Gong Across The Org: How Mintel Aligned Their Go-To-Market Teams With Reality

Josh Morgan: Hello Gongsters. Thank you for joining us at Celebrate Today. We hope you're having a cracking day. Here from Mintel we are looking at sharing some stories about how Mintel has been influenced by Gong over the last year and a half. A quick introduction to myself. My name is Josh Morgan. I am the sales enablement head at Mintel. I previously was in a sales role for Mintel in the US and spent some time in Asia and the UK for Mintel as well. And a quick fun fact about me, my biggest fear is actually Heights. And about 10 years ago, I decided that I would try and cure that fear by jumping out of an airplane in a sky dive. It didn't make my fear cured. It actually made it way worse. And now I have a terrifying fear of Heights. Over to you, Patty.

Patty Avila: Thanks Josh. Man, what a crazy fear and I totally get it. I've never been skydiving. I don't know if I could do it to be honest. So kudos to all of you that have tried it. As an introduction, my name is Patty Avila and I'm the director of client success here at Mintel for CPG and beauty. So, fun fact. Well, I did play the violin for eight years and classical music is still my favorite genre with Han Zimmer being my favorite composer. So if there are any other Han Zimmer fans, I'd love to learn more about that.

Josh Morgan: So, who is Mintel. We are global leaders in market research. We've been around for about 50 plus years now. And we pride ourselves on being experts in what the consumers want and why. So how we do that, we have a number of analysts all around the world who are analyzing markets continuously. These analysts put content onto platforms and those platforms are used to help customers make the best strategic decisions, but also to avoid threats in the market too. Our main aim is to help customers make the best strategic decisions so they can help their businesses grow as much as possible. We've got about 6, 000 clients globally across a complete array of different industries from food and drink, finance, beauty, agencies, academic, consultancies, and many, many more. So, thanks for hearing more about Mintel, now is onto the Gong piece and how Mintel is using Gong. So there's two areas to how Gong is being used in the sales teams at Mintel. And broken them down into two different buckets, effectiveness and efficiency. So the way that Mintel is improving its effectiveness with Gong is through game tape reviews. Our enterprise teams especially are using game tapes in their team meetings to improve and see the highlights of what happened in the last couple of weeks. But also when there's new initiatives coming out, Mintel will be using these game tapes to show the best in class examples of these initiatives. So, that's one example of effectiveness. The second example is just continuous feedback. So that continuous feedback comes at a rep level, comes at a coach level, but also comes at an organizational level as well. So some of the stuff we've seen from an organizational level is seeing a trend across Mintel that we don't multi- thread enough. Multi- threading being contacting more than one or how many contacts we need to make at a company to sell faster and sell more effectively. We notice that it's four plus contacts and we are now pushing our reps and our teams to do more than four contacts per deal. So that's one way. At an organizational level, we've been pushing it. From a manager to coach level, it's just continuous feedback. We know that we can't be on those phone calls at all times. So it's being able to have each different channel, whether that's in the comments section or reviewing it one- to- ones how a rep can improve or how we can get better continuously. And then from a rep by rep level, it's always so nice to see how you sound in calls. And a really funny example I heard over the last couple of days is one of our top sellers, actually, our number one seller last year was using the word facets as a very frequent call- only used term in her calls. And she didn't know why. But she's looking to continuously perfect how she portrays herself. And that was just a really funny example that she was using facets, the word facets too much. Okay. So the second part of how we're using Gong is through efficiency. So we use Gong for our pipeline reviews, especially under the Gong deals function. These pipeline reviews, we can quickly pull up how much velocity is in the deal, where the deal is, rather than trolling through lots of different opportunities on Salesforce. So, that's one way we're improving our efficiency. The second way is having the advice that Gong provides us to not only coach continuously and one- to- ones, but be coached all the time by Gong. So if the deals are lagging for 15 days plus, or if the multi threading isn't there, we are being continuously advised by Gong and that is helping speed up the way that we do our work at Mintel. So the efficiency is a really crucial part to how Gong has influenced us. So in summary, we can see on the page here that it may not be completely down to Gong, but we have seen a drastic increase of our close rates from first call to close. We saw a 34% increase since having Gong on board. So thank you Gongsters. We really do appreciate it. And also not just the improvement from the numbers side of things, we created a culture of coaching, and that is so important to us to continuously try and get better. Over the next couple of months and over the next year, we are going to input trackers, which we're really excited about to track things like competition, success plans that we'll be putting into our clients, and then also building a sales framework using Gong as well. So we're really excited about what's to come, not just what's happened. Over to you, Patty.

Patty Avila: Thank you, Josh. Transitioning over to client success. As many of you know, client success, our goal is to bring value to our clients. That means helping them tap into our tools. But honestly, when I got tapped by Josh to present here on Celebrate Today about why I love Gong, I was thrilled and I jumped for joy. So I'm going to walk you through some of those reasons right here. So we have four, of course. One of them being confirmed communication. So we live in a virtual setting and man, oh man, I must tell you, it is so hard when you are listening in to your client, as you're navigating through a conversation, whether it's a spontaneous meeting. You're helping them with a quick request or maybe it's a scheduled QBR. There's so many times we're so down in our notebooks, drooling down through the notes, right? And we might have missed one second of something fantastic they just said. Or again, we're working from home. How many of you have had the time where, hey, the mailman has arrived and our dog suddenly went nuts, right? And it's like, oh, you quickly mute your button and you're like," I don't know what I just missed. I'm sweating right now. I want to make sure I captured everything." Well, the good news for us is here at Mintel we do use Gong and we use it for every single client call. So that's absolutely fantastic for me and my team and the account team, because we work tandem. We're a tight- knit family here and hashtag team selling. Thank you, Devin Ray. So that means that we're able to pause after that meeting, we take some time, we get our recording and we immediately know awesome, that's exactly what the client communicated. Best part, we can even share that recording with our client to ensure that we're a hundred percent aligned on exactly that project. There's no room for mishaps or mistakes. So that's one or confirmed communication. So two, virtual support. I spoke to it a little bit earlier. So again, we are all working from home, which is awesome because we can spend a little bit more time with our families. But that said, it makes it harder when say you have a new member on your team. Here at Mintel, we recently expanded our client success team. So I actually have the honor of four new hires, which is so exciting. I love it. But when it comes to coaching, it makes a little tricky, right? I don't have the ability to just turn around and say," Oh, I love that call. You're doing so well." Having Gong, allows me to do that. All they do is go ahead and tag me in there. And I can see exactly what's happening. It's almost like being a fly on the wall. But to Josh's point, here at Mintel, we're really, really digging on that culture of coaching. So what I've seen my team do, and I absolutely love it, is that when they're sending me their gongs, not only are they sending me the things that they love and they're proud of, but they're also sending things like," Oh, I realize I use those filler words, like awesome or facet." Maybe for them it's um, and like and kind of. Hey, you might even hear me do it right now. So you'll have to let me know my metrics after this call. But I love the ability of supporting my team from afar and really being there for them and with them, I love to see them grow. So that actually trickle right into measurement number three, on how we're using it. Valuable metrics. Hey, we love numbers. We know that's exactly how it tells us how we're performing. Are we hitting our marks? And that is exactly what my team loves about it. Instead of me always going," Hey, you could do this better." Gong allows them to see that. They get to see things like," Hey, how patient am I? Am I really listening to my client? Or am I leading the conversation too much?" And I mean, that happens all the time. We're really there for our clients. We get super excited and sometimes we're the ones talking too much. So being able to take that feedback from Gong and see," Oh, you know what, it was 50/50." Or," Hey, even better, 85?" What is 85 minus 100, 15%. I don't know. I'm not a math magician. I'll leave that to you. But that allows us to know, hey, are we actually sitting in listening and supporting our clients and responding to their needs or are we pushing too much of our agenda on them? Actually it's even fun because I've had some of my client success managers come to me and say," Hey, Patty, check out this Gong. My patient score, it went up," vice versa. The one that's better. That's the one I'm getting to. So it's been amazing to see them get excited over the platform. But as you know, as I said earlier, Mintel, we are a tight- knit family. So client success, sales, we're here to stay, dynamic dues, partners in crime, three Musketeers, whatever those groupings are that you can think of. So sometimes being that we're in a virtual setting account managers might be out on PTO. Maybe they're picking up those children from school. Our CSMs might be taking a call or vice versa, the AM's taking a call without the client success manager. And at times there's an opportunity that presents itself. Gong allows our team to listen in after the fact so that we can provide the proper support based on the conversation that was had. So, hey, I am all for supporting and advocating for a tool that makes my life easier, that gets my team excited and motivated. So if you're using it today, I can't wait to connect with you all after and hear how you're implementing it, because I'm sure there's some ideas that we can even take in here at Mintel. But if you want to learn more about how Mintel is doing it, feel free to connect on LinkedIn and I'm happy to share those thoughts. But thank you Gong for everything you've done. Honestly, it's made COVID, this work from home environment so much easier. So I appreciate it. Now, before we leave you to celebrate the rest of today, Josh and I would like to leave you with some tips. And my tip for you is when you are implementing or thinking about implementing a revenue intelligence solution, I highly recommend finding champions within your team. Because honestly, passion is contagious. And once you find one advocate that shows how that tool works and why it works, it's going to be seamless from there on out.

Josh Morgan: So my final tip for everyone is if you're looking to build a new function into a workflow, know that it takes about eight weeks to build a habit. Work out what that eight weeks looks like to expose that habit and expose that process and then work that plan.

Patty Avila: So thank you everyone. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your day today here at Celebrate. And if you'd like to continue the conversation, you can absolutely reach out to me on LinkedIn. Josh?

Josh Morgan: Thank you everyone for listening. It's been great to be a part of your day. Also, feel free to add me on LinkedIn as well. We'd be happy to continue the conversation and vouch for Gong in any situation. We love Gong as a revenue intelligence tool. Thanks for listening everyone. See you all soon.

Patty Avila: Bye.