63: Chris Orlob from Gong.io

Boston! I'll be here in my hometown August 8th for the Flip My Funnel Conference. Come join me. Good afternoon or morning everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Monday. Hopefully you all had a fantastic weekend. I did myself. Spent some time with the family and I'm excited to bring back, I think, my first second time guest, Chris Orlow from Gong. Welcome aboard again. How's it going, brother? Let's do it. Round number two. Doing fantastic. Excited about it. Awesome, man. Well, the first one did so well and everybody was such a big fan that we had to come back on and start talking about some of these tips. Because you guys kind of fill a gap that I'm not great at, which is data, okay?

I mean, a lot of my gut and a lot of my experience tells me certain techniques and tactics work, right? But the thing I love about you guys is it's data-driven. So one of the things that we're going to dive into today is you guys did a post about two weeks ago, I think it was, or two or three weeks ago, of the 21 best sales tips that you've come across through all your research on the internet, plus all the different data points that you have internally. And it was funny how, in reading the post originally, it's like, look, here's our 21 favorite. But the way that we came up with those 21 is based on data, which I'm like, all right, cool. Because there's a bunch of idiots out there like me spewing shit about, yeah, this works and try that.

But they're really not backing it up with too much data. So that's what I'm loving to dig in with you guys today. So for those of you who don't know about Gong or kind of your approach to things, you want to kind of dovetail into that about what you guys are looking at these days and what Gong is all about? Yeah. So the way I like to think of Gong is if you wanted to simplify the job of generating more revenue, it can be deconstructed into two levers. You can get more sales conversations into your funnel, or you can have better sales conversations. You can increase your close rates, make them more effective. And if you look at just about all of the sales technology tools out there, they address problem number one.

They help you get more conversations. And that's very important. Don't get me wrong. I'm not like underplaying that. But again, you take a look at this giant heap of sales technology tools, you notice there's a glaring void when it comes to lever number two, which is how to have better sales conversations. There's a lot of services that help you have better conversations, like sales trainers. And that's all great, but there has not been like technology that helps you have these better conversations. So the quick elevator pitch of Gong is we help sales teams generate more revenue by having better conversations. And the way it works is it automatically records, it transcribes, and it analyzes your sales calls and sales meetings.

So you can identify what works and what does not work based on data. Kind of close that gap between your super performers, people smashing quotas, and your high potential but struggling B players who make up the majority of your sales team. Yeah. I think that's the key, right? I mean, everybody, you know, we talk about management coaching, and it's, you know, it's almost like, look, your A's are your A's for a reason. You want to try to replicate as much of that as you can to coach your B's. Because as a manager, my philosophy on A's is you've got to over-communicate with them, but you've got to treat them as rented space. Because ultimately, they're going to either get promoted because they're that good, or they're going to go find another job making more money someplace else.

So your number one job as a manager is to coach your B's into A's, and then you kind of, your C's, unfortunately, too many managers focus too much time on those. You kind of got to let them know, hey, you're a C, and here's what you've got to do to get off the island. Figure it out. Good luck. But all your energy should be focused on B's. But you can't coach your B's to be A's unless you know what an A looks like, right? Yeah, exactly. Or where your B's are struggling. There's kind of two parts to that puzzle. You've got to know what A looks like, and you've got to know what's holding back the B. Love it. Cool, man. So, yeah, and for those of you out there listening right now, people ask me all the time, John, what podcasts, what blogs do I follow, all that stuff.

My number one recommendation outside of mine, obviously, is the Gong. So go to gong.io. For those of you listening on the podcast right now. Oh, by the way, we got approved to be on Spotify. So now that Jay Barrow's podcast is on Spotify, which I'm fired up about. So that should increase our downloads here, especially for this one, too. But yeah, go to gong.io and check out their blog, and we're going to be ripping through that right now. So let's talk about some of these tips. There's 21 of them. We're not going to go through all of them. We don't have that kind of time. But some of the ones that really stuck out for me are the ones that are more counterintuitive, where there's kind of this perception that this is the right way to do it.

But then the data shows this, which is awesome, because those of us paying attention to the data can gain that competitive edge, in my opinion, which is why I wanted to carve up some of these, if it's cool with you. And the first one actually struck me, again, color me stupid here, based on my perception. But the schedule of your sales calls for the right time. And it talks about how morning versus afternoon. And the perception is out there, at least in the general masses, is call in the morning. That's when people are kind of more energy and all that other stuff. You as a sales rep, you have more energy. The prospect's more open to picking up and having a conversation with you. But data says different.

So talk to us about when you're making – and this is for cold calls, right? Or no, this is for calls showing up. Yeah, this is scheduled meetings. So what we found is there are two data points, and it's really weird, that the best time to schedule a sales meeting, based on the likelihood of them actually showing up to that meeting and having a qualified meeting, is in the afternoon. It's like 3, 4, 5 p.m., which is a little bit counterintuitive because, like you said, we tend to try to schedule toward the morning. And it's not just we think we try to schedule toward the morning. We actually have data that shows salespeople are misdirecting their efforts by scheduling most of their meetings in the morning, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock.

And we found that if you schedule your sales meetings in the morning, you have the highest likelihood of that person no-showing your meeting. So on the one hand, we've got best time to do it's in the afternoon. On the other hand, we've got the masses of salespeople trying to schedule for the morning. Why this is happening, I don't really know. I can explain it from my perspective. I hate taking meetings in the morning, especially on, like, Mondays, like days like today, because I like to feel like I'm getting a jump start on the day, right? And if I take a meeting with a vendor, I almost feel like it's putting me back a little bit. Like, I'm delaying my productive activities for later in the day instead of, like, getting that jump start on the day.

It's probably different for everybody else, but that's what the data tells us. And it's funny because, thankfully, I'm right on this one as far as, you know, my actions. Not necessarily my perception, but my actions. But I think it was almost because I sell so much to the West Coast. So, here in Boston, you know, I'd say 75% of my customers are on the West Coast. So, what I've done is I use time trade, you know, calendar sharing, whatever. And I make it so that people can really mostly book meetings with me in the afternoon. And in the mornings, that's when I get my, you know, my emails done, my research done, my projects, if you will. So, to your point, I can kind of feel accomplished and productive early.

And then I leave all my stuff in the afternoon, but it's almost out of circumstance because of West Coast. But that's how I did it with Morgan as well. What I realized with Morgan and this simple thing, and you can ask him, it really made a difference. When I looked at his calendar when he was first working, right, and for those of you who don't know who are listening, Morgan Ingram, he's my new hire, SDR, SDR manager. But he's now the director of sales evolution and execution for Jay Barrows. But he was all over the place. He had, you know, a meeting in the morning, and then he was trying to do a call blitz, and then another meeting, and then research, and, you know, and then a podcast or something like that.

And I had to help him schedule his time a little bit more effectively. And I said, look, do this. Mornings are for email, research, projects, anything like that. Anything that is almost like typing oriented, right? Whereas afternoon is all phone oriented. Have all your meetings there because now you're in that same mindset, right, plus West Coast, whatever. But say you have a meeting at from 1 o'clock to 1.30, well, you're talking. And then if you have a gap there, get on the phone and make cold calls because you're in that zone of making calls. Yeah. And it worked out real well for him to have all those meetings in the afternoon. Yeah, there's this analogy that you can think of, like, from the buyer's perspective, and I didn't invent this analogy, but there's, like, this prioritization slash time management parable where if you've got a tub and then you've got a bunch of rocks, pebbles, and sand, there are two ways you can approach filling that tub.

The first one is you can start off by putting the sand in, which is the smallest thing, then the pebbles, and then the rocks. And usually you're not going to be able to fit everything in if you do it in that order. But if you approach it in the other way where you put the rocks in first, which is the biggest item, then the pebbles, which fall around the rocks, and then the sand, which falls around the pebbles and then falls around the rocks, now you can fit everything into the tub. And if you think about it from your buyer's perspective, they probably see taking a sales meeting like you as a pebble, or in worst-case scenario, they see it as, like, a grain of sand. In the morning, they want to get the rocks done.

They want to get, like, the really important stuff done and let the pebbles and the sand fall kind of, you know, not by the wayside, but fall, mold themselves around the rock. And if you schedule for the afternoon, you're aligning with how they want to approach their workday. I love that, man. That also aligns to goal setting and everything else. I mean, I think that analogy was funny. I saw it in a little bit of a – it was a – I forget what the – it was a classroom where the professor had a bunch of big, heavy rocks in this bowl, and he said, is the bowl full? And everybody was like, well, yeah. And then he put the pebbles in. He's like, well, no, it wasn't full. Is it full now? And everybody was like, yeah.

And then he put the sand in. He said, okay, now it's full, right? So it's all perception, right? You think it's full, but there's always gaps. And I think that comes to goal setting. Like I have a whiteboard in front of my office, like right here, and every day I wake up and I put those big rocks, right? Like what are my three goals for the day of what I have to get accomplished today? And then what – then everything else kind of falls by the wayside. But if I tackle those things early, I already feel accomplished. So then no matter how the rest of my day goes, I can look at the end of the day and say, you know, I got my shit done here, and I feel good about how my day went as opposed to if I just started making cold calls, for instance, immediately and had limited success.

I might go home at the end of the day being like, holy shit, I didn't get anything accomplished today, and I feel bad about how my day went, right? Yeah. I – funny side story. I recently stopped drinking, not like forever, but just like for a period of time because I couldn't get myself to like wake up on time. And for me on time is 5.30 a.m. I kept sleeping until like 6.30 and 7 because I would have like one or two classes of wine the night before. Yep. And what that ended up doing is going back to like this rock analogy is reading for 60 minutes, like reading a book for 60 minutes is like the most important thing that I can do every day from my perspective. Like it's really important. If I don't read for a day, I like can't pay attention for the rest of the day because I feel like I didn't like do my thing where I'm like taking care of myself.

And so I usually read in the morning, but because I, you know, would have like wine or whiskey or something, I would sleep in. So I'm like, all right, enough. Like I'm just going to stop drinking for a while. I'm going to wake up at 5.30 every day. And what I do is I get my reading done from 5.45 to 6.45, and then I go through the workday feeling more accomplished, but I can also get home and spend time with my wife, my son, and my daughter without like – without being distracted at all, without being like, well, I didn't read this morning because I slept in. So I feel like I should do it right now. And when you – we're kind of going off on a little bit of a tangent. Oh, that's great, man. Go for it.

Yeah, yeah. Because I'm right there with you. When you get the rock done, the most important thing done, like at the beginning of your day, it almost gives you permission to, A, be more productive the rest of the day, but also, B, disconnect when you're done and really like focus on your personal life, whether you have a family or just friends or something else. So it's so funny you bring this up, you know, because I've been – I've literally talked to my wife last night about this, about like – because I'm trying to get back in shape. You know, I'm going to this boxing gym, right, because I realize like I can't keep up this pace as far as how, you know, how much I travel and all this other stuff and work in 17, 18 hours a day at 42 years old if my body isn't like in line, right?

So I've been trying to get back in shape, but, you know, the gut is the piece that always is like, okay, everything else kind of gets pretty toned and everything else pretty quick. But, you know, man, our problem is we grow that way, right, instead of – but it's here. But it's funny because I told her, I go, look, if I would – I think if I would have just stopped drinking, I'd – first of all, I'd drop 10 pounds in a heartbeat. Second of all, I know I'd sleep better and I'd be able to wake up a lot earlier and get shit done because I do the exact same thing as you is at the end of the day, grab a glass of wine or some whiskey or something like that. You know, for me, I smoke a little bit too, but it's like it puts me in a position where it's like, okay, that's my mental checkout phase where I'm kind of relaxing, but it doesn't do me any benefits as far as sleep habits or anything like that.

So I'm not there with you yet as far as being able to commit to not drinking because summertime for me is a real hard time not to socially drink, but I'm this close to it. I'm just – I'm taking one step at a time. I want to be antisocial like me, just like don't have any friends. Yeah, see, our problem is we literally have parties every weekend, so it's like, oh, shit. Everybody would think I'm pregnant if I stopped drinking for crying out loud, but I'm close to it. So cool, man. Well, all right, the second one here. This one I love because I'm a huge believer in it, which is structure your sales calls, okay? I always talk about structure versus script. So what are you guys finding as far as – you know, there's the, hey, you know what?

I'm a kick-ass sales rep. I've done this so often. I've had this call so many times. I can screw it. I can go into any situation. And that's like almost the perception of A-level reps is that they're so good at what they do that just throw them in. They've had the conversation enough times. They can wing it enough and turn, you know, anything into gold. But what do you find that the best sales reps do? Because I think this is a massive point for those people out there thinking that the best sales reps just have the skill. So let me explain the data real quick, just so the listeners have context. The analysis we do is able to identify just three conversations throughout a sales call. That could be next steps, pricing.

It could then be doing a demo and talking about specific features, et cetera. And what we found is that the most successful sales people flow through their sales call in a very sequential way where when they transition from one topic, it's to an adjacent topic. It's not a completely different topic where you're like turning 90 degrees and it's like you're taking conversation down a different course. Whereas average performers, the middle of the pack, they actually do do that. Not constantly, but they do it throughout their sales call. And the typically there is the most successful people have very structured sales calls. It's not like this perception where, you know, super successful sales people just do it and they have the gift of the gab and they can navigate any situation.

Although that's probably true, what they really do is they're like chess players. They're master strategists. They're thinking ahead. And to go back to like what you said a few minutes ago where it's like, oh, these guys have had the call enough times and they can just wing it. What I would say is they're not winging it. They're probably not planning their call. But because they've had the call so many times, they're still following structure. It's unconscious competence at this point instead of like, you know, let's spend 30 minutes at the beginning of the sales call planning or, you know, charting our course to figure out where to go. So the takeaway is, you know, even if you are like a super successful rep and you're at that point where it's totally unconscious competence, I would still invest 10 or 15 minutes planning your sales calls.

Which direction are you going to go? If the buyer does this, what's your move point? And this also goes back to how preparation allows that fluency, right? In the sense that, or fluidity, I guess, if you will, because without, you know, again, without scripting it out, what I don't like, and I hear this all the time with sales reps who are new, is they literally go question to question to question to question, right? And you can feel, like, to your point, the 90 degree, like, oh, they were having a good conversation on this point. And if they dug a little bit deeper there, like, that's what would have sold the account. But they checked off that box and now they're going to the next one. Whereas if you go in and you do your homework, you know what the agenda for the call is going to be.

So you have some guidelines. You set your goals of what you want to get out of the conversation. And then you maybe do a little bit of homework to figure out what's going on in their business so you can ask them contextual questions and not just your band stuff. Well, now you can kind of weave in and out of that conversation, but that thread is constantly there because you've put in the effort. I talk about reps going through a checklist. Like, I go through a checklist before every meeting. Who's on the call? What are their background? What's their LinkedIn profile? Who do they know? What are some recent news and events? What's my goal for the meeting? What's the agenda? Those type of things.

And I do that the night before every meeting I have. And so then during the meeting, I can just go boom, boom, boom, but also now be in it with the client as opposed to now thinking about, oh, shit, now I have to ask this other question, right? You know, I bet there's something to the fact that you do that the night before, too, rather than, like, a few minutes before. Because when you, like, stuff a bunch of information into your brain and then you sleep on it, your subconscious mind starts to work on it. And now you can, like, have this conversation in the moment instead of, like, you know, bouncing between or, like, thinking about it the whole time. But I also wanted to bring up this point is I think super successful salespeople structure their sales conversations in the same way that you and I are approaching this conversation.

So, like, right before this, you know, call, we said, hey, we're going to talk about this blog post. There are a few data points in here. But we have not, like, stuck to that in, like, a rigid way. We're still flowing through the conversation that way. But we went on this whole tangent that was not playing more, like, this rocks, pebbles, and sand, and goal setting, and all that stuff. So, I would say kind of, like, have this end in mind. Know how you're going to flow through it. But be flexible at the same time. Totally. Because I think that's the danger. And I think, you know, a lot of it comes with experience is having the conversation and having it so structured. And that's why I recommend early reps have it very structured, right?

Because you don't know what you don't know yet. And then you ease into being able to flow with it because what I've seen is reps who try to kind of go with the flow, if you will, who aren't really that experienced. All of a sudden, they'll go down the rabbit hole for 45 minutes with a client about some topic that is not really relevant. But it's an interesting conversation but not relevant. And it's good for rapport building. But it leaves them five to ten minutes left at the end where they're like, shit, I didn't talk about anything I actually wanted to talk about. So what do you do for this? And what about this? And what about this? And then it's just like this rapid fire, holy shit thing.

And it ruins all that rapport they built for that entire time. So there is kind of a middle ground of how long you can let those questions ask. And actually, I know, again, going to skipping, there is an optimal number of questions, right? I think that's one of the other tips here. Yeah, so keep your eyes filled for a blog post that we have coming up a week from today. And in fact, I'll give everybody a little bit of a hint. So the data you're looking at says on a scheduled discovery call, the ideal number of questions to ask is between 11 and 14. And we did an analysis about a year ago, and we found that it's still true today. But we also just got done with a new analysis, which is the same analysis, but done exclusively with executive level senior decision makers, those with a VP level and above.

And I'll just tell you right now, the data is totally different. I'm not going to tell you how yet. You're going to have to wait a week, follow me on LinkedIn, whatever you have to do. It is, you and I were talking about counterintuitiveness. We got on this, easily our most counterintuitive insight yet. I'm going to take a wild guess on this and say it's a lot less, but the reason is because the questions are different. When you talk to an executive, you're not asking speeds and feeds and features and functions conversations. And that's what leads to 15, 20, 30, like how, for me, how many sales reps do you have? What's your average deal cycle length? Those type of things. Those are very, you know, answer friendly, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

I can get 15 of those in without really having to worry about it too much. But I don't have those conversations with C-levels and VPs of sales. You could have written the blog post. I'm going to have to let you in on the draft. I feel like in a simplified way, there are two types of discovery questions. There are information gathering questions, and then there are questions that benefit the buyer, not the seller. There are questions that make the buyer think differently about his or her business or challenge them in some way. And I don't want to use the word challenge because it's a specific methodology, but. No, I get it. Yeah. A senior executive does not have time to, quote, unquote, fill you in on the basics of their business.

What they want is to be asked questions that rattle their brain a little bit in a good way. Make them think differently. Make them think. That's why I tell everybody, like, especially at that level, our job as sales reps is not to talk about features, functions, speeds, and feeds. Our job is to get them to think, and literally, and I use you guys as an example of this, you know, in the sense that, you know, I tell everybody, look, if you are comfortable with where you are right now, right, whether it's your job, your role, your industry, whatever. If you're comfortable, I'm worried for you because there's going to be an app that comes out tomorrow that makes your role, your industry, or whatever completely irrelevant.

So if you're not at least thinking about shit, where things are going, so that's why I encourage reps to talk about, like, things that are impacting the industry, like, not just their company, but, like, you guys are in prime spot to talk about artificial intelligence. I suggest every single rep, like, learn as much as they can about AI and the impact it's having across the board, not just in sales. You know why? Because those are the conversations that executives want to have. Every executive out there, I don't care what industry is thinking, what is AI going to do to my industry? Like, how is it going to shake up our industry, even if it's not there? I actually call AI these days the eye of Sauron, right?

It's like, when is that eye going to point it at you and your industry and say, sorry, industry, we're about to fuck you up right now because we just came up with this thing. Like, if the eye of Sauron all of a sudden comes on your industry, what are you going to do about it? So, as a sales rep, you should really dive into those type of trends so that you can have those type of conversations because that will lead to one, two, three, maybe questions that will get the executive to go, yep, as a matter of fact, blah, and talk the entire time, right? Yeah. One of the things I've learned the hard way back when I was an account executive is you will get relegated to the level of the organization that matches the language that you're using.

100%. If you're lucky enough to start with a senior executive and you start talking about your product, you'll get relegated down to, like, the ops manager level. But the opposite is also true. It's a little more difficult, but it's also true. If you are starting in the middle of the organization and you're coming into the sales conversation talking about business trends and how they are inflicting opinion on the status quo, and how if you're not going to change how you approach your business now, you're going to be creamed, you're going to be left behind, then that mid-level manager is probably going to be like, you know, this is a little bit, like, over my head, but they're going to be saying it in a good way.

My boss is going to be pretty impressed if I introduce this guy to him. He's talking about stuff that he would be concerned with, like shareholder value. I don't give a shit about shareholder value, but I know my boss does. Chris, this is why I love having conversations with you, man, because I feel validated in a lot of ways because this is not a promo for my training, but literally a lot of the stuff that you talk about validates the approach. I talk about for the first 10 minutes of five minutes of any conversation, your goal as a sales rep is to align temperature levels in the sense that we usually come in on fire because we're here to talk and we're like, hey, look, you know, I get all this shit I want to talk to you about, right?

And we finally got somebody to have a conversation with us. But do you think the prospects sitting in their office, like all fired up to have a meeting with us? Like they barely remember why we're there. And what we do is we do the typical fake rapport building shit where it's, oh, you see the weather and the fishermen and, oh, you know, I see the game last night. And that's what we think is rapport building, even though rapport building is important. But then and then we then we dive into our doctor checkup and we're digging for pain. Executives don't want that. They rapport building. Here's how I report. There's another stat in your thing that talks about rapport building. So you do it's important to build rapport, but instead of weather fishermen, that type of stuff, do it based on your homework on the account.

Yeah. Hey, in preparation for our meeting today, I was actually looking at your website and I noticed you guys just launched this new or did this thing or whatever it is. And before we get into the details here, help me understand, like, why did you all of a sudden do that or what's going on right now? That, to me, get now you get to chill out a little bit and calm down and they get to talk to some about something that they love talking about, which is themselves and something that they're an expert in. Right. Yeah. And what this is just kind of another side note that just like popped out of nowhere is and this isn't just related to like selling to executive buyers, but really any type of buyer is introducing loss aversion into that messaging that you're just talking about or into that sales conversation.

Especially like senior executives, like they're at a big company. If you're like trumpeting benefits the entire time, you might even see them like get kind of excited. But a benefit is not enough to move somebody at that level. You have got to tell a story where to no fault of their own, like the world as they know it is changing and they have to do something because they're going to be left behind. That's like the concept of loss aversion. So, like if nobody's heard of loss aversion or you listening have not heard of loss aversion, it's this idea that people are willing to work two times harder and risk twice as much to prevent themselves from losing something than they will to gain something.

And so, if you enter a conversation with an executive level decision maker talking about how their status quo is being threatened, there are external business trends in the world that are threatening their status quo and they need to be propelled out of that. Oh, and by the way, your solution happens to help them do that. That's a much more compelling conversation than coming in talking about product features and even product benefits. Like benefit-based selling is better than feature-based selling, but it's still not enough. No, and I, you know, I, same thing, right? I did a post a while ago called Everybody Needs a Vision, which is, and I talk above the power line and below the power line.

Below the power line, people are focused on today or yesterday. Above the power line, they're focused on tomorrow, right? So, today or yesterday is usually pain. Tomorrow's pleasure. And talking about where you want to go and the visionary things, painting that picture is where I want, what I want to talk, because that's what I think about. I don't think about day-to-day. I think about next year, how are we tracking towards these trends? What are we doing to address these type of things? And if you can paint that picture for me, now you get me fired up, and now I go tell people below the power line to pay attention to you while you figure out the details, right? Awesome, man. We're almost up on time, but I wanted to hit this last one because I thought this one was, this one's kind of the most, I think, the most counterintuitive stat you guys have on here, which is number 14, which is ask your manager to join a sales call.

It says share the limelight. It'll boost your sales, your ability to close deals by 258%. So, apparently, I got to start doing this with Morgan, but talk me through this one because this one is bananas as far as the data. That shows the difference here. Yeah, so I think there are several points to make, or things to, like, unpack as far as this data. So, like you said, if you have a, we did this analysis where we analyzed how many meeting participants on a sales call, both on the buying side of the organization and the selling side of the organization, would impact the likelihood of you winning the deal. And what we found is if you can get a second seller, whether it's your manager or a product manager or somebody else who really holds a level of credibility on a sales call with you, you're 258% more likely to win that deal than if you flew solo the entire sales process.

Now, there are a couple of things, there are a couple of nuances. The first one is it doesn't work on your introductory sales meeting, right? Like, if you have a discovery call is your first meeting, if you get, like, your manager on the call or somebody else, you're actually slightly less likely to close that deal. Why that happens, I don't really know. I'm guessing it's because discovery is already kind of a complex conversation. When you have two people trying to guide that, it can really kind of open up. Now, the second point I would make about this, that I would imagine a lot of people are thinking is, well, isn't that more correlation and causation? Isn't that like, oh, we've got this deal that's on the perfect trajectory to close, we're going to close.

And the fact, that's the reason the manager hopped on the line. So that didn't really go. And that could happen, but what we found is that the same thing, the same thing in front close rating was the KK manager in the meeting, which to me, that deal was not on this perfect trajectory to close. If he or she joined the second meeting and you've still got, like, five or six more meetings after that, well, it's a little bit of a different story. That's a very, you know, it's hard to, you know, manager, product marketer, product manager on a call, on like a demo, or get them to present to a customer, you're much more likely to win. And for like sales managers out there, the takeaway is get involved in key deals early.

Don't wait until like the end. Don't wait until the closing call or the negotiation call. You can have a lot more influence just by sitting on the phone with your rep and being that voice of credibility. Love it. Yeah. Actually, I'm going to start talking to Morgan about that because, you know, I think there are, I've had this gut feel that, oh man, hey, why don't you just offer? Because a lot of the clients, they might have heard of me or my training. And then Morgan gets on the phone and I can hear through Gong, oh yeah, you know, I remember seeing John at whatever. And I've been like, well, you know what? Like, not that I want to take a power away from Morgan, but just add something to it where he controls the conversation, but just brings me in as almost like a quote unquote favor to the client.

Say, hey, you know what? Why don't we get John on the next call here? So if you want to ask him some very detailed questions about this, then, you know, we can do that. It's just, if nothing else is an offer to see if we can accelerate those sales cycles. So that's something I'm taking away from this one where I'm going to start to potentially implement that if, you know, schedule permitting and all that other stuff. But we've actually implemented this in kind of an interesting way over here at Gong where me and my VP of marketing will present some of our data to like key prospects during their QVR meetings or like during their sales kickoff. Like they requested, like, hey, can you get Chris or Udy to like speak at our QVR?

And this is a good deal that's in the middle of the sales process. Yeah. When we do it for like bigger customers, you know, we go through this whole presentation and present for their, you know, 100 person sales team or 200 person sales team. It totally changes the dynamic of the deal. It goes from being like a buyer, like a vendor evaluation to like everybody in the company being excited about Gong. I love it. So, Morgan, if you're listening right now, I'm probably going to be jumping in on more of your calls. So we need to close some deals here. So anyways, awesome, Chris. Well, I like I said, I mean, we only went through four or five of them here. There's 21 tips there. Go check out Gong's blog.

We're going to post it in the Facebook feed here. And also for those who listen on Spotify or anywhere else, you know, go to Gong.io, take a look at their blog. Chris, anything else that you want to kind of share with people? I know you said you got you. I don't know how much you can share, but I know you're coming out with some new cool shit coming up here in the next few months. Anything you want to share with the audience here to have people start paying attention to outside of your blog? So I'll give everybody a hint. We've got a huge new product launch coming up in September. I wouldn't say huge, but it's going to be pretty game changing. And I guess this is the hint I'll give you. We call ourselves conversation intelligence, not voice intelligence or call recording for a reason.

Think of the other channels you have conversations through. Love it, man. Two and three together. Love it. Well, that just means more data for you to analyze, to get better insights, to help reps improve, right? Yep, there you go. Love it. Awesome, Chris. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I'm probably having you go on and be a third time. You're going to be like Alec Baldwin for me for Saturday Night Live, right? He's got the record of something like 14 shows on Saturday Night Live or something like that. But cool, man. For everybody out there, again, thanks for listening. Share the intel. Help elevate this profession. I know Gong is doing it. And yeah, have a great day. And again, Chris, thanks so much for coming on board here.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Gong. All right, everybody. Make it a great week and let's make it happen. Later. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.