DISCLAIMER: The information provided on sales call recording laws is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice. If you have any legal compliance questions, please consult your legal counsel.

When it comes to sales and business call recording laws and regulations in the United States, states adopt either a one-party or two-party (also known as all-party) consent policy. One-party consent policy means that you’ll you need consent from one of the parties participating in a call in order to record. As of the time of the publish date of this article, 13 states have opted for a two-party (or all-party) consent policy, where all parties have to be informed that the call is being recorded. Here at Gong, we always obtain consent from all parties when we use Gong, regardless of the states where call participants reside or the call purpose.

Business Call Recording Laws by State:

As of the publish date of this article, one-party consent states include Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Two-party, or all-party, consent states include California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

International Call Recording Laws:

International business call recording laws and regulations vary widely. Many countries do not have specific business call recording laws, or even regulations covering telecommunication issues. Other countries might specify details around how consent needs to be obtained based on subject matter. There are even some countries or industries that do not allow call recording at all. When in doubt, consult with a lawyer.  Here are a few jurisdictions that our customers frequently encounter when using Gong:

Canada

Canada has an “all-party consent” approach. To record a call, you need to obtain informed consent by notifying others on the call: (1) You intend to record the conversation (2) Any purposes the recording will be used for (3) That the call may only be recorded with each person’s consent. For more details on Canada’s approach, you can take a look at the Privacy Commissioner’s Guidelines for Recording Customer Calls.

Europe and the UK

Be sure you’re compliant with the GDPR and other country-specific regulations when recording in participants in European Union member states, and the UK GDPR when recording participants in the United Kingdom. Generally speaking, inbound and outbound calls with participants in European Union member states and the UK require consent from all participating parties. When you use web conferencing, you can deploy the ‘Gong Welcome Page’, which gives participants the option to join the recorded call or to join the call without it being recorded. Here is what that looks like:

Australia

If a call is to be recorded or monitored, you must inform parties at the beginning of the conversation. This allows the respective parties to have the chance to either end the call, or to ask to be transferred to another line where monitoring or recording does not take place (if this is available). In the state of Queensland, however, it is not illegal to simply record a telephone conversation if you are a party to the conversation. For more details on Australia’s call monitoring, check out the surveillance and monitoring guidelines from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Calls recorded by a customer’s phone system (e.g., SalesLoft, OutReach, RingCentral, etc.) are subject to the same privacy rules as sessions recorded by Gong. Review your call recording policies with your legal team, especially if you plan to start recording calls following a deployment of Gong. 

How Gong Helps You Stay Compliant with Call Recording Laws

There are four ways Gong’s two-party consent platform helps you maintain compliance with the above call recording laws.

1) Automatic Audio Prompt

Gong features a setting that allows you to play a short, automated message when new attendees join a web conference meeting. This automates the process of notifying your customer that the call is being recorded, and gives you the peace of mind that it happens on every meeting.

You have two options for playing the audio prompt:

1. One time: When the first external meeting attendee joins the call, or
2. Multiple times: Every time an additional external meeting attendee joins the call.

This second approach ensures every external meeting attendee hears the audio prompt, regardless of when they join the meeting.

2) Email Alerts for Calls Without Call Recording Notification Language

You can setup Trackers in Gong that alert you every time a particular type of call happens that doesn’t contain compliance notification language.

Once you save your filter criteria, you can then choose your email alert settings, opting to receive an email alert every time a call happens where recording compliance language was not mentioned.

3) Custom Legal Footers in Pre-call Emails

To notify meeting attendees ahead of time that an upcoming meeting will be recorded, you can configure Gong to send an automated email to all invited attendees a few minutes before the meeting starts, explaining that the meeting will be recorded.

4) Redact Sensitive Information

Finally, if you’re concerned that your calls may contain information that you’d rather not record (such as social security or credit card numbers), you can configure Gong to automatically “redact” segments of calls where sensitive information is mentioned.

All in all, Gong provides a lot of easy-to-use options for helping you maintain compliance with call recording laws.

Learn how to enable these features and more by signing up for a demo of Gong today.

Sales teams are up against a lot of challenges. In this rocky economic landscape, consumers (and businesses) are even pickier about how they spend their hard-earned budgets. We consistently hear that sales teams are being asked to “do more with less” — pursue more leads, schedule more demos, and win more deals. Consumers are flooded with content and easily annoyed by sales reps who reach out at the wrong time or with the wrong message.

The best way to make sure your outreach is productive is to bring context into every one of your sales team’s calls. With the Gong App for HubSpot, sales teams can analyze massive amounts of customer interaction data in seconds, getting the most important insights about each prospect or customer before hopping on the phone with them. 

The Gong App for HubSpot can also help teams dig into broader trends and future-proof their sales strategies. Gong surfaces key insights into sales performances to highlight what works and what doesn’t, and brings in HubSpot data to ensure that every point of contact is considered. 

Gong’s revenue intelligence platform, coupled with HubSpot’s powerful CRM system, clarifies sales teams’ strengths and areas of improvement so they can stop losing winnable deals.  

1. Dig into the various stages of the customer experience across calls, emails, video meetings, and demos. 

Integrating HubSpot CRM with Gong’s Deal Board gives sales leaders access to critical details about what’s happening in every account. Information flows both ways, so HubSpot event actions flow into Gong, and Gong’s call details and transcripts flow into HubSpot. That means no more double data entry by reps and no need for the data cleaning that regularly wastes sales pros’ time. 

“We love using Gong, and the HubSpot integration is fantastic. Using Gong has helped us as a team to learn from other calls, and having the added visibility of everyone's calls helps us to see how deals are progressing in the pipe[line], and what questions clients are frequently asking,” shared Wendy Sly, a computer software professional at a mid-size company in a review of the Gong App for HubSpot. “I love being able to see action items in HubSpot that the AI flags from each call.”

Gong allows sales leaders to uncover why some calls result in wins and others don’t. They can create easy-to-understand win-loss reports and use their newfound pipeline visibility to guide sales reps to more closed-won deals. 

2. Win more deals — and save those at-risk — by bringing context and account data into every sales conversation.

Since Gong’s data flows into HubSpot, it’s easy to create detailed reports in HubSpot that take into account every touch point across both tools. 

There are two primary ways for sales teams to bring in more revenue: 1) close more new deals and 2) save at-risk deals from slipping.

When it comes to closing new deals, sales reps can improve their outcomes by gathering information about a contact or company before they reach out. HubSpot makes it easy to quickly get a snapshot of the contact’s history. When you run virtual sales with the Gong App and the HubSpot CRM, you can automatically view all your previous call details in HubSpot. No more switching between platforms. 

Gong also identifies at-risk deals and then flags them so sales reps can step in, look through the deal profile in HubSpot or Gong, counter any doubts or objections, and close the deal. 

“Gong is amazing - it has helped us close more deals and identify risk in others to better manage our pipeline,” shared Ray Rhodes, a computer software professional at a small company in a review of the Gong App for HubSpot.

3. Tag team members about critical feedback to solve issues before they spiral.

Sales teams are juggling increasingly complex workloads and bigger territories, so it’s easy for issues and tasks to fall through the cracks. 

But Megan Gammie, a computer software professional, shared that Gong’s tagging function makes it easy to alert other team members to important customer feedback. This enables teams to intervene before questions turn into at-risk deals. 

4. Level up on training and learn from your peers. 

Sales teams are constantly learning about new products, new messaging, and new selling tactics. One of the best ways to learn is by watching sales peers and leaders conduct sales calls, battling objections and connecting with prospects and customers. But it’s not always easy to find the time to sit in on other peoples’ calls, and there’s no guarantee those calls will impart the right lessons. 

With Gong, you can easily share call recordings with your team to use them as a teaching tool. “Gong has allowed me to review other people’s calls to implement some of their skills into mine, as well as critique myself to see how I can improve everyday,” Spencer Wiese, a facilities services professional at a small company shared in a review of the integration.

“I use Gong mostly for coaching purposes, and for building a valuable library where my team can learn from the calls that are held by other team members as well as get feedback on their calls and turn weaknesses into strengths,” explained Pascale Mine, a computer software professional at a small company and HubSpot and Gong user. “It also helps me a lot when onboarding a new BDR.”

Plus, you can share call recordings and highlights with prospects and customers to ensure that everyone’s on the same page after a call. 

5. Share the voice of the customer with other teams.

Sales teams aren’t the only ones who benefit from access to call recordings. Iddo Avneri, who works in IT services, shared that he uses Gong to easily pass along unfiltered feedback to product and marketing teams. He’s able to quickly flag common objections and competitor features that might otherwise lead to lost business. 

By digging into the customer experience and using data-backed insights to train sales teams, companies can more effectively reach and engage new customers. “I use Gong almost daily to inform our marketing strategy and tactics,” Megan Gammie, a computer software professional added. “We love using Gong to gain deeper insight into the problems our customers are facing and take any necessary steps to improve our marketing and product.”

Learn how to leverage the Gong App for HubSpot to connect with customers and improve your sales team’s performance.

Revenue predictability is more important—and harder—than ever.

This is the one-two punch of an uncertain macroeconomic climate. Revenue teams have all the same pressure to make accurate forecasts, but have fewer resources and less reliable historical data to make them.

Part of the problem is that paradigm. The traditional method of forecasting depends on analysis of manually entered CRM data—data that can be rife with biases and out of date. 

But the past several years have been so erratic that recent historical data is a weak predictor of future revenue. Deals are more dynamic (and include a shifting array of personas), pipeline is harder to generate, and reps don’t always understand deal quality in real-time. The market is moving so quickly that static data models in unwieldy CRMs don’t offer the insights leaders need to hit today’s targets.

To achieve revenue predictability, especially in an uncertain macroeconomic climate, revenue teams need to stop depending on only second-hand data about the past, and start looking to primary data about the present. They need deeper, AI-driven understandings of every deal in their pipeline, using conversation intelligence to gauge pipeline risk and power more accurate forecasts.

That’s why we just announced new AI-powered enhancements to Gong Forecast, so customers can harness the power of an AI-based forecasting solution that's built on top of the world's leading Revenue Intelligence Platform. With prediction models that leverage over 300 buying signals drawn from customer interactions, deal activity, historical deal performance, and enriched contact information, Gong Forecast is able to predict deal outcomes with 20% greater precision than models based solely on CRM and activity data.

Why AI-based forecasting built on revenue intelligence platforms powers more accurate revenue forecasts

1. Intent signals come directly from customer interactions. During my nearly 30-year career in sales, I’ve used everything out there. And still today, most forecasting solutions on the market offer predictive models based solely on CRM data and sales activity logs. 

The power of modern AI-based Revenue Intelligence solutions is not just that they can identify keywords, but that they can identify the intent and context behind keywords.

Gong Forecast identifies key topics—pricing, legal review, competitors—and assesses whether they’re being raised at the right stages of deals. This modern revenue tooling interprets the context and vocabulary that customers and prospects are using, and incorporates that in deal predictions, making it the only solution that’s built customer interaction data into its core predictive engine of forecasting.

2. It enables speedier, more impactful decision-making. Agile revenue organizations need to empower managers to quickly translate insights into effective execution. Modern revenue tools should boost actionability for managers, allowing them to easily prioritize which deals to focus on and the best strategies to close. 

Gong Forecast uses models built by analyzing more than 2.5 billion interactions to more deeply understand what factors truly impact a deal’s likelihood to close  - and most importantly, what teams can do to improve that likelihood. These insights empower teams to eliminate risky pipeline from their forecast projections, keep their organization accountable to uphold pipeline health, and convert deals quickly and effectively.

3. It aligns your entire team around your customer. Forecasting is a team sport. Every team member needs to be looking at the same scoreboard, with the same understanding of overarching revenue objectives, and the same understanding of customers’ needs. Moreover, the “team" extends beyond the traditional conception of revenue stakeholders. It can’t just be on sales and revenue teams, it has to include customer success, support, implementation, partnerships—any org with any impact on the health of customer relationships.

Unfortunately, too many companies rely on second-hand interpretations of what customers need and when they need it. They struggle to make primary customer interaction data accessible in a meaningful way. 

We built Gong Forecast with this in mind. Never in my career have I had such easy access to so much fine-grained contextual information. When customer interaction data is baked into your revenue team’s operating rhythm - deal reviews, pipeline inspections, forecast calls, sales analytics, and more – organizations can drive complete accountability by ensuring every team has a crystal clear picture of where the entire organization is positioned (and trending), and the best steps they can take to deliver customer value and meet revenue goals. 

There are a lot of open questions about our collective future. Markets remain erratic; work/life arrangements remain in flux; standards of corporate normalcy are more elusive than ever. It’s time revenue teams shift their focus from the past to the present. There’s more data—and insight—available than ever before to companies who know how to find it.

If you’re ready to peek into your revenue future, click here to book a demo of Gong Forecast.

Businesses often struggle to tap into the mind of their buyer. Despite frequent calls and qualitative feedback, it can be difficult to understand which of your buyers are at risk of churning and what's driving their decision. 

As a result, businesses require a standardized metric to understand buyer sentiment and gauge whether their products or services align with customer expectations. That’s where the net promoter score (NPS) comes into play.

In this article, we’ll define net promoter score and outline the steps you need to take to calculate one for your business.

A net promoter score (NPS) is a standardized rating that measures your buyer experience and overall sentiment. Companies often issue an NPS survey as a part of their overarching net promoter system to assess the customer journey and overall customer loyalty associated with the brand.

Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, was the one who came up with the net promoter score in 2003. Reicheld is often considered the program's creator, involving the signature NPS question and the associated rating scale.

This metric of buyer experience and overall satisfaction is now widely used by companies worldwide.

Many businesses have adopted the metric as a valuable north star to assess whether their buyer experience aligns with buyer expectations.

In fact, more than 69% of buyer experience team members use NPS as a “core metric” to guide their policies and buyer interactions. 

The score measures buyer experience through the lens of how many of your buyers would (and would not) recommend your product or service to a friend on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 meaning the product is highly recommended and 0 meaning the product is not recommended at all.

The NPS score recognizes that it’s not enough to measure buyer satisfaction by those who “like” a product. This magical scale prevents buyers from confusing their positive feelings toward it with merely apathy and tolerance of it. 

To assess whether or not your buyers value your product, it’s useful to understand if they would recommend it to their friends or colleagues. 

This reframes how they look at the product and whether or not they are comfortable stamping their name and personal brand on the recommendation. 

As they evaluate that question, they may wonder how confident they are in the product’s ability to add value to their colleague’s work (making it a worthy recommendation) or negatively impact their personal brand.

To help statistically analyze buyers’ thoughts and feelings toward the product, net promoter score evaluations classify three types of survey respondents: promoters, passives, and detractors.

Promoters are evangelists who are fully confident in your product and would recommend your business to a friend. 

You want to strive to get as many buyers as possible into the promoter’s range. NPS categorizes promoters as those who select 9 or 10 on the scale.

Passives are those who like your product but may need to be more passionate to recommend it to a friend. 

Businesses should try re-engaging passives to earn their loyalty and nudge them closer to promoter status. NPS categorizes passives as those who select 7 or 8 on the scale.

Detractors are those who don’t care enough about your business to recommend it to a friend. 

You should evaluate what your business might be doing wrong if you have an overwhelming amount of detractors. NPS categorizes detractors as those who select anything between 0-6 on the scale.

The score can be used to predict future growth since it assesses whether or not your buyers will share positive or negative thoughts about your product or services.

Now that you know the net promoter score, let’s look at why you need to know your net promoter score.

A net promoter score is valuable for businesses for a variety of reasons.

At a high level, the net promoter score enables business owners, marketers, and operators to understand whether or not their products and services are delivering value in the minds of their buyers.

It is one of many tools to set your business up for success. It can sometimes be challenging to understand your buyers and compare them through qualitative feedback against your own or competitors’ businesses.

The net promoter score provides a unique health check that can guide your business strategy and inform where you need to allocate more time and resources. It can help you scale appropriately and prepare for the future.

More specifically, businesses can use their NPS score to make strategic decisions to help improve the experience, reduce churn, benchmark against competitors, and forecast growth.

Let’s break each benefit down one by one in more detail.

Does your buyer like your product or service? How much? 

NPS helps establish standardized criteria that quantify how strongly your buyers feel about your product or service.

Business units, including operations, product development, marketing, business intelligence, and customer experience, can use this metric to assess their performance and guide future decisions that impact the company and buyers — both current and future — as a whole. 

If customers are having a negative experience, they will churn. Many businesses focus on churn reduction in a variety of ways. Often, it’s a never-ending battle of maintaining peak buyer happiness at all times. 

NPS scores enable businesses to take a look at buyer satisfaction and to zero in on buyers who aren’t enthused with the product or service.

Once this segment of buyers is identified, team members can reach out to hear more about the buyers’ existing pain points with the product or service or explain any features they don’t understand. 

With your NPS score in hand, you can intercept unhappy buyers and transform them into promoters before they cancel. 

Afterall, customer retention is the single most significant revenue driver:

By applying NPS scores to your customer retention strategy, you may increase brand affinity toward the company and ultimately reduce churn.

How does your NPS data compare to your competitors? What about the industry standard? 

Because many businesses widely accept the NPS score across industries, you can assess your performance against another competitor or your industry as a whole.

However, it’s important to note that this isn’t the only metric to measure up against your competitors and industry. Other factors like revenue, funding, growth, customer base, and more should be considered.

With an NPS score indicating your buyers’ satisfaction, you can begin to extrapolate your orders for the next month, quarter, and even year.

While anything can happen in the market, NPS is one factor enabling forecasters to create predictable growth models. 

By understanding how many buyers will likely purchase again, NPS scores once again provide incredible value to organizations.

Now that you know the net promoter score and why it’s important, let’s address how you can calculate yours on your own.

The net promoter score is simple to calculate and requires a few steps.

Typically, it begins with a net promoter score survey sent by the company to its current buyers. Sometimes, you’ll need to incentivize your buyers in various ways to entice them to complete the survey.

In the NPS survey, you must add the question, “How likely are you to recommend this brand/product to a friend or colleague?”

Companies can use various survey programs including Qualtrics, Satmetrix Systems, Medallia, and more.

The answer should have a scale ranging from 1-10, giving the survey respondent the option to select any individual number.

Remember, those who select anything in the 9-10 category are considered promoters. Those who select anything in the 7-8 category are considered passive. Those who select anything from 0-6 are considered detractors.

Next, calculate the overall percentage of promoters and the percentage of detractors:

Finally, you’ll subtract the percentage of your promoters from your detractors to get your final net promoter score.

But why don’t you do anything with passive NPS respondents?

Passive NPS respondents will likely not have a strong impact on future business. They will neither share positive nor negative things about your product, service, or brand in the market. 

They may like your product or service, but just not enough to endorse it. However, they won’t say anything negative about your company while detractors could. Using the polar opposites of the scale — promoters and detractors — can help provide balance and a foundational middle ground for an accurate buyer satisfaction rating.

Now that you know how to calculate your NPS score, let’s see how you did.

You sent the survey and completed the NPS equation, and now you’re left with a mysterious number. What does it mean?

Once you have your score, you can assess the health of your buyer experience and use it to benchmark against your competitors.

But promoter scores can range from -100 to 100. NPS ratings can be interpreted depending on the preset ranges below:

Don’t fret if you’re in the “Needs Improvement” category. Look at it as an opportunity to re-engage with your buyers and work to earn back their satisfaction and overall endorsement. Plus, sometimes it only takes one positive experience to turn a detractor into a promoter.

An NPS score alone is valuable, but you can also use it to compare your company to your competitors. 

However, as you use your NPS score to benchmark against other businesses, you must be careful. Most net promoter score averages will vary by industry, so you need to consider the context of the score. 

For example, take a look at the chart below:

As you can see, the average NPS score for a consulting company is 68, while the average NPS score for a cloud and hosting company is 25. There is a wide difference between the two.

However, these industries are important to take into consideration. 

For example, if you are a cloud and hosting brand with an NPS score of 29, you might feel discouraged about being in the “Needs Improvement” category. In reality, you would be above average compared to your competition. 

That’s why calculating your net promoter score is only half of the task. You need to know how to interpret it in the right context. 

A low NPS isn’t a bad omen for your company. 

Instead, it just mean there is more work to be done. Actively working to improve your NPS will require time, resources, and most importantly: listening to your buyers.

Businesses should concentrate on both the detractors and passive respondents — but for different reasons. Passive respondents will be the easiest to convert into promoters. This will have the biggest impact on your NPS score.

However, listening to and nudging the detractors toward a more positive score is valuable. Their feedback is essential for the overall health of your company. 

There are many different steps you could take to improve your NPS score. 

Each tactic involves multiple business units and builds on one another to create a comprehensive approach to overall customer satisfaction: 

Let’s dive into each one a bit deeper to see the prescriptive steps you should take. 

Reach out to the detractor and see if they would be willing to talk to you on the phone. Why are they frustrated with your product or service? How could it be better?

Sometimes, they simply don’t have enough product education to use it right. Other times, they may have valuable ideas that you can pass on to your product team.

The more calls you have, the better equipped you’ll be to gather trends to guide your business forward.

No matter how hard you try to unite your company, sometimes your teams can run astray.

This isn’t always due to faulty leadership; instead, it is often caused by teams being so focused on their own goals that they miss the big picture.

Share buyer feedback from your initial calls with all departments and realign teams around your company’s strategic goals.

Sometimes buyers experience frustration with a product simply because they don’t know how to properly use it. 

This can be solved by improving your buyer onboarding process. How are new customers being onboarded? What educational resources do you offer?

Audit your onboarding process by going through each step with someone who knows nothing about your product. Pay attention to where they click, what questions they ask, and where confusion may lie.

Maybe your product or service isn’t giving your buyers what they need. Consider updating or adding new product features customers are requesting.

Review your notes from your buyer feedback calls with your product team.

Which requests are most common? Which are feasible? Which are aligned with your vision for the business? Once you find the overlap, you should add those to your product roadmap.

The net promoter score is a valuable metric to assess the health of your buyer experience. This indicator can show whether or not your buyers are happy and help direct your team to areas where more attention is needed.

By defining “what is net promoter score” and understanding its importance, you can begin to use it to guide strategic business decisions.

Want better visibility of your buyers and customers? Get a demo of Gong and see how winning teams use Gong's conversation intelligence platform to get winning insights that help to minimize churn and increase retention.

In 2023, sales teams are harnessing the power of generative AI to revolutionize their strategies and gain a competitive edge like never before.

This groundbreaking technology is not just a buzzword; it's a practical tool that is reshaping the way sellers engage with buyers and drive revenue. It’s easy to see how generative AI has already helped sales teams, with examples like:

In this blog post, we'll explore the eight transformative ways sales teams are using generative AI to maximize their efforts, elevate their results, and stay ahead of competition.

Generative AI models can be trained on your own internal data and output results like advice or even finished call scripts in perfect English (or other languages). That means there’s an incredible range of applications in the sales world.

In a 2023 survey by McKinsey, sales leaders shared the AI use cases they were most excited about for sales, including lead identification, personalization, and better analytics.

A minority (25%) also highlights the potential for personalized sales coaching. Basically, AI sales training that’s optimized for each rep without needing a mentor or coach to do it manually. 

We generally agree with McKinsey and the view the interviewed executives take, although we see a bit more potential on the sales engagement side (as that’s where we’ve already driven great results with AI).

Let’s start by touching on the CMOs’ favorite use case — identifying leads with AI-guided prospecting.

Generative AI doesn’t just help you to analyze existing leads. It prescribes new prospects based on a range of factors — geography, market trends, connected employees, recent news, and more.

It can analyze your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and determine which companies match it. This saves your sales development reps a lot of time on manual lead identification. Plus, it lets them focus on selling to interested prospects since AI still can’t close effectively (yet).

Use AI to leverage sales intelligence data to help personalize outreach emails: highlight relevant case studies, recent events, connections to existing clients, relevant regulations, etc.

Our prospecting partner, Apollo.io, has already leveraged OpenAI’s ChatGPT to create an AI sales assistant that can do this at scale. It will analyze contact signals like relevant news articles and create a personalized opener (like congratulating on a recent funding series).

It will even analyze responses to identify the type of objection and the ideal response automatically, creating a much more engaging follow-up sequence. This ability to hold conversations is the next evolution in AI sales automation.

Seller proactivity has a significant impact on win rates. How big? We’ve done the research here — seemingly small actions like nudging a prospect can boost win rates by 18%.

(Image Source)

Okay, you might ask, but how does generative AI come into play here? It plays the role of a real-time sales coach. Generative AI can help reps know when to take what actions, leading to taking the right kind of proactive actions and higher win rates.

With real-time guidance on specific leads (like AI suggesting the next action with a lead based on the most recent call), it’s much easier for sales reps to close deals.

Plus, lead prioritization powered by artificial intelligence means sales reps can focus their sales actions where they have the highest ROI. So AI-powered insights can help drive a higher win rate and also a higher average deal value.

But AI can’t just help your individual sales reps make better decisions in the moment. It can also help guide crucial strategic decisions for your organization.

You no longer have to get high-paid analysts to comb through data, create custom reports, and search for crucial needle-in-the-haystack insights. Instead, AI-powered prescriptive analytics can find these vital insights for you.

For example, it might identify that when CFOs are included in the sales process, your win rates are 46% higher. It will then suggest this adjustment to your sales leaders.

Your VP of sales or sales manager can then implement this change to your sales strategy and train your sales reps to apply it in their sales process.

Prescriptive analytics are key to helping your team optimize their overall selling strategy and who to target within the organization. It’s the next natural step in AI sales forecasting — not just calculating how much deals are worth but prescribing what you should do to land them.

ChatGPT is already being used to generate a lot of content. Students use it to write essays, bloggers use it for blog posts, and YouTubers get their video scripts from it.

Many companies already use it for their content marketing efforts, mostly for less complex top-of-funnel content.

If you use it correctly, it could also help you scale your sales content. For example, you could: 

Make sure that you proofread and fact-check any AI-generated content, as it has a widely reported tendency to lie. This happens because it can make false associations based on its data set or simply rephrase misinformation already on the web.

So don’t fire your writing/editing staff just yet. AI still needs a lot of human oversight in this department.

Sales enablement powered by generative AI can act like your sales reps' navigation system. An AI assistant can recommend what types of prospects to call, when to call them, and what to write or say. It can even suggest what next actions to take after a call.

AI sales enablement can feel like having a personal sales coach:

If you want to scale the impact of your sales enablement team and efforts, generative AI is the perfect ally.

Any seasoned sales rep knows the importance of taking notes (physical, not mental) from a discovery call to help guide the sales process with a qualified lead.

AI can help you not just transcribe these calls but identify critical points in the conversation and how they imply the best next step. The most basic example of this is a call spotlight that reminds a rep to fulfill a promise, like sending a meeting invite or case study.

It could also identify key details that indicate whether or not the prospect has a good potential of becoming a buyer or not.

This last benefit is more of a cumulative effect of many of the different use cases mentioned above.

By either eliminating or speeding up repetitive tasks like making sales reports or editing call scripts, you free up time for your reps to focus on more valuable lessons. This will help improve your sales efficiency across the board. 

Now that you have an overview of the generative AI’s use cases in sales, let’s talk about how you can get your team involved.

The first option is to build generative AI using open-source models and your internal data. This might sound tempting for a CIO with a big budget, but the path to positive ROI is long and complex.

Pros

Cons

The second and more realistic option for most companies and sales teams is to leverage generative AI tools for existing sales.

Pros

Cons

Do you want to boost win rates and improve your sales strategy with real-time AI-powered insights?

Gong can do all of that and more.

Call spotlight makes note-taking obsolete and helps your sales professionals choose logical next steps. AI-powered sales call analytics help managers spot weaknesses and help individual reps improve. (Gong helped Mintel improve win rates by 34% with this new access to smart sales performance data.)

If you’re ready to power your campaigns and sales efforts with the power of next-gen AI, sign up for a product demo today. A technical expert who understands your company’s unique needs will walk you through exactly how Gong can help. Take your sales engagement to the next level.

In today's rapidly evolving sales landscape, the integration of sales engagement platforms have become essential for businesses.

These platforms offer a variety of features and functionalities designed to streamline sales processes, enhance customer interactions, and boost overall productivity.

However, simply having access to these tools is not enough; knowing how to leverage them effectively is the key to maximizing their potential.

In this blog, we'll dive into essential strategies and tips to help you harness the full power of your sales engagement platform, empowering you to closer more deals and achieve unparalleled success in the competitive world of sales.

Picture a control center where data-driven insights fuse seamlessly with personalized buyer interactions. Sales engagement platforms act as a hub, unifying tailored communication, prospect engagement, and strategic analytics. AI-powered tools empower sales reps to customize pitches, identify high-potential leads, and seal deals more efficiently.

Sales teams can gain real-time visibility into the sales pipeline, transforming intricate data into actionable intelligence. This enables agile resource allocation and data-driven strategy shifts. Simultaneously, marketing experts align their efforts through integrated automation, lead scoring, and precise segmentation.

This platform's value goes beyond operational excellence. It becomes a repository of sales wisdom, capturing successful tactics and objections and ensuring consistent performance amid team transitions.

In this section, we’ll dive into the benefits of sales engagement platforms that can work wonders for your sales team's performance, process streamlining, and revenue amplification. The perks sales engagement software can provide include:

In the dynamic world of modern sales, success goes beyond adopting cutting-edge tools; it demands a strategic approach to their ongoing effectiveness. This rings particularly true for sales engagement platforms. While their initial implementation is vital, the journey doesn't stop there. Regularly evaluating your sales engagement software guides your sales team towards lasting triumph and heightened ROI.

Establish clear evaluation criteria that serve as the benchmark for measuring your sales engagement platform's performance. These parameters create a structured analysis framework aligned with your organization's goals.

Evaluating your sales engagement platform involves assessing user adoption to understand how well your sales team has integrated the platform into their routines and its impact on their overall performance.

Analyzing the platform's influence on lead conversions, deal velocity, and revenue growth provides a holistic perspective that guides enhanced sales performance through informed decision-making and strategic improvements.

Evaluating integration and scalability ensures that your sales engagement platform harmonizes with your existing technology and is equipped to evolve alongside your growing operations. This assessment guarantees a seamless technological landscape that supports your sales team's efficiency and lays a strong foundation for future expansion.

Assessing user-friendliness and adoption ensures alignment with user needs, sales productivity, and success.

Analyzing platform data ensures accurate insights. It guides decisions, refines tactics, and fosters growth.

Sales team feedback directly enhances platform usability and alignment. Collaboration between users and developers leads to improved sales outcomes.

Spotting platform gaps is proactive. It aligns with needs, empowers decisions, and bolsters market standing.

Comparing the platform with goals turns it into a strategic enabler. It drives impactful decisions and resource use, advancing the organization's vision.

Industry trend consideration is crucial for platform competitiveness, relevance, and innovation. It ensures your platform aligns with industry shifts, empowering your sales team for market excellence.

Based on the evaluation, determine whether adjustments, improvements, or a transition to a new platform are necessary.

Selecting a suitable sales engagement platform transcends operational decisions; it becomes a strategic imperative for sales teams. The choice of platform has the potential to shape an organization's success, influencing strategic decision-making, enhancing operational efficiency, and driving revenue growth. 

Sales engagement tools bridge the gap between sales reps and closed deals, revolutionizing how interactions are managed.

Intrigued by the prospect of boosting your sales team's efficiency and effectiveness? Learn more by getting a demo with a product expert and see how Gong's engagement platform can equip your sales team for success.

Are your sales reps caught up in the whirlwind of manual, time-consuming tasks that limit their productivity? The burdensome administrative work—from updating call notes to crafting follow-up emails—can get in the way of achieving their revenue targets. But there's a way out.

Optimizing your sales workflow offers a structured pathway for your sales team to efficiently usher prospects through the sales funnel. Implementing a structured process with automation enhances efficiency and liberates your team from tedious, administrative overhead, to focus more on revenue-generating endeavors.

In this post, we cover how to create an effective sales workflow and harness the power of automation to supercharge it, empowering your sales team to achieve more in less time.

A sales workflow (or a sales process) is the actions your team needs to take throughout the sales cycle to complete a deal. 

A good sales workflow should be customer-focused, well-defined, replicable, and measurable. It’s not an idealistic plan or a loose suggestion; it is a concrete set of actions that sales reps should follow from when they find a prospect to when they close the deal. 

It should also follow the seven stages of your sales cycle. 

You can think of the sales cycle as a top-level version of a sales workflow. It’s the broad phases that reps move through when converting prospects to buyers.

(Image Source)

It starts with finding buyers and ends with following up after a sale is complete:

Your sales workflow is your sales team's specific actions to achieve these steps and move on to the next one. 

There are many benefits to defining a set of processes for each stage of your sales cycle. Creating a sales workflow will create more productive and profitable reps. A defined sales workflow also presents clear milestones that make it easier for new and existing sales reps to understand what needs to be done at each stage and benchmark their performance. 

It will also give you better visibility into your pipeline and help you to understand the areas your team struggles with. This will allow you to provide more tailored and effective training. It can also present valuable insights to marketing teams and sales managers, allowing them to tailor sales and marketing strategies better and attract the right kind of qualified leads. 

Finally, a sales workflow helps reps to deliver a consistent customer experience. In the same way that customers love the consistent result of McDonald’s easy and repeatable method of cooking fast food, your prospects will love the consistently high-quality experience they get when they speak to your sales reps. It doesn’t matter which sales professional they speak to; they know they will receive the kind of thoughtful and helpful interaction they will receive.

Use the following steps to get started building your own sales workflow.

Before you create a sales workflow from scratch, start by looking at your existing sales processes first. Even if you don’t have a clearly defined strategy, your reps probably carry out similar tasks at each stage of the sales process. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel in some cases. 

Speaking to sales reps can be invaluable here. Ask them what they think works and what doesn’t — paying particular attention to your top performers. Highlight the best practices and then build your new sales workflow around them. 

Finding, contacting, and qualifying prospects are the first three stages of the sales cycle. To move swiftly through these stages, sales reps need a clear understanding of who the people are that they are targeting and why they may be interested in a solution. 

Creating in-depth ICPs and buyer personas is invaluable. 

An ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is a detailed breakdown of the kind of company reps should target. It includes all the information in the example below, including the company’s industry, revenue, employee count, tech stack, and challenges. The more detailed your ICP, the easier it will be for reps to target relevant companies. 

Buyer personas are descriptions of the stakeholders within these target companies that reps should be addressing. Understanding — and writing down — your buyers' pain points is crucial. You need to understand the factors that motivate them to become customers and the challenges your product helps them overcome. These may not be the same for all buyers, but it will give your reps a jumping-off point and make it easier for them to craft an enticing pitch. 

Your sales workflow should be customer-centric. That means it shouldn’t just mirror the sales cycle but also the customer journey — specifically, the actions your prospect takes at each stage of the funnel. 

Examples of these actions include:

By listing out these actions for each stage of the sales cycle, it becomes evident what your reps need to make prospects do. As a result, each part of your sales workflow can be geared towards making that outcome as easy for the prospect to complete as possible. 

Sales tools are vital in helping your reps execute your sales workflow and move prospects quickly through the funnel. A good CRM is a given, but I’d recommend investing in a sales engagement tool or revenue platform that centralizes and automates much of their work.

Take Gong, for instance. Our revenue platform has built-in third-party integrations, meaning everything sales-related can be combined under one roof. Team members can see their workflow at a glance, easily re-read previous conversations with prospects, and build outreach flows that automate large chunks of the sales process.

A sales workflow is always a work in process, and it should change in line with the needs of your prospective customers, your tool stack, and other key elements of the sales process. 

You should also be looking to optimize your sales workflow to make it more effective — but only when you have enough data. 

Start by tracking some of the KPIs listed in the image below. Metrics like quota attainment, deals won, sales cycle length, and sales forecast volume can help you track whether your reps are becoming more efficient and effective.

(Image Source)

If your sales forecast volume is increasing alongside quota attainment, then you know your reps are driving more revenue, for instance. Should your deal win rate drop, on the other hand, then there could be a problem with your workflow. 

Tread carefully when you do come to optimizing your sales workflow, and don’t make multiple changes at once. Track the impact of a single change before optimizing further.

According to Salesforce, 91% of CIOs and IT leaders say that the demand for automation is increasing — especially from sales teams. That’s for a good reason. When sales reps spend just 28% of their time selling, you know something needs to change.

So now you have your sales workflow established, it’s time to take it to the next level by automating your processes. 

Entering and updating into a CRM or other sales tools is an enormous time sink. And there’s no excuse to waste your sales team’s time with these kinds of tasks when several tools can help save a considerable amount of time — about 20% of a sales team’s capacity, according to McKinsey.

For instance, with a tool like Gong, your CRM is automatically updated with critical data from every customer interaction. Reps don’t have to lift a finger, and the data stored in your CRM is more accurate and insightful. 

Most of your reps’ selling time is spent creating and executing outreach cadences. Making cold calls, writing follow-up emails, sending LinkedIn messages, etc. 

Some tasks, like phone calls, can’t be automated just yet, but many other parts of a sales cadence can. For example, sales reps can create templated cadences that every new prospect is automatically entered into. 

Emails and LinkedIn messages can be scheduled and sent automatically — and personalized using templates that draw CRM data to create an engaging and authentic message. 

Even the cadences themselves can be automated and segmented depending on each prospect's actions. If prospects respond to the first email, for instance, no follow-up emails get sent. 

Switching software applications wastes time and can be a significant distraction to sales reps. With sales teams using an average of 10 tools to close deals, it happens a lot.

You may not be able to eliminate tool switching completely, but you can certainly reduce it by integrating as many third-party applications as possible.

For example, connect your VoIP provider with your CRM or sales enablement platform. That way, reps don’t have to leave the CRM to make a call. The same goes for social media profiles, meeting scheduling applications, and any other tool your reps use daily. 

Better still, use one over-arching sales enablement platform that connects with your other tools so that your reps can run everything from one platform. 

A good sales workflow will outline the steps reps should take at each sales cycle stage to convert prospects. But it’s never that simple in reality. 

Every prospect is different after all, and what works for one potential customer may not work for others in your sales pipeline. The solution is to use AI-powered sales tools that offer insights and guidance on how to best move prospects forward. 
These tools are already proving popular. Gartner predicts 75% of organizations will augment their traditional playbooks with AI-guided selling tools by 2025.

They can be incredibly powerful, too. Rather than wasting time and worrying about what move to make next, reps can use a tool like Gong to scan conversations and suggest the best next step. Reps can even use generative AI capabilities to craft a personalized email. 

A sales workflow gives your team a structured process to close every deal. But it’s only when you start to automate that workflow that you unlock the revenue-soaring potential of a robust sales workflow. 

Use Gong to automatically capture and analyze sales data, offload other manual tasks, and generate AI-backed insights that streamline your sales process and make it easy for reps to choose the next best steps. 

Gong won’t just help reps execute your sales workflow faster —  it will empower them to improve it. Request a free demo today to find out more. 

In an increasingly saturated marketplace, now, more than ever before, the race is on to get inside the customer's mind in order to beat your competition to a sale.

Think of industry giants like Apple and Tesla. They’re not just innovating but racing against time and rivals to crack the code of buyer engagement.

Answers to questions like, "What drives a purchase?" or "When will a buyer commit?" is now within reach with conversation intelligence (CI) software.

Conversation intelligence offers cutting-edge technology that analyzes customer conversations and translates words into wisdom, empowering innovators with a deeper understanding of buyer motivations and needs.

In this article, we'll explore how conversation intelligence software can revolutionize your sales strategy, stop revenue leakage, and outperform your competitors every time.

Conversation intelligence uses machine learning and natural language processing to identify keywords and topics in customer interactions. This info is pulled from customer chats and calls to give sales teams insight into buyer wants and needs. Teams can then use this data to inform their processes and improve the customer experience.

Much like the new wave of transcription software taking the business world by storm, conversation intelligence software records and transcribes calls and meetings. CI software takes these transcripts to the next level using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the raw text, drawing out deeper meanings and insights. Natural language processing (NLP) identifies topics, buyer sentiments, objections, and talk patterns in reps and prospects.

Here's how it works:

This AI-driven superpower takes the sales world by storm, providing teams with actionable business insights previously hidden within customer conversations.

TechCrunch says data has surpassed traditional commodities to become the world's most valuable yet vulnerable resource.

This is especially true in the sales world, where understanding buyer behavior, preferences, and trends can be the difference between success and failure.

However, merely amassing data is not the endgame. The real mastery lies in leveraging this data effectively. It's not just about what data you have— it's about how you apply it. At Gong, our conversation intelligence solution goes beyond traditional data points. Along with identifying keywords, competitor mentions, product references, and talk-to-listen ratios, Gong stands out in its ability to discern context. Gong's sophisticated algorithms can comprehend sentiment, capturing the essence of every customer engagement. This depth offers invaluable insights, revolutionizing how businesses approach sales strategies.

The benefits of conversation intelligence are wide-reaching, from offering complete visibility over your sales pipeline to shortening the sales cycle and closing more deals.

And sales teams are catching on. The conversation intelligence software market is currently valued at a massive USD $22.8 billion, with predictions showing it will reach $46.8 billion by 2033.

When leveraged in the right way, conversation intelligence software becomes your most sophisticated research tool. Using data given to you directly by your customers allows your reps to walk in the customer's shoes, understanding how they feel about your products, what works, and what needs improvement.

Gong's CI platform pulls specific sentiments from customer conversations. This information informs your reps and how they approach their sales and can also be fed upwards to revenue leaders and product designers to redesign products and services to address commonly mentioned issues. Gong’s productboard integration allows reps to quickly send these messages interdepartmentally, so valuable feedback isn’t lost. 

Without insight into your customers and their needs, your sales team is flying blind, following up on neverending leads that go cold without understanding why.

CI software takes the guesswork out of sales, allowing you to gain meaningful insights into buyer behaviors and how they respond to your outreach efforts.

Gong's CI platform provides visibility over:

These issues lie at the heart of leading from prospect to purchase. Understanding where the obstacles are allows your team to pivot as necessary— increasing customer satisfaction and ultimately improving conversion rates. With recent studies showing teams using conversation intelligence saw an overall 21% growth in revenue, CI software is a game changer for sales teams.

Understanding customer pain points and preferences allows reps to provide tailored solutions, leading to happier and more satisfied customers.

Here's a scenario: Imagine you're engrossed in a call with a potential client. You're eager to seal the deal, but as they dive deep into the nuances of their specific market — terrain you're unfamiliar with — they use the term 'hyper-specialized vertical reach.' It's Greek to you. Instead of pausing and asking them to clarify, you wrap up the conversation, still in the dark. However, there's a silver lining! Gong's CI software has been eavesdropping, deciphering that jargon, and enlightening you: they're discussing scalability. Voilà! With this newfound knowledge, you can craft your subsequent approach, amplifying your chances of landing that deal.

This ability to understand the buyer's underlying needs is driving a 48% improvement in customer ratings for teams using CI software.

New sales team members can learn from successful calls, gaining insights into effective communication strategies and objection-handling techniques. New market teams can use these insights to flesh out their sales playbook with real-world examples and methodologies that have a proven win rate.

When it comes to getting new hires up to speed, Gong's conversation intelligence tools streamline the sales onboarding process. Sales teams can leverage our platform to empower new team members with a curated onboarding library filled with standout conversations, enabling them to grasp what an effective call sounds like at each sales process stage, all in lightning-fast time.

While the tech industry has quickly adopted AI, NLP, and machine learning-powered applications, other industries are still grappling with their integration. While most sales teams have strong onboarding processes and have implemented a CRM, some still need to catch up regarding data and analytics.

Integrating CI into your sales tech stack means:

40% of companies using AI to improve customer experience report using it to fill their sales pipeline.

Here's how conversation intelligence software can be a game-changer as you move from prospecting to purchase.

Ready to kick off? With Gong's conversation intelligence tool, you can sift through successful interactions to identify those gold-star openers. Maybe touching on certain challenges earns you more email engagements. Ditch those generic templates. Instead, craft your outreach backed by tried-and-true insights.

Jumping into initial chats? Let Gong be your eyes and ears. Gong will work to detect key phrases that speak to buyer concerns, making sure you understand what matters most to them. Say goodbye to generic pitches and hello to personalized engagement. With Gong's insights, you can craft conversations that resonate deeply, building trust and forging stronger connections with every interaction.

Moving things forward? Gong is your secret weapon at this stage, identifying the features that make your prospects sit up and take notice. By tuning into these preferences, you can tailor your follow-ups to ensure you keep the momentum flowing towards the close.

Hit a roadblock? No problem. Gong pinpoints common objections and equips you with tested strategies to navigate them, turning concerns into opportunities and keeping the deal on track

When deciding which conversation intelligence platform is right for your needs, there are several things to consider:

Revenue intelligence and conversation intelligence are like two sides of one coin. Revenue intelligence analyzes all aspects of the sales process that influence revenue, using data from a range of touchpoints to identify sales drivers and efficiencies. Conversation intelligence focuses on analyzing interactions between your reps and customers, extracting insights about dialogue quality, sentiment, and topics discussed. While they analyze slightly different data, both offer unique perspectives to optimize sales strategies.

Chatbots, often found popping up at the bottom of a page asking if you need assistance, are a type of conversation AI. For this reason, conversation intelligence and chatbot are sometimes used interchangeably; however, they aren't the same. Conversation intelligence is primarily designed to analyze customer conversations between sales reps and potential buyers. It focuses on capturing, transcribing, and analyzing live or recorded conversations to provide feedback, training, and strategic insights. On the other hand, chatbots are automated systems designed to interact with users in real time by simulating human conversation. Chatbots actively engage with users based on pre-set scripts and AI-driven responses.

The home stretch! By analyzing the art of the close, Gong provides you with game-changing strategies. Armed with this knowledge, your sales team is primed to seal the deal with confidence and finesse.

Conversation intelligence software allows you to understand what drives customers, so you can fine tune your sales processes and grow your revenue. Ready to learn more? Get a demo of Gong and discover how to beat your competition to the sale every time.

Sales reps are no strangers to performance and productivity-related tools. From CRMs to sales engagement software, these solutions allow reps to do their job better. 

But there’s one technology that has the potential to blow every other piece of software out of the water: predictive AI. With predictive AI, sales teams can understand winning behavior, prioritize leads, and all but ensure success. 

In this article, we’ll explain what predictive AI looks like in a sales environment, why it’s so important to sales teams, and four ways your team can use this technology.

Predictive AI is a form of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics that aims to predict future events and outcomes by analyzing data sets. A predictive AI sales tool will analyze historical data such as sales conversations, buyer behavior, and customer experiences to spot patterns, generate insights, and predict future outcomes that sales reps, managers, and leaders can use to improve their performance. 

We’re not talking about small data sets here. AI models can process mountains of data, a company’s entire history of sales, to gain insights into behaviors and buying habits. 

Here’s an example:

A sales team employs a predictive AI model that analyzes historical sales data to see which prospects in the company’s pipeline are most likely to buy. The sales rep can use the information to prioritize those accounts with a high propensity to buy and increase their close rates. Sales leaders can use that data to forecast future revenue more accurately, and marketing leaders can use that data to target potential buyers with the same characteristics. 

Let’s clear up any potential confusion around predictive AI vs. generative AI before we go further. Yes, they are both forms of artificial intelligence, but they are two distinct approaches. Predictive AI analyzes patterns in historical data sets to predict future events accurately. 

Generative AI doesn’t make predictions. These models (usually natural language processing models) are built to create new and novel content, whether that’s writing, images, or something else entirely. Generative AI tools still need training data, but they aim to create something new that isn’t in existing data sets — rather than predicting how that data may change. 

AI isn’t going to replace your sales reps (more on that below), but it certainly can make them more productive. And that’s a good thing. 

Not nearly enough of a sales rep’s time is spent selling. In fact, over two-thirds of the day is spent on non-selling activities.

But predictive AI can change that. By helping reps to work smarter rather than harder, reps can free up valuable time to do things that an AI can’t — like nurturing prospects or closing deals. In fact, AI is expected to improve employee productivity by as much as 40%.

Predictive AI also eliminates the risk of human error — especially regarding sales planning and forecasting. I’m sure you are a diligent and experienced sales leader, but everyone makes mistakes — except AI, of course. 

Better still, AI models can analyze heaps more data than the hardest-working sales leader, meaning their predictions have a much better chance of being accurate. 

Ultimately, it’s about not getting left behind. Research shows that high-performing sales teams are 1.9 times more likely to use AI than underperformers. Such is the power and accuracy of AI that these teams will begin to outperform their non-AI-adopting counterparts comfortably. 

Given all that, it’s no wonder that the AI market will be worth almost $2 trillion by 2030. 

Several things separate great predictive AI sales tools from their mediocre counterparts. The first is that they are built specifically for sales and revenue teams. Gong’s AI, for instance, is built on billions of high-quality sales interactions and gets even smarter when you feed it your team’s data. While any predictive AI model can be trained on sales data, there’s simply no replacement for a model designed to use sales-specific data. 

The second is that machine learning and complex algorithms understand context rather than keywords. Predictive AI models need to understand the full context of sales conversations rather than cherry-picking keywords that may or may not make sense in isolation to make accurate predictions and generate genuine business insights. 

Finally, good predictive AI models should be customizable. These models are only really useful when they can be tailored to your business’s unique situation and needs, regardless of your size or location. Every sales organization and revenue team is different, and every predictive AI model should be slightly different. 

There are many ways sales and revenue teams can use predictive AI in their day-to-day work. Here are four of the most popular methods:

It’s one thing to understand data like customer behavior and sales conversations — it’s another thing entirely to generate actionable insights from it that you can act on. This is where predictive AI shines. 

By analyzing mountains of sales data, Machine learning models can uncover trends that sales reps or leaders either can’t see quickly enough or won’t be able to spot at all. That could be the specific variables that lead to more closed-won deals or the specific actions that top performers take compared to the rest of your salesforce.

From there, it’s easy to turn these trends into actionable insights that can be used across the customer journey, from improving marketing campaigns to improving rep performance to achieving other business goals.  

Most B2B deals require a lot of back-and-forth communication. Deals can get so complicated that it’s unclear what action a rep should take next. Should they pick up the phone and speak to a stakeholder? Should they send an email? Book a demo? 

When the slightest misstep can jeopardize a deal, choosing the right action is vital. Enter predictive AI that can analyze the sentiment from conversations and combine it with historical data to suggest the best next steps to each rep.

As you can see in the image above, Gong’s AI has analyzed the conversation to understand a potential outcome and suggests the next steps a rep should take. 

The result?

Sales reps spend more time taking the action that moves deals forward and less time worrying about what they should be doing next. 

Predictive AI isn’t limited to suggesting the next best steps for reps to take. In many cases, it can handle much of the heavy lifting, too. Predictive AI software can use historical data analysis to work out which sales messages are most likely to resonate and then craft those messages on behalf of the rep. All they need to do is review the email or LinkedIn message and hit send. 

This kind of boost in productivity is already happening. Statistics show that 61% of workers say that their adoption of AI within the workplace has led to a boost in productivity.

Predictive AI can also help sales leaders empower reps to become more productive. By more accurately analyzing past performance and forecasting future performance, a predictive AI tool can help leaders set sales targets that reps are likely to achieve. 

In some cases, that may mean pushing successful reps beyond what they thought was possible. In others, it may mean reducing targets so that under-performing reps get a taste of success. In either case, reps are happy, motivated, and more likely to go above and beyond to propel the company forward.

The last thing you want your reps to do is waste time on leads that aren’t going to convert. You’d think those leads would be easy to spot, but that’s not always the case. Even if a lead shares all of the characteristics of a recently closed deal, there could be one tiny issue that a rep can’t spot until it’s too late. 

But where sales reps fail, predictive AI can succeed. 

A predictive AI-powered lead scoring system can accurately estimate the likelihood of every prospect in your pipeline converting. It can assign a score to each lead and then prioritize them accordingly, ensuring reps spend as much time as possible speaking to the prospects most likely to convert. 

From a sales manager’s perspective, this use case can also highlight issues with your sales pipeline. For example, maybe a large percentage of prospects in a certain geographic area or from a particular referral source are rated the least likely to convert. A predictive AI can highlight these discrepancies and allow sales leaders to shift tactics accordingly. 

Predictive AI can significantly improve the accuracy of your sales forecasts. AI-powered sales solutions can draw on a much wider range of data if they are integrated with the rest of your sales tech stack and use more sophisticated models to give a much clearer view of your potential future sales. 

It’s not just accuracy where predictive AI supersedes other solutions; it’s also speed. In many cases, forecasts can happen routinely and automatically without any intervention from sales managers. Everything happens in the background, and all sales managers or VPs of sales need to look at a dashboard or a report. 

In turn, this allows sales leaders to make much faster decisions 

There may come a day when salespeople are replaced by AI. But it won’t be any time soon. The truth is that while predictive AI is much better than sales reps at many things — like analyzing historical data and predicting future performance — it pales in comparison to a sales rep when it comes to communicating with other humans. 

The sales profession centers around human-to-human contact. The most valuable parts of the job require reps to understand their customers, anticipate their needs, and solve their problems. Even if an AI can tell a rep what they should do, it will never be able to build the rapport needed to turn a B2B relationship into a deal. 

But that doesn’t mean sales reps should ignore or shun predictive AI. The truth is that the future of sales is one where sales reps and AI models work together hand in hand. Sales reps should take advantage of the many opportunities that AI brings, allowing predictive models to handle as many non-selling activities as possible while they focus on building and nurturing relationships with buyers. 

Revenue teams can use predictive AI to improve almost every part of their operations. From making reps more productive to improving sales forecasts. 

But not just any predictive AI tool will do. When revenue teams want to generate genuinely actionable insights relevant to their business, they turn to Gong.  

Unlike other off-the-shelf AI tools, our technology is purpose-built for revenue teams and can be tailored to your business. Gong boasts over 40 AI models built on sales-specific data sets. That makes it the best way for sales teams to make smarter, faster decisions. 

Ready to learn more? Get a demo with a product expert and see Gong AI in action.

I’m thrilled to share that Gong has been named the only leader in The Forrester Wave™: Conversation Intelligence for B2B Revenue, Q4 2023. Gong received the highest score possible in the current offering and strategy category of any vendor assessed – a recognition that we believe validates Gong’s commitment to AI from day one, and the transformative power of conversation intelligence for revenue leaders. Conversation intelligence is fundamental to Gong’s Revenue Intelligence Platform and its ability to power critical revenue workflows, including deal execution, coaching, sales engagement, forecasting, and strategic initiatives in a single, integrated platform.

Gong’s Position as a Leader

In its report, Forrester evaluated 12 vendors on 25 categories across their current offering, strategy, and market presence. Gong received the highest score possible in 19f of 25 criteria assessed, including the ability to automate users' work, analyze and report on conversations, as well as customer perception of product/marketing. 

Forrester notes Gong’s position as the leader saying, “Gong is the most feature-rich conversation intelligence solution available in the market today.” Gong also received the highest possible scores in the vision, roadmap, innovation, and adoption criteria.

Delivering High-Impact Value to Customers

This recognition didn't happen overnight. It's the result of years of dedication, innovation, and an unwavering commitment to helping revenue teams transform how they operate and achieve their true potential. And it's a testament to our commitment to pushing the boundaries of what's possible in conversation intelligence. For example, we recently released Call Spotlight, a generative AI solution that delivers revenue teams highly relevant, secure, and accurate summaries and next steps from customer interactions.

To date, we've captured over 2.5 billion customer interactions on our platform, transforming them into actionable insights for our customers. These insights are the driving force behind meaningful business outcomes, both for large enterprises and smaller businesses. 

Our journey has been peppered with recognition from renowned research firms. In The Forrester Wave™: Revenue Operations & Intelligence, Q1 2022, Gong was honored as a leader, reinforcing for us our status as a driving force in the Revenue Operations and Intelligence market. We were also named an "Action Platform," the most comprehensive category, in the second annual Gartner® Market Guide for Revenue Intelligence Platforms published earlier this year and recognized in Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Generative AI for B2B Sales”. These recognitions motivate us to maintain our high standards of excellence.

Forrester notes in their recent Wave report that, "Conversation intelligence tools will be the most important AI investment for sales organizations," and we couldn’t agree more. We’re grateful for the opportunity to be the strategic partner our customers choose to power their most critical revenue workflows. I want to thank our team for their work in making this placement possible. We’re excited for what’s next! 

To access the full Forrester report, download it here.