How Gong Helps Babbel’s Multilingual Sales Team Achieve Their Goals

An international approach

Babbel is a consumer-focused language learning app that launched their B2B sales team in 2021. The salesforce is based in Europe, which means colleagues are coming from different countries, cultures, and use different languages to get the job done. They needed a tool that helped them communicate, coach, and get visibility on their deals. That’s where Gong came in. 

“The question was, how do we keep ambitious, but also maintain a culture where people feel supported and like they’re set up for success?” asks David Anderson, Babbel’s Director of B2B Sales, EMEA. “To us, that meant making sure we keep learning at the forefront of everything we do as a team while meeting the targets we have in place.” 

Gong helped this growing sales force scale without losing consistency. With an initial need to help their brand new revenue team onboard and coach across borders, Babbel quickly saw the value that Gong could provide with understanding their pipeline and deals in motion.

Getting a handle on deals

For both account executives and leadership, Gong has proven invaluable when trying to understand the details of Babbel’s deals. On the frontline sales side, handover became not only easier but also more accurate. “The quality of handover you get from just watching an explore call for yourself, rather than relying on the notes, is a world of difference,” says Anderson. That’s because in addition to watching the call, Gong enables you to surface deal information in the same tool without having to stop mid-prep to find what you need. 

Seeing down the pipeline is a crucial functionality, and Gong made that an even smoother process. Lindsay Lydon, Head of B2B Sales, EMEA uses deal boards to get her top-level view—in fact, she starts every day in Gong. “I start with the deal first in Gong and drill down into a risk assessment, then open our CRM. That way, I can very easily go through and pick and understand if something is really at risk,” she says. 

It works for teams across their many countries, too, and Babbel team leads start and end everything in Gong for that reason. “For me, it’s because the UX is really easy and seamless and super visual,” says Lydon. “Supporting teams that are multilingual, I don’t need to speak Italian or German to see what’s going on.”

Coaching across language barriers

Due to their unique use case, Babbel’s sales leadership wanted to ensure that coaching would be effective no matter what first language a rep spoke. “Gong allowed us to manage a multilingual team very easily,” says Lydon. “I could see what my French and Italian speakers were doing, and in real-time.” The combinations of metrics and being able to reference the recorded call meant Lydon could coach despite not speaking the languages. 

The one-on-one coaching piece is so crucial to growing a confident, competent sales force, and being a language learning company themselves, Babbel knew that those kinds of differences shouldn’t hold anyone in an organization back from doing their best work. 

“Even though I couldn’t speak their language, I could provide for them the same kind of support and guidance I would give to someone that’s a native English speaker, all because there was a recording of what they were doing,” says Lydon. Gong helped level the playing field for reps across borders.

For the sales reps themselves, being able to watch calls back also altered the way they worked in a positive way. “They were held accountable, in a way, and it gave them the ability to go back and watch themselves,” says Lydon. “Having the real-time coaching moment and also having them create a better self-awareness of what they were doing—that was now part of our daily behavior.” 

For Lydon, in her leadership position, it made a difference, too. “What it allowed me to do was make some minor changes that were impactful,” she says. “I noticed very quickly things I probably wouldn’t have noticed if we didn’t have Gong.”

Onboarding a remote team organically

In the last year, Babbel went through an intense growth phase and wanted to ensure that everyone they brought onto the sales force got the same level of attention and training that the earliest employees did. Add in the international element, and they needed one platform where teammates could learn organically and consistently.

“We were looking to solve that challenge and also try to work out how to take the knowledge we have stored in our top performers and make sure we share it effectively,” says Anderson. Being able to share those top performers’ calls through Gong, and onboarding employees directly into the tools they’d be using to track their calls and deals was the perfect way to integrate everyone at once. 

“It felt similar to that organic osmosis of learning with your colleagues,” says Anderson. 

Achieving Goals with Gong

Because Babbel is a young, growing company breaking into so many markets with great speed, having a tool like Gong helped them to really focus on what matters. Being able to get full visibility into any deal, in any country, no matter what language reps are speaking has made an elemental difference in Babbel’s approach to sales.

“You just get to know the customer better,” says Anderson. “Why would you not want to do that?”