How to create and manage deal boards

Business admin, RevOps

Gong Foundation*

This article will guide you through the process of building, configuring and managing a deal board, enabling you to create several deal boards to suit diverse business needs.

Set-up a new deal board

Deals > Pipeline > > + Create board

If no deal boards have been created yet, you’ll find a sample board available*.

Tip:

Speak to your sales team to find out what information they rely on the most and what they need, before creating your board.

When you start to build a new board, the sidebar has all the sections listed and you can use this to go straight to the right place. Here’s a guide to the stages of building your board:

1. First create the main structure and filters for the board using these sections:

   • Basics

   • Filters

   • Tabs

2. Now use these sections to add substance to your board by deciding which deal details you want to see:

   • Columns

   • Update CRM

   • Amount

   • Warnings

3. Additional fields include:

   • First View

   • Digest

When you’ve completed setting up your board, click SAVE. Once it's saved you can share it with others, duplicate it and make tweaks, edit or delete it.

Basics

The details in this section will help your team members quickly see which board has the data they're looking for:

1. Give your board a name and description.

2. Choose which deals are shown in the board based on who handles them. This can be any role defined in your CRM. Examples include – deal owners, sales engineers, CSM’s.

3. Check In the opportunity team (optional), to show deals by any member of an opportunity team.

4. Choose a CRM date field to decide which deals are shown on your board. For example, sales teams may want to view information based on close dates, while CS teams may want to look at deals based on renewal dates.

   A column is also added for this CRM field.

Filters

Use Filters to create segment-specific deal boards e.g. SMB deals. Adding filters is optional and can also be added later. If you don’t use them, all deals that match the board level filters, such as date, will appear on the board.

Only deals that match your filters appear on the board and the filters apply to all tabs (created next). Here's how to add them:

1. Click Filter by, then click Add filter.

2. Select the CRM field and add values to filter the deals by.

   Note:

   You can’t use a range field as a filter.

3. Click to add a conditional filter.

Tabs

Tabs are used as a shortcut for seeing different groups of deals, for example – forecast category, deal stage, account size. They also give high level visibility to the roll-ups of these deals. These groups can be defined by any CRM field, allowing you to make groups based on anything that has business value.

By default we’ve added a tab for Commit, Pipeline, and Best Case, but you can edit or delete these. You’ll need at least one tab to build your board and there’s a maximum of 8*.

Note:

If you chose to use Filters (explained above), make sure that they don’t conflict with your Tabs.

Here’s how to create tabs:

1. Click + Add tab.

2. Give the tab a name.

3. Select a CRM or Gong field the group should be based on.

4. Select the values for that CRM field, to make up the group.

5. Click to add a conditional filter.

6. You can use to change the order of the tabs. The higher tabs will be seen closest to the left on the board .

Note:

Conditional filters can be used in both tabs and filters to further define the deals. When using conditional filters, keep in mind these definitions:

The location and order affects how they are handled: Not functions are performed first, followed by And. Finally Or functions take place.

See this article to understand more about using conditional filters.

Columns

Now fill your Columns with the data needed to evaluate deals quickly*. Columns for CRM data, activity information, and AI-powered insights give your team full visibility into the deal’s status. By default we show the following columns, which can’t be deleted but some can be hidden from deal board view by using the – Score*, Warning, Contacts, Deal Activity.

Here’s how to create your columns:

1. Click + Add column to search the options. Click the name to add it as a column.

   

   We recommended adding the most important columns that allow you to better understand the deal. Here are some examples of columns you might want to add:

   1. Playbooks*. You’ll see Playbook available! on your list of columns if you have one available and can add by clicking Add now.

   2. Notes fields.

   3. Smart and keyword trackers. Use Gong pre-trained trackers to see when concepts came up in calls and emails in your deals. This allows you to view key information about the deal at a glance, e.g. Customer pain.

      Note:

      There are two ways that trackers can be presented in a deal board, depending on how you defined the trackers:

      • For trackers where you chose to include separate columns/trackers for each phrase, each phrase for the tracker will show in the deal board when detected. This is useful for competitor or product names.

      • For trackers where you didn't choose separate columns/tracker per phrase, a checkmark will appear in the tracker column when detected.

   4. Columns for your most used CRM fields. You can update your field in the CRM directly from Gong.

2. You can use the to change the order of the columns. The highest columns will be seen on the board closest to the left.

3. Add suggested updates. Choose one of your CRM fields (text only) you added as a column to fill with AI suggested updates based on conversations from the current and previous week.

Update CRM

In Update CRM, you can define which CRM fields you want available in the Update CRM tab to allow reps or managers to update fields in Gong, which automatically sync with your CRM. This tab is found on the deal board when clicking a deal’s company name or activity column.

This is useful to allow sales reps and AE’s to update fields that you don’t necessarily want visible on your board. This way, the board's main view allows you to focus on key information at a glance.

To add a CRM field, click + Add field.

Amount

In Amount, select the CRM amount field to use when calculating total amounts (roll-ups) for each tab within this board. The default will be the field used in your company settings, but here you can update it here for this deal board only. The amount field will be added as a column on your board.

Note:

Make sure the amounts are fields in your CRM’s opportunity object, and that they are being imported into Gong.

1. Select your CRM amount field. These are examples of what amount fields might be used:

   • Currency amounts like Total ARR or Renewal ARR. Legacy sales teams may want to calculate totals based on Total ARR.

   • Non-currency amounts like Seats or Subscriptions. New business teams may want to calculate totals based on Subscriptions.

2. If you work with opportunity splits, check APPLY OPPORTUNITY SPLITS IN DEAL AMOUNTS AND ROLLUPS.

Warnings

Warnings are AI-powered alerts that help you identify which deals are at risk, and are triggered by certain activities, or lack of activity on a deal. The information that prompts the warning is defined by Gong, but you can customize details, such as which ones you want to use, and the length of time that prompts that warning.

We recommend choosing the warnings that commonly affect your deals, and looking at past successful deals to get an idea of where your threshold is between healthy and risky deals. Learn more about each warning.

Here’s how to set your warnings:

1. Toggle on the warnings you want to include in your board.

2. Adjust the warning settings as required.

First View

In First View, you can set how this board looks the first time a team member views it.

While they can’t update the board's settings, they can adjust certain filters and views at the board level. The next time they view the board, their previous view will be shown.

Here’s how you can set up the default:

1. Select the date range to filter the board by.

2. Select which tab is open.

3. Select which column is used to sort the deals by, and whether it's ascending or descending.

Digest

Choose who gets a tailored weekly email digest for the board. Subscribers get a digest where the deals they see are tailored as follows:

• Reps/other role: Deals they handle.

• Managers: Deals handled by their direct reports.

• Managers of managers: Deals handled by everyone rolling up to them.

Observers get a digest that shows deals handled by the selected team. The digest is sent weekly on Monday morning, and subscribers and observers can unsubscribe whenever they want.

Note:

To allow email digests to be sent, you’ll need to have at least one warning enabled.

Additional support

The Gong Academy has several deal board recipes, so you can easily get started on creating deal boards for specific business use-cases:

• Coaching

• SDR development

• Methodology adoption

• Tracking strategic initiatives

• Managing macro-economic conditions

• Customer success, renewals, and upsells

Managing deal boards

Once your deal board is set-up, anyone in the company can share it with other team members.

To edit a board, duplicate or delete a board, you’ll need to have deal board management permissions in your assigned permission profile.

Share a deal board

Company settings > Deals > Pipeline

Once you’ve set up a deal board, you can let others know it’s available by sharing it. Team members the board is shared with will receive notifications via email as well as on their homepage.

To share a board:

1. Find the relevant board if you don’t want to share your current board.

2. Click Share board.

3. Search for and select team members or entire teams to share the board with.

4. Write a message to let them know the benefits of this board, which they’ll receive with the notification.

5. Click Share.

Duplicate a deal board

Company settings > Deals > Pipeline

Save time by duplicating an existing board and tweaking it to suit evolving business needs. Here’s how:

1. Click in the top right corner and choose Manage boards.

2. Locate the board you want to edit and click Duplicate.

3. You’ll be taken to the settings of the duplicate board, where you can make the necessary changes.

4. Click Save.

Edit a deal board

Company settings > Deals > Pipeline

Follow these instructions to make edits to any board:

1. Click on the name of your current board to search for the relevant board, and select the name of the board to open it.

2. Click Edit board.

3. Make the necessary changes to your board settings and click Save.

Note:

If you edit any warning settings, it may take a few hours for the board to update while we recalculate data.

Delete a deal board

Company settings > Deals > Pipeline

Follow these instructions to easily delete a board:

1. Click in the top right corner and choose Manage boards.

2. Locate the board you want to edit and click Delete.

3. Confirm you want to delete this board.

Warning:

Once you delete a board, this can’t be undone.

*The features available to you depend on your company’s plan and your assigned seats.