Leveraging Revenue Intelligence to Drive Conversions and Build a Growth Mindset

Growing a stellar sales team involves much more than just gathering a group of people and sticking them on the phone. The best companies engage their salespeople through continuous coaching and learning opportunities that inspire them to excel. As the front line of any brand, salespeople must stay on top of the latest company and product developments and use intelligent and effective tools to share and retain knowledge.

Keeping sales teams on the same page and optimizing their training is especially challenging in a startup environment. When your business is in growth mode and your product is constantly evolving, you need ways to quickly filter through changing information and share it with your team. At Sparrow, we didn’t want training tools to slow us down. As the Chief Revenue Officer, I oversee our 11-member sales and marketing team and have learned to harness technology to get the best from everyone.

Leveling Up with New Technology

Founded in 2019, Sparrow is revolutionizing employee leave management. Whether someone on your team is welcoming a new addition to their family, caring for a loved one, or tending to their own health, Sparrow is the first leave solution to combine seamless automation and expert service to handle every type of leave in the U.S. and Canada. Sparrow makes employee leave stress-free while saving teams and employees 20+ hours of frustration and up to $30k of hard cost savings for each leave we manage. 

I joined Sparrow in 2021 after a decade at a $6 billion publicly traded HR tech company. Even though Sparrow is much earlier-stage, we invest about 3X more in technology than my former employer. Everything moves faster here, and we leverage technology to be nimbler and smarter. I can do more in a six-hour day at Sparrow than I could in 12 hours at my old job. 

That said, there were still many places where Sparrow was stuck in the past. We used to run from meeting to meeting, writing notes by hand and afterward having to decipher what we wrote. Sometimes we would have to schedule follow-up meetings to debrief on an initial meeting or have another make-up session if someone couldn’t attend. It was archaic, and we spent a lot of time dispensing and interpreting information. We are always looking for the best technology to improve collaboration, and there was one solution I’d wanted to try for years: Gong.

I’d long heard about Gong from industry peers. When I joined Sparrow, I was thrilled they were using Gong because of their outstanding platform and stellar word-of-mouth reputation.

A Simplified Training and Onboarding Experience

Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that lets Sparrow capture, transcribe, annotate, and share sales calls. It’s an incredible training tool that tracks topics and keywords, allowing me to see what’s working and what isn’t. Instead of scrubbing and scrolling through an entire call and its transcription, Gong lets me zero in on a specific subject, word, or interaction.

We lean heavily on several features, including call libraries and snippets. Call Libraries are where we collect and categorize certain types of calls that I can then share with my team and new hires for training purposes. Snippets allow us to share specific call sections, whether they’re five seconds or five minutes long. No longer do salespeople have to sit through an entire call to glean a single nugget of wisdom or have endless meetings to relay information. With Gong, we hear everything we need quickly and simply.

I use Gong extensively to train our existing sales team, but I also use it to recruit and onboard new reps and account executives. When I want to engage a high-value job candidate, I send them Gong recordings to give them an idea of our sales process, call format, approach to prospects, and market demand. I want them to know what Sparrow is all about before they decide to join our team.

Once we complete the hiring process, I provide all new sales reps and account executives with a Gong call library of some intro call recordings to get them going. From there, they can leave specific questions or comments within the platform, and we can address them together in detail.

More Time and Better Conversations

Our marketers, sales development reps, and account executives have really taken to Gong. It gives them tremendous insights and is incredibly easy to use, even without training. That level of simplicity was evident from the moment I first set eyes on the platform. Within minutes of creating an account, people can start using it.

We used to waste a lot of time and energy note-taking and confirming information during and after meetings and calls. Now, it’s as easy as opening a call recording by typing in keywords to find what we need. We can share webinars and internal meetings on Gong to keep everyone at Sparrow up to date on the latest information. We can also track who’s accessing recordings to initiate follow-up conversations. There’s no more second-guessing involved. 

Gong has proven helpful with prospects too. Sometimes, we’ll have a great sales call, but a key person was missing from the room. That’s no longer a problem—we can forward them a Gong link so they can review everything that was discussed. This allows us to move to the next step faster instead of repeating our sales pitch. Later down the line, we can clarify any ambiguity by pinpointing the exact moment when all parties agreed to something. You can’t put a price on that.

I don't know how I ever lived without Gong. Even though I've only been using Gong for six months, our win rates are already increasing, and we are recruiting incredible new talent. To me, Gong is a must-have tool. When I think about the time my team and I have saved, I would say that Gong has paid for itself. 

Moving Forward with a Growth Mindset

As we build out more revenue operations in the coming months, I hope to drill down on those win rates and start A/B testing to see which calls and meetings yield higher conversions. 

Over the next year, Sparrow expects to double and triple in size, and knowledge sharing is integral to our growth mindset. Gong drives exponential knowledge sharing and sales enablement. It is far more efficient and scalable than traditional training and empowers everyone from experienced reps to new hires through self-directed and team learning. 

Thanks to Gong, Sparrow’s sales and marketing team leverages technology to have better conversations and work smarter and more effectively. The rest of the company has noticed, and I expect other departments will find ways to use Gong as time goes on. After all, it may be a great sales tool, but Gong can benefit every area of a business.