Harnessing the Unfiltered Voice of the Customer to Drive Growth

Throughout the economic downturn, sales teams have gotten savvier. Many are having a harder time making quota, sure, but they’re learning new ways to drive revenue and grow the business. And often, that means looking to functions beyond sales to identify revenue opportunities and drive growth across the organization. 

According to Forrester, effective coordination across business functions can drive 2.4 times greater revenue growth than companies whose customer-facing departments operate in silos. But how can companies ensure effectiveness across the organization? How can Product Marketing create cross-sell opportunities if they’re not creating campaigns around customers’ real pain points? How can Customer Success drive loyalty if they’re not able to solve pain points today and anticipate a company’s future priorities, not just their historical ones?

In short, the answer is insights. AI-driven insights allow even the most distributed, global, enterprises to get to know their customers – not just while selling into them, but across the account lifecycle. They can market the right products to them, create opportunities to delight through customer service that drives success, and help them accurately forecast and plan for the future. AI-driven insights make the voice of the customer – what keeps them up at night and what they celebrate, their future concerns and goals, even if yet unspoken – loud and clear.

Gong provides these insights through our Revenue Intelligence platform, and we’ve seen first-hand how customers have captured them to drive value across their most critical sales workflows, as well as outside of their day-to-day sales functions. With the insights they capture on our platform, entire organizations can start to understand – and align around – the voice of the customer. 

Organizations – now 4,000 of them – use Gong to capture and analyze customer interactions at scale (we’ve analyzed tens of billions of interactions to date). Gong’s platform then surfaces insights to sales teams, as well as adjacent teams, such as product, marketing, and finance. And companies that use more of Gong, get more value. In fact, across 332 customers, we found that companies who used Gong org-wide more had an 11 percent higher growth year-over-year.

Take our customer Virgin Pulse for example. The employee health and wellbeing platform has been a Gong customer since 2020, when they began using conversational intelligence for coaching their sales team. Now, three years later, Virgin Pulse has expanded their use of Gong across sales, customer success, marketing, and product departments. With the ability to tap into the voice of the customer, Virgin Pulse is able to build market intelligence and make strategic decisions based on what they know about their customers’ needs and wants. As a result, Virgin Pulse achieved a double-digit lift across the sales pipeline – with a 4x increase in top of funnel conversions and 33 percent reduction in onboarding time for new sellers. 

The value isn’t just found at the top of the sales funnel, but throughout. Gong keeps all the knowledge of an entire account in one place, making it easy for cross-functional teams to consume and navigate. When teams need to collaborate to support or upsell a customer and are looking for insights, instead of being filtered through a busy AE’s memory or subjective analysis, the business gets a true understanding – directly from the customer or prospect. 

For example, in post-sales functions, AI-driven insights can help the customer success teams see not just what’s up for renewal, but also a detailed view into the last time the CSM or Account Manager has been engaged with the account, and at what level within that organization to achieve that renewal. These insights also serve to consolidate account updates, health scores, success plans, and adoption data in a singular location for account teams to co-manage and leaders to see risk. Gong found that this results in an automated customer feedback loop to product teams, and can identify and alert team members on churn risks. In fact, we found that the very presence of these insights helps reduce churn risk by a full 68 percent. 

As companies learn more about their customers and anticipate their needs, they are able to see gaps – gaps that their products and services can fill. By providing the insights that lets teams collaborate around a shared truth, the connections fall into place more efficiently and clearly – leading to better decision making and successful business outcomes.