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The Problem with 'Just Listening'
For years, GTM (go-to-market) and sales teams have operated in a black box.
Sales conversations—the most critical source of revenue data—were lost the moment a call ended. Then, conversation intelligence platforms like Gong and Chorus (now part of ZoomInfo) emerged, giving revenue teams a powerful new sense of hearing. These tools provided call recording, transcription, and ai-driven analysis, shining a light on customer interactions and transforming sales coaching.
This first wave was revolutionary. Suddenly, sales leaders could analyze talk time, spot objection handling techniques, and review sales calls to improve rep performance. But an unintended consequence soon followed: data overload. Sales reps and sales managers now had another platform to log into, another set of dashboards to review.
The critical gap remained. Knowing what was said on a call is different from acting on it. Insights were stuck in one platform while the team’s work lived in Salesforce, Slack, and email.
The new challenge for RevOps teams is not just intelligence; it’s execution. The market is now shifting from passive analysis to active orchestration, which is where new AI-native platforms enter the picture.
From Conversation Intelligence to Revenue Orchestration
This category of sales tools has evolved rapidly. Let's clarify the terms:
- Conversation Intelligence (CI): This is the foundational category. These tools automatically record, transcribe, and use artificial intelligence to analyze sales conversations. They are primarily used for sales coaching, performance analysis, and understanding market feedback. Gong and Chorus are the pioneers here.
- Revenue Intelligence (RI): This is a broader term that encompasses CI. A revenue intelligence platform aims to analyze all GTM interactions (calls, emails, meetings) to provide insights into deal health, pipeline visibility, and forecasting. Gong has repositioned itself as an RI platform.
- Revenue Orchestration Platform (ROP): This is the newest evolution, built for the AI sales era. Orchestration platforms do not just analyze conversations; they act on them in real-time. They are built on workflow automation, connecting conversation insights to immediate, automated actions in your tech stack (like updating CRM fields, triggering alerts in Slack, or creating tasks). Momentum is an AI-native revenue orchestration platform.
What people often assume is that these tools are just for call recording and transcription. What they actually deliver is a way to replicate top performers, de-risk your pipeline, and, in the case of orchestration, automate the administrative work that stops sales reps from selling.
The Pain Points of a Disconnected Tech Stack
Even with mature conversation intelligence tools in place, modern revenue teams struggle with significant pain points:
- The Manual Data Entry Nightmare: A sales rep finishes a call with Zoom or Microsoft Teams. An insight is flagged in Gong. The rep must still manually log call summaries, update MEDDPICC fields in Salesforce, and note action items. This administrative burden is a primary driver of poor CRM data hygiene and rep frustration.
- The Insight-to-Action Gap: A sales manager reviews a dashboard on Friday and sees that a key deal is at risk because a competitor was mentioned on Monday. By then, it is too late. The insight was passive. Without real-time alerts tied to a workflow, critical moments are missed, and follow-up is delayed.
- Tool Fatigue and Low Adoption: The average sales rep juggles a CRM, a sales engagement platform (like Outreach or Salesloft), email, Slack, and a CI tool. Reps are busy. They stop logging into the "extra" tools that feel like they are for management. When adoption drops, the ROI of your expensive CI platform plummets.
- Inconsistent Sales Process: Sales leaders spend months on sales enablement and onboarding, training reps on a specific methodology (e.g., MEDDICC). But in the heat of a call, reps forget steps. There is no mechanism to enforce the sales process in real-time or automatically track compliance without manual review.
- Poor Pipeline Visibility: Because data entry is manual and inconsistent, forecasting becomes a guessing game based on outdated CRM data. Sales managers cannot get a clear view of deal health or deal risks until it is too late.
What to Look For (Evaluation Criteria)
When evaluating Gong vs. Chorus vs. Momentum, you are not just comparing features; you are comparing philosophies. Do you need a system of record for analysis, or an engine for action?
Here are seven key criteria to evaluate these platforms for your GTM team.
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Call Recording & Transcription Accuracy
This is the table-stakes foundation. The tool must reliably capture and transcribe customer interactions from your meeting platforms (Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams). Look beyond just recording; assess transcription quality. Some platforms, like Momentum, are AI-native and leverage modern models for high accuracy, though multi-language support may vary. Gong and Chorus are proven leaders in transcription fidelity.
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AI-Powered Insights & Summaries
Capturing speech is easy; understanding intent is hard. This is where AI-powered analysis comes in.
- What it should do: The platform's AI should go beyond raw call transcripts. It should automatically generate concise summaries of what happened, extract key topics (like competitor mentions, pain points, budget), and identify action items.
- Why it matters: Automated AI-generated summaries and note-taking save reps hours of administrative work. This is a key difference: platforms like Momentum were built to provide automated summaries from day one, while older CI tools historically focused on the transcript itself.
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Deal Intelligence & Pipeline Visibility
Your sales calls are the best source of deal intelligence.
- What it should do: The tool should link all conversations to opportunities in your CRM. It should provide a clear view of deal health, engagement levels, and potential risks (like a stalled deal or a single-threaded relationship).
- Why it matters: This moves you from anecdotal forecasting to data-driven forecasting. However, pay attention to where this intelligence lives. Is it in a separate dashboard you have to check (like Gong/Chorus)? Or is it pushed to you in real-time in a tool like Slack (like Momentum's Slack Deal Rooms)?
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Workflow Automation & CRM Integration
This is the most critical differentiator. What happens after an insight is found?
- What it should do: A modern platform must have deep, bi-directional CRM integration (especially with Salesforce and HubSpot). It should not just read data; it should write data. This is true workflow automation: automatically updating CRM fields (like MEDDPICC), logging notes, creating tasks, and triggering alerts across your tech stack.
- Why it matters: Automation solves the "insight-to-action" gap. It eliminates manual data entry, ensures your sales process is followed, and shortens the time to follow-up. Momentum is built around this orchestration, while Gong and Chorus are primarily analytics platforms that require a human (or another tool) to take action.
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Sales Coaching & Team Performance
A core value prop of CI is improving team performance.
- What it should do: The platform should provide metrics on rep performance (talk-to-listen ratios, patience, filler words). It should allow managers to find "coachable moments" (like objection handling) and share best practices.
- Why it matters: This is how you scale your best reps and shorten the onboarding time for new ones. Gong is renowned for its deep sales coaching analytics and scorecards. Momentum's approach embeds coaching insights into the workflow, alerting managers to key moments so they can coach "while deals are still winnable".
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Ease of Use & Adoption
The best sales tools are useless if your team refuses to use them.
- What it should do: The tool should fit into your reps' existing daily workflow with minimal friction.
- Why it matters: Adoption is the biggest challenge for "destination" apps. Gong and Chorus require reps to actively log in to a separate platform. This can lead to adoption fatigue. Momentum is designed for "passive adoption" by living inside the tools reps already use—Slack and the CRM. It surfaces insights and handles tasks in the background, requiring no new habits from the rep.
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Pricing & Scalability
Budget is a major factor.
- What it should do: The vendor should offer clear pricing that can scale with your team, from startups to mid-market to enterprise.
- Why it matters: Premium platforms like Gong and Chorus are significant investments, often costing over $1,200-$1,400 per user, per year, with large base fees and no free trials. This can be prohibitive. Newer platforms like Momentum often offer more transparent, flexible, and affordable pricing (e.g., starting around $69/user/month) and provide a free trial.
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Top Tools/Vendors Breakdown
Here is a 3-way breakdown of Gong, Chorus, and Momentum, based on the criteria above.
1. Gong
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[LEFT]
Best for: Enterprise sales teams that need the deepest conversation analytics and a robust, proven platform for sales coaching at scale.
Pricing: Premium. Does not list public pricing. Reports show it is approximately $1,400 per user, per year, often with a significant base fee (e.g., $5,000) and contract minimums. No free trial is offered.
Key Features:
- Conversation Intelligence: Pioneer in recording and analyzing sales calls for keywords, talk patterns, and sentiment.
- Revenue Intelligence: Expanded platform including Deal Intelligence (Deal Board for risk), People Intelligence (coaching scorecards), and Market Intelligence (trends).
- High-Quality Transcription: Known for high fidelity in call transcription.
- Extensive Ecosystem: Has over 160 integrations, but primarily for collecting data, not for deep, interactive workflow automation.
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Strengths:
- Advanced AI Analytics: Unmatched depth in analyzing conversation data to find patterns, such as what top performers do differently.
- Mature Coaching Tools: The richest feature set for sales managers to run sales enablement programs, build call playlists, and scorecard reps.
- Polished UI: Despite its complexity, users rate its ease of use highly (9.3/10 on G2), though it requires training.
Considerations:
- Lack of Automation: Gong is an analytics platform. It tells you what happened, but it relies on humans to take action. Its Slack/CRM integrations are mostly for notifications, not for writing data or triggering multi-step workflows.
- High Cost & Commitment: It is a significant financial investment suited for enterprise budgets.
- Adoption Risk: It is a "destination tool". Reps must log in to use it, and some teams report it can feel "bloated" or that adoption falls off after the initial novelty.
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[LEFT]
Best for: Core conversation intelligence for mid-market teams, especially those already embedded in the ZoomInfo ecosystem.
Pricing: Opaque. Generally considered 10-15% less expensive than Gong, with estimates around $1,200 per user, per year. It is often bundled "for free" or at a steep discount with larger ZoomInfo data packages.
Key Features:
- Conversation Intelligence: Records and transcribes calls, identifying next steps, objections, and sentiment.
- Multi-Channel Capture: Captures calls, video, and email interactions to create a unified timeline.
- Deal Hub: An interface that aggregates all deal-related interactions for pipeline visibility.
- ZoomInfo Integration: Its key differentiator. It can pull in ZoomInfo data, like new stakeholders joining a target account.
[RIGHT]
Strengths:
- Strong Core Functionality: Covers all the essential CI bases (recording, transcription, analysis) effectively.
- ZoomInfo Synergy: The integration with ZoomInfo's contact data provides valuable context that Gong lacks natively.
- Cost-Effective (if bundled): For existing ZoomInfo customers, it can be the cheapest option.
Considerations:
- Destination Tool: Faces the same adoption challenges as Gong; reps must actively log into the Chorus app to get value.
- Limited Automation: Like Gong, Chorus is an insights platform, not an automation engine. It does not automatically update CRM fields or trigger complex workflows.
- Fewer Integrations: Has a smaller integration library (~45) compared to Gong.
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3. Momentum
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Best for: RevOps teams and sales leaders who want to automate workflows, eliminate manual data entry, and use real-time alerts to drive execution.
Pricing: Transparent and more affordable. A "Business" plan is listed around $69 per user, per month. A free trial is available.
Key Features:
- AI Revenue Orchestration: Its core functionality. It listens to conversations and immediately acts on them.
- Automated CRM Updates: Automatically generates AI-generated call summaries and writes them to Salesforce and HubSpot. It can auto-update specific fields (like MEDDPICC qualifiers, next steps, or competitor mentions).
- Real-Time Slack Workflows: Creates "Slack Deal Rooms" that post summaries and deal health updates in real-time.
- Proactive Signal Detection: Listens for critical signals (e.g., deal risks, churn indicators, competitor names) and automatically triggers workflows, like alerting customer success or a manager.
- Automated Follow-ups: "Spotless Follow-Ups" feature drafts a personalized follow-up email based on the call discussion.
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Strengths:
- Enforces Sales Process: By automatically tracking and updating MEDDPICC fields, it ensures your sales process is followed consistently.
- Solves the "Insight-to-Action" Gap: Momentum is the execution layer. An insight (e.g., "we need legal review") can instantly trigger a task for the rep and an alert to the legal channel.
- Eliminates Manual Data Entry: This is a primary value prop. Reps save 3-10 hours per week on administrative work, which improves CRM data hygiene and rep morale.
- High "Passive" Adoption: Because Momentum works in the background and pushes insights into tools reps already use (Slack, CRM), it requires "no rep adoption" of a new app.
Considerations:
- Not a Just a "Call Library": While recordings are accessible, its philosophy is to extract and disseminate info, not (just) to be a passive library for historical call reviews.
- Language Support: As a newer, AI-native platform, its transcription accuracy is strongest in English, with support for other languages still improving.
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Side-by-Side Feature Summary
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Feature / Capability
Momentum (Revenue Orchestration)
Gong (Revenue Intelligence)
Chorus (Conversation Intelligence)
Core Focus
Automating workflows from conversation insights (calls → actions)
Deep analysis of sales conversations for insights & pipeline signals
Analyzing sales calls to improve rep performance
AI-Generated Summaries
Yes, automatic. Generates concise summaries & notes, shared via Slack/CRM.
Partial. Added as a feature, but platform focus is on transcripts & analytics.
Limited. Provides highlights, but focus is on raw transcripts.
CRM Auto-Updates
Strong. Auto-updates Salesforce/HubSpot fields (e.g., MEDDPICC, next steps).
No. Logs call activity/transcripts, but does not auto-populate structured CRM fields.
No. Logs call activity, but reps must manually update fields.
Workflow Automation
Extensive. Triggers cross-system workflows (e.g., create tasks, alerts) based on AI signals.
Limited. Provides insights and in-app/email alerts; requires humans or other tools to act.
Limited. Focus is on insights; relies on user to act.
Real-Time Alerts
Yes. Proactive Slack alerts for churn signals, competitor mentions, stalled deals.
Partial. Alerts via email or in-Gong dashboard; not as instant or interactive.
Limited. Some in-app notifications.
Adoption Approach
Embedded. Works in the background (Slack/CRM), high "passive" adoption.
Destination Tool. Users must actively log into the Gong app for full value.
Destination Tool. Users must access the Chorus app; adoption can be tied to ZoomInfo use.
Sales Coaching
Has its own Coaching Agent. Identifies coachable moments and alerts managers in real-time; scores calls against methodology.
Robust. Deep scorecards, behavior analysis, call libraries, "People Intelligence".
Solid. Call libraries, rep performance metrics (talk ratio, etc.).
Pricing (Approx.)
~$69/user/month. Transparent. Free trial available.
~$1,400/user/year + base fee. Opaque. No free trial.
~$1,200/user/year. Opaque. Often bundled with ZoomInfo.
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Not a Replacement, but a Critical Advantage
Many GTM teams ask, "Do I choose Momentum or Gong?" The answer depends on your core problem.
Gong and Chorus are powerful systems of record and analysis. They are excellent at helping you understand what happened in the past. Momentum is a system of action and orchestration. It is built to change what happens next.
Momentum does not just replace your tech stack; it makes it better by acting as the connective tissue. Here is how Momentum provides an advantage:
- It Closes the "Insight-to-Action" Gap: When Gong or Chorus flag a deal risk, a human has to see it, log into Salesforce, and take action. When Momentum's AI detects a churn signal or competitor mention, it can immediately and automatically post an alert in a Slack channel, tag the manager, update the opportunity in Salesforce, and create a task for the customer success manager.
- It Eliminates Manual Data Entry: Momentum ends the "I'll update the CRM later" problem. Its AI-powered note-taking auto-generates call summaries and, most importantly, auto-populates structured CRM updates. This means your forecasting is finally based on real-time, accurate CRM data, not on what a rep remembered to type.
- It Meets Reps Where They Work: The biggest failure point of sales tools is adoption. Reps do not want another app. Momentum's Slack-based workflows and automatic CRM updates mean reps get all the benefits (less admin work, timely reminders) without ever having to log into the Momentum platform.
Some organizations even use a hybrid approach: they use Gong for its deep, historical coaching library and Momentum as the execution layer to ensure insights from all tools (including Gong, which Momentum can integrate with) are acted upon instantly.
Which Tool Should You Choose?
It comes down to your primary business challenge:
- Choose Gong if: Your main problem is "We have no idea what's happening in our sales conversations". You have a mature sales enablement function, a large budget, and you need the absolute deepest analytics for sales coaching and performance reviews at scale.
- Choose Chorus if: You want solid, core conversation intelligence and you are already a heavy ZoomInfo customer. It provides 80-90% of Gong's analytical value at a slightly lower cost, especially if bundled.
- Choose Momentum if: Your main problem is "We know what we should do, but we are not doing it consistently or quickly enough". Your pain is manual data entry, poor CRM hygiene, a slow follow-up process, and a sales process that is not being enforced. If your team lives in Slack and Salesforce, Momentum will act as an AI-powered assistant for your entire revenue team.
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Stop Analyzing, Start Orchestrating
Insights are only valuable when you act on them. While other platforms provide a rear-view mirror of your sales calls, Momentum gives you a steering wheel.
Momentum’s AI-driven revenue orchestration platform doesn't just tell you what's happening; it helps you respond and execute, instantly. It unifies your calls, CRM, and Slack into a single, seamless engine for growth.
Ready to see how you can save every rep 10+ hours a week and close the gap between insight and action? Book a demo of Momentum today.
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