Recorded calls between your prospects and your SDRs and Account Executives contain a gold mine of information for go-to-market leaders. Do you know how to properly mine those calls to extract useful insights, not just gather more data?
If you're new and you don't know what Voice of Prospect (VoP) means, then hustle over and check out "What is Voice of Prospect and How is it Different from Voice of Customer?"
Then, come back here to learn:
Successful marketing and sales requires intimately understanding your buyers so you can deliver the right message and position your product in the right market.
Get it right and you’ll grow like crazy.
Miss the mark and you’ll likely struggle with low website conversion rates, long sales cycles, and low win rates.
Historically, product marketers have taken the lead in gathering prospect feedback through eight main avenues. Each one has drawbacks:
| Old Method for Capturing Voice of Prospect | Drawback to this method |
| Buyer persona interviews | For a typical marketing team, persona research can be done, at best, once every year or two. Excellent feedback can be gleaned but it’s usually your existing customers who are willing to help, not potential customers. |
| Reading customer reviews online | Customer reviews primarily reference your product/service, and are by definition not prospect reviews. |
| Copying competitors | Taking inspiration from competitors is helpful, but it’s unlikely they have a systematic, measurable approach to capturing VoP. |
| Talking to frontline customer support and client success people | These folks are talking to people who already decided to buy your product, and don’t usually provide great presale insights. |
| Talking to frontline sales people | Getting subjective feedback from people that talk directly to prospects all the time is helpful, but it’s biased and often anecdotal feedback at best. |
| Pop-up surveys / feedback forms | Tools like HotJar let marketers gather feedback from website visitors about how specific pages resonate, but it’s limited. |
| Third Party Research | When branding agencies or analysts interview buyers in your industry, their reports are helpful, but they’re static and don’t precisely reflect a buyer’s mindset and emotions as they truly enter a buying cycle. |
Gong.io is the #1 ranked software in the world based on G2 customer reviews. Dubbed "conversation intelligence software" or "revenue intelligence software," Gong.io primarily focuses on equipping sales managers with dynamic tools to listen to recorded calls, coach their team members, track their deals and interactions, and much more.
There’s an additional use case for Gong.io that is more strategically powerful: Capturing and structuring Voice of Prospect data.
By leveraging conversation intelligence software, you get the most natural, stream of consciousness feedback directly from your buyers; no more depending on salespeople to provide secondhand feedback on what prospects say or to enter accurate buyer data into the CRM.
For Gong.io to work, it must be configured to record virtual sales meetings and calls. This involves setting up Gong with your calendar/email tool (e.g. Google), meeting software (e.g. Zoom) and/or sales acceleration software (e.g.. Salesloft), and your CRM (e.g.. Salesforce CRM).
Quick tip: Establish a consistent naming convention that your sales team can follow when they send calendar invites to prospects so it’s easy to sort and find similar calls in Gong. For example, each intro call should be labeled “[Company] Intro to [Prospect].”
After connecting Gong to your meeting software to record your sales calls, you’ll want to create specific call categories so you can aggregate calls where the most prospect feedback will likely be gathered.
For most businesses, these include intro calls, qualification calls, demos, or proposal calls hosted by your salespeople. In this example below, I’ve set up a category for “Demo” calls that are more than 20 minutes long.
The Tracker feature in Gong allows users to set up a filter that captures every time a prospect says a certain word or phrase. Trackers are highly flexible and can be used to capture very broad topics or very specific topics.
In the example screenshot, I have set up a Tracker to capture when a prospect mentions that they are currently using the software company Clari. Gong will log this tracker and I can then easily search, find, and report on any calls where a prospect mentions the company, “Clari."
Want to know how often your prospects are saying key words or phrases? You can spot trends by reporting on the volume of times a Tracker is tagged, the percentage of total calls that Trackers are tagged, and how that Tracker presence has grown or decreased over time. Where else can you get this granular?
If you want to listen to calls, you can sort by specific trackers or call types and listen to hear the actual voices of your prospects. Want to write more compelling copy on your landing pages? Use the same words your prospects use to describe their desired solution.
As you’re listening to calls and you hear a prospect describe a challenge that they currently face, use Gong to grab a snippet of that call and send a link to your content team so they can create a blog post about that topic.
Let’s say you have a new cohort of sales people onboarding next week and you want to help them learn about how your product is solving real problems in the marketplace. How about letting your prospects do the explaining? You can gather recorded calls or call snippets and store them in call libraries in Gong based on topic. Then, you can just share access to that folder with the new hires!
Perhaps while you’re listening to a call, you hear a prospect describe a particular feature that would make their job so much easier. You want your product managers to hear that ASAP!
You can make comments, tag co-workers, and configure Gong so that anytime a certain hashtag is used, your product team is notified.
Dan Quirk : December 10, 2020
When growth flatlines for investor-backed tech companies, board members start pressing the CEO for answers... “What’s going on?" "Can you get back on...
scaleMatters : June 29, 2021
Making go-to-market decisions about strategy, positioning, and messaging without Voice of Prospect data is like driving at night in the countryside...
scaleMatters : July 14, 2021
Once you start capturing what your prospects are saying using a conversation intelligence tool like Gong.io, you’ll want to structure this data so...
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