Track adoption and the success of your marketing initiatives

Who's it for: Marketers and Gong admins

Marketers regularly research and create strategic initiatives, and train sales teams to best use them. For example–sales decks, new pricing and packaging models, product launches, and customer testimonials.

However, many of these projects fail because companies can’t track whether the team actually used the new messaging in sales conversations or how it’s performing when they do.

In this article, we’ll show you three key ways you can capture information on adoption rates, and the effectiveness of your new initiatives.

Get analytics on your slides

Sales decks are a valuable business resource and marketers invest a lot of time designing new ones. Using slide analytics, you can check how individuals and teams are adopting the latest sales deck.

To get analytics on your slides, filter calls based on slide titles that were presented, and the amount of time they were shown. Here’s how:

1. Go to Conversations > Search.

2. Click Add filters.

3. Click Screen share and select Words or phrases in slide title.

4. Now add the words or phrases from the slide title you need, for example ‘Customer success testimonial.’

5. Use the slider to select a time range for how long the slide is shown.

6. Remember to refine your selection using the additional filters.

You’ll now see a library of the calls where that slide was shown. View the chart at the top of the page to see trends for slide usage.

Tip:

Want to watch the part of the call where they show the slide? Open the call page, click Points of interest, and select Slides. Click on the slide you’re interested in to go straight to the right place.

Create customized smart trackers

As a marketer, you’re constantly creating valuable new messaging for the sales team, who are the frontline to the customer. But how often is your new material being referenced in calls?

Smart trackers let you train Gong to locate very specific themes, regardless of the wording, so Gong can leverage AI to identify them in past and new calls. You can then easily find relevant calls, create statistics relating to these concepts, and also use trackers in initiative boards to measure how these talk tracks relate to deal success.

Note:

To customize your own smart trackers, you’ll need a database of at least 500 calls. You should also have at least 200 occurrences of the topic in your team's conversations. If you don’t have that many calls yet, try building a keyword tracker.

Here’s how to customize your own smart tracker:

1. Go to Company settings > Customize analysis > Trackers.

2. Click Create tracker and select Smart tracker.

3. Choose a name, description, and how you want to filter the calls.

4. Provide at least 5 sentences that reflect the concept you want to track.

5. Gong will now create a set of sentences from your existing calls. Tag the sentences with YES, NO, or NOT SURE so the model learns which ones match your concept and which ones don’t.

6. In Review model, you’ll be able to evaluate the results. Click Activate and your new smart tracker is ready to use.

Creating customized smart trackers has several stages so we suggest you read this article or consult with your company’s Gong admin for a more guided approach.

Use initiative boards to measure success

Now that you’ve created trackers for the key messaging you want the sales team to use, an initiative board will provide data and trends on which teams and individuals are adopting your initiatives. By choosing to view results by deals, you can also get valuable data on whether the new initiative’s messaging is having a positive impact on the business.

Once your initiative board is ready, you can compare and view adoption trends over time. You can also drill-down into the deal percentage to see tracker data in the context of deal wins and losses, allowing you to promote the benefits of your project, or assess the need to adjust your messaging or training.

Follow these steps to create a new initiative board:

1. Go to Insights > Initiatives > Create new board.

2. Choose a name, description, and that you want to view results by deals–which shows the percentage of deals in which tracker terms were mentioned during the deal. You can also view the results by calls to see the percentage of calls in which tracker terms were mentioned.

3. Add your smart tracker or keyword tracker. Set the percentages below and above which you want initiative adoption to be measured. You can add as many trackers as you like but we suggest no more than 6.  

4. Optional: Choose filters and/or a call category so that you can focus on specific types of calls, opportunities, and accounts.

See these articles for more support creating initiative boards and using them to track adoption of your initiatives.