How a Google sales team got hours of its time back using Gong
Most companies are sitting on plenty of sales data. But few companies have Google-level amounts of data.
Wherever you fall on that spectrum, you know that managing data is tough, no matter how much data you’ve got. It’s tough to corral, tough to unify, and tough to assess in a way that delivers actionable insights and measurable changes. That is, of course, unless you use Gong.
Headquarters
Mountain View, CA
founded
1998
company size
10,000+
industry
Software Development
Our partnership with Gong was that piece of magic we needed
Mike Chen
Director of Product Strategy at Google
Google brings data science to sales using Gong
Mike Chen is the Director of Product Strategy at Google, and leads sales for the Google ads team, specifically for SMBs. His team enables sellers to go to market effectively and engage directly with their customers.
Mike’s motivation for bringing his sales team into Gong was clear: A standardized approach to evaluating and understanding sales data brings leadership onto the same page when they make key business decisions. It also enables everyone from leadership to sales reps to understand and take action on vast quantities of data.
With thousands of sellers worldwide, it had long been difficult for Mike and his managers to evaluate individual, team, and regional inputs, outputs, and outcomes at scale. Not surprisingly, the Google sales team is highly data-driven, and Mike wanted to find the best way to track all of their customer and sales data and use it to drive better outcomes. As he put it:
“Our partnership with Gong was that piece of magic we needed; it’s been complimentary to how we evaluate our performance. At every level of our org, we now have a standardized view of our sales data, and having that is a game-changer.”
Mike has seen firsthand that access to reliable data at scale — and in one platform — is a game-changer for his teams. They’ve already used it with great success…
Major revenue boost from efficiency and effectiveness
Gong adoption and engagement have been high at Google. That’s made an immense difference in Mike’s sales leaders’ ability to set standards, run evaluations at scale, and adjust their approach across several strategic initiatives.
“Across one specific segment of our sales team, we saw a weekly revenue increase that made some of our leadership do a double take,” says Mike.
How did they do it? Their managers leveraged three features in Gong:
- They piloted Gong’s Scorecards by asking a group of managers to rate calls for their sales effectiveness.
- With that as their baseline, they used a Smart Tracker (which is an AI-trainable model) to identify effective calls. The Smart Tracker yielded similar results to the team’s managers, validating the fact that Google’s sales managers know good calls when they see them.
- That being said, Google’s sales teams are so large that managers can’t possibly evaluate calls at scale, so they use Gong’s Smart Trackers to pinpoint best-in-class calls across the full sales cycle. That’s how they amassed a Call Library that’s now used to train new hires and refresh the rest of the team.
New hires now ramp much faster
Mike’s sales teams also use Gong in their sales onboarding program, which consistently serves large numbers of hires around the globe.
With help from Gong’s platform and AI capabilities, Google boost in its new-hire graduation rate. That means more people are up to speed and ready to hit the sales floor — and quota — faster, which is great news in terms of efficiency and effectiveness on Google’s sales team.
Having seen the results, Mike’s long-term goal is to drastically reduce onboarding times by partnering with Gong. He has big goals, and he feels ready to meet them by the end of 2024 using Gong for onboarding and coaching.
3 principles guide Google’s sales team
Mike’s team achieved these remarkable outcomes, in part, because his team’s sales strategies are data-driven, and founded on three principles:
- Unification
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness
Mike’s team — like every sales team around the world — typically mined multiple sources for different types of information. Sometimes the information they uncovered was contradictory, and sometimes it was nowhere to be found. What Mike’s team really wanted was a unified platform; a place that could serve up insights based on a cohesive dataset.
For Mike, achieving peak efficiency means using the best technology available to remove mindless tasks (like data collection) from sellers, leaving them free to actually sell. Prior to Gong, Google’s sales reps spent hours each week doing tasks that could be entirely automated in the Gong platform. Mike estimates that with the addition of this automation, thousands of sellers are getting back around 12% of their time each year. It was an untouched deposit of savings that Mike was keen to mine.
With a more unified and efficient sales workflow in place — thanks to Smart Trackers and a Call Library — Mike’s team was able to collect best-in-class calls that drove their onboarding program to new heights. The team was also free to concentrate on working more effectively as a team and across departments, all in an effort to better serve their customers/prospects.
The Google: Gong partnership goes onward and upward
Before Gong, Mike’s sales team couldn’t capture all of its sales inputs and actions at scale with the right level of precision. Those days are gone.
As Gong’s automation and AI-powered insights expand in the coming year, Google’s sales team will continue using Gong to make valuable gains in unification, efficiency, and effectiveness.
Interested in more of the lessons that were revealed at Celebrate ‘23? Watch the keynote address and panel discussion here.
A summary of Mike Chen’s fireside chat with Amit Bendov at Celebrate. Join us for Celebrate!
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