How BlueGrace’s reps got an 88% lift in reply rates using Gong Engage

Self-driving vehicles aren’t the only groundbreaking innovation happening in the transportation space. Something astounding happened this past year at BlueGrace Logistics, a logistics technology, freight management, and customized transportation management company with more than 10,000 customers across the United States. 

BlueGrace Logistics used Gong Engage to transform their selling motions and boost pipeline flowthrough and conversion rates. The increase they received in outreach reply rates was outstanding:

“Since we launched Gong Engage, our outreach response rates have increased from 16% to 30%. That’s an 88% boost.” —Bryce Williford, SVP of Sales, BlueGrace Logistics

It was exactly what BlueGrace needed, but couldn’t achieve without the right sales engagement solution.

Before Engage, BlueGrace’s full-cycle sellers worked in legacy tools that forced them into disjointed sales engagement workflows. Critically, the workflows didn’t support the personalization that’s essential to winning deals in this sector. Sellers wasted time on admin tasks and tool switching, and struggled to prioritize revenue-generating activities. Despite their efforts, they ran low-quality engagement and got poor response rates.

Making matters worse, BlueGrace’s sales leaders had limited visibility into their sellers’ onboarding and performance, so coaching was a guessing game. That opaqueness was only compounded by siloed teams and fragmented data, making it so sales leaders couldn’t access the analytics they needed to run day-to-day operations or make critical business decisions. 

BlueGrace’s sales engagement system was broken… until they consolidated their people, data, and workflows in one unified platform: Gong.

Bryce Williford, SVP of Sales at BlueGrace, was ready to eliminate the often-used but rarely effective “spray-and-pray” tactics that were a mainstay on his team. It was time to shift from quantity to quality engagement. That meant leaving the team’s legacy tools behind. Today, his full-cycle reps manage their entire lead-to-close sales process in Gong.

“We live in Gong. It’s our sales team’s primary solution for their day-to-day work. All our outreach, daily planning, Scorecards, metrics, and performance management happens in Gong.” — Bryce Williford, SVP of Sales, BlueGrace Logistics

Bryce’s teams now use streamlined flows for activities, events, and key industries, all of which include email templates and phone scripts that can be personalized. The workflow is more efficient and the customer journey is tailored and cohesive from first touch to close. 

These workflow improvements moved BlueGrace’s reply rates by 88% (from 16% to 30%). 

The sales (and revenue) teams see their Salesforce data in Gong’s “Deals” board, which helps with precise pipeline management. Everyone updates their opportunities and revenue predictions directly in Gong, so there’s no platform switching. This gives BlueGrace’s customers a smooth, high-quality experience that helps close more deals.

Today, Bryce’s sellers spend more time selling. (Good thing too: According to Forrester, sales reps usually spend 77% of their time on non-selling activities.) 

Since adopting Engage, BlueGrace sellers execute 52% more sales calls and emails, and touch 49% more accounts. 

How are they achieving such outstanding results? With help from Gong’s proprietary AI models.

Gong’s AI-powered workflows help users save time while staying up to date on their key deal activities. With generated call summaries and prioritized daily to-do lists, for example, sellers spend less time on administrative tasks and more time making calls and sending personalized emails.

With Gong’s full visibility into the highlights and next best steps in each account, sales leaders have the insights they need to coach their teams to more closed-won deals. Plus, leaders can quickly review call summaries and key performance metrics for any individual or deal. They’re covering more accounts than ever before, and getting great results.

“Our recent class of new hires is getting 2x the expected revenue productivity, even in a challenging market. And we’re continuing to hire, which not a lot of companies can say right now. The only thing I can attribute that to is Gong.” —Bryce Williford, SVP of Sales, BlueGrace Logistics

The distributed nature of BlueGrace’s workforce previously made it hard to confirm that every team was using the same data. That’s not an issue anymore. Since Bryce brought his nine geographically dispersed teams and their data into a unified platform, everyone — from the frontlines to executives — is on the same page about pipeline health. They all have access to a single source of truth that provides them with the complete context of their customers’ and prospects’ accounts. That includes all of BlueGrace’s interactions and past actions with each account.

Historically, Bryce’s teams struggled to get good front-end data about their sales activities. This made performance management and pipeline predictability very difficult, as everything was based on anecdotal or self-reported information. Now, BlueGrace’s sales teams have coachable insights at their fingertips. As Bryce says, “Gong has become our single source of truth for performance management.”

Having everyone in one platform also means Bryce can build flows for sales teams or pursuit groups, with leaders in different departments and locations contributing to those flows. 

“That’s been critical. As we scale our sales team in multiple locations, we need a place to collaborate. Gong is the community for my sales teams. We can be anywhere in the world and still be part of that community.” —Bryce Williford, SVP of Sales, BlueGrace Logistics

BlueGrace has had so much success transforming their workflows and coaching with Engage that, even in the current market, they’re growing their business and hiring new reps. With an 88% lift in reply rates, they understandably need more sellers in their roster! In fact, they now use Gong as an incentive in their sales rep recruiting campaigns.

Bryce even plans to build his upcoming sales KPI processes entirely on the platform. As he says, “The success is evident from at all levels of our organization, from the CEO down to our entry-level sales reps. We wouldn’t have the success we’re having today — in a very challenging market — if it wasn’t for our partnership with Gong.”