A call recording platform, like Gong, captures the conversations between a sales rep and a buyer during an online call or meeting. However, these systems have no way to capture competitive intelligence that never came up during those calls. That could include a discount mentioned at a trade show, a tip from a former colleague now selling for the competitor, or even a claim a customer relays via email. Closing that gap takes a system that proactively goes out and asks reps what they know and have heard.
Reps Know More Than What Is Mentioned On Customer Calls
Most RevOps teams already have Gong or Chorus running, and they naturally assume those cover the competitive intelligence problem, but that’s a poor assumption. The assumption is wrong because of where competitive signals actually start. What if a rep hears about a competitor’s new pricing at a user conference, what if they learned it during an in-person pitch, what if they read about it in an industry forum? None of those competitive intelligence learnings reach a recording platform, because they don’t happen inside a recorded call. Even more straightforward, what if a rep knows something and just never brings it up on a call? That knowledge still shapes how that rep handles the next competitive deal, but the intelligence isn’t tracked anywhere RevOps can see or share.
Passive Recording and Active Elicitation Solve Different Problems
A recording platform is built to transcribe and analyze conversations that are naturally already happening. It only sees what got recorded and recorded calls are a fraction of the competitive intelligence realm of sources. Deals with no recording, informal conversations, and anything a rep hears secondhand all sit outside the platform’s reach.
An AI-led interview engine works differently. Instead of waiting for a call to happen and mining it afterward, it runs short, recurring interviews with reps and asks directly what they’ve heard. None of it has to be tied to a specific deal or a specific recorded call. One system listens for whatever signal happens to pass through a microphone, and the other goes and asks for it, on a set cadence, across the whole team, whether or not a recorder was running.
A recording platform will tell you what was said on the calls it captured. It has nothing to say about anything else. This includes the super valuable intelligence sitting in a rep’s head. If competitive intelligence only counts what a recorder happened to catch, most of what reps actually know never gets documented or shared.
The lack of proactive automated elicitation of sales reps is one piece of a larger pattern behind why sales teams lose deals they should win. For the full breakdown, read “Why B2B Sales Teams Lose Deals They Should Win (And How to Fix It),” on the Sedulo blog.