You Need to Automate Meeting Participant Capture with Gong June 17, 2023 | 3 min Read

You Need to Automate Meeting Participant Capture with Gong

Table Of Contents

Tip

Machines laugh at people who don’t automate monotonous tasks. Don’t let the machines laugh at you.

Sales reps don’t create contacts.

You know how it goes. You send out a meeting invitation, and someone who wasn’t invited accepts the invitation. One of your contacts obviously forwarded the invitation because they needed this person on the meeting. That’s great.

In a perfect world, you’d fire up Salesforce and create a new contact for this person. But that means you’ll also need to figure out who they actually are based on their email address – which means that you’ll need to open LinkedIn and do some searching.

Let’s be honest.

You’re way too lazy to do that. You tell yourself that you’ll wait until after the meeting since you’ll know who the person is, get their phone number, title, etc. You tell yourself this lie because you really want to be a good soldier and ensure data hygiene is good in Salesforce. The angel on your left shoulder tells you to do it because it’s right. The devil on your left shoulder thinks you should wait.


The fact of the matter is you will never enter this person into Salesforce, and all of your interactions with them will be lost in time. Maybe Customer Success or someone in Finance will do it later if they’re really important, so you choose to live with the little bit of shame because it’s “not that big of a deal.”

Automation with Gong to the rescue!

Tip

Don’t create Leads. Leads only cause pain and chaos.

Any person you create in this scenario should be a Contact. Period. Full stop.

If good how-tos don’t exist, I’ll create one. However, Gong has written a couple of brilliant articles that give you all you need to know about how to automatically create contacts in Salesforce that don’t already exist.

Additional steps you’ll want to take

So, that gets everything setup and contacts are getting created, but in practice, you’ll want to do a few more things to ensure everything is buttoned up.

When the flow creates the contact, be sure to set the Lead Source to something like “Gong Meeting.”

Add Lead Source to the record when you create it.
Add Lead Source to the record when you create it.

Why? You will still likely need to do update the contact record with their name and title. You should create a report that shows you all of the contacts Gong created in the past 7 days. Schedule it to run weekly, and go into Salesforce to update them every week so that the job doesn’t get to be too big.

Report filters with Gong Meeting Lead Source
Create a report to retrieve all contacts created by Gong Meetings in the last 7 days.

Conclusion

This is an immensely powerful and relatively easy way to ensure your contacts are updated regularly. Gong does great work with their Salesforce integration, so please make the most of it.

Header Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

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