How have you / are you planning to track Gong adoption at your organization?

  • 4 October 2022
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If you’ve already introduced Gong to your internal teams, how do you ensure healthy adoption and usage? If you haven’t yet, what are your plans to?

Share your thoughts or best tactical pieces of advice in the comments below!


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Reviewing Gong calls is a crucial part of our team’s daily sync. Since we adopted the platform, all of our onboarding sessions, quarterly reviews, etc. are recorded and evaluated for optimal performance. 


From our COO to our Associates, everyone in our organization is on Gong, interacting with each other, learning together, and evolving as a team.

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To increase user adoption of Gong we plan to execute on the following:

  1. Build a library of quality calls to be leveraged by onboarding as well as seasoned reps. Have folders for calls including Competition, Qualification, Decision Point, and Objections. 
  2. Set up rep KPIs around listening to their own calls monthly/weekly, and a few of their teams calls monthly/weekly - providing positive feedback to peers and asking for feedback from leadership. 
  3. Support sales leadership in providing coaching to their sales reps on calls reps have requested feedback on during their 1:1’s. Show leaders how to use call searches and subscribed search notifications of set criteria to surface calls they’d like to provide feedback on. 
  4. Coach Sales Executives and leaders on how to use deal boards to their advantage for board reporting etc. and create warnings that are more pertinent to the risks they’d like more visibility too.  
  5. Create a drip campaign of messages from Enablement to sales reps on best practices and use cases for Gong. Goal will be to showcase how Gong can work for them first and foremost, making their day to day deal management easier. Send this out in our weekly Sales Enablement “Patch”.   
     
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  • Create a personalized call library for reps to easily navigate their peers calls to listen to specific objections, competitor mentions, & other trackers.
  • Created KPI’s for both managers & reps on using scorecards. Have them listen to X amount of calls per week / month & fill out X amount of scorecard.
  • Tracking other KPI’s such as the call > meeting conversion rate & average call time
  • Train all front line managers on forecasting, deal boards & scorecards
  • Highlight ‘best call’ in weekly team newsletter & feature a different rep each time
  • Create Spiffs to encourage the team to leverage the platform more 
  • By setting the stage for the implementation - highlighting some major win factors from key stakeholders (coaching, insights, good behaviors)
  • Set up trackers for each area to enhance reporting; key initiatives for the organization, behaviors that enable more wins, and areas to gain more accurate insights.
  • Enable our listeners - Gong isn’t just for recorders; this will help us cross functionally in the org for communicating and hearing directly from the customer. 
  • Reward the high adopters and continue momentum - incentivize internally for utilization of Gong (I.e. listens, comments, and communication between areas).
  • Create dashboards that empower the team and are meaningful to be effective in their respective areas.

We plan to use Gong as a means to both highlight good examples as well as raise hands for help in a newly emerging coaching program. With Gong already being the call library or source of truth from sales conversations, it was the obvious choice to use it for call coaching. 

As we do not have a formal coach or trainer role, we are relying on reps and sales enablement to review calls and bubble up clips that highlight “golden examples” of a job well done or finding instances where they may have struggled and didn’t have the right answers, thus triggering a conversation with their RVP or Solutions Engineers. Gong allows easy sharing and selecting specific clips from calls, thus cutting down on RVP time of reviewing the entire call. 

Good examples will be stored in libraries within Gong, allowing new or experienced reps to easily find highlights for key conversations, such as demos, objection handling etc. 

@Barry de Leeuw perfect use of Gong! Let us know if any cool / unexpected outcomes happened as a result of this approach! 

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We use both SPIN and MEDDIC in our selling, for discovery and sales methodology. Although we speak about each, we have not had wide scale formal training for every seller. 

By utilizing Gong trackers and initiative boards, we would like to find our baseline for how well adapted these are and where we are doing well VS where we should spend more effort. Each person on the sales enablement team will be shadowing calls this quarter via gong and by using the trackers and their own area of expertise, be it MEDDIC or SPIN, they can then leave feedback and assist in building out the trackers to better fit our company. To start with, we used a mix of examples from Miller Heiman and Gong for SPIN and plan to enhance it with real company based questions in the near future. SPIN should also lend itself to Smart trackers once we have more usage and standardization of key questions being used. 

Phase 1.5 will be having sellers and managers looking to these initiative boards to see where deals are healthy VS at-risk. So custom alerts will need to be arranged i.e. stage 3 and too many situational questions or no coach involved at a certain interval. 

We plan to implement Gong into our company’s compliance and training processes. In regard to our compliance, we would utilize the smart trackers found in the software to help navigate the hundreds if not thousands of calls made in and out of the offices on a daily basis. We will check for infractions in which our sales, processing, and customer service sectors make in hope to be able to complete audits accurately. Our company utilizes Gong to remain compliant with all financial and governmental institutions.

 

In addition, we utilize Gong in a similar facet but in terms of our lower level Business Development Representatives. We utilize the smart trackers and filters to locate certain phrases and key words to be able to help train the new employees so that they can become better salesman and fine tune their pitches and customer service skills.

We are in the early stages of creating/iterating on the following:

  • Creating a call library used by sales coaches and frontline managers
  • Providing new and existing AEs a demo bank for any closed-won opportunities to review the calls
  • Building call scoring for both calls and demos for sales coaches to utilize and align on best practices
  • Utilizing reporting to understand frontline manager Gong usage to provide feedback to sales leadership

We are trying to make use of every feature Gong has to offer. Adoption has failed in the past sales operations has pushed ideas but they have fallen short because of failure to get senior leader buy-in. What’s different about this time around is we will partner closer with leadership to understand pain points and solve with Gong’s functionality. 

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To measure adoption, we plan to do the following at our org:

  • Utilize dashboards/deal boards with integration to salesforce. Tracking warnings and reps activities to ensure proper coaching.
  • Coaching by managers based on recorded calls. This is crucial especially as we plan to roll out new products/services so there will be new talk tracks.
  • Have Office hours every week for the month month to answer any questions the team might have. While some of the reps can demo how they are utilizing gong, to serve as a learning for others.
  • Leverage Call library and smart trackers. 

To get Sales Leadership buy-in/adoption, I believe the “Insights” feature will be key.  The ability to analyze a call with stats, instead of having to listen to it in its entirety is a game changer and a great time saver.  And what our organization has become to notice is those sales reps who are falling within the “Best Practice” range are often times our top performers in the field.  We can get our sales team to truly buy into this by using this competitively with one another.

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We will, and have been tracking coaching activity From Q4, Coaching activity has improved by ~25%

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To help promote adoption in CS we have held sessions with the leaders of each team to learn what information is important to them.  During these sessions we mostly focus on understanding their team’s specific role in the organization, but also explain features and proffer ideas on metrics that they might find useful. With the context we gain from team-specific learning sessions, we can help the team leaders build trackers, scorecards, etc that will provide a comprehensive view of the information that is most meaningful to them.      

To see how well Gong is catching on, we're going to do a couple of things. First, we'll send out a survey to everyone involved to get their feedback, while also keeping an eye on how many people are using it regularly, and if anyone needs extra help or training. Plus, we'll look at how often people are using it, and if there are any patterns to when they use it. This way, we can make sure Gong is being used the way we want it to be.

My company has used Gong for several years not but unfortunately it has not been fully adopted. 

The plan to get more adoption and buy in is as follows: 

  1. Educate the Sales Enablement team on how to fully maximize usage of the tool. This certification program along with meeting with our Gong support team to learn best practices is the starting the point to up skill ourselves before rolling out to the larger team. 
  2. Train the trainer(managers). We will take the crawl, walk, run approach and start with basic functionality and build to more advanced usage of the tools. 
  3. Implement accountability metrics for managers. Review one gong call each month and provide feedback to the rep. We will then grow this number once we are comfortable and hitting these metrics consistently. 
  4. Continually, make updates and clean up our Gong instance to streamline usage and ensure we are looking at good data. 

 

Open to feedback on this but this is the plan for now! Thanks! 

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