Gong Helps Sales Teams and Buyers Have Better Conversations

Converting a potential buyer into an actual customer isn’t easy. The key to making the sale isn’t having more conversations, it’s having better conversations. Gong is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams improve their interactions with prospective buyers by analyzing these discussions in real time and providing Sales Conversation Intelligence. “We capture all of their sales conversations: phone, video conferencing, emails, telephone systems, bring them into a single platform, and make the whole conversation visible to the organization,” says Eilon Reshef, CTO and co-founder of Gong.

Gong then ties the results to the company’s CRM and provides strategic insights about how the sales team handled these discussions. For instance, Gong will let companies know if their competition was mentioned on the call and whether the sales team is staying on message. It tracks how deals are progressing and suggests what the sales team could do better by identifying customer needs, objections, and challenges. The analysis can be used to coach employees on how to tweak their pitch to improve quality, buyer experience, and sales performance.

“Gong, using a data-driven approach, can tell you across all of your sales organization what’s actually going on all over the market versus perception,” Reshef says. “Before Gong, [sales teams] are pretty much working in the dark.” After deploying Gong, most teams can achieve a much higher conversion rate with a shorter sales cycle, helping the entire sales organization become faster and more efficient, he says.

Reshef co-founded Gong with CEO Amit Bendov after they noticed a gap in the market while working together at business analytics software company Sisense. “Bendov ran multiple sales organizations and, as the sales leader, he was always frustrated with not having true visibility into what’s happening in the sales organization,” Reshef says. “Once we teamed up, we decided to attack it, not from a process perspective but from a technology perspective, using AI, machine learning, and deep learning to make it more automated and streamlined.” Gong’s executive team includes scientists and engineers, and its clients range from small startups to large corporations such as GE and ADP.

Robots and machines won’t be replacing salespeople anytime soon, Reshef says, but technology can help salespeople to develop a better customer experience by understanding what topics their prospective buyers want to discuss. For instance, Gong gives sales reps real-time feedback on their calls, including whether they’re talking too much or focusing on the product’s features for too long and forgetting to discuss the product’s value proposition. Gong can also tell sales reps whether they engaged the potential buyer in a healthy, two-way conversation.

Gong helps sales teams on multiple levels by reminding reps to focus on the value of the product, helping them to explain how the product differs from the competition and coaching them on how to respond to any objections from the clients. Mid-sized to large B2B companies with a large sales and marketing team that spends the majority of its time on the phone with potential customers are Gong’s ideal client. While most companies base their sales methodologies on personal experience and anecdotal evidence, Gong uses fact-based reasoning to help sales teams close the deal.