Gong Labs: Beyond Productivity

Danny: Coming back from the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Celebrate Beyond continues. Where I left you, hopefully on pins and needles wondering what global icon could I possibly be talking about? So we assembled this event fully intending to bring rockstar power to you in person and all across the world. Naturally, if we're bringing rock stars together, Hollywood's A list, they just started calling. A few weeks ago I get this call, " Danny, Beyonce here. How do I play Celebrate Beyond?" I said, " Queen B, girl, our dance card's full. I'm sorry." So only natural, a few hours later I get this random text. " Danny, Jay- Z. I'll play the old stuff, I'll play the classics, but get me on that stage." I said, " Jay, we've already got the perfect artist for this next session." Yes, he's coming up as a giant among men in his field. You may be thinking, what hot beats is he about to drop? What killer raps are we about to hear? No, no, no. He's way above that. He's about to hit you between the eyes with facts, figures, and numbers that any rapper would say is true to their heart. He's talking productivity. Yes, we have someone who's got 99 problems, but a stat is not one. Bring him to the stage, Dan Morgese.

Dan Morgese: Wow. Thank you, Danny. What an absolutely hard intro to follow. My wife would be... She's a Beyonce in her own right, so I think she'd be pretty happy with that. No, thank you so much, Danny. Thank you so much all of you for joining us here in San Francisco at this beautiful venue today. Thank you to all of you tuning in or from around the globe today to celebrate with us. It's truly an honor to be here. The Gong Labs team has been hard at work and I'm just the lucky one that gets to actually present those awesome insights to you today. With that, let's talk about how sales has transformed. I think it's something we could all agree on. It's the seismic shifts to B2B selling that we've experienced over the past three years. First, let's think of the buyer. We do a ton of research on our own online. Reading peer reviews, reading vendor content, reading analyst reports. This is actually only leaving buyers time during the sales process, only roughly 17% of that time is spent engaging with US sellers or you as sales leaders with your teams, leaving us fewer at bats to truly provide value. On the selling side of things, as a seller, this we've heard a lot of the stats in terms of productivity and activity this morning. Only 23% of a seller's time is actually spent what we're paying them to do. That's to connect with buyers, close deals and generate revenue and growth for our business. Finally, when we are selling, those sales are getting more and more complex. We talked about the importance of multi- threading a little bit earlier this morning. Understanding that 94%, almost 100% of your deals have at least three or more buyers involved, means that we have to manage multiple contacts, across multiple accounts, across multiple opportunities. Leaving our sellers a bit overwhelmed at how they're going to hit their numbers. Searching for ways that we can get buyers more engaged and provide them value. Sending flurries of emails to keep those deals moving forward and ensuring that they don't stall and cross the finish line. By the way, this is Gong's newest hire. He's a strategic AE, his name is Kermit. He'll be helping out. He's going to hop onto a few slides for me and keep the data a little light. We've got tons of great insights for you, but I know numbers can get a little heady. Our head starts spinning so we'll keep it fun and engaging, I promise. The good news is you don't have to be stressed and don't have to be over a typewriter frantically type tapping away at the keys like Kermit here because Gong Labs has your back. My name is Dan Morgese and I have the distinct honor of heading up our thought leadership and research content here at Gong today. Prior to my time at Gong, I actually worked with hundreds of sales leaders helping them measure and improve their sales team's productivity. This is something I'm super passionate about and was super excited when I got the call to say that we would be focusing on productivity for today's Gong Lab session. I'd like to start off by taking a look back at how most of us look at productivity at our organizations today. The first one's an activity basis. This is actually something that's near and dear to my heart, what I spent a lot of my time doing. That's measuring productivity from an activity perspective. There we go. That's understanding how can we maximize that selling time? It's the baseline and the foundation of understanding how can we unlock productivity for our sales organizations? What we would do is we would typically go into our client accounts and measure how their sellers are spending their time, by asking them to log their activity across a standardized list. From forecasting to data entry, to internal meetings, to manager one- on- ones. That's ultimately how we would get to roughly that 23% figure. Great thing is we now have solutions like Gong that could actually help us measure this in a much more automated and less labor intensive way. Now this is again, a great foundation for understanding what the productivity of your sales force looks like, but it lacks depth into the qualitative insights that we need. When we look at productivity, we don't want to just measure activity. But I'm sure as many of you today are probably thinking about for your teams, how do we lock effectiveness? Once we've maximized that seller time, are we doing the right things, the right activities with that time effectiveness? Then efficiency, once we understand if we're doing the right things, are we doing those things in the right way? For the purpose of today's session, I want to deliver to you insights that are focused on those second two, effectiveness and efficiency. Understanding we are in trouble times right now in terms of, we're facing macroeconomic headwinds that top of funnel, our pipeline starts to dry up. New leads are hard to come by. How do we make sure we're squeezing the most juice out of that existing pipeline and those existing opportunities to make sure our sellers are set up for success? Just a little bit on Gong Labs, and for those of you who are just joining in, Gong is the most valuable platform for your customer facing teams. In short, we unlock reality to help you and your teams reach their full potential. We do that by capturing all of your customer interactions to give you full visibility into your deals and then analyze those to deliver to you insights, that you could scale across your team and set your sellers up for success. Now this comes in handy, especially when we want to run research like this because what that gives us access to is a treasure trove of buyer and seller data. Understanding what buying behaviors look like in today's market, and then what seller behaviors attribute to successful outcomes. For this particular analysis, the Gong Labs team took a look at over 100, 000 deals that closed in the past six months, that comprise over a million interactions between buyers and sellers. Now, earlier today, Ameat presented a data point and Kermit, unfortunately he doesn't have yours, I don't think so anyways. He was covering his ears because he didn't like the sound of it. You might recall this one. So 45%, nearly half of our sellers have a critical action item that slips through the cracks each week. You're probably thinking, yes, this resonates. We had a few people admit that maybe there are things that fall through the crack. But what I want you to do is based on the insights that I delivered to you during this session, what's one or two action items that we can put into place today to set a foundation to make sure that, as times are tough, we continue to get the most use out of that existing pipeline and hack the productivity of our team? What I'm going to show you is not necessarily a silver bullet by any means, but it's reinforcement that if we do the right things in the right way, we can set our teams up for success. Let's first dive into effectiveness. As I said, this looks at doing the right things or the right activities. I mentioned earlier that we looked at over a million interactions and actually, of those million interactions we found that 86% of them were written communications between buyers and sellers. Meaning, that roughly only 14% of those interactions were either sales calls or virtual meetings with a buyer. What we did is we wanted to zero in and categorize or catalog what type of email or written communications actually made up those 86%. What we did is we bucketed in into six groups that you see on my screen. First we have email response. This is the most common that you would typically expect to see. A buyer has actually responded to my outreach and then I respond. Again, just moving deals forward from a reactive standpoint. Nudging a prospect. This is where we talked about getting ghosted, potentially by a lead or a prospect, then we send that additional touchpoint or outreach to the buyer. Call follow- up. We have a great sales call, we have identified some action items. " Hey, I'm going to send over this great piece of content or thought leadership." Hopefully, our Gong people are sending over some thought leadership content. I'm going to send over whatever those follow- up items are. It's actually creating that email following up with those action items, following the call. Emailing a new contact. As we mentioned before, multi- threading is as important as ever. As those new contacts at each account are identified, either on the sales call or via email with an existing contact at the account, this is the proactive outreach to go and loop that new buyer into the buying group. Confirming a meeting. Similar to getting ghosted from our prospecting emails, we often sometimes get stood up for sales calls. This is proactively identifying if the buyer has not accepted our meeting invite, following up. " Hey, buyer XYZ, just looking forward to our call today. Here's the agenda we have set. Looking forward to connecting. If this time doesn't work, please let me know." Then finally back to office email. We're approaching the holidays, I'm looking forward to some turkey on Thanksgiving, some time out of the office with friends and family. As a result, I'll have my autoresponder on. Out of office reply, right? This is proactively knowing that John, from Acme, is going to be back into the office that Monday after Thanksgiving. Let me make sure I set a reminder for myself to proactively follow- up. These are the six different types of actions that we looked at in terms of, doing the right things. In terms of their frequency and what we saw across that 86% of interactions, the most common that actually slips through the cracks and goes on action is simply that email response. Think about that. The buyer is engaged, they're actually willing to play ball with us and we're just simply not being responsive and replying to them. This is table stakes, this is sales 101. We have to reply to that buyer. This is the frequency of actually how they happen, but let's see how not doing these things can actually impact our win rate. Okay, come on Kermit, what are we doing here? Okay, here we go. Looking at these wind rates and the delta in win rate that we see. The blue represents the increase in win rate when these items actually get followed up on by the seller. There we go. I want to zoom in on the first three. These have the largest impact. If we look at back to office email, confirm a meeting and nudge a prospect, we see that these have one common thread and one commonality across these activities. They're proactive outreach on behalf of the seller. This is not reactive to buying behavior, it is understanding that yes, I have to circle back and follow- up with that back to office email. I have to confirm a meeting. Actually, we all know that getting ghosted can be discouraging, but I think Catherine was on stage earlier this morning and actually said this is her favorite of the assist types. The reason being, this can actually more than double our win rates. If we send that additional email, that additional touch point to try and see if we can get that new lead on the hook and get them engaged as a buyer. Speaking of this nudge of prospect, last year, Gong Labs did some extensive research. The idea here is when we do send that nudge and we do send that follow- up, we need to make sure that we're providing value. That message is resonating because what we see, every additional outreach or every additional touchpoint that we see, our success rate declined significantly. We actually have a great Gong Labs, I'll throw a QR code up in just a few slides, all about what are the types of words and types of messaging that actually impacts the most, in terms of success rate for these type of follow- up nudge emails? We talked about what types of things, these six different types. What happens if we do all of the things correctly across all six of those action items all the time? We actually see that our win rate almost doubles. Here we're seeing a binary review. Has the seller completed all of the open action items throughout the opportunity versus those that have incomplete action items? We see a 20% delta or 20% lift in win rate overall. So my ask here, and again, this is a fundamental of selling 101. But let's make sure we're one, comprehensive, not leading any open items to go. And two, doing the right things, making sure that we're proactively engaging with the buyers that are quiet. Particularly during these times where selling is tough, we see that you could actually double your win rate if you're proactive and sending those additional touches. Next I want to focus on efficiency. This is doing those things the right way and more specifically, we zeroed in on a ton of data around timing and recency. The recency effect that timely follow- up can have on your win rates. A small question for the room and for those of you online, would love to hear your thoughts in the chat. What's the best day of the week to send an email? Tuesday? All right, I heard a few Tuesdays. Now this is kind of a trick question. So technically, because today is Tuesday, everyone who said Tuesday is right. But the answer is today. We actually didn't see much variability in the days of the week when that email sent. However, similar to the data point we showed earlier, when that seller responds in 24 hours and actually, one in three don't respond in 24 hours to reply to a customer email, we see that their win rate is impacted by 14%. Their deal duration is actually contracted or decreases by 11%, meaning we close more revenue and less time. Sounds pretty good to me. Here at Gong Labs, we're all about unlocking the science behind sales. If you will humor me for a minute, I would love to dive into why this 24- hour window is so critical for your sellers and talk about a 19th century German psychologist. This German psychologist by the name of Hermann Ebbinghaus, did studies. Extensive studies on memory and information retention over time. He developed this concept that's called the forgetting curve. What he found through a series of tests and studies is that we actually lose about 50 to 70% of information within 24 hours time. You'll see here there's a huge drop off in that 24 hours. Let's think of that from a buying perspective. As a buyer, I'm evaluating multiple solutions, already hard for me to sort out solution A, from solution B, from solution C. As a seller, I'm trying to communicate value, differentiation, our value propositions. Do I want that buyer to forget 70 to 50% of what I just told them? Absolutely not. So that follow- up within the 24 hours, what Ebbinghaus actually found is, if we introduce a steady cadence of these new moments, we can actually flatten that curb substantially. That 24 hour follow- up is absolutely critical when engaging with your buyers. Appreciate you guys letting me nerd out on this little psychology study. We mentioned win rate is impacted, as well as deal duration. I want to zero in on both those and provide a little more color there. Here spanning across our horizontal axis, we have the seller response time. This is a little more, we set this up into different segments based on recency, zero to 10 hours, two to five, and so on. We see a direct impact on these first three bars. With actually the most chance of success or the highest win rate at that five to 10 hour response time. I took a look at this and I was actually scratching my head. Actually, was reviewing this with one of my colleagues and he goes, " It's kind of like dating." I was like, " Russell, what do you mean, it's kind of like dating?" He's like, " Well, you don't want to seem too eager, but you've got to let them know you're interested." That five to 10 hours, the third bar there, is your highest chance of success. But then I took another look and I was looking. I said, " Five to 10 hours, that's one business day." For all of those sellers that are about to close out for the day and might have that email to follow- up on, don't wait until tomorrow morning. We're seeing that five to 10 hours has your best chance in terms of your follow- up and the correlation to win rate. This actually makes sense. I went out and I asked some of Gong's top sellers, " Hey, just in terms of time management, when you guys do follow- ups..." Each and every one of them said as a best practice, they have a distinct block where they take calls and have about an hour window following anywhere from three to four sales conversations that they have where they can do their due diligence and follow- up. So if you aren't planning your calendar in that way to do the appropriate follow- up in a timely fashion, I highly recommend you do and use that little hack to close the year strong. We looked at win rate. Let's look at how this practice can actually help contract or decrease our deal duration. The return here is twofold. When we're responsive and quick to reply, our buyers are more likely to be responsive and quick to reply. We see here with the scatter plot, again, we created these cohorts of sellers who can respond in zero to four hours, four to seven and a half hours, seven to 11 and a half hours, respectively. We found that yes, there's a direct correlation between our response time and the seller's response time. Meaning, that if we're timely in our follow- up, it can be an absolute game changer even during these hard times, to make sure that we're closing more revenue in less time. There's no denying that we find ourself in tough times, but I think now more than ever, setting that foundation, doing things the right way is more important than ever. These are the fundamentals. Let's make sure that we're comprehensive in our outreach and follow- up, making sure things don't slip through the cracks. As sellers, are we proactively engaging and prioritizing those proactive tasks of understanding, " Hey, I got ghosted by this prospect, but I'm not discouraged. I know I can get them on the hook." Finally, are we timely and responsive? At the end of the day, many of us might be in B2B sales, but it's human to human. Understanding that many of us can go on Amazon and order something and have delivered at our door the same day. Don't create any unnecessary friction with your buyer and be timely in that follow- up. Get them what they need to get that deal moving towards the finish line. If you do these things, and again, these are all fundamentals, I promise you it will have significant lift in your productivity. I thought there was a really appropriate quote from one of the greatest of all time or the greatest of all time, his earnest, Michael Jordan. He says, " Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise." Even your win rates will rise, I promise you. Do these fundamentals the right way and Kermit and I will be seeing you at President's Club next year with a drink in our hand on the beach. If you like these type of insights, my call to action for you all today, if you're not already subscribed to the Gong Labs newsletter, you can get firsthand data and first access to all of the insights that we're publishing on a monthly basis. Thank you all so much for having me. It was an absolute honor to be here and appreciate your time.