“Gong Truths”

Back to the office off the conference circuit and one of the themes we heard from attendees is something we’ve come to call “Gong Truths.”

What are “Gong Truths”? Well, thanks to sales call recording technologies like Gong, marketing and sales are hearing how salespeople actually use messaging in customer conversations.

And the revelation for everyone is, it’s not going well! These conversations are not going the way the people we met with think they should be going.

What’s the biggest issue? What everyone is finding out is that sellers don’t use collateral — or, as some told us, they “abuse” it.

How so? Stuff we hear:

• Telling a different / wrong version of the solution/provider story
• “Frog march” / “firehose” customer through the entire deck
• Use the deck as prompts for themselves, not as a conversational aid
• Completely ignore the deck
• Dive straight into features and benefits
• Ask too few questions
• Ask poor questions (e.g., Ask at the start of the discussion, “What vendor do you currently use?”)
• Don’t qualify the opportunity
• Mis-scope the opportunity (typically miss the larger opportunity for the “quick win” sale…which is also smaller / less revenue)
• Don’t field questions well — give wrong answers or answer questions in ways they shouldn’t (e.g., provide customer with quote…before the opportunity actually has been scoped properly)

…the list goes on but you get the idea. Sellers are not executing how sales and marketing leaders want them to.

How do you correct for these problems? There are two major issues to resolve:

Issue 1: the message design (and the collateral that embodies that message) does not align; i.e., the message as it’s designed does not align with the requirements of the seller and the customer. There’s a disconnect.

It’s critical that messaging enables both participants in the discussion — seller and customer — to get what they need from that discussion. For example: the customer needs to understand whether the seller’s solution can help with a problem or problems they face and the seller needs to qualify the sale / prospect (in or out).

Issue 2: the conversation execution fails to leverage the messaging. Assuming Issue 1 has been put to bed, the seller still does not use it effectively. They stray from the central message, they don’t articulate the argument clearly, they don’t use questions effectively, they let the discussion get out of hand and/or they fail to build trust and credibility.

There’s certainly a failure of preparation, but more than that there’s a failure of effective preparation: they are not given the coaching they need in the amount and quality they need it.

What they need is practice and sales conversation coaching. Coaching is the harder of the two to achieve. Why? Nominally, such coaching is the domain of sales managers. But they lack the time and often the required coaching skills. As a result, sellers do not receive coaching in the quantity or the quality they need.

How do you resolve these issues?

Answer: “Bang a gong” — more accurately, “bang your Gong!”

What does that mean?! Gong recordings (or those of whatever technology you use) are a treasure trove of incredibly valuable information. The trick is to make use of that information: there’s an incredible amount of recording data — but that data is raw, it’s unstructured. Lots of it is worthless.

Therefore, to use it to improve design, you must have a robust message framework (synonymous terms: IP, canon, rubric). A framework helps you sift through the unstructured data to find and then to organize what’s relevant and valuable. It separates the valuable insights from the dross, then it organizes the insights into a story structure. From there you can iterate the story until it’s to your standards.

To use it to improve execution, you must possess three capabilities:

1. a coaching rubric
2. …specifically adapted to each customer conversation (solution)

and

3. …the ability to provide conversation-specific coaching at quality and at scale

Generic AI coaching agents are a huge leap forward but against these three capabilities they fall short. They certainly can provide coaching at scale and they do have a coaching rubric but it’s generic. It provides feedback on things like how many filler words you used or how much you “monologued:” it’s more descriptive than prescriptive. So the coaching quality is not specific to the conversation or to the message and therefore is lower than what’s required.

What you need, then, is an AI coaching agent trained in the actual conversations your sellers must master.

That’s an entire post in its own right. So we’ll cover that in a future post.

Summing up

Gong (or similar) recordings reveal reality varies from what’s expected and from what’s needed. Result: ineffective customer conversations leading to lost sales. Gong reveals the problems, but Gong can be part of the solution. Filter and synthesize the “raw data” of customer call recordings to design a simple, effective message. Use a specially-trained AI coaching agent to help your sellers master customer conversations using the new messaging. Give them the “safe space” to practice and master the conversation.

Do this and your Gong recordings will be a source of pleasure not pain.