Understanding your competitive landscape

Who's it for: Marketers and Gong admins

Monitoring competitor mentions helps your sales teams better understand their prospects' needs and pain points, while indicating how competitive you are in the market. This enables your team to pitch effectively, and close deals with a more targeted approach.

Using Gong, you can create competitor trackers, allowing you to follow mentions as well as view trends and analytics. By identifying which competitors you’re dealing with regularly, you’ll be able to differentiate against them and highlight where your product or service has the edge.

Win/loss insights shows how a deal's win rate is affected when a competitor is referenced in at least one customer interaction. If a prospect is engaging with a competitor’s product, they may be closer to making a decision – or it could be a key barrier. Understanding your overall win rates lets your sales team prioritize messaging, and sales enablement initiatives.

Identify competitor mentions by creating trackers

Trackers identify when words, phrases or concepts are mentioned in calls and emails, enabling you to surface the parts of conversations that matter most to you. They serve as the foundation for initiative boards and analytics.

Gong provides a pre-built keyword tracker during setup – Competitors, that offers valuable insights into competitor mentions. This keyword tracker has the names of all your competitors included, and is the basis of the Competitor mention insights in win/loss analytics. Anyone can edit this tracker, for example if a new competitor enters the field.

You can also create your own trackers, using just one competitor name or several. Choose from  two types of custom trackers:

• Smart trackers let you train Gong to locate certain concepts, regardless of the precise wording, so Gong can leverage AI to identify them in past and new calls. We recommend using smart trackers if you have a large database of calls. Creating customized smart trackers has several stages so we suggest consulting with your company’s Gong admin for a more guided approach.

• Keyword trackers look for mentions of specific words or phrases only. This is a simpler approach, and also good if you have fewer calls in your database. You can create a single keyword tracker to cover one or several competitors.

Use your tracker to filter for relevant conversations faster, and set up a stream – to receive notifications when it comes up during a call or email.

Measure trends with initiative boards

Initiative boards help you regularly track competitor trends in your buyer conversations, and give you early insights into a competitors' brand strength in the market. For example, if a competitor is increasingly mentioned by buyers, you might want to preemptively differentiate against them in your first-call deck or talk track.

Follow these steps to create a new initiative board:

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

2. Give the board a name and description, and then choose how to want to view team adoption:

   1. View by deals to see the percentage of deals in which tracker terms were mentioned. By choosing to view results by deals, you get valuable data on whether competitor mentions are having an impact on the business.

   2. View by calls to see the percentage of calls in which tracker terms were mentioned.

3. Add your competitor tracker, and set your adoption goals. 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.

Once your initiative board is ready, you can compare and view competitor mentions over time. You can also drill-down into the deal percentage to see tracker data in the context of deal wins and losses. See this article for more support creating initiative boards.

Calculate a win rate with win/loss analytics

Win/loss analytics calculate a win rate for closed deals, helping you assess whether competitor mentions influenced a successful outcome or worked against you.

You can use either of these insights:

• Competitor mentions. This will automatically use your pre-built competitor tracker.

• Tracker. You can add any tracker here, for example if you only want to look at one competitor.

Follow these instructions to view the win rate:

1. Go to Deals > Analytics > Win/Loss > Competitor mentions or Tracker.

2. Select which team, time period, and any relevant CRM filters.

3. When using the Tracker tab - Add your competitor tracker.

You’ll see a graph to display the relevant metrics. Click VIEW DEAL to open the deal in the account page. See this article to help you explore the insight metrics.

Tracking both your overall and competitive win rates provides valuable insights. A low win rate when no competitor is mentioned may suggest a need to create more urgency for buyers to consider your product or service. Competitive win rate indicates your brand's position against competitors in your market. A gradual increase in this win rate could signal that your brand is gaining traction and that buyers are perceiving greater value in your offering, compared to the alternative options.