Nancy Hardin: Good morning, everyone. It’s Nancy Nardin, and I’d like to welcome you to our webinar today. I’m really excited to have a couple of guests with us today. We’ve got Chris Orlob from Gong with us, and then we also have Kyle Bastien with us, from Copper, formerly known as ProsperWorks. One of the first things I’m going to ask about is the name change there, but before we get started, let me first just say welcome to both of you.

Chris Orlob: Super. Happy to be here.

Kyle Bastien: Thanks for having us.

Nancy Hardin: Our webinar today is on why every sales trainer should have conversation intelligence, so I want to find out what exactly is conversation intelligence, and how are you using it, Kyle, because you’re the end customer here. You’re like many of the practitioners that are on the line today listening to the webinar. It’s really helpful to have folks like you on to share with them what your experience has been and why you decided you needed to do something, how you came to learn about conversation intelligence, and all that good stuff. 

Nancy Hardin: And then after Kyle and I have a brief discussion, then Chris will be chiming in, and he will be showing us, actually, a little bit about how Gong works. There’s a lot to it, so we don’t want to go into lots of big long demo, but you’ll certainly get a good feel for what Gong looks like and how it works. I use it myself, so I feel like I could almost give the demo too, Chris, if you drop off for any reason or something.

Chris Orlob: I’m glad to know we have a plan B.

Nancy Hardin: Yes, we do, we have a plan B. All right, so Kyle, let’s start talking about Copper and what was formerly ProsperWorks. Why the name change, and what does Copper do?

Kyle Bastien: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we were formerly called ProsperWorks. We’re now called Cooper. There was a lot of reasons for the name change, but I think the fundamental reason is that we completely view the CRM market, I think, differently than a lot of other providers out there. We wanted kind of a name and brand that really reflected that. So ProsperWorks, if I heard one more person call it like ProspectWorks or just Prosper or whatever, it was kind of hard to say and hard to remember, so that was part of the driver. But I think more importantly, Copper, it’s been a currency for ages, but more importantly, it’s associated with connectivity and conductivity, and that’s really how we view the CRM that we provide.

Kyle Bastien: Our take is that the CRM market is fundamentally broken. It’s more around the expectations, I think, that a lot of businesses have when they implement CRM. And frankly, the entire category may just be misnamed, because I don’t think in today’s day and age you can expect a software, any software, to actually manage your customer relationships. You know, if I told you that I had a software to manage your kids or your marriage or your friendships, you’d probably laugh me out of the room, but we accept that every day, that somehow software’s going to help us do that with our customers.

Kyle Bastien: And so I think if that’s the aim of the quote-unquote “CRM”, then it’s going to fail to meet expectations in terms of productivity and actually deepening your relationships with your customer base. I think we would all agree that the best organizations in the world are the ones who do that the best, so we have built Copper to minimize the amount of quote-unquote “C-level work” or busy work or data entry or administrative work that is associated with the sales role, so that the people whose skills are best aligned to building and fostering relationships with the customer base, they’re able to spend more time doing that, through a CRM that supports that kind of productivity. And then the last part is the how, which we do through a seamless integration with the Google G Suite, and that’s Copper.

Nancy Hardin: All right. Well, we need to have you on to talk about Copper as well, and maybe give a little demo about Copper, because that sounds interesting. And we could also have a whole nother webinar on what you mentioned, the topic of CRM and how it really is kind of an over-promise on one hand, and on the other hand, it is really a matter of definition, because CRM is oftentimes just a system of record, and so you really want to make sure that you’re not hampering your sales reps, but rather giving them some time back and making them more efficient. So anyway-

Kyle Bastien: [inaudible 00:04:39].

Nancy Hardin: I’m interested in learning more about Copper as well, but let’s have you next tell us about what Gong is, because I like to have the end user describe what the vendor solution is, because I always find that interesting.

Kyle Bastien: Yeah, for sure. Gong, the conversation about what Gong is, is the natural segue to what I was just talking about, because if you accept the premise that you want to be closer to and better understanding your customers and building better relationships with them, the same type of, I think, rigor, I guess, that you would apply to the data side of sales or CS or support, then you need to spend to the qualitative side of those actual interactions. If we’re freeing people up to spend more time on the phone with their customers, then we want to shift our attention to what is the quality of those conversations, how well are we listening to them and understanding them, what are we talking about, and how are we talking about it, in a way that best solves the customers’ problems or the external stakeholders’ issues?

Kyle Bastien: Gong is, you guys would call it conversation intelligence. I don’t have a better way of putting it. It basically helps us better understand the quality of our interactions with our clientele. In this day and age of modern, kind of like, sales or commercial relationships, there is no shortage of technologies out there that help us understand the data side of it, from just the basic sales pipeline of leads to demo set to close rates to ACV and all that kind of stuff. I think every organization kind of has that down to some extent, but this is now allowing us to take that same kind of rigor when we approach the qualitative aspects of those interactions. It’s been incredibly invaluable in that.

Nancy Hardin: Well, I wanted to ask about a couple of things that you said. One is that we have a lot of information and data outside of the conversations that sales reps are having, which is interesting, because conversations is what selling is all about. Why not just do ride-alongs? Did you do those before? Did managers do those before? What were you doing before you used Gong?

Kyle Bastien: Yeah. No, it was actually the process of trying to do ride-alongs that brought into focus the need for this, and that’s how I discovered Gong and its entire category in the first place. I started here at Copper in February of 2017 as the sales trainer, and my first task was to kind of understand the current state of affairs on the sales floor. Before I started training, I didn’t even know where to start unless I know where we are, and so I wanted to listen to sales calls for everybody on the floor. After kind of just like awkwardly showing up at their desk and being like, “Hey, I’m the new sales trainer. Can I listen to some of your calls? When are they?” They would share their calendars, and then I would ask to be invited to the meeting. And then, like every business, some percentage of calls don’t show up.

Kyle Bastien: We had about 25 reps on the floor at the time, and it took me a good three weeks just to listen to one call for every rep on the floor. And then there’s also this, I think there’s an observational bias. When you know the trainer’s listening, maybe you do things differently than you do when the boss or somebody isn’t listening in to your call. And so it took a very long time just to do one ride-along … and this is the inside sales team … for everyone on the floor, which gives me at best an incomplete picture of what the general state of their conversations is like. So I basically spent a lot of time to get a likely biased and definitely incomplete view of what the quality of the conversations was on the sales floor. And this is before I’d even done a single training.

Kyle Bastien: I’m thinking to myself, man, how am I going to do this? I want to listen to a call a week for these guys. This is never going to work, and I’m going to end up wasting everyone’s time by doing a bunch of trainings that isn’t going to have any follow-through as to whether they’re actually better for it, and are they implementing it with the customer? It’s just not tenable, at least, and we’re not the biggest sales floor in the world. I mean, I can imagine having 50, 100, 200 reps, and how are you going to understand what people are doing, absent something like this?

Kyle Bastien: That’s how I became aware, that’s how I understood, man, I just can’t do ridealongs. That’s not going to work. And that’s even with me being dedicated to sales training, and a lot of organizations don’t have that either. It’s usually the frontline manager that has to do this, in addition to everything else entailed with that job. So that’s how I knew I needed something like this [inaudible 00:09:32].

Nancy Hardin: Yeah, it’s interesting. A couple things I hear you say. One is that, how are you supposed to train effectively if you don’t know what each rep needs help with? Oftentimes, we just do these training programs, and we come in and we do them, and we treat everyone the same. That may or may not be helpful for some period of time, a short period of time, most likely is all it is going to help for. And then the other that I heard you say is that it’s difficult for a salesperson to hold a call with you on the line like they would normally hold the call, because you can’t help but get a little bit self-conscious about things, so it’s better to understand how a call really goes than how it goes when they’ve got somebody watching them.

Nancy Hardin: Let me ask you, did you use something before, or did you just say okay, well we need something that will allow us to listen to recordings, so let’s go see what’s out there?

Kyle Bastien: Yeah. No, prior to April of last year, we hadn’t used anything like this. We kind of went into the market and got involved in April of 2017.

Nancy Hardin: Got it. Okay. Tell us how you went about evaluating, because I know there’s other solutions on the market. What were some of the things that you were looking for, and maybe questions that you asked or concerns that you wanted to resolve?

Kyle Bastien: Yeah. I kind of have a bias, and I know this isn’t the most tech-forward thing to say, but I have had many softwares promise revolutionizing my business with the advent of AI and deep learning, machine learning, and so forth, and I had yet to find one that was able to kind of like deliver on the promise of the technology yet. So when I hear, “Hey, we’re going to record your calls and sprinkle some AI on that, and you’re going to understand everything,” I was like, give me a break. We’ll see.

Kyle Bastien: I kind of came in skeptical in that regard. We looked at both Gong and Chorus and kind of did like a bake-off. We had half of our team trialing one and half the team trailing the other, and we even used Chorus for a period of time, for a while when we got started on this. The thing that has been one of the game changers with Gong is that they’ve been able to show us things about our conversations that I wouldn’t have thought to look for. Having the recordings in the first place is going to be valuable, and even absent a lot of the machine learning, the artificial intelligence, and the tracking that goes with these softwares, just having the calls recorded is very valuable.

Kyle Bastien: And in a lot of cases, we were able to kind of identify by looking for certain things. If I know we tend to say certain things around discovery or when we’re presenting pricing or when we’re talking about the value of our software,I could kind of like build some keyword searches that’ll identify for me in those moments when those things have happening. What Gong has enabled us to do, though, is they’re showing me things that I wouldn’t have thought to look for on the call.

Kyle Bastien: A good example is that there’s a very important aspect of Copper for automated actions that kind of prescribe the next right sales action to take, given on where deals are in a pipeline stage. It’s something that hopefully our reps are talking about often, because it delivers great value to our customers, and it’s a pretty impactful feature for driving results within the Copper CRM. I hadn’t built a tracker around that, and I never had told Gong to look for that.

Kyle Bastien: After a certain amount of calls had been recorded, they started telling me what we were talking about. They were able to recognize these kind of like clusters of words and keywords and things that our reps were saying again and again, and say, “It looks like automated actions is coming up a lot with these reps and not these reps.” And so I was able to actually look at who was talking about these things. To no surprise, the reps that were kind of enjoying the most success on the floor were the ones that were talking about that most consistently and at a certain time in their conversation.

PART 1 OF 3 ENDS [00:14:04]

Kyle Bastien: … most consistently, and at a certain time in their conversation. That’s one of many example of how Gong’s been able to … I don’t have to ask it what to look for, it’s been able to tell me what’s important based on what’s going on on the floor. I think this also speaks to a more important thing, which is that even though I’m a sales trainer, the collective wisdom of the group will almost always be the plans of the lone genius, so me saying do your call this one way and this is how the sales thing needs to go is not how we wanna run it. I wanna learn from these guys. I wanna take the reps that are performing the best and be like, well, what are you guys doing and how can we stamp that out across the rest of the organization and train to those behaviors? We’ve been able now, through that kind of machine learning or that artificial intelligence that Gong provides on top of the call recordings, what are our best reps doing and how is that different from what the core is doing, and where might we focus our training efforts to get that kind of lift.

Nancy Hardin: Okay. I wanna talk about some of the outcomes that you’ve had as a result of using and having your reps use Gong. One of the questions I had, you talked about the collective wisdom and what the top performers are doing versus the core, and that makes me think about adoption and whether or not and how many sales reps are actually using it. Did they like it at first? Did they like the concept of it? Reps tend to be skeptical now about tools because typically they end up helping managers and really don’t do anything for themselves. Talk a little bit about the outcome from the perspective of user adoption and usability.

Kyle Bastien: Yeah, sure. What’s nice about Gong is that I can turn it on once the reps accept the invite and link their calendars. It can be somewhat passive in that there’s no necessary change to their life or workflow that they need to do to actually use Gong. They just need to do their jobs and Gong is going to record their calls, and I’m gonna be able to help coach them better. So, they don’t need to do or use or do anything different, necessarily, to get value from Gong. In that way, it’s very easy to ramp up and implement and start getting value from. I don’t need the reps, necessarily, to buy into Gong, I need them to buy into training and I need them to buy into that there’s areas to improve. If it’s my opinion, then it’s my opinion, and they can argue any one person’s opinion. What’s been helpful from an adoption standpoint is two things.

Kyle Bastien: One of them is if I hear a teachable moment on a call, I don’t need to even give them feedback, I can just pull them into a room and say hey, I heard this moment on the call that I thought was very instructive. I wanna play it back for you and I want you to tell me what you hear and what your thought process was in that moment. I play it back and nine times out of ten, they are harder on themselves than I would’ve been on them in giving the feedback. If I could just point them to the right thing to look at, they’ll be like, oh my God, I [inaudible 00:17:29]. I can’t believe anybody ever buys from me. It’s like, okay, well it’s definitely not that bad, it just needs a little refining here and there.

Kyle Bastien: But, what if we were to try it this way? Or, they’ll try a pitch and say oh, I thought I nailed it, and then I’ll like, okay, well, let’s listen to what the customer does next. You can hear, it doesn’t even need to be me saying it. The customer will vote with whether they bought or not and what they said next in that conversation, being able to listen back for that a little bit more critically than maybe you were able to do in the moment in the sales call. They’re like, oh, yeah. They took the conversation this other way. Or, yeah, I can see now they weren’t really as excited as I would’ve expected them to be right there. That gets a lot of buy-in.

Kyle Bastien: The other thing is when I’m doing my trainings, as a trainer, and I came up in sales so I’ve sat in on their side of the table 100 times through sales training and it’s almost always somebody giving a PowerPoint presentation or going through an exercise or doing some role playing, if we’re lucky, but there’s never been that kind of follow through on are people actually doing it. One of the biggest things I’ve learned through this is that people learn at different rates, and it depends by topic. Some people pick things up really quick. Some people pick it up but don’t use it, and some people try but it’s pretty hand-fisted and they need some refinement. So, seeing it through to completion to actual effective usage in a customer facing situation, the training isn’t done until that is happening and you’re actually changing behavior and it’s working. I just don’t know how I would do it without this.

Kyle Bastien: So, my favorite training that we do is what we call film review. We’ll basically train on a topic, we’ll role play on a topic, everybody will see [inaudible 00:19:17] and then the next training we’ll just zero in on those moments where whatever we were talking about is being implemented. Bring all the reps together in a room and I’ll ask the rep to pick two people of their peers they wanna have give them feedback and we’re gonna play your company story pitch. Who do you wanna have give you feedback? They’ll pick a couple people, and then we’ll play it. Then, we’ll ask how they think about it, having it heard played back. Then, we’ll ask their peers to give them some feedback and I don’t really have to do much. Through that conversation, they’re learning from each other and they’re participating in that way. It is a long winded way of answering your question, but it’s socializing the learnings and getting their buy-in on yes there is more that needs to be done. I could’ve been better there. Help me with this and help me with that. Having their peers say it to them in addition to myself, or better yet instead of myself, that’s where the adoption and the value really comes in.

Nancy Hardin: I have a couple more questions and then we’ll switch to Chris, but one of the questions is about metrics. It seems obviously that it would have good outcomes, how could it not? But, are you able to measure it or its impact on revenue?

Kyle Bastien: Yeah, absolutely. We have a strong promote from within culture here, so a lot of the reps on the floor when I got here, and to this day, were promoted from the SDR ranks, of course bolstered with external hires here and there, but a lot of people were in a role and this was maybe their first full cycle sale, when they were selling copper for the first time. Getting them from never having run an entire deal cycle end to end to hitting quota, we had a base line on that and it was taking us about eight months to get a rep up to hitting quota, and even then we were only successful in doing that about 60% of the time.

Kyle Bastien: So, I was able to look at it like looking at hiring cohorts or people who are promoted into role and then pre-conversation intelligence, post-conversation intelligence, what was the either decrease in ramp time, increase in ramp productivity, and then we didn’t even necessarily factor in what their productivity was going after that, but we saw we were able to reduce our ramp time from eight months to five months through using these kinds of coaching techniques. And then, of the people who were getting through the five months, we got up to about 87% ramp success rate. So, the people who were getting promoted were getting better faster and more often. We’ve also been able to see a material increase in bookings just during ramp, let alone through the rest of their careers here. Just during ramp was generating about $150,000 in ACV a year annually.

Nancy Hardin: Wow. All right. Thank you very much for sharing all of that. I think what we’ll do is I’ll go ahead and hand it over to Chris right now and have him show us a little bit about what it looks like. Kyle, if you wanna jump in at any point with some comments, feel free to.

Kyle Bastien: Great.

Chris: That was amazing, Kyle.

Nancy Hardin: We can see your screen Chris, so we’re good.

Chris: All right. I’m just trying to figure out how to move the video icons. Give me just a second.

Nancy Hardin: Oh, okay. Yeah, we don’t see them so you don’t have to worry about it from our perspective.

Chris: Right, right, right.

Nancy Hardin: But, they might be in your way.

Chris: Yeah, they’re a little bit in the way. Oh, here we go. All right, put them down there. All right, you guys can see my screen?

Nancy Hardin: We can.

Chris: Okay, cool. I’ll walk everybody through the basics here. It’ll be pretty high level. Kyle, feel free to interrupt me as we go with some anecdotes about how you guys use key things that I’m about to show internally over their [inaudible 00:23:23]. What we’re looking at is the aggregate view of how your sales team behaves across all of their calls, not just a single call at a time. If you wanted to frame up the problem that you’re trying to solve by looking at these numbers, it is closing this delta between what your best reps are doing, like Kyle talked about, and the core, the middle of the pack. How do they behave differently consistently across all of their sales calls? At a very high level, we have some basic things, like the talk to listen ratio, how long does each rep spend talking on their calls compared to listening, how long they monologue, how long they let the customer talk uninterrupted. What some of these basic metrics do is first help you identify what your best reps are doing, like I mentioned. They also help you point your coaching efforts in the right direction. They’re kind of like a barometer to diagnose what each rep needs help with.

Chris: Now, it gets a little bit more advanced than just these basic metrics like the talk to listen ratio, in that you can actually profile your top performers and how they approach call structure at each stage of the sales cycle. The way that we can do that is, Gong is looking at specific topics of conversation in every sales call that are being discussed, independent of specific [inaudible 00:24:50] that are being talked about. Just to make that more concrete, we’re looking at how long and at what point in the call we’re talking about pricing or next steps or specific futures or behavioral contracts or up-front contracts, if you’re a Sandler Training fan. Right now, we’re looking at our topics and we can see that our top performer, Jameson Young, spends a lot more time on discovery, which is the topic that we have highlighted, than everybody else, which would make sense. That gives us a little bit of a clue. Now, we can dive into Jameson’s, quote/unquote, back of the baseball card.

Chris: This shows us what Jameson, our super successful rep, does consistently across all of his calls. What does he talk about and when? We can see that compared to the average, he’s spending almost double the amount of time on discovery than everybody else is. That gives us a little bit of a clue. In addition to just duration, or how long he spends on each topic,we can also look at his call structure. When in each call does Jameson discuss each one of these topics compared to everybody else on the team? When you look at enough of your top performers, or if you group them together, and when you do this at every stage of the sales cycle, you start to understand, like Kyle was talking about, the wisdom is in the crowd, not necessarily in the single genius, how do your top reps approach call structure? Now that gives you the information to start to replicate this call structure to the rest of your team. That’s the high level.

Chris: If we wanted to get a little bit more context, we can dive into all of Jameson’s calls that match the analytics that we’re taking a look at. In this example, let’s see all of Jameson’s calls where he spends a lot more time on discovery than, say, his peers do. We can drill down here, and I’ll just choose one of these calls at random. Now, it brings us to what an actual call looks like in Gong. I’ll just draw your attention to Jameson and then the customer here. We can get a visual of what the conversation ping pong looks like, the back and forth dialog, and it looks like Jameson talked very little on this conversation and he got the customer to talk quite a bit.

Chris: Now, if we want to figure out how Jameson is running these discovery calls so successfully, we can scroll down to the bottom and highlight what questions is Jameson asking. We can see up here with these little pinpoints, you can see exactly where Jameson is asking his questions throughout the sales call. If we go down to the transcript, you can click on one and it brings each of that point in the call where Jameson asked those questions. So, this really shines the light on what Jameson, or your top performers, are doing differently than everybody else. It gives everybody in the organization access to this tribal knowledge of what your successful sales people are doing and if you’re a sales trainer or sales coach, this is the system of record that you can use to really, not only identify where your reps need training, but also continually reinforce that training, like Kyle talked about. There’s a lot more to the platform …

PART 2 OF 3 ENDS [00:28:04]

Chris: Like Kyle talked about. So there’s a lot more to the platform. If I wanted to walk through feature by feature, it’d take another 20 minutes or so. This is kind of the high level, this will give you the gist. I hope this gives people more clear vision of what Gong does and how it can be applied to your sales training.

Chris: Kyle, are there any specific use cases that you want to highlight about you guys use Gong over there at Copper internally? And I’m happy to navigate over to those parts of the product if I need to show them.

Kyle Bastien: Yeah. No, it’s bad, as you’re showing Jameson’s call, I put my sales training remote hat on and I’m like, “What would I say [inaudible 00:28:48].” But like the interesting things is like, before you even mentioned this was a discovery call, you look at dozens and over time you look at hundreds and hundreds of calls and you get a feel for what I call, the shape of the call, right? You can just basically look at the ping pong pattern and know immediately what was going on. Right? And I can even tell you without looking, where the demo probably started, where discovery started and where it ended and where next steps are.

Kyle Bastien: And so when I was looking at this one, I was immediately struck by how little Jameson was talking. And even in a discovery call, that’s an exceptional amount of customer talk time. And so, I look at that and was like, “There’s no way you showed product there.” Right? Like there have to be moments where there’s a few minutes of Jameson talking and [inaudible 00:29:30]. Or if he did, that’s and exceptional amount of customer engagement. But, yeah, that stuff is really cool.

Kyle Bastien: A couple of things that I would highlight outside of just the coaching aspect of it, right, we use this… I’ll give a couple kind of non-standard examples of how Gong has helped us drive some business results outside of training and coaching. One of them is with our account and management team. These guys are responsible for working with our existing customers to introduce Copper to other commercial teams in the business outside of sales that aren’t using a CRM perhaps or to potentially talk about what their growth plans are into new markets. Basically, upsell or expand the footprint within the business.

Kyle Bastien: And we also have a CSM team that works very closely on kind like the technical side of the relationship. So we wanted to know on the AM side, we can’t sit in on every single CSM call because they’re doing four or five a day and the AM’s have other things they need to do. So how can we know if a customer is talking about something that is interesting to us, right?

Kyle Bastien: So you have these alerts you can set up in Gong, which we set up on our side, that when somebody says something like, “Hiring new markets, at seats, at licenses, growing” a few keywords that are typically common in, well, you’ll probably need to expand [inaudible 00:30:56] in these new things. Then our reps are getting an email digest of those CSM calls that they weren’t on where those things were likely discussed. And then they can go in and listen to those moments.

Kyle Bastien: And sometimes their talking about something else and those words were used, but a lot of times they are talking about something that’s interesting to the AM team. Then they can work with a CSM, be like, “Hey, could you introduce me. I thought of an angle and I’d like to talk to them about this and that.” And they can kind of like sift through what would otherwise be just an insurmountable pile of calls to find the ones where it might be most effective for them to jump in.

Kyle Bastien: So those alerts are something that’s really cool. You got something to say Chris?

Chris: I’m actually just going to kind of emphasis what you just said. I think alerts are one of our most underestimated feature. And it’s really something… Lots of people [inaudible 00:31:46] alerts is what has really put Gong in it’s own league in this category because it brings things to your inbox instead of you having to do the work and go search for things.

Chris: If you want any type of call where a competitor was mentioned or any other type of call that you just want to be on top of. Maybe it’s like a late state negotiation call, you can set up this alert one time and they’re brought to your inbox instead of you having to kind of go search in a platform to find one you’re looking for. And that, in addition to the other ways we’ve approached building this product, is really what has driven adoption of successfully in most of our customer organizations.

Nancy Hardin: Interesting.

Kyle Bastien: Yeah. I agree. It’s very valuable. And the other thing, [inaudible 00:32:29] call to is the on the stats side. For me, I’m not the frontline sales manager, I have training in enablement in [inaudible 00:32:42] with that group. But getting manager coordination and alignment is very critical if you are an organization that has somebody besides the frontline sales manager doing the training. And what that means to me we put a lot of thought into what the learning path is, what the sales cycle is and how do we equip people with the capabilities they need to be effective at each part of the sales cycle.

Kyle Bastien: And then if I’m working with somebody on something specifically, I would want the manager to be reinforce that in their one-on-ones. Or if it’s something that’s effecting everybody in their team meetings, without necessarily needing to be there so that we can kind of all be singing from the same song sheet when it comes to what best looks like and what we’re coaching towards.

Kyle Bastien: And so the stats for that is like… One of the things that was unique to Gong, it was really valuable to me was, if I tell a manager, “Hey, I’m working with your teams on this and this and this and I’d like you guys to help me reinforce that in your one-on-ones.” We get visibility now with Gong into who’s listening to calls, whose calls are they listening too, which calls are they commenting on, whose receiving feedback. And that’s really valuable, right?

Kyle Bastien: And there’s the kind of reinforcement of training thing too but then there’s also this idea that is common, and I’ve done this as a sales manager, where your top performers, sometimes you’ll kind of like leave them alone and let them do their thing. And you’ll have a habit of focusing all of your effort and time on maybe your core or lower performers, and I think that’s a natural human thing to do is to look at at a quote unquote problem and try to fix it.

Kyle Bastien: But a lot of the research says that. in terms of driving results, not necessarily the best way to do it. And that you’re more likely to get better lift by continuing to play at people strengths. So if someones really good at something, you should give them a continuous coaching reinforcement on that. And that you’re more going to get [inaudible 00:34:45] lift by focusing on your star players, actually, or your kind of like cusp of stardom players.

Kyle Bastien: And that’s kind of our intuitive and a lot of new managers want to do that. And so what you’ll see in Gong is people who are not listening to or you’re providing coaching to their best people. Which to some rate of degree would make sense but actually is counterproductive towards driving improvement.

Kyle Bastien: So being able to at least surface that to the reps or audit that or at least have group visibility. I’m like hey, I’m making sure that I’m spreading the love equally across the team. I’m not leaving anybody out. I’m not focusing all my time on the people who I might not be able to help but rather focusing my time on the people whose performance is actually going to drive results in the business. That’s super, super important.

Chris: Absolutely.

Nancy Hardin: That’s a good point. I mean, you learn a lot as a sales trainer in how to really leverage this. It feels like other sales trainers out there can really learn from these little tips and tricks that you’re talking about. We have just a couple more minutes and I just want to tell people that if they do have questions, they can go ahead and post them in the question panel and we’ll try to get to those.

Nancy Hardin: But I wanted to comment on a couple things. One, is that I would encourage you all to go to LinkedIn right now and connect with Chris, Kyle too I’m sure wouldn’t mind. Chris is constantly putting out, and I’m sharing it because it’s so good, he’s constantly putting out great content that they’ve learned from all the data they’ve collected from all of the different users of Gong. And so you’ll learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t work on sales calls, even if you’re not using Gong to analyze it yourself.

Nancy Hardin: So I would just encourage you to go follow him, even if you don’t connect, to follow him so you get those resources that are really important. And then the other thing I wanted to do is just share a way that I use Gong. And I don’t think it’s a typical… It’s not about training, in other words. I use Gong because I need to keep track of all the discussions that I have. And I can’t keep them all in my head and, of course, I can write notes down but you miss some of the context when you’re not really hearing the voice and you’re just trying to remember it from notes.

Nancy Hardin: And also, it kind of distracts you from the call because you’re busy trying to to write down the notes and pull out the most important things. So I just simply record everything in Gong and then when I know I’m going to have my next meeting, or I have to do my follow-up, then I can just quickly listen back. And believe me, you can just skip ahead and within a minute, you’re reminded of the entire conversation and can put the relevant tidbits into the follow-up that need to be in there. And you’ll look like you’re really on top of things when, in fact, if I hadn’t had that, I’d be like, “I don’t remember what happened.” So that’s another great

Chris: It’s funny that you… Yeah, I just wanted to emphasis what you said. It’s funny that you bring that up because as much as sales trainer and sales manager love Gong, usually account executive are some of our biggest fans and they love it for the exact reason that you just brought it up. In addition to the self-learning and self-coaching, it’s a great way to navigate and quarterback your deals more successfully.

Chris: Because not only can you skim through these previous calls and start your next call as if the last one just happened, because you’re all refreshed. You can also comment on the calls, tag your product marketer, your product manager,your sales manager and get the right eyeballs on these deals to make sure you get it across the finish line.

Nancy Hardin: I like it. I like it. All right. Well, with that, I think we’ll sign off. And if you do have questions and their in the side panel, we’ll go ahead and answer those when we send out a link to the recording, which we will be getting shortly. So I would encourage you to share the link with your colleagues, if you think they’re interested or should know about this from a training perspective, from understanding where you can get better and improve how you can get better outcomes from your customer conversations. Just go ahead and share that link.

Nancy Hardin: Gentleman, thank you both for joining us today. Again, it was a pleasure to have you.

Chris: Absolutely. This was fun. Thanks Nancy, and thank you so much, Kyle, for joining us.

Nancy Hardin: Absolutely.

Kyle Bastien: Thanks guys, it was fun.

Nancy Hardin: Yeah, thanks everyone that’s on the call. We hope to see you all on the next one. Have a great day everyone. Bye bye.

PART 3 OF 3 ENDS [00:39:39]