Ask a product manager what the sales team is hearing on calls this quarter. They’ll likely provide a version of the same answer, some of it, sometimes, when someone thought to share it.
“I didn’t feel like I had all the information to make the best design decisions,” said Benjamin Humphrey, CEO and co-founder of Dovetail Software, reflecting on his years as a designer at Atlassian.
He was based in Sydney; customer data lived with sales and support teams on the other side of the world.
The CRM Knows the Numbers: It Has No Idea What Was Actually Said
Pipeline data tells you where a deal stands. It does not tell you why a prospect hesitated on a call, which competitor came up three times in the last fortnight, or what objection the sales team has quietly stopped raising because they assume the product already knows about it.
This is the blind spot at the centre of most revenue intelligence conversations. The tools built to serve sales, such as Salesforce, Gong, and their ecosystem, are exceptional at what they do. Structuring commercial data, tracking pipeline movement, enabling sales coaching. What they do not do is translate qualitative signal from those conversations into something a product manager can act on.
Humphrey is honest about the consequence: “A lot of companies talk to buyers and the product champions, but not as many end users.”
What Happens When Sales Calls Actually Feed the Product Roadmap
Dovetail Software’s own revenue team runs on the platform it sells.
Humphrey says: “Our head of sales has a top deals report that he gets sent in Slack, which has information about the deal, but because we’re putting our sales calls in, there are actual transcripts from the conversations with the prospects, so we can touch on what the top objections are, what competitors are coming up, that kind of thing.”
That is a materially different kind of intelligence than a pipeline dashboard offers.
The transcripts are processed, themes are extracted, and the findings surface automatically, not as a document someone has to go looking for, but as a structured feed that product managers can query directly.
A PM wanting to understand why enterprise deals stall at a particular stage can pull that answer from the same platform they use for everything else. No waiting for a sales leader to prepare a readout. No secondhand interpretation.
The Licensing Problem Nobody Talks About
There is a structural reason this kind of cross-functional access rarely happens, and it has nothing to do with goodwill or communication culture.
“Even if the sales team said, ‘I’m going to give everyone access to Salesforce and Gong,'” Humphrey points out, “those two products are a seat-based licensing model. So they’re not going to want to pay for the entire business to have access.”
At a company of five thousand people, the economics of giving a product manager read access to Gong simply do not work.
Dovetail Software’s answer to this is architectural. Rather than asking product teams to live inside sales tools, the platform sits beneath them, ingesting data from Salesforce and Gong, processing it, and making the intelligence accessible to anyone who needs it.
Humphrey describes the goal as creating “the portal, the window into that data for everybody.”
Fragmentation Is a Feature Nobody Asked For
Every department that touches the customer has built its own data stack. Support lives in Zendesk or Intercom. Sales runs through Salesforce and Gong. Marketing has its own layer. Product has another.
Salesforce’s own research found that 70% of data and analytics leaders believe their most valuable insights are locked inside unstructured data, precisely the category that sales calls, support transcripts, and customer interviews fall into.
Humphrey likens the wider problem to what happened with quantitative data a decade ago, before tools like Mixpanel and Snowflake gave data teams the infrastructure to make usage analytics accessible across a business.
“It’s the same sort of thing happening in the world of qualitative data. Tools like Dovetail are democratising access to those insights and allowing all the teams to combine what they have instead of having them fragmented.”
The fragmentation is not accidental. Departmental leaders, Humphrey observes, tend to treat their data as something they own and curate before sharing upward.
“The sales team doesn’t really want to share their calls. The customer success team doesn’t want to share their calls.”
The Intelligence Layer That Changes What a Sales Leader Can Actually See
The case for a customer intelligence layer beneath the sales stack is not about replacing what Salesforce or Gong does. Those tools are doing their jobs well. The gap they cannot fill is the one between a logged call and a product decision, the step where qualitative signal gets processed, themed, and routed to the people building what customers are actually asking for.
Dovetail Software’s integration with Salesforce and Gong is built around exactly this handoff. Sales call transcripts sync automatically and surface as themes inside Channels and Dashboards.
Revenue teams can filter feedback by account tier, contract value, or pipeline stage, so a feature request from a high-value enterprise account carries the context it deserves when it reaches a product manager’s desk.
