Understanding deal boards

A sales pipeline is a conceptual framework that represents the entire sales process. Deal boards help professionals visually track and manage their sales pipeline. It typically displays all active deals, their current stage in the sales process, and key details such as deal value, expected close date, and the sales rep responsible. This creates a clear picture of what deals are on track and which are at risk.

Each revenue intelligence platform represents the sales pipeline in different ways, and Gong’s highly customizable settings allow you to easily adapt your current system. These are the key ways that using Gong deal boards elevates your existing process:

• AI-driven insights: Upgrade your deal board with unique features such as smart trackers, playbooks featuring content suggestions, and warnings. Combined with important CRM data, Gong deal boards help you stay ahead of deals at risk.

• User-friendly: Gong deal boards are intuitive and easy to navigate, with dynamic activity information and integrated playbooks. AE’s are able to prioritize high-value deals, while managers can quickly access all the information they need to catch-up and fully understand each deal.

• Better forecasting accuracy: A well structured deal board, along with the added value of Gong specific features such as AI and activity, provides more accurate and reliable forecasts.

• Seamless CRM sync: Gong’s deal boards include critical CRM fields, allowing you to filter, group, and view essential deal data. Plus, you can update your CRM fields directly from the deal board, ensuring cross platform consistency.

Deal board structure

Each deal board is organized on three levels using filters, tabs and columns.

• Filters are at the top level, and based on available CRM fields. They allow for a segment specific deal board, for example – SMB deals.

• Tabs are used to see different groups of deals, such as forecast category or deal size, and give high level visibility to the roll-ups of these deals. Tabs can be defined by any CRM field, allowing for groups based on anything that has business value.

• Columns are where you can see the most important information needed to evaluate deals at a glance. These can be based on a CRM field, but are also where you can view playbooks, notes fields, activity and AI features such as smart trackers.

This is what the Gong deal board looks like:

Drill down for more information

The deal board is designed to give you a snapshot of your deal pipeline health at a glance, but you can drill into certain columns for full details, including:

• Score (Forecast seats only) - Understand what signals impact the deal positively or negatively, leading to the deal likelihood score.

• Warnings - See detailed alerts on the deal and suggestions for mitigating the risk.

• Contacts - See who is involved in a particular deal.

• Deal activity - Review the activity timeline for the deal, such as emails, calls and deals.

• Playbook - Open up the playbook to see every element with a notes field and any AI suggestions.

This information is available on tabs when opening up the deal panel, by clicking on several places on the deal board.

Insights on deal boards

The following AI-powered insights are visible on a deal board:

• 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.

• Playbook. Your company’s sales methodology playbook can be integrated to your dealboard, and AI automatically suggests notes based on interactions with leads to help you complete each stage.

• Smart trackers can be added as a column. Use Gong pre-trained ones or create your own, allowing you to view key information about the deal at a glance, for example – Customer pain.

• AI-suggested deal updates. One of the CRM fields (text only) used in columns can be selected to fill with AI-suggested updates based on conversations from the current and previous week, for example – Next steps.

• Deal AI: Ask anything related to recent interactions in this deal, and generate account briefs.

Sync with your CRM

CRM fields can be updated directly from the deal board using either a column cell or using the Update CRM section, which contains available CRM fields that won’t show up as a column, but can be found in the deal panel.

Conditional filters

Conditional filters can be used in both tabs and filters to further define the deals. It’s helpful to fully understand how these work before creating a deal board.

Deal boards and forecasting

When you set up a forecast board, we automatically generate an associated deal board. Use this board for pipeline reviews ahead of updating numbers. Generated boards are identifiable as they have a Forecast tag on them.