Gong study: 4 in 10 buyers in a buying group stay silent on sales calls

Bigger calls, more silent buyers

Gong Labs, the research arm of the revenue intelligence company Gong, used Gong Revenue AI to analyze more than 120 million sales calls. Hayden Jardine, Director of Marketing Analytics at Gong, wrote up the findings. The headline number: 4 in 10 people in buying groups speak zero words on a sales call.

The share of silent buyers grows with the size of the room. According to Gong, one-third of sales calls with multiple buyers include a silent participant. In calls with 4-6 people, that figure rises to 38%. Jardine argues that a crowded demo is not necessarily a sign of interest, since some attendees may simply be using the call as cover to multitask.

Voices matter more than contacts

The most consequential finding for sales teams concerns win rates. Gong reports that win rates increase by 30% when 4+ people speak up in a deal, compared with deals where only one person ever talks. According to the company, this holds regardless of how many contacts are logged.

Jardine says this challenges the usual view of multi-threading as a numbers game. In his words, a deal with six contacts and one active voice is functionally a single-threaded deal, it just looks better in the CRM. His advice is to stop counting contacts and start counting voices, and to ask before a forecast call how many people on a deal have actually said something.

Seniority and geography shape silence

Gong found that silence follows seniority only partly. Individual contributors have the highest silence ratio at 15%, while VPs have the lowest at 5%. C-suite attendees are an outlier: their silence ratio is 11%, the second highest, and far above the VPs below them.

Jardine links this to a practice attributed to Jeff Bezos, who has said the most senior person in a meeting should speak last so their opinion does not steer or silence others. He suggests sellers should not automatically read executive silence as disengagement, and should put a direct, specific question to them before the call ends.

Country also matters. Japan has the highest silence ratio of any country Gong measured, at 16.5%. Northwestern European and Nordic countries sit at 6.5-8%. Jardine cites an episode from Phil Knight's book Shoe Dog, in which Japanese executives at Onitsuka left the room in silence after a pitch and later returned to grant what Knight had asked for. He ties this to nemawashi, informal consensus-building that happens before anyone speaks in the room.

His conclusion for international sellers is that a single global silence benchmark does not work. Quiet from a Tokyo-based buying committee and quiet from a Stockholm-based one are not the same signal, according to Jardine.

What it means for sellers

The takeaway from Gong is a change in what sales teams track. A dominant champion on a crowded call can feel like broad buy-in while leaving the rest of the buying committee unheard. Jardine recommends treating every attendee as worth knowing: who they are, what they care about and why they made time to attend.

Silent buyers are not necessarily out of the deal, the article says, but sellers cannot tell which ones are engaged until they listen for who is actually talking.