From Practice to Performance: The AI Coaching Loop in Action

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Hopefully you can all see my screen and me okay now.

Yes, looks good. Take it away.

Excellent. Thank you. So yeah, exactly. And well, you guys are a tough act to follow. It's some great enthusiasm. Love the energy to start us off here. I'm gonna be talking about Funnel-X and a little bit of a demo as well. Funnel-X is an AI sales roleplay and coaching platform. We specialize in real-time coaching and really creating an environment where we can deliver great coaching in 3 phases: the practice, the live calling, the performance, and the improvement areas. And we're gonna be talking a lot about that today. So what I wanted to cover first is just understanding sort of where we came from. And I think, you know, we were just talking about this a little bit on the panel the other day, like I built this platform, I started this company because I had been in this business for a long time in terms of technology sales, building teams, having started several companies, and we were always looking to how we could build up our reps. How can we build them, you know, from the bottom up as opposed to being top-down driven? We wanted to make our reps better at their jobs, and so we wanted to have the reps have better conversations, and so that's really what you know, we've built Funnel-X for, because when we look at the problem, the fundamental problem we were looking at with training in the past was it was often very periodic, right? Sales teams have sales kickoffs, they have specific times when they'll do training as a group, even role-play, you know, Stephanie was just mentioning that earlier, like there are lots of things we did in sales, we've been doing them for 20 years, right, role-playing and coaching, These things are not new, but now we have the opportunity to actually do them continuously on a regular schedule where we did them very much more limited because of time or expertise in the past. So now we can deliver training, you know, really when it's needed because selling is happening all the time. And so we really need to deliver the opportunity to sales reps to have continuous opportunities to train and do role plays and do coaching in the moments that matter the most. So when we look at enablement, what we're really dealing with here is that enablement creates momentum. You know, we have these sales kickoffs, we have these opportunities to deliver content to our teams, but then execution drifts, execution becomes more difficult over time, people forget things, right, if we don't reinforce them. And so, you can think of this diagram here as a good example of something that is really like the forgetting curve, right? Over time, everyone forgets things that they would otherwise remember if they had reinforcement. And so, what we want to make sure we're doing is constantly reinforcing those messages. And managers really want to do this. Like managers want to coach, but what they're often moved off of because of targets and deadlines and other things that they just got to get done, they don't have the time to spend as much with the reps that they should be spending time with. So that model of that one-to-one manager-coach interaction doing role plays has really become more and more difficult, especially as we look at having more remote teams, sales teams that are all over across the country, all around the world, on different time zones, we want to make sure that we're able to allow sales reps to train when they're ready to train and when they're ready for the opportunity to do that and doing that on their own schedule, because otherwise execution becomes uneven and we want to maintain that momentum and continually reinforce the messaging and the improvement in those conversations and creating that virtuous cycle. What often happens today is that we throw a rep in after training and put them in the ring, you know, we put them with customers live and they're learning on live customers, right? They're learning on those live opportunities that they have, and that's really just inefficient, right? You get so few opportunities sometimes now to talk to customers in person that you really need to make those opportunities last. They need to be part of the key components of what you're doing, and so you need to be able to rehearse them right off the bat. Now, I often get asked about role-playing coaching, and, well, somebody's saying to me, well, my existing reps, they don't need that. They're already comfortable. They're already doing what they're supposed to be doing, but the reality of it is that we really look at 2 very interesting use cases. And they're similar, yet they have nuances to them. There's 2 different kinds of reps. There's the new rep who is ramping up, who maybe is getting the— you know, I often talk about the metaphor of a 3-legged stool. They've got the live coaching as one of those components, kickoffs, live interaction, human involvement. That's certainly one very important leg of that stool. The second leg, you know, you have is the content, right? The things that people are reading about, your case studies, your playbooks, your information that they need. And the third leg, though, is the practice, because you need to put that information into use and be ready so that you have that solid foundation that, you know, yeah, of that 3-legged stool. And that's what a new rep needs. They need that ability to be ready to go into calls, be able to engage with customers in that, in those moments that, you know, where they get in front of a customer. With existing reps, what we're finding more and more is the messaging is changing so rapidly. You know, we talked about the age of AI, things are— the velocity is increasing. So existing reps need to get continually trained and updated on new products, new services, acquisitions, right? How they should be delivering those messages to customers and having the opportunity to practice those key times when they want to go into a big pitch. They wanna be able to practice that ahead of time. And so now the practice component becomes different, yet so much very, you know, so very important to their success. And then the live coaching comes in, giving those reps also key information that maybe they didn't have at their fingertips or they just can't recall in the moment. So really it's about augmentation in that case. And that's why we built the Funnel-X Loop. This is an AI coaching loop, one system for before, during, and after calls that completes that cycle so that you can practice, you can perform, and you can improve. So when I talk about practice, it's role-playing and coaching during those role-plays built from your own ICPs and your own content and your knowledge. And then building that and scoring that based on your own frameworks and scheduling that on a regular basis so that people become very familiar with the role-play activity and doing that. Second is the performance where we're actually, you know, coaching people live on calls with real-time coaching cards at low latency, monitoring conversations and giving them key nudges and information that they would need or coaching tips that they can use. While they're in those calls without disrupting the activity, right? Without disrupting the normal flow of what you would normally be doing on a call, but giving you that key information you need, whether that's for things like objection handling or compliance or other things that might come up on a real call. And then third, finally, is the improvement aspect. And this is where we wanna take all that information from simulations or from live calls and give feedback on those so that people get better over time. We wanna make sure that every time that you're doing one of these, you know, whether it's a simulation or a call, that you're learning from that experience and then you're able to take that away and do better the next time. Now, when we look at Funnel X, what we're trying to achieve here is, you know, combining 3 different things in a way into this one system because we've seen, you know, role-play tools in the past be very good at practice, right? Being able to prepare before a call, improve conversations. And that's been— roleplay has been going on for, you know, years and years, 20-plus years, sure. And then you have conversation intelligence that's happening after the fact, right? You can record a call, you can have someone review the call, you can use AI to review that and then get feedback after the fact on what you could do. But the combination of the 3 things and be able to execute in all different aspects really completes a virtuous cycle of improvement for your reps. So what changes about this when we run this kind of AI coaching loop is that now we're better prepared before calls, right? We have better conversations because we've done them before. There's research on how many conversations you need to have in order to be proficient, and some of that says 20 to 30 calls, right? simulations before you're truly proficient. Well, if you can get proficient much more rapidly by doing some of that during a simulation, you'll be much more ready for the real thing. And then when you go into a call, you can be better in the moment where your coaching is being given in those times when you really need it, in that moment where you're expecting to— maybe you have a moment of a lapse where you need some help. AI can augment you, giving you some key information, help you remember to ask a key question that you need to ask on this call. And then finally, you have the, again, the better the next time, right? Using that evidence from the calls to articulate where you need to specifically focus your attention and how to be better the next time and giving you ideas of how to take that and really apply it in that moment. So I want to do a little bit of a demo now and show you what these 3 aspects look like and make sure— and I'll talk to some of it and then we'll bring it in for questions afterwards and then we'll see how people— how this resonates with people. So here we're starting a simulation in the practice component. Where we're going to run a simulation and select a specific buyer and a pre-selected coaching playbook where we'll start the simulation. This is for an example of a wealth management company where I will be pretending to be a wealth manager on an initial call. You'll also see there are sales discovery questions, which before I run, I can look at and review things I might want to say during my call. And now we'll talk.

Hey, nice to meet you.

Hey, Miles. Yeah. Hi, it's Steven from Meridian, and I appreciate you reaching out to us from the, you know, the form you filled out on our website. I wanted to touch base and see if it's a good time to chat a little about your financial planning needs. So is it great? Is it good to talk now?

Well, I'm glad we could finally connect today to chat about things. I have a few minutes before my next call starts. Things have been busy here with the business, so it's a good time. With a young family and the business growing, my self-directed investing just feels insufficient now. I really need to make sure everything is structured properly for the long term.

Sure, Miles, I hear you. You know, managing that transition from self-directed to something more structured can, you know, it's a pretty common hurdle for business owners. And especially as you, you know, taking a lot of risk and you've spent a lot of time in your business, it's harder to spend the time on self-investing. When you look at your current approach, what's the biggest friction point or specific gap that's costing you the most time or peace of mind right now?

See, I'm just looking for a bit more professional guidance than I've had before. Honestly, the biggest friction is that I don't know if I'm being tax efficient. I'm scaling the business, but I worry I'm missing opportunities to protect my family's future. It's hard to balance those high-stakes decisions when I'm focused on client communication strategies.

Miles, that friction, uh, is totally normal, obviously, between scaling your business and protecting your family's future. That's kind of why we work with a lot of business owners to make sure that You know, they have that right balance.

That's good to hear, but I really need to move beyond just feeling like it's normal. I'd like to see a clear plan for putting cash back into the business while securing personal assets. My main goal is establishing a tax-advantaged structure that lets me take calculated risks without jeopardizing my family. How do you typically approach that kind of planning for business owners?

Well, I definitely handle that by building a custom approach that separates your business capital from your family reserves. We would map out some specific tax-advantaged accounts to protect your assets. How about we arrange some time to go into a bit more of a deep dive? Is there anyone else that you would want to make sure is on that call so that we cover all of your family's needs overall? Like, should your wife be on that call, for example, to make sure we cover her suggestions as well?

That makes sense, and I'll handle the coordination on my end. For now, let's just keep this as a one-on-one session to start. I'd prefer to get a better sense of how you work before involving my wife. Go ahead and send over a calendar invite for sometime next week.

So what you saw there was a snippet of a few different elements of this roleplay. I'm going to quickly jump back to a part of this. So you can see what I was sharing. Great face here. So you can see we were showing you the call goals that you can check off, and hopefully you saw that little confetti when I completed the call goals. You see the transcript, the live coaching that you can utilize in the simulation. That's optional. You can turn it on or off, and you get real-time metrics all the way through your simulation. So all this is intended to build capability and give people the opportunity to, you know, get better on their roleplay. So these videos, as I'm showing you, as you probably gathered from that, I picked out sort of the beginning, middle, end to give you a flavor for how a complete roleplay would look throughout this. So now we'll move in from, you know, from practice into the performance stage where we'll do a live call and you'll see again an example of performance here. What you'll see on this next slide as we go through this is I want you to focus on— obviously, we'll be talking— I'll be talking to Kenny here. You can— you'll see as we go through this, and I'll start it up, that you'll be looking at this Say This and the coaching tips box, and you'll see how it adjusts as we get into conversation and there are things to coach for. Morning, Kenny. How are you doing today?

Good, Stephen. How are you?

Good, thank you. Good. Thanks for taking the time to reach out on our website and fill in that information, and for also then scheduling this call today. Really excited to talk with you. hear about your, you know, your needs, what prompted you to kind of, you know, reach out to Meridian, um, so I can understand your, your motivations.

I guess there's really 2 things. First and foremost, uh, on my end, uh, over the last few months, my wife and I have been looking at our portfolio, if you will, and it sort of came up in a conversation with our friends and they were talking about, you know, their future planning. And, and so when we were thinking about our current advisors, it didn't really Match up. In other words, our current advisors were quite sort of reactive. I feel like we're the ones that are always coming to them and saying, hey, we heard about this, or what about this? And asking questions. And they just kind of seem to be either agreeable or they'll give their point of view, but I don't feel like we should be driving that conversation. They're the experts. And so that's when your name actually came up, Meridian, and someone said, well, these guys are really good at—

No, that definitely, I appreciate you sharing that.

Yeah.

You know, obviously sounds like you're looking for advisors who are, you know, proactive and bring, bring you valuable insights. You know, not just, not just react to you, right? Not just, just reactive. I think the important thing there is that, you know, we understand what you're trying to achieve. So with that in mind, could you share a little about your, some of your, your objectives, some things that you brought maybe to your other advisors or that you're looking to achieve, you know, both, you know, short-term and long-term?

Sure. But, you know, I guess the 2 things, and I'm sure you hear this all the time, one is, you know, we've got 2 kids that are teenagers and, excuse me, in the next year or so, They're going to start the university experience, which is great. We're fortunate that we're in a position to give them that opportunity. But we also know that 2 kids going to university roughly around the same time is going to be a big cash outlay. And so just having a conversation about, you know, what does that look like and where do we, you know, how do we fund that and where do we take the money from and so forth and move things around if need be. So that's sort of one thing that's on our near horizon. 10, 15 years from now, I think we'd both like to be in a position where Either we can start to wind down, we don't have to work, or we can work if we like to, or what does our income requirements be? What does that look like? So, that's sort of a little bit of a short-term and long-term.

Okay.

Yeah, that's great. There's a lot to unpack there. Certainly, when it comes to your planning horizon, it's wise to plan that 10 to 15-year horizon for your financial freedom. But you also mentioned you had some short-term needs like your kids' university education and That can be a big expense for sure. So that transition to a phase where work is optional and not required and then defining your income need, that's a really critical part of comprehensive financial planning. Tell me a bit about sort of that long-term plan. Do you have particular ideas about what that's going to look like?

We've been looking at a second home, sort of a A vacation home, maybe potentially a retirement home, or just having a second home to have a place to go to get away. By all means, that's certainly on the horizon.

Vacations are certainly an important part of enjoying, you know, what you've worked so hard to achieve, right? We want to— right, what we work with you on is balancing, you know, the, you know, the needs, uh, that your, your wants and your desires and with what the, you know, your primary needs. And certainly you've got some short-term and long-term goals. I'd really love to see if we could schedule some time to talk with you and your wife 'Cause it's good to get both persons' perspectives because we put a plan together. We wanna make sure it's obviously aligned with everybody's thinking and everybody's kind of involved in making those decisions. Okay. So as you can see there, you would see the Say This and the coaching tips. All these boxes and these panels are optional. They can be moved around where you like them to be. And there's a lot of other features in the Live Coach that I won't be showing today, but I encourage you to kind of reach out and we'll show some more about that as well. And as we move forward here into the 3rd element, which is the Improve, and here is where we'll start to look at the analytics and we'll look at the history, and you can see that here. So we're looking at both this from the perspective of the simulator or between the calls. You get the same kind of appreciation for the transcripts, the coaching tips, the summaries. The scorecards, you get to track all of the different things that you were given along the way. And you're scored against your framework and your playbook. So you get to feel, you know, get to— an important aspect of this is it's consistent between your scoring, your simulations, or your history. And then you can also talk to an AI coach about your specific call, which will—

Hi, Stephen. I've reviewed your call and have some thoughts to share. What stood out to you most about how that conversation went?

Hey, Alex, I thought it went pretty well, but maybe you could just help me. Give me some examples of where I could maybe better explain our services so I could give them some better background to start with.

It's great you're thinking about how to provide more context upfront. While the call went well, we can definitely enhance how we introduce our services. Remember how Miles mentioned he was looking for professional guidance because his self-directed investing felt insufficient and he was worried about tax efficiency? We can use that as a springboard. Instead of just launching into questions, we could briefly touch on how we help business owners like him structure their finances for growth while ensuring tax efficiency and protecting their family's future. This sets the stage by showing we understand his specific pain points. We can then transition into exploring those needs further. How does that sound as a starting point for introducing our services?

Yeah, it seems like there was an opportunity there. Maybe I didn't quite focus on it enough. Thanks for the advice. And as I was mentioning, you can look at the simulation, the history of either one, and look at your calls and your simulation history. And so you get to track all that within the system and be able to compare how someone's doing both on live calls and how they're doing in terms of their— on their simulations. And then finally here, you can also get reporting. There's a lot of different reports, but you can have managers can look back and look at their entire team, look at individuals, see how they're performing on both simulations and live calls, and see if the simulations are translating over to success on live calls, or if we need to look at those things a little more closely. So that brings me to the last step in the process here, which is that we wanna make sure that we're able to practice the call, make the call, and learn from the call and get better every time. That's really what we're talking about. And I think when I talk about sales, and I mentioned it on the panel I was on the other day, sales is still a relationship business. And so we wanna make sure that we're really making salespeople better at their job and improving their experience. And AI is not there to replace them. It's not there to do that. It's there to make them more efficient, certainly, as we were talking about, and just make the opportunity better for them to really focus on being better at where the human aspects are. And practice is one of those important aspects that we need to do to be better at anything. And we all know that from, you know, going to the gym or getting up shots before a game or getting in the batting cage. All these things are important elements of being better at, you know, the final outcome. So with that in mind, I will turn it over and stop. You can certainly scan there on the screen to book a demo if you'd like, and we can We can kind of do that in person and show you even more if you'd like. And I'll stop sharing now and turn it over to Gerhard to ask me any questions. Stephanie, ask me any questions. And hopefully there's some great, great questions out there too that we can, that we can address.

Yeah, well, Stephen, excellent job here. We do have a question from Trip Braden, and he says, is there a way of scoring this against peer group especially when onboarding new employees?

Yeah, absolutely. So in fact, we do that with our own employees. So when we onboard new people and we put them through simulations, the same thing happens. We score people, we assess them against simulations, and we make sure that they're going better. It's not so much that you're always comparing, you know, A to B or, you know, Joe to Susie, The idea is there that everyone's getting better, but certainly you can make sure that, you know, your team is improving over time, and you can do that through reporting as well. There's a report in there, for example, that actually lays out a 30-60-90 plan. So based on if once you've done a bunch of simulations, you can get a good trend line and then give suggestions on what to do next.

Okay, great. Yeah, I think Tripp says this is Provide a base to better evaluate employee individual needs and performance. So kind of aligning with some of that as well.

Yeah, yeah. We're also partnering with another company on something new that's going to be coming out shortly around sales assessments. So actually working on giving personalized sales coaching based on a sales assessment. So if you're actually going through a sales assessment, the training, instead of being, you know, a role play that everyone can do the same ones, The role plays will automatically adjust for the need of that individual. We're moving— this is the direction we think it's going— moving into this sort of idea of personalized medicine, personalized, you know, coaching for each individual rep.

Is it any assessment, or is it a particular assessment that you're going to be focused on?

We're working with a certain assessment company right now on rolling that out, so for their assessments, but, you know, it could be others. down the road.

Stephen, can you explain a little bit about the feedback? You know, I was impressed by how natural everything was. And how do you help students once they get the feedback to measure that they actually take the advice?

Well, yeah, I mean, you've got the idea there is that the coaching is designed to be evidence-based. One of the things we find is that when, you know, a manager just reviews a call or they sit in on a call, a lot of times what they're thinking of is they're going from their gut feel. They're sort of saying, I feel like, you know, maybe you could have done better in this or could have done better in that. One thing that AI is great at is analyzing the call, the transcripts, and the details and giving evidence to support saying, here's where the opportunity was, here's that moment where the customer said A and you didn't dig deeper and you should have. That's a very hard thing for managers to do consistently because they just can't listen to all the calls, right?

Right.

They just can't be that in-depth in every call. So we think that by giving evidence-based coaching and supporting the managers with that information, the managers can then point to that as well And really hone in on the key area where, you know, they might need help. And salespeople respond better when they can really take an action for a particular item as opposed to a very general, you know, you could have been more energetic, you could have been more, you know, that's hard for salespeople to take to heart.

Can you give us a customer success story?

Sure. Well, we work with one company that's used this. The role play, and we've got a case study out on them that I'd be happy to share for anybody who wants to reach out. They've used this as a warm-up activity. So what they're doing is they're actually putting it into their regular process, like in their schedule, so that in the morning they do a— they have their sales reps doing a few role plays in the morning and then a few in the afternoon. And they've built that into a regular cycle because they're doing a lot of prospecting. And when you're doing a lot of prospecting, you don't always talk to people. All day long. So they don't wanna— they wanna make sure that people are prepared and comfortable when they actually do get somebody on the phone and they talk to them, that they've actually spoken to someone that day, that they've actually warmed up. And so I think that's a really powerful opportunity, and they've had better— when they do get connected, they've had better calls as a result because they're, you know, they're actually prepared to take that on. That's a really good example of one we've used.

Stephanie, you have done a ton of role plays. What is your experience with what is the right length for a role play?

Well, I mean, it really depends on who your audience is, and it depends on what the conversation is that you're going to be practicing. So, it, you know, often doing quick drills are very effective to get repetition, but At some point, you've got to practice a bit of a longer call.

Stephen, what's your sort of rule of thumb for clients? What do you recommend?

Yeah, within our platform, we have— you can select how long you want the simulation to be. So for example, on a cold call, generally they're shorter and you're trying to engage the customer and disrupt them to the point where you can get a meeting, right? That's gonna be a— tend to be a shorter call and with different objectives which are aligned with the playbook. Whereas a discovery call and/or a call that's warmer where someone's put in like the one I was showing you where someone's, you know, made a web request so they're interested, they've just gotta be, you know, warmed up. Those are gonna be a little bit longer. They're gonna be a little more willing to talk. What's interesting, I have had another customer mention that like when they were trying to do them, they wanted to shorter ones because they wanted to be able to do multiple iterations instead of one longer call because they wanted to have a little more— they wanted more reps instead of a longer call. So that's when we introduced, you know, that was a little while ago, we introduced that call timing so that they could choose how long they wanted them to be.

Yeah, I would imagine if it gets too long that it becomes overwhelming or the advice is gonna be so voluminous that people don't know how to prioritize their behavior change.

Yeah, for sure. And that's why in the feedback, we, we always focus on the top 3. You know, we try not, we don't try not to give people, you know, I think that's one of the challenges of AI as, as Stephanie kind of alluded to earlier in her earlier comments was, you know, you can get too much information. And then you don't, you know, then what does the human do with that, right? You wanna make sure that you're giving pointed evidence-based advice to people that they can actually action that isn't so, you know, too much volume is just, is not useful, right?

Yeah.

You really have to just make it very pointed. And that's why even our coaching is very much, you know, a little nudge, a sentence or two. It's not there to, like, read a paragraph because nobody can absorb that in the right amount of time. They need to be given those pointed clips to, to take action on quickly.

Well, thank you, Stephen. That was very educational, very informative, and very convincing. I think that it's— AI is becoming so realistic, so lifelike. Do you agree, Stephanie?

I think so. I mean, every, every day I wake up and I'm always surprised to see that everything's getting better and better.

Yeah.

And you know what? There's a, there's a ton of additional questions in the chat here. So I would say, you know, everyone should stop by that booth and the Funnel-X sponsor booth and make sure that they go check out that demo and get a lot of these questions answered. So you got a lot of interest here in the, in the comments and some questions. So that's great.

Fantastic. Well, I look forward to everyone reaching out. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, for everyone on the chat or in the— reach out to me and book me and I'd love to chat more.

I recommend that anybody who wants to get more information go to funnelx.ai or visit the sponsor booth.