Gong adds GenAI conversational intelligence for sales insights

Gong has added generative AI to its conversational intelligence tools to provide sales reps and their managers with deeper analysis of customer calls.

Gong AI Smart Trackers analyze sales reps' phone and digital conversations for their managers. The low-code tools enable admins and managers to spin up and test standardized AI Smart Trackers, or design their own custom workflows and train AI models with their company's data. Analytics run on those conversations help project revenue, provide opportunities for coaching and track what is working -- and isn't -- as salespeople talk with customers.

Generative AI automates Gong's tracking process further, by summarizing calls, detecting positive and negative signals within the context of the conversation, and overlaying them into standardized sales processes such as the Miller Heiman methodology.

Most Gong users are B2B companies, where teams of sales reps and technical experts sell to customer buying teams, which can also represent many areas of a company such as operations, finance, end users and developers.

Reinforcing a company's best practices for its salespeople is a manual process for managers, who have to listen to calls, take notes and come up with advice for their reps. Another Gong feature released today, AI Scorecard Suggestions, offers a generative AI summary of each sales call, assigns a score on the job a rep does and gives managers suggestions on how the rep can improve their customer approach.

"The benefit of Gong scorecards is that they analyze questions and provide a summary and link to key points in the conversation," Forrester Research analyst Seth Marrs said. "This removes the need to listen to an entire call to score it."

Many different tech vendors offer conversational intelligence tools for sales, including startups like Highspot and Allego, hyperscalers such as Azure and AWS, and CRM vendors like Salesforce. Even contact center technology vendors such as Nice and CallMiner encroach on Gong's sales-centric tech turf.

Gong, which launched its product in 2015, also offers a data platform on which to develop apps and workflows that can automate complex sales tasks such as revenue forecasting and onboarding of sales reps.

"If you're a revenue [operations] leader, you probably don't want seven different tools to educate people, another to help you forecast revenue, another's going to help you prospect," said Eilon Reshef, Gong co-founder and chief product officer. "That is crazy, not only from a [sales rep] perspective, but also from a data perspective. As an operations leader, you need to consolidate all the data."

The biggest share of Gong users connect it to Salesforce CRM. HubSpot's upstart CRM is the second-most common CRM among Gong users. While it might be surprising to longtime CRM users that Microsoft, Oracle or SAP isn't second, Reshef theorized that HubSpot's straightforward CRM interface and tight integration with the HubSpot marketing suite make it a popular choice for businesses as they start -- and they stick with it as they grow.

Gong is priced according to the number of users who are recorded and the features utilized, plus a platform fee.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.