Helix vs Gong: Comparing AI-powered sales enablement and skills intelligence

Sales teams have never had more data about customer conversations than they do now. AI-powered platforms can record calls, analyse interactions and help sales leaders understand what is happening across their pipeline, including where sales are falling down and why.

Gong has become one of the best-known platforms in this space. Its revenue AI platform captures and analyses customer interactions, helping sales teams understand deals, improve conversations and ultimately drive revenue. Gong also offers dedicated sales enablement capabilities, including AI-powered call scoring, coaching and roleplay through Gong Enable.

But there is another question sales and enablement leaders increasingly need to answer: how well are our people actually demonstrating the skills they need to succeed?

That's where Helix, 5app’s award-winning AI skills intelligence platform, takes a different approach. As Helix expands into sales enablement and sales effectiveness, it can be used to assess the behaviours that underpin effective selling, from discovery and objection handling to demonstrating value, adapting communication and closing with clear next steps.

So how does Helix compare with Gong?

Helix vs Gong at a glance

Gong is a powerful revenue platform with a growing enablement and coaching offering. Helix is approaching the problem from a different direction: understanding and developing the skills that create better performance. On the surface, they may seem to operate in a similar space, but in reality, they serve different purposes.

What is Helix?

Helix is 5app's AI-powered skills intelligence platform, designed to help organisations see, measure and develop the skills that drive performance. Rather than relying solely on self-assessments, manager observations or occasional performance reviews, Helix analyses real conversations to identify evidence of defined skills.

It can join meetings in Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet as a silent participant, analyse the resulting conversation and evaluate behaviours against an organisation's chosen skills framework.

For sales teams, that means looking beyond whether a call happened or whether a deal progressed and asking how effectively the salesperson actually performed during the interaction based on the skills they demonstrated on the call.

A sales team could, for example, measure sales-specific skills including:

• Intro and value proposition
• Setting expectations
• Objection handling
• Adapting delivery
• Closing effectively

These skills can then become measurable data points rather than subjective skills observations. Instead of simply knowing that one salesperson has a higher win rate than another, sales and enablement leaders can start exploring which behaviours might be contributing to that difference.

What is Gong?

Gong is a revenue intelligence platform designed to help go-to-market teams understand customer interactions, improve sales performance and drive revenue.

Its platform captures and analyses customer interactions including calls, meetings and emails, while connecting those insights to sales workflows, CRM data, deal management and forecasting.

Gong has also developed a substantial sales enablement offering through Gong Enable, as well as an AI call reviewer to automatically score calls against predefined scorecards. Gong also offers an AI trainer, which allows reps to practise customer conversations through AI-powered roleplay based on real interactions captured within Gong.

Gong is a market-leading revenue intelligence platform for a reason, but Helix takes a different route into the same problem.

Sales performance vs sales skills

The biggest distinction between Helix and Gong is arguably what each platform is trying to understand.

Gong is fundamentally interested in the revenue organisation and the customer interactions taking place within it.

That makes it particularly powerful for questions such as:

• What is happening across our pipeline?
• Which deals are at risk?
• Which calls should managers coach?
• What are our customers saying?
• What actions should sales reps take next?

Gong's ability to connect conversation data with deal, pipeline and revenue information is one of its biggest strengths.

Helix asks a slightly different set of questions:

• Which skills does each salesperson demonstrate strongly?
• Which behaviours are common across high performers?
• Where does the team have capability gaps?
• What development would help an individual improve their sales?
• Is learning actually changing behaviour?

In other words, Gong can tell you a great deal about what is happening in your sales conversations. Helix is designed to tell you what those conversations reveal about your people's skills.

How Helix can measure sales skills

Traditional sales coaching often depends on a manager listening to calls and making a judgement. A manager might notice that a rep isn't asking enough discovery questions, struggles when faced with objections or rushes through a product demonstration.

But the problem with this approach is scale. A manager can't realistically listen to every call from every salesperson and consistently evaluate every behaviour.

Gong addresses this challenge with its AI Call Reviewer. Sales teams can create scorecards and have Gong AI suggest answers or automatically score calls against predefined criteria.

Helix follows a similar principle, but places AI skills intelligence at the centre of the process. Rather than treating each evaluation as an isolated call score, Helix can use conversations as ongoing evidence of a person's capabilities.

For example, a sales leader might want to understand a salesperson's performance across:

• Discovery
  Does the salesperson ask effective questions, uncover relevant needs and demonstrate that they understand the customer's situation?
• Objections
  Can they respond constructively to concerns, clarify the underlying issue and adapt their response rather than simply repeating the pitch?
• Demonstration efficacy
  Can they connect product features to customer needs and explain value clearly?
• Adaptability
  Can they adjust their delivery according to the customer's questions, knowledge level and reactions?
• Close with action
  Does the salesperson finish conversations with a clear, appropriate next step?

These aren’t just stages in a sales process – they’re observable skills, and that distinction opens up a much broader approach to sales effectiveness.

Gong's scorecards vs Helix's skills intelligence

This is one of the areas where the two platforms overlap most closely.

Gong's scorecards allow organisations to define structured criteria for evaluating calls. AI Call Reviewer can then suggest answers to scorecard questions or automatically score entire calls, helping managers apply evaluation criteria more consistently at scale. That's a significant advantage for Gong, particularly for organisations that already use Gong as their central sales intelligence platform.

Helix's opportunity is to make the underlying skill, rather than the individual scorecard or call, the central unit of measurement.

A scorecard might tell a manager that a rep scored poorly on discovery during a particular call, whereas a skills intelligence approach can ask:

Is objection handling a recurring development need for this salesperson?

And then:

Has their objection handling skill improved over their next 10, 20 or 50 conversations?

That creates a more continuous view of development.

Instead of simply scoring conversations, organisations can begin building a picture of capability.

From call scoring to continuous skills measurement

This is where Helix can offer a particularly compelling proposition for sales enablement teams.

A single call doesn't necessarily tell you how good someone is at a skill. Perhaps the customer was unusually difficult. Perhaps the call was an atypical use case. Perhaps the salesperson was having an off day.

Repeated observations provide a much richer, more holistic picture that more accurately reflects a salesperson’s skills and behaviours. Helix can turn those observations into longitudinal skills data.

For example, in Helix, you may see skill scores follow this pattern:

Discovery: 62% → 68% → 74% → 81%

Objection handling: 71% → 66% → 73% → 79%

Demonstration efficacy: 84% → 86% → 87% → 88%

Now a sales enablement leader can see more than individual call scores. They can see where skills development is happening, where it has stalled and where additional intervention may be needed.

That creates the potential for a much more measurable development cycle:

Observe → Measure → Develop → Practise → Measure again

With this approach, the sales leader (or salesperson) isn’t getting hung up on a single weak call. Instead, they’re seeing the full picture, and getting incredibly focused insights to help make each salesperson better.

Coaching: identifying the problem is only the beginning

Gong has made significant investment in closing the gap between conversation intelligence and coaching. Its coaching functionality allows managers to identify coachable moments, use AI to score calls and track coaching activity. Gong Enable also provides AI-powered training and roleplay through its AI Trainer.

AI Trainer is particularly notable because it allows salespeople to practise realistic customer conversations using scenarios derived from their organisation's real interactions.

Helix can approach the development loop from the opposite direction. Once Helix identifies a skills gap, those insights can feed into 5app's wider learning and coaching ecosystem, including realistic sales conversation roleplay scenarios with VeeCoach, which is integrated with Helix via a 'Coach me on this' button.

That means the journey can become:

Measure the skill → identify the gap → recommend development → practise → observe the skill again → measure improvement

This is particularly valuable for organisations that don't want sales enablement to stop at a single training course, because the ultimate question is whether the salesperson actually behaves differently after your sales training intervention.

Gong's strength as a sales intelligence platform

A fair comparison needs to acknowledge that Gong is a very mature sales technology platform.

Gong's biggest strengths include its depth of revenue intelligence, its established position within sales organisations, its ability to connect customer interactions with CRM and deal data and its increasingly sophisticated sales engagement and enablement capabilities.

Its broader platform can connect conversation intelligence with:

• Deal and pipeline insights
• Forecasting
• Sales engagement
• CRM workflows
• Call analysis
• Coaching
• Scorecards
• AI roleplay
• Sales training

For a CRO looking for a comprehensive revenue intelligence platform, that's a powerful proposition. Gong also has the advantage of scale and a substantial customer base, with the company currently citing more than 5,000 customers.

Helix isn't trying to beat Gong at being Gong. It's trying to solve a different problem exceptionally well.

Where Helix can go further than Gong

The opportunity for Helix is to make skills intelligence the foundation of sales effectiveness.

Sales performance isn't created by a CRM field, a pipeline stage or a completed training module. It's created by people doing things well.

As Helix expands its sales-specific skills framework, organisations can move towards a more granular understanding of the behaviours that drive effective selling. That means potentially analysing not just what happened in a call, but the underlying capabilities demonstrated by the salesperson.

And because Helix isn't restricted to sales conversations, the same skills intelligence infrastructure can potentially extend across the organisation:

• A salesperson might be assessed on discovery, objection handling and demonstration efficacy.
• A leader could be assessed on change management, strategic vision and adaptability.
• A trainer could be assessed on active listening, growth mindset and communication.

The result is a consistent skills intelligence layer that can span the workforce into areas like leadership development, training and coaching, rather than a platform focused exclusively on revenue interactions.

Helix vs Gong: two different approaches to sales effectiveness

Ultimately, the difference comes down to what you want your technology to understand.

Gong is exceptionally good at understanding revenue conversations and the commercial context around them.

Helix's strength lies in understanding the skills demonstrated within conversations and how those skills develop over time, both in and outside the sales function.

For organisations already invested in Gong, its enablement and coaching capabilities can provide a powerful way to turn conversation data into better sales performance.

But for organisations looking to understand why some people perform better than others, which skills need development and whether those skills are actually improving, Helix offers a different proposition, both within and outside the sales team.

Rather than starting with the deal, the pipeline or the CRM, Helix starts with the person, because better sales performance ultimately comes down to better skills.

Can Helix and Gong work together?

If you're serious about digging deeper than the top line sales figures and understanding the why behind them, combining Helix and Gong for the most comprehensive insights into sales skills and performance would be a smart move.

While Gong can provide a rich understanding of customer interactions, deals and revenue performance, Helix can add another layer of intelligence: what those interactions tell you about the skills of the people leading those sales conversations.

For example, Gong might identify that a particular type of discovery conversation is strongly associated with successful deals.

Helix could then help organisations understand whether their salespeople are consistently demonstrating the skills required to conduct those conversations effectively, and whether targeted development is improving those skills.

That creates a powerful connection between commercial outcomes and human capability.

Which platform should you choose?

It completely depends on your goals.

Gong is a highly capable revenue intelligence platform with increasingly sophisticated sales enablement, coaching and AI training capabilities. It's particularly compelling for organisations that want to connect customer interactions directly with deals, pipeline, forecasting and revenue performance.

Helix is built around a different proposition.

Choose Helix if your priority is:

• Measuring the skills behind sales performance
• Creating a consistent skills framework for sales teams
• Identifying individual and team capability gaps
• Measuring whether development is changing behaviour
• Extending skills intelligence beyond the sales organisation

The future of sales effectiveness relies on analysing and understanding the full picture. Knowing who your top sellers are and how much they're selling is one thing, but understanding how they got there and how the rest of your sales team can improve unlocks a lot more potential for raising sales performance across the board.

When sales enablement can finally connect both the revenue engine and the skills powering it, organisations can move beyond measuring activity and start measuring what really matters: capability, behavioural change and performance.