Modern sales leaders focus primarily on closing more deals. That is possible if sales engagement platforms such as Conversation Intelligence (CI) software are part of their technology stack.

Sales engagement software tools are critical in optimizing sales cycles by integrating with the communication channels and the tools sellers use most. With this kind of software, sales leaders ensure tight management of sales processes and automation of essential tasks, messages, and workflows. 

These platforms have the capability to capture data from sales conversations and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to derive actionable insights. Using a top-down approach, you may need to try Einstein's guide to AI use case to proactively plan and improve your most critical KPIs across the business.

This article dives deep to compare three CI platforms; Gong, Einstein Conversation Insights & Chorus. It aims to provide a buyer's guide in selecting the right fit CI solution based on the following four key points of discussion;

• This article dives deep to compare three CI platforms; Gong, Einstein Conversation Insights & Chorus. It aims to provide a buyer's guide in selecting the right fit CI solution based on the following four key points of discussion;
• Conversation Intelligence: What is it? It benefits in sales performance.
• Features-based, pricing, and product functionality comparison between Gong, Einstein Conversation Insights, and Chorus for Conversational Intelligence
• Integration with the Conversation Intelligence Ecosystem such as Salesforce
• Final thoughts.

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What is conversation intelligence?

Conversation intelligence is the process of finding actionable and valuable business insights from conversations that the sales team are having with prospects and clients.

These insights can come in many forms via sales calls, emails, web conferences, or any other digital communication format. 

What makes a product qualify as a Conversation Intelligence?

To qualify for inclusion in the Conversation Intelligence (CI) category, a product must:

- Be able to create transcripts to convert calls into text and data that can be searched and analyzed
- Use AI and Machine Learning technology to analyze the transcription of a call and identify keywords, themes, and possible action items
- Provide insightful metrics of a conversation, including talk ratios, customer interactivity, and total call duration.

What are the benefits of Conversation Intelligence?

The information and insights from conversation intelligence can be levaraged for a variety of purposes across the business.

Let's explore these benefits with examples in Sales and other parts the business; 

Sales

Conversation intelligence helps sales and revenue teams by facilitating coaching, onboarding, and training, among other things.

• The following are some examples of the benefits that conversation intelligence can provide to the Sales department.
• It takes notes so that your sales reps can stay focused on the conversation and never miss important details mentioned by prospects or customers.
• Allows you to monitor sales conversations for consistency with the designated sales process, allowing you to see who needs more guidance, coaching, or training.
• Allows individual sales reps to track their own performance by listening to key moments in sales calls. They can then request feedback on areas they are working on, get suggestions on how to improve, and learn how they could have responded when stumped by a question.
  

Marketing

The insights contained in call recordings, when combined with the data generated by their analysis, are pure gold in the marketing world.

• Some of the advantages they gain from conversation intelligence are as follows:
  
• Determining why deals are won or lost based on actual customer feedback from phone calls.
• Creating more accurate prospect and buyer personas by learning about their actual needs, challenges, and day-to-day practices.
• Staying on top of the competition so that you always know who your top competitor(s) are as the market evolves.
  

Product development

Conversation intelligence-generated call snippets, transcripts, and analytical data enable product developers to learn from the voice of the customer and accelerate buyer, prospect, and user research.

• This technology provides them with the following advantages: 
• Understanding the challenges and needs of prospects, buyers, and users so that your product can address them.
• Gathering customer quotes to share with the rest of the product development team in order to bring these needs and feelings to life.
• Identifying the most frequently requested features and easily prioritizing the most popular one (s).
  

Customer success

Share key moments in the customer journey with those in your organization who constantly get in touch with the customer to keep everyone on the same page. 

• These customer call snippets provide information to team members throughout your organization about:
  
• What was previously discussed with the customer, what’s promised, their painpoints and their expectations and goals
  

This gives everyone context for each customer and allows for a better customer experience across multiple touchpoints, from prospect to customer and beyond.

Furthermore, when inconsistencies are identified along the customer's journey, conversation intelligence can aid in improving the customer experience.

What is Gong, and how does it work?

Gong is a higher ranked conversational intelligence tool compared to Chorus and Einstein Conversation Insights. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze unstructured data to help B2B sales teams win more deals by recognizing effective patterns from tens of thousands of hours of spoken sales conversations.

The patented Gong Revenue Intelligence Platform captures and understands every customer interaction, then delivers insights at scale, empowering revenue teams to make decisions based on data instead of opinions.

With Gong, customers experience improved win rates, increased deal sizes, and accelerated employee ramp-times

What is Chorus, and how does it work?

Like any other Conversation Intelligence, Chorus is a platform for generating actionable call notes and insights into sales conversation for optimization and sales enablement or training purposes harnessing AI. Chorus is the leader in Conversation Intelligence and an integral part of ZoomInfo's leading modern go-to-market software, data, and intelligence for more than 20,000 companies worldwide. 

Chorus' Conversation Intelligence Platform identifies and helps revenue teams replicate the performance of top-performing reps by analyzing their sales meetings. These insights serve as the foundation of an effective coaching strategy for sales and customer success teams and provide insight into the voice of the customer across the entire organization.

What is Einstein Conversation Insights, and how does it work?

Einstein Conversation Insights is a conversational intelligence feature that's built-in Salesforce High-Velocity Sales (HVS), an add-on product to Sales Cloud. It allows Sales and Service users the ability to see insights and trends surfaced from voice and video calls. Calls are recorded and analyzed for mentions of specific keywords and phrases.

How Einstein Conversation Insights Works

Define Keywords

Sales managers and other stakeholders can work with the Salesforce admin to define keyword insights in three categories: competitors, products, and custom mentions. Einstein Conversation Insights will also track insights for the next steps and pricing, which occurs automatically and does not require further configuration.

Collect Conversations

Einstein Conversation Insights helps sales organizations collect conversations in one place within Salesforce High-Velocity Sales, within the CRM. If you are already recording sales calls, you can connect those recordings to Salesforce so that you have those conversations stored in one place. 

Process Recordings

The AI system then processes the compiled recordings for transcription and insight detection. This is when Einstein Conversation Insights sifts through all of the calls to pull out the key moments you specified with keywords.

Analyze Transcriptions

Einstein Conversation Insights will use AI to spot key moments based on keywords and phrases defined by your Salesforce admin. This is when Einstein Conversation Insights analyzes the key moments you specified.

Surface Post-Call Insights and Recordings

After the transcripts have been analyzed, Einstein Conversation Insights surfaces relevant call recordings and provides insights through multiple dashboard views. 

This is when Einstein Conversation Insights aggregates the analysis and serves it up in an easily digestible format.

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Comparison between conversational intelligence software

According to G2 reviews, below is the custom comparison between Gong, Einstein Conversation Insights, and Chorus for Conversation Intelligence to guide you through your B2B Sales performance platform.

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Ranking and ease of use

In their Top 20 Easiest to Use Software Under Conversation Intelligence Category, G2 has ranked Gong.io as the best (#5), followed by Chorus.ai (#11) and Salesforce High Velocity (Einstein Conversation Insights being its built-in feature) in the (#18) position. Which platform is best suited for a customer depends on their underlying goals and organizational culture?

For example, some providers use conversation insights to understand deal tracking and areas for management intervention. In contrast, others leverage the intelligence to automate note-taking, while still others focus on using the insights to identify and correct individual and team skill gaps through targeted coaching. 

Clearly, Chorus.ai, Gong, and Salesforce High Velocity Sales (ECI) have similar features and functionalities as Sales Coaching and Conversation Intelligence. 

Chorus.ai is categorized as Sales Performance Management and Sales Analytics.

Gong is categorized as Sales Analytics and Revenue Operations

Salesforce High Velocity Sales (ECI) is categorized as Sales Performance Management, Outbound Call Tracking, and Sales Engagement.

Features and Product functionality

At a glance, you may observe not so much difference... All three Gong, ECI, and Chorus offer the following:

Visibility into your sales pipeline:

‍Get a single source of truth about all customer conversations and the pipeline and understand which deals are progressing and which ones are at risk.

Identify high-performing sales reps:

‍You can use their talk patterns to build proven coaching programs when you know who your all-stars are.

Track customer sentiment:

‍See how your prospects/customers are reacting to your business, including competitor mentions and feedback on customer experience on calls.

Call recording, transcription, and analytics:‍

Get insights in minutes after your call ends and identify action items and next steps. 

Market intelligence:

Get first-hand insight into the customer's voice, who your customer thinks of as your closest competition, the product features your customers appreciate the most, and more.

Integration with Salesforce:

Map calls between you and your prospects with prospect information in your CRM and associates each call with a single opportunity.

Pricing

No one wants to spend deep into their budget for a solution, but pricing vs value will spice up your decision to select the best CI solution.

Only Einstein Conversation Intelligence shared pricing information, unlike Gong and Chorus, who did not provide this information on their website (like a lot of companies targeting mid-market and enterprise customers). 

However, both Gong and Chorus have a free trial subscription (none indicted for ECI mainly because it is a built-in feature of Salesforce), and on average upon from my deep research, customers are paying $1400/seat/year with Gong, $600/seat/year with ECI or fully $900 fully-fledged Salesforce for HVS and $1200/seat/year with Chorus.

Pricing should not be the only factor to consider when selecting the best CI solution, but rather seamless integration with your CRM application and CTI technology such as PhoneIQ in order to provide the desired value for your sales organization.

Gong and Chorus both provide free demos, and of course, you should ask for an ECI demo if you are already running on Salesforce. It's recommended to take advantage of these demos by asking the sales reps exactly what is included in their annual plans and ensuring there are no "hidden expenses and other costs" (like minimum users, implementation/setup, or training fees).

Final thoughts 

It's no secret that customer-facing conversations are a vital resource for any organization, but without a sales performance platform like conversation intelligence to mine them, it's hard to gain value from these conversations. 

Conversation intelligence technology that can identify these areas and help facilitate targeted and ongoing coaching that is contextual, measurable, and repeated, can be a strategic differentiator for sales leaders as more and more teams work to overcome the ubiquitous Insights-to-Performance Gap.  

If you are looking for a solution to equip your Sales team with Conversation Intelligence insights, then go for either Gong or Chorus. But suppose you need a full-fledged solution with insights and automation to improve Salesforce productivity. In that case, Einstein Conversation Intelligence with Salesforce for High-Velocity Sales will be the obvious option. 

To summarize, conversation intelligence isn't just useful for salespeople. It allows your entire company to benefit from all of the useful information contained in client dialogues. Getting so close to your customers gives you a significant advantage over your competitors. You stay informed about the needs, wants, and concerns of your prospects, buyers, and customers.