GONG RECIPE BOOK

Understanding your customers’ viewpoints on products and features

What is it?

Effective product management requires staying on top of customers’ viewpoints on products and features and tracking them over time. With Gong, product managers can get a deeper understanding of a product’s perception in the market—especially if it’s a new product—and adjust the product strategy to make the most impact.

Who is it for?

Gong helps product managers at any organization whose product strategy depends on and is impacted by customers’ viewpoint on the product, features, or service.

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How does Gong help out?

Gong provides out-of-the-box functionality that helps product managers understand customers’ viewpoint on products and features qualitatively and quantitatively, individually and as a product management team, including:

Elaborate search capability across all customer conversations. Product managers can search all conversations or focus on specific market segments, based on any keyword – for example, a search for “database integration” when a new capability is launched.

AI-driven search capability (called Smart Trackers) that lets Gong users teach the system to locate very specific concepts, regardless of the wording. Companies provide Gong with some examples of what they’re looking for and after a short round of tuning, Gong finds those concepts in past and new calls.

Feeds (called Streams) that let product managers consolidate relevant conversations in a shared folder that’s constantly being updated. With Streams, one person can set a topic, and everyone else on the team can consume the feed without having to determine how to locate the topic in customer conversations. Team members can subscribe to feeds and receive daily or weekly digests in their inbox.

Slack integration. This pushes new calls in a Stream to a shared Slack channel. This lets product managers in organizations that use Slack heavily consume the conversations in Slack and add a layer of collaboration on the customer input.

A way to quantitatively measure the appearance of certain viewpoints within customer conversations and assess any trends around them. A Gong page titled Market Insights provides a quick way to quantitatively measure customer voice share based on keywords or concepts.

How does it work?

1. Provide product manager and adjacent roles product
(marketing, user research, and product design) access to Gong.

Consumption-only users do not require a paid license, so this does not incur additional costs.

2. Educate product managers on Gong’s functionality.

Product users are not primary Gong users and thus are usually not part of Gong’s initial setup. [link to a yet-to-be-created guide] Gong administrators are responsible for setting up Smart Trackers; a PM leader can be added to the list of Gong administrators, or Gong’s owner can provide support.

3. Determine the team’s key areas of interest

Set up Streams, subscriptions, and, if applicable, Slack channels to which the feeds arrive.

4. Include customer viewpoint analysis

In the launch process of new products or major new features: when a new major feature is launched, follow the same methodology (search, feeds, quantitative analysis) to better understand market reception.

Pro tips

Once the product management team determines what it cares about, Gong can also export data around the accounts and deals in which these concepts or topics arise. This makes it easy to create Excel reports that quantify and summarize such viewpoints (e.g., how many customers complained about a certain product issue or brought up a certain need).