CRM, meet revenue intelligence: How AI is supercharging CRMs

For the past couple of decades, CRMs have been the main system of record for revenue organizations. At the same time, almost everyone has struggled with two key challenges to CRMs: getting data in and getting insights to ultimately drive action that results in revenue. New AI-driven capabilities in Revenue Intelligence (RI) platforms are changing that and finally unlocking value and more ROI from CRMs. 

Revenue Intelligence has become the main revenue execution layer on top of CRMs. If those RI platforms are built on the right data and depth of understanding, they become the most effective engine to leverage AI capabilities. This also significantly changes the paradigm of how we interact with and get value from our CRMs. 

What’s been holding CRMs back, and how is AI finally changing that?

Almost everyone who uses CRMs has struggled with the same two challenges: getting valuable data in and getting actionable, revenue-driving insights out. Capturing data primarily relies on reps manually entering notes and fields into the CRM. But what we get is typically very sparse and outdated, and ultimately, it’s the rep’s opinion. Manually populating CRMs with data that reps type into fields is both laborious and introduces subjectivity that can hurt revenue organizations’ execution and predictability. Then, analyzing all of this data in search of meaningful insights involves running tons of reports, manually combining and sorting disparate data, and then constructing lots of dashboards to try to make sense of it. It’s a very manual process requiring a lot of time and energy from RevOps and admin teams..

What does the new paradigm look like with AI-powered Revenue Intelligence? If done right, RI platforms can automate the ingestion and analysis of all kinds of data. They automatically capture and understand data without relying on reps, eliminating repetitive administrative tasks and providing revenue leaders with actionable insights.

AI-driven Revenue Intelligence can be the most powerful way to get ROI out ofCRMs: Gong’s AI Revenue Intelligence platform lets you capture all interaction data, deeply understand it with full content and context of the deal, generate key next steps, guide their execution, automate inefficiencies, and predict realistic outcomes. If CRMs provide an outline, revenue intelligence tells the story. This transforms a revenue organization’s tech from a system of record to a system of action. 

The primary inefficiency of CRM systems is their manual data entry requirement. This adds a lot of non-selling time to reps’ schedules, and it means the data in the CRM is prone to bias  (reps are only human, after all).

Revenue Intelligence automatically captures all interactions, understands them and turns them into updates, insights, and recommended actions that can fill the CRM, more quickly, accurately, and objectively than is humanly possible. This gives revenue leaders a comprehensive, unbiased, and perpetually up-to-date view of the business.

Another benefit of the CRM is that you can build the structure to map your sales process and stages. Whatever your deal stages, sales methodology, and account hierarchies, you can model those in CRMs. Granted, these are empty fields that reps or RevOps need to manually fill in to have any value. None of that is going away.

The power of AI-driven Revenue Intelligence is that it can automatically understand exactly how things are going in that sales process. Is this deal on track or not? Have the key sales process benchmarks been hit and the best practice behaviors you trained the team on used? How are customers responding – is it landing or are objections coming up? RI with true depth of AI understanding can tell you exactly where the deal stands, what you’ve learned, the risks and the next best actions so you know what to do about it. As an example, the CRM can tell you if a rep entered an opportunity in the Commit stage and if they forecast that it will close. RI with AI tells you the qualitative side – have the key steps and behaviors been hit, what’s missing, what would work to progress the deal, and the real likelihood it will close. 

While the CRM is a great repository for sales data, talking with it is a bit of a one-way street. You can input data, but you can’t easily query that data and get informed, contextual answers without running lots of reports, often left relying on your RevOps or analytics teams.

AI-powered Revenue Intelligence turns this one-way street into a two-way dialogue. The structure of the CRM, combined with the 360-degree view of customer interactions, gives sales reps, managers, and leaders the power to easily get the insights and actions they need directly where they’re working. For instance, Gong has the unique capability to ‘ask anything’ across an entire account, leveraging info from thousands of interactions as well as activities and what’s in the CRM. It’s an amazing way to get complete context in seconds.  For example, if a sales leader is jumping on a call, they can ask, “What are the prospect’s main pain points?” or “What are the main reasons this deal may not close, and what can we do to solve them?”

AI is transforming how revenue teams plan, operate, and execute. Organizations using Gong are already expanding their capabilities, guided by the three principles outlined below. 

Capture the right data. Gong automatically captures all of the data—including CRM and activity data, but also all the most valuable source: interaction data – without relying on reps to do manual entry and finally giving organizations the right visibility and data to work with.

Drive deeper understanding of that data. After capturing the data, Gong automatically puts it in context—of your sales methodology and your business goals.

Generate automated, actionable insights. Gong’s depth of understanding (see previous bullet) helps us autonomously and easily extract actionable insights without having to dig through tons of activities and emails and without listening to hours of calls each day. It finally moves us to the velocity and scale of turning insights into actions that we need.

A last point: Not all AI is created equal. As you set about beefing up your CRM data ingestion and analysis process, it’s critical to build on a platform that has these essential components built in. Gong is the only Revenue Intelligence platform that unlocks the true power of your data and maximizes the ROI you get from your CRM.