Revenue Intelligence vendor Gong unveiled Gong Engage, its entry into the Sales Engagement space.  SEPs have been adding Conversational Sales tools for several years, so Gong adding SEP functionality should not be surprising.  After all, Gong began as a conversational sales solution before widening its scope to Revenue Intelligence.  Also, one of Gong’s top rivals, Chorus, is owned by ZoomInfo, which has been building ZoomInfo Engage for several years.

“Gong Engage serves as a single solution to streamline sales engagement for revenue teams by delivering AI-based sales guidance from the first touchpoint with a prospect to deal close,” wrote the firm.  “Engage helps teams create and accelerate pipeline by delivering increased productivity with AI-driven automation and guidance, high-quality outreach to engage entire accounts, and a single sales engagement solution to streamline revenue workflows.  Gong’s proprietary AI delivers three times more accuracy than off-the-shelf AI models.”

Engage supports core SEP features, including a web-based dialer, workflows, and email templates.  It also sports generative AI models for deal prioritization and extracting call highlights, action items, and outcomes.  AI features include:

• Call Spotlight, Gong’s generative AI functionality that composes call briefs, account highlights, and action items from sales conversations
• Automated call outcomes and email response classification that automatically categorizes calls and emails and syncs these insights with the CRM
• Assisted writing, which helps reps personalize their outreach based on persona

“Engage’s contextual, account-based approach for prospecting and selling exceeds the limitations of traditional lead-based tools that encourage mass outreach with little targeting.  Instead, it delivers a complete understanding of an account, including all touchpoints, relevant CRM information, and conversational history,” stated Gong.

Gong emphasized that it didn’t jump on the generative AI bandwagon following the breakout success of ChatGPT but has been working to integrate generative tools into its platform for over a year.  Furthermore, its focus on sales-focused NLP offers it a leg up on vendors marketing generic ChatGPT tools or lacking years of AI expertise and product development.

“Gong launched in 2016 to harness the power of AI to rid customer-facing people of their day-to-day drudgery.  We have been working with LLMs for over a year and see it as a major breakthrough.  But highly accurate, domain-specific AI that delivers a deep understanding of what’s going on within a sales organization and the next steps needed to win deals is more elusive,” said Gong CEO Amit Bendov. “AI is the core of Gong’s platform, and our new models exemplify the sales-driven advancements we’re bringing to market to help our customers transform their teams and accelerate revenue growth.”

Along with conversational sales expertise, Gong offers Smart Trackers, a set of AI-based customized signals.  Launched last year, Smart Trackers help revenue teams “identify deal risks and opportunities, understand the effectiveness of strategic initiatives, replicate best practices, and get ahead of emerging market needs.”

Engage’s Recommended Contacts feature analyzes historical deal data to recommend contacts for outreach.  It feeds contact data from LeadIQ, Cognism, and Apollo based on target personas.  Recommended contacts may be added to flows (cadences), or sales reps can reach out via email, phone, or LinkedIn.

Engage also displays buying signals from over 120 Gong Collective integrations “to help teams stay on top of their pipeline, no matter where signals are coming from.”

Along with consolidating conversational sales, sales engagement, and revenue intelligence in a common platform, Engage supports partnerships that include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Chili Piper, and Calendly.

Engage workflow and dashboard features include Pipeline Views for viewing key tasks and insights across open opportunities, an Analytics Dashboard for sales management, and team collaboration tools for sharing and assigning tasks across teams.

“Gong changed how revenue teams build pipeline with our customer-centric AI – now we’re changing how they engage with customers at every stage,” said Bendov. “We have leveraged our market-leading AI technology as the foundation for Gong Engage, which sets the entire revenue team up for success.  Engage is the only solution that harnesses customer interactions at scale to drive high-quality engagement and ultimately, grow revenue.”

Gong Engage will GA this summer.