3 new ways you can use AI to better understand initiative adoption and build sales excellence

Revenue teams are always fine-tuning the way they operate – they know staying the same means staying behind. 

So whether it’s during initial onboarding, ongoing training, or reset opportunities like SKO, enablement and RevOps leaders are tasked with rolling out the latest initiative or messaging intended to shift strategy in a new direction. Reps walk away with a new set of marching orders, and leaders immediately start to wonder: will it work? 

The better question is how do you know it will work?

You put weeks into rolling out a sales process, but how do you know if your team is actually following it? What about new messaging – can you tell which reps have implemented the latest talk tracks and which haven’t? Do you have a way to track adherence to sales methodology? Call reviews can be a time-suck that don’t always provide answers, and CRM data can be biased and misleading. But we need to take our cues from somewhere.

It’s already hard enough to create change, it’s even harder to track it – which is why we’ve created three Gong features designed to address these issues. We’re rolling out AI Methodology Playbooks, AI Scorecard Suggestions, and Assessment Tools for AI Smart Trackers, which all rely on AI purpose-built for revenue teams to bring clarity to strategy execution.

Scale necessitates standardization. That’s why many revenue organizations embrace a sales methodology – whether that’s MEDDICC, Challenger, or SPICED, for example – as a framework or set of principles to guide reps when they qualify, connect with, and close customers.

Sales methodologies are important to follow for consistent and reliable deal execution, but reps can struggle with them for two common reasons: 

That means RevOps is flying blind, with manual tracking as their only option for measuring methodology compliance. Unless, however, they tap AI-powered tracking capabilities for help.

Customers, like Demandbase, are already using Gong’s industry-leading AI Smart Trackers to detect and understand how reps are using methodologies like MEDDICC. 

We decided to build upon the power of AI Smart Trackers and make it even more seamless to incorporate those insights directly into our customers’ pipeline management workflows. That’s why, starting in July, you can add AI Methodology Playbooks to Gong Deal Boards. You can define your sales methodology of choice right in Gong, then rely on AI to detect whether or not important topics – like identifying a champion or economic buyer – were discussed and see how much your team is applying your methodology overall. 

Gong’s AI also automatically suggests snippets for a rep to confirm and edit, automating data entry for reps while keeping them in the loop. In the meantime, managers and operations can verify methodology adoption across their teams by viewing Deal Boards at a glance. By using AI to automatically pinpoint gaps in adherence to sales methodologies, your team can improve forecast accuracy and pipeline conversion rates without sapping rep productivity.

Once they’ve selected a methodology, enablement leaders and frontline managers need to coach reps on how to effectively adopt it in their customer interactions. Are reps asking the right discovery questions? Are they communicating value to your buyer? Managers need to hold reps accountable to following best practices, working with them to outline how they’ll measure against it, as well as establish KPIs and targets – those parameters and metrics often take shape in the form of a scorecard. 

Managers can use scorecards to measure performance and provide feedback in a consistent, clear way – if they have the time, that is. Scorecards can, in all honesty, be time-consuming and therefore hard to keep up with, leaving reps aimless and managers scrambling for workarounds. But these scorecards are important to maintain; in fact, according to Gong’s Reality of Sales Talent study, only 40% of sellers feel they have adequate levels of coaching to be successful in their roles.

That’s why we’re excited to add AI Scorecard Suggestions. Now, teams can streamline the coaching process using generative AI, helping managers obtain answer suggestions for scorecard rubrics based on accurate AI Smart Trackers. With this feature, managers can save the time traditionally spent on full call reviews and provide efficient, accurate feedback for reps to action on, raising performance in the process.

AI Methodology Playbooks and AI Scorecard Suggestions are both built on Gong’s industry-leading AI Smart Trackers — the only technology in our industry that goes beyond keyword recognition to capture complex concepts in all your customer conversations. 

While they’re simple to set up, AI Smart Trackers are actually advanced AI engines – they pick up not just keywords, but also phrases and longer statements you’re hoping to track in the hundreds of ways they could be articulated by reps, customers, or both. It quickly becomes clear who is — and isn’t — adopting your new initiative. And now, we’ve enhanced AI Smart Trackers to make understanding adoption that much more accurate.

With the latest version of AI Smart Trackers, you can:

Enablement and RevOps are there to support reps as they grow the business. But they can’t do that without knowing what stifles growth – if the new messaging isn’t effective or being used, or the current methodology still works. Understanding fosters opportunity, which is why Gong’s latest features are designed to give enablement and RevOps the trustworthy insight they need to know what’s landing, who’s adopting, and how growth happens. Once you demystify execution, you pave the way for targeted support, streamlined workflows, and reliable growth. 

Assessment Tools for AI Smart Trackers and AI Scorecard Suggestions are available to all Gong customers today, with AI Methodology Playbooks arriving in July. 

If you’re not yet a Gong customer, get in touch to learn more about Gong today.