I'd wager very few people have used Gong more than I have. Six years, nearly every single day, first as a rep and then running sales teams.
Over those six years I watched the product change jobs. Gong started out rep-centric: record the call, learn from it, sell better. Somewhere along the way it became an operating system for the whole revenue org, and the value moved to the forecasting and finance side. Incredibly sticky. Great for the CFO. Tell me I'm wrong.
That shift has a name now: revenue intelligence. It's a real category doing a real job. It just isn't the job most of us thought we were buying.
So here's the plain version of revenue intelligence vs. Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™: what each one measures, where each one wins, and why, if making your reps better is the point, you want the second one.
Revenue intelligence tells you what is happening to your pipeline: the forecast, which deals are at risk, which ones will close. Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™ tells you how well each rep actually sold on every call, and coaches them to it. Pipeline truth and behavior truth - you need both, and Elanor Labs is built for the second.
What is revenue intelligence?
Revenue intelligence is software that pulls data from your calls, emails, calendar and CRM to tell you what is happening in your pipeline: how healthy each deal is, which ones are at risk, and what the number will be at the end of the quarter.
Gong, which says it pioneered the category, defines it as technology that "automatically captures customer interactions, analyzes them to provide insights, and applies those learnings to determine the next best action for winning outcomes across an organization's go-to-market strategy" (Gong, updated March 2026). Salesforce puts it shorter: revenue intelligence "uses data and AI to uncover risks and opportunities in deals throughout the sales pipeline" (Salesforce).
In practice, as of October 2026, that means four things:
- Forecasting. Gong Forecast pressure-tests the pipeline with what Gong calls an "AI Revenue Predictor" and rolls up the team's forecast (Gong). Clari Forecast does the same job and kept its name when Clari and Salesloft combined; Clari's old revenue intelligence page now redirects to Salesloft (Salesloft).
- Deal risk. Deal-health scores and stalled-deal alerts; Gong says its product "detects deal risk in real time."
- Pipeline inspection. Deal boards, coverage, pushed and neglected deals.
- Next best action. In April 2026 Clari and Salesloft wired Clari Forecast to Salesloft's execution tools, so a manager can spot a problem in the forecast and fire off a task without leaving the screen (DestinationCRM).
The question revenue intelligence answers is "will this deal close, and will we hit our number?" That's a CRO and CFO question, and it's a good one. Gartner found that only 45% of sales leaders and sellers had high confidence in their organization's forecasting accuracy (Gartner, February 2020). The whole category exists because the Monday forecast call was running on vibes.
Real talk: revenue intelligence is excellent at this job. Gartner now files the platforms that bundle all of it under Revenue Action Orchestration, "the primary system of seller action and a single source of truth for sales interactions," and named Gong a Leader on October 16, 2026 (Gong). That is a long way from "help my rep run a better discovery call."
What is Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™?
Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™ (RBI) is the discipline of measuring the specific behaviors a rep uses on a real sales call and scoring how well they executed them, against a rubric built for that type of meeting. The output is an RBI Score for every call, rep, team and company - think of it as a credit score for sales conversations.
The question it answers isn't "will this deal close?" It's "how well did this person sell, and what should they do differently on the next call?"
Revenue intelligence looks at the deal. RBI looks at the seller. A deal-health score tells you an opportunity is slipping. An RBI Score tells you what the rep did or didn't do in minute twelve, and hands you the clip.
Like a credit score, it's one number with the factors behind it: skills, and the exact timestamped moments that earned or cost points. When a rep asks why they got a 68 and not a 75, the answer is on the recording. No black box.
Revenue intelligence vs. Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™: the difference at a glance
Short version: revenue intelligence is about the pipeline. Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™ is about the people selling into it.
| Revenue intelligence | Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™ | |
|---|---|---|
| Core question | Will this deal close, and will we hit the number? | How well did the rep sell on this call, and what should they do next time? |
| Unit of analysis | The deal and the pipeline | The seller |
| Inputs | CRM fields, email and calendar activity, call transcripts | The full recorded call |
| Primary output | Forecast roll-up, deal-health scores, risk alerts, pipeline boards | An RBI Score per call, rep, team and company, broken into skills and timestamped moments |
| Who it serves | CROs, CFOs and RevOps | Sales managers, enablement and the reps themselves |
| Coaching | Reports on win rate, days to close and deal size; optional scorecards you write (as of October 2026) | Every rep coached on every call within minutes, with short clips of the moments that mattered |
| Forecasting and deal boards | Yes - this is the job | No - keep those where they are |
| Examples (as of October 2026) | Gong Forecast, Clari Forecast (Salesloft), Salesforce Revenue Intelligence | Elanor Labs |
Why you need both: pipeline truth and behavior truth
Here's where I'll disagree with both camps.
The revenue intelligence vendors will tell you coaching is already in the box. Salesforce's own explainer describes it as reporting on win rates, days to close and deal size so managers can coach underperformers (Salesforce). Those are outcome metrics. They show up after the quarter, and they tell you WHO is behind, not what they did on the call.
The behavior-only crowd makes the opposite mistake. Coaching without revenue context is "coaching in a vacuum," as one vendor comparison puts it: a rep can run a textbook call and the deal still dies when the champion leaves (Sybill, May 2026). True.
So you need both truths:
- Pipeline truth - what is happening to the deals. Forecast, risk, coverage. Revenue intelligence owns this.
- Behavior truth - what the humans did in the room that made those deals move or stall. Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™ owns this.
They're layers three and four of the four-layer stack I laid out in why sales needs Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™: the CRM tells you what was logged, conversation intelligence tells you what was said, revenue intelligence tells you what is happening to the pipeline, and RBI tells you which behaviors are creating or destroying revenue. Layer three tells you the deal is at risk. Layer four tells you why.
If all you have is the forecast, you're a weatherman. You can tell everyone it's going to rain. You can't do a thing about it.
Where revenue intelligence still wins
I'm biased, so let me be plain. If your board deck runs off Gong Forecast or Clari Forecast, keep it. If your SDRs live in Gong Engage or Salesloft cadences, keep that. If ops depends on Gong Enrich, keep that too. Elanor doesn't do forecasting, deal boards, sequencing, dialing or data enrichment, and she isn't trying to.
The category is also racing toward agents. On October 27, 2026, Salesloft announced an Agentic Playbook, a meeting-prep agent and real-time battlecards inside Zoom, most of it in early access (GlobeNewswire). Agents doing the admin is awesome for reps. But notice what's missing from that list: a score for how well the rep sold.
If you're weighing the whole platform, read my guide to Gong alternatives. This article is about one narrower job: making your reps better.
Why Elanor is the better choice for making reps better
1. Scoring is the whole product, not a tab on a pipeline platform
Revenue intelligence platforms do have scorecards. In Gong, AI reads the call transcript to answer the scorecard questions you write, sold with Gong Enable and Enable Essentials (Gong Help Center, updated September 13, 2026). Gong's own FAQ adds: "Sometimes, AI produces different outputs for identical inputs. This is expected and normal AI behavior" (Gong Help Center). That's what scoring looks like when it's a feature on a forecasting platform.
For Elanor, scoring is the product. She watches the full call, not just the transcript, and grades the behaviors that create or destroy revenue. The whole thing is built around that one job.
2. A rubric for every meeting type, built with you from your playbook
A deal-health model is trained on your CRM history. A Gong scorecard is trained on whatever questions you thought to type in. Elanor scores an intro call differently from a demo and a demo differently from a close, and we build each rubric with you, from your own playbook. I've run and coached more than 2,500 B2B intro calls over the past decade. You don't have to figure out the questions alone.
3. One number about the seller, not the deal
A deal-health score is about the opportunity. It drops when a champion goes quiet, whether or not your rep did anything differently. An RBI Score is about the rep: one number per rep, team and company that breaks down into skills and timestamped moments. Your CRO still gets the forecast. Your managers finally get a number about the people.
4. Every rep coached on every call, within minutes - including your best ones
Revenue intelligence points managers at the deals that are at risk, so coaching follows the red deals and the bottom of the board. Your top performers, the ones you can least afford to lose, get nothing. Sad but true, and it's one of the main reasons great reps leave.
Elanor coaches everyone, on every call. An hour-long call takes her roughly four minutes; we analyzed 415 hours of video in one week. She cuts short clips of the moments that mattered before a manager would even open the recording. I ran a call recently that felt awesome; within minutes she scored it a 90 and showed me exactly where to take the deal. No more replaying it in my head.
5. Nothing to rip out
Elanor joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet as a notetaker, or ingests the recordings you already have. Scores write back to the CRM (HubSpot is live; see integrations). Keep your forecast tool. Reps keep selling the way they sell; the first new thing they see is their own coaching. Here's how it works.
The lesson
The forecast tells you where the quarter is going. It will never tell you why. Knowing which behaviors are winning and losing deals - and coaching every rep to them, on every call - is the point. Pipeline truth from your revenue intelligence platform. Behavior truth from Elanor.
If your team's calls are already recorded, you're one step away. Reach out. We gotta chat. We'll run Elanor on your own calls and you can see the scores yourself.
Frequently asked questions
Sources: Gong blog: What is revenue intelligence; Salesforce: What is revenue intelligence; Salesloft: Revenue intelligence (formerly Clari); Gong: Revenue forecasting software; Gartner press release, February 12, 2020: forecasting confidence; Gong press release, October 16, 2026: 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration; DestinationCRM, April 15, 2026: Clari + Salesloft connect forecasting to execution; GlobeNewswire, October 27, 2026: Salesloft new AI capabilities; Sybill: Revenue intelligence vs conversation intelligence; Gong Help Center: Gong AI for scoring; Gong Help Center: Automatic review scorecards FAQ. Details reflect public information as of October 30, 2026; vendors' terms may change. Gong, Salesloft, Clari, Salesforce, HubSpot and other product names are trademarks of their respective owners; Elanor Labs is not affiliated with them.