Education Archives - Gong

Absorb Software sees 30% revenue boost by adopting gen AI for productivity gains and improving buyer experience

Hannah Hapin — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 19:34:16 +0000

Absorb Software sees 30% revenue boost by adopting gen AI for productivity gains and improving buyer experience Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Small Business North America Education 30% Increase in revenue The challenge Before adopting Gong, Absorb’s leadership team made many decisions based on the info that sales reps entered into Salesforce. They had to trust that the reps added the right info in a timely manner. Execs didn’t have functional visibility and the time it took to mine for insights was untenable. All this impeded Absorb’s growth trajectory. The outcome Absorb’s sales team is closing more deals by using Gong’s gen AI to power training sessions and refine sales strategies. They halved the time from a rep’s hire to their first sale. Best of all, total revenue is up by 30%. Headquarters Calgary, AB founded 2003 company size 500+ industry E-learning A whopping 77% of a rep’s precious time gets devoured by non-selling activities, as reported by Forrester. That’s a startling reality and it has repercussions for everyone in revenue-focused roles. Generative AI (gen AI) addresses this by delivering remarkable productivity and automated support to sales teams, so they can spend more time on selling activities. Absorb Software revamped its sales workflows by adopting Gong’s gen AI (purpose built for revenue teams), thus increasing the coaching time available to sales reps and propelling productivity gains. We talked with Absorb’s Senior Sales trainer, Kerry Heilskov, to hear about these wins first hand and how they increased revenue by 30%. Let the highlights spark ideas for how you might use AI to improve win rates in your role. Turning limited visibility into actionable insights Absorb Software is a global leader in learning solutions, and their learning management system (LMS) revolutionizes onboarding and learning engagement. Kerry oversees the onboarding and ongoing development of Absorb’s sales professionals. She’s devoted to ensuring that Absorb reps have the training they need to improve the buyer’s journey and quickly drive new and recurring revenue. Before Gong, Kerry says “life wasn’t good.” Senior managers made decisions based solely on the info that reps did or didn’t put into Salesforce. There was “no real visibility.” Tasked with significant growth, Absorb’s sales team hit pause to find a platform that could help them save time and enhance decision-making. Absorb adopted Gong, a choice Kerry credits with contributing to a 30% increase in revenue. The Call Spotlight feature has been the real standout for the team — they can’t imagine going back to not having it. Call Spotlight focuses your attention on the critical aspects of a call, helping you understand all the key details without listening to an entire conversation. Plus, it delivers actionable insights instead of basic summaries. Unlocking sales excellence in workflows Gen AI has fully reshaped Absorb’s sales workflows, resulting in stronger communication and high performance. Here are the top ways the sales team is closing more deals using Call Spotlight: Meeting mastery and coachable moments Preparing for meetings now takes 80% less time. Sales leaders review three times as many calls in less time. The best part? They hone in on the key parts of a call to deliver timely spot coaching, which has accelerated high performance. Crafting compelling follow-ups Sales reps use the AI’s suggestions for impactful follow-up emails. Call Spotlight integrates pertinent details from the discussions into the emails, guiding buyers towards action, then team members simply customize the email to align with their individual style and tone. This eliminates the challenge of figuring out what to say, and prevents deals from slipping through the cracks. Collaborating to close deals Call Spotlight facilitates seamless collaboration between account execs and solution engineers. Call synopses pinpoint customer pain points and show exactly what to cover in demos to improve the buyer’s journey. Teams use Call Spotlight’s Ask Anything feature to uncover the business problems behind a customer’s tech problem. Asking straightforward questions like, “What business problem is the customer trying to solve?” can provide deep insights into the customer’s needs and culture. With that knowledge, the team sells a wider range of solutions grounded in value. This approach leads to more and larger deals closed. Adoption and getting results If you want to unearth AI’s full potential, Kerry recommends “showing your team the power of the tool.” She devised an activity that requires reps to document a call’s highlights and next steps. This activity takes them more than one hour to complete manually, but only two minutes with Call Spotlight. Once a rep experiences this time saving, they quickly incorporate the tool into their workflows. It’s a no-brainer. The best part? Now, you can enrich your CRM with Call Spotlight data and insights. This means your reps won’t spend countless hours on manual data entry instead of selling to customers. “Throughout my sales career, sellers have always asked for an assistant. Well, Gong is your assistant! Call Spotlight reduces our follow-up and documentation time by as much as 96%. Experiment with it. Those who use it will always outperform the rest.” If you want to harness the time-saving power of gen AI with your team, we’d love to show you Call Spotlight. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one How Gong Became Diligent’s MVP by Increasing Close Rates by 7.4% Enterprise Coaching Strategic Initiatives Europe/Middle East/Africa North America Software Gong Lets HubSpot Sales Reps “Go Back and Watch the Game Tapes” Enterprise Coaching Strategic Initiatives Global Software Virgin Pulse used Gong to achieve a 4x jump in its top-of-funnel conversions (in this economy!) Enterprise Coaching Strategic Initiatives Global Software

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Learning and transforming: How Gong helps Udemy make critical revenue decisions

Hannah Hapin — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 15:12:53 +0000

Learning and transforming: How Gong helps Udemy make critical revenue decisions Coaching Deal Execution Strategic Initiatives Enterprise Global Education The challenge Prior to Gong, Udemy was faced with the difficulty of trying to form, understand, and track its strategic initiatives without any formalized system in place. The outcome When Udemy implemented Gong, it instantly helped the team make informed decisions about strategic initiatives, so they could link enablement projects to their business goals. Headquarters San Francisco, CA Founded 2010 employees 5000+ industry Education 44+ million. Per day. That’s the number of learners Udemy serves daily as the world’s largest online learning marketplace. Eric Stoddard, Head of Global Sales and Customer Success Enablement at Udemy, is tasked with driving change through informed decision making, using a programmatic approach. The biggest historical challenge? Understanding whether his team’s strategic initiatives actually drive the business forward and create change, as intended. “Before we had Gong, that was tricky to measure with confidence.” When Udemy implemented Gong, it instantly helped the team make informed decisions about strategic initiatives, so they could link enablement projects to their business goals. Nearly overnight, Eric and his team gained confidence in their initiatives. Most companies have a hard time assessing whether their strategic initiatives are working. Here’s how Udemy figured it out… Move from uncertainty to total clarity No matter the organization, new hires need to get up to speed as quickly as possible. The faster they learn the product, the sales methodology, and best practices, the faster they generate revenue. Before using Gong, Udemy’s new reps learned by listening to live customer conversations while sitting next to a veteran … in a cubicle. Hours (and hours) evaporated without an opportunity to really show them how the best performers talk to customers, and what customers say across a sales cycle, at scale. Back then, Udemy also struggled to understand what was happening during customer conversations. Too often, the “squeaky wheel got the grease.” “We used to focus our resources on whoever screamed the loudest, not necessarily what the data showed.” Gong changed that. It gives Eric the insights he needs to train his new reps efficiently and monitor their selling skills, as well as gain insights into which customers really needed attention. “I don’t know how I used to do my job before Gong,” shared Eric. “Gong brings deep customer understanding, clarity, and insight into my world.” Turn instant visibility into revenue growth with Gong’s AI Today, Eric knows which reps struggle to get up to speed, and which deals are actually a priority. He spends his limited resources on the right reps and the right customers. That’s all thanks to Gong. The platform’s AI allows Eric to dive deeper into understanding what his new hires learn and the value they provide to customers. “If they’re not helping our customers drive change within their businesses, we pivot,” says Eric. Gong captures and harnesses the voice of the customer and gives Udemy insights into trends that happen at an account level. “What separates Gong are the insights I can grab from customer interactions at scale. Our teams can turn those insights into actions that improve pipeline management, drive successful outcomes for our key initiatives, and help us make better revenue decisions.” Gong has the largest data set of customer interactions in the industry. Gong’s AI engine as analyzed over 1 billion customer calls and tens of billions of emails, bringing value to the data by understanding what is really happening within customer interactions and identifying revenue risks and opportunities with unrivaled accuracy and relevance.. Eric particularly loves Smart Trackers which allow customers like him to quickly and easily train Gong’s AI to identify concepts and topics specific to their business. Smart trackers mean Udemy can take immediate action as soon as Gong surfaces trends. Those actions lead to stronger revenue growth. Gong’s “Initiative” board is also a favorite of Eric’s. “If you’re not taking advantage of this board, you’re really missing out.” The Initiative board gives Eric instant visibility into how all his initiatives are being adopted. He can see who participates in an initiative — and who doesn’t — by team. That also means he spots trends over time. All these capabilities enable Eric and his team to assess and adjust their coaching and training strategies… and inevitably, win more often. Tip: Leadership can subscribe to Deal Boards to get a weekly update email, rather than rely upon Eric for their enablement data. They can quickly see how initiatives stack up. Udemy hits a winning streak with Gong Gong has helped Eric’s team — and Udemy in general — make great strides in several aspects of its revenue operation: Deal execution and forecasting: Managing your pipeline is no easy task. Gong gives Udemy insights about each deal by immediately (and automatically) surfacing risks in Deal Boards using proprietary & patented AI models. Managers use those Deal Boards to understand relevant risks so they keep deals on track and have more accurate forecasts each quarter. Sales productivity: Gong has become Udemy’s central repository for new skills training. Eric makes sure his new hires listen to a curated set of calls so they get exposure to different sales-related approaches that work. From there, the new hires can take what they heard from top-performing reps and make it their own. Business alignment: Gong has helped Udemy align its sales, marketing, and enablement motions. “We now operate as one cohesive team,” boasts Eric. In particular, it can be challenging to understand what the competition’s up to and where they show up. Gong data highlights this competitive information for managers when it happens on calls, and also allows sales reps to pressure test competitive messaging. Smart guidance: With Gong, managers can quickly and efficiently coach and provide feedback on many calls … not just the ones they attend live. “We fill out scorecards to track whether a rep is progressing on a particular skill,” said Eric. Gong has been a powerful AI platform to elevate coaching within the organization. A new (and sane) way to operate That’s a pretty exhaustive list, but it’s not the end of changes Gong has brought to Udemy. Sharing lessons learned and asking for feedback; picking up tactics you may not have thought of; leveraging Gong’s call analysis and metrics to improve a skill. There’s a constant (and virtuous!) cycle for all of it now happening at Udemy. Everyone wins. Eric and his managers, reps, the rest of the revenue team, leadership, and Udemy customers. Understandably, Eric could not be happier. “I truly feel those who don’t leverage technology like Gong will be left behind. Gong brings us sanity because we can see the data behind our actions. Gong is confidence. Gong is insight. Gong is the ability to truly understand what’s going on inside customer conversations.” Don’t get left behind. Back to All Stories Have questions or want a custom demo? We’re here to help! Click the button below and we’ll be in touch. Request demo Keep exploring stories like this one Gong for BDRs: How Aircall boosted qualified pipeline by 35% in EMEA Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Global Business Services How Tinuiti Used Gong to Close 50% More Recurring Revenue from Cross-selling Small Business Coaching Strategic Initiatives North America Software Watch Appen use Gong to onboard CSMs 4 months faster Small Business Coaching Deal Execution Asia-Pacific North America Business Services

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