Whether you’re running a business or a professional trying to make your mark in your industry, you understand the importance of communication. Effectively sharing information with clients, customers, and team members is critical for business and career success.
And this is no secret, which is why tech companies are going to great lengths to develop tools for helping companies and professionals communicate with more impact. These days, you can use AI-powered software to make each word count in your customer interactions and team meetings.
Gong and Poised are popular communication tools on the market, and while they share some similarities, each has distinct features and characteristics. Is one better than the other?
Keep reading to find out more.
What Is Gong?
Gong was founded in 2015 in the San Francisco Bay Area with the hopes of using artificial intelligence (AI) to help companies improve sales through "conversation intelligence." In 2019, the company rebranded its software as a "revenue intelligence" solution.
Conversation intelligence and revenue intelligence share many similarities, but they are distinct concepts. Most conversation intelligence software records, transcriptions, and analyzes conversations between a business and current or prospective customers.
It provides deeper visibility into such interactions so that sales reps, customer relations managers, and other leaders can improve their communication and, ultimately, get more sales.
Conversation intelligence solutions use AI to record calls and meetings, transcribe speech into text, and provide advanced analysis. These tools will also evaluate email content. And they use natural language processing (NLP) to identify speech patterns, questions asked, topics of discussion, sentiment, customer issues, and other aspects of conversations.
Revenue intelligence evolved from conversation intelligence. The primary difference is that the former goes beyond analyzing sales and customer interactions by evaluating marketing activities as well.
Often, startups and businesses struggle to maintain alignment between their sales, marketing, and success departments. And since the misalignment usually means that the tools used for these areas are not integrated, it can significantly hinder end-to-end visibility.
The Gong Revenue Intelligence Platform automatically gathers and analyzes data across your teams and provides actionable insights to keep team members working cohesively and optimizing their tools. As such, revenue teams can collaborate and develop strategies more quickly for growing revenue (partly thanks to minimized onboarding time).
Who Might Benefit From Using Gong?
People working on marketing, sales, or success teams can benefit the most from using revenue intelligence software like Gong. With your permission, it essentially tracks activities and collects insights to help teams strategize and close more deals.
Gong tracks things like content downloads, website visits, site interactions, site chats, and other site-specific behaviors. It also monitors when an individual opens a marketing email, as well as when someone clicks an offer in the email.
When using Gong, a sales rep or manager can keep up with prospect meetings, outbound and inbound calls, and cold emails and responses. It will also track contact engagement and deal activity.
When it comes to customer success/relations, revenue intelligence software will track all customer calls, meetings, and emails. It will also keep tabs on NPS survey reviews and support tickets.
Sales Coaching
So, how does all this information benefit marketing, sales, and success teams?
First, organizations are able to identify common objections of potential customers and significant gaps in the buyer’s journey. This enables teams to close the gap and minimize issues related to the objections.
A revenue intelligence solution like Gong can also show you which marketing messages and channels are resonating the most with target customers. It can even provide competitive intelligence and demonstrate which products and features are in the highest demand.
As Gong tracks your calls and meetings, it will give you insight into topics, speech patterns, and steps you can take to improve customer interactions. It can also help you determine how to create more interest in your marketing emails and provide you with sales-specific coaching to help you lead more customers through the buyer’s journey. This type of tool can help you create accurate financial projections when used correctly.
Furthermore, Gong can coach you to better customer relationships. And it can help you strategize for more upsell opportunities and alert you to potential customer churn.
What Features Are Unique to Gong?
Gong is a highly-specific software with only a few direct competitors. Chorus is probably one of its primary rivals, but you could also say that Salesforce, Salesloft, and MeetRecord are competitors. With that said, Gong is geared towards sales teams looking to boost customer interactions more than those who want to improve internal communication.
The software analyzes customer interactions and notifies users of business-wide risks and opportunities. It does this by capturing communication (e.g., phone calls, emails, website activity, etc.), evaluating the data, and delivering insights to managers and employees.
The tool integrates the most popular business apps (like Slack) to help salespeople make forecasts, attract new customers, and execute deals.
The Drawbacks of Using Gong
Business leaders everywhere are drawn to Gong for sales purposes. But the "revenue intelligence" concept the company itself created is still relatively unexplored. And the jury is still out as to how effective Gong’s marketing features will prove for the average team.
If you are looking for software to help you become a more effective communicator during video meetings and presentations, there are better options. It's essential to remember that Gong is sales-centric, meaning it's not ideal for general communication coaching.
Poised vs. Gong: What Sets Poised Apart
Poised focuses more on speech during online meetings and presentations. The software analyzes various facets of a communicator's performance and identifies areas of strength, weakness, and everything between. It also provides real-time corrections and advice for how users can present themselves more clearly, confidently, and competently.
Being able to impact and engage your team members and your audience will benefit all aspects of your career. If you are a salesperson, it will naturally help you guide prospects further along the buyer's journey and close more deals. In that respect, Poised has more to offer overall than Gong and similar software.
What Is Poised?
Poised is a free online speaking assistant created in San Francisco in 2020. The digital communications platform helps individuals improve their public speaking skills during virtual meetings and presentations.
It uses AI technology to recognize areas of improvement in real-time and provide practical tips for sounding more competent, confident, and even more empathetic in the moment.
Poised also provides long-term analyses of a user's performance along critical dimensions, helping the user to become a more impactful communicator over time. The software integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and several other video conferencing platforms.
Why Online Communication Training Matters
Online communication comes with countless benefits for businesses. It allows teams to communicate outside of traditional office hours (if that's something the team wants). It allows workers to stay in touch from any device, meaning most knowledge-based jobs can be performed remotely or at least in a hybrid model. And online communication can save companies lots of time and money.
All this assumes that an organization's team members can communicate effectively online. If you or your coworkers are noticeably anxious or have trouble delivering and receiving messages in virtual meetings, you will not reap all the benefits of online communication. Poor communication hinders organizational success and worker retention.
That's why it's vital to train and become the most impactful online communicator possible. Not only will it help you in your current job and help your organization reach its goals, but it will also boost your career prospects and help you become a professional to be reckoned with.
What Features Are Unique to Poised?
The communication capabilities of Gong and similar software are quite limited compared to those of Poised. Because it is communication-centric, Poised offers unique features to help you improve at public speaking and connect on a deeper level with your audience and team members.
The software will alert you when you’re rambling, speaking too quickly, or using a poor camera angle during meetings. It will show you the number of hedging words and filler words you have spoken and monitor your speaking pace while providing real-time insight into how you can course-correct the ship.
What Organizations Have Used Poised?
Though we are a new company, many organizations and professionals are hooked on Poised! Some of the heavy hitters you might recognize are Disney, Forbes, Shopify, Salesforce, and GitLab. That’s just the beginning — keep on the lookout for more testimonials from companies across many different industries!
Boost Your Team’s Communication Skills
Now is the time to get your team the tools they need to communicate more effectively with one another, clients, and customers! Poised is a first-of-its-kind solution for helping people improve their public speaking skills in virtual meetings, and your staff can start using it for free today.
Sources:
What Is Natural Language Processing? An Introduction to NLP | TechTarget
Natural Language Processing | Deepgram
Why Email Marketing Is Crucial For Businesses | Forbes
Verbal communication skills for selling | Business Queensland
