Coaching for account executives

Who's this for: Account executives

Use Gong to improve your pitch, sharpen your negotiating techniques and win more deals, by leveraging Gong features to self-reflect, level up, and drive your own success.

Coach yourself by investing reviewing your own calls, evaluating your conversations and talk tracks, and collaborating with your manager and peers to get their feedback. The call page has many aspects that you can use to surface areas you need to improve, from your talk ratio, dynamics on your calls, how you deliver your pitch, how you discuss pricing, whether or now you defined next steps clearly, and more.

This is self-coaching, and it’s an incredibly powerful place for reps like you to make small changes that can have a big effect on the outcome of your deals.

Start self-coaching

Here's a few ways you can get into the habit of coaching yourself to improve your game.

Listen to your calls

Tip: Increase playback speed to save yourself time.

Our recommendation: Listen to your own calls once a week.

• Review your notes and check you captured and understood the main points raised.

• Refresh yourself on next steps and any action items you have to follow up on - and follow up!

• Listen out for any critical details that will help unlock the deal.

• Add notes in context by commenting on key parts of the conversation.

  Comments can include bookmarks, deal notes, and anything else you think relevant. Savvy reps leverage bookmarks to surface positive moments, such as clever objection handling, driving concrete next steps, etc.

• Tag people to get their weigh-in.

  You might want to request help, ask questions, or share information the team should know about.

Tip: Look out for an email for each call saying it's ready to review in Gong, and our daily digest that lists your calls of the day and links to the previous call you had with the customer.

Ask for feedback

Get guidance from your manager in the context of a particular moment on a call, or ask them to score your overall performance. Getting feedback on your calls will help you improve your skills learning from your manager's expertise.

Our recommendation: Request feedback from your manager once a month.

Learn how to request feedback

Score your own call

Scoring your calls is a great way to reflect and evaluate how you think the call went. It's also measurable, so you can easily track your improvement over time.

Our recommendation: Score one of your calls once a month.

Score a call

Build out your coaching habits

It's great that you've got self-coaching built into your routine, but now it's time to up the ante. Increase the frequency of your self-coaching to improve faster, and focus on the areas you want to get better at.

Listen to your calls (more!)

Our recommendation: Listen to your own calls once a day. The more calls you listen to, the more you'll see where you can make tweaks to better drive the deal.

• Search for anything said on the call to jump directly to something you want to listen back to.

• Review your talk tracks critically to spot places you can improve your pitch.

  • Find points of interest

  • Quickly locate the topics discussed

• What worked well, what wasn't so good? Take a note of positive responses from your prospects, and use these insights for your next call.

• Notice how your customer actually reacted to something you said (rather than what you thought happened).

  Tip: Got a meeting with an important prospect coming up? Refresh your memory before your next call by listening to previous calls you've had with them.

Check out your call stats

Reviewing a call can be much more than just listening to how it went. Review your interaction stats for each call to see what your talk times and call dynamics are like, figure out whether you're talking too much or too little, and learn from that to course correct.

This is measured data, so besides leveraging it to become more aware of yourself, you can also follow how your performance improves over time.

• To see interaction stats, clickon the right side of the call.

   

The stats you see include:

• Talk Ratio: The percentage of the call in which you spoke. The recommendation is for no more than 65% of the time.

• Longest Monologue: The duration, in minutes, of the longest speech you made. The recommended length is no more than 2m 30s.

• Longest Customer’s Story: The duration, in minutes, of the longest customer-talking segment. This can include short interruptions by you. The recommended length is between 1 and 2 minutes.

• Interactivity: This shows how often the conversation switched back and forth between you and your customer, and is on a 0–10 scale. The recommended grade is 5 or more.

• Patience: This shows how long you waited after the customer completed talking before you took over the conversation. The recommended wait time is between 0.6 and 1 second.

If your org has enabled Whisper for call interaction, on each stat you'll see a green or yellow dot next to the stats icon. Green indicates that you are within the recommended range, and yellow indicates that you are outside the recommended range.

Request feedback

Get into the habit of requesting feedback from your manager on a weekly basis to keep them involved and get their support in areas you want to improve.

Our recommendation: Request feedback once a week.

Tip: Learn from your peers! Tag them in calls, or ask them to give feedback or score your calls. Selling is a team sport and picking your peers' brains a great way to pick up new skills.

Score your own call

Increase the velocity of scoring your calls to keep a closer eye on your progress.

Our recommendation: Score one of your calls once a week.

Listen to your peers' calls

Listen to other team members’ calls to learn from their experience. Start by listening to the calls of top closers, calls in recently closed-won or closed-lost deals, calls in deals in specific vertical markets, and so on.

Our recommendation: Listen to a peer's call once a week.

Listen. Learn. Implement. Close.

Find good calls

• Search: Think of Gong as a search engine for your company’s sales conversations. Any sales call is at your fingertips. Check out calls from your company’s top reps at any stage in the sales cycle. You can even search for calls that discuss the competition.

• Library: Your company has probably set up library folders to help you ramp up fast, and know the product and how to pitch it. It will also include folders with good calls covering specific stages in a sales cycle. For more details, see Intro to the library.

Note: About 70% of calls listened to in Gong are listened to by people reviewing their own calls, or those of their peers.

Score peer calls

As you're already listening to your colleague's calls, why not score them while you're there? Rate their calls as a way of giving feedback and giving positive reinforcement when due.

Our recommendation: Score one peer call once a week.

Next-level self-coaching

By now you're regularly listening to your calls and others', getting and even giving feedback, and hopefully seeing some improvement and feeling better about your calls. Here's a couple of ways to take your self-coaching even higher.

Monitor your progress against your peers

Keep tabs on how you’re doing. Are you improving? Staying the same? Backsliding? Take a look at your stats to see where you are, and compare your performance to that of the rest of your team.

• Go to Insights > Team page.

  In particular, check out these tabs:

  • INTERACTION: Monitor your conversational skills

  • TOPICS: Review how much time you spent talking about key topics

  • GONG USAGE: See how you're using Gong compared to top-performing reps

  • COACHING RECEIVED: Keep an eye on how much coaching you've received, how, and when.

  For more details, see Analyze team performance.

Our recommendation: Check your stats at least once a month.

Add calls to the library

If you just had a call you think others could learn from, add it to the relevant folder in the library, or create a new folder for the purpose of learning and ramping up – that way you can easily locate your most inspirational calls.

Some ideas for call to look out for are ones that cover competitive positioning, pricing negotiation, and overcoming objections.

Our recommendation: Add a call to the library once a week.

Tip:

Share your library folders with your team to help others self-coach too!