It's 2023. The "Best Conversational Intelligence Tool" search query and debate are about to go out of fashion soon. The world has changed since 2015, when conversational intelligence was the next best thing since sliced bread. 2015 - also the year Gong and Chorus (acquired by ZoomInfo) were founded. There's a reason Gong no longer calls itself that - it’s been eight years since then. But if you are new to the world of sales call reviews, sales enablement platforms, and conversational intelligence from sales calls, we're here to help. In fact, not just help, we have some bonus tips too, for you to hit the ground running in a world that has moved past conversational intelligence.
Going back to Gong and the story of it no longer calling itself a conversational intelligence tool. In 2019, around the time when nearly everyone was building conversational intelligence platforms, Gong repositioned itself as a Revenue Intelligence tool. Here's the big question - what's the difference, really?
Conversational Intelligence Vs Revenue Intelligence (or Gong Vs Chorus): What’s the Difference?
Conversational Intelligence refers to the technology that enables organizations to analyze, understand, and improve communication between their teams and customers. CI tools leverage AI and machine learning to transcribe, analyze, and provide insights from sales calls, meetings, and other interactions. They allow sales teams to identify patterns and trends in communication, making it easier to refine their approach and increase the likelihood of successful outcomes.
Revenue Intelligence (RI), on the other hand, focuses on delivering actionable insights that help organizations optimize their revenue-generating activities. RI platforms collect and analyze data from various sources, including CRM, email, calendar, marketing touchpoints and call recordings, to provide a comprehensive view of the entire sales process. This allows sales teams to identify bottlenecks, streamline workflows, and make data-driven decisions to enhance overall revenue generation.
Key Differences Between Conversational Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence:
- Scope: While both conversational intelligence and revenue intelligence platforms analyze sales interactions, conversational intelligence primarily focuses on communication patterns and techniques. Revenue intelligence encompasses a broader range of data sources to provide a more comprehensive view of the entire sales process.
- Application: Conversational intelligence platforms excel in helping sales teams refine their communication skills and approach. Revenue intelligence platforms are more geared towards optimizing sales processes, improving cross-functional collaboration, and enabling data-driven decision-making.
- Target Audience: Conversational intelligence is primarily aimed at sales representatives and managers who want to improve their communication skills and customer relationships. Conversely, revenue intelligence caters to a broader audience, including sales leaders, marketing, and customer success teams, all working together to drive revenue growth.
So, is Gong Really a “Revenue Intelligence” Software?
Debatable. Despite calling itself revenue intelligence software, Gong continues to focus on analyzing sales interactions, offering insights into communication patterns, deal progress, and risks. So while it does go beyond traditional conversational intelligence software, it does not fully meet the criteria for revenue intelligence, which typically requires a much larger data source, including tracking activities across various marketing touchpoints.
The critical thing to remember here is that Chorus says on its website that it "Captures and analyzes customer calls, meetings, and emails" - which is practically everything that Gong did too, until 2022.
The good news for Gong? It stands out with that promise of revenue intelligence, making it sound more appealing to sales leaders.
Intelligent move. But that’s where it ends.
Gong Vs Chorus: What are the Differences in 2023?
As of 2023, Gong and Chorus have both evolved, offering unique features and capabilities to cater to different organizational needs. Here are five key differences between the two platforms.
Feature Focus - Gong Vs Chorus
While both Gong and Chorus analyze sales interactions, Gong primarily focused on providing insights into communication patterns, deal progression, and deal risks. On the other hand, Chorus emphasized data-driven decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, and a more comprehensive view of the sales process.
Why are we saying all of this in the past tense? Because Gong's had several tricks up its sleeve this past year, bringing AI sales enablement and AI sales assistance as its differentiating features.
Gong Vs Chorus: Who stands where in the AI sales assistance race?
Recently, Gong launched Gong Assist. It automates mundane tasks like updating CRM and drafting customer emails. All from a single tool.
Gong Forecast, too, creates roll-ups and revenue insights and highlights risks. In addition, Gong claims that it gives teams total visibility into pipelines from front to bottom line, ensuring reliable revenue predictability.
Chorus is yet to offer any of this, keeping itself restricted to the world of conversational intelligence.
What’s missing in Gong’s AI-based sales assistance?
Chorus may be missing the AI bus for now, but Gong’s missing something too. And that’s emotional intelligence.
You can have all of the insights from all calls and emails. But without evaluating your prospects on the non-verbal cues they leave behind in these interactions, you’re missing significant insights across nearly every sales workstream. From next steps and meeting summaries to deal and revenue intelligence, every sales person and leader needs to have a finger on the pulse of the prospect’s real objections, needs, concerns.
And that's precisely what we have built with Sybill. The only sales intelligence tool out there that considers non-verbal cues and behavior intelligence to provide a more holistic view of every deal. More importantly, it pushes these insights into the manager, leader and reps' email and Slack, so everyone is constantly on the same page on what's really going on with every deal.
Check out Magic Summary if we’ve piqued your interest.
And if that wasn’t enough, we bring automatic call summaries to Gong and Chorus too. Check out how.
Market Intelligence - Gong Vs Chorus
Gong offers unique content called "Gong Labs," which provides data-driven insights and best practices from analyzing millions of sales calls. These insights help sales teams understand industry trends and improve their sales techniques.
Chorus does not currently offer an equivalent feature.
Integration with Marketing - Gong Vs Chorus
Gong does not yet track activities across various marketing functions, which limits its scope as a Revenue Intelligence platform.
Neither does Chorus, but with its integration with Zoominfo, Chorus can now integrate contact and company intelligence for GTM teams. That means the entire relationship history for each prospect and insights into past interactions. How much does this help GTM teams? That's worth asking.
Sales and Marketing Alignment: The Sybill way
Last year, we built Sybill's Marketing Partner. This AI solution ingests calls (including those on Gong) to provide specific insights on how each slide in your deck or each message in your talk track resonates with individual buyer personas. Of course, we brought body language and emotional intelligence into the equation, ensuring that sales and marketing teams were aligned not only on prospects' verbal responses but also on non-verbal cues.
So if your messaging gets specific buyer personas to want to check their emails instead of listening to your sales rep, sure as hell you’ll know about it. And that’s an opportunity for sales and marketing teams to act.
Check out how you can use your sales calls to align with marketing on messaging that means business.
And hear what Sybill users have to say about Sybill Marketing Partner.
Coaching and Training
Gong's platform includes a robust coaching and training component, providing sales managers with tools to create personalized coaching plans, review sales calls, and share best practices.
While Chorus also offers coaching capabilities, Gong's tools are generally considered more extensive and refined.
But What’s Coaching Without Emotional Intelligence?
Not much, if you ask us. That's precisely why Sybill goes beyond conversational intelligence to analyze verbal and non-verbal cues, as well as winning behaviors of sales reps, providing sales managers and leaders with precise coaching guidelines.
By eliminating guesswork, sales leaders can coach their teams more effectively and efficiently, based on individual strengths and areas for improvement, ensuring that each sales professional receives personalized guidance tailored to their specific needs.
And because call insights are automated and land directly in the manager and reps' Slack and email, Sybill users foster a culture of continuous learning. But more importantly, effective learning that saves deals before they go south.
User Interface and Experience
The user interfaces and experiences of Gong and Chorus differ, with each platform offering its own unique design and layout.
Users may find one platform more intuitive and user-friendly than the other, depending on personal preferences and familiarity with the respective interfaces.
Time to Look Beyond?
We have. Because in 2023, AI sales assistance and enablement are changing at breakneck speed.
Even as Gong Vs Chorus debates continue on search engines, if not elsewhere, sales reps have already achieved left and right brain superpowers that make them smarter, more effective, more efficient and more empathetic.
It's time to dig deeper than good old (2015, remember?) conversational intelligence.
