Reviving lost sales opportunities: How I turn them into closed-won using Gong
February 25, 2025 
Enterprise Account Executive at Gong
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Enterprise Account Executive at Gong
Brian LaManna is an Enterprise Account Executive at Gong and a 6x President’s Club winner. Since joining Gong, Brian worked his way from Commercial AE to Mid-Market AE, and now to Enterprise AE after achieving 147% of quota in 2024. That same year, he founded Closed Won to help SDRs and AEs with repeatable systems and frameworks to support their success. He also shares tactical sales advice on LinkedIn, helping thousands of sellers sharpen their prospecting, discovery, and execution.
Most sales reps treat lost deals like a breakup — painful, awkward, and something they never want to revisit. But that’s a huge mistake.
Every company wants to understand why a deal went south. The best ones don’t just analyze the loss, they mine insights to re-engage and turn “no” into “not yet,” and “not yet” into yes. Gong included. Over $1.1M of my 2023 closed-won revenue came from deals that already existed. Not new inbound, not cold outbound — just opportunities left for dead.
Common mistakes reps make chasing old opportunities
Reviving closed-lost deals is one of the easiest ways to build your pipeline but almost everyone messes it up by:
- Taking closed-lost at face value. Most deals don’t die because of price or value — they stall because the buyer couldn’t get internal buy-in. That means there’s always a way back in.
- Skipping the research. Context is everything. But without a way to pull insights together from emails, calls, text, video meetings, and CRM, most reps rely on guesswork – and that doesn’t get you very far.
- Sending lazy, generic messages. A weak message never converts. If you’re not crafting contextually-relevant, personalized messages, you’ll never get a response.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Reps just need to get their hands on the right tools to support their success.
If you follow me on LinkedIn, you already know I’m such a Gong power-user, that I wouldn’t work in sales for any company that doesn’t use our platform. So, let me show you how I bring dead deals back to life fast and turn them into closed-won using Gong.
The struggle of reconnecting with prospects before Gong
Most sales reps and AEs want to follow up on lost deals but the process is slow, manual, and frustrating. You know you should personalize your outreach, but the time it takes to gather relevant insights makes it feel impossible to do at scale.
Here’s what that looked like for me before I used Gong:
| What I had to do | Why it was limiting |
| Dig through CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot, Dynamics — take your pick) to find the account. Open 5+ different tabs to review past opportunities. | No easy way to get the full picture — just a mess of disjointed info. |
| Sift through old notes (if they even existed) and/or Slack the previous rep for insights about what actually happened. | Notes were incomplete, outdated, biased, or missing altogether. Slack responses? Either “no opportunity there” or zero response. |
| Attempt to write a compelling message that would actually re-engage the prospect. | No easy way to tie past conversations into relevant, personalized outreach — just guesswork and gut instinct. |
All this took way too many clicks and wasted way too much time. It made no sense to drop a prospect into a brand new sequence and pretend we’d never spoken. I knew past conversations held critical information that could help me land a new opportunity.
But those insights? Gone. Flushed down the drain.
My three-minute playbook for resurrecting lost deals using Gong
Thankfully, reconnecting with past prospects is no longer a time-sucking, multi-tab nightmare. What used to take several hours, now takes me less than three minutes — all inside one platform.
Here’s my step-by-step process using Gong:
1. Instantly access an account’s full history
- Search and select an account from my Gong homepage
- Review the complete picture, including every interaction and intent signal — calls, emails, texts, web meetings, and even the content they engaged with (decks, proposals, case studies)
- Filter interactions by specific people (e.g., perhaps I just want to review conversations with the Head of RevOps)
Why it’s a game-changer
No more hunting for details across sources, no missing pieces, no noise. I get the most relevant data on the people who matter.
2. Surface unique insights with AI-generated answers
- Use Gong’s “Ask Anything” to instantly generate sharp insights that will make my outreach stand out
- Example prompt:
- “I’m writing a prospecting email to re-engage this person. Provide three compelling bullet points that highlight their key pain points, the value they’ve seen from our solution, and the challenges or priorities they’re currently facing. These should be sharp, persuasive, and easy to copy and paste into my email.”
- If needed, I can take a deep-dive into specific calls and emails for proof and extra context. But honestly? I rarely have to. I’d rather spend that time reaching out.
Why it’s a game-changer
- No more sifting through notes or waiting on teammates for context. No more guessing about what matters and getting it wrong. Ask Anything gives me a crisp summary of pains, value seen, and priorities.
3. Craft a hyper-relevant, personalized message
- Move to the Gong Engage sidebar (no extra tabs)
- In my “to-do’s,” I copy and paste the AI-generated insights and personalize my email in seconds
Why it’s a game-changer
- No more generic email sequences. Every message is relevant, and built to convert.
- Seamless workflow: From insights
to messaging to outreach — all in one place.
Win more from existing pipeline
The highest performing reps don’t just chase new leads — they maximize the pipeline they already have. Our data shows a direct correlation between time spent with buyers and quota attainment. Reps who exceed 130% of quota spend 60% of their time on customer-facing activities.
That’s why reviving lost deals is a necessity. But only if it’s efficient and gets you back in front of your buyer with the right message.
That’s exactly what Ask Anything helps you do. Instantly understand customer challenges, so you can craft compelling outreach — without getting stuck in research mode. It’s how elite sellers work smarter, not harder. Quarter after quarter. Year after year.
Your success – and your company’s long-term business growth – depends on leaving no stone unturned and knowing exactly which ones to flip. Lost deals don’t have to stay lost forever.
Take Ask Anything for a test drive and bring them back to life today.
Table of Contents
- Common mistakes reps make chasing old opportunities
- The struggle of reconnecting with prospects before Gong
- My three-minute playbook for resurrecting lost deals using Gong
- 1. Instantly access an account’s full history
- 2. Surface unique insights with AI-generated answers
- 3. Craft a hyper-relevant, personalized message
- Win more from existing pipeline
