Brian LaManna (Gong) explains how he uses Gong’s deal boards and deal intelligence to manage an active sales pipeline. He demonstrates a daily three-step routine: (1) review active opportunities and identify actions to advance each deal using deal heatmaps and risk signals; (2) execute the prioritized “plays” in focused blocks to avoid context switching; (3) time‑block calendar white space for prospecting and top-of-funnel activities. The guidance is practical, workflow-oriented and tied to Gong features (communications heatmap, single-threading risk, call/email summaries).
Chapters
Foreign what is up GONG community? You got Brian Lamana over here from gong, of course, currently a strategic mid market account executive. And what I'm going to highlight today over the next five minutes is how I use gong's deal boards and deal intelligence to actively manage my pipeline and stay on top of every deal with confidence. So the first thing that I do is I go through my active opportunities for the day and I go through them one by one and I simply ask myself the question with bitflow, Forge or Calderon or Creedax, what can I do today to advance this deal in any way, shape or form? Now, what I did prior to having gong, and this will look scarily familiar to a lot of you whether you use Salesforce, HubSpot, any other CRM move. My big head here is I go through these opportunities in this report and I was going through one by one and saying, okay, Burlington Textiles, where am I at with this? When's my next meeting? What should I do? Dickinson Mobile. Oh yeah, like where is the risk in this deal? Have I brought up legal yet or pricing? It's really hard to stay on top of and manage 15, 20, 30 different deals when they all look the same visually, right? There's really no way that, you know, Edge SLA looks the same as Grand Hotels SLA right down here. So why I started doing this out of gong. And what you'll see here is this deal board, this pipeline filter to your name. I'll be Alex Justillo filter to the quarter or month that you want to look at. I'm just looking at this quarter and then it's rolling up my deals either by stages or forecast categories, however you have it set up. Now, what GONG helps me do here, you can see all these funny purple and pink circles are. It's actually a heat map of all my communications, right? So GONG is natively pulling in my web conferencing meetings, my emails, phone calls. It's looking at third party marketing intent as well and it's going to help me understand, hey, for example, if Delphium had no purple and pink circles here, this deal is running cold, right? I'm losing velocity with it. However, my pipeline here looks pretty strong overall, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go one by one and say, hey, bid forward. What can I do today to advance this deal in any way, shape or form? First thing I highlight and I look over is where does GONG think there might be risk in my deals, right? This isn't like a silver bullet that says hey, if there's risk it's not going to close or it's dead. It's kind of like a warning signal on a car that says, hey, pop the hood. You might want to look a little bit deeper here or get in front of some of this. In this case, Gong's telling me, hey, I've actually been stuck single threaded for over 30 days, meaning only one person has been engaging with my emails or joining physical calls looking at those actual communications and I'm actually not at power. I don't even have a director involved and I have this deal still set to close in the next 30 days. So with this example here with bit Forward, I'm going to mark a play for today saying, hey, I've got no next call in the meeting I of the books, right? Gong's looking at my calendar, it's going to tell me, hey, there's nothing scheduled and I'm stuck with Mike, right? So my play for the day might be researching this account and saying who else can I get in touch with? Who can I multi thread, get wider and go higher up in the deal, right? So I'm going to spend some time strategizing on that. Calderon, right, looks pretty strong here. There's a lot of different communications I can always click in as well if I'm like, hey, where did this leave off? It has all of my last emails, even my last calls that are fully summarized all within this view here. So what I'm doing here is I'm spending about 15 to 20 minutes to start the day going through all 26 active ops and I'm simply building out basically a master to do list for the day of saying, hey bitforge need to multi thread it. Calderon need to get a next call on the books. Maybe Credax will pretend this call. I need to prep for this call in advance of my call later this afternoon. Once I build out that master to do list, those are all my plays for the day. The next thing that I do is I go through and I execute all those plays, right? It might be 8am or 8:30. I'm going to hammer out all of those plays in a row, prep for those calls, send those value touches, multi thread, etc. So that I can eliminate context switching and do those things in bulk in chunks. That way I'm prioritizing my active pipeline first and foremost before the day gets super busy and I'm getting blown up with notifications and sleep slacks and emails and I'm behind, right? This is how to start your day on offense. So step one, strategize your plays going one by one by one. Step two, execute all of those plays, send those emails, prep for those calls. And then step three, what I do is I go to my calendar. I have Google Calendar as an example. This can work through office as well. And any white space in my day will pretend like it's Monday. As an example, any white space in my day equals prospecting in my head or white space equals prospecting. So what I do is I time block those open slots and say hey, I'm going to sequence three new accounts or I'm going to do a gifting campaign to six different individuals and I get hyper specific. The more specific you get, the more likely you are to actually follow through and execute on that versus having a three hour block for prospecting which you know once the day gets busy you're behind on emails might ultimately forego. So rest of the day I time block just for that day for prospecting I build in any breaks and then usually I have like an end of day some different follow ups. Excuse this example here that I found online that's clearly not meant for sales in particular, that's how I use gong each and every day to strategize on my active deals, execute my plays and then white space and time block the rest of my day to focus on top of funnel. Now that I've got this current pipeline settled and run effectively.
