clay’s sales team starts conversations that its users already opened. Of all the revenue growth strategies in this article, this one compounds hardest over time.
Chili Piper: Create the category, then be its proof
Chili Piper routes and books inbound meetings the moment a prospect fills in a form. Before Chili Piper, that gap between form fill and first meeting was just an accepted annoyance. Chili Piper gave it a name: speed to lead. Then it made the name famous.
1. Name the problem before you pitch the product
Tactic: Put a memorable label on a pain everyone feels but nobody measures.
Execution: Chili Piper hammered one message: every minute between a demo request and a booked meeting costs you revenue. ‘Speed to lead’ became shorthand the whole industry now uses, and Chili Piper owns the term it coined.
Impact: When a buyer feels that pain, the search term and the vendor are the same thought. That is what category creation buys you: you stop competing on feature lists because you wrote the test.
2. Founder-led social, done properly
Tactic: Make the founder the face, and post like a person rather than a press office.
Execution: Co-CEO Alina Vandenberghe shares the journey in public: product bets, hiring, failures, culture. Chili Piper also puts paid spend behind real voices, using LinkedIn thought leader ads to promote posts from actual people instead of polished brand creative.
Impact: The brand feels human in a category full of corporate accounts. Buyers follow Alina long before they ever book a demo, so by the time they need meeting routing, the trust is already built.
3. Use customers as the evidence
Tactic: Lead with conversion numbers your buyers can check.
Execution: Chili Piper publishes specific, named results. Gong, fittingly, is one of its customers: Chili Piper reports a 70% lift in demo form conversions and a 5x increase in demo requests for Gong. Frontify reached an 80-85% lead-to-intro conversion rate.
Impact: The product proves the category, and the category sells the product. A buyer who accepts that speed to lead matters has very few places to go.
What these revenue growth strategies have in common
How a content engine, a community flywheel and category creation built B2B pipeline
Three companies, three different models. Yet underneath, the same engine is running. First, each company earns attention by being useful or interesting before it asks for anything. Gong gives away research. Clay gives away skills and status. Chili Piper gives away a way of thinking about inbound.
Second, each one is built on people rather than logos. Gong’s employees, Clay’s community and Alina’s personal feed all out-perform their brand accounts. In B2B, trust still moves person to person.
Third, each converts attention with speed and specificity. Chili Piper made speed its whole category. Clay’s users arrive knowing exactly what they want to build. Gong’s buyers show up already convinced the problem is real. The lesson for any team comparing revenue growth strategies: attention is only half the job. The handoff to revenue has to be fast and personal.
And one more thing they share: none of them grew by sending more generic outreach. They grew by being impossible to confuse with anyone else.
Three companies, three different models. Yet underneath, the same engine is running. First, each company earns attention by being useful or interesting before it asks for anything. Gong gives away research. Clay gives away skills and status. Chili Piper gives away a way of thinking about inbound.
Second, each one is built on people rather than logos. Gong’s employees, Clay’s community and Alina’s personal feed all out-perform their brand accounts. In B2B, trust still moves person to person.
Third, each converts attention with speed and specificity. Chili Piper made speed its whole category. Clay’s users arrive knowing exactly what they want to build. Gong’s buyers show up already convinced they have a genuine problem. The lesson for any team comparing revenue growth strategies is that attention is only half the job. The handoff to revenue has to be fast and personal.
And one more thing they share is that none of them grew by sending more generic outreach. They grew by being impossible to confuse with anyone else.
How to apply these revenue growth strategies to your team
You do not need Gong’s data science team or Clay’s venture funding. The principles scale down well. Here is how a lean B2B team can run the same plays.
1. Publish what you know that others cannot
You have data nobody else has: your win rates, your call notes, your customer questions. Even a small sample beats recycled advice. One honest post a week about what is actually working in your pipeline will out-perform a content calendar full of generic tips.
2. Put faces on the company
Your founder and your reps reach more people, with more trust, than your brand page ever will. Encourage the team to post in their own voice. If you sell with video, this gets easier since a face on camera builds the same trust a feed post does, one prospect at a time.
3. Name the problem you solve best
Chili Piper had speed to lead. What is your version? Find the pain your buyers feel but have not labelled, give it a name, and repeat it everywhere. Categories are claimed by repetition, not by size.
4. Act on signals, not lists
Every strategy above works because the timing is right: the buyer is paying attention when the company shows up. You can engineer that on a small scale by watching buyer intent signals like new sales hires, funding rounds and job changes, then reaching out while the moment is top of mind. Speed to lead applies to outbound too, especially with respect to response time to any replies.
5. Make the outreach itself exceptional
Attention earned by content is wasted on a template. When the right moment comes, send something a human clearly made. We have found personal video gets ~14 times more replies than email alone, and our 2026 video prospecting ROI report breaks down the numbers. A 60-second video referencing a real signal is the small-team version of everything Gong, Clay and Chili Piper do at scale: human, specific and timed right.
Common questions
What are revenue growth strategies in B2B?
Revenue growth strategies are the repeatable systems a company uses to create and convert demand. They cover how you earn attention (content, community, brand), how you find buyers at the right moment (signals, inbound, outbound), and how you convert that interest into revenue (speed, personalisation, proof). The best B2B examples, like Gong’s content engine and Clay’s community flywheel, combine all three rather than relying on one channel.
How did Gong grow so fast?
Gong grew by turning its own product data into original research content, then distributing it through its employees on LinkedIn rather than only its brand page. The content made sellers better at their jobs, which built trust at scale. As of May 2026 Gong reports over $500 million in ARR, growing more than 55% year on year, with over 5,000 customers.
What is a GTM engineer?
A GTM engineer builds go-to-market systems: connecting data sources, buying signals and messaging into automated workflows that feed sales teams. The role grew out of Clay’s community and is now a real job title across B2B SaaS. It reflects a wider shift from outreach as a volume game to outreach as an engineering problem.
Can a small team copy these revenue growth strategies?
Yes, because the principles do not depend on budget. Publish what your own pipeline teaches you, post as people rather than a logo, name the problem you solve best, and reach out the moment a buying signal fires. A founder posting openly once a week plus signal-timed personal outreach is the same engine Gong and Clay run, at a scale one person can manage.
Which matters more: brand or outbound?
They feed each other. Brand earns familiarity so outbound gets opened. Outbound creates conversations that sharpen what your brand says. Gong, Clay and Chili Piper all pair big-reach attention with fast, specific conversion. Choosing one and ignoring the other is how most teams end up with content nobody acts on, or outreach nobody answers.
Further reading
For more on building a modern revenue engine:
- GTM strategies from Slack, Tesla and Apple – The original deep-dive on how iconic companies went to market.
- 57 buyer intent signals and how to spot them – Know when a prospect is ready before your rivals do.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator vs Apollo vs ZoomInfo – Picking the right data tool for your team.
- Video prospecting ROI: 2026 report – Real data on how video compares with cold email and phone.
Stack BD is a video prospecting tool that helps B2B sales teams reach the right person at the right moment. It spots buying signals, drafts a script from live data, and helps you record and send a personal video in minutes. The result is far more replies and meetings from the same effort. If you want the small-team version of the strategies in this article, we would love to talk.