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Sales and customer success calls contain detailed information about why deals stall and why accounts churn, but that information is hard to use while it sits in individual recordings. This page covers importing those calls into Dovetail and analyzing them together. There are four steps: import the calls, connect your CRM so revenue context is attached to each contact, use Channels to rank what the calls raise, and configure agents for the recurring reporting. The CRM step is the one most often skipped. Without it, feedback is ranked by how frequently something is mentioned. With it, ranking reflects the revenue represented by the accounts raising each idea.
New to Dovetail? Create a workspace at dovetail.com/signup, then come back to this guide. If your company already uses Dovetail, ask a colleague to invite you instead.

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Get the calls in

A workspace admin creates a Gong source once for the whole workspace and chooses which Gong teams it imports calls from. Users can then add its calls to their channels. Learn more about Sources → Use a channel when you have more calls than anyone can read. In a channel, each call arrives with Gong’s transcript, call brief, and call details, but not the recording. Zoom cloud recordings import into a project. For Teams calls, connect Outlook Calendar with Teams as the video source so recorded meetings land in a project without a user uploading anything. Reps continue running calls the way they do now.

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Connect your CRM

Dovetail knows what was said and who said it. It doesn’t know that the person saying it runs a $400k account and renews in six weeks. That lives in your CRM. A workspace admin connects your CRM once for the whole workspace, as a customer context source (CRM enrichment). It adds details such as company and revenue to your Dovetail contacts, including the customers your calls are linked to. Learn more about customer context sources →

Salesforce Contacts

Map Salesforce contact and account fields onto your Dovetail contacts.

HubSpot Contacts

Map HubSpot contact and associated company properties onto your Dovetail contacts.
Both match CRM records to Dovetail contacts on the Email default contact field, and both pull one way — Dovetail never writes back, so your CRM records are unchanged.
A workspace can connect only one customer context source at a time. Salesforce Contacts and HubSpot Contacts are mutually exclusive, so decide which CRM is your system of record for account data before you start.
Map your CRM’s company name and revenue to the Company (named Company name by default) and Revenue default contact fields, because those are the fields the revenue roll-ups on ideas read. Beyond those, map only the fields you’ll actually filter or segment by, such as plan tier, industry, or renewal date. If a field doesn’t exist in your contacts database yet, you can create it while you map. Keep Daily syncing on — an ARR figure from nine months ago mis-ranks everything downstream.
CRM enrichment updates only contacts that already exist in Dovetail. The Gong source creates contacts from the customers on each call, and speaker identification creates them from recordings in projects. Keep both on, so CRM enrichment has contacts to add revenue to.

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Rank ideas by revenue

Channels 2.0 groups incoming feedback into Ideas, ranked by your business context, how often something comes up, how many accounts are affected, and how much ARR sits behind it. Every idea rolls up its data points, sources, contacts, and total ARR. That roll-up is the whole point of the CRM step. It turns “12 people mentioned SSO” into “12 people across $1.8M of ARR mentioned SSO”, which is an argument product can act on. You can open the Evidence behind an idea to see which accounts are counted in it.
Roll-ups read each linked contact’s Company and Revenue default contact fields. Missing ARR on an idea usually means its evidence isn’t linked to contacts, or your CRM mapping doesn’t fill in those two fields. See Revenue and customer roll-ups on ideas.
Filter the feed by ARR, contacts, intent, or contact fields such as plan or industry, sort it by ARR, and save the combination as a view so each account team returns to its own slice instead of asking you to pull it.

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Ask about specific deals

Chat answers the question you have right now, with citations back to the calls it drew from, so an answer used in a deal review links to the call it came from.
  • “What objections came up most in the deals we lost last quarter?”
  • “What did we promise this account during the sales cycle?”
  • “What are accounts renewing in the next 90 days complaining about?”
  • “Which competitor comes up most in stalled deals?”

Chat in Slack and Teams

Ask the same questions from Slack or Teams, without opening Dovetail.

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Automate the rest

Agents run on a schedule, on a Dovetail event, or from a webhook fired by a Salesforce Flow, and can read and write connected tools during a run. Deal briefs, closed-lost debriefs, renewal risk scans, and competitive digests are all recurring work an agent can own. Because an agent writes to the tools your team already uses, its output arrives where the work happens: a digest posted to a Slack channel, a direct message to the account owner when renewal risk appears, or a Salesforce field updated with competitive context.

Sales prompts

Lead briefings, objection loaders, deal debriefs, stalled deal analysis.

Customer success prompts

Renewal risk, churn digests, health reviews, expansion signals.

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Close the loop

Send an idea to Jira or Linear and the ticket stays linked to the feedback that prompted it, so you can trace a deal-blocking objection through to the change that shipped. When the idea moves to Resolved, use Notify customers to draft an update to the contacts whose feedback drove it. Set up end to end, the workflow produces three things you can bring to a forecast review or a QBR: a ranked view of what is costing revenue with the accounts named, answers that link to the calls they came from, and briefs that reach reps on schedule without a user writing them.