Gong

I think Gong would be great for companies with younger associates or subscription related services. I have found it to be valuable for training sessions to provide to customers after the call. I do wish I could filter the feed by internal and external calls, but if you are a seller using this strictly for customer calls it would be a great fit.

Easy to use, helps every employee in the company from new hire to the most senior employee. Every sales organization needs this to help make sales reps better. The statistics breakdown of each call is very helpful for managers who can use this during feedback talks. It is truly suited for each stage of the sales cycle.

Gong is primarily built for Sales teams. We were able to use it well enough for our Customer Success team, but there is definitely significant focus on closing deals and some of the verbiage doesn't align super well with Customer Success needs and focuses. Nonetheless, its primary ability to record and analyze call data is helpful for any customer facing team that wants to improve their calls.

Gong is well suited for any customer facing employee that has conversations over video chat. Not only does it record the call, it analyzes the call for key words, topics, themes, etc.. It makes it easier as you don't have to take notes while you are talking, being more present for the customer.

Gong is well suited for constructive feedback from team members. Scenarios, where it is less appropriate, are monitoring employees to a point where calls are strained from being "watched".

It is an awesome recording app which allows you to record conversations in real time. This is very helpful when you do not have the time to take detailed notes or you want to feel present in the conversation. A time it is less appropriate are for routine internal calls of smaller importance or 1:1s where you would not want the whole company to see/hear what was said.

Gong is great for Sales teams, especially remote teams. It allows for your team to easily view calls from colleagues that help in both training and overall understanding. I personally found it most useful as I joined the team, as it let me listen in on a wide-variety of calls.

Appropriate when:
There's some kind of repetition and success formula that you're trying to find out. You have a big team, and you're trying to find something that works. Then gong will be helpful. In my experience, B2B SaaS will almost always benefit from it.

Less well suited when:
You're making big deals over a small number of very specific clients. I worked for a little bit in government and oil&gas deals, and everything in each deal varies wildly - can't see gong being that big of a help here.

I think in any sales scenario, as you can learn multiple things from the tool, whether for the sales representatives or the managers themselves. It brings to light a lot of discussions that most other team members were not aware of prior to being able to leverage Gong. It now enables you to listen to colleagues calls, who are successful and learn from your own team. Only place where it may not be appropriate would be for non-performance related roles.

Anyone making sales calls needs Gong, full stop.

Gong has saved multiples deals for us (both by keeping reps on top of activity and also by allowing us to leverage data and insights from the call like competitors, budget, timelines, etc.

Gong is well suited when you have a team handling multiple types of calls both in terms of meetings vs cold calls as well as platforms, e.g., Google Meet, Teams, and Outreach/Salesloft. It is good for orgs where they need to build out sales enablement fast - as you can create libraries of similar calls focused on a specific use case. It is also good for orgs that are scaling and finding their product fit or adapting to the market - since non client facing teams like product and engineering can also hear what the customers are saying via keyword matches, without needing to watch whole calls or attend.

It is not so well suited to teams in orgs where you have all reps using the same script, know your customer inside out and have everyone doing exactly the same thing. As in this scenario, it is quite expensive. If everyone is already rowing in the same direction for the company - it's perhaps not so essential.

Gong is really a fantastic tool for sales teams. Especially when someone new comes on board, to be able to watch different styles of calls is extremely useful and even for seasoned reps for areas of improvement. Also, as sales reps become busier with calls, it's often impossible to keep track of all the key points, so being able to go back and review the call has made a world of difference. I wouldn't recommend this tool if you're not a customer-centric focused organization.

As a CSM, Gong is great to use for customer meeting follow-up. I can go in and easily find what I said I'd do as a "follow up" - and it highlights those key words, so I've gotten into a habit of verbally saying certain phrases like "I'll send that over" or "I'll follow up" so that when I review the call in Gong later, those things will be bolded for me to easily find. Taking notes within the Gong app in Zoom has helped me avoid taking notes in a Word doc while facilitating a meeting. However there isn't an option to download the notes and the copy and paste formatting is not great (as a CSM I have to input notes into systems like Gainsight, so improving this workflow for users would be amazing!) I used gong heavily as a new hire to watch other Customer Success Managers present data and I was able to get insight from those on forming my own talk track. You can make comments on Gong calls including hashtags for easy reference later, and you can tag in teammates in call notes to easily transition off a follow-up to someone else. Gong is great for practicing and recording yourself presenting so you can review yourself and make recommendations. Your manager can also show you some data in Gong about how often you interrupt someone, how "patient" you are waiting for a response from someone else, and the balance between you and another person in calls. I found this data really insightful as I'm always trying to improve my presentation skills. Gong has a transcript of each call which I find to be really helpful but I wish you could download it and/or reformat it. It is handy though to use with "control F" if you're looking for something specific.

On cold calls it helps to see what works and what doesn't and how to improve my cold calling techniques. It helps when a question is brought to my attention from the person I called and they feel I may have said something that was false, misleading or profane. We can review the call and determine if it's true or incorrect.

As a new rep, it has been amazing to use Gong to learn from other successful reps and see what they're doing.

If you have a scaling sales team, then Gong is the perfect partner in that scaling motion, as it allows you to know exactly what is being said, pressure test your GTM strategy, and your product market fit. For example, when our messaging shifted during the pandemic, using Gong allowed us to measure whether reps were adopting the new messaging quickly and to highlight high-performing reps by sharing call snippets, etc.

I think Gong can be valuable across all functions and departments. Staying in touch with customers and prospects is central to organizational success and ensuring your company and product are valuable in changing landscapes.

I would recommend it to a colleague because it really helps in our day to day responsibilities, especially if we have to speak to multiple clients in a day, it helps to refer back to it to check if we have missed out any important notes mentioned by the client and even share it with the team to get their thoughts on how the call went.

If you're a seller you need Gong. Being able to pick apart calls, understand how long you spoke, and see transcripts are so huge. You can easily get feedback and share recordings across the org and with your prospects. The tool is an integral part of my success on a daily basis.

As a new account executive, Gong was helpful in keeping track of training calls for review later. During ramp-up, Gong was helpful in listening to senior account executive calls to get familiar with organizing and conducting meetings. After a few months of building my pipeline, Gong is helpful in keeping track of my deals. Reminds me to ping clients, etc.

Great for sales teams and can be used across the org in CS, Marketing and Product as well.

Gong is ideal for sales conversations in which a wide range of products or services are addressed. When speaking with clients who have thick accents, this feature comes in handy for double-checking our understanding of what they've said the first time. Using Gong to examine demonstrations and conduct discovery calls is an excellent choice. This is the product's strongest suit. For the time being, the platform participates in calls with a decent degree of success. A great tool for team collaboration.

Gong is very well suited for reviewing demos and discovery calls. This is the strongest aspect of the product. The platform joins calls with reasonable successes for future review. Very easy to share with the team.

I have found it a little difficult to gain macro-level insight into their reporting. It might be the qualitative nature of the data, but such reporting is better suited for Salesforce

Customer Success, Demos, and Product discussions. Contract calls are a no-go. Lawyers don't like being recorded.