Ever felt like a summer camp director with a busload of wide-eyed campers arriving any minute? Sales leaders kinda feel that way with cohorts of new hires for sales onboarding. You want them to eat, sleep, and breathe everything about your product, organization, sales process, and necessary skills. You aim for total immersion so you […]
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A great culture doesn’t just happen — it’s built through care and intention. Great company cultures require intentional effort. Culture is cultivated and groomed, not just at the top, but at every level of an organization. Leaders often place focused attention on their strategic priorities, but they don’t always apply the same intentionality to building company […]
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Who is this? What company are you calling from? Why are you calling me? No, thanks. Not interested. Sorry, I’m too busy. Can you just email me some info? We already have something in place. Yeah, we don’t have a budget for this sort of thing. Objections. Objections. Objections. Cold call objections are par for […]
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The moment a customer voices a sales objection, it’s tempting to do two things. Both of them are a bad idea. Hearing sales objections make a rep want to: Say these words: “I’ve got the perfect solution for you!” Launch (knee-jerk styles) into a monologue about how their product solves the problem. We’re pulling the […]
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This article is part of the Gong Labs series, where I publish findings from our data research team. We analyze sales conversations and deals using AI, then share the results to help you close more revenue. Subscribe here and follow me to read upcoming research. Mention ‘the holiday season,’ and people picture turkey legs, decorative lights, and New Year’s […]
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So you want to learn what skills the best-of-the-best sales pros use to close more deals, crush their goals, and make boatloads of cash? Of course, you do. You are reading this blog post! To emulate what the top sales professionals do, you can: Shadow them for a few weeks (months?) and hope “sales skills […]
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“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything …” Those were the now-iconic words spoken by then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his 2007 MacWorld keynote. This talk — well worth the 80-minute watch — was Jobs’ introduction (cough cough SALES PITCH) for the OG iPhone (aka, iPhone … aka iPhone […]
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Let’s take a page from the book of sales operations (sales ops) and give you an answer as efficiently as possible. Here’s the answer to “What is sales ops,” in a nutshell: You have a sales strategy and you have people on the ground to execute it. Sales operations make that plan a reality in […]
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When people want to learn a new topic, internet research alone is not enough. In Gong’s early days, one of our biggest hurdles was learning about speech-to-text technology. We knew we needed it to analyze phone and video conversations, but we had no idea where to start. Had we just typed “speech-to-text” into Google, we […]
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COLD EMAIL. an unsolicited e-mail that is sent to a receiver without prior contact; the email equivalent of cold calling Wikipedia nails it; however, the Urban Dictionary definition is (unfortunately) sometimes more accurate. But just blasting out cold email after cold email without a plan, without direction, without heeding our advice (based on data), would […]
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Have mercy, it’s your everything. For a long time, sales leaders thought that the way to give sales teams a leg up was to help them target the right buyers in the right ways. Tons of software came along to do that quite effectively in recent years. And yes, it’s been helpful. But if you […]
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“Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” That famous quote is (maybe incorrectly?) attributed to Vince Lombardi. No matter who said it, it’s spot on, especially for those of us in the sales world. Winning in sales is kinda sorta VERY important. If you are not winning (closing deals, for example) in sales, your sales […]
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I’m a big believer that when you first start a company, you want to hire senior people. The first few people you bring on board are going to massively dictate the culture of your company, the speed at which you are able to move, and how many problems you are going to need to fix […]
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Few things are as comforting as the presence of a dog in the workplace. Dogs greet you at the door, humor you in the conference room, nuzzle you at your desk. They roam the halls like zombies in search of a quick morsel, a friendly glance, a belly rub. Ya, having dogs at work somehow […]
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