If you’re an SDR like I was, you know the intensity that comes with juggling so many tasks along with the urgency of capturing a potential customer's attention. When the competition is fierce and there's so much noise in the market, standing out has never been so tough. 

Top that with the weight that we’re often the first point of contact that prospects have with our companies — we literally shape their first impressions. That's why we can't fall into the trap of prioritizing quantity over quality in our outreach efforts. And we can't afford to drown under the demands of our huge workloads and high quotas.

Now, imagine the power and confidence we can gain from using sales engagement software like an extra set of capable hands. Every company wants that – including Gong. It helps us stand out from the crowd, save valuable time, and build a robust pipeline quarter over quarter. 

For me, that’s Gong Engage, the sales engagement solution built right into our revenue AI platform. I wanted to share how it made me more efficient and effective at driving quality relationships and revenue when I was an SDR in this edition of our “Gong on Gong” blog series. I rely on it even more in my new role as an AE.

Our most crucial task is to instantly build trust — without a solid foundation, even the best pitches and products fall flat. Many sales engagement teams struggle to achieve high outreach volumes without compromising the quality needed to build real trust and rapport. For me Gong Engage is a superpower in this area. 

Once all my contacts are in Engage, I use the “Ask Anything” feature to surface important nuances about a contact’s or account’s history and needs. It’s powerful because it draws from every type of interaction across a customer’s entire journey with us. 

I combine these details with extra insights from company websites and LinkedIn, all housed inside Gong Engage. This allows me to always personalize my communications effectively (as you’ll see further down). Engage makes it easy to show customers that we understand their challenges and are genuinely interested and able to help them. It supports higher-quality conversations that foster engagement and fruitful, long-term relationships.

One of the biggest challenges that SDRs face is maintaining context at every stage in the sales process. Juggling so many conversations can lead to disjointed communication, which is problematic, especially if it makes prospects feel overlooked or misunderstood. 

I rely on Engage’s AI-recommended actions in the “To-dos” section to manage all tasks related to my calls, emails, LinkedIn messages, and even videos. It supports me by focusing my attention on the right activities and gives me peace of mind by keeping all relevant info organized in one place. It’s amazing that anyone on our team always has at-a-glance access to the same critical information when they need to support or take over.

Knowing that I’m always aligned with a customer’s journey is a huge advantage. Our customers have smoother experiences, increasing the likelihood of engagement and follow-ups. 

If we don't get our messaging right, we get nowhere. We know this and yet, there are a few factors that can work against us when we're trying to craft communication that converts:

Sound familiar? Crafting individualized messages takes significant effort, making it easy to slip into the habit of rushed, generic outreach.

Gong Engage simplifies this with its “Scripts” feature, letting us create persona-based scripts for our calls. We use insights from sales and marketing to address each persona’s unique challenges. It saves us loads of time because we don’t have to start from scratch each time.  When I combine these scripts with my personal notes, I’m confident I’m addressing customers’ specific needs. This approach makes my sales engagement personal and impactful so I get results.

Failing to connect with enough prospects and customers or resorting to substandard messages is unacceptable if we want to be sales professionals who win consistently. But now, we can double our productivity and personalize conversations like never before, thanks to AI-powered technology rooted in insights from our market and actual customer interactions. 

Gong Engage is that AI-powered sales engagement software, enabling you to exceed quotas faster. It’s a one-stop shop to unite SDRs and AEs, streamline workflows, and manage pipelines effortlessly. 

Ready to level up your sales engagement by fostering trust and genuine connections with customers? Here’s your instant demo. 

RevOps teams agree: Relying on traditional sales reports has serious consequences for profitability. 

When sales professionals are waylaid by non-essential activities that machines can expedite, you have to wonder why sales reps spend time like this:

The good news is that sales reporting software can reduce (and, in many cases, entirely eliminate) these numbers by offering sales teams better workflows. It provides them with better customer interaction data, more accurate predictions, automation, and AI-powered insights to totally transform their ability to make data-driven decisions.

This capability comes with a note of caution: Because sales reporting — as a growth-related activity — is so central to the RevOps playbook, it’s more important than ever to ensure that the software solution you choose will simplify your workflows, rather than add complexity to them.

Follow along below as we investigate the ins and outs of sales reporting software, the outcomes you can expect from its implementation, foundational features for your growth goals, and more.

Sales reporting software captures and analyzes individual and team sales performance, revealing insights into sales trends, customer and rep behaviors, and purchasing patterns. 

A reputable platform will generate analytics reports on key sales metrics, based on the continuous collection of data from sources such as your sales pipeline, CRM, and marketing initiatives like email or ad campaigns.

As part of its basic functionality, sales reporting software automates data collection and translates patterns, trends, and insights using compelling visuals that make it easy to identify gaps, back up pitches with data, and better forecast budget and resource allocations for the year. 

And that’s just its core function. Great sales reporting software can change the way teams work, communicate, and collaborate, both internally and in customer-facing situations. 

Here’s a sampling of what it can do: 

If there’s one objective you should set when adopting sales reporting software, it’s the ability to decode sales by converting raw data into actionable insights. This is true whether you target enterprise companies or SMBs.

Enterprise sales do have large contracts with a necessarily longer deal cycle, simply due to the number of stakeholders involved in the purchase decision. The right sales reporting platform should be able to “decode” where gaps occur, even in these long sales cycles.

Meanwhile, SMB sales tend to have fewer decision-makers and shorter deal cycles but also come with tighter budgets. They’re often more discerning with their purchase decisions. Your sales reporting platform should reflect this tendency and draw conclusions accordingly, so your team can act on them. 

Ultimately, the right sales reporting platform should empower sales reps to sell more easily and effectively.

Here are the top five ways sales reporting software helps you and your team get there: 

As your business scales, its data volume grows in tandem — and that data will be prone to errors if you rely on reps for data entry and updating.

In contrast, a sales reporting tool automatically captures data from multiple sources, to uncover the most granular insights and provide high-quality analysis. 

Once you have the capacity to generate accurate data and insights, you want teams to be able to access and understand them easily. That’s why your software solution needs to simplify data interpretation and make even technical reports digestible for every stakeholder. 

Quality reporting systems present findings through compelling graphs and visuals that marketing professionals, sales reps, and customer support team members can view at a glance. 

This effective data analysis and presentation will enable data-driven decision-making across your revenue organization. 

Setting and tracking sales targets manually for a growing team is inefficient — and sales reporting tools can solve this problem. You can set targets for each sales rep based on forecasting data, trends, and their bandwidth. 

You should be able to easily generate reports that offer transparency into performance metrics and encourage self-evaluation and improvement. 

Managers can easily keep track of their team’s performance in real time, in custom dashboards. 

Data captured by sales reporting software should enable sales team leaders to uncover individual strengths and weaknesses, plan professional development opportunities, and tailor coaching scripts for sales calls. 

Some sales reporting software offers actionable insights and coaching recommendations to improve your bottom line and quickly reach targets. 

Every strategic initiative you launch is unique, and marketing and sales must be perfectly aligned to drive quality leads into your pipeline. That requires seamless communication and streamlined collaboration among departments. 

A sales reporting tool can help establish communication channels and a collaboration framework. In it, teams can share updates and insights and enrich their joint understanding of customers’ needs and how to cater to them. With customer information organized in a unified platform, everyone has the same information, which enables collaborative decision-making. 

Sales reporting software lets employees easily message each other and comment on collaborative projects. The system sends real-time notifications so others can take note of relevant changes and implement revised strategies quickly. 

Collaborative features let departments communicate clearly and easily by facilitating trust, encouraging teamwork, and making employees adept at working toward shared goals.

Manual processes leave a lot of room for error. Reps may miss important details about a potential customer that may affect sales negatively. 

Additionally, repetitive tasks like data entry and lead scoring take up significant time your team could invest in strategizing sales outreach and other sales-related tasks. 

A sales reporting platform can help you bypass these roadblocks with smart automation. This software can pull data directly from your CRM and ERP systems, ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks. 

It’s designed to organize data and generate automated reports in a consistent and accessible format so there are no discrepancies — or very few — from inconsistent data handling.

These sales tracking solutions are designed with consistent data validation rules, flag potential anomalies, and ensure data accuracy. That’s why their generated reports are more precise, insightful, and actionable. 

Besides automation and collaboration, effective sales tracking software offers mobile access to reports. Your sales team can access insights and previous interactions wherever they are, and follow up with potential customers. 

Whether your team is on site or on the move, they can brush up on their clients’ needs and provide the best possible experience. You’ll see increased flexibility and improved responsiveness across your revenue teams. 

To experience these five benefits, you’ll need to ensure that you’re working with the right sales reporting software. Next up, we’ll consider 10 essential features that are foundational to your business’s revenue goals.

After almost two decades of increasingly sophisticated software platforms, there’s now a baseline level of features and functions that all analytics software offer. But you’re looking for one that’s capable of reporting on the full sales funnel, from lead to close.

Here are the essential sales reporting features you should look for when choosing sales analytics software:

Your chosen sales reporting platform must produce clear, comprehensive, and detailed reports. It should present visually clear data that sales reps can refer to quickly between sales calls. 

You should be able to create precise reports around every variable related to your entire sales cycle. The insights should cover customer behavior, pipeline analysis, sales funnel health, etc. The tool must be customizable enough to accommodate important sales metrics like: 

Finally, ensure that your sales tracking tool lets you accommodate KPIs that are unique to your business. 

The next feature to check before investing in a sales platform is the range of report types it offers. Your chosen platform should be able to run real-time analytics on individual and team performance, complete with metrics on their progress toward targets. 

It should also generate regular sales trends and forecasting reports to help you refine your sales strategy. 

An effective sales reporting platform can also create custom reports based on your immediate needs.

Your chosen software must automatically collect data from multiple sources, validate its accuracy, and organize it in a structured manner. 

It must have real-time data sourcing and analytics so you always have the most recent insights and can make decisions that suit changing customer needs. Confirm that you can search for specific insights on the platform using efficient search and filter buttons.

The whole point of using tools is to enhance and optimize your pre-existing deal cycles, which are likely supported by other tools. If your sales reps have to go back and forth between multiple platforms, it defeats the purpose of investing in a sales reporting tool.

Your sales reporting software should come with a comprehensive library of available integrations with little-to-no developer input required for connection. Look for support and integrations that cover the most popular CRMs, email marketing tools, and other communication solutions your team uses. 

For example, Gong integrates with Google Workspace, Zoom, Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Slack, and other popular tools.

The software you choose should sync data across platforms automatically to create a single source of truth. That way, your teams won’t have to toggle between tools and can focus squarely on the sales opportunity. 

In short, with the right integrations, your sales workflow will be streamlined and agile enough to easily handle a growing customer base.

Every business is unique, and your chosen sales reporting software must accommodate your specific goals and objectives. Check to see if the software allows ample customization and tailored reports based on your shifting business needs. It should support custom metrics and KPIs so that you can assess the precise areas you want to target. 

As your business evolves, your goals will too. Ensure that the sales enablement tools you select can adapt quickly to your changing requirements. 

Effective sales reporting software should offer you real-time analytics and updates. This enables you and your teams to make decisions using current information, thereby reducing errors (and deal losses) caused by outdated or irrelevant data.The software’s real-time analytics feature should also cover sales performance tracking. Sales leaders must have access to every team activity and performance benchmark to drive individual accountability, identify areas of improvement, and enhance productivity. 

Select a sales reporting platform with an easily navigable, user-friendly interface. It paves the way for quick adoption with minimal training and keeps your workflows intact.

An intuitive user experience also helps both seasoned and new employees perform tasks more easily as they can navigate even the most advanced features without wasting time on complicated steps. 

Ease-of-use encourages employees to use the system extensively, boosting engagement and productivity. 

Sales professionals are often on the move while meeting clients, and don’t always have access to their work computers, and others work entirely from remote locations. A sales tool with a mobile application makes everyone’s job easier, giving them access to reports and data insights from anywhere, at any time. 

With mobile access to sales reports, your reps can make impromptu but informed decisions during client meetings without returning to the office. Sales leaders can review reports and deliver feedback quickly despite their busy schedules. 

This sales reporting feature also allows real-time notifications, keeping every sales rep updated on new leads, customer inquiries, or changes in sales targets. They can respond to urgent customer questions and sales opportunities promptly. 

Sales reporting tools must be able to handle large arrays of sensitive customer information. One leak or data breach can harm your reputation and cause expensive legal challenges.

That’s why top-notch data security and compliance is a must-have. Don’t click the “Agree” button under terms and conditions without carefully reviewing its contents. Read each point in detail and find answers to the following questions: 

Understand the current regulations in your industry and assess your chosen tools against those compliance benchmarks. 

Collaboration fosters innovation and is proven to increase wins. Invest in sales reporting software that has features like instant messaging and report sharing within teams. 

It should also allow collaborative data analysis among stakeholders. Sales managers, team leaders, and other department heads should be able to easily deliver feedback and host discussions on particular data points.

Remember, these 10 essential features are broad guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Look for reporting platforms designed to serve the needs of sales and RevOps teams — including how easy it is to onboard, use, and adopt.

Reps don’t need another solution that’s popular but comes with an overwhelming level of complexity and a steep learning curve. Instead, purchase reporting software that’s built on user experience best practices for sales reps.

If you ask a sales professional, a sales performance report or a sales forecast is the absolute must-have reporting asset for decisions about how and where the business can expect the greatest ROI. A CRO’s team, on the other hand, is likely to say that it’s lead conversion reports or customer acquisition cost (CAC) reports that should lead the way. 

What’s the right answer?

Well, it’s a bit of a trick question because the answer is both. 

The various types of sales reports should validate and inform each other and broaden your perspective on RevOps gaps and opportunities. To that end, make sure your software can produce these five types of reporting:

Funnel analysis and sales pipeline reports track prospects from initial contact to closing and visualize lead stages. They break down pipeline metrics like response rate, conversion rate, and pipeline health. 

You can measure the number of deals in each stage and monitor their progress. The insights let you identify bottlenecks, stages that need more focus, and how to optimize sales processes for better conversion rates.

For example, Gong offers a pipeline management solution with funnel analysis reports that help teams understand sales pipelines inside out. Teams know exactly how deals are progressing and their likelihood of closing. 

Forecasting reports predict future sales based on historical data, trends, and ongoing customer interactions. They estimate how much your company will sell in a specific period and predict expected deal closures and performances against targets.

Regular sales forecasting helps you set realistic and achievable sales goals, allocate resources appropriately, and anticipate market changes.

Want sales reporting software that generates accurate sales forecasts? Gong’s AI-powered Forecast solution analyzes past deals and current pipeline data to generate accurate sales forecasting reports.

This type of sales report tracks revenue generated over specific periods, as categorized by products, services, or customer segments. It calculates total sales, growth rate, and revenue contributions by different sources.

Revenue reports help businesses rank revenue streams, identify high-performing products, and eliminate ineffective channels. 

Gong’s sales reporting software can also provide revenue analytics, with details about the expected revenue from your current pipeline. You can also monitor your actual revenue against forecasts and test the effectiveness of your sales strategies, processes, and methodologies.

Performance reports evaluate the performance of individual sales reps, teams, and departments. They track sales activities, deal closures, quota attainment, and productivity levels. 

Performance reports identify strengths and areas for improvement within the team, and help sales leaders notice top performers while allotting projects and leads accordingly. 

Gong offers interactive dashboards with deep insights into individual and team performances that highlight training needs and include actionable suggestions.

These reports examine your team’s customer interactions, including sales calls, emails, meetings, and other touchpoints. They measure the volume and quality of interactions, engagement levels, and outcomes. 

Customer interaction reports help decode customer behaviors, improve communication strategies, and enhance customer relationships.

Thanks to Gong’s extensive integrations, the platform’s analytics can track all your customer interactions and offer actionable insights into your communication and engagement strategies.

You can get a platform tour or book a demo to see it in action.

Features, functionality, customization, scalability, performance — these are all must-haves if you’re going to invest in a technology partner. 

But before you begin looking into a potential software partner, clarify the single most pressing reason why you need sales reporting software. 

Perhaps you have a specific goal in mind, like hitting a particular market valuation in five years. You’ll need to hit non-negotiable sales targets quarterly and annually, and a sales reporting platform can help you get there. Hitting this valuation goal would be your one driving need.

It may be that your competitors are closing prospects faster with a particular industry or persona. In this case, you’d use your ideal sales software to gather insights from across the deal cycle and uncover bottlenecks and roadblocks. The ideal platform will make this information centrally available, and translate it into actionable next steps that will positively affect revenue.

Overtaking your competitors would be your one driving need in searching for sales reporting software. 

Here’s a multi-step process you can reliably use to vet and find “the one”:

While the singular driving need you’ve identified is what your business is aiming at as a whole, the search for the perfect sales reporting software starts with understanding your team’s micro and macro needs.

For example, a sales team operating primarily from an office might have different constraints and requirements than a team that usually holds sales meetings in person. This type of context matters because in-office sales teams may require robust data analytics and CRM integrations, while external or “traveling” sales reps may prioritize mobile access and offline capabilities. 

If you have both on your team, your software choice will need to offer features that adequately provide offline mobile access and advanced analytics features. 

When you audit your budget don’t leave out these critical steps:

Once you have a rough idea about the expense you may incur with each vendor, consider the software’s potential ROI. Will the software save time, increase productivity, and boost sales enough to justify its cost?

Uphold your customer’s trust by choosing software with impenetrable data security. Ensure that it complies with industry standards and regulations for data security and privacy.

Look for privacy settings like access control, so sensitive information remains among the stakeholders. Evaluate the platform’s data encryption framework to protect critical sales information.

Your team may face some hurdles during initial onboarding, implementation, and then once again through adoption. Look into each vendor's reputation in customer service before investing. Try to understand the following: 

Evaluate the vendor’s reputation and market presence. Established vendors with a proven track record are often more reliable. See whether the vendor has a diverse customer base that includes brands you recognize.

Go through reviews and testimonials from other users for authentic insights into the software’s effectiveness. Look for common praises and complaints. Has the vendor taken action to resolve the issues? 

You should also check to see whether the software has received any awards or recognition from reputable industry platforms.

For example, among numerous other accolades, Gong was named among the Top 50 Analytics & AI Products by G2 in 2023. 

Using product demos and case studies, you can now make a checklist of the analytical abilities you need in a sales reporting tool, then evaluate potential performance in key categories: 

There are more subjective aspects, such as adoption times and the onboarding process, that should factor into your decision-making. Ask your stakeholders to evaluate the following:

Instead of subscribing right away, use the free trial period to get answers to most, if not all, of your questions.

Of course, how the trial goes will depend to some extent on the size and scale of your team, as well as some of the pre-existing workflows you use internally. That’s why it might be beneficial to work with a dedicated account specialist during the trial period. 

Regardless, you’re the customer in this scenario, so go ahead and request demos and raise questions specific to your business needs.

Remember, these seven steps will help you narrow down your sales reporting software options and uncover which one responds best to the singular driving need you identified.

Choosing the right sales reporting software from a plethora of options may look tricky, but there’s no need for it to feel overwhelming. 

Your search for the perfect sales tool ends with Gong. Our AI-powered software has all the capabilities your team needs:

Gong reports also provide accurate key metrics and offer actionable insights and recommendations to improve your team’s performance.

Book a demo to reap the benefits of the best sales reporting software today!

For more information about the perfect software stack for sales managers, click here.

“Improving pipeline performance” was the main focus of 84% of business leaders in 2023. It’s no surprise that this priority continues to lead the way in 2024, across sales teams and organizations.

This is because a clunky, disjointed sales pipeline results in lost leads and slow sales cycles. 

With a streamlined sales pipeline, you can pull high-potential prospects down the funnel and get a greater number of qualified leads to convert and close. 

But how do you get there?

Let’s dive into the top pipeline generation strategies and best practices to streamline your funnel to drive more sales.

Pipeline generation includes activities and tools that consistently and reliably ensure there’s as in-flow of revenue from closed-won deals. Ideally, this happens via an efficient, automated process that includes business intelligence tools and cross-team collaboration.

Inside the black box of pipeline generation are prospect-nurturing processes handled by sales and marketing teams. They consider a lead’s journey, from the moment of awareness through to the transformation when leads become sales- or marketing-qualified leads as a result of nurturing and engagement.

The key activities for successful pipeline generation include robust prep or scoping work. Include the following in your long-term plan for healthy pipeline generation:

These activities should make it clear why pipeline generation is a process and a journey with many moving — and often complex — parts.

The solution to complexity is cohesion. Just ask the sales and marketing teams of companies that reported a 20% annual growth rate when working together, according to research conducted by Aberdeen Research Group. If any of your pipeline generation activities are going to result in revenue, cohesion is key.

The difference between pipeline generation and lead generation is about sequencing as much as it is about scoping. 

Whereas lead generation focuses solely on finding new leads, pipeline generation covers the entire journey from identifying leads to closing the sale. As an activity, lead generation is complete once a prospect enters the funnel.

By contrast, pipeline generation and management never fully closes. Having a sales pipeline that constantly moves prospective leads from top to bottom and addresses their needs at every stage of the journey, is the goal. It sets you up for long-term, sustainable revenue generation. 

Part of pipeline generation and management is using each step of the sales pipeline to guide the lead or prospect down the sales funnel, ever closer to a sale. In fact, it’s why cohesion is necessary: Lead generation precedes pipeline generation and management. You couldn’t develop a pipeline without lead gen campaigns. 

Pipeline generation fuels your company’s growth by continuously attracting and nurturing potential customers. It’s the foundation for all your sales and revenue efforts. Below are the benefits you’ll reap if you construct this foundation well:

When your marketing and sales teams align their messaging and processes, their efforts are more targeted and effective.

By focusing on the same type of leads and qualifying opportunities properly, the marketing team can deliver prospects with a higher chance of converting. 

When your pipeline generation efforts are concentrated in a specific direction, your sales team can take a more direct approach and focus their messaging, communications, and engagement on only the most promising prospects. This increases the chance of moving a deal forward and smooths out the friction and delays. 

When a sales pipeline is well-organized and founded on reliable data, teams can get a clear picture of each prospect’s status, understand where they sit in the pipeline, identify what needs to happen to move them along, and tie all these insights to business outcomes. It also provides a reliable roadmap for future sales, which reduces uncertainty and makes it easier to predict potential revenue.

With a clear view of what’s on the table, you can enhance budget planning to allocate resources where they’re most needed. 

Plus, it makes it easier for your sales team to prioritize the leads closest to a conversion.

Good pipeline generation boosts the number of sales opportunities available to sales professionals. A steadier flow of better-qualified opportunities, backed by data, will help boost your win rate.

With clearly defined steps, it’s easier to move leads down the funnel, resulting in higher profitability — and not just because you have more qualified prospects. You’re also wasting less time and fewer resources on ineffective methods and poorly qualified leads.

Additionally, aligned sales and marketing teams operate with clarity about their ideal customer’s behaviors, pain points, needs, and levels of awareness. With this information, it’s easier to identify the most promising prospects and lower your customer acquisition cost.

Long sales cycles result in dropouts. An alarming 28% of prospects say they back out of deals if the sales cycle takes too long.

A refined pipeline accelerates the sales process. 

Lead qualification becomes more effective, and sales teams know how to address buyer needs, which results in quicker conversions. With less time spent going back and forth with leads, sales reps can focus on high-value prospects and move them through the sales cycle faster.

With a well-maintained pipeline comes more accurate pipeline data. If your pipeline truly reflects what’s in your funnel, it becomes easier to make decisions based on this data.

You’ll get a better idea of the most promising customer segments and profiles, thus enabling you to focus your efforts and refine your overall strategy.

New market and segment opportunities become clear when you better understand buyer behaviors through your pipeline data. These insights allow you to spot promising trends in places you may not have previously noticed. 

You gain a competitive advantage if you can immediately recognize changes in buyer behaviors and tap into opportunities that expand your reach.

Insights into your pipeline help you identify bottlenecks that slow down the sales process and cause leads to drop out.

With data-backed sales pipeline reports, you can address issues with speed and focus, to improve efficiency on your team and optimize your sales and marketing tactics for better performance.

While pipeline generation brings a wealth of benefits, it can be challenging if you don’t have reliable data or great data capabilities to guide the way. This will make it tough to understand your current reality (i.e., get real visibility into your pipeline), or confirm whether the changes you make achieve the desired outcomes. Here’s where you may run into trouble if you try to tackle pipeline generation without reliable data and transformative data capabilities: 

It’s important to understand and target the right audience, and identifying them correctly can be tricky.

You need to develop an ICP and buyer personas using existing buyer data alongside social and website engagement data.

Once you know your ICP, you need a consistent process for qualifying leads. Otherwise, you’ll find your team underqualifies leads and waste time on prospects that don’t fit your solution. 

Alternately, you might find your team overqualifies leads. In this case, they’ll spend so much time ensuring a buyer’s fit that other prospects will slip through the cracks.

A data-backed approach to qualification helps establish the right balance.

If your pipeline management software lacks the capacity to run in-depth analyses, you’ll miss key insights. 

Most sales tools only examine a small part of the pipeline. What they neglect are key marketing efforts and external signals such as search intent, website clicks, predictive signals, etc..

Revenue intelligence tools like Gong use powerful AI to look deeper into your pipeline, using more than 300 signals to assess pipeline health and deal opportunities. This gives you crystal-clear visibility into what works, what doesn’t, and what you should do next.

If you want to learn more about how AI can improve your pipeline forecasting, speak with an expert at Gong today.

Pipeline visibility is only as accurate as the data you input.

Outdated information, human error, and incomplete data all lead to inconclusive or incorrect assumptions. 

If your pipeline analysis isn’t founded on reliable and relevant data, you’ll put effort into the wrong places, create skewed forecasts, and make poorer business decisions.

Sales and marketing teams need to coordinate their approach. In fact, 39% of sales reps say better alignment is the thing they need most from their marketing team.

Inadequate communication and uncoordinated processes lead to disjointed efforts. This might present as lots of poorly qualified leads sitting in a stagnant pipeline with long, slow sales cycles. You might also see poor handoffs from marketing to sales that let promising prospects slip through the net.

The average prospect needs six to 10 touches to convert, but maintaining consistent engagement can feel tedious. It’s tough to come up with inspiring ways to approach your prospects, and it can feel like you’re hounding them.

Long-term nurturing requires conscious consistency where you build relationships with prospects and foster trust — in part by establishing your expertise.

This kind of consistent back-and-forth costs time and money, so if you suffer from resource constraints, lead nurturing can feel overwhelming. Turn to your data to see where your lead-nurturing efforts would be most effective, and which ones work best.

The right metrics can measure success and pipeline health properly, so choose them wisely

Your metrics should support the achievement of your goals and targets, otherwise you’ll get mixed messages and create misguided strategies.

Remember, you need to track your key metrics consistently and interpret them correctly. Doing so manually or with low-quality tools will almost certainly lead to inaccurate or subjective results.

Instead, a solution like Gong offers keen insights that drive highly accurate predictions, helping you manage your pipeline with a more dependable level of clarity.

A healthy sales pipeline is crucial for driving sales performance. 

Let’s explore the best practices that help you generate a powerful pipeline strategy and create a steady stream of sales opportunities that supercharge growth.

Analyze existing buyer data and social media engagement to define your ICP’s characteristics, business demographics, pain points, behavioral traits, and more.

Dive into further market research to understand how current market trends and competitor strategies support this portrait of your ICP.

Use this information to segment your target audience and create detailed buyer personas that reflect your ideal customers. Focus on the needs and challenges these personas face to understand how to solve them through your marketing and sales tactics.

Doing this makes it easier to align sales and marketing, as everyone can target the same audience.

Rank prospects with a lead scoring system based on their likelihood of converting. This way, you can prioritize leads so your sales team knows where to focus their energy. 

Consider using AI lead-scoring software, as these tools can analyze data quickly and accurately.

By scoring sales leads in this manner, you prioritize efficiency in upcoming stages of the sales process. You concentrate on the prospects most likely to convert, which can lead to shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates. 

AI-driven predictive analytics can considerably improve your sales forecasting and lead identification.

Among teams using AI for forecasting, 84% say they’ve seen an improvement in the accuracy of their forecast, with 41% noting major improvements.

Unlike traditional forecasting methods, solutions like Gong use hundreds of intent signals to predict buyer behavior with extremely high accuracy.

With its ability to ‌forecast future sales trends and identify high-potential leads, predictive analytics help you make data-driven decisions that anticipate and respond to market changes. 

According to top sales leaders, improving cross-functional alignment is the number one way to drive growth. 

This is because aligned sales and marketing teams share objectives, goals, metrics, and communication channels. This leads to a synchronized focus and a better handoff process, where everyone concentrates on the same buyers and uses complementary tactics to move them through the funnel.

Regular alignment meetings are vital to agreeing on shared goals and approaches to improve collaboration and ensure consistent messaging. These discussions allow you to make sure everyone has access to the same data, tools, and CRM systems.

Track and analyze all marketing activity to pinpoint what works and what doesn't. Trace the path from lead generation to conversion to see which tactics convert the most qualified leads. 

Then dive into conversation intelligence data and AI-backed insights on your best-qualified leads to understand which methods generate the most promising prospects. 

Don’t be generic about it. Identify exactly which content types and marketing tactics work best for each segment. Just because something works for one group doesn’t mean it works for another.

When it’s done well, this best practice will help you identify the most effective campaigns with the best ROI.

Analyze and track your sales funnel regularly. This way, you’ll notice bottlenecks and areas for improvement straight away.

Work out where potential customers get stuck or drop out of the buying process, and assess whether this arises due to poor lead qualification or ineffective sales tactics. This will help you figure out where the funnel needs improvement and how you should enhance it.

Continuously refining the sales funnel increases your pipeline efficiency, shortening sales cycles and driving conversions.

While most buyers expect customization, only 13% of buyers say that sellers’ messaging is relevant to them.

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This is why 84% of sales teams now use generative AI (gen AI) in their sales outreach.

Gen AI can considerably speed up personalization by tailoring sales content to each buyer’s needs and challenges. This improves the customer experience and cuts back on admin time for sales reps.

A whopping 78% of reps say they’d like AI to help them personalize their content marketing since they spend nearly six hours manually tailoring pre-written content each week.

Using AI and automation on your team, you can ensure personalized and optimized lead nurturing with timely, relevant content that speaks to the buyer. Solutions like Gong generate hyperpersonalized content and automate parts of the follow-up workflow.

This personalized and streamlined approach improves lead engagement, reduces manual efforts, and encourages prompt buyer engagement.

If you want to leverage the power of AI to personalize your pipeline strategies, speak with a sales expert at Gong today.

Having a clear overview of your competitors’ pipeline generation strategies can provide you with invaluable insights as to how to improve your approach.

Here’s how you can analyze it properly:

Examine your competitors’ websites, landing pages, and social media accounts. Consider their techniques to capture leads, such as gated content, promotions, and interactive posts.

You also need to review all their sales documentation. Look closely at their brochures and pitch presentations to understand the messaging and sales tactics they use to hook their target buyers.

Make a map of their blog content to identify key themes. Consider how they use pillar and cluster tactics to group content around particular topics. 

Dive in further using SEO tools to identify their keyword rankings. This will help you better understand where they’re focusing their content efforts.

Pay attention to the types of content they use. Do they leverage video and graphics as well as written content? How successful are these posts?

Also, consider their backlink strategy. Which expert authorities are linking to their content? Backlinks help boost your competitors’ credibility and in some cases are sources you can also reach out to for backlinks.

Read customer feedback on review sites to see what their audience says about them. 

Find out what buyers love and dislike about your competitors’ products. Learn which features your target audience enjoys most, then consider how you can gain a competitive edge by offering an improved service or product.

Also look for industry reviews or comparison articles to get an expert’s perspective on the competition’s success.

Harness social listening tools to track online conversations about your competitors and relevant industry trends.

Identify the key phrases and discussion topics to gauge the overall sentiment, as well as what the audience enjoys talking about most.

Look into how your competitors price their products and services, as this will help you determine whether your prices reflect the market rate.

Dig into the promotions and discounts they offer to see if you can compete with their pricing tactics.

See where your competitors leverage industry awards and recognitions to boost their credibility. Determine whether these awards are relevant and attainable for your company to boost your social proof.

Dig into the industry trends being suggested or identified by expert authorities and look at how your competitors harness these trends. Research industry papers that talk about your competitors and note down any strategies they might be pursuing. 

Listen for any industry experts that mention your competitors in reviews, listicles, or comparison articles. What are they being listed for? Which of their tactics might you want to try to support your own pipeline generation approach?

An effective pipeline generation strategy requires an end-to-end solution. It’s the best way to track how you attract prospects and lead them through your funnel in a streamlined way. 

This is where Gong shines. Assisting you with every stage of pipeline generation, Gong’s powerful AI helps you forecast correctly, engage interactively, and analyze your strategies in depth. 

If you want to learn more ways to improve your pipeline, check out these articles:

If you’re ready to take your pipeline generation to new heights, it’s time to look into Gong and its AI-backed data capabilities. Stop guessing and start strategizing with highly accurate insights and hyper-relevant interaction tactics. 

Book a demo now.

Ready to turn your customer interactions into insights you can use to win deals? 

Sales AI tools are already a must-have on the leading sales teams. They’re using AI to analyze calls, spot hidden deal risks, and get the information they need to win more deals, faster. It’s time your team started using AI to unlock smarter strategies, boost revenue, and free up valuable time that could be spent selling, rather than on manual and administrative tasks.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about choosing an AI sales tool. That includes reviewing the types of tools that exist, their benefits and drawbacks, and how to integrate one into your team. 

Your sales team can use AI for a variety of tasks. Here’s a run-down of the main types of sales-related, AI-backed tools currently on the market: 

Revenue forecasting tools have been around for a while, and most of them use historical data to provide basic forecasts. Now, with the addition of AI to forecasting, you have more advanced tools to choose from. Today, they use real-time data and scenario modeling to create more accurate predictions about your pipeline, with some providing actionable insights about individual deals. The best forecasting tools are data-driven, and offer up detailed information that goes beyond predictions to point out at-risk deals and opportunities to take corrective action.

With generative AI, you can create personalized content, such as emails and targeted social media posts. Reps can save hours of time each week while also providing their buyers with more effective outreach. A Gong survey found that sellers spend 5.9 hours each week drafting personalized content, and 6.2 hours creating content from scratch. Not surprisingly, 78% of sales reps want to use generative AI to personalize their sales engagement and shorten their writing time.

Conversation intelligence tools transcribe and analyze call recordings to give you valuable insights into customers’ needs and challenges, as well as reps’ performances on calls. Managers can use it to target their coaching and reps can use it for self-coaching that boosts their sales performance.

AI lead-scoring tools can help your sales team make better decisions about which leads to prioritize. These tools analyze customer data to predict the likelihood of conversion. Use these tools to get better results from your sales efforts. 

Sales managers can now use AI to highlight any topics of conversation they want to track, alongside the usual keyword trackers. This makes it easier to spot skills gaps and — in the right platform — enable personalized feedback at scale. With the right AI-backed tool, it’s also easier to spot and share best practices across a sales team, no matter its size.

AI can identify both risks and opportunities inside accounts by analyzing customer interactions, engagement levels, and buying signals. This “foresight” helps reps avoid losing deals that are in flight, and also helps customer success teams reduce customer churn.

There’s a wealth of AI-backed sales tools available right now, which is great, but it can also feel overwhelming if you’re trying to find the perfect match. Remember, the best tool for your sales team depends on your workflows, your challenges, your anticipated growth, and more. Here are the key points to consider:

Start by pinpointing your primary pain points. Do you struggle, for example, with poor lead qualification, email personalization, call analysis, or closing deals? Ensure the AI tool you're considering addresses your most pressing challenges.

AI tools are only as good as the data they’re trained on. What data was your tool’s AI model trained on? It’s important information in terms of understanding whether that tool will address your specific needs. When you choose an AI sales tool that was trained on industry-specific rather than general-purpose data, you’ll get more relevant capabilities and actionable insights.

Focus on a tool with essential features your team will use, and consider the time and training you’ll need for its successful adoption. A user-friendly interface and a simply visual presentation of insights will make the tool easier to learn and integrate into your workflows.

Consider how the AI tool will fit into your current tech stack. Does it integrate seamlessly with your CRM, email platforms, and other essential tools? Consider potential future needs, too. If you need custom setups, check if an API is available.

Choosing a unified platform over multiple point solutions prevents potential problems and provides clear benefits for your sales team:

Think long-term, not short-term. Can the tool grow and change alongside your business? Make sure it can handle your evolving product lines and sales strategies. Also look for flexible pricing models that match your potential growth. Consider the customization options, and finally, investigate the vendor's track record. Do they have a history of innovation and adapting to market changes?

Find out what level of onboarding and ongoing technical support the vendor provides. Check for readily available training materials and make sure there are “easy learning” options. Investigate the vendor's overall reputation and how responsive they are when customers need help.

Choose vendors with strong data security measures in place, especially when it comes to sensitive customer data. Make sure the tool you choose helps you comply with relevant regulations (like GDPR). Check that they have clear policies on data ownership and how customer information might be used.

Calculate how quickly you might see a positive return on your investment through things like a boost to revenue, time saved, and process efficiencies. Don't focus only on immediate results — consider the long-term benefits, too. Ask if the vendor has case studies from businesses whose situations, challenges, and pains are similar to yours.

Don't underestimate the value of your sales team's input when choosing an AI tool. Involve them from the start of your search. Ask them which features would make their jobs easier — you might be surprised by their insights and requests! Bringing your team into the decision-making process gives you a much better chance at successful adoption. 

AI sales tools can increase your sales team’s effectiveness by providing insights and automation that wouldn't be possible with manual processes alone. Our research showed that AI-assisted sales strategies can increase your win rates by 50%. These impressive gains are due to AI’s ability to analyze massive amounts of sales data to identify patterns in buyer behaviors and pinpoint ideal prospects. Some AI can even suggest the best next steps in a deal, personalize interactions, and sharpen your messaging, to create more success in converting leads and closing deals.

An AI sales tool can improve your team’s productivity, saving countless hours by automating mundane tasks and streamlining workflows. For example, AI-powered lead scoring helps you prioritize the best prospects, allowing you to focus your energy where it will have the most impact. A majority (60%) of commercial leaders said that AI significantly impacted their ability to identify quality leads. With its ability to automate lead scoring and qualification, AI can also help you manage a larger pool of leads.

Scheduling tools can seamlessly integrate with your team’s calendars and automate meeting prep, which saves you time. Generative AI tools can quickly draft emails, follow-up sequences, or product summaries. By taking on all the mundane but necessary parts of the process, AI frees up time for relationship-building and selling activities.

With AI in the driver’s seat, you and your team will handle data less often, minimizing errors and calculation mistakes, and generating more reliable forecasts and reports. You’ll never have to redo calculations or fix mistakes.

AI sales tools analyze vast amounts of data to uncover hidden patterns, trends, and correlations hiding in your customer interactions. AI models use this data to predict customer behaviors, recommend next steps, and highlight potential risks before they become major problems in your deals. This takes the guesswork out of the sales process, allowing your team to make better, data-driven decisions about individual deals and accounts. With more accurate forecasts at hand, your leadership team can also make better decisions about the overall business.

AI sales and engagement tools allow your team to tailor their interactions using customer data. For example, they can personalize email subject lines, make product suggestions based on past purchases and current challenges, or generate emails that address a prospect's specific pain points. This creates a highly relevant experience for the customer, which leads to more satisfaction and loyalty.

AI identifies strengths and areas for improvement by analyzing call recordings, email interactions, and win/loss data. It also offers benchmarking against other sales team members, which reps can use for self-coaching. Managers use this information to focus their coaching efforts — they know who needs help and with what sales skill. It gives coaches an unprecedented ability to craft personalized feedback, guidance, and tailored training programs for each team member.

By working smarter with AI, sales reps can close more deals and achieve better results. When reps see this reflected in their metrics, it boosts job satisfaction and motivation, which discourages them from seeking work elsewhere. That’s a massive financial win for sales orgs, as onboarding can be costly in terms of hiring, training, and ramp times (i.e., the time it takes to get a new hire up to quota).

On top of all the benefits outlined above, AI sales tools improve continuously over time. The more data they have, the more they learn — and the more accurate and relevant data you get, quarter over quarter. 

There can be a few drawbacks to using AI sales tools, especially initially. Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate these drawbacks, as noted below: 

While AI sales tools require an upfront investment, their ROI potential is significant. McKinsey research found that investing in AI can lead to revenue growth of 3% to 15% and boost sales ROI by 10% to 20%. These impressive gains confirm that AI tools can offset their initial costs and drive long-term profitability.

Choose a vendor that provides good onboarding support and training resources. Doing so will have a powerful — and positive — impact on your setup and implementation experience.

To get the most out of your AI sales tools, collect accurate data and regularly review it for any inconsistencies. Even though your AI sales tool will help you automate much of your data collection, you should still incorporate human oversight into your data review processes and have a good sense of what data underpins your work.

Conduct regular bias audits of your AI sales tools to ensure they're used responsibly and minimize the potential for unfairness. Again, you’ll need human expertise to put this into practice.

Treat AI as a support tool, not as a replacement for human sales expertise. From the frontlines to your leadership team, your revenue team members are still responsible for their performance, even if it’s bolstered by AI. 

While AI is great at streamlining routine tasks and providing data-driven insights, it simply can’t replace strong, human relationships ... or handle complex negotiations. To get the most out of an AI sales tool, train your sales team to use AI as a data-driven assistant that frees them up to focus on building rapport and understanding their clients’ needs. Sales reps who are backed by AI are every bit as valuable as they once were — in fact, they’re probably worth more in terms of closed-won deals!

To keep your own data and your customers’ data safe, choose vendors with strong security features. Make sure you follow data privacy laws (e.g., GDPR), and have clear guidelines in place on your teams about how to use customer information.

Although all tools — including AI sales tools — have downsides, these are usually outweighed by their benefits. With careful planning, you can choose the right tool and overcome any initial challenges. Remember that as more sales orgs adopt AI-backed tools, you'll likely need them just to keep up with the competition.

You can set yourself up for success if you know the best practices for AI sales tools before you bring them on board. Here are nine proven tips to help you craft a successful launch:

Kyle Asay says that with its rapid evolution and widespread uptake, “AI is quickly going to become less of an advantage and more of a must-have.” He describes it as a minimum standard for success in sales today.

Here's what we can anticipate in the months and years to come:

AI systems will be able to analyze customer data even more deeply to further understand buyers’ unique behaviors and needs. You’ll continue to respond with personalized interactions at scale.

AI will get even better at pinpointing your best potential leads, which will save your team valuable time. With advanced AI tools, such as Gong Forecast, analyzing massive amounts of data, you can expect sales forecasts to become incredibly accurate.

Generative AI will streamline the creation of high-quality engagement, marketing materials, and sales scripts tailored to individual buyers. This acceleration in content output will be a game-changer. Gartner predicts that 60% of B2B sales will use generative AI sales technologies by 2028. This is an increase from less than 5% in 2023. Reflecting this trend, there’s been a 464% increase in emails using Gong’s generative AI since February 2023.

Author and innovation consultant Soren Kaplan believes that AI will soon become emotionally aware. He predicts a world in which “salespeople pitching a new customer through a videoconference can see hidden real-time feedback about the emotional state of the prospect and adjust their pitch to be more persuasive.” 

This presents tremendous potential in terms of refining sales pitches in real time, but brings with it a host of ethical considerations around consent, privacy, and bias prevention. In this scenario, strong AI governance will be more important than ever.

While AI will excel at data-driven tasks and automation, the human element of relationship building, nuanced negotiations, and strategic thinking is irreplaceable. The most successful sales teams will use a balance of people-based and AI-backed approaches.

“To say Gong crushed it would be an understatement. All the people using Gong were responsible for 30% more revenue, year-over-year.” —John Burke, Virgin Pulse’s Senior Leader for Solutions Consulting

Gong’s user-friendly interface and the powerful features listed below make it easy to act on the platform’s customer insights:

Gong developed a proprietary AI model using billions of sales interactions, so it’s perfectly tailored to sales organizations. The platform understands the unique language and patterns of sales calls and emails, so it gives you deeper insights than tools like ChatGPT, which are trained on a public dataset that includes less relevant data.

Gong integrates with Salesforce, Zoom, and hundreds of others in the Gong Partner Network. These include tools for automation and workflows, data and BI, calendars, email, CRM, support and customer success, and digital interactions. This gives you more comprehensive ways to access Gong insights and make decisions using data from across your tech stack. It also includes an integration with Zapier, connecting thousands more apps. Gong doesn’t charge extra for integrations.

Gong's unified platform gives your entire team a centralized place where they can access insights about customer interactions and work together more easily to sell collaboratively. It also makes coaching easier than ever and enables sellers and managers to drive sales performance. There’s no need to juggle multiple sales solutions when your whole team works in Gong.

Gong’s cloud-based infrastructure easily handles increasing users and data, and its flexible pricing lets you scale your subscription as your team grows.

Gong is highly adaptable to different workflows, offering customizable fields, deal stages, and dashboards, alongside an extensive integration library, and for more specialized needs, Gong lets developers build integrations. 

Gong offers unparalleled support and resources to help you get the most out of the platform. You have a comprehensive knowledge base in your dedicated Customer Success Manager, and a help center for self-guided solutions. There's also live chat support for quick questions, and you can submit a support ticket for more detailed inquiries. 

The Gong community forum, called Gong Visioneers, is where users can connect, share best practices, and seek advice from each other. There’s also a newsletter, podcasts, and a library of webinars you can watch on demand. 

Gong offers a strong set of security measures:

From real-time insights to automated processes, AI is revolutionizing selling. It unlocks data-driven strategies, saves valuable time, and allows your team to provide buyers and customers with highly personalized experiences. 

Gong stands out as a leader in AI-backed sales tools with its powerful features, user-friendly platform, and proprietary AI model. 

Ready to streamline your processes, empower your team, and boost your results? 

Discover what Gong can do for you. Book a demo today.

Customers are increasingly using data warehouses to unify and process the data from all their business systems. However, these data warehouses can typically only pull static data – like CRM data – making it nearly impossible to assess market conditions and team performance. 

In fact, only 54% of GTM leaders feel that they have clear, real-time visibility into the progress of deals, and just 48% have real-time insight into the performance of individual sales reps, according to Harvard Business Review.

You need access to consistent, accurate, and up-to-date data across your entire tech stack if you want to better understand the health of your business.  

That’s why we created Gong Data Cloud, which equips you with insights from Gong right in your business intelligence (BI) platform, so you can make more informed decisions. We launched our data sharing capabilities last year with Snowflake, and now we're excited to announce additional connectors with Databricks and Google BigQuery. With more integrations available, you can seamlessly access insights rooted in customer interactions across your tech stack.

With this latest expansion, the impact of Gong Data Cloud extends beyond Snowflake to support Databricks and Google BigQuery.

With Gong Data Cloud, you can bring Gong data into your data warehouse of choice without any complicated data infrastructure work. With more readily available data, you can identify leading indicators and gain a deeper understanding of your market, team, and pipeline all within the context of your existing solutions.

With data derived directly from customer interactions flowing into your data warehouses, you gain deeper insights into your GTM strategy, revenue health, and team productivity. Gong Data Cloud helps you answer questions across the following areas: 

With Gong Data Cloud, you can get the answers you need and access deeper insights across all go-to-market functions to drive more revenue for your business. 

With Gong Data Cloud, you can finally stop wondering what’s working and what isn’t, and know with certainty what action you should take next.

Gong’s Revenue Intelligence platform captures customer conversations and turns them into actionable insights. And now, you can access that treasure trove of data in Snowflake, Big Query, and Databricks for even more informed decision-making. With Gong data available throughout your tech stack, you can bring new levels of productivity into your teams’ workflows that drive efficiency and measurable growth across your GTM operations.

Interested in fueling your stack with more accurate and complete data? Get a demo. 

Bringing together the functionality of sales engagement platforms, conversation intelligence (CI) tools, and revenue operations and intelligence, revenue orchestration platforms (ROPs) have emerged as a strategic partner for go-to-market (GTM) teams hoping to streamline workflows and save time while driving growth. 

This trend sparked a new report from Forrester, titled “The Forrester Wave^TM: Revenue Orchestration Platforms For B2B, Q3 2024,” which gauges how 12 different providers stack up in terms of a 29-criterion evaluation. Forrester’s report highlights what exactly revenue orchestration platform customers should look for from providers.

Revenue orchestration isn’t just about consolidating on a unified platform – it’s about doing so in an advanced, strategic offering. These platforms won’t generate key outcomes for sellers if they’re not layered with strategic capabilities that foster necessary workflow optimizations. 

When talking about how to identify those essential capabilities within a platform, Forrester called out three key outcomes customers should expect from providers – and consider in their evaluations. According to the Forrester Wave, revenue orchestration platforms should: 

In this new report, Forrester assesses top revenue orchestration vendors, classifying those providers as Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. 

When evaluating Gong, Forrester found us to be a Leader, and we received the highest score in the Current Offering category of any vendor assessed. And there are a few reasons as to why. 

To quote from the report, “Gong’s AI reveals unique buyer and seller insights to improve deal outcomes. One of the few companies founded with AI at its core, Gong has used its nine-year AI résumé to create transformative insights for revenue organizations.” 

And not all AI is equal. Gong is the only vendor to receive the top scores possible across the three AI criteria, including AI automation, guidance, and a range of analytics insights. “[Gong’s] ability to consistently advance the application of AI in sales has been a key differentiator. With CI as the foundation of the platform, Gong excels at turning unstructured interactions into insights. This foundation plays a major role in its ability to unlock the value of genAI for revenue teams.” 

Our rich history with AI showcases how we’re continuing to evolve how we improve seller outcomes. As the report states, “Gong’s [roadmap] is more aggressive and backed by a track record of delivering on commitments…This platform begins and ends with AI, where it consistently differentiates.” 

“The Forrester Wave^TM: Revenue Orchestration Platforms For B2B, Q3 2024” cited Gong’s Ask Anything feature as a key example of this foundational AI innovation. The report adds, “Although other vendors in this evaluation have similar features, Gong’s customers validate its accuracy and differentiation…Gong is a fit for companies committed to leveraging AI to improve revenue outcomes.”

It’s one thing to run your workflows in a unified platform, it’s another entirely to fuel your entire GTM motion with accurate and consistent AI-driven insights into customers’ needs. That’s the kind of consolidated platform that paves the way for highly productive revenue teams to surface — and act on — opportunities for growth.

That’s been the goal for us since day one at Gong: help our customers access unparalleled insights through highly advanced, patented AI tailored specifically to revenue teams. We believe “The Forrester Wave^TM: Revenue Orchestration Platforms For B2B, Q3 2024” report validates the strength of our current offering and our vision. Our 4,000+ customers are in a promising position – consolidating on Gong paves the way for a competitive advantage across the entirety of the GTM org. 

Get started with the Gong platform today with a demo. 

Research shows that 63% of business leaders believe sales forecasting is critical to their organization’s success, but only 27% say their current forecasting method is accurate.

Although sales forecasting is vital, most sales leaders don’t use a process that helps them understand how their teams win or lose deals. Without access to those insights, they can’t investigate their current pipeline or keep it on track, nor can they create an accurate sales forecast.

Every sales organization should have a clear sales forecasting method in place, and its sales leaders should understand why they use that particular method. This guide explores six proven sales forecasting methods, clarifying when to use them and what information you can glean from each one. 

Before we dive in too far, let’s cover the basics. What exactly is sales forecasting?

Sales forecasting is the practice of predicting the sales your business expects to close in the coming month, quarter, or year.

Successful forecasts draw on a wide range of data:

The reality is that accurate forecasting is tough to achieve. The data listed above is typically dispersed across numerous tools, and many conventional forecasting tools don’t even factor in market conditions or emerging trends. That makes it near impossible to get a clear picture of what’s really happening in your pipeline and create an accurate forecast.

Plus, most sales teams don’t have access to high-quality data, and even fewer teams have access to high-quality data that’s centralized in one platform. That’s likely why, as Gartner recently reported, “Executive stakeholders frequently lack confidence in the pipeline data and forecast results, leading to wasted effort and lost opportunity for data-driven decision making.”

Without reliable data and the right forecasting model, you’ll never uncover insights that can keep your forecast on track and improve its accuracy.

The crux of sales forecasting’s importance is this: When sales forecasts are accurate, business leaders can make better decisions about their company, and sales managers can prioritize their team’s time and resources to drive sales and growth. 

With a reliable and accurate sales forecasting model in place, you can set achievable, realistic revenue milestones that align with your business’s resources, goals, and capabilities. The right model will also give you a better idea of how, when, and where to improve operations, hire more people, train your teams, and allocate resources. You’ll understand when to upscale and downscale inventory, manage seasonal fluctuations, and capture market trends.

Sounds important, right? It is.

The problem today is that too many companies rely on their reps’ gut instincts instead of hard data when they create forecasts. While gut instinct has its place in sales, you can’t rely on it to create accurate forecasts, and you certainly can’t rely on those forecasts as a foundation for good decision making.

Take software development company Piano as an example. They used to rely on their sales team’s knowledge and experience to forecast future sales. The results were highly inaccurate. After they switched to Gong Forecast, an AI-driven solution, their forecast accuracy shot up to 90%! They now make smarter, real-time decisions about individual deals in their pipeline, as well as the company’s overall growth.

Accuracy is everything when your entire organization flies or fails based on the revenue predictions you make — and how well your team lives up to them! You need to be able to spot problems early on and make adjustments straight away. 

Read on to learn which of the six sales forecasting methods below can help your team achieve reliability on both fronts.

Each forecasting method below offers a unique way to look at potential sales. 

Let’s dive in to understand how each technique works and what it can help you accomplish.

In opportunity-stage forecasting, you look at the likelihood of closing the open opportunities in your pipeline and calculate their total potential value. 

You’d consider how deals progress through all stages of the pipeline and ask, "What’s the probability of this deal closing in a given timeframe based on its current stage?"

Assign a likely conversion rate to each stage in the sales pipeline. This probability represents the chances that a deal at this stage will close on time. The further along the pipeline a deal is, the better its chances of closing. 

To get an overall forecast, you’d multiply the value of the deals by the percentage and then add them together. 

For example, let’s say your pipeline looks like this:

Your pipeline potential would be ($10,000 x 0.1) + ($5,000 x 0.3) + (3,000 x 0.7) = $4,600 

This method works best for businesses that already have a clear sales process with well-defined stages. 

It’s clear and relatively simple, and it also helps you identify challenges by highlighting where deals drop out of the pipeline. That said, it overlooks external factors that can affect deal closures and it doesn’t provide you with any insights into why losses happen or long-term sales trends. 

Intuitive forecasting relies on your sales team's gut feelings and knowledge to predict sales. It’s most useful when you launch something new, when historical data isn't available. 

For example, a sales team might intuitively predict a surge in sales after a famous influencer mentions your product.

On the plus side, this method is quick, flexible, and highly relevant to your company’s specific product range. 

However, since it's based on personal judgment, it’s often inaccurate — and it can be tough to manage if your sales reps all say something different.

The historical forecasting method uses past sales data. It looks at what was previously sold, when, and to whom, and uses these historical patterns to forecast future sales. 

This method considers aspects like growth rates, seasonal variations, and average sale values.

It’s a helpful sales forecasting technique if you have lots of data and consistent sales patterns as it helps you spot trends and cycles in past sales so you can predict future demand.

There are several methods of historical sales forecasting:

These methods can offer reliable forecasts if you’re in a stable market (and that’s a BIG if). They also give you a benchmark against which to measure success. 

Be wary though: These forecasts rely on past conditions and assume that these conditions will continue. They don’t consider unexpected market changes or new economic factors.

Multivariable analysis forecasting uses a wealth of data sources to predict future sales. It looks at everything from how customers behave to fluctuating market dynamics. It considers historical sales data, social media trends, sales call topics, economic factors, marketing data, and so on, to create a big-picture overview of anticipated sales figures.

Sales leaders use this method to predict complex sales situations with lots of moving parts. 

For example, when Tackle.io was in hyper-growth mode, trying to scale quickly, it relied on forecasts created using spreadsheets. It was a slow and overwhelming process that relied on error-prone manual input. 

They switched to Gong, where Tackle now creates sales forecasts easily, using over 300 data points. The company has highly accurate AI-powered forecasts, plus, using Gong has cut down their forecasting time by a whopping 40%!

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As you can see, this method helps sales teams understand the real reasons behind sales trends so they can hit their targets and optimize operations. You’ll need a high-powered sales forecasting tool like Gong to analyze massive amounts of data in this way.

Ready to see AI-powered, multivariable sales forecasting in action? Book a demo.

Regression analysis connects sales volumes to other factors, as a way to understand their causal relationships. 

For example, an online store might use a regression model to see how advertising spend influences retail sales.

The causal model works best for sales teams that want to understand how specific changes push sales figures up or down. Since you can only assess one variable at a time, it can take a while to work out which factors have the most impact on your numbers. It’s also easy to overlook variables that might sway sales figures without your knowledge.

Length of sales cycle forecasting helps you determine how long it takes to convert a potential customer into a sale, and then asks, "How does the length of the sales cycle impact our forecast?"

Figuring out how long deals take can also help you uncover where they get stuck. You can use this model to determine which sales opportunities to prioritize based on the time they take to convert.

For example, a cybersecurity company might notice that deals with smaller businesses take around three months to close, while deals with larger businesses take six months. With this understanding, they can forecast revenue better and plan their team’s workload more effectively.

On the other hand, this method doesn’t always reflect deal complexity — instead, relying on averages.

Whichever sales forecasting method you choose, here are four best practices to get more out of it:

Using the right forecasting method makes a significant difference to your own team and the business as a whole. Stay true to your own needs and be aware that it’s easy to fall into the trap of using a complex method when you only need a simple one. 

Think carefully about your available data and what you’re trying to learn. Pick the forecasting method that helps you reach your goals with the resources you have available.

The better the tool, the more accurate the forecast. Good sales forecasting software analyzes many kinds of data points to make more informed predictions. The best forecasting tools use AI. 

Solutions like Gong use AI-powered predictive forecasting to provide complete visibility into your pipeline. By performing a multivariable analysis on more than 300 signals, Gong’s AI finds sales patterns with incredible accuracy. 

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Drew Korab, RevOps Director at Upwork, has experienced the benefits of Gong Forecast firsthand. As he explains, “Our forecast accuracy has grown to the point that we’re now at 95%. Gong lets us run a predictable revenue organization, reduce the number of tools in our tech stack, and save tons of time on forecasting.” 

And, unlike conventional forecasting software, Gong Forecast’s performance improves over time. By learning from real-time data, Gong’s machine-learning algorithms produce more accurate and relevant predictions. 

You’re able to see exactly how your pipeline progresses and respond to trends or changes as soon as they happen.

You’ve heard it before: “Garbage in, garbage out.” High-quality data is the cornerstone of effective forecasting. When your data isn’t clear, complete, or clean, you’ll get unreliable or inaccurate forecasting.

Gong improves your forecast accuracy by corralling your pipeline’s most critical data in one platform. There, it’s analyzed by AI to build a forecast that’s founded squarely on your best information.

Sales don't happen in a vacuum. Market shifts and seasonal trends shape sales patterns. If you don’t take them into account, you’ll miss both opportunities and risks.

Compare sales and market data from similar time periods to predict how these factors might impact your future sales.

Analyze high-quality data using an AI-backed platform. The combination of accurate data from multiple sources and high-powered AI leads to shockingly accurate forecasts and extremely helpful deal insights.

Here’s a quick checklist:

Look at historical data on how similar products or services did when they launched. If you don’t have similar offerings for comparison, do your best by considering what you know about similar target audiences, revenue goals, or marketing angles. 

Data. Or rather, a failure to look at the right data. Sales reps’ opinions aren’t accurate enough in today’s market. When sales reps rely on their own gut feelings and guesses, they can lead the whole team in the wrong direction.

When it’s done well, sales forecasting guides a business's growth by keeping the forecast on track and enabling smart business decisions. It’s how you (and your business’s leadership) set realistic targets and make informed decisions about which strategies to use to reach your goals. When you accurately predict which deals will close, you can ‌prioritize your pipeline efforts, plan resource allocations, upgrade operations, and improve training accordingly. 

For sales forecasting to be truly effective, you need to use a method that helps you achieve your business goals with the resources you have. You also need an AI-powered forecasting solution that corrals high-quality data from multiple sources to give you accurate forecasts that highlight both the risks and opportunities in your pipeline.

To get more insights into how to set up your own sales forecasts, check out these guides:

To learn how to create highly accurate sales forecasts, book a demo with Gong today. Discover how AI-driven forecasting can transform your sales and pipeline strategy.

A healthy sales pipeline is critical to moving prospects from one stage of the sales funnel to the next. It’s also a foundational part of driving revenue growth on your sales team. 

Most sales managers and their teams struggle to manage their pipeline successfully. Reps commonly forget to send follow-ups, bottlenecks pop up, managers don’t know where to coach most effectively, and before you know it, winnable deals fall through the cracks. That’s no way to run your sales process.

The solution lies in modern, efficient sales pipeline management. 

This article covers everything you need to know about pipeline management — what it is and how it can improve your sales, as well as actionable tips and best practices. We also delve into AI-driven software that can help you manage your sales pipeline from lead to closed-won. 

Sales leaders put time and effort into identifying new sales opportunities, closing deals, meeting their sales quota, and boosting sales performance. And yet, according to a 2021 survey, as many as 33% of B2B marketing decision-makers still struggle to reach their target market and generate qualified leads. That has dire implications for the health of their overall pipeline and their team’s quota. 

If you’ve noticed that your team’s sales efforts seem to fall flat no matter what you do, it’s time to take a look at the state of your sales pipeline management — how you oversee and organize your team’s entire sales cycle. 

A sales pipeline is the sequence of stages and activities your sales team uses to move prospects through their buying journey. 

It’s typically broken into stages that move from acquiring to nurturing to ultimately converting leads into customers. These stages make it easier to analyze your pipeline, identify areas for improvement, and track whether any changes you implement have the intended effect. Pipeline management also involves designing a pipeline that reflects your company’s broader sales goals.

The stages of a sales pipeline will look different at every company, depending on its product, target market, business model, scale, industry, etc. 

That said, a typical sales pipeline contains seven stages: 

Technically speaking, the terms “sales pipeline” and “sales funnel” can both refer to the flow of prospects through the sales process. But while sales professionals may sometimes use the two terms interchangeably, they don’t refer to the same thing:

An optimized pipeline leads to a shorter sales cycle and more sales — which means more revenue. 

That’s an oversimplification, but it reflects how vital pipeline management is to your sales organization’s success.

With that said, here are four key benefits of sales pipeline management you can achieve on your team:

The most obvious benefit of getting your sales pipeline under control — and defining the specific actions your team should take at each stage of the sales process — is the revenue growth you’ll experience. 

Proper sales pipeline management sets the stage for all your sales efforts by ensuring that everything works like a well-oiled machine. It requires that you have a complete view of the prospects in your pipeline, so you can make sure “good-fit” deals don’t slip through the cracks or grow cold. You can also ensure that everyone on your team operates at their best. When your reps follow best practices, you’ll see an improvement in your numbers and be more likely to meet your revenue goals and drive growth. 

Once you start tracking key sales performance metrics and analyzing previously closed deals, you’ll be better positioned to make more accurate sales forecasts. 

That, in turn, allows you to make more informed decisions about your team’s resources, set more realistic sales and revenue goals, and know where to direct your own coaching efforts. When leadership is confident in your ability to call and achieve your forecast, they can make better business decisions. You can set the stage for great decision-making when you know how your sales pipeline is performing. 

The most important thing about sales pipeline management software is that it gives you access to customer interaction data you can use to gain valuable insights into your team’s performance. 

As a sales manager, you’ll be able to assess your sales reps’ productivity, identify your top performers and the sales activities that make them more successful. You’ll also be able to recognize challenges that prevent the rest of your sales reps from reaching their full potential and spot risks happening inside deals.

Sales cycle length is an important factor in your team’s success and their ability to achieve quota. In a well-managed pipeline, each stage runs smoothly and your prospects flow through the sales process quickly, reducing the length of your sales cycle. 

The math is pretty simple: 

The shorter your sales cycle, the more wins your sellers can chase and the faster they can grow revenue. 

Below are proven tips and best practices you can use to improve your sales pipeline management — and boost your sales performance. 

Without critical metrics and reliable data it’s practically impossible to identify which sales pipeline stages need improvement, let alone accurately measure the effect of any changes you make. 

Some sales teams try to track every pipeline metric in the book — dozens of them — while others might overlook the most critical ones. Either way, it’s tough to maintain an effective pipeline management strategy and meet your revenue goals if you have no idea how your pipeline is performing.

With that in mind, keep an eye on the following key sales performance metrics: 

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By the time buyers reach your website, they’ve already done their online research, compared prices, and read a few customer reviews. In fact, today, 54% of consumers turn to search engines as their go-to source of information. 

While most buyers prefer to do pre-purchase research independently, your content still plays a key role in attracting “right-fit” leads and encouraging them to progress to the next stage in the sales process. 

Remember that the type of content each buyer responds to will vary depending on where they are in their buying journey. Your goal in managing your pipeline to accommodate this reality is twofold: Review your entire sales process to determine whether you have content gaps at any point in the journey. Then develop a content strategy that includes everything from blog posts and ebooks to webinars, case studies, and customer success stories. 

Most importantly, make sure your content provides your buyer with value and supports them as they move to the next stage in their customer journey.

Considering how complex pipeline management can be and the amount of data it involves, you shouldn’t attempt to handle it manually. When it’s done well, it’s beyond the scale of what humans can manage, plus you can automate many aspects of sales pipeline management today using software solutions.

That brings us to sales pipeline management tools and other business software. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is crucial in optimizing workflows, gathering crucial data, and maintaining an effective sales strategy. 

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But it has its flaws, namely that it loses close to 99% of the words spoken on calls, and that it’s dependent on reps to enter the data they think is important to a given deal. (They spend hours on this each week and often get it wrong.) 

If you’re ready to take your current CRM system to the next level, consider integrating it with Gong’s Revenue Intelligence Platform. You’ll be able to manage your pipeline using AI-backed software that makes it incredibly easy to keep track of your team’s sales activities at a macro and micro level, gain real-time insights into deal risks and opportunities, and improve your sales forecasting. You’ll also bring all your data and everyone involved in the sales process into one platform where they can easily collaborate.

Modern-day buyers have more choices available to them than ever before. Making things even trickier for your sales team, buyers are constantly bombarded with advertising, promotional emails, and sales calls. It can be challenging to cut through all that noise, let alone convince prospects to choose you over the competition. 

The one-and-done approach to closing a sale no longer cuts it. Without timely follow-ups, your sellers are at risk of losing prospects who are already in your pipeline. Following up — not only in a timely manner, but with personalized content — is critical to differentiating your offering in today’s market. 

The whole point of building a sales pipeline with its clearly defined stages, activities, and sales metrics is to create a roadmap that is organized and aligns with your broader sales goals. 

When it’s well-defined, there’s no room for misinterpretation by your sellers. Clarity takes the guesswork out of the entire sales process for everyone involved. Moreover, it simplifies communication, ensures transparency and accountability, and makes onboarding new sales team hires easier. 

Most importantly, a standardized sales process is easy to replicate and leads to more consistent results and accurate forecasts, quarter over quarter. 

Even when your pipeline is well-managed and rolling along smoothly — getting the results you want — there’s one very important lesson you should never forget: Your sales pipeline isn’t set in stone, and you should never treat it as such. 

Even if you’ve figured out the optimal pipeline structure for your sales organization, you have to conduct regular reviews of your sales pipeline. (We mean annually, if not quarterly.) 

Review everything from the number of deals in each stage to sales velocity, average deal size, average deal value, and other key metrics we noted in this article. Look for trends and patterns along with inefficiencies, gaps, and other aspects of your sales pipeline that need improvement. Address them early on and often to ensure you maintain an effective sales strategy, year over year. 

Gong’s Revenue Intelligence Platform gives sales reps, managers, and leaders 360-degree visibility into the entire sales process and every deal in it. Use this information to keep deals on track and create more accurate forecasts. 

AI has made its mark in virtually every sector, including sales. In fact, according to The State of AI In Sales report, sales reps already view AI as a crucial part of their business processes, primarily in terms of automating manual or repetitive tasks (35%), getting real-time insights into sales performance (34%), and supporting digital marketing efforts, including sales content and outreach email creation (31%). 

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If your sales and marketing teams aren’t using AI-powered business software to handle routine tasks, sales forecasting, and marketing automation, to name a few, you’re already at risk of falling behind your competition. 

With that in mind, here are a few examples of how AI platforms can level-up your sales pipeline management: 

Gong’s AI-backed platform will provide you with the data-driven insights you need to manage your pipeline and meet your revenue goals. 

Sales pipeline management is the foundation of a healthy, well-functioning sales process, and the key to keeping buyers moving through the sales funnel faster. It requires the right software and a willingness to embrace AI-backed change. 

Ready to improve your sales process, drive growth, and take your team’s productivity to the next level? Book a demo to see how Gong’s Revenue Intelligence Platform can help you and your team meet all your goals. 

Related reading: If you liked this article, check out Sales pipeline tracking: 3 risks costing you winnable deals and A guide to building effective and accurate sales pipeline reports to learn more.

Sales intelligence tools are revolutionizing how businesses approach customer interactions. But with hundreds of sales intelligence platforms claiming to be the “best,” how do you identify the right one for your team? You need to know what makes a sales intelligence tool a perfect companion for driving revenue growth. 

This guide will highlight the common features, integrations, and strategies you need to leverage AI tools to boost your sales.

These days, new sales intelligence tools come onto the market fairly regularly, and most of them address the pain points in one or several categories below. It’s important that you understand what's on offer in each category so you can choose a tool that solves your most pressing challenges.

Here are the most common categories addressed by sales intelligence tools today:

This type of sales intelligence tool offers insights into a customer’s needs, pain points, and interaction history, which your marketing and sales teams can use to tailor their outreach efforts. 

Personalized messaging engages prospects more successfully, getting them interested in your product, and nudging them to initiate contact as a high-quality inbound lead. Your team can then nurture them further and improve conversion rates with targeted communication.

Sales forecasting tools estimate your team’s future revenue based on their current pipeline. Some also predict industry trends to facilitate informed decision-making around growth and stability. 

This type of sales intelligence tool offers insights into your potential sales volume so you can allocate resources accordingly. Sales forecasting enables better budget planning, realistic goal setting, inventory management, and risk management. 

A CRM (customer relationship management) is a sales intelligence tool that stores, organizes, and analyzes all your company’s relationships and interactions with existing and potential customers. 

CRM software offers contact management, automates repetitive manual tasks, and streamlines sales processes. CRMs also generate detailed customer profiles and enable better service personalization, thereby improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Too many sales organizations spend time chasing the wrong leads. Sales intelligence software with lead scoring lets you rank prospects based on their conversion likelihood. 

A scoring framework quantifies the prospect’s interest in your product and filters out low-quality opportunities. It helps your sales reps clarify which prospects are worth pursuing so they can focus on high-quality leads. This should improve their productivity and conversion rates.

Competitive intelligence analyzes the voice of your customer so you can glean actionable insights into your position in the industry. It’s a great way to stay ahead of the curve.

It pinpoints where your competitors are doing well or falling short so you can learn from their successes and mistakes, identify gaps in their services, and gain a competitive edge. Competitor insights also help you identify market trends and risks in time to mitigate them. 

This type of sales intelligence tool enhances existing datasets with additional information. It detects the slightest changes in customer and prospect behaviors and lets you update your ideal customer profile and segments accordingly. 

Manual data entry is inefficient and takes time, and reps often miss critical data points and valuable insights. Plus, sales leaders struggle to manage data on multiple platforms, with 87% of them considering “unstructured” data management their top priority. 

That’s why unified data management is a key feature you should look for in a sales intelligence tool. Automated data entry and a centralized data repository are critical, and allow sales teams to access customer insights more easily. 

For example, Gong’s Revenue Intelligence platform captures every customer interaction from sales calls, emails, web, and more, and analyzes them in a centralized platform where sales team can access insights and information. This saves time and improves their productivity. 

Your sales intelligence tool must have a lead scoring and prioritization capability so your sales reps can make the most of their time. 

Your chosen tool should be able to factor in the ideal buyer persona and other predefined criteria and analyze how leads interact with your business and industry. 

Based on the insights it gleans, it should group your leads into interest score categories that your sales reps can use to prioritize their efforts. This will streamline the sales process and focus your resources in the right areas. 

In short, a sales intelligence platform with a lead-scoring feature can: 

With Gong, you get AI-powered analytics that score your leads in real time. The result is efficient resource allocation, a highly productive sales team, and better conversion rates. 

In competitive industries, the stakes are high and there’s no room for guesswork when it comes to your revenue. That’s why predictive analytics and sales forecasting should be key features in your sales intelligence tool. Combining historical data with current and emerging patterns allows your team to forecast sales and track customer behaviors so they can respond in real time.

The tool should include: 

A sales tool with these types of analytics helps you accurately predict your sales performance and set realistic sales goals. It empowers you and your team to stay on track and handle even the most tumultuous market trends. 

Want your business to be battle-ready? 

Eliminate the guesswork from your sales efforts with Gong. Its advanced analytics give you predictive insights into your team’s sales performance and customer engagement and detect risks to your sales pipeline.

Your team doesn’t have time to check your sales intelligence platform for hourly changes. That’s why you need a sales tool that provides real-time updates. These will keep everyone responsive to opportunities or risks as they arise. 

Give your sales professionals instant notifications when a prospect takes a specific action, or a significant event occurs in the customer journey. You should be able to set up alerts for competitor insights and changes in market trends too. 

Gong offers real-time monitoring capabilities, action-based triggers, and intent signals that will always keep your sales team informed of critical developments. You can set up targeted actions, and the system will send instant alerts, letting you capitalize on opportunities, address challenges, and stay ahead of the competition. 

Effective sales strategies are built on understanding your pipeline’s overall health, your team’s strengths and weaknesses, and how the market’s responding to your messaging. Being aware of each rep’s potential areas for improvement is critical to eliminating roadblocks to your sales goals. 

Use a sales intelligence tool to monitor and assess individual and team performance against set goals and benchmarks and ensure individual accountability. 

The tool should let you customize and measure metrics unique to your company so everyone is aligned around the same goals. Regular sales performance tracking also identifies areas where the process may be a challenge, thereby enabling optimization of the sales process. 

With Gong, you get comprehensive tracking features to monitor your sales performance. 

Going back and forth between multiple tools wastes time, hampers sellers’ workflows, and reduces productivity. That’s why your sales intelligence tool should integrate with your existing tech stack. 

Here are some integrations you need to confirm before selecting a sales intelligence tool:

Your sales intelligence tool must integrate with your CRM to synchronize data and offer an unparalleled view into your sales funnel. 

Having a CRM integration means your sales intelligence tool can collect all the information from your customer interactions, including contact details and email addresses, and centralize them in one platform. If your sales intelligence tool offers automation, this can reduce the need for manual data entry, cut the risk of errors, and ensure the consistency and accuracy of the information used across your team. 

A tool that integrates with CRM can enable more personalized outreach campaigns, maximizing impact. Your sales reps can also access relevant details about their leads, refer to previous sales conversations, and nurture prospects accordingly. A well-informed team can offer more substantial and faster solutions to queries and requests, thereby improving customer experiences, satisfaction, and loyalty. 

Gong integrates with popular CRM solutions, including HubSpot, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. 

Investing in sales intelligence tools that sync with your email marketing tools lets you track and collect valuable insights from communications with prospects. You can measure email metrics like open rate, click-through rate, unsubscription rate, etc., to see where you can perform better. Email integration lets you identify the communication strategies that drive the best results, so you can apply them across your team. 

Gong integrates with email marketing solutions like Lavender, Google Workspace, and Microsoft Office 365.

Automate your marketing efforts to better target your audience. A great tool ensures that the right content reaches the right crowd at the right time, maximizing impact.

You’ll get the best results when your sales and marketing initiatives are aligned, which isn’t always an easy task. 

The solution? Enable seamless integration between your sales and marketing teams. Having a holistic view of your sellers’ customer interactions can empower marketing professionals to craft campaigns around what prospects want, need, and expect. The sales team can also keep its promises aligned with what is advertised in marketing campaigns.

Looking for a sales intelligence tool that integrates with — and streamlines — your marketing? 

Look no further than Gong. Here, you get an in-built marketing solution that offers full visibility into customer and prospect interactions. Your marketing team can collaborate to craft hyper-relevant messaging and drive more leads into the pipeline. 

Today, having a thriving LinkedIn profile is non-negotiable for any company. Make sure your sales intelligence tool offers these social listening features on LinkedIn: 

Gong’s extensive integrations include LinkedIn Sales Navigator so sales professionals can build and maintain close relationships with buyers at scale and sell virtually. 

When you use multiple data sets to craft your insights, they’re more accurate, which enables better decision making. Look for a sales intelligence tool that syncs with multiple business intelligence platforms. 

Such integrations will combine your sales data with other organizational data sources and uncover actionable insights and opportunities. This helps solidify your outreach and sales strategies, and ensures the best possible results from every deal. 

Gong makes this simple by integrating with tools like Zoho and Zapier, and syncing your customer interaction data in one unified platform.

As your business scales, so will your need for data-driven insights. Choose a scalable tool that allows seamless expansion without compromising performance or functionality. Before investing, opt for a free version or a trial period to examine the tool’s agility. 

Ensuring quick adoption is essential to maintaining productivity. That’s why you need a solution that offers a user-friendly interface and intuitive workflows. An easily navigable sales intelligence tool also minimizes training requirements and maximizes user engagement for successful implementation. 

Sales benchmarks, prices, and target demographics vary depending on your niche. With rigid sales intelligence software, it’s difficult or impossible to set up the customized metrics you need to navigate your industry.

Thoroughly check how extensive the customization options are before investing in a sales intelligence tool. In particular, assess whether its reporting and email templates are customizable.

Since sales intelligence tools deal with extensive amounts of sensitive customer information, their data security measures should be top-notch. Any breach could compromise your image or land you in legal trouble for non-compliance.

Before you sign up for a sales intelligence tool, check the terms and conditions thoroughly. 

Integrating new technology comes with challenges, and a sales intelligence tool is no exception. Your team may also need guidance to make the most of the tool’s features. 

Make proactive customer support a top priority when you look for a sales intelligence tool. Be sure you clearly understand the vendor’s customer support framework — 24x7 customer assistance channels are a great indicator that they’ve got your back whenever you need them. It’s helpful to monitor G2, Capterra, or other review sites for reviews from current or former customers. 

While business intuition is a component of any company’s success, you can’t rely on it to create an effective sales strategy. Data is your biggest asset. Sales intelligence tools let you turn your data into valuable insights and make informed decisions that boost revenue. 

You can, for example, collect a target company’s details, analyze their behavior across each sales funnel stage, and stay updated on their changing preferences. Gong offers a LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration that identifies potential clients and collects data on the company’s size, its decision makers, and their job titles. The tool also crawls the client company’s website to strengthen its insights.

After pinpointing what the customer wants, a comprehensive sales intelligence can create a report that helps you: 

Sales intelligence tools prioritize winnable deals through lead-scoring algorithms. You can refine your prospecting list using this tangible data and direct your efforts toward quality leads. 

You can also customize your sales messaging for high-value leads, nudging them to conversion. Targeted and highly personalized outreach satisfies customers by providing them with the answers they need to their most pressing questions. This generates heightened interest and opens the door to further conversations. 

Sales intelligence tools let you keep a finger on the real-time pulse of your market. They uncover data about current pain points, desires, and preferences, which your team can use to tailor their pitch, personalize outreach, drive more engagement, and build stronger relationships.

Your sales reps can refer to these customer insights while cold calling to highlight how your offering solves their challenges. You can also use sales intelligence tool data to customize your email outreach for different segments. For example, you can send exclusive offers based on individual prospects’ preferences and encourage CTA clicks. You can also nurture leads with regular, personalized email and social media content to maximize engagement and encourage recipients to explore your offerings.

Sales involves time-consuming work, including manual data entry, lead research, and scoring — and manual processing is notoriously error-prone. 

Sales intelligence tools automate these repetitive tasks, streamlining the entire sales process. When a lead enters the pipeline, the tool collects relevant data, and analyzes the prospect’s behavioral patterns..

This improves data accuracy, lets the teams focus on winning leads and strategies, improves productivity with optimized workflows, and generates more sales opportunities and a shorter sales cycle. 

AI-powered sales intelligence tools offer predictive analytics that track emerging market trends and demand patterns. Use these insights to project future sales and growth. It also spots market opportunities so you can capitalize on them before your competitors. Sales forecasting also enables better inventory and resource planning. 

Unforeseen risks can shrink your revenue potential and hamper your business growth. Predictive analytics lets you avoid surprises by notifying you of possible threats to your pipeline and market risks. You can take preventive measures early on and protect your pipeline from any shake ups in the industry. 

Unexpected circumstances are inevitable in business, no matter how well you plan. When these situations arise, you may need to make decisions quickly, and sales intelligence insights can help. These tools constantly monitor key metrics and performance indicators and can notify you about significant changes in real time. 

Instant alerts mean you can respond promptly to changing market conditions and customer needs. Real-time sales intelligence reporting makes your team more resilient in difficult times, enables fast and informed decisions, and protects your revenue. 

Sales intelligence reporting can highlight bumps in your sales process and customer journey, and can help you drive continuous improvements. Track your team’s sales performance and identify what’s blocking reps. Then, finetune those areas and hone your strengths. 

If your team uses manual sales processes, the newly implemented sales intelligence tool will take some time to adopt. To simplify the journey, ensure your team has sufficient training resources to refer to while using the platform. 

Sales leaders should become familiar with the tool first. Then, run comprehensive training programs for sales managers and sales representatives to ensure their effective use of the tool. Create a dedicated manual of best practices and provide ongoing support and resources to encourage user adoption and proficiency. 

The wrong tool will fail to drive substantial revenue growth, and you’ll watch your investment go down the drain. Instead, make sure you take steps to select the right tool in the first place:

You don’t want to get stuck with a tool that doesn’t fit your existing workflow seamlessly. Before selecting a tool, check out its integrations and ensure they are compatible with your existing tech stack.

You may face some issues while integrating the sales platform at first. Seek assistance from the vendor to simplify the integration process and minimize disruptions.

Some tools may look affordable initially, but their costs may quickly add up because of hidden charges and add-ons. Choose flexible pricing plans so you can scale up your subscription as required. 

Reports show that 66% of B2B companies have opted for AI-powered sales automation tools. In the future, these tools will process even larger volumes of data with greater speed and accuracy. In time, they will likely be able to make real-time recommendations about potential sales process improvements. 

Machine learning will eventually make forecasting even more accurate, enabling it to gauge more precise trends and risks. 

Reports estimated the global sales intelligence market size to be at $3 billion in 2023, and predict that it will reach $8.25 billion by 2033. These numbers indicate that a wide range of companies are investing in sales intelligence, and that this trend will only increase. It’s not a surprising trend given all that sales intelligence tools can do today and the capabilities we expect to see in the not-so-distant future.

Sales intelligence tools’ analytical capabilities will be refined, enhancing personalization and improving customer engagement. The algorithm will more deeply understand each lead’s needs and be able to help with hyper-targeted messaging, offers, and recommendations, as well as provide a tailored customer experience.

Gong’s platform captures, transcribes, and analyzes 100% of your sales team’s customer interactions (web, phone, email, etc.) to understand customers’ needs and pain points. 

Its cutting-edge sales analytics identify hundreds of buying signals to predict the likelihood of a purchase. Sales reps can use this information to craft a conversion-driven sales pitch that alleviates objections. 

Gong integrates with popular CRM solutions like HubSpot and Salesforce and syncs data to give you a unified view of customer information and deals across your entire pipeline. You can use insights from its data analysis to enhance the efficiency of your sales processes and workflows, as well as close more deals.

Gong offers seamless pipeline management with automated workflows that streamline and accelerate your team’s sales execution. This end-to-end platform gives you a bird’s eye view of your entire pipeline, so you can fully understand its health at any given moment. 

Gong’s forecasting framework analyzes more than 300 unique buying signals to gauge deal outcomes with 20% more accuracy than CRM predictions alone. Discard gut instincts and outdated CRM fields, and put precise customer interaction data at the core of your revenue operations in no time.

Gong tracks relevant customer conversations and offers industry insights. It uncovers what’s working and what isn’t when you go up against your competition, so your revenue teams can learn from and avoid pitfalls.

Use AI to analyze the voice of your customer to find unaddressed market opportunities, differentiate your product, and master competitive selling. Gong also lets you set up Smart Trackers so you get alerts about real-time industry insights. 

Gong offers a lead-scoring algorithm for sales prospecting. Use it to identify and prioritize the best potential leads, and use Gong’s insights into your win/loss data to uncover variables that lead to closed-won deals. 

You’re ready for Gong, which is so much more than a sales intelligence tool: It's a revenue intelligence platform that’s transforming sales teams. Instead of piecing together data from multiple sources, Gong unifies all your customer interaction data from calls, emails, web conferences, etc., into a single, actionable source of truth.

Use it to unearth insights that can help you coach more effectively, call forecasts confidently, navigate complex deals smoothly, and — most importantly — guide your team to closed-won deals more often.

Integrate Gong into your tech stack to simplify your sales process with a centralized dashboard, real-time alerts, and much more. 

Request a demo today!

If you also work in revenue operations, you know the relentless pursuit of accurate sales forecasting. Every company strives for that sweet spot, where precise forecasts drive impactful results and growth. 

At Gong, we’re no different. We constantly analyze our pipeline to align with our goals and navigate complex data to make informed decisions. And we rely on our own platform to solve these challenges. 

That’s why, as part of our “Gong on Gong” blog series, I’m pulling back the curtain to take you through some of the Gong Forecast features I rely on daily to prevent forecasting gaps and misses and achieve greater accuracy.

Before I get into how I use Gong, I want to stress the importance of embedding forecasting as a critical part of your organization’s operating rhythm. We’ve set clear weekly steps and expectations for reps, managers, and VPs that keep our data accurate and actionable. It’s this rigor and discipline that allows us to maximize Gong’s capabilities in the first place. Adhering to clear processes and fostering accountability will keep you aligned with your business and hugely increase your win rates. 

It can be tough to ensure clarity and alignment across your entire revenue team. I’m obsessive about monitoring Gong’s pipeline to foster collaboration and focus our efforts on the right activities. I do a deep dive every Monday but maintain real-time awareness by checking our pipeline build every single day. 

Using Gong's Deal Board functionality, I can quickly assess how much pipeline is being built across each channel and team. Inside of Gong Forecast, you’ll find that you can either use different deal board templates or build your own. We rely on specialized views of the pipeline generation board to focus on critical metrics, for example. I'm particularly interested in where our pipeline may be falling and how that impacts coverage in the current and upcoming quarter. Seeing gaps early helps us adjust strategies to mitigate risk and keep our momentum. 

Missing a forecast is my biggest fear. You too? To make sure that doesn’t happen, I try to identify at-risk areas and find ways to mitigate them throughout the quarter. Every week, I look for potential gaps in our sales forecast and determine how we might fill them. When the indicators give us confidence, I may even raise our forecast, but then the cycle starts over to ensure we don't miss the new target. To effectively manage these risk cycles, here are key things that I review all within Gong Forecast: 

I always say forecasting isn't about being right — it's about managing how wrong you might be. That's the beauty of it. You have to understand risk profiles and leverage the right solutions to navigate them effectively. 

That’s where Gong Forecast comes in; it has taken our revenue operations to new heights. By centralizing everything within our platform, we've achieved incredible accountability and alignment across our teams. Gong Forecast’s latest enhancements have drastically increased our ability to forecast with accuracy and agility. 

Gong Forecast can help you make AI-powered, informed decisions based on real customer interaction data. It offers a holistic view of your sales pipeline, and supports your entire revenue organization – from SDRs to AEs to customer success – to drive revenue growth and operational excellence.

If you're ready for next-level revenue forecasting results, get in touch.