AI-Enabled Change at Scale for Sales Teams

Well, I'm delighted to be here, everybody. As the team said, I'm Kate Lewis, Chief Product Officer at Richardson Sales Performance, and I'm gonna talk today about AI-enabled change at scale. But before I do that, I wanna set the scene. Something Jill just said there, and it's absolutely right, sometimes this sounds like it might be career limiting for me, but given the audience of today and the fact that I work for a sales training organization, but bear with me. If sales training alone worked, most sales teams would already be transformed. So I'll say that again. If sales training alone worked, most sales teams would already be transformed. And yet everybody on this call, I suspect, has the experience to know, and Jill perhaps has also mentioned this, that we know that that's not what happens, right? We know that often you go into something with great intentions and the result isn't what you were looking for. The key word in that slide, and what I mentioned there, was alone. I'm not saying that sales training isn't valuable. Again, that would be far too career-limiting, I suspect. It's just not the whole story. Yeah, most sellers leave training excited. They have that aha moment. They understand the model. They believe in the approach. But then the Tuesday comes around, and it's back to the day job and quotas, time pressures, old habits return, and that knowledge decays, not because sellers don't care, but under pressure, people revert to what feels familiar. And we know it's challenging to maintain reinforcement, and managers alone certainly can't carry it. And I think that's been a trend very much of late, to think that managers can carry the coaching burden, managers can do that, managers can do the reinforcement, and that's just not the case. That is very much a failure point. But I'm sure that you will all agree on the call today that the goal isn't really training, right? Even though it feels like the obvious answer that, oh, we're going to go and do training. The goal is actually, as Jill suggested, lasting behavior change. Because actually, if you think about it, nobody really buys training. You know, you might get a quote and pricing and a proposal and put out a tender, but you're not building a business case to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on training because it sounds like a good idea and everybody will high-five and love it. You're building that business case to improve your performance of your sales teams through lasting changes in behavior. Yeah, that's what's going to deliver impact. But assuming we all agree that anchoring on behavior change is the right thing to do, we also need to acknowledge that it's certainly not easy. In fact, to use a phrase that I would often say in the UK here, it's bloody hard, right? We're trying to understand where every single seller is in their journey. Now, that's hard enough to do for one seller, right? It's hard enough to do for a manager for a team of sellers, let alone for an enablement team or a senior sales leadership team for an entire group of sellers, trying to understand what they need next, how to keep them engaged, how to make sure they take the right next steps at the right time. Doing that for hundreds or thousands of people is nearly impossible. And so that failure point is repetitive. Every time we embark on something, it fades afterwards. And I like to think of it— now, I've been a sales leader and been in sales and selling myself for about 30 years, so I'm allowed to say this. I know I don't look old enough, but we'll put that to one side. But it's a bit like herding cats, right? I count myself as one of them, because the challenge isn't just that behavior change in isolation, it's coordinating it across hundreds of thousands of different realities. Like each of those sellers is operating in a different environment. They've got different personal time pressures. They're operating in different markets. They've even got different personalities and skill levels. And we're expected to apply a transformation and behavior change journey across the board. So coordinating all of that and delivering that transformation that you've promised when you built your business case with, I suspect, in your organization, decreased budget, Decreased resources, decreased time. No wonder it actually feels like herding cats, and no wonder it's really bloody hard. But I think we have to agree, as Gartner is identifying here, that even if it's hard, doing it matters. Creating that personalization, understanding where every seller is, driving that relevance and resonance to each individual drives that nirvana goal of behaviour change. Deep personalisation should be on your Christmas list. But again, it's really, really hard to achieve at scale. You know, doing it for a very small team, okay, I can do that, I can be that for that person. But doing it at scale is really, really hard. So obviously I've painted a picture of a nightmare. It's very hard, it's very difficult. What can we do about it? Stick with me here. I want to take a moment to just breathe a little. I want you all to, I mean, maybe not close your eyes, but close your eyes and listen to me and listen to the world that I want you to imagine. Feel free, like I said, to close your eyes and relax. Imagine a world where every seller in your organization has their own dedicated version of you or your enablement team or a sales coach enabling them personally, a true 1-to-1 ratio, someone who knew exactly where that seller was on their journey, who knew their strengths, their gaps, how to motivate them. Now imagine that that enabler, let's call them their personal sales enabler, hey, Let's imagine that that enabler knows exactly what that seller should do next, what behavior they should focus on, because they understand where that's dropping, what skill they should practice, not generic guidance, the exact right action for that exact seller scenario. But here's where it gets really interesting. Imagine those enablers aren't operating in isolation, they're connected, they're constantly sharing signals with the rest of the team, the rest of that enablement and coach team. They know what's working, they know what behaviors are sticking, they know where adoption is drifting, they know where their seller is in relation to all of the other sellers and what's working for them. So every seller in that case, is getting guidance from that personal enabler that's constantly improving. In that world, behavior change would be incredibly precise. Every seller gets the right reinforcement after training. They get it at the right moment, and they get it based on the right signals that are personal to them. That would be the dream. Now, I'm a great believer in relevance drives resonance. So everything that we can do to make something personally relevant for a seller means that they've got a much greater chance of that resonating. So you can probably see where I'm going with this in terms of where does AI come in. The challenge was never understanding or agreeing that behavior change was the goal, right? The challenge has always been, okay, we understand that there's a goal, but that's really hard and I don't know how to do that at scale. And that's where AI comes in. When we think about where AI supports that personalized approach, right, that approach that knows where everybody is, knows what they need, know where their gaps are, knows their personality and their motivations, then we can apply AI to support that approach across 5 key phases. So we like to think of it in these 5 key phases. Assess— that's about understanding where to focus. So that personalization of understanding where that individual's gaps are, That activation, making sure that what they are engaged in terms of training is hyper-relevant to them. Yeah, it's personal. They're connecting with it on a deeper level because it relates to the gaps that they actually have as an individual. Then reinforce. We know that that 48-hour window, that immediate aftermath of learning, is a key risk where it drops off, knowledge retention goes out the window. So we need to make sure that that opportunity to practice, embed, and use those new skills they've learned in training is actually available. Sustaining that for the long term. Again, we don't want these skills to tail off. We don't want the pressure to mount and therefore people reverting back to type. And then finally, signal. That ability to continually connect data and see where things are working, where they're not, where there's impact on performance, where we've still got gaps. That's the framework. And once you have that architectural framework defined, AI becomes incredibly powerful as an orchestration layer to make sure that it is continually identifying where focus should go. It is able to personalize the learning, not just to the individual gaps, but actually to the individual scenarios that that person is seeing in their learning, to create practice opportunities at the right time, to sustain that momentum through those nudges and connected connectivity to that individual's goals, and then surfacing those signals back to managers, enablement teams, and the wider orchestration engine to make sure that those are happening at the right time. And importantly, whilst it's handily displayed as a nice linear line for me on a slide, it's not linear. It's a continuous adaptive system that knows where each person is in that process and where they need to funnel next in order to achieve that goal of behaviour change. Now that all sounds conceptually interesting, but I want to bring it to life for you a little bit. So I'd like to introduce you to Amanda. This is Amanda. I'm absolutely certain that you all have an Amanda in your sales teams. Amanda knows the methodology, she's been through the training, she's actually a great seller, right, but when the pressure hits, she tends to default to discounting, right, so she knows everything, she's pretty good at what she does, her manager has no time to coach, they're doing lots of other things, So that defaulting to discounting is showing up more often than she'd like in the moment that matters. So let's apply that AI orchestration, that personal AI enabler that I talked about earlier, and see how that changes for Amanda. So first up, our AI enabler's role here is to diagnose and prioritize. That's that assess part and phase in that architecture and framework. For Amanda, like I said, the issue isn't general capability, it's very specific. She struggles to hold value in the late stage of commercial conversations. In fact, her assessment and the Personal Enabler has identified that proactively assert opening terms is actually a key gap for her, not generic negotiation skill gaps, go learn the whole thing again, but that specific behaviour within the negotiation cycle. So her Trusty Personal Enabler is going to surface that, and it's going to surface it in language and motivation that are linked to what Amanda cares about. So they're saying, I'm going to read this out to you. Amanda, when I look at your recent interactions, the key behaviour to focus on is this. It's not about improving negotiation in general. It's about how you position and anchor value. That's where we'll focus next. So Amanda's immediately connecting to the fact that, okay, there's a gap for me. I absolutely want to lean in there, and I want to improve on that behaviour. Next up is Activate. Now, in Activate, our AI-enabled role here is to customize and contextualize. Remember that phrase I said earlier, relevance drives resonance. Let's make it as real to Amanda as possible. So instead of sending Amanda back through generic training, she gets something much more targeted. Her AI personal enabler kicks in. She knows she needs to focus on proactively assert opening terms, and she's recommended some short digital learning related to that. But really importantly, that learning is actually tailored to her company, the persona she sells to, the types of negotiation objections and the negotiations that she comes up against, with examples of ineffective and effective dialogue that shows Amanda how she can do it. You can see here, I've learned a short targeted learning module. It's going to give you side-by-side examples of ineffective and effective dialogue, so you can clearly see how positioning value more strongly. From the outset. Again, she's resonating with it because it's relevant to her, her scenarios, her persona, the things she's coming up against all the time. And the AI orchestration is serving that up automatically. Once she's learned that, we need the opportunity to allow her to reinforce it. So our AI enabler's role here is actually to coach and accelerate skill development. So the enabler knows she needs to practice as soon as possible after learning to reinforce any new behaviors. So our trusty AI enabler is scheduling her a practice task, a role play, so she's able to practice how she positions her offer at the start of the negotiation and get instant AI-guided coaching and where she's done well in applying that behavior and where there's room for improvement. Remember, we're not wanting her to practice and do that reinforcement directly. With her customers is the opportunity to do that in real time with an AI coach. And her AI enabler knows that and is scheduling that at the right time for the right purpose, just for Amanda, not for everybody, just for Amanda. Next up, we've got sustain. So our AI enabler's role here is to orchestrate ongoing behavior change. Amanda's personal enabler knows there's a big risk that learning degrades over time. Jill mentioned it earlier, it's not sustained. We all know about the forgetting curve and we want to avoid that, so our Trusty Enabler keeps Amanda on track through timely nudges that are relevant not only to where Amanda is in terms of her performance and ongoing skill gaps, but is all aligned to what Amanda wants to achieve. You know, if Amanda wants to get to a promotion or she wants to get to President's Club that year, then all of that's aligned to tap into that personal motivation. Her enabler saying, I'm going to remind you for your next impact item. No noise, just the right nudge at the right moment to keep building step by step and layering in those skill development opportunities. And finally, signal. So our AI enabler's role here is to inform and guide decisions. So this isn't just about Amanda, right? It's also about the wider organization. So the personal trainer here and personal enabler isn't just there to support her. They're also providing insights and signals back into the enablement team, back into the senior leadership team, back into Amanda's manager to enable them to track progress, track impact, look at where they need to intervene on a more organizational or team-wide level, and to apply coaching and alignment to that whole program. And doing that is exactly where AI can be applied in order to help you accelerate and scale that behavior change journey. It's why we built Accelerate Prism, right? Connecting defined behaviors to continuous cycles of reinforcement to embed those prompts into the flow, surface those behavioral signals, and enable that organizational visibility. In fact, Prism takes your priorities, so the selling metrics that you're guided by, the performance gaps of your individual, and it takes that and translates them through AI orchestration, actional performance data from your own systems, the right sales methodology for your organization, that real-world customization that makes it resonate with your sellers, and that applied behavioral science of doing the right thing at the right time to motivate the right individual. And it applies that to that behavior change architecture at the personal level, so it's continually orchestrating all of the right actions to the right person at the right time for the right reason based on their motivations and personality. Because honestly, I've got to accept behavior change is hard. You know, Jill called it out at the beginning. But my perspective, our perspective, and with the advent of AI enabling it, shouldn't be. Now, hopefully I've been able to paint a picture there of how AI can be leveraged to orchestrate a complete program of behavior change in your organization. If you want to find out a bit more, there's a QR code there on the screen. We do have a couple of minutes, hopefully, for some questions, so I'll, I'll open it up.

Thank you so much, Kate. The first question is, does this mean that you assess individuals to help define their personal development plan?

Yeah, absolutely. When you think about how you change behavior, the first thing you need to do is identify the right behaviors for the role that that individual is doing. Not, not like, let's just put all these behaviors across all, all sellers because they're selling behaviors. We want to know that what behaviors actually drive performance in that role. So we start there, role-specific. That's the personalization journey that starts. Each of those individuals then, with their personal set of behaviors, is then assessed against that. And that's a combination of qualitative and quantitative indications and markers across that assessment. And that immediately gives us a picture of where they need to focus because we understand what data is driving and connected to each of those behaviors. So yeah, absolutely, we assess each individual.

It sounds to me the way you describe it is that with all that input you get, from every training moment. The LLM integrates that and captures the best practices and makes it available to everyone, right?

Yeah, absolutely. We use lots of different things. So we have a built-in recommendation engine that feeds all of that, as you talked about there. But we also leverage benchmarking. So, you know, what good looks like for different organizations changes, right? And the makeup of those sellers, the makeup of how experienced those sellers are, different teams. So what we don't want to do is sort of think, well, we've got an entry-level sales team here, let's measure those on the same as our enterprise people who've been doing this for 20 years, right? There's different things. So we, we apply lots of different things like benchmarking to make sure you're evaluated against your peers. And so the recommendation engine and the, the AI orchestration is utilizing all those signals and levers in order to recommend the right behavior to you, as well as looking at your individual performance metrics. To make sure that we're really pinpointing it where you can focus to improve your outputs.

And what are— what is your best practice for making this available to the hiring team to recruit better salespeople that are better equipped?

That's a really good question. Today, we don't put this out to people who, from a hiring perspective, this is very much about identifying within the organization What, what can be coached and developed and trained and then reinforced in the long term. So it's a complete kind of orchestration and ecosystem, but it's within the organization that we operate. That's a good, good point.

I think the, the way you describe it is that you are creating an ongoing improvement engine that makes the salespeople feel 10 Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

As you said, you know, this is—

it's—

you said it's bloody hard to do this. And I just, I love that because as we started it, it is, it is really hard. And sales training, the traditional sales training we've done, that's still important and valuable. And what sales managers do to support their people, that's important, but it really isn't sometimes enough really to support the behavior change. And something like this, can be that tool that all sales managers have to make sure all that work is being done in between the days that we're with them. So, amazing.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the key thing here is to make sure that you don't have points of failure. And it's not on an individual, or whether it's a manager or otherwise, to think, oh, it's on me, I've got loads of other things to do. It's about making sure that there is a plan, an architecture, and that it's continually operating, to your point, Jill, that we're not just reliant on that one person making sure they're following up after a training event. So absolutely.

Yeah. Amazing.

I've got one more final question. How do you deal with, with a failure experience? So let's say a salesperson is working the system and it doesn't work out for some one reason or another that they have some mental block. How do you deal with that?

Gosh, that's a really interesting question. I think, I think having everybody on the same page from a supported architecture perspective is really important. So this isn't just about me understanding that I've got a repetitive failure point. I can't get my head around that proactively assert opening terms as a skill, for example, or a behavior. My manager is also aware of that, so we're completely in step. My enablement team are aware of that. They're seeing whether that's a repetitive trend throughout the organization. So this isn't just about a personal failure point here. This is about having everybody singing to the same hymn sheet and allowing that to identify how I move forward. So it's continually surfacing those signals across the board and making sure that I'm not just left in isolation with that failure point. Ultimately, you know, selling isn't for everybody. So if it's that, then that's fine. But this is all about identifying how we can improve and move that person forward.

Okay. One final, final question, because you have so much knowledge and I want to benefit from that. We talk about sales training, which is to improve individual performance. So what kind of training do you offer to help the team be more cohesive, more collaborative, more proactive, more supportive, and more motivating to be member, a member of a team that is you know, dedicated to win, like in the field of sports, they have line coaches and they have quarterbacks and they have psychology coaches. There's so many factors that help them win as a team. So what kind of team training does Richardson offer?

Yeah, great question. So the way we typically approach it is all of our programs, if you like, even our individual skill modules, has a sort of companion journey that the managers can go on, right? So, it isn't just, and we wouldn't recommend, let's just send the sellers through the sales training and they'll be fine and they'll crack on and even Prism will just do its job. The manager needs to come along that journey and the manager is the glue. They're the power-up that if we can remove some of the burden of like just to-do lists, of you've gotta follow up this with them, they're the people that creates that team dynamic and creates that ability to do like team selling and team support. and kind of driving that motivation as a team. So again, it's about aligning that and making sure that with AI orchestration, you're able to align them on that path so that they are taking the journey together and they're all informed. So that would be my perspective on that.

Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that, Kate. You've been wonderful. We are running out of time.

Thank you very much for having me. It's been a blast. Thank you.

Thank you.