Conversational intelligence became hot a couple of years ago, and remains a much debated category even today. A single tool that can record, transcribe, and derive insights from your sales conversations is no easy feat. With the advent of advanced foundational AI models, this category has gotten even more competitive, as the AI moat of a lot of the older players faces serious new questions.
At the end of the day, the product that solves the end users’ problems most comprehensively, and right where they reside and do their work will win the day. In this blog post, we compare Gong - the age old conversation intelligence behemoth, and Avoma - the relatively recent entrant that’s moving fast to capture market share.
If you are a sales leader, enablement or operations leader, or an individual seller who is looking to buy a new conversational intelligence (CI) solution, this post should help you figure out the pros and cons of both these products. It would also help you figure out the key capabilities that outline a powerful CI solution, so that you know what to look for when you go shopping even for other tools in the market.
Conversational Intelligence: A Quick 101
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's refresh our memories on what conversational intelligence is all about. Conversational intelligence tools use AI and machine learning to transcribe, analyze, and provide insights from sales calls, meetings, and other interactions. These platforms help sales teams identify patterns and trends in communication, refine their techniques, and increase the likelihood of deal closures.
While a sales rep typically uses CI tools to review calls, follow-up, and keep a record of conversations to derive insights from, a sales leader would typically use it to get visibility over deals, rep performance, and get pointers for rep coaching. Other functions might benefit from improved CRM hygiene, availability of the voice of the customer, and knowledge about market trends.
Now, let’s dive into the comparison.
Gong Vs Avoma: Let’s Dive Right Into It
Gong Vs Avoma Round 1: Feature Focus
Gong is known for its deep dive into communication patterns, deal progression, and deal risks. With its robust AI, Gong can analyze sales interactions and provide actionable insights to refine your sales approach. It utilizes the insights from calls like number of participants, topics covered, etc. to flag deal risks and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each rep.
Avoma, on the other hand, prides on being a meeting management tool. It's an end-to-end meeting assistant that records, transcribes, summarizes, and allows you to share your meetings, and goes into pre-call prep as well. Avoma focuses on helping you save time, improve collaboration, and drive better decisions across your organization.
While Gong’s focus is on helping boost sales management’s visibility into rep performance, helping them coach sales teams better, Avoma is focused far more on making sales meetings efficient, by solving problems in conducting and analyzing individual meetings. Thus, even though Avoma has feature sets around deal intelligence and rep coaching, they are not as deeply developed as Gong’s.
Gong has a clear advantage in revenue intelligence with its pipeline management and forecast intelligence. Avoma, in contrast, is limited to deal intelligence and pipeline visibility but lacks the capability to notify or forecast potential risks.
Gong offers both email engagement and insights, while Avoma only offers email engagement tracking without insight analysis.
Verdict: Gong has a fuller feature set for an advanced sales team, as long as you have the time and patience to learn how to use it to its full potential. Avoma is a nifty tool to boost team productivity and keep a record of conversations.
Gong Vs Avoma Round 2: AI Capabilities
Gong's AI is pretty snazzy, offering features like automatic call transcription, keyword tracking, and smart suggestions. Gong’s smart trackers allow sales leaders and admins to customize the topics and insights that Gong uncovers from their team’s calls. Gong Assist allows crafting follow-up emails using AI within the constraints of pre-made templates.
Avoma's AI focuses on transcribing meetings, automatically identifying action items, and generating post-meeting summaries. In addition, Avoma integrates with popular calendar and video conferencing tools, ensuring smooth workflows. A lack of a strong email and Slack integration does limit Avoma’s capabilities to take data from these sources in a meaningful way and apply AI for actionable insights like they do with calls. Avoma also offers collaborative note-taking feature, which allows multiple users to edit or make notes on a call via its inbuilt editor.
To reduce repetitive tasks, both Gong and Avoma offer automated CRM entry. However, Avoma has a clearer focus on meeting assistance and the entire meeting lifecycle workflow, making it more useful for sales reps, not just sales leaders who are Gong’s primary target.
Verdict: Essentially, Gong has a stronger focus on using AI to uncover insights from calls and deals for future action, while Avoma is good at leveraging AI to capture automatic call notes. Both have pros and cons with respect to the workflows that they enable, but Gong has a stronger play with the Gong Collective, making it a slight winner on not just using AI to surface insights, but also deploying them into other products that sales leaders live off of.
Gong Vs Avoma Round 3: Coaching & Training
Gong has built an impressive coaching and training component within its platform. Sales managers can create personalized coaching plans, review sales calls, and share best practices with their team.
Avoma, although not as extensive in the coaching department, does offer features to help users learn from their meetings. You can quickly review meeting summaries, identify trends in communication, and make improvements to drive better results.
Verdict: While it’s easy to say that Gong is the winner in this category, it should be noted that most teams would do just fine with Avoma’s coaching capabilities as well, unless you really plan to dive deep into and make the most use of those provided by Gong.
Gong Vs Avoma Round 4: Collaboration & Workflow
Gong is primarily geared towards sales teams, focusing on improving communication skills and driving successful sales outcomes. While it does offer some collaboration features, its primary goal is to strengthen the sales team's performance.
Avoma levels up team work and cross-functional collaboration. By automatically summarizing and sharing meeting notes with your team, it ensures everyone stays in the loop, even if they couldn't attend the meeting. Avoma's focus on improving collaboration extends beyond the sales team to other departments within your organization, which reflects in their feature focus as well.
Verdict: Since Avoma is not just strong at meeting insights but also in meeting notes and sharing, it edges out Gong in this category.
Gong Vs Avoma Round 5: Pricing & Plans
Gong’s pricing is available on request, with minimal clarity on its website on the various tiers or plans. It’s quite expensive by most standards, and the forecasting capabilities are a chargable add-on.
Avoma provides four pricing plans: Basic, Starter, Plus, and Business, and offers a 14-day free trial. Its pricing is visible on its website, and one can choose the plan that they like and subscribe right away.
Verdict: Gong's pricing is not transparent and requires a sales call to uncover. On the other hand, Avoma offers transparent pricing and flexible licensing options. Gong also comes with a platform fee according to most accounts, whereas Avoma does not have a minimum platform fee or base price. Avoma clearly wins this one for a modern customer of CI tools.
Gong Vs Avoma: And the Winner Is…
The winner of this contest would depend upon what you're looking for in a conversational intelligence platform!
If you're all about sales enablement, coaching, and refining your team's communication skills, Gong might be your go-to choice. Its powerful AI and sales-centric features make it an attractive option for sales teams looking to optimize their performance and close deals more effectively. With a strong focus on revenue intelligence, deal intelligence, and people intelligence, Gong is particularly well-suited for larger enterprises and sales leaders who need comprehensive insights into their sales processes.
While Gong has laid the foundation for a comprehensive sales coaching tool, it’s still on the analytics layer. It hasn’t yet transcended into true intelligence, where it can provide suggested next steps based on deal context, or help reps and sales leaders with deal strategy or automated coaching.
We’re getting there with Sybill - check us out if the above sounds interesting.
On the other hand, if you're searching for a more versatile platform that can cater to the needs of various departments within your organization, Avoma could be a better fit. Its emphasis on meeting assistance, management, and collaboration makes it an excellent option for SMBs and mid-market organizations. Avoma is a reasonable tool to streamline workflows and improve collaboration.
However, while Avoma claims to meet your needs with rep efficiency, it actually falls quite short of what that entails. A true meeting assistant with rep efficiency as a core focus should have:
- Automatic meeting summarization and notes.
- Automatic follow-up email generation based on the conversation context that the rep can send right away (or after a bit of tweaking).
- Automatically filling up CRM fields based on what was discussed on calls/emails/other sources.
- Ability to consume information and take action from Slack, email or CRM systems - where reps spend all of their time.
Of these elements, Avoma only does the first. It still has a long way to go to be a true sales rep productivity and automation tool, to truly help reps save time and close more deals. If you’re looking for a tool that actually helps sales reps save 45-60 mins every day by doing all the above pieces, check out Sybill.
The Missing Piece: Behavior Intelligence - Gong Vs Avoma
As fantastic as Gong and Avoma are, there's one crucial aspect they don't quite cover: behavior intelligence. Sure, their AI can analyze conversations and provide insights, but without behavior intelligence, the call summaries, follow-up emails, next steps, and identification of champions and detractors remain incomplete.
Staying restricted to conversational intelligence in a workstream like sales, which historically operates on human relationships, leaves a pretty significant gap.
Enter Sybill: The Fusion of AI Efficiency and Human Empathy
The Sybill stable shakes things up in the world of conversational intelligence by adding the human touch your prospects crave. How does it do that? By combining AI efficiency with behavior intelligence-based nuance and empathy, Sybill empowers sales professionals to truly understand their prospects and customers. And take actions that truly resonate with them.
Sybill analyzes verbal and non-verbal cues during sales interactions, enabling sales reps to better understand their prospects' emotions, motivations, and concerns. This level of insight empowers sales teams to tailor their approach and communication style, resulting in more meaningful connections and successful outcomes.
By providing behavior intelligence across all sales touchpoints, Sybill helps sales professionals strike the perfect balance between AI-driven efficiency and human empathy. In a world where AI plays an increasingly significant role in sales, Sybill ensures that the human element remains at the heart of every interaction.
In conclusion, while Gong and Avoma offer powerful conversational intelligence features, they lack the behavior intelligence component that Sybill brings to the table. By embracing Sybill's unique fusion of AI efficiency and human empathy, sales professionals can elevate their game and forge deeper, more meaningful connections with their prospects and customers.
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