Gong.io: Artificial Intelligence for Successful Sales Calls

Amit Bendov, CEO

The art of sales has always been one that is difficult to master, some are good at it, while others are not so lucky. Even though there have been thousands of books written about how to be successful in sales, the problem still lingers. San Mateo, California based Gong.io is leading the way in this regard, being the first company to build a solution—Gong that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to explain the differences between the top and average sales professionals in companies.

“There are two things that impact the sales persons’ performance. The first is, how many calls they make, which is relatively easy to measure. The second is what they say and what happens on a call, which is extremely difficult to measure,” says Amit Bendov, CEO of Gong.io. The firm’s solution uses AI and voice recognition to understand what is being said on a call and analyzes it according to the set parameters, based on the call close rates of the top sales professionals in the company. Gong sifts through the call data quickly, without having people actually monitor the calls, and then creates personal suggestions for every sales person to help adjust their pitch, behavior, and other patterns in order to match those of the top professionals. This, in essence, provides a level playing field and helps companies sell more.

Gong comes pre-defined with certain call patterns, but it works by predominantly listening to the calls before providing the actionable data.

Gong analyzes every call and tests each against the different patterns and in doing so, optimizes the sales pitch

Sales patterns differ between different companies—some deal with quick transactional sales and low-cost products while others deal with large volume with technology costing millions of dollars. Over time, Gong analyzes every call and tests each against the different patterns and in doing so, optimizes the sales pitch, making sure that the sales representatives always say the right things on the phone. “The software keeps improving and it learns about what are the things that are better and it tries hundreds or even thousands of different patterns, and always picks the top one,” continues Bendov.

Unlike traditional call center technology known for its extensive and lengthy implementation, Gong is a SaaS service, which can be set up in a couple of minutes with a few clicks. Once live, it starts monitoring the calls and begins providing the analysis a little later, working almost in real time. Gong integrates with most telephony services and web conferencing systems and Gong.io is actively adding additional integration with services every two to three weeks.

Gong actively transcribes all the phone calls and highlights the keywords, negating the need to take notes anymore. It provides a transcript with highlighted questions and answers, which enables clients to quickly jump through the different points or search for specific words. For sales leaders, Gong provides reports about issues and areas of improvement, while also allowing them to compare their employees to see how they work. It also functions as a good sales enablement tool, allowing clients to use the recordings for training purposes. When Kareo, a company that builds software applications for the healthcare industry integrated Gong with its sales team, their close rates increased by 30 percent and Gong was able to shorten their ramp-up time significantly, cutting their sales cycle in half.

Gong.io has an R&D team based out of Herzliya, Israel and has amassed over a hundred customers in only one year. The firm is expanding into the customer service and support area, with the plan of supporting all customer communications in a company, which will double or triple its market opportunity.