See below for a recap of Gong’s Q3 2022 Product Buzz (PB) presentation, as well as the questions and associated answers that were discussed during the session. We’ve also included some resources to our Gong Academy and Help Center to help you start implementing these workflows, features, and functionalities. Happy Gonging!!! 

Click here for a full recording of this Product Buzz Live session.

Here’s what was shared during this PB Live session:

• Gong Forecast

  • Introducing the industry’s first reality-based forecast solution, built on the Gong Reality Platform!
    Some highlights:

    • Align your organization across every individual and team forecast, quickly and all in one place

    • Understand all customer interactions - what they say, write, read, and engage with - to forecast on a full picture of reality from over 100 reality sources

    • Improve accuracy by drilling down into any level of your forecast to understand and act upon deal-level data

    • Diagnose and pinpoint exactly why there are changes in your forecast to catch and address risk early

• Smart Trackers

  • Rather than relying on an exact keyword match from call transcripts like with Keyword Trackers, Smart Trackers are a revolutionary AI solution you can train yourself that pinpoints important themes in conversations

  • Benefits of Smart Trackers:

    • Unlock new use cases around what your customers and teams are saying

    • Increased Accuracy (reducing false positives and increasing coverage by capturing variations of a concept)

    • Time Savings (set Smart Trackers up in under an hour, versus the weeks you/other resources might spend on setting up and refining Keyword Trackers)

  • Click here for more information about and instructions to create Smart Trackers

• Initiatives Board

  • Helps leaders track early indicators of strategic rollouts - Gong will now pick up when and where your initiative was mentioned in customer interactions, with the help of the most accurate tracking technology in the industry: Smart Trackers

  • Get early insights into what’s working and track field adoption down to individual segments, teams, and team members to target reinforcement

• Market Insights Dashboard

  •  Easily track and measure the impact of market conditions on your business - view the impact of market trends on your pipeline, tap into the voice of your customers, and drill into the underlying data

• Gong Platform Enhancements

  • Improved Call Search

    • New search filter functionality with customizable filter panel

    • Enhanced Call Search results with more prominent account names and a detailed tooltip to view participant names and roles

    • View only the CRM fields you’ve added into your filters to view relevant information more easily

  • Get the full picture of a Deal

    • Gong now captures non-recorded meetings as well as in-person meetings, and reflects the non-recorded meeting events on the associated Account Timeline

    • Capture future calls that won’t be recorded when they happen

    • See when recordings have been skipped from the calendar view in the Activity tab

  • Enhanced Activity Association

    • Previously, some users were challenged by seeing communication activity that belonged to different deals within the same account

    • Gong’s new, smarter algorithm will automatically associate activities to the appropriate deals - view this updated activity across the platform, in call searches and listening to calls, in deals, Gong Forecast, Insights, and so on

    • Manually add or remove an activity or email thread from a deal, and associate deals and accounts for a call on the call detail page

    • Gong Customers who are particularly challenged with deal association should enable the use of contact roles in Salesforce or Hubspot to allow the algorithm to function accurately

  • Call Status Export

    • Diagnose if there are systematic reasons why calls aren’t being captured, like if customers are declining to be recorded from a consent page at a higher rate than expected

    • To view this report, navigate to Gong Settings > Reports > Find Call Status. Select the team’s calls you’d like to see and the date range (up to the day before yesterday)

• Gong Collective

  •  View Gong’s available integrations by clicking here

  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator

    • Experience improved efficiency and time savings with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator iframe embedded directly into Gong

    • Select a contact when viewing any account and learn about commonalities, mutual connections, and any recent content they’ve written to help break the ice and initiate contact

  • Workato

    • Unlock over a thousand enterprise tools to help create custom connections to meet your exact needs

    • Connect the systems you use to Gong to widen the lens of your view on customer interactions

Session Questions and Answers:

Q: Can Forecast be auto-filled via integration from systems like Hubspot? 2 way? 1 way?

A: Gong does pull CRM data in to inform the forecasting process (similarly to how you can see CRM data on Deal Boards). In current state, we have a bidirectional sync with Salesforce so that Reps can update ARR or Close Date directly on the Forecast page in Gong, for example, and these updates will sync back to Salesforce. The bidirectional sync capability for Hubspot is on the roadmap and will be a very quick follow.

Q: Can Gong pull in MEDDPICC fields for use in Forecast as well?

A: Assuming that these MEDDPICC fields are in your CRM, these could be incorporated.

Q: What is the difference between Smart Trackers and creating detailed call filters in Gong?

A: The huge difference is that, when creating call filters, you’ll likely never think of all the variations of how something might be mentioned on a call. Smart Trackers will do this work for you - Gong will look at the context and determine if a phrase, question, etc. is a match to your overarching Smart Tracker theme. Once they’re built, you can use your Smart Trackers in your call filter criteria, and end up with more - and more accurate - filter results. 

Q: If you enable a Smart Tracker, for example, “Pricing”, but you also have a Keyword Tracker set for “Pricing” as well, does Gong track both? Does a Smart Tracker replace a Keyword Tracker?

A: You could absolutely use both a Smart Tracker and a Keyword Tracker here. When you create a Smart Tracker, it doesn’t replace or delete the Keyword Tracker. We’re encouraging teams to use Keyword Trackers for really straightforward tracking, for example, when you want to track a verbatim call script or a very specific phrase. We recommend Smart Trackers be used for themes that are more nuanced. You might want to use a Keyword Tracker to track a dollar amount/range and a Smart Tracker to track pricing objections, for example.

Q: If I added “after Thanksgiving”, “after the holiday”, etc. to track deal timing/implement, would Smart Trackers remove all the false indicators like “Happy Thanksgiving”, “talk to you after Thanksgiving”,etc.?  

A: Yes, and you can continue to train the Smart Tracker on an ongoing basis to ensure accuracy.

Q: Are Smart Trackers still currently limited to 10? 

A: Yes, the current Smart Tracker limit is 10. However, your Gong CSM can help with increasing this limit if you’d like to create more.

Q: I imagine it can vary, but what is the average amount of time (or amount of sentences to tag) to ensure the Smart Trackers are accurate? I am trying to figure out the time commitment.

A: We recommend a minimum of four rounds of training for each Smart Tracker to ensure the Smart Tracker accuracy. For context, one round of training is tagging 25 sentences. The more sentences you tag, the more accurate your Smart Tracker will be. The good news is that you can spend 15 minutes tagging when you have time, save your work, and come back when you have more time later - training a Smart Tracker doesn’t have to be done all in one sitting.

Q: Can you please send me a training link on how to create Trackers and the best way to use them?

A: Click here for our most comprehensive course on Trackers. This course talks through the difference between Smart Trackers and Keyword Trackers, how to decide which to build by use case, and how to build both types.

Q: Is there a plan to add the Call filter link to open the CRM record? The same button that is available on the Deal Boards?

A: This is not on our current roadmap, but our Product Team regularly reviews customer requests and bakes these into the game plan! Feel free to submit a request by clicking here.

Q: Are Smart Trackers available for Spanish speakers/other languages besides English?

A: Right now, Smart Trackers are only available in English.