Conversational Intelligence delivers Revenue Reality - with Amit Bendov, CEO and Co-Founder, GONG

Conversational Intelligence (CI) is a technology that materially enhances the effectiveness of every B2B Sales professional.

CI has quickly become a "must-have" component in the B2B sales tech stack and has become a feature in most Sales Engagement Platforms...WHAT is the future of Conversational Intelligence?

Our host, Ray Rike, recently spoke with Amit Bendov, Founder and CEO of Gong.io, to discuss the vision and future of Gong and the Revenue Reality.

Amit's premise was "is there a better way to get market feedback" from every communication channel into the CRM without requiring manual data input.

What was the initial catalyst for Gong and CI? Amit's previous company hit a wall and had revenue growth challenges for two consecutive quarters. After scouring every record he could in the CRM platform and speaking with the leaders across sales and marketing, he quickly realized there was no single version of the truth!

Recently, Gong introduced the vision of "Revenue Reality" which is the mission to help companies understand the reality of their market and their market interactions. Unlocking the power of this insight is behind the next phase of Gong's evolution.

Conversational Intelligence goes far beyond "recording conversations". The higher order of value is to gain additional insights into what the conversations are foreshadowing and then surfacing those insights without human intervention.

Seventy percent of Gong customers have expanded the use beyond sales and into the post-sales organizations, including Customer Success and Product Management. These insights allow the product team to be "served up" the most relevant comments and insights from customer interactions with any other function. Leveraging conversational intelligence dramatically increases the product team's ability to benefit from direct feedback from the customer, without listening to a 30-60 minute conversation, and to identify common themes and trends across multiple customers and even buyers in the prospecting phase of the buyer's journey.

One of the most intriguing parts of the Gong ecosystem is Gong Labs which surfaces insights from millions of interactions across thousands of companies. One example of a finding was that multi-threading the sales process across multiple individuals, including having a C-Level executive from your company in the process, DOUBLES the win rate. 

Additional information that Gong serves up that comes from their proprietary data is the number of questions that a salesperson asks during an introductory or discovery that predicts the highest probability to become a customer. Another interesting insight is that the more time spent on speaking while presenting a "PowerPoint" has an inverse correlation to win rates.

One final insight is that during a discovery call, the close rate dramatically increases when NO slides were used, and the prospect engagement level rises. When using slides/presentations, the salesperson spends 25% more time speaking and asks 21% fewer questions!

"Accept the Losses" is a comment Amit made in a recent LinkedIn post. The story behind this comment is that you can invest far too much time in understanding the primary reason you lose a deal and even identify false positives in the analysis. 

The primary goal behind this comment is to "simplify" the value proposition and reduce the number of variables that can lead to a loss. For example, Gong focuses on why their solution is BETTER, but it is not the low-cost solution - thus, knowing they will lose a few deals due to price is an acceptable revenue reality.

Amit Bendov is a true leader in the B2B SaaS industry, and our conversation surfaces many great insights and ideas to accelerate revenue growth and gain revenue reality!

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