What is Gong? A clear guide to the revenue intelligence platform

You’ve probably heard the term "Revenue Intelligence" floating around, and the name Gong almost always comes up with it. It’s a big name in sales tech, promising to pull back the curtain on what’s really happening in your customer conversations. But for a lot of sales and ops leaders, it’s still a bit of a black box. What does it actually do? Is it right for your team? And is that famously high price tag really worth it?

If that sounds familiar, you’re in the right place. This guide is a straightforward, no-fluff look at Gong. We’ll break down what it is, how it works, where it has some blind spots, and how it compares to more modern AI platforms that are built to take action, not just spit out reports.

So, what is Gong software exactly?

At its heart, Gong is a Revenue Intelligence platform made for B2B sales teams. But let’s be real, "Revenue Intelligence" is a buzzword. What it really means is using AI to record and analyze all your customer-facing chats, calls, emails, video meetings, and turning that messy pile of conversations into something useful.

The main idea is to give you an honest look at your deals. Instead of relying on a sales rep’s gut feeling or some vague notes in the CRM, Gong gives you data. It helps teams figure out which talking points actually lead to a signed contract, lets managers give better coaching, and helps leaders predict revenue with a lot more confidence.

Basically, Gong’s job is to show you what’s happening in your sales conversations, all of them. It’s designed to help your whole team shift from guesswork to working with facts.

The core mechanics for understanding what is Gong

Gong isn’t pulling insights out of thin air; it connects with the communication and sales tools your company already uses. This is how it builds a complete record of every chat your sales team has with prospects and customers. The whole thing happens in three main stages.

Capturing interactions to understand what is Gong

First things first, Gong has to collect the data. It plugs directly into your team’s calendars (like Google Calendar and Outlook) and your video conferencing tools, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. When a sales call is on the books, Gong can automatically hop on as a silent note-taker, recording the audio and video. It’s a hands-off way to make sure no conversation gets missed. It also scans emails tied to your deals to give you the full story.

Using AI analysis to answer what is Gong

Once a call is recorded, the interesting part starts. Gong uploads the recording and transcribes the entire conversation. Then, its AI digs through the text to spot key topics (like when pricing or a competitor comes up), conversation dynamics (like the talk-to-listen ratio), and even the customer’s general vibe. This is the step that turns a long, unstructured conversation into organized data you can actually search and learn from.

Delivering insights: The final piece of what is Gong

Finally, all this analyzed info is presented on dashboards. Sales leaders can log in to see trends across the team, figure out which sales pitches are landing, and find specific moments where they can offer coaching. Reps can go back and listen to their own calls to see where they can improve and learn from the team’s top sellers. To bring it all together, these insights are often sent back to your CRM, like Salesforce, adding some real-world color to your deal records.

What is Gong: A breakdown of its key features

Gong’s platform is built on a few main pillars, each meant to solve a different problem for a sales team. Knowing what they are helps you understand what you’re paying for.

• Deal Intelligence: Think of this as a health check for your pipeline. Gong monitors every deal and flags things that might be risky. For instance, it can warn you if a key decision-maker hasn’t joined a call, if you haven’t heard from a prospect in two weeks, or if your main contact goes silent. It helps teams get ahead of problems instead of just reacting to them.

• Conversation Intelligence: This is the core of Gong. It lets you dig into any recorded call. You can search transcripts for certain words, see when different topics were discussed, and jump right to the moment a prospect brought up a competitor. For managers, this is huge. They can leave time-stamped comments right on the call recording, making feedback specific and easy to act on.

• People Intelligence & Sales Coaching: Gong doesn’t just look at deals; it looks at how your reps are performing. It tracks stats like how much a rep talks versus listens, how many questions they ask, and whether they jump in too quickly. By comparing the habits of your best reps to everyone else, it helps create a data-backed guide to what works. Coaching goes from a subjective "I think you should try…" to an objective "The data shows that…"

• Forecasting: We’ve all sat through those forecast meetings that feel more like wishful thinking. Gong tries to fix that. By looking at the substance of sales calls, like whether solid next steps were agreed upon, it gives you a more realistic picture of the pipeline. This helps leaders build forecasts based on what’s actually happening, not just on what reps hope will happen.

The big question: The cost of what is Gong

This is where it gets a little murky. Gong doesn’t publish its prices online, so you have to talk to their sales team to get a quote. This is a pretty common sign that you’re looking at a premium tool aimed at bigger companies.

From what customers and industry reports say, you should expect a pricing model with a big annual platform fee plus a license for each user. It’s a structure built for established companies and can be way too expensive for startups or smaller teams. Here’s a general idea of the costs:

Component	Estimated Cost	Key Considerations
Annual Platform Fee	$5,000 – $50,000+	A required base fee that usually depends on your company’s size.
Per-User License	$1,400 – $1,600 / year	For every sales rep or manager who needs to record and access calls.
Onboarding & Support	Often an extra cost	You might have to pay more for setup and training.
Contract Terms	Usually annual or multi-year	You’re typically locked in for at least a year, without the flexibility of a monthly plan.

The challenges of what is Gong: What to know before you buy

Gong is a powerful tool, but it’s not perfect. A lot of the issues are things teams only run into after they’ve already signed a long-term contract.

First, it’s not exactly plug-and-play. Getting Gong set up correctly involves connecting it deeply with your other tools and careful configuration. This work usually falls on a dedicated Revenue Operations team. If you don’t have one, you might find you’re only using a fraction of what the platform can do, leaving a lot of money on the table.

Second, Gong is hyper-focused on sales intelligence. That’s great for the sales team, but it creates a knowledge silo. All those valuable insights from customer calls rarely get to customer support, IT, or product teams, where they could be incredibly helpful.

And finally, Gong is great for insights, not so much for action. It’s fantastic at telling you what happened on a call, like pointing out that a customer was frustrated or that a rep missed a buying signal. But that’s where it stops. It doesn’t help you with the work that comes next. It gives you analytics, but it won’t resolve a support ticket or power an internal helpdesk.

While Gong can take weeks of guided setup, modern platforms like eesel AI are built so you can get started on your own. You can connect your help desk, train an AI on your existing knowledge, and go live in minutes, without ever talking to a salesperson.

A more flexible alternative for company-wide AI automation

If Gong’s cost, complexity, and sales-only focus are giving you second thoughts, it’s worth checking out a different approach. eesel AI is designed to tackle these exact problems by focusing on automation that works across your whole business.

From post-call analysis to real-time automation

Here’s the key difference: Gong tells you what happened in past conversations. eesel AI’s agents and copilots take action right now. Instead of just flagging that a customer had an issue, an eesel AI Agent can resolve their support ticket on its own, right inside your helpdesk. It handles triage, drafts replies for human agents to review, and cuts down on the manual work for your whole team.

AI for your entire business, not just sales

Unlike Gong’s sales-focused world, eesel AI is built to be used anywhere. It connects to customer service help desks like Zendesk and Freshdesk, internal chat tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and all your knowledge sources like Confluence and Google Docs. This means you can use one platform to automate support for customer service, IT, HR, and ops, breaking down the silos that tools like Gong can create.

Go live in minutes, not months

eesel AI is designed to be simple. With one-click helpdesk integrations, you can be up and running almost immediately. Its simulation mode is a killer feature that takes the risk out of launching. Before you go live, you can test your AI on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it would have responded. This gives you a clear picture of its performance and how much it will automate.

Transparent pricing that scales with you

Forget about mysterious enterprise contracts. eesel AI has clear, public pricing tiers that are predictable and easy to understand. One big difference is that there are no "per-resolution" fees that many other tools charge. With eesel AI, your costs won’t suddenly spike after a busy month, so you can scale your support without blowing your budget.

So, what is Gong and is it the right tool for you?

So, let’s circle back to the main question. Gong is a very powerful Revenue Intelligence platform. For big sales teams with a dedicated RevOps department and a healthy budget, it can deliver deep insights that are tough to get anywhere else. It’s great at making sales coaching more data-driven and bringing some much-needed reality to forecasting.

But for teams that need more than just analytics, its value gets a bit blurry. If your goal is to automate tasks, reduce manual work, and get instant answers across your entire company, not just in the sales department, then a platform built for action will give you a much faster and more flexible return.

If you want to give your support, IT, and internal teams an AI that actually works for them, see how eesel AI can start automating your workflows today.

Give your team a upper hand by taking the first steps, start a free trial or book a demo today.