PMMs today are drowning in conversation tools. Every team has a sea of Gong, Kaia, or Chorus recordings sitting in their backlog, and everyone knows these calls contain real buyer truth. The problem isn’t access. It’s scale. No PMM can listen to 200 hours of calls every month, yet every call contains something valuable — an objection, a pattern, a hesitation, a hidden pain. At Proponent, we analyze large sets of conversations across different companies, and we see the same problem again and again: PMMs want the insight, but not the overwhelm. The real question is how to extract signal without burning hours of your week.

1. You don’t need every call — you need the right five

There’s a misconception that PMMs need to “listen to everything” to stay close to the customer. In reality, most of the insight comes from a small set of calls each week. Teams usually benefit the most from listening to a mix of early-stage qualification calls, high-intent demos, and the occasional closed-lost conversation. These calls reveal the rawest reactions — the confusion, the resistance, the moments where buyers try to fit the product into their workflow. When teams choose calls intentionally, they get a clearer sense of the market pulse without losing entire days to recordings.

These selective calls matter because they carry emotional weight. Buyers often say things like, “I need to see where this fits in my process,” or “This looks good but I don’t know if my team will adopt it,” or “This is exactly what slows us down internally.” These moments tell PMMs far more than a long summary across ten calls. There’s more insight in five thoughtful calls than in fifty random ones — as long as you listen for patterns, not stories.

2. How AI extracts objections, competitors, and messaging patterns in minutes

While listening to calls is helpful, the real leverage comes from using AI to scale the analysis. PMMs today don’t need AI to generate summaries; they need it to extract patterns from hundreds of conversations. When we run call batches through Proponent, the tool surfaces repeated objections, competitor mentions, points of confusion, and the exact buyer phrases that keep showing up. It’s common to see insights like, “Buyers are confused at slide three,” or “Competitor X is mentioned in 60% of late-stage calls,” or “This objection only shows up after price is revealed.” These patterns help PMMs refine messaging and positioning without relying on guesswork.

What AI really does well is highlight consistency. It can show PMMs that “ROI clarity” appears as a late-stage blocker, or that buyers from certain segments repeatedly ask the same clarifying question. PMMs then interpret this within the GTM story. AI brings the raw material to the surface; the PMM adds judgment. It’s a workflow that saves hours and creates alignment faster across Sales, Product, and Marketing.

3. How 200 hours of sales calls become a launch strategy in 2 hours

One of the biggest shifts we’ve seen at Proponent is how PMMs reduce research time without losing insight. Teams often tell us they used to spend days listening to calls before a launch, trying to understand the market’s biggest pains, objections, and expectations. Now, with AI filtering and pattern extraction, a PMM can turn months of conversations into a clear launch direction in under two hours. This happens because the workflow shifts from “consuming calls” to “understanding themes.” Instead of listening linearly, PMMs look at the clusters — what buyers repeatedly say they want, what they consistently push back on, and what actually excites them.

A PMM recently said, “I didn’t need to listen to 200 hours. AI showed me the top five objections, the language customers used most often, and the moments where the pitch fell apart.” That clarity gave her the launch narrative instantly. This is the new reality for PMMs in 2025: with the right workflow, staying close to the customer doesn’t require endless recordings. It requires structured extraction.

Final Thoughts

The goal isn’t to listen to every call. It’s to understand what’s happening across all of them. The PMMs who thrive in 2025 are the ones who combine selective listening with AI-powered pattern recognition. They spend less time reviewing audio and more time shaping the insights into sharper messaging and better GTM strategy. AI does the heavy lifting. The PMM turns it into clarity.

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