'Let's buy Gong' is not a strategy
The sentence usually drops during Q4 planning. Win rate is flat, coaching keeps falling short, someone saw a video on LinkedIn. Let’s buy Gong. Decided, budgeted, checked off. Feels like a decision.
It isn’t one. It’s a postponed one.
Because the real questions are exactly as open after the purchase as before. Who listens to the calls? The sales lead has 30 direct reports on the pipeline and doesn’t have four hours a week for call reviews. What happens with what stands out? Is there a coaching format, a rhythm, someone who actually trains objection handling, or does the insight get a quick mention in the weekly and evaporate? Who maintains the trackers, the keywords, the scorecards? Software answers none of this. Software records.
And that’s exactly how it plays out. The tool dutifully captures every call, the library grows to 2,000 recordings, nobody has looked inside since month three. After twelve months the CFO goes through the SaaS list, finds 15,000 euros for a tool with no identifiable user, and cancels. Rightly so. The tool was never the problem. There was just never a process for it to support.
The order that works is unspectacular. First define the process: who reviews how many calls per week, by which criteria, what’s the loop back into the team, who owns it. It fits on one sheet of paper. Then, second step, check what you already pay for. Salesforce and HubSpot now ship call recording and analysis natively, in the editions many companies already run. Not at Gong’s level, true. But for a team of eight sellers with a cleanly defined review process, native is usually plenty. And only once the process stands and the suite demonstrably can’t do what it needs, only then do you buy.
Sounds banal. Still gets done the other way around almost every time, because a purchase feels like progress and a process definition feels like work. The purchase takes a week. The process forces you to settle uncomfortable questions, nail down responsibilities, block time on calendars.
Which is exactly why it’s the only thing that makes the difference.
Which tool in your stack was a postponed process decision like this? You probably know immediately.
