The best sales insights of 2024
January 10, 2025
Director, Content Strategy and Research at Gong
Sales AI
Sales Strategies
Selling Skills
Director, Content Strategy and Research at Gong
For over a decade, Dan has provided revenue leaders with data and insights to inform and execute their GTM strategies. As a former analyst at Forrester Research, he worked with hundreds of B2B organizations to measure and improve sales productivity.
This article is part of the Gong Labs series, where we publish findings from our data research team. We analyze sales conversations and deals using the Gong Revenue AI Platform and then share the results to help you win more deals. Subscribe here to read upcoming research.
From demystifying deal complexity to uncovering the anatomy of the perfect cold call, it was another busy year for Gong Labs.
The team analyzed hundreds of millions of sales interactions throughout the year to uncover the insights you need to elevate your game and close more deals.
Whether you’re catching up on what you missed or looking for a quick refresher, we’ve rounded up the top Gong Labs insights that powered your success this year.
So let’s take a look back at Gong Labs’ top five insights of 2024 so you can set the stage for a winning 2025.
Here’s your 2024 Gong Labs, “wrapped”…
#1 You embraced the power of the phone.
“Cold calling is dead.”
“Prospects never answer numbers they don’t recognize.”
We get it. In a world where you send 3,000 emails with a click of a button, why spend hours on the phone when most of your cold calls won’t even connect?
After analyzing more than 300 million cold calls, we learned that it not only pays to cold call, it pays to be really good on the phones.
The numbers showed that top-quartile cold callers book more than 3x the number of meetings than their average peers.
But wait, there’s more!
Every cold call you make and voicemail you leave draws attention back to your emails, so you book even more meetings across other channels.
Cold calling nearly doubles your email reply rate (3.44% vs 1.81%) even if you don’t connect live.
And people still believe it’s not worth one hour a day to cold call?
#2 You learned voicemails aren’t just for our parents.
Speaking of the phone… we settled a modern-day seller soliloquy: To leave a voicemail or not to leave a voicemail?
After analyzing the same 300M cold calls, we found that the goal of a voicemail isn’t to get a callback. It’s to get a reply over email.
In 2024, engaging buyers across multiple channels is more critical than ever. This means reaching out to buyers via phone, email, chat, SMS, social, and more. While you might rely heavily on a channel that your typical buyer prefers, data shows that using two or more engagement channels can have an impact.
Gong Labs data shows that leaving voicemails increases your email reply rate from 2.73% to 5.87%.
#3 You gave yourself a competitive edge.
As price-conscious buyers searched for more value, deals in 2024 were more competitive than ever. Since 2022, the average number of competitive mentions increased by 57%.
While your solution might have been the obvious choice in years past, buyers set their sights on the option that meets most of their needs for the right price.
There’s good news: The timing of competitor mentions plays a large role in how they shape deals. Understanding this relationship informs how a seller should approach these conversations.
When competitors are discussed early in the sales cycle, it’s a positive signal that the buyer has real intent to buy. They know other players in the space, and are most likely educated about your offering and the problem it solves. In fact, an early competitive mention increases the odds of winning an enterprise deal by 32% over not discussing the competition.
This is when you need to set your offering apart from the rest and work with your champion to build a watertight business case.
On the flip side, if competitor mentions happen in the late stages of a sales cycle (e.g., during negotiations), the deal is likely under threat, and the odds of closing the deal decrease.
If competitor discussions are still happening at this point in the deal, you need to uncover the source of the buyer’s uncertainty. Is it something you can control for? Or is it purely leverage to drive down your price?
With complete visibility into the context of these competitive scenarios, you can improve your win rate while avoiding a “race to the bottom.”
#4 You used discounts strategically.
As rising interest rates and external market factors began to affect budgets in 2022, decision-makers became increasingly sensitive to price. At the beginning of 2023, we found that the average length of pricing conversations had increased by 62% since 2020, signaling that sellers needed to adapt their negotiation strategies.
That emphasis on pricing continued throughout 2023, with an 18% increase in the number of pricing mentions since 2022.
Naturally, sellers tended to offer more discounts in direct response to these tightening purse strings. Makes sense right?
Only sometimes.
While discounts undoubtedly help sellers close deals, they often extend deal duration and can sometimes signal that the customer is not an ideal fit.
Instead of leading with a discount, reps should uplevel their negotiation tactics.
Leadership should also reinforce negotiation strategies that are best for the business. For example, incentivizing sellers to close multi-year contracts can lower costs, reduce churn, and even block out competitors.
No matter your company’s take on discounts, make sure that your pricing strategy is up to date and aligned with the value your customers expect in 2025 and beyond.
#5 You leveled up with AI.
Let’s face it. This wouldn’t be a 2024 article for revenue teams if we didn’t mention AI. Earlier this year, we uncovered how AI really affects your deals and how you can use it to your advantage.
One of AI’s most distinguishing capabilities is that it can process and understand large volumes of data.
When Gong introduced conversation intelligence in 2015, it gave revenue teams the ability to capture and transcribe every customer-facing interaction and unlock an invaluable dataset that made sellers better at their jobs.
Today, using conversation intelligence data, AI can surface key moments that occur in customer interactions throughout a deal cycle. It can highlight competitive mentions, pricing objections, cross-sell opportunities, and more. With these insights at their disposal, sellers can adapt their sales strategies in real-time or remove obstacles before deals are at risk.
By surfacing key moments, risks, and competitive insights, reps increase their success rate. When GTM teams used this AI functionality, their win rate was 35% higher.
More to come next year!
We’re calling 2024 the year of the “revenue rebound.” After a challenging 2023, organizations report an average revenue growth of 19%, up from 11% this time last year. We hope these insights contributed to your success and help you hit the ground running in 2025.
From all of us at the Gong Labs team, we hope you have a warm holiday season and a prosperous New Year. Happy selling in 2025!
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