GONG RECIPE BOOK
Identifying Areas that People Need Coaching on
Ingredients: Team Stats, Insights, Deal Drivers
What is it?
One of the biggest coaching challenges is knowing exactly what areas to focus on to provide personalized, high-value, and high-impact coaching for each individual on your team. Gong helps take the guesswork out of this by giving coaches data-driven insights, warnings, and recommendations. It also makes it easy to track changes—good or bad—in rep behavior based on coaching.
Who is it for?
Anyone can benefit from coaching—whether they’re a seasoned, quota-carrying AE or a brand-new SDR. Gong provides both skill-based and deal-based coaching insights to help managers tailor their coaching efforts to each individual. And when a company has a well-developed coaching culture, they’ll see improved individual and team performance, increased job satisfaction and retention, and an increase in quota attainment.
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How does Gong help out?
Gong provides out-of-the-box functionality that can be used to identify coaching priorities and help drive a standardized coaching culture. This includes:
- Skill-based insights that can be used to identify coachable behaviors:
- Team Insights > Activity
- Team Insights > Interaction
- Team Insights > Responsiveness
- Team Insights > Gong Usage
Deal-based insights that can be used to identify areas for coaching based on pipeline management:
- Deals > Pipeline
- Deals > Deal Drivers
Initiative-based insights that can be used to identify areas for coaching based on company-level strategic initiatives or priorities:
- Insights > Initiatives
Dashboards that allow managers, managers of managers, and sales enablement to track how people across the organization coach:
- Insights > Coaching Metrics
How does it work?
1. Review insights and dashboards in Gong to find coachable opportunities
There are several places in Gong that can help you zero in on areas of focus for your coaching efforts. Gong provides many metrics that can be used for skills-based coaching, such as interactivity, responsiveness, and patience, which can be found in the Insights > Team area.
Additionally, by using Deal Boards along with the Deal Drivers and Win/Loss sections of Gong, you can identify both high-level and deal-specific areas to coach on, based on a team member’s behavior or warnings or behaviors specific to a particular deal, such as:
- Not having follow-up meetings scheduled
- Not having enough contacts in their deals
- Not having individuals in their deals with an appropriate power level
- Not mentioning price during deals
Gong also provides insights based on company-wide initiatives and general trends in the market. These help leaders identify and drive behavioral change at an organizational level and help coaches drive these initiatives on the front line by providing specific initiative-based coaching opportunities for their team members.
2. Automate delivery of coachable opportunities
In addition to diving into Gong to view and explore dashboards and insights on your own, you can also set up alerts, streams, and subscriptions, which deliver these insights directly to your inbox based on the schedule you set: immediately, daily, or weekly. You can use trackers to define key topics, key words, or other priorities, and set up streams to alert you when these moments occur in conversations. You can also set up subscriptions on Deal Board progress, be alerted when anyone on your team asks for direct feedback, and more.
Pro tips
Use the Call Library to keep track of great examples so others can benefit! If you identify a coachable opportunity with one of your team members, you can point them to an example in the Call Library and give them the opportunity to learn from it.
Use Gong to identify coachable opportunities, and come equipped to each 1:1 with a few specific items to focus on. Whether you’re listening to the call together, reviewing an objection that came up on a call, or setting a goal regarding a change in behavior, coming prepared with a data-driven action plan helps you and your rep make the best use of your time together.