Gong imports accounts, opportunities, leads, contacts and users from Salesforce, with your choice of standard or custom fields. Multi-select, address, location and encrypted fields cannot be imported at all, and opportunities only import for users who have data capture enabled.
What Does Gong Import From Salesforce?
Gong imports accounts, opportunities, leads, contacts and users, and you select which standard or custom fields come across.
One constraint is worth knowing before implementation rather than after: Gong only imports opportunities for users who have data capture enabled. Deals owned by reps outside that group simply will not appear, which presents as a sync problem and is actually a licensing and configuration one.
Which Fields Cannot Be Imported?
This is the detail that most often derails a reporting plan.
| Field type | Imports? |
|---|---|
| Standard and custom simple fields | Yes, you select which |
| Simple reference fields, e.g. AccountId on Contact | Yes |
| Complex references pointing to data tables | Ignored |
| Multi-select | No |
| Address | No |
| Location | No |
| Encrypted | No |
What Permissions Does the Integration User Need?
Gong documents read permissions on Account, Opportunity, Contact, Lead, Opportunity Stage, Opportunity History and Publisher. A Salesforce Dialer integration additionally needs read on Task, and viewing the app inside Salesforce needs read on the Conversation object and its related custom objects.
The integration user needs either a Salesforce license or a Salesforce integration license, with API Enabled in System permissions. Gong recommends defining all of this in a dedicated permission set rather than attaching it to an existing profile, which is sensible: it makes the access auditable and reversible.
What Does This Tell You About the Data Model?
Gong is conversation intelligence. It captures what was said on calls and analyzes it, and the Salesforce integration exists to attach those conversations to the right records.
That shapes what the integration is good at. It reads the CRM to know which account and opportunity a call belongs to. It is not reading Salesforce to model pipeline outcomes, which is why the field restrictions above matter less to Gong's core job than they would to a forecasting product.
The distinction matters when evaluating. See revenue intelligence platforms for how conversation intelligence, pipeline inspection, account intelligence and predictive forecasting differ, since all four get sold under one label.
What Should You Confirm Before Implementation?
Whether your key segmentation fields are multi-select, because those are invisible to Gong. Which users have data capture enabled, since that determines which opportunities exist in the system at all. Whether a dedicated permission set is acceptable to your Salesforce admin. And what the integration user licence adds to your Salesforce bill.
For what the platform itself costs, see Gong pricing.
Why the Multi-Select Restriction Matters
Of the field types Gong cannot import, multi-select causes the most rework, because it is the type Salesforce admins reach for when a record can belong to several categories at once.
Territory, industry, product interest and use case are all commonly built as multi-select picklists. Any of those being invisible to Gong means analysis along that dimension has to be rebuilt on a different field, usually a formula field flattening the multi-select into text.
That is solvable, and it is much cheaper to discover during scoping than after the reporting has been designed.
What Does the Data Capture Requirement Mean in Practice?
Gong only imports opportunities for users who have data capture enabled, which produces a specific and confusing symptom: the pipeline in Gong is smaller than the pipeline in Salesforce, and nothing reports an error.
Before implementation, list which users have data capture and compare that against opportunity ownership. The gap between those two lists is exactly the pipeline that will be missing, and it is a licensing decision rather than a technical one.
How Does This Affect What You Can Measure?
Conversation data attached to a subset of opportunities supports coaching well and pipeline analysis poorly.
If the intent is coaching, partial coverage is fine, because the unit of analysis is the rep and the call. If the intent is measuring how conversation patterns correlate with outcomes across the pipeline, partial coverage introduces a selection effect: the deals you can analyze are the ones owned by reps who were licensed, which is rarely a random sample.
For the wider category question of what conversation intelligence does and does not answer, see revenue intelligence platforms.
What Should You Ask Gong Before Signing?
Four questions that surface implementation cost rather than feature coverage.
Which of our segmentation fields are multi-select, and what is the recommended workaround? The answer determines whether reporting has to be rebuilt.
Which users need data capture for our analysis to be complete, and what does that add to the licence? This is the single largest driver of whether the deployment answers the question it was bought for.
Does the integration user need a full Salesforce licence or an integration licence in our configuration? The two carry different costs and different internal approvals.
What happens to historical conversations if a user's data capture is later disabled? Retention behaviour on de-provisioning is rarely covered in a demo and matters at renewal.
Frequently Asked Questions
What data does Gong import from Salesforce?
Gong imports accounts, opportunities, leads, contacts and users, and you choose which standard or custom fields come across. Opportunities are only imported for users who have data capture enabled, which is a common source of gaps that look like sync failures.
Which Salesforce fields can Gong not import?
Multi-select, address, location and encrypted fields cannot be imported. Simple reference fields may be imported, for example AccountId on Contact, while complex references pointing to data tables are ignored.
What Salesforce permissions does Gong need?
Read permissions on Account, Opportunity, Contact, Lead, Opportunity Stage, Opportunity History and Publisher. A Salesforce Dialer integration also needs read on Task, and viewing the app in Salesforce needs read on the Conversation object and its related custom objects.
Does the Gong integration user need a Salesforce license?
Yes. The integration user needs either a Salesforce license or a Salesforce integration license, with API Enabled set in System permissions. Gong recommends defining the requirements in a dedicated permission set.
Why are some opportunities missing in Gong?
The most common cause is that Gong only imports opportunities for users with data capture enabled. Deals owned by reps outside that group will not appear, which looks like a sync problem but is a licensing and configuration one.
Does Gong write data back to Salesforce?
The integration is configured for both directions, so permissions need to cover data exported to Salesforce as well as data imported from it. Which direction you actually use depends on what you want surfaced in the CRM.
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