7 Sales Skills You Can Dramatically Improve Using Gong.io

Improving sales skills is one of the main reasons people use Gong.io.

Think of your sales methodology as a race car — it’s the vehicle that brings you from first call to close. 

Think of your sales skills fuel for that sales process.

Without the right sales skills to fuel it, it’s just an expensive piece of metal.

Sales skills (and specifically, effective sales conversation skills) make the process go forward.

Here are 7 sales skills that can dramatically improve using Gong.io.

1. Improved Discovery Calls

Discovery is often the top skill that sales leaders want their teams to upgrade.

That’s because discovery calls set the trajectory for the entire deal.

How does Gong.io help your reps improve their discovery skills?

You can pinpoint discovery call sticking points by checking these types of stats across your reps:

• Talk-to-listen ratio
• Number of questions
• Customer story length (i.e., how long your reps can get customers to talk in response to their questions)

These stats point you in the right direction so you understand what kind of coaching each rep needs.

Next, you can review individual discovery calls to answer questions like these:

• Which questions did your reps ask?
• How evenly did they balance their questions throughout the call?
• Did they create a healthy, two-way conversation, or interrogate their prospect?

Finally, you can score calls against your own discovery call methodology.

Reviewing discovery calls this way is great for your coaching and it lets you identify how your best reps do discovery so you can “clone” their sales skills to everyone else.

(Want to see this in action? Request a demo).

2. Sell Value (Instead of Features or Price)

Feature dumping is the bane of many sales leaders’ existence.

“Feature dumping” can be unpacked into two separate problems:

• Reps talking too much (and in long sprints)
• Reps talking about features instead of value-based messages

When those two behaviors are combined, your buyer is in for an eye-glazing feature dump.

Gong.io finds calls that contain feature dumping. It filters for calls with high talk/listen ratios, long monologues, and a large chunk of time spent discussing product features.

When you identify those types of calls, you should stop here and have a coaching session with the rep in question.

Then you can set up email alerts so you’re notified if it continues to happen.

That’s right, the coaching opportunity comes to you, rather than you going hunting for it.

Follow the same process when you want to prevent your reps from selling on price (rather than value).

3. Better Objection Handling

Disarming the objections that make your deals go dark is another high-priority sales skill to improve.

Simply getting visibility into which objections come up most often and how your team responds to them will put you miles ahead of your peers.

I’ve seen some sales teams take this to the next level.

They learn which objections come up most commonly at different stages in their sales process, document those objections, and create an objection handling guide for their sales team.

Talk about mastering objection handling skills.

They find the best rebuttals by listening to how their top reps overcome objections https://www.gong.io/blog/objection-handling-techniques/in Gong.io call recordings.

(Want to see this in action? Request a demo).

4. Solidify Next Steps

End the tyranny of long sales cycles by solidifying “next steps.”

Gong.io shows you at a glance which deals are in limbo with no next steps.

Increasing your deal velocity is as simple as getting that visibility.

Create email alerts (like you did for feature dumping) and you’ll be notified any time a sales call happens and the next steps aren’t discussed.

5. Selling Against Competitors

If you’re alerted every time a competitor is mentioned during sales calls, your team will accelerate their ability to sell against the competition.

They’ll learn how to nail the “What makes you different?” question every time, sell value, and get a seat at the executive table while your competitors are pushing product.

If you’re ultra-competitive (like me), you can set competitor alerts.

Every call with a competitor mention goes straight to your inbox in real time.

It’s like having a competitive command center.

6. Enhanced Phone Presence

Let your team listen to your best reps’ calls so they can mimic their phone presence.

Phone presence — sounding confident and authoritative — is a sales skill that cannot be taught, but can be learned.

There are two ways to learn it:

• In-person call shadowing
• Listening to call recordings

Call shadowing doesn’t scale well, and it’s a roll of the dice.

Listening to call recordings does scale. And you can handpick winning calls for your reps to listen to.

7. Better Call Structure

The best sellers in the world don’t wing their calls.

They follow a cerebral, methodical sales call process.

Think chess grandmasters, not improv comedians.

Gong.io helps your reps control their conversations and structure their calls like a pro.

One of our customers, TouchBistro, has a great case study for this use case.

They used Gong.io to analyze their best performers’ call structures.

They discovered that the order in which their top producers presented software, hardware, and services during their Solution Presentation was completely different than their “average” performing reps.

Once this call structure was identified, the sales managers developed a framework they could coach against.

They could understand each call’s structure at a glance, including the amount of time spent on discovery, presenting, and next steps.

Improve Your Team’s Sales Skills Today

You owe it to yourself to see Gong.io in action.

It can absolutely improve your team’s sales skills, so check out a demo today.

Judge it for yourself.