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Business Financing Leader Funding Circle Credits Gong With More Successful Customer Interactions

Hannah Hapin — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 20:21:28 +0000

Business Financing Leader Funding Circle Credits Gong With More Successful Customer Interactions Coaching Strategic Initiatives Enterprise Global Business Financing The challenge Funding Circle wanted a platform that would identify key trends and risks inside its customer interactions. They also wanted to be able to test new initiatives and coach employees on best practices so they could guarantee quality as well as compliance with internal policies and procedures. The outcome Using the Gong platform’s advanced AI capabilities, Funding Circle vastly improved the quality of its coaching and its understanding of market trends. It also transformed its business efficiency and compliance by using faster and more effective testing and monitoring. HEadquarters London, England founded 2010 company size 1000+ Industry Business Financing In a win for business financing leaders everywhere, Funding Circle got more than they bargained for from Gong. They’re ready to share how they did it. Founded in 2010, Funding Circle originally operated as a peer-to-peer marketplace. It’s now one of the largest online platforms for small business loans in the world, having helped 130,000+ businesses borrow more than £14.5 B (~$18B USD). Peter Lindeman, Head of Quality Assurance and Control at Funding Circle, runs a team that’s responsible for ensuring that customers are treated fairly and in compliance with the company’s agreed policies, procedures, and regulatory requirements. When he first approached Gong, his focus was on improving the quality of customer calls and compliance using coaching. He wanted managers to have advanced visibility into customer interactions so they could improve their quality assurance (QA), compliance, and messaging initiatives through coaching. Gong’s Revenue Intelligence Platform was a perfect fit for the needs of this highly regulated, global, business financing powerhouse. A focus on QA, coaching, and customer insights leads to real-time agility and understanding the daily challenges our customers face. Funding Circle had tried other solutions, but it was hard to customize and update their tracking features in line with the company’s real-time requirements. Business financing is subject to the whims of global market systems that can turn quickly based on political and world events. Lindeman needed a solution that would keep his team one step ahead of the market. Gong was the right solution. Gong’s versatile keyword trackers were a step in the right direction. Funding Circle now monitors keywords in real time inside customer interactions, and updates those trackers with ease in just a few clicks. This enables Funding Circle managers to spot emerging market trends as they happen and tailor their coaching accordingly. Funding Circle has gone even further by using Gong’s proprietary AI-powered Smart Trackers. This allows them to track key concepts, no matter how they’re phrased, and enables them to track emerging trends and gain a fuller understanding of the daily challenges their customers face, and respond accordingly. With Gong’s insights, managers can easily recognize the best practices happening on calls — like behaviors or talk tracks — and replicate them across a team. They’re also able to track whether agents are in compliance with the policies and procedures that guide customer interactions in business finance. These steps have been major wins for quality improvement and real-time agility on Funding Circle’s frontline teams. New message testing is faster and more effective Once they realized the extent of Gong’s AI-backed capabilities, Funding Circle incorporated Gong more deeply into their monitoring and testing (M&T) program. This allows them to make well-informed decisions from day one with respect to new messaging roll outs. They can also ensure that regulatory requirements, policies, procedures, and best practices are followed. Relying on keyword trackers enables the team to take on increased levels of M&T. “We saw Gong’s larger value when we realized we could use the platform for coaching and for monitoring and testing our latest test scripts,” said Peter Lindeman. The team now runs faster testing for new talk tracks because the tracking and evaluation functions are automated in Gong. It takes fewer resources to run higher-quality testing, saving the company both time and money. Gong also helps the team ensure that Funding Circle’s new messaging initiatives are agile, and that compliance on new selling scripts is monitored. (The latter is a critical component of rollouts in business finance, as well as many other heavily regulated sectors.) As Lindeman said, “Having increasingly automated M&T processes means we’re able to pick up a wider scope of testing and highlight emerging areas of risk and, furthermore, with less resource” Gong’s insights enable everyone with a hand in the rollout to pivot quickly and ensure its success. Visibility into market trends enables customer-friendly responses Lindeman noted that one of Funding Circle’s enduring challenges (as with other businesses) was a lack of clear visibility into key market trends and emerging risks from specifically, an overall customer’s perspective. With Gong’s advanced visibility, Lindeman’s team now analyzes customer interactions at scale to highlight key market trends and emerging risks it might otherwise miss. For example, they identify the micro- and macro-economic obstacles that borrowers regularly mention. The company periodically reviews this interaction-based data as part of its customer insights reporting (CIR). It’s incredibly useful in increasing the company’s responsiveness to changing market dynamics, and lets them make smart business decisions that address their customers’ stated needs. Gong bankrolls success across the global company Funding Circle’s Quality Assurance and Control team now use Gong’s data and analytical capabilities to keep key stakeholders within the business up to date on insights into customer interactions. This allows the teams to remain agile in the face of market trends and ensure the top-shelf quality their customers expect during interactions with a global business financing leader. Lindeman’s team regularly learns about new ways to use Gong’s AI-backed capabilities to extract more information from their customer interactions. Where they once needed to improve the quality of their calls, compliance, and coaching, they are now positioned to tackle broader market issues affecting the business. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one How Zenefits increased their win rate using Gong Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Software Drift uses Gong’s goldmine of data to increase sales productivity Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Software Khoros Keeps Managers and CSMs Accountable to Each Other With Gong Small Business Coaching Strategic Initiatives North America Software

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Learning and transforming: How Gong helps Udemy make critical revenue decisions

Hannah Hapin — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 15:12:53 +0000

Learning and transforming: How Gong helps Udemy make critical revenue decisions Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Enterprise Global Education The challenge Prior to Gong, Udemy was faced with the difficulty of trying to form, understand, and track its strategic initiatives without any formalized system in place. The outcome When Udemy implemented Gong, it instantly helped the team make informed decisions about strategic initiatives, so they could link enablement projects to their business goals. Headquarters San Francisco, CA Founded 2010 employees 5000+ industry Education 44+ million. Per day. That’s the number of learners Udemy serves daily as the world’s largest online learning marketplace. Eric Stoddard, Head of Global Sales and Customer Success Enablement at Udemy, is tasked with driving change through informed decision making, using a programmatic approach. The biggest historical challenge? Understanding whether his team’s strategic initiatives actually drive the business forward and create change, as intended. “Before we had Gong, that was tricky to measure with confidence.” When Udemy implemented Gong, it instantly helped the team make informed decisions about strategic initiatives, so they could link enablement projects to their business goals. Nearly overnight, Eric and his team gained confidence in their initiatives. Most companies have a hard time assessing whether their strategic initiatives are working. Here’s how Udemy figured it out… Move from uncertainty to total clarity No matter the organization, new hires need to get up to speed as quickly as possible. The faster they learn the product, the sales methodology, and best practices, the faster they generate revenue. Before using Gong, Udemy’s new reps learned by listening to live customer conversations while sitting next to a veteran … in a cubicle. Hours (and hours) evaporated without an opportunity to really show them how the best performers talk to customers, and what customers say across a sales cycle, at scale. Back then, Udemy also struggled to understand what was happening during customer conversations. Too often, the “squeaky wheel got the grease.” “We used to focus our resources on whoever screamed the loudest, not necessarily what the data showed.” Gong changed that. It gives Eric the insights he needs to train his new reps efficiently and monitor their selling skills, as well as gain insights into which customers really needed attention. “I don’t know how I used to do my job before Gong,” shared Eric. “Gong brings deep customer understanding, clarity, and insight into my world.” Turn instant visibility into revenue growth with Gong’s AI Today, Eric knows which reps struggle to get up to speed, and which deals are actually a priority. He spends his limited resources on the right reps and the right customers. That’s all thanks to Gong. The platform’s AI allows Eric to dive deeper into understanding what his new hires learn and the value they provide to customers. “If they’re not helping our customers drive change within their businesses, we pivot,” says Eric. Gong captures and harnesses the voice of the customer and gives Udemy insights into trends that happen at an account level. “What separates Gong are the insights I can grab from customer interactions at scale. Our teams can turn those insights into actions that improve pipeline management, drive successful outcomes for our key initiatives, and help us make better revenue decisions.” Gong has the largest data set of customer interactions in the industry. Gong’s AI engine as analyzed over 1 billion customer calls and tens of billions of emails, bringing value to the data by understanding what is really happening within customer interactions and identifying revenue risks and opportunities with unrivaled accuracy and relevance.. Eric particularly loves Smart Trackers which allow customers like him to quickly and easily train Gong’s AI to identify concepts and topics specific to their business. Smart trackers mean Udemy can take immediate action as soon as Gong surfaces trends. Those actions lead to stronger revenue growth. Gong’s “Initiative” board is also a favorite of Eric’s. “If you’re not taking advantage of this board, you’re really missing out.” The Initiative board gives Eric instant visibility into how all his initiatives are being adopted. He can see who participates in an initiative — and who doesn’t — by team. That also means he spots trends over time. All these capabilities enable Eric and his team to assess and adjust their coaching and training strategies… and inevitably, win more often. Tip: Leadership can subscribe to Deal Boards to get a weekly update email, rather than rely upon Eric for their enablement data. They can quickly see how initiatives stack up. Udemy hits a winning streak with Gong Gong has helped Eric’s team — and Udemy in general — make great strides in several aspects of its revenue operation: Deal execution and forecasting: Managing your pipeline is no easy task. Gong gives Udemy insights about each deal by immediately (and automatically) surfacing risks in Deal Boards using proprietary & patented AI models. Managers use those Deal Boards to understand relevant risks so they keep deals on track and have more accurate forecasts each quarter. Sales productivity: Gong has become Udemy’s central repository for new skills training. Eric makes sure his new hires listen to a curated set of calls so they get exposure to different sales-related approaches that work. From there, the new hires can take what they heard from top-performing reps and make it their own. Business alignment: Gong has helped Udemy align its sales, marketing, and enablement motions. “We now operate as one cohesive team,” boasts Eric. In particular, it can be challenging to understand what the competition’s up to and where they show up. Gong data highlights this competitive information for managers when it happens on calls, and also allows sales reps to pressure test competitive messaging. Smart guidance: With Gong, managers can quickly and efficiently coach and provide feedback on many calls … not just the ones they attend live. “We fill out scorecards to track whether a rep is progressing on a particular skill,” said Eric. Gong has been a powerful AI platform to elevate coaching within the organization. A new (and sane) way to operate That’s a pretty exhaustive list, but it’s not the end of changes Gong has brought to Udemy. Sharing lessons learned and asking for feedback; picking up tactics you may not have thought of; leveraging Gong’s call analysis and metrics to improve a skill. There’s a constant (and virtuous!) cycle for all of it now happening at Udemy. Everyone wins. Eric and his managers, reps, the rest of the revenue team, leadership, and Udemy customers. Understandably, Eric could not be happier. “I truly feel those who don’t leverage technology like Gong will be left behind. Gong brings us sanity because we can see the data behind our actions. Gong is confidence. Gong is insight. Gong is the ability to truly understand what’s going on inside customer conversations.” Don’t get left behind. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one BlueCat Empowers Their Field Team to Understand Their Pipeline Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Business Services How monday.com used Gong to align revenue teams around customers Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Global Software Drift uses Gong’s goldmine of data to increase sales productivity Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Software

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Hear.com improves high volume sales call effectiveness with Gong

Hannah Hapin — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 08:06:31 +0000

Hear.com improves high volume sales call effectiveness with Gong Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Enterprise Global Hospitals & Physicians Clinics The challenge As Hear.com was growing quickly, they wanted to have a greater understanding about what their sales team was really talking about and the ability to analyze their customer interactions. The outcome With Gong, Hear.com has improved their coaching and has “gotten smarter” about how they approach their sales calls. Download PDF Learn More Headquarters Coral Gables, FL Founded 2012 Employees 1,200 Website www.hear.com Industry Medical Technology Hear.com is the fastest-growing hearing care company globally. They are driven by their belief that every person should hear well to live well. But aside from hearing, Hear.com wanted to improve their sales team’s listening. With Gong, their sales leadership is able to better listen and analyze their team’s calls to look for ways to improve coaching and the way the team approaches the market. Veit Albert, the VP of Sales at Hear.com says, “If you want to get smarter about what your sales reps are saying on the phone — how you want to improve — you need Gong to get these insights.” Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one Measure the Immeasurable: Remove the Hypothetical and Increase Transparency in Your Sales Process Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Global Software Gong Lets HubSpot Sales Reps “Go Back and Watch the Game Tapes” Enterprise Coaching Strategic Initiatives Global Software How Maggie Hott of Webflow uses Gong for Work-Life Balance Small Business Coaching North America Software

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Sky’s the limit: How corporate traveler uses Gong to refine their customer journey

Hannah Hapin — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 07:32:17 +0000

Sky’s the limit: How corporate traveler uses Gong to refine their customer journey Strategic Initiatives Enterprise Global Hospitality 20% Increase in sales efficiency 2x Amount of calls reviewed The challenge Customers are handed over not once, but twice in Corporate Traveler’s workflow, and a lot of crucial information was previously lost in that process. Moving clients between agents meant that customers often had to repeat their stories, and agents had less time for up-selling or cross-selling. The outcome Implementing Gong has made Corporate Traveler’s customer experience seamless. With visibility into all previously recorded calls, frontline reps can now access relevant customer interactions. That means they can quickly root out and analyze pain points to provide a greatly improved customer experience. It has also fundamentally improved the relationship between Corporate Traveler’s CS team and other areas of the company. Gong has helped to contribute to a 20% increase in sales efficiency. Watch the video Headquarters New York, NY Founded 1993 Company size 201-500 Industry Travel Agencies & Services It’s vital that the customer is heard and not just talked to. We realized that by listening better and providing smooth customer handoffs, we’d be able to increase adoption and retention rates among our customer base. Ben Hobbs VP of Customer Success @ Corporate Traveler Kick off customer success with the customer Corporate Traveler and it’s online booking platform, melon, are 100% focused on customer experiences. From finding great deals to integrating with corporate expense systems, the customer journey is — literally — their focus. Despite that (and a great tech stack on the sales team’s side), the CS team worked mostly in Excel. (Don’t worry, there are great solutions ahead.) Corporate Traveler realized that in order to truly provide a customer experience worth repeating, the team needed a platform that would help them provide five-star service. That’s when they implemented Gong. Perfect your customer onboarding The Corporate Traveler team initially used Gong to improve the customer onboarding process, leveraging it to create a single source of truth, and help CSMs build rapport with customers. At the time, the customer onboarding process was brand new and there was a lack of transparency in the process for other teams and agents. As a result, it was hard to train new hires with messaging that was aligned. “Gong really helped us with this venture by giving us visibility into the team’s performance and potential efficiencies in the process, with an eye to increasing customer satisfaction scores,” says Ben. Another important aspect of retaining customers is providing a single source of truth on the history of their interactions with the company. Selective memory and a lack of key information can contribute to miscommunication — an issue the Gong platform has nearly eliminated. “Gong enables smoother handovers from sales to CS, and gives us the ability to refer back to the sales process so we can validate what was agreed upon by both parties,” says Ben. That enables near-immediate validation, and also allows the customer onboarding team to highlight areas of opportunity where the sales team can tighten their talk tracks. It also means the customer onboarding team can easily refer back to earlier calls so customers don’t waste time repeating themselves. Given the importance of rapport in evolving customer relationships, listening carefully to customers during calls is key. Using Gong means that CSMs don’t have to take notes. They can be more engaged with customers, focusing on listening and learning what’s really important to customers. Create seamless handovers As part of improving the overall customer journey, Corporate Traveler analyzed how its staff complete handovers. Customers experience not one, but two handovers in their journey — the first, from sales to customer onboarding, then another from onboarding to a permanent CSM. Without the right tools in place, multiple transitions meant opportunities for gaps in knowledge and information loss. “Gong’s transcribing, keyword search, and categorization have been essential to creating a smooth handover process, so the customer never has to repeat their story,” says Oli Richardson, Corporate Traveler’s Senior Director of Customer Success. In trying to foster longer-lasting, more harmonious relationships, information must be shared across teams at all points in the process. When leaders and team members are both able to review calls and gauge customer reactions, the team as a whole can better tailor and align their approaches. “Using Gong showed us where there were opportunities to really take customer relationships beyond the initial expectations set by sales and our customer onboarding team,” says Oli. Focus on the voice of the customer Better customer experiences should be driven by the voice of the customer. This means using tools that make listening to that voice easier. “With recorded and transcribed calls, we can search keywords or overall sentiment using Gong ‘trackers’ that we’ve set up. Now that we have Gong, changes to our process are guided by the actual voice of our customer,” says Oli. “Hearing a recording of their feedback — in their own voice — has been so important.” So much can be gleaned from direct conversations with customers. Capturing their ideas and sentiments in one place means being able to problem solve faster and more effectively. “We can now, with ease, get this information into the hands of the right people by tagging relevant comments. That helps us expedite any actions or development that’s required as a result of customer feedback.” Corporate Traveler has also started using call statistics best practices, provided by Gong. In particular, they’re paying attention to talk ratios. That’s the percentage of the call for which a team member (versus a customer) speaks. The best practice recommendation for Corporate Traveler is that agents speak no more than 65% of the time, which reinforces a customer-centric approach. When agents and leaders can see those stats visualized, it’s easier to see that an improvement is needed and adjust accordingly. Enable peer-to-peer learning With everyone working towards the same CS goals, sharing knowledge became a key propellant of growth. “Using talk tracks from our most successful CSMs’ calls and making them available to our whole team, on-demand, was a huge part of improving everyone’s product talk tracks, renewal language, and issue resolution,” says Oli. When CSMs are able to share knowledge with ease, every agent has the information they need to perform as well as the best reps. This kind of instruction isn’t just beneficial between team members, it also connects the CS team to the rest of the business. “Gong allows us to more easily share what we’ve learned with other teams. It removed the previous barriers to access,” says Oli. “This has really improved the relationships between CS and other teams, and allowed us to make our talk tracks even more accurate.” Now that 100% of Corporate Traveler’s CSMs use Gong, the average number of calls they review each month has more than doubled. What’s more, every lesson learned can easily be shared with others to keep the team(s) aligned. Since adopting Gong, instead of working on customer service after implementing a new product or process, the CS team now integrates what they’ve learned about the customer journey earlier on. The CS team has been able to increase the efficiency of the sales team by 20%, thanks in part to the alignment Gong has enabled. Today, Corporate Traveler’s reps do more than provide support — they provide deep value to customers on every journey. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one Sky’s the limit: How corporate traveler uses Gong to refine their customer journey Enterprise Strategic Initiatives Global Hospitality How Stansberry Research finally got the info it needed (Hint: Gong) Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Media & Internet Pendo Implements Methodologies to Improve Win Rates Using Gong Small Business Coaching Strategic Initiatives North America Software

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How monday.com used Gong to align revenue teams around customers

Hannah Hapin — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 02:20:24 +0000

How monday.com used Gong to align revenue teams around customers Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Small Business Global Software The challenge monday.com wanted to align its sales reps and go-to-market teams on the company’s new brand messaging. It also used the launch to promote more effective pipeline reviews and one-on-ones, assess whether the new messaging landed well in the market, and uplevel client partnership. The outcome With the help of Gong, the Sales Enablement team tracked internal adoption and saw areas where reps needed more support. Sales managers were more effective than ever in their pipeline reviews and one-on-ones, and reps were totally on board with the new approach to training and coaching. Customer Success got in on the action, creating more outstanding Executive Business Reviews than ever before. In short, monday.com used Gong to make this implementation a rousing success. Download PDF Headquarters Tel Aviv, Israel Founded February 2012 Company Size 600+ Industry Work management software Gong is a team unifier. The revenue intelligence platform empowers many teams and individuals within a sales organization to come together and win as one team. It provides them with transparency, insights, and actionable next steps at every stage of the customer journey. Monday.com is SaaS work management software that makes it easy to build, run, and scale workflows on a single platform. The company has enjoyed massive growth in recent years thanks to its agility and ability to work as a genuinely cross-functional organization. Gong helped monday.com accelerate growth by providing valuable insights across several of its teams. “I cannot say enough about the undeniable value that Gong adds not only to my role in Sales Enablement, but to our entire client-facing organization as well,” shared Dave Seugling, Director of Global Sales Enablement at monday.com. Gong helped align the entire GTM team at monday.com. Dave used Gong to successfully implement a new GTM strategy, including updated messaging. Jason Miller, Director of Sales in North America, used Gong to drive more effective pipeline reviews and one-on-ones. And Cassie Vaughn, the Team Manager for Enterprise Success, exceeded her goal of upleveling client partnerships through more efficient Executive Business Reviews (EBRs). Since implementing Gong, monday.com has: Moved away from assumptions and towards a reality-based world Recognized the power of autonomous insights to guide its teams Enabled truly cross-functional collaboration and alignment Read on to learn how monday.com leveraged Gong across its organization to boost alignment and accelerate the growth of its business, specifically its sales enablement, sales, and customer success teams. How sales enablement measures GTM messaging According to a recent Harvard Business Review study, people forget 87% of what they learn in training sessions after about 30 days. That means your real challenge isn’t launching a new initiative or making people aware of the behaviors that need to change. That’s the (relatively) easy part. Rather, the hard part is everything that comes after the training and launch, like getting them to adopt and maintain those new behaviors. monday.com recently launched new GTM messaging as it began serving as a Work Operating System (Work OS) for hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. This new GTM messaging needed to be rolled out across its sales team, its customer success team, and all the remaining employees at monday.com — no small task. That’s when monday.com leaned heavily into Gong. As monday.com’s Director of Global Sales Enablement, Dave helped execute this initiative. He led the sales team’s roll out of the new org-wide messaging. Per Dave, “monday.com is a product that can essentially do anything work-related, but we were struggling to communicate that to our prospects effectively.” The new Work OS messaging was going to be a game-changer, but our team still needed to successfully train, evaluate, and certify the entire organization on the new messaging. Plus, they needed to be sure the new messaging landed as intended, and was adopted by prospects, customers, and the market at large. Dave and his team used Gong to track the effectiveness of this GTM initiative, which included 100+ reps across the company, as well as other employees. Gong’s platform helped Dave and his team easily understand which reps used the messaging and which ones needed more guidance. They used Gong trackers to see whether reps used keywords in customer conversations. Once a salesperson fully grasped the new messaging, monday.com changed that rep’s status to “GRADUATED” on a monday.com board. Transparency was essential and helpful, as everyone knew the expectations and where they stood. Gong’s trackers didn’t stop with the new messaging. The monday.com team also set up trackers for other keywords reps used on calls, specifically flagging “filler words” … like, awesome, um, and great. The trackers uncovered which reps used filler words and how often. The goal was to minimize their use and focus instead on language that moves deals forward. “Trackers have been a lifesaver,” said Dave. “The ability to jump to a specific section in a call is super-efficient … a big time-saver! Another positive outcome of this initiative was the increase in peer-to-peer coaching. Reps who “graduated” with a full grasp of the new GTM messaging got to help out reps who were struggling. Students became teachers, which freed up more time for sales leaders, who could let coaching happen more independently on the team. How sales leaders drive effective pipeline reviews and one-on-ones As the Director of Sales in North America, Jason Miller regularly thinks about sales process improvements. The main question is how he can get his team to overachieve month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year. Jason was interested in creating real procedural change, specifically, driving more effective pipeline reviews and one-on-ones. He had three goals: Ensure that his team was less reliant on salesforce.com field data and opinion-based sales rep input Improve insights for managers so they could drive better conversations using improved coaching Create more actionable outcomes in one-on-ones Gong has also helped Jason “answer the whys” for his team. That means making sure reps know why managers coach them on specific things. Gong’s Deal Drivers, for example, are notifications that show him where reps have deficiencies in their process. Their managers can jump in and help the reps course correct immediately using data to clarify the issue. Jason sees real value in understanding three key data points: The percentage of calls that don’t have a next step on the calendar Which opportunities haven’t had any activity in a certain number of days The instances when reps are ghosted, have single-threaded conversations, don’t get to power, or are stalled in a specific stage, etc. Without Gong, getting this data can be a time-consuming process. Sometimes it involves reps uploading data into salesforce.com, or having managers search the data manually, or — worst of all — simply guessing at what’s really happening after staring at endless numbers. “Gong bubbles issues to the top, doing the automated work for us,” says Jason. “This allows monday.com to focus dedicated energy on helping reps improve. Our managers can add immediate value.” Gong’s platform also helps monday.com reps and managers focus on being more aligned. Jason knows Gong’s magic is working because reps can quickly and easily tell him the area(s) they need to focus on. “They recognize their areas for improvement thanks to Gong’s data and insights. This alignment on what needs fixing helps drive behavioral change across the entire team.” Furthermore, Jason sees feedback in Gong call recordings as instrumental to helping reps develop. “Sales trainings where I included Gong call snippets — from actual calls — have been far and away the most impactful sessions.” “Hearing a real buyer talk is way more meaningful than a sales manager telling a salesperson about the same thing. The more a rep hears someone in their seat doing something correctly, the more effective it is,” shares Jason. Jason’s key takeaway is this: Don’t boil the ocean. He highly recommends focusing on one — maximum two — key metrics until they’re fully dealt with. Jason also had this to say about Gong: “When I hear Gong, I generally think of call recordings. That’s where Gong laid its roots, where a lot of people use it, and why a lot of people buy it. But it’s become so much more than that for us. As Gong moves more deeply into revenue intelligence, there’s a lot more data it now derives. The data comes from many different places, as Gong is plugged into our CRM, our Zoom, our emails, and our calendars. So it picks up a lot of automated data that Salesforce can’t or data that we used to rely on the reps putting in.” How customer success uplevels client partnerships Before 2021, the customer success (CS) team supported the product and helped train customers for monday.com. While those goals haven’t changed, they have certainly evolved. “We needed to pivot to upleveling our conversations with customers. We’re now more consultative and able to engage in true partnerships,” said Cassie Vaughn, Team Manager, Enterprise Success at monday.com. The monday.com CS team aimed to uplevel client partnerships through Executive Business Reviews (EBRs). However, they faced a huge challenge: CS team members had different levels of experience, especially when it came to EBRs. As a result, there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to help them reach their goals. “We knew it was essential to take a data-driven approach to our EBRs,” shared Cassie. It was also essential to treat this as a cross-functional initiative and work with the Sales team and account managers. The CS team needed to be aligned with other teams in the monday.com organization. “Gong was the data-driven partner we needed to make this cross-team collaboration happen.” Cassie and the CS team set some ambitious goals: Conduct 4 EBRs per CSM, per quarter Initiate bi-monthly peer review sessions with the Sales team CS launched new monday.com dashboards, presentation templates, and talk tracks, using Gong to provide data and insights on usage and effectiveness. It worked. In Q3 of 2021, monday.com’s CS team completed an astounding 100+ EBRs. Gong helped make this happen, thanks in part to how easy it is to share lessons learned. “Reps were able to learn from their peers. They shared the highs and lows, what worked and what didn’t work, and that was extremely valuable,” said Cassie. In addition, the team was able to review Gong calls and truly dissect each EBR from start to finish, looking for key indicators of what a compelling call looked and sounded like. Even better, the reviews weren’t limited to the CS team. Cross-functional teams listened to calls, left comments, collaborated, and ultimately helped everyone level up in a very organic and natural way. Gong enabled real-time coaching through peer-to-peer comments and scorecards that managers used. These Gong scorecards comprised five to seven focus areas that helped management consistently track messaging as well as their own coaching. “The scorecards made us better coaches,” said Cassie. “Over time, we moved all our scorecards from private to public, providing full visibility and creating truly collaborative opportunities.” Gong makes life easier at monday.com, one insight at a time Products and brands evolve. (Read about Gong’s recent rebrand here!) When the team at monday.com underwent a global revamp of their mission and brand, they got things right because they used Gong and relied on data to see them through. Gong unlocks reality to help companies and their reps reach their full potential. Today, monday.com still relies on data to power its initiatives and improve its reps through ongoing coaching efforts. As Cassie said, “I’m not one to publicly rave about business products I love, but I can truly say the one piece of tech that has made life so much better is Gong.” (We swear we didn’t put her up to it.) You got it, Cassie. Gong has your back with unstoppable revenue intelligence. We’re delighted to know it’s changed your world, and can’t wait to see where it takes your teams next! Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one How Gong Became Diligent’s MVP by Increasing Close Rates by 7.4% Enterprise Coaching Strategic Initiatives Europe/Middle East/Africa North America Software All Paths Lead to Retention: How Gong “Forever Changed” Sendoso’s Customer Experience Team Small Business Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Software How Tinuiti Used Gong to Close 50% More Recurring Revenue from Cross-selling Small Business Coaching Strategic Initiatives North America Software

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Gong for BDRs: How Aircall boosted qualified pipeline by 35% in EMEA

Hannah Hapin — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 01:05:16 +0000

Gong for BDRs: How Aircall boosted qualified pipeline by 35% in EMEA Coaching Deal Execution Small Business Global Business Services 35% increase in qualified pipeline The challenge Aircall’s EMEA team was working in the dark. The team was operating off of reps’ and managers’ hypotheticals and role-play calls, not reality. They needed a way to cut through the opinions and get to the data. The outcome By implementing Gong into their UK&I office, Aircall was able to have immediate access to what was really happening in their calls and pipeline. With this new data backed knowledge, the EMEA team was able to improve their onboarding and coaching while positively impacting the rest of their org. Watch the video Headquarters New York, NY Founded 2014 Company Size 201-500 Industry Telecommunications Pre-Gong, nothing seemed clear. No analysis we did compared to actually being on the phone trying to get better. With Gong, everything is a real-world example and a more complete way of learning and improving. Jack Obertelli BDR Manager UK&I “A phone can (and should) do more than make calls.” That’s from Jack Obertelli of Aircall, a global, cloud-based call centre and phone system solution that integrates with almost any business tool. It interacts with CRM, help desk, and even productivity tools like Slack. As Aircall puts it, the phone can live in — and between — everything you do. By design, Aircall empowers every professional to have richer conversations, thanks to its integrations and ease of use. Jack credits Gong with helping him move from being a Business Development Rep (BDR) to his current role of BDR Manager UK&I. His first job out of university was in a BDR role. “It was very phone-intensive,” he said. “The training was very hands-on. There was no such thing as call transcripts. Call recordings? Not a chance. Lots of learning on the job.” When Jack joined Aircall, Gong was only used by the company’s US-based team, so Jack was still living in a sales world that was dominated by reps’ and managers’ hypotheticals and role-play calls, not reality. Everything changed for the team once Gong came to the UK&I office. “We knew about Gong and were excited to start using it to help our team. As soon as our office got its hands on Gong, we dove right in.” Led by their boss, Sean Hayes (Director of Business Development, EMEA) and supported by Jack’s colleague, Nura Al-Kital (Team Lead BDR, Northern Europe), the Aircall EMEA BDR team was all in. And the results speak for themselves: Since implementing Gong, Aircall has realised a 35% increase in qualified pipeline in EMEA. Aircall also uses Gong for coaching and onboarding, and to help guide its strategic initiatives. How Gong improves Aircall’s coaching and onboarding You know them as the two tenets of any thriving sales organisation. And when they’re executed effectively and efficiently (and backed by data), coaching and onboarding can take a sales team from good to off-the-charts. They save time, lower costs, and ultimately help close more deals faster. Gong for coaching Gong is the ultimate sales coaching platform, empowering teams to “clone their A-players” and transform the entire team into superstars. It’s sales coaching with rocket fuel. Sean Hayes, Aircall’s Director of Business Development, EMEA, loves that Gong just works. It’s now been built into Aircall’s workflow and process. Sean uses Gong in every one of his weekly 1:1 meetings. He’s found a ton of value in the patience metrics in particular. They put a focus on ”talk less and listen/pause/breathe more.” “Generally speaking,” says Sean, “sales reps overestimate their ability to be patient on the phone with buyers. And most BDRs would say they’re good at this skill.” Without Gong, Sean listens to calls and gives them a general rating like “good” or “room for improvement” on the BDRs’ patience skills. But that’s only a feeling. It’s not backed by data. If you have no means of measurement, you have no control. And “no control” isn’t exactly a stellar motto for an effective sales team! Gong gives BDRs and their managers the ability to track and report on call effectiveness, with features like patience scores. Sean had an early win with Gong, when he used it to show a BDR who was “not too keen on patience” that his impatience score (0.2) was tied to his close rates. With Gong’s data insights, this BDR moved his patience score up to 1.4 — a huge improvement. “Every time I go into Gong and see that he’s maintained his patience score,” shares Sean, “I smile. This would not have been possible without Gong.” Jack recalls his “Gong is amazing” moment while working as a BDR at Aircall. It came when he began reviewing recorded demos from top performers. Suddenly, he was able to learn from the best-of-the-best BDRs. “I began to truly understand what top reps were saying and how they were saying it. I gleaned best practices and learned which talk tracks moved deals through the pipeline.” Put another way, Jack began to take ownership of his own skills improvement in sales (self-coaching). He proactively sought out Gong recordings and listened to them like they were game tape, to learn from the top sales professionals. (Did it help propel him into a management role? No doubt.) Since moving into his new role, Jack listens to his reps’ Gong calls to uncovers critical interactions (the good and the not-so-good) that ultimately turn into best practices and coachable moments. “With Gong,” says Jack, “it’s just so easy to access and send a link to a sales rep.” Jack loves being able to comment on calls and rate each call using Gong’s Scorecards. Time-stamped comments that reps leave in the call recordings help Aircall managers cut through the noise and “go straight to what is relevant.” Today, trying to run a coaching session without Gong is, well … not so easy. The team just can’t go back to analysing deals without data. Comments provide them with a blueprint and set the agenda for every call review. Everyone on the team adds comments (praise and constructive criticism) to a pre-selected call. Ultimately, these comments prompt lessons that lift up the entire team. The BDRs love using Gong to kick-start manager-led coaching. They now send calls to Nura Al-Kital, their Team Lead, and ask for feedback at specific points in the call. Paired with Nura’s proactive efforts (like searching out best-practice calls to share with reps), the full spectrum of ‘Gong for Coaching’ is covered. “As our team has grown, I’ve relied heavily on the activity feed to track our reps’ performance — it’s super-easy.” Gong for onboarding The Gong for onboarding platform also means there’s no more call shadowing. Instead, Gong gives new hires a Call Library of curated recordings they can use to onboard faster. Before Aircall implemented Gong, teams relied heavily on a “bank of recorded calls.” While this was more efficient than trying to find time on a rep’s calendar to shadow calls (and hoping for ones they could learn from), it wasn’t as powerful as what Gong offers. With Gong, new hires have curated call recordings where the most relevant sections are tagged with comments. They provide best practices, teachable moments, and the ability to see how both parties respond during a video conference call. This “lens of reality,” as Aircall refers to it, is helpful in understanding what success sounds (and looks) like. The team loves having the ability to regularly update and refresh the Call Library as their market (and messaging) changes and evolves. Nura says Gong helps “normalise the experience” of cold calling. “Cold calling is hard! Everyone makes mistakes. Most calls are rejections — more than 80%! I couldn’t imagine what it would be like training someone without having Gong’s call recordings. I feel like that would be a different world.” Nura loves pulling up a specific Gong call for each part of the onboarding training. Have BDRs who need to learn how to address pricing? Pick some calls in the Gong Call Library. How about objection handling? Gong has it covered. Competitors? Gong. But there’s so much more on offer than coaching and onboarding though. Gong helps Aircall make strategic business decisions Gong has also boosted Aircall’s ability to understand pricing and competitive intelligence. Jack credits Gong with helping Aircall focus more on targeted, strategic calls. “With Gong, we can now quantify the value of every call. It’s no longer ‘spray and pray.’ We can spend more time on each call because we know what works.” Aircall also uses Gong to distill the subtle distinctions between markets — especially international ones. Nura runs a team that is primarily German-speaking. Having calls transcribed in German is incredibly important to the team, and Gong is the only tool her team uses that has this translation capability. Gong means her team can filter German-speaking calls and tweak messaging according to whichever details are the most relevant. Given that certain Aircall features are more popular in particular parts of the world, Gong’s ability to filter by region helps focus her team on winnable deals. And as Sean shared, “the numbers speak for themselves.” After using Gong across northern Europe in the first quarter of 2021, Aircall broke records for the amount of qualified pipeline delivered by the business development function, with a 35% increase! “Working with Gong has made it a lot easier for me to set quantitative benchmarks for what good looks like. If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it. With Gong, we can now measure everything that matters.” Gong’s future at Aircall Gong has made raving fans of the entire Aircall BDR team — both newbies and more experienced reps. “Gong is fully embedded in our workflow,” shares Sean. “It’s so easy to add Gong calls to the Call Library so new BDRs can review them, but we see adoption at all experience levels. As soon as the more tenured BDRs realised the benefits of Gong, they were sold.” Sean has noticed that his team now engages in more “healthy competition,” like who has the longest story told by a customer, for example. (It’s a good thing! It means your reps are drawing intel out of their customers.) And who doesn’t want to manage a team that’s fully engaged and wins more often? It’s clear that Gong has found a home at Aircall; it’s now built right into the culture. And why not? The numbers continue to defy expectations. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one Gong Gives Genesys Sales Managers The Ability to “Ride Shotgun” With Any Deal Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Global Software How Gong Helped Quinyx Digitally Transform and Scale Faster Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Europe/Middle East/Africa Software All Paths Lead to Retention: How Gong “Forever Changed” Sendoso’s Customer Experience Team Small Business Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Software

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

Hannah Hapin — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 23:20:25 +0000

How Gong Helps Babbel’s Multilingual Sales Team Achieve Their Goals Coaching Deal Execution Small Business Global Software The challenge With reps in countries all over Europe and United States and without proper tools, visibility into the pipeline was difficult. Babbel needed insights in order to properly forecast. Additionally, when coaching, Babbel leaders were struggling to translate the best of their sales knowledge in a multilingual environment. The outcome Using Gong, Babbel was able to create consistent, high-quality onboarding based on the knowledge of their top performers’ recordings. Language barriers were no longer a challenge because Gong provides transparency into calls that allows for coaching in the moment, and one-on-ones became more focused. Finally, Babbel achieved greater insight into their pipeline using Gong’s deal boards, helping them track risks and opportunities all over the world. Headquarters Berlin, Germany Founded 2007 Company Size 1,000 Industry E-Learning The deal boards give me a nice overview. Because my coaching is about driving behaviors, I need to be able to drill into the deals to understand the behaviors that are happening. Lindsay Lydon Head of B2B Sales, EMEA 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?” Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one Ascending the peak: How Gong helped new hires at Iron Mountain hit their ramp targets and align revenue teams Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Business Services ComplyAdvantage uses Gong to decrease ramp time by 50% Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Europe/Middle East/Africa Software How Gong Helped Quinyx Digitally Transform and Scale Faster Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Europe/Middle East/Africa Software

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Gainsight’s CEO uses Gong to better understand the true market

Hannah Hapin — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 19:09:56 +0000

Gainsight’s CEO uses Gong to better understand the true market Coaching Small Business Global Software The challenge With market trends changing, Gainsight needed intuitive and easy ways to surface insights about their prospects and customers. The outcome Gong trackers allows for Nick and the leadership team track for market trends and gain an authentic voice of the customer. Headquarters San Francisco, CA Founded 2009 Company Size 1,400 Industry Enterprise Software & Network Solutions Working with Gong has completely changed our business. It allows every employee to understand the true voice of our customers. Nick Mehta CEO “Gong is fundamental to running a SaaS business.” This is from a person who knows a thing or two about running a software company. Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, a platform that helps companies of all sizes and industries drive durable growth through customer-led, product-led, and community-led growth strategies. They help companies achieve a durable and efficient growth model through not only new but also existing customers … “the most durable and efficient way to grow,” per Nick. As the CEO of a $1B company with nearly 1,400 global employees, Nick entrusts his team to make tech stack decisions. As far as Gong goes, “It was love at first login” said Nick. The first time he used Gong, he thought, “THIS IS AMAZING. It’s awesome … so easy to use.” “Gong is super intuitive.” But it wasn’t just Nick who started using Gong. The immediate (and significant) impact of Gong The adoption of Gong was “very organic and very natural” for all Gainsight employees. For teams across the entire Gainsight organization the impact was immediate and significant. Managers use Gong to coach teams. Marketing uses Gong to understand buyers’ personas. Onboarding teams use Gong to onboard new reps. Sales reps use Gong to record, then review calls and to self-coach. Sales enablement uses Gong to really implement and enforce sales methodology. Rev Ops and Product Marketing use Gong to listen for market signals and competitive intelligence. Product Management uses Gong to hear how customers talk about features and product feedback (the good and the bad). Customer Success uses Gong to record calls for coaching AND share calls with Product Managers. Many teams at Gainsight leverage Gong to help turn insights into actions. “Gong recordings are just way more powerful … different … better … than reading notes,” shared Nick. “There is something about actually hearing what the prospect or customer said in their own words.” But how does Nick, the CEO, use Gong? Using Gong to understand the authentic voice of the customer Okay. The headline gave it away. Nick uses Gong to understand the authentic voice of Gainsight prospects and the customers. “I play Gong. Anytime I hear about a customer issue or problem, I go back to the Gong call to hear what really happened.” No guessing, no assumptions. Nick and the Gainsight team have also been using Gong to understand how market trends impact customers and the overall business. Gainsight uses Gong trackers to listen for words and phrases like “Net Revenue Retention,” “product analytics,” “CCO,” and “budget cuts.” At an individual level, sales leaders can coach sales reps on how to navigate these conversations best, but as the leader of the organization, Nick thinks about the big picture: How will this impact our business? What are the early warning indicators? One indicator of market trends is how often prospects and customers discuss this topic on calls. The Gong trackers uncover these keywords, and Nick and the leadership team look for trends, tracking weekly. Gong helps Nick understand the market better. He has a clear view of what’s happening on the front lines, what’s actually happening. “I love that first-hand perspective. It also allows me to connect with the team, to reach out to someone who had a great call and provide both praise and constructive feedback.” With 1400+ employees and growing, the employee connection is huge for any CEO. Speaking of connection … Gong+Gainsight: A winning combination Nick believes customer success has never been more critical than it is today. “Protect your customer base.” The Gong-Gainsight integration moves the customer success space forward by “supercharging your customer success strategy with the tools you use daily.” In addition, it provides better visibility and efficiency into the entire customer journey. Those who live in the customer success world want to understand everything that’s happened with their customers. With Gong+Gainsight, teams not only have the real-life recording … the voice of that customer … but also all other relevant customer information all in one place. Gainsight embeds the Gong player directly into its platform to “bring the calls into its timeline.” The integration saves the team time toggling between various platforms. Nick sees Gong + Gainsight as a mission critical duo for all customer facing teams to bridge the knowledge gap between sales and customer success while driving a more seamless approach to creating and maintaining happy customers. Bonus: Customer Service Managers will be alerted to any and all early warnings. Gong is having a lasting impact on Gainsight. Gong has ‘completely changed our business.’ There is no way an executive of a 1400-person, $1B SaaS organization has the time to use all the software in its company’s tech stack. Nick is no different. He sticks to the essentials: Email. Slack. Zoom. Salesforce. Gainsight (of course). And … you guessed it, GONG. In Nick’s words, “Working with Gong has completely changed our business. It allows every employee to understand the true voice of our customers.” Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one How Uberflip uses Gong to create winning outcomes and look to the future Small Business Coaching Deal Execution North America Software Plate IQ shrinks ramp-up time from a year to a few weeks Small Business Strategic Initiatives North America Software How Gong Helps Babbel’s Multilingual Sales Team Achieve Their Goals Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Global Software

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Sprout Social creates a customer-first culture using Gong

Hannah Hapin — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 23:00:36 +0000

Sprout Social creates a customer-first culture using Gong Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Enterprise Global Software 40% increase in sales methodology adoption 51% average gain in closed-won percentage The challenge Sprout Social wanted more than a call-recording solution. They were looking for a scalable, data-driven way to understand whether its sales teams were adopting new training methodologies, improving deal execution, and creating a seamless experience for prospects and customers. The outcome Sprout Social now tracks the successful implementation of new sales training methodologies. It also leverages Gong’s deal execution capabilities to ensure that deals in the pipeline are on a path to closing, and aligns cross-functional communication on customer accounts for SDRs, AEs, and CSMs. Download PDF HEADQUARTERS Chicago, Illinois FOUNDED 2010 COMPANY SIZE 700+ INDUSTRY Internet/Marketing That’s Sprout Social’s mission as a social media management and optimization platform for brands and agencies worldwide. Sprout offers a single hub for social media publishing, analytics, and engagement across an organization’s social profiles. The team at Sprout believes that building a powerful brand means connecting with the people who love and trust it. Its suite of deep listening and analytics, social management, customer care, and advocacy solutions enable organizations and brands of all sizes to be more open, real, and empathetic on social. As a company that helps its customers manage social media, Sprout wanted to better understand its own sales team’s conversations with potential customers. Before engaging with the team at Gong, Sprout used a call-recording tool that enabled sales managers to listen to calls as they happened, but that was it. The team wanted more—more visibility, more insights, more analytics. Basically, it wanted a solution that does for its sales process what Sprout does for social media. Marshall Hamilton, Sprout Social’s Director of Sales Strategy, knew that the current solution wasn’t cutting it, but didn’t know which alternatives existed. “Our pre-Gong solution that allowed us to listen to calls was good, but there was no way we could hear every single call by every single rep. The solution we had just didn’t scale.” When Sprout heard about Gong, the team was confident that its data would help identify areas to focus on and ensure better compliance with messaging. Sales managers wanted to be sure reps were highlighting key points about the product in their conversations with prospects. Marshall was also excited about the opportunity to “sift through the noise” of all the sales conversations that were happening. The ability to be better organized was appealing as well, with more visibility into what customers and prospects needed and wanted. But helping the sales team was just the tip of the (Gong) iceberg. Like so many Gong clients before them, what started as a solution for the sales team quickly spread to every customer-facing team in the Sprout Social organization. Increase sales training adoption Sprout’s first use case involved implementing a sales training methodology, which focused on coaching the sales team to ask the right questions rather than jumping to provide answers. The time and money invested in any training program is enormous, so getting it right mattered. Sprout wanted to understand how its new sales training methodology played out on the floor. And sales leadership wanted to know how each manager’s coaching plan impacted their reps’ results. Pre-Gong, Sprout faced challenges in tracking both individual and team adoption rates. Specifically, it wanted to determine whether using questions about the prospect’s pain points could positively impact the discovery process. Marshall and his team created several Gong trackers for techniques that focused on revealing a prospect’s challenges. These trackers empowered the team to see who was—and more importantly, who wasn’t—taking advantage of these techniques. Thanks to Gong’s detailed reporting, leadership could identify the low adopters and provide mid-cycle coaching and immediate impact reporting. In the first five months, this Gong insight and real-time coaching led to a 40% increase in sales methodology adoption on discovery calls. Even better, Sprout correlated this data to its closed-won percentages relative to the use of its sales training methodology and found a 51% average gain in its closed-won percentage. Diagnose deal health and funnel movement in real-time Sprout benefits from a robust inbound funnel. With a high volume of inbound leads and trials, it’s next to impossible for a sales manager to truly understand how each of those deals is moving through the funnel. Gong provides a great visual representation of how each deal is developing, how each conversation is changing and evolving. “We can see the communication rate across the deal, both by email and phone. We can tell which deals are stronger, which ones have more back-and-forth, and which discussions are real conversations,” says Marshall. Gong’s deal execution capabilities allow Sprout to diagnose deal health and funnel movement in real-time. There’s no more guessing. The team is already noticing some benchmarks for success … like three to four interactions per week with a prospect after reps host a proper discovery, compared to just one or two when they don’t. Because of this data, “we’re able to coach that if reps go for five days without talking to a prospect, there’s a good chance that person will forget much of the conversation. But if the sales rep and the prospect communicate every other day, there’s a much better chance they will retain the bulk of the knowledge we shared,” says Marshall. Foster more human interaction When it comes to moving deals through the sales team, Sprout operates like most other organizations: SDR/BDR > AE > Onboarding > Customer Success. But as we all know, each stage of the typical hand-off process is fraught with inefficiencies. The SDR takes notes during the first call, records them in the company CRM, and passes the lead (and notes) along to the AE. The AE takes the notes and asks many similar—if not the exact same questions—the second time around. (Yep, that feels like a colossal waste of time to the prospect.) Gong helps unify teams around customer needs to create a seamless customer experience. Consider onboarding sessions. AEs don’t always take the best notes (Sorry! True tho.), and often their notes may not be helpful to the onboarding process. Then the transition from onboarding to the CSM is also full of redundancies and inefficiencies. “It’s like a huge game of telephone,” says Marshall. With Gong, the SDR records their conversation and the AE can listen to that call before the transition. More importantly, the AE can hear how the conversation flowed. This helps the AE provide the customer with the best experience because the AE goes into the discussion genuinely understanding the full context of past conversations. “The phrasing of how concepts are referenced is also important in a deal cycle,” says Marshall. “Keeping the flow consistent throughout the whole cycle ensures a smooth hand-off the whole way.” Bonus: The entire conversation between sales/onboarding/CSM and prospect-turned-customer is accessible for teams to ensure the best possible support Crowdsource feedback in real-time Sprout’s growth is driven by its product. In fact, in the last few years, it has released more than 100 features per year. When launching new products, Sprout balances customer feedback with prospect needs, all while predicting industry direction. From design to marketing to roadmap planning, Sprout’s entire product team is heavily plugged into Gong. If the team finds that customers are asking for “X feature,” it can search Gong, then do a deep dive into the data to uncover what customers asked for related to that feature. “As we think about new product features,” says Marshall, “we consider how we are positioning that feature and how it should be designed to more accurately represent customer feedback. We ask, ‘Is this truly the way the customer described it in their product feedback?’” The data often reveal mentions of potential product enhancements that are not formally submitted as feedback. Using Gong, the product team can tease out how often these informal feature requests pop up. This, in turn, can lead to more in-depth, customer-facing interviews and market research. How every Sprout team uses Gong Sales. Customer Success. Product. When it comes to Gong usage at Sprout Social, multiple teams get in on the action. They use Gong for new feature development and adoption to create a more customer-centric organization. Adopt new features Sprout Social recently created a “Gong Champions” group internally. They’re the truly “outrageous fans of Gong,” as Marshall puts it. This cross-functional team even has its own Slack channel. When a new Gong feature is introduced, this is the group that drives the adoption. “Gong treats us like we’re part of the company,” said Marshall. There’s now a broad spectrum of individuals who better understand how Sprout customers describe themselves. This enables Sprout to move at a higher velocity than one-to-one customer interviews would permit. Gong has enabled Sprout to iterate and improve upon its products, its messaging, its marketing, and so on. Additionally, it’s helped ensure that Sprout serves its customers by better understanding their needs and wants. Create a more customer-centric organization Like so many clients, when Sprout implemented Gong, it was solely for its sales team. And like many other clients, word quickly got out that Gong is a valuable asset for more than just sales. Marshall: “We quickly started engaging our listening licenses for the rest of the company. Marketing wanted to use Gong to better understand the customer’s voice. The product team wanted to get more engaged with customer-facing feedback. I started getting pinged left and right by other teams in the organization. To this day, as new teams are formed, they ask to use Gong.” Gong has helped Sprout to ensure that every team and every role within the Sprout organization is customer-centric. No matter where you sit on the Sprout team, you support an end product that drives business, revenue, and value. In many organizations, employees don’t see the impact they have on a day-to-day basis. They can’t imagine how their work flows to the customer and how their efforts materialize into revenue. Gong changes that completely. Gong enables the Sprout team to see and hear what customers say. They have access to the data, the metrics, and the actual voice of the customer. And it changes how they work. Now that’s empowering. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one Gong Gives Genesys Sales Managers The Ability to “Ride Shotgun” With Any Deal Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Global Software Business Financing Leader Funding Circle Credits Gong With More Successful Customer Interactions Enterprise Coaching Strategic Initiatives Global Business Financing Hello, new reality: How Gong helps Apptio keep their field sales team engaged Small Business Coaching Deal Execution North America Software

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Measure the Immeasurable: Remove the Hypothetical and Increase Transparency in Your Sales Process

Hannah Hapin — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 19:27:16 +0000

Measure the Immeasurable: Remove the Hypothetical and Increase Transparency in Your Sales Process Coaching Deal Execution Enterprise Global Software The challenge The HubSpot sales team lacked visibility into deals and customer conversations. They believed this lack of visibility also contributed to the possibility of missing out on some greater deal opportunities. The outcome With the help of Gong, HubSpot managers and reps were able to listen in on customer conversations firsthand. Thanks to Gong’s recording capabilities, libraries, and filters the HubSpot team now had the visibility and insight needed to improve their onboarding and coaching skills. Read article Headquarters Cambridge, MA Founded 2005 Employees 3,500+ Industry Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and CRM Software How do you evaluate a customer relationship? Determining whether account engagement was successful is personal and subjective, and yet, when it comes to sales and customer success, it’s a critical part of business outcomes. When asked, “How are things going with your account?” we need a way to objectively answer that question. I love this kind of problem-solving, and that’s why I love my job as Senior Global Program Manager, Go-to-Market Enablement at HubSpot. Whenever people ask what I do for work, it’s hard to explain. But the common thread is that I help sales reps and customer success do their jobs most efficiently. We have revenue professionals all around the globe, including Japan, Singapore, Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, and across the US, so I have the opportunity to make an impact on so many colleagues. My background is in sales as well as a training, so a lot of my focus has always been around change management: How do I get people to adopt a new system to its full potential for their benefit? I’ve created strategies to help engage my teammates to support a variety of learning styles. I produce a weekly internal newsletter called The Sales Digest because at a software company like HubSpot, there are always a lot of changes that everyone needs to keep up to date on. I also coordinate the Sales Panel, where other departments supporting our revenue team pose questions to the crème de la crème of our thousand-strong sales team. Those departments can get feedback on changes like pricing or product before it’s rolled out, and get a sense of how those change will affect the sales process. The exciting part of my work is that it’s cross-functional—I’m always looking for a win-win-win. To help keep HubSpot winning, I’m part of a rollout team focused on driving the adoption and success of digital innovations. One of the platforms we’ve rolled out over the past two years that’s had a huge impact on our company is Gong. Lack of Visibility into Conversations Meant We Left Money on the Table When I arrived here in November of 2018, we had no visibility into how our team talked about HubSpot with existing and potential customers. Our sales reps are very smart and hardworking. HubSpot takes hiring very seriously and we are constantly striving to bring in exceptional people. But even the most experienced sales teams can always up-level their skills. In sports, they have game tape. But what do sales reps have? Sales managers have lacked insight into whether the sales rep mentioned our new products, or how they talked about competitors. From my own experience in sales, I acknowledge that everyone has their own way of selling that works for them. And it’s important to support personal styles to maintain authenticity. But it comes with balance—if your reps get tunnel vision, they might miss out on some greater deal opportunities. For example, at HubSpot, our Marketing Hub is one of the core products we sell, but we also have a new version of our CMS Hub, and both Sales and Service Hubs. In April, we also announced Operations Hub to help revenue operations teams scale. We have the opportunity to serve customers better by providing an end-to-end solution and giving our reps a more robust package to sell. When we don’t do that, we leave money on the table. When I joined the company, HubSpot had already chosen Gong to solve this problem, and I was asked to help with the rollout in the spring of 2019. HubSpot’s North Star goal is to solve for the customer. Gong enables us to hear those customer conversations firsthand. I’d never heard of Gong before, but I soon realized I wish I had something like this when I was a sales rep. I’m sure all of us have some aspect of our job we know we could do better, but finding the resources to actually become better can take a lot of effort. Gong takes the effort out of a sales rep’s professional development by being that game tape for sales reps to review—not just to improve on their mistakes, but to learn from the best of their peers. Initially, HubSpot drove adoption by pitching Gong as a manager’s coaching tool, where managers could surface their team’s calls and provide feedback. We also created a library of calls within Gong where managers could review good examples of talking about a specific product feature or a competitor. That was our first use case, but it’s since grown to much more. Rollout to a Global Sales Team Means Different Legal Requirements—but the Same Human Element Since HubSpot is a global company, we had to overcome the challenges of rolling out Gong worldwide. Our Gong customer success manager started by working with us to train managers. We had in-person sessions at our North American offices as well as Dublin, and virtual sessions everywhere else. Thankfully, even pre-pandemic, HubSpot has always used tools for remote learning, so we were well equipped for our sessions with our colleagues in Japan, Singapore, and Australia. We held workshops where sales reps could ask questions and recorded step-by-step videos on Gong within our Sales Academy to anticipate any issues that users might have. With any tool adoption, you want to lead with a big push of training, but also leave a trail of breadcrumbs for people to pick up later. I regularly highlight valuable features in Gong during our weekly manager meetings. Being a global company, we face different regulations from country to country when it comes to recording calls. Of all our operational territories, Germany has the strictest data protection laws which require two forms of consent to record a call: written and audio. On top of this, we want recording the call to be as frictionless as possible to drive sales rep adoption. Even requiring an extra click could mean pushback, so we had to understand the sales rep’s workflow. Our sales reps start by scheduling a Zoom meeting that then goes into their Google calendar. With the help of HubSpot’s legal team and Gong, we responded by building a Zoom integration that included both forms of consent: The Gong pre-meeting email to the prospective customer informs them the call will be recorded, and then Zoom also provides audio notification at the start of the call. With that Zoom integration, we’ve built GDPR compliance into the sales rep’s existing process, giving all the assurances and awareness, without requiring the rep—or the customer—to do a thing. There’s more than technical and legal details to onboarding, though—there’s also the human element. We wanted to empower our sales reps with the understanding that this wasn’t a tool to catch a call they may have bombed. It’s an AI-powered game tape to help them improve and the ability to capture customer conversations to make sure nothing is overlooked. HubSpot’s culture is built around five principles, one of which is transparency. We want to be as transparent as possible with each other. Gong is that tool that facilitates gathering information for everyone’s personal growth and the success of our customers. With Greater Insight into Conversations, Managers Become Better Coaches In the two years since we first rolled out Gong, we’ve continued to use it for coaching, particularly with new hires. HubSpot is great at onboarding training, but there’s always that period a few months into a new job, when someone has enough training to fly but they still need time to get acclimated.. That can be a vulnerable time. Managers can step up to play a powerful coaching role. They will ask those new hires to select what they thought was their best call of the week as well as one where they struggled. Then they’ll go through the calls together, one on one. We’ll use the calls of our highest performers, those who sell a lot, as a kind of social proof to highlight best practices for other reps. Another thing that our managers will do to drive behavioral change is using the automatic filter notification. One of our more successful managers noticed in Gong that her team was discounting too much. It started with her reps mentioning discounts too early in the process. She created a filter so that any time one of her reps said the word “discount” during a call, she would receive a notification. She could then work with the rep to develop strategies to offer discounts later in the deal cycle. I had another manager, who was new and eager, who told me he wanted to ride shotgun on all of his team’s calls. That’s not a good use of anyone’s time. With filters, he could zero in on the portions of conversations he actually wanted to listen to in Gong. That made him a much more effective manager. He later told me, “I realized I had to give up some control to gain control.” It’s paradoxical, but it’s true. We’re Not Done Yet: Future Plans to Get Even More Out of Gong With all the progress that we have made so far in our Gong adoption, the beauty of the tool is that new features and updates continue to add value to the overall user experience. With every quarter comes new ways that Gong can help our reps reach their quota faster and solve for the customer better. My goal is to continue to work towards full Gong adoption and to integrate its insightful data into how reps approach their daily tasks and priorities. Now, when someone asks, “How are things going with your account?” we have a definitive answer. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one Gong Lets HubSpot Sales Reps “Go Back and Watch the Game Tapes” Enterprise Coaching Strategic Initiatives Global Software Sprout Social creates a customer-first culture using Gong Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Global Software TIBCO has Mastered the Art of Closing Huge Deals Faster, Thanks to Gong Enterprise Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives North America Software

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