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%!

(Image Source)

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. 

(Image Source)

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: 

(Image Source)

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. 

(Image Source)

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%). 

(Image Source)

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.

Increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25-95%.

Investing in retention has a massive impact on the bottom line, but preventing churn is notoriously difficult. 

With little time and incomplete or inaccurate data, customer success (CS) leaders often struggle to gather insights and proactively identify at-risk customers before it’s too late.

I’ve dealt with these issues before, so I’m excited to share some of the workflows we’ve implemented at Gong to mitigate churn.

Here’s the three-part playbook we use to drive happy customers. 

Like many CS leaders, my calendar is packed with meetings, so I’m always looking for ways to efficiently walk through upcoming renewals and spot potential risks. 

With Gong Deal Boards, I can quickly identify renewal red flags and assess risk across all accounts. 

You can customize the boards to fit your needs, but these are the three fields I review daily:

After I've reviewed potential risks across all customers, I hone in on each upcoming renewal by diving into the “next step” field. 

The “next step” field is an open text field on our deals board. My team updates it before our weekly forecast call with risk and pricing summaries, dated next steps, and details on decision-makers. This field syncs bi-directionally with our CRM, so I have peace of mind knowing the data in all our platforms is accurate and up-to-date. 

I recommend creating a “next step” template with required categories to distribute across your team for consistency within CSM notes. Getting your team to update this field regularly may require some coaching, but having up-to-date notes is hugely valuable in moving deals forward.

I also use this field to guide my team 1:1s and discuss potential gaps, what’s working, and what isn’t. Having a regular and systematic operating rhythm with my team gives me insights into accounts with upcoming renewal dates, allows me to focus on high-value opportunities, and escalate risk when necessary. 

Clear processes drive stronger internal team collaboration and, ultimately, better customer outcomes. 

The final piece of my renewal check-in requires peeling back the onion again. After reviewing the “next step” field, I have a better idea of the action my team member is planning to take (or lack thereof), but manually inputted data can be biased so there's still more to learn. That's where AI comes in.

To form a more complete picture of an account, I rely on Gong’s conversational insights. Specifically, I use Gong’s Ask Anything, a revenue-specific query solution, to search for intel across all customer touch points. Asking targeted and specific questions helps me understand each customer account more deeply.

Here are some questions I ask to uncover customer pain points and potential issues:

I can use Ask Anything to gain context on customer needs and objectives. This helps me start piecing together next steps without having to schedule meetings or scroll through Slack threads.

With a more complete picture, I can accurately assess risk and take action to drive more renewals. 

Creating and implementing an actionable plan to prevent churn isn’t a nice to have, it’s a must. Mitigating churn improves retention rates and drives profitability, but I’ve seen how challenging it can be to extract insights and take action. 

Thankfully, Gong can help. 

Gong’s Revenue Intelligence Platform uses AI to capture critical intel and transform that information into actionable next steps. Leading GTM teams turn to Gong to deliver a seamless customer experience.

Sound interesting? Watch this quick demo to learn how customer success managers use Gong to manage renewals and move deals forward. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the sales sector by storm. And while many teams, including mine, are eager to harness new AI-powered solutions, we don’t always know where or how to begin, so we stick with the status quo.

I didn’t want to fall into that trap and get left behind.

As a sales professional, I started by arming myself with information on how to use AI-powered insights from every deal in my pipeline. I was able to create more accurate sales forecasts, engage in more effective coaching, streamline workflows, uncover emerging trends, and prioritize high-value deals.

Sound like a lot? It is, and it’s what today’s leading sales teams do to succeed on a daily basis.

In this article, I’ll dive deep into how I have used AI to supercharge my sales processes, focus on high-value opportunities, and ultimately drive up my company's bottom line.

Every bit of data from your customer interactions is a goldmine of insights waiting to be unearthed. AI turns this information into actionable insights you can use to devise strategies that bolster your sales team’s effectiveness in ways that impact your quarterly and annual numbers.

AI can process unimaginable amounts of sales data, customer information, emails, social media chatter, etc. Machine learning algorithms analyze this data to identify trends and clarify customer behaviors, so you can build sales strategies that overcome your most pressing challenges. 

How does it work?

At a basic level, AI handles administrative and manual tasks, which frees up valuable time that sales professionals can spend doing what they do best‌ — ‌building relationships with customers and selling. At a deeper level, offers profound insights into what works to close deals and what doesn't, so you can tailor and streamline your sales process accordingly.

What does this mean for your sales team? Using AI means you stay a step ahead of the competition. 

With support from AI tools, your team can prevent lost deals and better focus their efforts, since they can more easily identify and prioritize ideal buyers and high-value deals. You’ll also see an uptick in customer satisfaction as buyers enjoy a smoother and more streamlined purchasing journey. 

Let's dive into how AI-powered solutions like Gong’s Revenue Intelligence platform can transform your sales outcomes by offering deeper insights, focused coaching opportunities, and more efficient sales strategies — because knowing when to use AI matters.

AI is transforming the sales landscape, streamlining every step from pinpointing leads to closing deals faster.

Here are some of the most valuable ways you can use AI in your sales organization:

While there are plenty of conventional sales forecasting tools, most of them provide rudimentary and inaccurate forecasts based purely on historical sales data and a few customer insights. AI sales forecasting is like having a telescope so powerful it can see how your customers will act in the future.

That’s how AI takes the guesswork out of sales forecasting. Solutions like Gong collect and analyze vast datasets from multiple sources to highlight patterns, trends, and potential pitfalls the human eye would miss.

Unlike conventional tools, AI brings a never-before-seen level of accuracy to your sales forecast in real time.

AI sales tools continuously track and process incoming data to offer real-time insights that keep your predictions accurate and relevant. This allows you to adapt your sales strategies as deals (and markets) evolve, and capitalize on trends as they happen.

Not only does this give you a better understanding of how your pipeline will perform, it also helps you plan better, allocate resources more effectively, and manage your inventory with confidence. 

Just look at the analytics company, Piano: After years of poor forecasting due to unreliable, fragmented data and disjointed systems, Piano now has 90% forecasting accuracy, thanks to Gong. 

This is because Gong Forecast — a solution built on the Gong platform — uses 300+ unique buying signals to predict deal outcomes, so your forecasts are at least 20% more accurate than forecasts that rely on CRM algorithms alone. 

Think of it this way: After a long day of back-to-back customer calls, sales reps and managers can either spend hours listening to conversations to try and pick out the key points, or they can get right to the heart of the matter by reading an efficient call summary that highlights key points.

AI-backed conversation intelligence tools like Gong record, analyze, and summarize the key information, next steps, and actions required after every sales conversation, saving countless hours and ensuring you never miss an insight.

It's like having a virtual assistant that never tires. AI captures your customers’ questions, concerns, and decisions, and gives your sales team a clear picture of what to do next via daily to-do lists for each rep. Just imagine what your sales reps could achieve if they could focus more on selling during calls, and less on note-taking. 

Plus, you’ll have a library of searchable call logs and summaries that provide a single source of truth to everyone involved in a deal. This way, nobody involved in the sale loses out, even if they miss a meeting.

As Sparrow’s CRO, Paul Park, puts it, “We used to waste a lot of time and energy note-taking and confirming information during and after meetings and calls. Now, it’s as easy as opening a call recording by typing in keywords to find what we need.”

When you assess calls with the help of AI-backed sales tools, you get a more complete picture of your customers’ needs and concerns. 

Conversation intelligence tools don’t just listen, they analyze sales calls to identify customer sentiment and intent and unveil actionable insights on how to improve sales performance. AI can do that for individual calls, and it can also pull insights from across your pipeline and your entire backlog of recorded calls to spot sales strategies that work.

(Image Source) 

Not only does this make it easier for sales reps to understand how to close a deal, but this type of real-time feedback unearths insights around sales coaching opportunities. It pinpoints exactly how and where sales reps struggle, as well as how the entire team might refine their sales pitches based on actual customer engagement. 

Hear.com, for example, leveraged AI-driven conversation intelligence to enhance its training programs and gain better visibility into how its sales agents can deliver positive buying experiences. As a result, the hearing aid company increased its close rate by a whopping 45%.

Personalized communication is key. According to 75% of marketers in a recent Hubspot survey, personalization drives sales and repeat business. But ask any rep and you’ll hear that it’s incredibly time-consuming to consistently produce high-quality, high-value, personalized content.

Generative AI simplifies and accelerates this process. It leverages a customer’s history to predict and draft the kind of email messaging they’re likely to respond to, and it’s capable of doing so at scale. 

Some AI sales tools can automatically create hyper-personalized emails that cater to the segment’s — or an individual customer’s — preferences and needs. You can also use these tools to generate follow-up emails that summarize next steps based on the most recent call. AI can also optimize email send times based on engagement data.

Not only does this save sales reps lots of time, it's also highly effective. Allison Horn, managing director of Accenture’s talent and organization consulting services, estimates that her AI users save as much as 40% of their working hours through AI-backed augmentation and automation.

Sales leaders and managers are always looking for new opportunities to grow their business. 

AI takes the guesswork out of this endeavor by scanning vast amounts of data to uncover opportunities as they emerge. By spotting patterns and trends in customer behaviors, purchasing data, social media interactions, and more, AI can identify potential markets and leads that are ripe for prospecting.

This shortcut into market visibility broadens your market reach and sharpens your competitive edge. It helps you concentrate your efforts ‌where they'll yield the highest returns. 

That’s what happened to the employee experience platform, Culture Amp.

As Simon Kirk, their VP of Revenue Enablement, explains, “Gong enables us to have a real-time update of what’s happening so that we can help coach our sales and customer success teams around how they’re approaching the market.”

The art of pipeline prioritization lies in predicting buyer intent. When you know which customers are most likely to buy, you can concentrate on accelerating their journey through the sales cycle.

AI supercharges lead scoring by predicting a prospect’s likelihood of buying with incredible accuracy. It factors in behavioral, engagement, transactional, company-specific, and demographic data, and uses machine learning algorithms to find trends in buying patterns that show you who's most likely to purchase. This way, sales teams can focus their energy on leads that are more likely to say yes, so the sales cycle is faster and smoother.

Gong's AI-driven platform transforms the way sales teams operate. From highly accurate forecasting to personalized email responses, Gong’s insights equip sales teams with deep learning capabilities that supercharge their sales processes.

Here’s some of what you’ll be able to do with Gong: 

Gong Forecast is exceptionally accurate. It analyzes more than 300 unique buying signals to understand exactly where a deal stands at any given time. Gong’s integrated platform consolidates customer interaction data from multiple sources in one place for unprecedented predictive accuracy. Managers who use Forecast can also see which deals are at risk and learn more about what’s causing the derailment. Then they're able to coach the rep to get the deal back on track.

(Image Source)

Drew Korab, Director of RevOps at Upwork, explains how Gong has improved its sales forecasts, saying, “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.”

Gong provides total visibility into the deal topics and actions that drive wins. 

(Image Source)

Its conversation intelligence pinpoints soft and hard skills that individual sales reps struggle with, as well as team trends. This enables managers to engage in highly targeted and relevant coaching.

As Kieran Smith, Past Senior Manager of Revenue Enablement of Andeles said of Gong’s coaching-related capabilities, “We cut our ramp time for SDRs [sales development representatives] by 50%, which is notably good. We also reduced the time to ROI for AEs to 12 weeks and shortened our sales cycle by 33%.”

By leveraging AI to analyze 300+ buying signals, Gong Forecast helps sales teams highlight the most promising buyers and spotlight potential issues that might jeopardize their deals. This makes it much easier to prioritize high-intent, high-value accounts.

(Image Source)

Take DemandBase, for example, who used Gong to analyze their sales data and build “intent scoring.” Since then, the go-to-marketing platform has experienced a 25% increase in annual contract value.

Gong's AI can generate personalized follow-ups that take into consideration the context of each customer’s past interactions. This customized information boosts buyer engagement, which in turn, accelerates the sales cycle. 

(Image Source)

Overall, this helps sales teams maintain consistent, personalized communication with potential clients without spending hours drafting follow-up emails.

Gong's analytical capabilities empower sales teams to understand the impact of broader patterns in the market, and drill down into the specifics of each account to strategically adjust their approach.

(Image Source)

Gong can identify and understand customer needs, competitor-related concerns, and emerging market trends. You’ll be able to keep your sales strategies and messaging relevant while highlighting potential opportunities or threats in a rapidly changing market.

Kustomer’s SVP of Global Sales and Customer Service, Vikas Bhambri, said “I don’t know how we would have survived these uncertain times without Gong. Gong enabled us to identify our customers’ and prospects’ most pressing concerns and challenges.” 

Yes! AI is the ultimate sales assistant. When AI handles routine tasks like data entry and drafting emails, it frees up sales reps’ time to focus on more complex tasks that require a human touch. Aside from its automation capabilities, AI provides sharp, data-driven insights and accurate predictions that help your team prioritize their opportunities to get the most out of their efforts. 

AI isn’t here to take over jobs. Think of it as a support system, not as competition. AI complements sales teams by automating mundane tasks and providing deep, data-driven insights. But AI can’t navigate the human side of sales, like relationship building. Understanding, empathy, and negotiation all come down to human sales reps. While AI can help you understand where to focus your efforts, it’s your energy that seals the deal.

In multiple ways! AI saves you money by streamlining sales processes and workflows so they’re more efficient. It also sharpens your team’s focus so they’re more effective, concentrating on the most profitable deals, personalizing interactions, and converting faster. With AI-backed, actionable, real-time insights, salespeople interact more productively with prospects to move deals along and solve buyers’ challenges.

Starting is easier than you think. First, identify the repetitive tasks on your team that AI could automate, like lead scoring or creating call summaries. Then, consider where AI-generated insights could bring the most value to your sales processes. This information could help you improve workflow efficiency, identify more deal opportunities, and improve your coaching, all of which would result in more wins, faster. Think about where your team wastes the most time and how you could remove this friction using AI.

AI’s potential is only just unfolding. Its ability to aid in personalization, for example, will only continue to evolve. This will improve the effectiveness of your team’s customer interactions at scale by creating tailored experiences at every touchpoint without the need for sales reps to spend hours customizing their follow-up emails.

You’ll also see even more accurate predictive analytics, making lead scoring and sales forecasting more robust. This will help you plan and strategize flexibly, taking advantage of real-time trends and changes.

Pull your sales reps out of the manual-task quagmire they’re in so they can focus on high-value sales tasks. Let powerful AI insights drive your decision-making and use its automation capabilities to take the tedious work off everyone’s plate.

Hungry for more information on how AI can transform every element of your sales process? Check out these articles:

Ready to power up your sales team? See Gong in action now.

Show any AE these three statements about sales engagement, and I guarantee they’ll nod in agreement:

Now imagine what AEs could accomplish if they didn’t face any of those sales engagement challenges.

The teams at Gong know it’s not enough for us to imagine it — we have to live it so we know it’s possible for our customers as well. My fellow Gong AEs and I avoid these issues using the same technology we sell: Gong Engage, the sales engagement solution that’s built on the Gong Revenue Intelligence Platform.

Every company wants to unlock the secret to better, more effective sales engagement – including Gong. We’re always looking for ways to use our market-leading AI to quickly uncover insights into customer interactions, connect with prospects and customers, and save time in the process. Now, as part of our “Gong on Gong” blog series, I’m going to share how I use Gong Engage to sidestep sales engagement challenges that have long been etched in stone, starting with a weighty to-do list.

Most AEs are so busy treading water in a lake of tasks that they can’t even think about prioritization or keeping up deal momentum. In fact, they’re lucky to even remember everything on their to-do list.

That’s because scenarios like this one are commonplace: You run a calendar of back-to-back calls one day and tell each customer something specific you’ll follow up with … and by the end of the day, your brain is so tired you forget what you said you’d send and to whom. I’ve been there!

How did I tackle this before Gong? I spent exhausting hours sifting through transcripts, looking for action items, and hoping I didn't miss anything. And though reading through transcripts is better than taking notes on a call, AI has eliminated the need to do either one.  

Today, Gong Engage’s AI automatically sifts through every customer-facing conversation I have, finds relevant action items, and creates a prioritized to-do list based on what was said and when each next step should take place.

As part of my daily workflow, I hop into my pre-populated to-do list from Gong Engage to see what’s on my plate. Here’s what it looks like:

I start ticking through my sales engagement tasks one by one, in the order they’re shown to me — from most to least critical. Gong reminds me of everything I need to do for my open pipeline.

And if I had a call with someone days ago and now need to send a follow-up email, I don't have to go back and review the entire call. Engage’s generative AI has me covered.

In the Gong State of Sales Engagement Report, buyers and reps identified personalization as the number one way to increase response rates. But the reality is that AEs pay a high price for doing it well in both prospecting outreach and follow-up emails.

According to the report, the most diligent reps customize 58% of their outgoing content and spend up to 12 hours each week personalizing their messages.  That’s both unsustainable and impossible to scale.

Not so if you have Gong Engage! With one click, Engage’s AI uses information from the call summary to create a relevant and personalized email that highlights the most important points from the call, including the next steps my customer and I agreed to.

Of course, I still review the email to make sure it sounds like me — and with Gong Engage, I can make edits for tone in just a few clicks. Then I send it off and go back to my AI-prioritized to-do list to work on the next action item. 

Instead of spending at least 30-45 minutes of work listening to a call again, summarizing it, and personalizing an email, I now spend seconds on the same task with support from Gong Engage. That means I have more time to spend on what I love: connecting with customers.

It’s perhaps not surprising that 70% of reps are overwhelmed by the number of tools they use . For years, they’ve needed to jump around in multiple — even dozens of apps — to juggle tasks like manual data entry, scheduling, prospecting, collaborating, following up, and more.

Not Gong users.

Every member of our revenue team — from AEs to managers to executives — work in one unified platform. And we do everything inside Gong. It automatically enriches your CRM, prioritizes our selling activities, and drafts personalized follow-up emails. Plus, it’s easy to collaborate with other sales team members in smooth and efficient workflows.

I get to skip most of the admin tasks that hold back AEs, and instead spend my days on tasks that actually move deals forward. Without Gong Engage, there's simply no way I'd be as efficient and as focused on tasks that win deals.

There’s no reason for reps to struggle against unfocused task lists, grueling email-writing sessions, or missed actions that cost them deals. You can forever change the way they sell for the better.

Gong Engage’s AI-powered tech makes it easy to get a prioritized to-do list, draft personalized emails at scale, and boost both the productivity and wins of every Gong AE, including me. Help your reps save time like I do, by staying on one platform that serves as a single source of truth and powers all my workflows.

Enable collaboration in a one-stop sales engagement platform, where your reps can unite with the entire selling team for better pipeline management and streamlined workflows. With Engage, work becomes manageable and growth is fully attainable.

For more information on Gong Engage, check out this instant demo.