Silence is golden, unless it's your buyer

This article is part of the Gong Labs series, where we publish findings from our data research team. We analyze sales conversations and deals using Gong Revenue AI, then use the results to help you win more deals. Subscribe here to read upcoming research.

Let’s face it.

How often do you join a call, hit mute, and quietly multitask for the next 30 minutes?

You're not alone. And more importantly, neither is your buyer.

We analyzed more than 120 million sales calls to find out how often buyers do the exact same thing.

Zero words. Not one.

Here's what we found.

Every seller has had this moment: you land a demo, and the buyer invites their whole team. More people in the room must mean more interest, right?

Not so fast.

The share of silent buyers climbs as the room fills up. One-third of sales calls with multiple buyers feature a silent participant. Get into a 4-6 person room, and that number jumps to 38%.

That "great sign" of a packed call might just be four extra people using your demo as cover to check Slack.

Here's the part that should actually change how you run your deals.

Win rates increase by 30% when 4+ people speak up in a deal, compared with deals where only one person ever talks — regardless of how many contacts are logged.

Multi-threading has always been sold as a numbers game: get more contacts, get more coverage. Our data says that's the wrong scoreboard. A deal with six contacts and one active voice is functionally a single-threaded deal. It just looks better in your CRM.

Here's where to start: Stop counting contacts. Start counting voices. Before your next forecast call, ask yourself how many people on that deal have actually said something, not just shown up.

You'd assume seniority predicts silence in a clean, linear way — ICs stay quiet, VPs take over, and everyone in between talks proportionally to their rank.

Mostly true. ICs have the highest silence ratio at 15%; VPs have the lowest, at just 5%.

But there's an outlier sitting at the top of the org chart. C-suite attendees have the second-highest silence ratio, at 11%, nearly as quiet as individual contributors, and far quieter than the VPs below them.

It tracks with something Jeff Bezos has said about how he runs meetings: the most senior person in the room should talk last, so their opinion doesn't unintentionally steer or silence everyone else's. Executives, it turns out, may already be living by that rule instinctively.

Here's where to start: Don't always read C-suite silence as disengagement. It might be the opposite, a signal they're deliberately holding back so the room can talk freely. Give them a direct, specific question before the call ends. Silence from the most senior person in the room is the easiest signal to misread.

Silence isn't a universal language. In Phil Knight's Shoe Dog, he recounts pitching Japanese executives at Onitsuka on distribution rights for what would eventually become Nike. After his pitch, no one spoke a word, and the executives got up and left the room. Knight assumed he'd lost the deal. Minutes later, they came back and gave him exactly what he asked for.

That silence had a name: nemawashi: informal, behind-the-scenes consensus-building that happens before anyone speaks up in the room.

It shows up clearly in our data. Japan has the highest silence ratio of any country we measured, at 16.5%. On the opposite end, Northwestern European and Nordic countries sit at just 6.5–8%, consistent with flatter, more vocally egalitarian business cultures.

Here's where to start: If you're selling internationally, don't apply a single silence benchmark globally. Quiet in a call with a Tokyo-based buying committee and quiet in a call with a Stockholm-based one are not the same signal. One might mean consensus is already forming behind the scenes; the other might mean you've genuinely lost the room.

The real test of whether you're multi-threaded isn't just how many names are on the account. It's how many of them have actually spoken.

A dominant champion on a crowded call can feel like broad buy-in while quietly boxing you into a single point of view and leaving the rest of the buying committee unheard.

Treat every attendee on your calls as worth knowing: who they are, what they care about, and why they carved out time to be there. The buyers who stay quiet aren't necessarily out. But you won't know which ones are which until you start listening for who's actually talking.