When I joined Amplitude, I started using a cool new sales product called Gong. For those who haven't used it, Gong is a product that records online meetings (e.g. Zoom meetings) and does the following:
Splits out all participants and allows you to see talk time by participant (including % of talking time per person)
Transcribes the call so you can search through the text of the call
Highlights keywords used in the call
Allows you to share portions of the call with others
Allows you to annotate calls and leave comments for co-workers on calls (with notifications)
Setup alerts to be notified when calls mention certain people or phrases
Gong can be set up to automatically record all calls that take place when someone outside of your organization is on a call, though you can manually prevent it from recording if needed. While there is definitely a bit of a "they are spying on me" aspect to the fact that all external calls are recorded, it is very handy since it is difficult to be part of all of the customer/prospect calls that you'd want to be on due to time zone and scheduling conflicts. It is also great to be able to speed through calls after the fact at 2x speed and to just listen to the parts of the calls that are relevant to you instead of listening to every minute of every call.
Here is what it looks like to see a recorded call...(video portion of call excluded)
Below is my list of features that I would like to see added to the Gong product.
Auto-compile Relevant Call Snippets Based Upon Search One of the coolest features of Gong is the ability to set search alerts. This feature allows you to set up public or private alerts that will email you if a search phrase is found within a call. You can specify if the phrase was spoken by your co-worker or a person outside your organization. Below you can see a sample alert for the phrase "Gong" spoken by someone outside of the organization.
Setting this alert will send a daily email that has snippets of all of the calls matching the alert criteria and allow you to quickly jump directly to the portions of the call that matched the alert criteria. Below is an example of what you see when you click on a link in a Gong email alert. The Gong timeline shows a pin for each mention of the alert keyword phrase:
What I would like to see added to the product is a way to view one long timeline that has all of the snippets that matched the keyword phrase (in the past day). Currently, you have to open multiple call recording timelines and click to see the sections that mention the phrase. This can be very time-consuming if you have 10 or more alert matches. I think it would be helpful to have one consolidated view that auto-compiles the matching snippets so you can power through all of the key moments. Then you can choose if you want to go back and watch the entire call.
Snippet Compilations (Movies) Another cool feature of Gong is that you can share specific snippets of calls with co-workers or add them to a library. A call snippet is a portion of the call and can be a few seconds or any other length. The library feature allows you to aggregate a bunch of related snippets and then you can share the library folder with your colleagues. One example use case might be having a folder for each competitor and storing interesting snippets from calls that mention the competitor.
However, asking colleagues to browse a bunch of random snippets in a library folder is not ideal. Watching call snippets without context can be confusing and ineffective. I have a background in data storytelling and know the importance of telling a compelling story to educate users.
Therefore, what I would like to see added to Gong is a way for users to create a "movie" of snippets that have been added to the library. Currently, I am hacking this together by using Apple iMovie, but it would be great if any user could add snippets to a canvas, put them in a logical order, add some context to the clips, and then share it. This would allow Gong customers to tell a more cohesive story around the call snippets and would increase adoption and learning. Connect to LinkedIn
The next feature request I have is for LinkedIn integration. When I watch Gong calls, I see the names of people who are on the call and in many cases, I would like to connect to them on LinkedIn. In some cases, I am already connected to them but forgot that I was. It would be great if I could connect Gong to my LinkedIn account and then have Gong look at the names and company of people on calls and let me know if I am connected to them or not. If I am, I may be able to help sales with the deal. If I am not, it would be great if I could simply click a button to initiate a LinkedIn connection request. That would beat having to manually copy the names individually, going to LinkedIn, pasting them, and then connecting. This feature could also help sales teams easily see who at their company is connected to each person on the call, so they can leverage their co-workers network to win deals...
Keyword Trends
Another cool feature of Gong is that when you search for a phrase, you can see the trend of how often it was said over time and what percent of all calls use that phrase. The trend looks like this:
However, I would like to see a few additions made to this functionality. First, I would like to be able to add this trend to a dashboard with trends of other phrases so I can easily scan and see how different terms are trending. This could be useful for monitoring competitors or other keywords. Second, I would like to have a way to be alerted if there is a spike in the trend of phrases. For example, it would be interesting to know if month over month, the phrase increased or decreased by more than 10 percent. This could be an early warning sign of something that needs to be addressed.
So those are a few of my Gong feature requests. If you are in B2B and deal with sales in any way, I suggest you check out the Gong product...
