Default CRM entity association

Associating activities such as calls and emails to your CRM entities provides proper context for your Gong activities. Once a Gong activity is properly associated, you will know who a call was made to, the company they work with and the deal the activity is for. Gong provides a default association algorithm for identifying the accounts and opportunities that should be associated with each Gong activity. To get more accurate results, you can customize the settings.

Account association

Find the CRM contacts that correspond to the activity participants. CRM contacts are identified by their email address or phone number. In addition to the standard CRM email address field, we also check for matches in any fields listed in Contact email addresses and Lead email adddresses in the Engage CRM setup page. For details of how to set this up, see Set up Gong Engage.
Association works as follows:
1. For participants that have a CRM contact:
  1. Associate the activity to that account
2. For participants that don’t have a CRM contact:
  1. If there is an account with the same website domain as the participant email domain, associate the activity to that account.
  2. If there isn’t an account with the same website domain as the participant email domain, do nothing.

In this scenario, an activity could be associated with multiple accounts or with no accounts. If you customize your settings, the list of accounts that can be associated with the activity is expanded and other accounts may be found to be relevant to association.

Deal association

Identify open deals for the accounts associated in the account association stage. See How we identify open deals.
If there are open deals:
1. Associate with deals where the deal owner is an activity participant.
2. If there are no deal owners, associate with all deals.
If there are no open deals, no deals are associated with the activity.

How we identify open deals

The list of deals includes those that were open around the time the conversation took place. Identifying open deals is based on the value of two fields:

deal status: set by the rep, indicates whether the deal is open or closed.
deal close date: a rough estimate of when the rep expects the deal to close

If these fields aren’t maintained, there may be deals where the status is open and the close date was several weeks or months previous. In addition, conversations just before or after a deal is opened or closed may still be related to that deal.

Therefore, the list of potential deals to associate is made up of:

Deals opened up to 14 days after the conversation took place
Deals closed up to 14 days before the conversation took place
Deals with a deal status of open but the close date field was up to 100 days before the conversation took place

This timeline shows when conversations might be associated with an opportunity based on the opportunity’s status and close date.

Examples

Date of conversation	Deal status	Deal close date	Include deal in list?
1st January 2024	Open	1st November 2023	Yes: conversation less than 100 days after close date
1st January 2024	Open	1st September 2023	No: conversation more than 100 days after close date
1st January 2024	Closed	21st December 2023	Yes: conversation less than 14 days after the deal status was changed to closed
1st January 2024	Closed	10th December 2023	No: conversation more than 14 days after the deal status was changed to closed

CRM entity reassociation

As data is added to the CRM it can be necessary to reassess the association assigned when the activity occurred. For example, if a new account is generated, we may be able to associate an activity to an account that we had previously not found a relevant association for.

Creating, updating or deleting the following CRM fields triggers reassociating activities to CRM entities:

CRM contact: email, phone, mobilephone, accountId
CRM account: website
CRM deals or opportunities: parentid, contact reference fields depending on configuration, user reference fields depending on configuration
Contact roles in a deal: (reassociation happens when the deal contacts association settings are set to On: Optional or On: Mandatory) contactId, opportunityId

Reassociation could result in activities which were originally associated to a specific deal is now reassociated with a different deal, or activities that weren’t associated to any deal may now be associated to a deal.

We update relevant activities that occurred up to one year prior to the current day.