Gong.io’s AI empowers B2B sales teams to spot bad deals early with revenue intelligence

gong.io, a seven-year-old startup that creates revenue intelligence software for B2B sales teams, today launched a major new functionality within its frontline Reality Platform called Economic Pulse. This new feature records, transcribes and analyzes all sales calls; it then identifies, tracks, and alerts sales and revenue leaders when economic trends are mentioned in customer conversations.

This ability to read customer data and accurately identify key sales trends gives the company a much clearer picture of the reality of how it is performing in the market, chief product officer Sheena Badani told VentureBeat.

Economic Pulse empowers sales leaders to understand how these trends affect deals over time, identify potential risks and enable rapid action that can protect the health of an opportunity and the overall pipeline, Badani said.

‘Voice of the customer’

“‘Voice of the Customer’ is another way you might think about Gong,” Badani told VentureBeat. “What Gong actually does is record all customer interactions. So whether that’s a Zoom call, a small web conference call, email, web interactions and other touchpoints that happen throughout the customer lifecycle, we capture it all.”

Gong analyzes and understands what happens in those interactions, Badani continued. “It’s not just that it happened, but it’s what the content of those conversations is,” she explained. “We then identify trends, best practices and suggestions for the [sales] representative, the first-line manager – leadership – about what is the next best action to take based on what we actually see happening with customers in the market.”

These trends and best practices are business-oriented at a high level, but users can also refine the application to better suit their own industry. Palo Alto, California-based Gong.io, which has raised $583 million in venture capital since its inception in 2015, already has integrations with LinkedIn and Salesforce, as well as sales intelligence providers Apollo, Clearbit and Cognis.

Recognizing early economic headwinds

It’s important for go-to-market teams to understand immediately how headwinds can affect deals, renewals and ultimately revenue targets, Badani said. Gong.io claims Economic Pulse provides leaders and teams with early warning signs that appear in conversations with customers and prospects and allows them to analyze how economic conditions affect specific areas of their business over time, including by segment, deal phase and team, among others.

A big part of Economic Pulse’s secret sauce is its intelligent use of keywords. The SaaS-based platform comes with a set of common keywords related to economic uncertainty – such as ‘recession’, ‘inflation’, ‘downturn’ and ‘slowing economy’, which are tracked in customer conversations.

Using Gong’s Reality Platform’s proprietary AI engine, Economic Pulse autonomously captures conversations, issues alerts, and provides leaders with detailed analytics to see which deals are actually at risk so they can take action before it’s too late is, Badani said. The platform also learns over time and autonomously identifies additional words and phrases in context related to economic conditions and deal health, the company said.

“The last thing a company wants is to be surprised when market changes affect their customers,” said Gong Chief Product Officer and co-founder Eilon Reshef in a media advisory.

Gong.io competes with a next-gen sales intelligence market: MeetRecord† SalesAttic† choir.ai† Execvision.io† Wingman† Avoma and fireflies.ai†

The company said it will expand Economic Pulse to other customer touch points, including email and instant messaging, later this year.