Chris Orlob, Author at Gong

Chris Orlob's Articles

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Gong Labs

Sales Demos That SELL: Winning Demo Techniques, According to Data

By Chris Orlob, September 14, 2017

Sales demos are often the most pivotal moments in the sales process. Hopefully, before your product demo, you’ve done a solid discovery call with your customer. What you talked about during discovery will dictate your sales demo flow (more on that later). The data science team and I at Gong.io analyzed 67,149 sales demos to understand […]

Gong Labs

These Are the Worst 13 Words to Use During Sales Calls, According to New Data

By Chris Orlob, August 29, 2017

Really, Chris? Do we really need yet another article about “X sales words to avoid” Yes – here’s why. This is the first of those articles to have data behind it (that I know of). Not that there’s anything wrong with similar articles that lack data. There’s something to be said about intuition. But it turns out new research […]

Gong Labs

This Is How a Bad Quarter Starts In Sales (As Illustrated by Data)

By Chris Orlob, August 15, 2017

Having a bad quarter in sales almost always follow this pattern: Two “lazy” months followed by a frantic third month (characterized by a desperate scramble to get something (anything!) across the finish line). At the beginning of a new quarter, you feel “fresh.” You’re glad the chaos of finishing the last quarter is over, and […]

Selling Skills

How to Predict If Your B2B Sales Job Will Survive AI

By Chris Orlob, August 9, 2017

I recently got sucked into a heated LinkedIn debate about whether artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually displace the B2B sales profession. These discussions seem to be cropping up a lot lately. Many sales professionals and leaders believe it won’t happen; they predict that people will always want to buy from people and that relationships will […]

Gong Labs

Here’s Why Your “Sure Thing” Deal Didn’t Close (And What to Do Next Time)

By Chris Orlob, August 1, 2017

New research confirms that “happy ears” in sales isn’t just some cynical phrase that grizzled sales veterans toss around to poke fun at rookies–it’s actually a real phenomenon, now validated by data (see below). The data illustrates that when buyers respond to your sales presentation a little too enthusiastically (with few objections raised), they are […]

Gong Labs

This Is How Gender Affects Close Rates In Sales

By Chris Orlob, July 26, 2017

Even though the B2B sales world is dominated by men, salesmen selling to men buyers kills more deals than any other buyer/seller gender combination. Just as interesting: saleswomen selling to woman buyers brings more deals across the finish line than the other gender combos. Four months ago I wrote an article titled Women Break the […]

Gong Labs

The 7 Best Discovery Call Tips for Sales You’ll Ever Read

By Chris Orlob, July 5, 2017

Running an effective discovery call often means the difference between winning and losing a sale. Your discovery call sets the trajectory of the deal. It dictates how you present, what objection handling scenarios you’ll run into, and how much negotiation leverage you find yourself with at the end of the sales process. So, what makes […]

Gong Labs

4 Tips for Nailing Your Sales Discovery Calls

By Chris Orlob, June 18, 2017

In the Gong Research Labs series, we publish data from analyzing sales calls with natural language processing and AI. Subscribe here for new data every week. . . . A new batch of sales conversation data confirms what some of us know at a gut-level: A key difference between the sales rep who goes to President’s Club […]

Sales Enablement

The Three Pillars of a Sales Enablement Manager

By Chris Orlob, June 11, 2017

The mission of sales enablement can be summed up in one sentence: To help the sales team sell better from the time each sales rep is brought on board, to the time they decide to leave the company. That mission is best measured in maximizing revenue per rep. Although we can summarize sales enablement in one […]

Product News

SalesLoft + Gong: Scale the Effectiveness of Your Sales Conversations

By Chris Orlob, June 7, 2017

Scaling the effectiveness of your sales conversations is what we aim to do here at Gong. That’s why we’re excited to formally announce our integration with SalesLoft: They’ll scale the number of conversations you’re having; we’ll scale their effectiveness. This partnership started with mutual customers requesting that we integrate the two platforms. Here’s How It […]

Sales Management

2 Things I Learned about Call Coaching from Interviewing 36 VPs of Sales

By Chris Orlob, June 6, 2017

Much of my job comes down to interviewing sales leaders so we can understand how to help them do their jobs better. Especially when it comes to call coaching and scaling the effectiveness of sales conversations. In the last six weeks, I’ve interviewed 36 of them. As you can imagine, I was able to pinpoint […]

Gong Labs

How to Hack Rapport Building In Sales with This New Data

By Chris Orlob, May 24, 2017

In the Gong Research Labs series, we publish data from analyzing sales calls with natural language processing and AI. Subscribe here for new data every week. . . . The best way to build rapport in sales changes from situation to situation. What works in one case actively causes failure in another. Winning strategies have a way […]

Sales Enablement, Sales Management

How To Get Started With Sales Coaching In 5 Actionable Steps

By Chris Orlob,

When sales managers come to the realization they need to take coaching seriously by instituting systematic coaching programs, they have taken a huge step in becoming true professional sales leaders. But knowing where to start (and how to do) sales coaching can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t already have the “muscle memory” of implementing […]

Sales Enablement, Sales Management

6 Sales Coaching Programs That Cure “Random Acts of Coaching”

By Chris Orlob, May 18, 2017

When your sales coaching activities are done in a random, ad-hoc fashion, moving the needle become stubbornly difficult. I call this “Random Acts of Coaching” (RAoC). The idea is to turn your sales coaching efforts into a steady, systematic, programmatic set of activities. When this is done, win rates trend upward. While this article won’t […]