Credit: Gong
Gong, a leader in revenue intelligence software, quietly revealed on Thursday that its artificial intelligence is transforming enterprise sales teams and leading to measurable improvements in productivity and revenue growth.
The company has published in-depth analysis conducted by Gong’s research division, which examined more than 1 million sales opportunities across nearly 1,500 customers. The results showed that sales representatives using Gong’s AI-powered features like Smart Trackers and Ask Anything achieved significantly higher win rates compared to those not leveraging the technology.
Specifically, teams using Smart Trackers, which identify key deal characteristics through natural language processing, had 35% higher win rates. Ask Anything, which enables reps to quickly surface insights by querying accounts and deals, delivered 26% greater win rates.
“The two keys to Gong’s solution – and to impactful AI in general – are translating the AI into meaningful business processes or insights; and, ensuring the AI is accurate,” said Eilon Reshef, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Gong, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.
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Reshef explained that Gong’s AI is carefully designed to translate raw data into meaningful recommendations and workflows for sales teams. “To generate impact, the models don’t work in a silo. Instead, all of Gong’s AI is woven into sales teams’ workflows within Gong.”
This integration is key to driving adoption and business impact across roles from individual reps to executives, according to Reshef. He provided examples like using AI to flag at-risk deals for management and auto-generating personalized email follow ups for reps.
The Growth of AI in the Enterprise Sales Market
Gong’s findings come as AI adoption is accelerating rapidly across the enterprise sales sector. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, Gong reported a massive 2,200% increase in sales conversations related to AI.
Emails composed using Gong’s AI writing assistant rose 464% since February 2023. This suggests sales teams are quickly integrating AI into daily workflows to boost productivity.
According to Forrester Research, sales professionals spend up to 77% of their time on non-revenue activities like administrative work and manual data entry. AI can free up significant time by handling these tedious tasks.
For example, Gong customers said AI eliminates the need for reps to review lengthy call recordings or conduct handoff meetings by automatically surfacing crucial insights. AI also reduces time spent on manual data entry and email writing.
“Reps no longer have to attend handoff meetings, or even review and listen to entire call recordings, as AI identifies key moments they’re looking for and summarizes the most relevant information,” Reshef explained.
The Role of Accuracy and Training in Enterprise AI
A key differentiator for Gong is its focus on highly accurate AI outputs tailored to sales scenarios. This is achieved by training models on billions of real sales conversations versus general internet data.
“Whereas humans can tolerate semi-accurate data, once companies need to drive aggregate analytics, let alone workflows, accuracy becomes paramount. This is Gong’s objective with our generative AI accuracy,” said Reshef.
Gong employs safeguards like pre-filtering training data and studying real-world distributions to reduce biases in AI communications compared to general purpose AI tools.
Reshef noted Gong’s AI often outperforms off-the-shelf solutions like ChatGPT not only in accuracy but capability. For example, Gong’s Next Steps feature delivers twice the accuracy of generic tools in surfacing action items from customer interactions.
The Future of AI in Enterprise Sales
As AI becomes further embedded into sales processes, Reshef expects the technology will expand beyond point solutions to orchestrate entire revenue workflows from onboarding to cross-selling.
Gong’s roadmap includes rounding out Ask Anything across full deal and account histories and continuing to improve accuracy.
“Whereas today, Gong is focused on specific workflows, like sales engagement, coaching, forecasting and similar—we will soon be able to use AI to drive a much more versatile set of workflows, and improve productivity to an even broader set of business roles,” Reshef commented.
This AI-powered workflow automation will reshape the role of sales reps. Rather than replacing humans, AI will handle administrative and data tasks so reps can focus on building customer relationships and higher value activities.
Gong’s ability to translate raw data into insights that increase productivity, pipeline visibility, and revenue exemplifies the transformative potential of AI in sales. As more teams follow Gong’s lead, AI-human collaboration appears poised to drive the next evolution in sales performance.
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