CIOs are split on how best to justify AI investments, according to recent research carried out by Gong, an AI-powered sales technology platform founded in 2015 by Amit Bendov. Lesley Ronaldson, the company's Dublin-based EMEA VP, comments:
We're definitely seeing CIOs struggling with how they bring in AI, and how to measure the value of it. There's also a lack of confidence in their CRMs, and many are finding they are constantly squeezed to do more with less resources.
The survey found that around half of CIOs prioritize increased productivity from their AI investments, while the rest focus on revenue growth as their key success metric. Unsurprisingly, there is growing interest in generative AI, with 54% of tech leaders prioritizing it, 51% prioritizing automation, and 31% prioritizing predictive AI.
Gong now has over 4,000 customers and over 1,000 employees around the world, giving it an insight into how enterprises are using AI in their sales strategies, and the impact on sales cycles. Ronaldson goes on:
Companies that are developing an AI strategy should be looking at where their data is coming in, and then they should be having the kind of measurables that they can focus on. When you add all these things together, optimizing yourself, and lack of confidence in your CRM, the obvious answer is AI, and using AI helps you be productive, predictable and to see around corners, and to do less with more.
Sales departments have traditionally based decision-making on data, says Ronaldson. But she points out that manual data entry into a CRM was not without pitfalls:
An average sales conversation is 6000 words and probably only 1% of that is put into the CRM. Is that accurate? We're seeing a lot of revenue leaders moving away from a manual CRM and using AI to capture objective, customer centric data. I'm not filling in spreadsheets anymore. The AI will now pull out and give the metrics from many sources, calls and emails.
Industry analyst firm Forrester has stated that around 70% of sales teams' work time is spent on non-revenue generating activities, and Ronaldson believes that by giving those teams the right data strategy, it's possible to cut down this unproductive time.
She cites Gong's AMA (Ask Me Anything) feature to illustrate how AI can save time, enabling staff to look at sales cycles, customers and pipelines, and also to figure out why they didn't win a deal, or even what they could do to close one. She says:
We spend a lot of time in deal reviews, talking about why we'd win it because we're this. We would say, 'Well, why wouldn't we win? Have you spoken about the competition?' Gong staff now tell us when we talk about the competition, early in the sales cycle, we close at a higher win rate.
Another tool is Smart Trackers, which looks at data from conversations, emails and calls and puts it into context, so that staff only concentrate on relevant information in the sales process. She adds:
We have to understand how to harness the power of it. You cannot replace salespeople. People buy from people, but what you can do is you can make your sales people use the right data strategy, and you can enable them to have the right engagement, the right level of conversation and sentiment, and to move their deals.
Enterprise sales and buying operations have changed a lot in the past few years. She explains:
Post-COVID, people were being really careful how they spent their money, and as we move into 2025 people are really focusing on existing customers. 'We want you to stay with us, but we also want you to buy more if you're growing,' and, 'We also want you to buy more of our products' if you are a multi-product offering. Those challenges have made us really focus on customers.
Gong's recent research on State of Revenue Growth 2025 found that revenues are currently growing at 29% in companies using AI in sales. For this research it surveyed 617 global leaders, in more than 800 companies, and looked at around 42 million sales interactions across 1.3 million sales opportunities.
Nearly half of those surveyed (48%) are currently using AI, while 24% plan to deploy AI in the next 12 months, and the remaining 27% are not using AI and don't plan to. Among leaders of organizations currently using AI, it found that 47% of are very confident that their sales teams fully understand buyers' and customers' needs, preferences, and buying behaviors, and 62% also said they were more likely to agree that CRM provides the insights needed to gain this understanding.
Top AI uses in sales included email and customer engagement automation, with 63% of sales leaders reporting that their teams use AI, followed by 52% using call summary and analysis, and 42% using automated note-taking and automated data-entry. Ronaldson comments:
In 2024 we saw strategies change, and revenue growth on the rebound,19% up from 11% in 2023. I think people are really focusing on improving and being more efficient, to get their growth, and we're all trying to be cost efficient and also be resilient as well. We're seeing a lot of revenue leaders move to this data strategy, move away from manual CRM and use AI to capture objective, customer centric data.
Sales was always about knowing your customer, and building a relationship with them, but there has always been a mountain of monotonous paperwork around the process. Gong's AI-based revenue intelligence platform seems to give sales teams some powerful tools to deal with all this data, and to improve their understanding of customers and what it will take to seal the deal.
