How to Set Up Gong Smart Trackers to Monitor Competitor Mentions, Objections, and Message Adoption

For Product Marketing Managers (PMM) and Sales Enablement leaders, sales conversations represent the most unfiltered source of market feedback available. However, manually listening to hundreds of call recordings to audit messaging adoption or track competitive headwinds is impossible. Gong solves this through conversational trackers. Historically known as Smart Trackers and now unified under Gong’s AI Trackers, these machine-learning-driven monitors detect concepts, intent, and conversational context across calls and emails, rather than relying solely on rigid keyword matching.

Setting up trackers effectively requires understanding the distinction between Gong’s tracker types, configuring speaker attribution correctly, and connecting tracker outputs to PMM initiative dashboards and enablement coaching streams.

1. Strategy: Matching Use Cases to Tracker Types

Gong provides three distinct tracking mechanisms. Selecting the right mechanism prevents false positives, eliminates wasted setup time, and optimizes Gong credit consumption.

The Three Tracker Models Explained

1. Keyword Trackers: Scan for explicit, unchanging terms or variants (e.g., "Competitor X", "Legacy Vendor Y"). They activate immediately upon saving and do not consume Gong credits.
2. Pre-built "AI Trackers by Gong": Out-of-the-box models trained across millions of sales interactions for universal concepts such as Pricing, Decision Makers, and Customer Pains. They require zero prompt tuning and consume zero credits.
3. Custom AI Trackers (Smart Trackers): Use natural language question modeling to detect complex intents (e.g., "Did the customer express hesitation regarding implementation timelines?"). These consume Gong credits based on the volume of analyzed calls and emails.

2. Step-by-Step Setup in Gong Admin Center

To create or modify AI Trackers, you need the Manage AI Trackers permission in Gong. Trackers are workspace-specific, so ensure you are operating within the correct workspace before starting.

Step 1: Access AI Tracker Settings

1. Log in to Gong and navigate to the Admin center from the left navigation bar.
2. Under Agent Studio, locate AI Tracker and select Settings.
3. Click the New tracker button in the upper right corner and select AI tracker.

Step 2: Choose Detection Method (Question Builder vs. Free-Text)

Gong provides two ways to define the concept:

• Question builder (Recommended): Guides you through a three-part structured syntax to define intent, surrounding context, and qualifying conditions. Gong auto-populates relevant details, allowing you to swap in your product-specific terminology.
• Free-text question: Allows you to author a direct natural-language question. This option is best for niche industry terminology, proprietary product tiering, or nuanced competitive packaging.

Step 3: Define Speaker Attribution and Context

Speaker filtering is the single most critical setting for data integrity:

• For Message Adoption: Specify that the detection question evaluates what the company representative says (e.g., "Did the sales rep explain our new multi-cloud architecture?").
• For Customer Objections: Restrict the question to what the prospect or customer says (e.g., "Did the customer raise concerns about budget limitations or contract duration?").
• For Competitor Head-to-Head: Allow detection across both speakers, but structure the question to capture customer evaluation (e.g., "Did the customer ask how we compare against [Competitor A] on reporting speed?").

Step 4: Configure Filters and Scope

Refine where the tracker listens to avoid unnecessary credit consumption:

• Channel Scope: Choose between Calls only or Calls and emails. For objection handling and message adoption, calls typically provide the highest-fidelity signal.
• Call Types & Stages: Restrict the tracker to relevant CRM opportunity stages (e.g., Discovery, Solution Presentation, or Negotiation). For example, new messaging rollouts should be tracked primarily on first-round Discovery and Demo calls.
• Teams & Reps: Filter by specific business units, market segments (Enterprise vs. SMB), or regional pods undergoing new enablement rollouts.

Step 5: Preview, Validate, and Publish

1. Click Preview to run the draft tracker against historical calls and emails.
2. Review the resulting transcript snippets and email cards. Confirm that true positives are highlighted and weed out false positives by adjusting the question context.
3. Check the estimated credit usage display.
4. Name the tracker with a standardized taxonomy (e.g., [PMM] Compete - Competitor A, [Enablement] Pitch - Q3 Platform Launch, [Sales] Objection - Budget / Cash Flow).
5. Click Publish.

3. Operationalizing for Product Marketing (PMM)

Once trackers are active, PMM leaders can turn qualitative call chatter into quantitative market data to guide positioning and product roadmaps.

Tracking Messaging Adoption with Initiative Boards

Under Insights > Initiatives, PMMs can build dedicated Initiative Boards to monitor campaign rollouts:

1. Create a new Initiative Board named after your product launch or messaging refresh.
2. Attach up to six AI Trackers representing the core pillars of the new pitch (e.g., ROI Framework, Security Narrative, Workflow Automation).
3. Switch between View by Calls and View by Deals:
   • View by Calls %: Shows the percentage of target calls where reps delivered the new pitch. Use this to track immediate post-training compliance.
   • View by Deals %: Shows whether the message reached the buying committee at least once during the sales cycle.
4. Track the adoption curve across teams over 30, 60, and 90 days. If adoption lags below 40% in week four, enablement can deploy targeted refreshers.

Building Competitive Market Intelligence

• Keyword vs. AI Hybrid Tracking: Pair a Keyword Tracker tracking raw competitor brand names with an AI Tracker identifying deep comparative evaluations. This separates casual name-dropping from genuine competitive risk.
• Win/Loss & Pipeline Correlation: Overlay competitor trackers against CRM opportunity stages in Gong Deals. Measure whether competitor mentions correlate with elongated sales cycles, stalled legal stages, or discounted average selling prices (ASP).
• Closing the Battlecard Loop: Export snippets where competitors were mentioned to identify new counter-arguments used by their sales reps, feed real prospect quotes into your competitive battlecards, and adjust product positioning.

4. Operationalizing for Sales Enablement Leaders

Sales Enablement teams use tracker data to move from reactive deal inspection to proactive, scalable behavior change.

Curating "Best-in-Class" Objection Handling Playlists

1. Navigate to the Call Library and filter for calls where the [Sales] Objection - Pricing Pushback tracker fired.
2. Filter by top-performing reps or closed-won deals.
3. Clip 60- to 90-second snippets where reps successfully reframed value, used mutual action plans, or anchored price to ROI.
4. Add these clips to an Objection Handling Playlist in the Gong Library for peer learning and new-hire onboarding.

Real-Time Intervention via Gong Streams

Enablement and frontline sales managers cannot attend every live call. By creating a Gong Stream:

• Set alert criteria: Trigger when an objection tracker (e.g., Security Hesitation or Competitor Displacement) fires on a late-stage opportunity (Stage 4+ or deals exceeding $50k).
• Route notifications directly to a dedicated Slack channel or manager email.
• Enable managers to review the exact call timestamp and coach reps on deal-saving follow-up strategies before the next touchpoint.

Coaching Scorecards and Deal Reviews

Incorporate tracker data directly into Gong Scorecards:

• Assess whether reps proactively neutralized expected objections or delivered required qualification talk-tracks.
• In weekly 1:1 coaching, compare an individual rep's tracker frequency against top-quartile performers.

5. Governance, Credits, and Best Practices

To ensure long-term data reliability and cost control, maintain the following operational rules:

1. Monitor Credit Consumption: Custom AI Trackers consume Gong credits per analyzed conversation. If your organization exhausts its credits, published AI Trackers pause automatically and require manual republishing once credits are replenished. Keyword Trackers and pre-built "By Gong" trackers remain unaffected.
2. Schedule Seasonal Trackers: Use scheduling settings to apply start and end dates for time-bound initiatives (such as a 60-day product launch campaign) to avoid permanent background credit draw.
3. Avoid Overly Broad Natural Language Questions: Asking "Did the customer like our product?" yields noisy, inconsistent results. Use tightly scoped, behavioral questions such as "Did the customer express concern about the length of onboarding or implementation?"
4. CRM Sync Awareness: Gong automatically exports AI Tracker results to Salesforce conversation records under Content > Trackers with a [Smart] prefix. Coordinate with your CRM administrator to map these fields to opportunity page layouts for cross-functional visibility.

References

• AI Tracker
• Create AI trackers
• Using AI trackers by Gong
• Create keyword trackers
• Create and edit initiative boards
• Create and manage example-based AI trackers