I was doing some consulting work for GrubHub and in that role I had to place calls to cranky restauranteurs and try to get pass the gate keepers (GK) and the script I used each and every time worked so well that the company ended up highlighting it among their best practices on their gong dashboard and it was an amazing feeling to hear my voice backwards especially on a hard grinding day!

I love GONG!

I work as a full cycle Sales Consultant within retail and hospitality. I cold call hundreds of Directors and VP’s each week and it’s anything but an exciting task. To keep myself motivated, energized, and engaged in my work I like to stand while I make calls and always SMILE when I am speaking to a prospect. Although they can’t see your smile, they can hear it in your voice! People are much more likely to allow me to speak when they perceive me as a happy person who actually wants to speak to them.

We are using Coach of the Quarter - Using our Managers to promote great behavior and reward them of their behaviors which has increased our Closed Won Approach. We also have our “Chef’s Kiss” program, where we promote new and best calls where we can highlight and share. We then vote on them at the end of the month and have our Reps as the Top Chef for the Sales Team. 

GONG has been integral to our GTM strategy across our team globally. New members have gotten up to speed much faster because of our “Hall of Fame” Library folder. This is showing best in class sales calls and techniques that have generated revenue. 

Our teams are using key hashtags for topic comments in our calls like #kudos whenever a partner has a compliment about our product or team member so we can celebrate that across the company, and #featurerequest when a partner describes a feature improvement or new feature that would help solve their challenges that we can add to our JIRAs so developers have further context directly from our partners mouth. 

To help drive revenue and win more deals, we focus first on listening to the customers challenges/pain points with their current processes, then structure the call around those areas. We serve many different stakeholders/personality types and so our main goal is to deliver content that is relevant to the person(s) on the call and their needs. No need to focus on areas or solutions that are not relevant to them or the challenges they are facing. Every client is different so a custom tailored approach always works best and will inevitably result in more won deals/higher revenue.

I have utilized the Gong Library to create an “Advisor Library” folder for the sales rep team, complete with subfolders organized by topics specific to their workflow. The sales reps were then encouraged to add their most successful calls to the appropriate folders so they can share their best practices with one another and the rest of the org. By empowering the reps to add their own calls, this helped us create a large sample size of calls quickly that could then be used to share successes and best practices amongst the sales team, in new hire training classes, as an alternative to live shadowing (especially now that we’re remote), and to help our business partners easily and strategically locate relevant calls.

I am brand new to sales, and am mostly speaking to voice mailboxes at this point. To get ready for that person who will actually answer the call and give me a moment of their time, I am encouraging my colleagues to contribute to a library of best practices, as well as a portfolio of the benefits of our services. This has fostered an air of collaboration and teamwork as we celebrate one another’s successes in anticipation of our next one.

An old boss of mine recommended the book, “Fanatical Prospecting”. It really opened my eyes to not only the importance of prospecting strategy, but to the overarching strategies around getting your target’s attention. Utilizing the tactics I’ve learned from that book coupled with the power of Gong has really helped keep my pipeline full and move deals along.

Congratulations to @Matt Scheitle for being randomly selected by the random name picker to win the iPad Air! I’ll be contacting you separately on how to redeem! For everyone else, thank you for your awesome submissions. I certainly learned a ton.

We encourage you to continue to share your best practices in the Community and stay tuned for more F-U-N from your favorite Community team!