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We suppose you're here because you are evaluating Gong and Chorus. In that case, I assume either you are leading or managing a sales team, or you are managing revenue operations or sales enablement responsibilities at a fast-growing B2B organization.
First of all, you're already doing the right thing by looking for a solution that will help your sales team's performance by analyzing their conversations.
The key difference between Gong and Chorus
It’s the narrative
Sure there are features and product aspects similar and different between the two companies (which we get to further down this page if you're interested). However, the biggest difference is in their narrative.
Both companies were founded in 2015 and have been on a mission to make your sales team more successful through AI. Until 2019, both companies described their offerings as "Conversation Intelligence".
But by the end of 2019, just when everyone thought this new category is now needed for every B2B sales organization, Gong repositioned themselves as a "Revenue Intelligence" solution.
Meanwhile, Chorus is still sticking to its "Conversation Intelligence" positioning.
I'm sure, by this time, you're already wondering about these questions:
- Is Gong's positioning change just wordsmithing? Or is it a bigger change?
- Why is Chorus not building a "Revenue Intelligence" software?
- What's the difference between "Revenue Intelligence" vs "Conversation Intelligence"?
- Which one is better?
If you're also wondering about these questions and feeling confused, don't worry. You're not alone. That's why we have written this article to help you get answers to those questions and get clarity to decide which tool is the best fit for your needs.
Let's first understand what Conversation Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence software are.
What is Conversation Intelligence Software?
A conversation intelligence software typically records, transcribes, and analyzes customer and prospect conversations. The software allows sales reps, account managers, and customer success managers to gain deeper visibility into their conversations and learn how to improve those conversations.
The foundation of these softwares is to record calls and meetings and use artificial intelligence (AI), convert speech into text, and then do more advanced analysis on the raw test. Thus by default, all products featured in this category include call recording and transcription capabilities.
But since email is a key channel for sales conversations, these platforms also analyze email content these days.
Using natural language processing (NLP), these platforms analyze conversations to identify topics discussed, talk patterns, questions asked, customer objections, sentiment, and more.
Using these insights, sales leaders can:
- Get visibility across all conversations to make data-driven coaching recommendations
- Identify the best talk patterns that the team should adopt to increase quota attainment
- Proactively learn issues in deals and accordingly guide the team to improve win rate
- Coach and onboard their team continuously in a lot lesser time
What is Revenue Intelligence Software?
Revenue Intelligence software is an evolution of the Conversation Intelligence movement. With Revenue Intelligence, the scope isn't just limited to analyzing sales and customer conversations but spans across capturing and analyzing marketing activities.
Most B2B organizations face a common pain point – lack of alignment between marketing, sales, and success teams. Furthermore, the misalignment typically extends to a lack of seamless integration between the tools used by marketing, sales, and success tools, thus impacting end-to-end visibility.
Revenue Intelligence software solves this problem by automatically collecting and analyzing data across all your customer-facing teams and making it accessible with actionable insights to other teams. This approach empowers all revenue teams to collaborate and strategize faster on revenue growth initiatives.
Let's look at what data and activities Revenue Intelligence softwares need to track across different teams and what actionable insights it needs to provide to different teams:
Activities to track
Marketing
- Site visits, website interactions, and content downloads
- Marketing email opens, clicks
- Chat on website
Sales
- Cold outbound emails and replies
- Outbound and incoming calls
- Prospect meetings
- Contact profile and engagement
- Deal activity and changes
Success
- Customer emails
- Customer meetings and calls
- Support tickets
- NPS Survey feedback and reviews
Intelligent insights to provide
Marketing
- Gaps in the buyer journey and prospect's common objections
- Which messaging resonates the most with buyers
- Competitive intelligence
- Product/Feature demand intelligence
Sales
- Insights from prospect calls and meetings for talk patterns, topics, and next steps.
- Insights from prospect emails for objections, purchase interest, action items, and more.
- Coaching recommendations for Sales reps
- Deal progression, risks and warnings, and suggestions for next action
- Forecasting predictions
Success
- Insights from customer call and meetings for talk patterns, topics, and next steps.
- Insights from customer emails for bugs, feature requests, action items, and more.
- Coaching recommendations for CSMs
- Upsell opportunities and customer churn warnings
Comparing Gong and Chorus
Having understood what Conversation Intelligence software and Revenue Intelligence software are, let's now look at where Gong and Chorus fit in.
As we mentioned earlier, Gong positions themselves as a 'Revenue Intelligence' software, and we questioned if it's just a wordsmithing or a true Revenue Intelligence software.
Is Gong a true 'Revenue Intelligence' software?
Technically, no. Not yet.
As discussed above, to be truly a Revenue Intelligence software, Gong would also need to track activities from various marketing functions. And that functionality isn’t available today.
It's definitely beyond what we defined as Conversation Intelligence software, as it also tracks the deal progression activities, shows and alerts you on deal risks, and more.
Since they wanted to differentiate from Chorus, they started positioning themselves as a Revenue Intelligence platform, and are definitely headed in that direction.
Smart move by the Gong team! 👌
Is Chorus ‘Revenue Intelligence’ or ‘Conversation Intelligence’ software?
Chorus is similar to Gong. It's neither completely transitioned into a 'Revenue Intelligence' software, nor is it confined to the boundaries of 'Conversation Intelligence.'
Chorus tracks deal progression activities, but it doesn't track marketing activities yet.
That said, Chorus is also headed towards evolving into a 'Revenue Intelligence' software, but unlike Gong, they aren't calling themselves a 'Revenue Intelligence' platform ahead of actually becoming one.
Respect to the Chorus team! 🙌
How to choose between Gong and Chorus
Both companies are market leaders, have raised hundreds of millions of funding, have thousands of customers and glowing reviews on Software review sites, have pretty comparable offerings from a product and functionality perspective.
Given all this, it’s difficult to choose between the two. That’s why we’re here to help.
But before pulling the trigger to choose between two, let’s first understand how to evaluate these tools.
Key factors for evaluation
1. Ease of use
This is arguably one of the most important aspects of the solution, as it will make or break adoption of the platform among your organization.
Questions to consider:
- Is the tool hard to set up and implement? Do you need a dedicated manager to administrate the tool?
- Is there a self-serve option to try it out yourself, or the only option is talk to the sales team, get the training for your end-users and admins?
- Does the tool benefit ongoing basis only to a handful of people, or everyone who is using it?
- Will you see excitement and higher adoption initially when the insights are new, or will it also get used after 90-days once people know what’s their Talk-time ratio, who are common competitor mentions, etc.?
2. Product functionality
This is probably the second most important aspect of evaluating the solution, to check if they offer comprehensive and comparable functionality.
Questions to consider:
- How comprehensive is the product functionality and features?
- What integrations do they support? Do they support natively or via some 3rd party API connectors?
- What functionality is flexible, customizable, etc.?
- What are your needs? Do you need all the bells and whistles?
3. Pricing
This is not the most important aspect of making a purchase decision, but everyone wants to buy an affordable solution, that also is the best of breed. And this becomes difficult when both these vendors do not provide public pricing information on their website.
But based on the information shared on public forums like Reddit, they are pretty expensive as they’re targeting Mid-Market and Enterprise customers. And they only offer Annual agreements and there is no monthly billing option.
Questions to consider:
- Do you really need all those functionalities? Is it an overkill at your stage or not?
- Are you going to pay for something that looks fancy, but you are not going to have time to use it actively, etc.?
- Is there a minimum platform fee, initial implementation or set up fee?
- What about ongoing customer success and training? Is there an extra fee?
- Is the pricing affordable, flexible and fair?
4. Future proof
While today a specific solution might serve your current needs for sales coaching and onboarding, have you considered how this solution will fit in for your future needs.
Questions to consider:
- What will happen after the initial reps are onboarded using this tool? What if you’re not planning to hire more reps continuously as a high-growth organization?
- Will this tool scale to other functions in the organizations if the need arises for the Product, Marketing or Recruiting teams to record and transcribe their meetings?
That said, let's now look at Gong and Chorus specifically.
Evaluating Gong and Chorus: Step by step
The TL;DR version
Chorus positions itself as a Conversational Intelligence platform focusing on building stronger relationships and acquiring unbiased market intelligence, whereas Gong is all about sales coaching and revenue intelligence. Both the tools are appreciated by their customers and are also known for being enterprise-oriented.
1. Ease of use
Both Gong and Chorus are rated highly by their customers. Since both are market leaders with thousands of customers, they have many reviews on G2 platform.
Gong
If you look at their side-by-side comparison on G2, Gong is leading the race with 4.7/5 stars and 2,860 reviews.
Chorus
Whereas Chorus is right behind it with 4.5/5 stars and 2,280 reviews.
What’s missing?
But when you look at G2’s “Easiest to Use” ratings across all segments, both Gong and Chorus are ranked #3 and #6 respectively. As the systems are getting comprehensive, it seems like they’re getting too bloated and complex to use as an enterprise software.
And in fact, Avoma’s conversation intelligence solution was ranked #1 across all segments for how easy it is to use, to set up and administer as well.
2. Product functionality
Gong
Gong primary takes the angle of being a Revenue Intelligence platform to distinguish their sales use cases into three major areas — deal intelligence, market intelligence, people intelligence.
Call recording and analytics: Chorus records calls, transcribes and analyzes your calls so that you get insights from the call in minutes after your call ends. These insights typically tend to be the next steps (action items from the call), competitor mentions, and more.
Deal intelligence refers to having visibility into your sales pipeline where you understand the interactions between your reps and your prospects/customers. It's about being proactive in potential risks and making sure you don't lose a deal from your pipeline.
People intelligence refers to identifying people who are crushing it and identifying patterns as to what's working for them. When you identify that, it becomes easy to build personalized coaching programs.
Market intelligence refers to understanding how customers and prospects are reacting to the business ecosystem you operate in. It could mean tracking competitor mentions on a call (whom they compare your product to), feedback on customer experience, sales and marketing plays and more.
Chorus
Chorus primarily talks about 'conversational intelligence' where the focus is on analyzing conversations to drive teams' performance and build stronger customer relationships.
But on a closer look at the features they talk about, you will realize that Gong and Chorus compete in the same niche (focused on enterprise sales teams).
Call recording and analytics: Chorus records calls, transcribes and analyzes your calls so that you get insights from the call in minutes after your call ends. These insights typically tend to be the next steps (action items from the call), competitor mentions, and more.
Deal visibility: Chorus offers a deal hub where you could get a single source of truth about all customer conversations and the pipeline. It gives you an understanding of the complete context of all calls and conversations from a deal maturity and risk standpoint.
Momentum: This is similar to Gong’s Deal Intelligence functionality, where you’ll know each deal activity and pinpoint exactly what interactions impact deal progression. This is helpful to forecast and find next actionable opportunities.
Market Intelligence: It refers to understanding the first-hand intelligence captured from the calls that give you an insight into the customer's voice, who your customer thinks as your closest competition, what features of your product do customers appreciate the most, etc.
What’s missing?
Note-taking capabilities. Both Gong and Chorus do not offer manual or automated notes as part of their platform.
Now, if you compare them with Avoma — Avoma offers call recording, conversation intelligence as well as deal intelligence (revenue intelligence). In fact, those are table stakes. And in addition, Avoma offers AI assisted note taking capabilities.
Now, that raises the question — Why is note-taking so important?
Let's say you have five sales reps on your team who make 50 calls each per day. And you want to have a quick understanding of what happened on each of those calls.
As much, one might want to think that they would listen to all the recorded calls, it's not practical. And it doesn't make sense to go through the transcriptions of the calls.
That's where notes help. Notes are typically a quick one-pager description of what was discussed on a given call. If you look at Avoma's screenshot below, the left section is a good example of how notes look like.
These are automated notes powered by AI, which also get appended to your CRM. And interestingly, the note taking software also recognizes the need for reps to take manual notes at times and hence augments any notes taken by you to the AI-assisted notes.
As of now, Chorus and Gong don't allow you to take notes (manually or automated) on their platform. Therefore, if you are taking any notes manually or on other note-taking platforms like Evernote, you need to manually update it on the CRM.
Therefore, if your notes aren't in a collaborative workspace, chances are that the notes and insights you gathered can easily be lost or siloed.
3. Pricing
When you visit Gong or Chorus's website — you won't see pricing right off the bat. So, if you want to trial their platform or want a demo, you need to go through a typical enterprise-style form where you will be BANT qualified by an SDR before you even get a glimpse of the product. And it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Gong Pricing
Gong pricing is not public but going by the reviews and discussions on publicly available forums like review sites and social media, it seems like — if you aren't able to commit to a minimum of $5000 - $10,000 per annum as a budget — you would end up wasting your time going through the grind.
Chorus Pricing
Very much like Gong.io's pricing — Chorus' pricing too is not publicly available. Looks like Gong and Chorus are in similar pricing ballpark.
What’s missing?
On an average, it looks like you will be spending $1400/seat/annum with Gong and $1200/seat/annum with Chorus. Ideally suited for enterprises and upper mid-market.
What if you are an SMB or mid-market? What if the platform in its entirety is an overkill compared to your use case?
Both these solutions don’t offer much flexibility, in terms of pricing as well as usage tiers. And most smart SMB players recognize the gap as well as the need:
Avoma recognizes the gap, and offers flexible pricing options. For example, with Avoma — if your sales and customer success teams want to leverage only the note taking and CRM appending capabilities - you could do that. Similarly, if you wanted access to conversation intelligence and not deal intelligence (revenue intelligence), you could do that too.
4. Future proof
Gong and Chorus
Both Gong and Chorus are primarily used for sales coaching, and there’s it’s a great fit if you are a fast growing mid-market or an enterprise who is continuously hiring more sales reps or account executives.
But what if you are not planning to hire beyond a point? What if other functions such as Product, Marketing or Recruiting teams want to leverage the platform to record and transcribe their meetings?
What’s missing?
Both these tools (as of now), aren’t catering to other functions beyond sales and customer success. And even if you wanted to use it for other use cases, their pricing model doesn’t offer enough flexibility for that.
And if you are in the phase, where you want to encourage cross functional collaboration, then you might want to leverage the power of Avoma.
Final verdict
Both Gong and Chorus are great tools. The sheer number of customers and the ratings they have across review platforms is a testimony to that. So, which one should you choose?
- If you are a high growth organization with a strong need for sales coaching (because you hire sales reps and AEs continuously), and if you want to go for a cult brand - go for Gong.
- If you want to make a choice between Gong and Chorus, and technology is the decider - then go for Chorus (we often tend to hear that Chorus has a slight technical edge over Gong).
- If you are looking for ease of use, scalability in terms of use cases and flexibility in pricing, then go for Avoma.
