Experian recorded a 25 percent lift in win rates after consolidating fragmented sales tools onto a single AI-driven platform — the headline number from four revenue leaders who presented at Gong's Celebrate '26 Executive Showcase in Las Vegas. Their shared method was simple and unfashionable: pick a business problem first, then aim AI at it.

Lisa Dickson (Experian), Marissa Council (Thomson Reuters), Evelina Petrova (Adyen), and Keegan Riley (Snowflake) each described a different bottleneck — consolidation, workflow friction, acquisition messaging, rep retraining. None started with a technology purchase decision.

What did Experian actually change?

Dickson, VP Sales Strategy and Enablement, led her division through two Gong rollouts while it coalesced after four acquisitions. Tools were fragmented, data disconnected, customer context lost in handoffs. She identified three capabilities she needed — coaching, continuity, and signal detection — before consolidating.

"You don't want to implement AI for AI's sake. You have to start with where you're headed, and for us, it was all about driving productivity so we could drive revenue." — Lisa Dickson, VP Sales Strategy and Enablement, Experian

Rather than mandating adoption, her team "opened the door and shared our information," letting other teams join on the strength of the data. The 25 percent win-rate lift came from better-qualified pipeline, effective handoffs, and earlier intervention on renewal risks. Her caveat matters: "AI can't create your strategy, it can only scale your strategy."

How did Thomson Reuters fix rep swivel-chair friction?

Marissa Council, Senior Director of Sales Technology Product Management, inherited a stack with no clear "recipe for success." Reps swiveled between platforms, unsure where to go at each stage of the cycle. Her team defined roles explicitly: Salesforce stayed the system of record; Gong became the centralized system of engagement for deal management, coaching, and daily workflow.

"We partnered to identify the points in our sales cycles where sellers were finding the most friction, where they were swiveling the most. We've had a really fun time centralizing within the Gong platform." — Marissa Council, Thomson Reuters

The reorganization took a year. The measured payoff: high adopters of Gong and Gong Engage see roughly 12 percent higher win rates than low adopters. Within three months, $38 million in pipeline was touched by a Gong flow or Gong Engage, with a 42 percent win rate on that pipeline. Council's framing: "Technology transformation doesn't happen when you install software. It happens when you improve the experience of work."

What can acquisition messaging tell you in 60 days?

In July 2026, Adyen acquired two companies — Orb and Talon — on the same day. Evelina Petrova, VP Revenue Operations, said her team "decided to treat those two acquisitions as product launches," framing them as go-to-market problems requiring fast feedback rather than lagging indicators.

Her team split Gong call data by merchant base versus prospect base and by geography, delivering a full sentiment and positioning analysis to leadership 60 days after close. The analysis surfaced uneven regional engagement, inconsistent terminology, and weaker verticals — gaps that typically take a year to discover. "We could figure it out on day 60 and pivot in a new way so we didn't lose a year," Petrova said.

How does Snowflake retrain reps without a playbook?

Snowflake restructured its sales org around dedicated new-logo acquisition, and reps now demo AI tools live to CROs, CMOs, and CFOs instead of pitching data plumbing to IT. The company raised full-year guidance to over $6 billion, accelerating to 37 percent year-over-year growth from 29 percent last year.

Retraining an entire org to sell new personas in real time required a tight feedback loop, testing messaging deal by deal. "Training and enablement is not a publishing effort," said SVP Keegan Riley. "It's a realtime experiment that you're running, and the only asset that truly compounds is the record of the sales calls and what has landed." His warning: "We are flying the plane while we build it in this AI world… you better make sure you have instrumentation on that team while you're flying it."

What separates AI leaders from AI buyers?

Not one of these leaders started with "let's buy AI." Each began with a named bottleneck, used conversation data to listen, and proved value in numbers rather than mandating adoption. The pattern suggests the question other revenue teams should answer before the next budget cycle: what is the one problem your team has to solve next year? Name it, then aim the technology at it.