In episode 93 of the Leadership Minute, practitioner analyst and CEO Tony Uphoff discusses Gong, a company that refers to its software as a revenue intelligence platform.
This episode is sponsored by “Selling to the New Executive Buying Committee,” an Acceleration Economy Course designed to help vendors, partners, and buyers understand the shifting sands of how mid-market and enterprise CXOs are making purchase decisions to modernize technology.
Highlights
00:52 — Tony reviews Gong’s history: it launched in 2014 and helped create the category of revenue intelligence. The platform captures customer interactions and analyzes them to provide insights and applies those learnings to determine the next best action that supports the organization’s go-to-market strategy.
01:39 — Now Gong is rolling out new functions based on generative AI. Many are precoded based on what has become a massive customer interaction dataset, so it won’t require prompt engineering. Gong estimates that 77% of sales rep time is taken up in non-sales activities such as crafting follow-ups, filling out internal forms, and reporting on prospects and customers. With generative AI prompts, Gong anticipates, sales reps will significantly reduce the time it takes to manage non-sales activity.
02:16 — The company is also launching a new product called Gong Engage to help sales create and manage sales pipelines. It will use Gong AI and new generative AI features to better understand who is engaging and how best to engage with them through personalized email and other forms of communication.
02:39 — Tony notes he’s a former Gong customer, and its platform worked well, delivering on the revenue intelligence promise and delivering actionable insights that didn’t exist before. Gong helped sales reps understand which actions helped win business.
03:15 — One unexpected benefit in that scenario was that Gong normalized style differences among sales reps. In the past, sales managers hired reps based on the styles they were most comfortable with. But Gong showed there was a broad range of styles that worked well in successful customer engagements.
04:24 — Tony recommends evaluating whether revenue intelligence platforms would benefit your business and your sales team.
Want more tech insights for the top execs? Visit the Leadership channel: