Gong.io Transforming CRM Solutions with AI
News that Gong.io has acquired $40M to add their existing funding shows they are well on their way to transforming CRM systems with the use of artificial intelligence. Gong.io is relatively new on the scene but is already making big moves in the CRM industry. 
Their AI-assisted Conversation Intelligence™ and account analytics platform removes the conjectures and unknowns to assist sales and marketing teams to formulate winning sales strategies.
Founded in 2015 by Amit Bendov, CEO, and Eilon Reshef, CTO, the San Francisco and Israel based company has two very successful people at the helm. Both founders have impressive resumes with proven track records in the growing, selling, and IPOing of startups. Since their inception, they have now raised over $68 million in funding, and have acquired ONDiGO, an AI-powered sales automation platform. ONDiGO technology measures sales effectiveness by analyzing sales teams' activities such as emails, meetings, and phone calls. After reviewing their performance, the system alerts sales executives on when to take action that could save or advance a pending deal.
Since most CRM solutions require salespeople to update information and add notes from their sales calls manually, Gong.io has gone the extra mile and introduced AI into the fold; enabling the process to be more streamlined.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Bendov says he started the company because of his experience at previous startups. He wanted a better understanding of why he had lost out on potential sales but was unable to gain the insight he was seeking from the data in a typical CRM database. "CRM could tell you what customers you have, how many sales you’re making, who is achieving quota or not, but never give me the information to rationalize and improve operations.”
Gong.io built a tool that uses natural language processing and machine learning to help train and suggest best-practice models to salespeople, with AI turning the phone, video, and text conversations into mission-critical information that companies can use to coach sales teams, increase win rates, and improve strategic decision-making. It also enables the platform to become smarter as it analyzes more data, ensuring learnings are refined deal after deal.
“We believe Gong.io’s technology is the most significant development for sales since the invention of CRM in the previous century.”, said Bendov. “Before Gong.io, companies were blind to customer realities and were managing with no real data.”
How Gong.io Works
Gong.io’s patented technology Conversation Intelligence™ automatically records sales calls and video conferences, transcribes them, then uses AI and machine learning to analyze hundreds of data parameters within each call. By analyzing sales call patterns and matching them to business outcomes, Gong.io provides actionable insights to salespeople and sales leaders so that they can improve their performance and win many more deals. With better conversions, Gong.io’s platform allows a team to connect the right way using the right words.
Features of Gong.io
Game Tape — Documents every sales communication, whether it's call, web, conference, or email. By capturing and analyzing calls, a deal's progression can be monitored and improved upon as required.
Search — Gong.io transcribes and indexes everything, allowing a search of communications to see how situations were handled. Did a competitor come up in the discussions? How was a request processed?
Stats & Benchmarks — To help learn what top salespeople are doing differently and how they close the deals. With the use of AI, Gong.io will examine team stats and industry benchmarks to show what works in the sales process and then passes that vital information to the entire team.
Collaboration — The platform enables collaboration between team members. Sharing and providing relevant feedback amongst everyone works better together to close the sales.
Gong.io on-the-go —With the mobile app, Gong.io lets the team stay connected. It provides alerts when deals are at risk being lost, tunes into sales calls, tracks deal progress, and provides coaching feedback to up a team's selling game.
Help Under-Performing Sales with Whisper™
Last year Gong.io also introduced Whisper™, which helps under-performing sales reps get on the same level as the superstars on their team. Whisper™ breaks down sales teams into the top, average, and low performers based on their CRM records then highlights the talk tracks that the best reps are using during their customer-facing conversations to win deals.
By accessing the talk tracks that are consistently winning deals, sales leaders can use Whisper™ to craft individual coaching plans for their reps. Sales reps can use Whisper™ on-demand themselves to continuously improve their sales skills, significantly reducing a managers' coaching time they would have otherwise spent with them.
Gong.io has over 100 employees along with a 55-person R&D team in Israel. Bendov expects the number of employees to double over the next year with the new funding to help keep up with customer growth. The company currently has 350 customers, a number that has more than tripled since the end of 2017.
Ending Notes
In an interview with MTS, Bendov mentioned, "that businesses lose 80% of their leads after the first few phone calls with salespeople despite investing trillions of dollars into reaching, nurturing, and contacting leads.". Gong.io presents actionable insights on a single window to offer accurate reports and analytics; enhancing the ROI of CRM and automation capabilities.
There is seemingly no end to the means available in a fierce market to help salespeople reach their goals. As artificial intelligence continues its spread into all aspects of computing, tools such as this will give incredible insight to managers, salespeople, founders, product developers, etc., who are trying to figure out why specific deals don’t close and certain ones do. Many believe that it will be the next big frontier in CRM.
Natalie Evans
Natalie Evans has over 16-years in the tech industry and currently works as the event coordinator and tech reporter for CMS-Connected, keeping up-to-date on what's happening in and around the Content Management industry.