Gong launches customizable generative AI models to streamline sales workflows

Revenue intelligence platform Gong today unveiled a suite of proprietary generative AI models designed specifically for sales teams. The company said that its extensive dataset of sales interactions, including calls, emails and web conferences serves as the foundation for these models, which customers can customize to meet their specific requirements.

Gong asserts that its generative AI models stand out from off-the-shelf systems due to their ability to categorize large quantities of sales deal-specific data — including customer objections — and understand the context and intent of sales conversations. This capability empowers the models to deliver precise and pertinent outcomes for sales teams.

“We’ve captured billions of interactions between sales teams and customers and have analyzed them to deeply understand context, intent, tone and outcome,” Gong CEO Amit Bendov, CEO told VentureBeat. “Because our proprietary generative AI models are trained on a specific corpus of sales-related data, the models can identify events like customer objections, deal risks and opportunities and generate relevant and accurate next steps — picking up on sales domain nuances that general-purpose models cannot. We’re counting on AI to replace the drudgery of white-collar people.”

Bendov emphasized that instead of manually searching through calls, emails and meeting notes scattered among team members, the platform consolidates all information into a unified and efficient view.

“Our model understands the important highlights in each conversation,” said Bendov. “Thus, when managing a pipeline, it bubbles up just the key items in each deal and prioritizes them based on understanding the deal.”

Leveraging intricate sales insights through generative AI 

Gong believes that sales engagement plays a vital role in the sales process, especially when generating qualified leads. Therefore, to optimize sales workflows and boost employee efficiency, the company has inculcated generative AI into its Revenue Intelligence platform to produce precise and relevant content.

The latest addition to Gong’s Revenue Intelligence platform is the Engage tool, a solution for enhancing sales engagement within revenue teams. By harnessing the power of GenAI, this tool offers invaluable sales guidance from initial interactions with prospects to successfully closing deals.

Central to the tool’s engagement strategy is tailored and personalized content delivery, which helps to ensure that each interaction resonates with potential customers’ specific needs and preferences.

In crafting a follow-up email after a meeting, the tool examines highlights composed by Gong’s GenAI. It also considers the account history and incorporates these details into a model that generates approximately 95% complete email, the company says. The user can further customize and send the email.

Personalizing post-meeting

When composing a first-time email in cases where no previous interaction has occurred, the platform retrieves information about the account and the recipient (using publicly available information).

This data is used to personalize the outbound message based on the company’s product and tailored to the specific seller. For instance, the email may reference the customer’s industry and include other relevant personal details about the individual.

Likewise, a Call Spotlight feature is a notable addition to the platform that generates precise summaries, key account highlights and actionable tasks based on lengthy sales conversations. The company says that this capability stems from its language models’ comprehension of call outcomes and concepts, including a prospect’s business objectives.

“When a seller concludes a meeting, our model automatically detects the presence of future actions and offers proactive suggestions for composing a follow-up email,” Bendov explained. “Leveraging the call’s discussion of next steps and potentially other contextual cues from the ongoing deal (including other involved individuals and prior communication), the model assists in drafting the email.”

Customized AI models catering to specific business needs

Gong said it is actively working with customers to tailor its AI capabilities to their individual needs. The company announced that advertising platform Gourmet Ads has already implemented Gong’s Call Spotlight feature to enhance the productivity and efficiency of their sales representatives.

“Call Spotlight is dramatically reducing the time my team spends consuming information during the sales prospecting process while quickly surfacing call highlights, outlines, and next steps without having to listen to calls,” Benjamin Christie, Gourmet Ads president said in a written statement. “Its ability to accurately understand and convey the context of sales conversations is transformative.” 

Similarly, the company offers a customizable AI model called Smart Trackers, which constitutes a user-trainable AI system designed to identify concepts and context, rather than relying on specific keywords. Gong asserts its distinction as the sole industry player granting users the ability to train and personalize the model according to their unique requirements.

“Searching and filtering customer interactions for only keywords has some major limitations: It’s almost impossible to create an exhaustive list of keywords, and depending on the context in which a keyword is used, it can also be flagged for the wrong meaning,” Bendov added. “Smart Trackers pick up on the unlimited variation in ways that a rep or a customer could communicate a concept, which in turn delivers much greater accuracy — they find up to 80% more occurrences, with up to 80% fewer errors.”

What’s next for Gong? 

Bendov said that the platform’s future vision revolves around constructing a fully autonomous system catered to revenue teams. The company perceives generative AI as a “co-pilot” for sales professionals and strives to eliminate mundane tasks like data entry into CRM. Furthermore, he firmly believes that AI will play a pivotal role in providing insights to support informed decision-making and optimizing various daily processes for sellers.

Bendov stated that certain professions will ultimately witness complete AI-driven substitution, similar to the paradigm shift experienced during the industrial revolution.

“In three years, I don’t see people agreeing to work at a company that requires them to fill in forms manually,” said Bendov. “We believe that AI will not replace human beings for most applications, but it will enormously speed up many of the mundane tasks in such a profession. In the sales domain, it may be that pure email outreach might be completely automated; or 90% automated and the other 10% moved on to other functions within the organization.”