LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform with over 810 million members worldwide. As a company focused on connecting professionals, LinkedIn relies heavily on its sales teams to convert free members into paid subscriptions. To optimize its sales processes, LinkedIn has adopted Gong as its conversation intelligence platform. Gong uses AI to analyze sales calls and provide insights to boost team performance.
What is Gong?
Gong is a leading conversation intelligence platform used by over 3,000 companies worldwide. It integrates with phone and video conferencing tools like Zoom to automatically record sales calls. Gong then uses AI and machine learning to analyze these recordings and surface insights to help sales teams close more deals.
Specifically, Gong captures every word of every sales call to provide the following benefits:
- Reveal customer objections, competitive intel, and rep talking points
- Identify team best practices and coaching opportunities
- Track deal progression and risk
- Generate alerts on critical deal moments
Gong synthesizes data from tens of thousands of phone calls to determine which sales behaviors have the biggest impact on deal outcomes. The platform’s Conversation Intelligence metrics make it easy to benchmark individual rep performance against the rest of the team.
Why does LinkedIn use Gong?
With over 15,000 employees globally, LinkedIn has massive sales teams tasked with acquiring new enterprise customers and expanding existing accounts. LinkedIn sells recruitment tools, job ads, Sales Navigator subscriptions, and premium business services.
Across these different products, LinkedIn sales reps engage in countless customer conversations daily. Prior to Gong, these important interactions were not being captured, leaving many opportunities undiscovered.
LinkedIn chose Gong for the following key reasons:
- Unlock coaching opportunities: By analyzing past sales calls, managers can identify each rep’s strengths and development areas.
- Learn from top performers: Gong makes it easy to uncover what behaviors lead top reps to close the most deals.
- Standardize best practices: LinkedIn can codify successful rep behaviors into playbooks and processes.
- Course correct quicker: Insights from Gong enable managers to provide rapid feedback to struggling reps.
- Accelerate onboarding: New hires can rapidly get up to speed by listening to calls from seasoned reps.
In summary, LinkedIn chose Gong so sales leaders would have data-driven guidance for coaching reps, maximizing performance, and improving processes.
How does LinkedIn configure and use Gong?
LinkedIn has customized its Gong deployment to align with its sales structure and processes. Key elements of LinkedIn’s Gong implementation include:
Integrations with core systems
Gong integrates with LinkedIn’s phone system, CRM, video conferencing, and calendar platforms to automatically capture sales interactions. This enables insightful call analysis without disrupting rep workflows.
Custom metrics and insights
LinkedIn has configured Gong Conversation Intelligence metrics to surface sales trends and behaviors most relevant for its reps. Managers also leverage Gong Insights to easily track account progression and risk.
Playbooks
LinkedIn used Gong to develop customized playbooks that codify the optimal steps for reps to navigate sales calls. Reps are automatically notified if they miss key plays during calls.
Coaching programs
Sales leaders use Gong call recordings to provide personalized coaching and feedback for each rep. Gong makes it simple to compare reps and highlight areas needing improvement.
Training content
LinkedIn curates examples of best-practice calls in Gong to accelerate onboarding and development. Reps learn by listening to how top performers handle objections and close lucrative deals.
What results has LinkedIn achieved with Gong?
Since adopting Gong in 2018, LinkedIn has seen tremendous value across its sales organization. Quantifiable benefits include:
- 10% increase in conversion rates
- 15% larger average deal sizes
- 33% faster ramp time for new reps
- 2x more coaching conversations per manager
These gains have compounded to significantly boost LinkedIn’s revenue and productivity. Specific examples of how LinkedIn uses Gong to drive sales success include:
Uncovering competitive insights
By analyzing past calls, LinkedIn gained intel on competitors’ pricing, features, and objectionsHandling. Reps use this to better position LinkedIn’s strengths.
Onboarding new hires
New reps use Gong to listen to calls from experienced teammates. This exposes them to proven messaging and objection handling to get productive faster.
Coaching standout moments
Managers highlight impactful rep behaviors like asking discovery questions, conveying value, and addressing concerns. This reinforces best practices.
Improving discovery skills
LinkedIn used Gong to identify reps who rushed to demos without proper discovery. Coaching helped these reps have more meaningful customer conversations.
Standardizing pitch templates
Analysis uncovered wide variances in how reps positioned solutions. LinkedIn created reusable templates with Gong to align messaging.
In summary, Gong enabled LinkedIn to systematically improve sales performance across its 6,000+ person sales organization.
How should other companies apply LinkedIn’s approach?
Any company looking to boost sales productivity and performance can replicate elements of LinkedIn’s Gong deployment. Here are best practices to consider:
- Integrate Gong deeply into CRM and other systems to capture all sales interactions.
- Analyze current deal progression metrics to set benchmarks for improvement.
- Build custom metrics in Gong that track KPIs important to your sales process.
- Develop playbooks and training content based on lessons learned from call analysis.
- Have sales managers conduct regular rep coaching based on Gong call recordings.
- Compare top performers to identify what behaviors to replicate across the team.
- Continuously monitor Gong insights to refine processes and messaging.
While every company’s sales organization is unique, these best practices represent a solid foundation to maximize Gong’s impact. IT leaders should view this as an iterative process, using insights to continually improve over time.
Conclusion
LinkedIn’s success proves the power of Gong’s conversation intelligence platform. By analyzing sales interactions, LinkedIn uncovers hidden opportunities to boost productivity, increase conversions, and accelerate rep ramp time. The quantifiable improvement across KPIs highlight the value of systematizing sales call analysis.
Other companies can achieve similar results by following LinkedIn’s blueprint. Integrate Gong into existing systems, build custom metrics, create training content, and focus on data-driven coaching. Approach conversation intelligence as an ongoing journey to refine sales processes using behavioral insights.
Gong enables sales leaders to have visibility into the voice of the customer like never before. As LinkedIn demonstrates, this can ultimately drive significant gains for sales performance, employee development, and the bottom line.
