Moneyball for In-Person Sales: Where 85% of Commerce Lives

You're about to listen to Pat Johnson as he shares us moneyball techniques. It's 9:12 in the city, going to a high of 72. Pat, it's all yours.

Wow. Give it up for Mark everyone. That was excellent. That was great. Thank you guys very much. My name is Pat Johnson. So nice to be joining you guys. Good morning from wherever you may be calling in from. I'm the head of customer experience here at Rila. So for the next call it 30 or so minutes, I want to teach you guys a little bit about what Rilla is, the work that we do do. A quick deep dive into what it actually takes to build a championship level sales team. And also look at what some of the key metrics of top performers in in person sales. What we found here at Rilla through analyzing millions of conversations. So very quickly, if you have never heard of Rilla before, we are the leading AI coaching software for in person sales. And when we say in person sales, we're actually Talking about the 85% of global commerce that happens via face to face interactions, whether that be med, device sales, roofing, plumbing, auto repair shops, senior living, home building, you name it. 85% of global commerce happens face to face. And how Rilla works, it's really simple. It's really just three steps. Your team speaks to customers just like normal. They record their conversations on our mobile app and the AI automatically transcribes, analyzes and gives them feedback on their sales performance, allowing you, the manager, to do what we call virtual ride alongs. So you might see, over the past couple years, Rilla has grown really, really fast. And that's thanks to our incredible partners, the people at neighborly LG Kohler, most recently Home Depot. So every single day There are over 33,000 sales reps, managers and coaches using Rilla to help improve their sales performance. That also happens to make us one of the fastest growing startups of all time. But I think the reason why we've grown so quickly is because we think of sales the same way that you do. And it's how we believe that sales is sport. And what I mean by that is that it is highly competitive and it takes a ton of infield coaching and training to get it right. But even more, if you want to be exceptional. And like any great team, it takes a couple key elements, right? Like you need amazing coaches, the owners, the sales managers. But of course we also need our athletes, right? Those sales reps out there in the field that are adept at understanding the customer, their pain points, how to Connect with them, how to deliver value. But we also need a game winning system, something that we can repeat and scale. And it's proven to drive success. That's really three things. It's the coaches, it's the players, it's the game winning system. That's how we build a generational sales team. But if you look at how most of us operate today, I would argue that it's almost impossible to do that. Why, that'd be just one word. Visibility. So I want you in your heads to think of the best sales team of all time, or, excuse me, the best sports team of all time. We'll start with sports, whether that's the Golden State warriors, the New England Patriots, the Alabama. Maybe you're a prem league fan, whatever that is, but let's say that you were the coach, right? So we say, hey, Mr. Rep, Mr. Executive, you're the new head coach of this team. Here's your $10 million contract. In year one, we want you to be competitive. You know, we know you're rebuilding, we just want you to make the playoffs. But year two and three, we want to see significant progress towards the big game, whatever that game is. You're excited, you're pumped, you're getting paid. But at the end of the day, they say, oh yeah, and there's just one more thing we forgot to mention. You're actually going to have to coach from the locker room. You can't coach on the sidelines. You can coach before the game, you can even see the scores after the game if you like. But you can't coach the game while it's happening and you can't review the film. And if we're being honest with ourselves, that's the reality of how most of us coach today. I mean, we work our butts off. We're constantly coaching and training, right? Whether that's role play, handling customer objections, on the process itself, the value, the product. But we can track our results in the CRM. But what good does that do when we can't have an actual effect on what's going on with our reps when they're speaking to customers? I mean, what good does all that do us if we can't see the game? Well, like I said before, Rilla is the key to fixing that and getting back that visibility. It's super simple. It's three steps. Your team goes out, they speak to customers just like normal. They press start on the Rilla mobile app. It then analyzes, transcribes that audio and the AI gives them feedback on Their sales performance. So let me give you a little sneak peek as to what that looks like. So this is a rilla ride along. I'll zoom my screen in just a little bit. But what this means is that a sales rep was speaking to a customer and they were able to capture their entire appointment. So we can take a peek at it. And this is a real conversation. Looks like it happened back in December. We anonymized it, but we were able to see exactly what happened. So if I am a sales manager, you know, I don't have to go on a ride along, spend three, four hours out of my day to go there, be with the rep, give them notes, drive back. Just a matter of minutes. I can see exactly what happened. Let's take a peek at the AI summary. Looks like in this case, the sales rep was Jorge Ayala. He discussed various LG H VAC products with the customer. Focused on mini splits or air handlers. They're efficient. They're suitable for cold climates. However, financing options were discussed. Explain the benefits of becoming an LG dealer. Their extended warranties, potential rebates, Customers interested, but they got to talk further with their boss. Got it. Just in a matter of minutes, I got a pretty good idea of what went on in that sales conversation. I zoom out a little bit, you can see this conversation is 56 minutes. That's a pretty long conversation. We can go down and we can scroll and we can listen back and take notes. I don't recommend spending 56 minutes to coach. Right. That's why we have the AI. So if you look over here on the right, you can see our script. This is LG's sales process. It'll actually score the rep on how they performed on these 10 metrics. So this is a full process starting all the way from setting the agenda and opening that call down to building rapport, discovering the needs, pain points and opportunities, all the way down to closing with value. So if we want to take a peek, see how the rep did, we can click into any of these, see how they set the agenda, and in this case, see why they only scored a 1 out of 5. He didn't follow the script for the agenda. There was no mention of recording for the conversations. There's a lot more that could have been done. So that's our process. And of course, we can take the time and we can punch through these three little bullets again. That'll take us a long time. We want to be efficient and we want to coach accurately. So, ladies and gentlemen, phoning in, I'D like to introduce you to the future or actually the present. But the present is a very good friend of mine. His name is Rick AI. Rick AI is our assistant sales coach. He knows everything about the conversation and we can ask him anything to help save us time. So in this case, I'm going to ask exactly what I asked before. Now, what was the main objection in the conversation? Now what do we miss? Why did this deal fall through? And in this case we can read. Looks like the main objection was price sensitivity. The customer emphasized many homeowners are interested in the cheapest option, might not care about premium features, makes it really hard to sell a high end product. Something really nice concern was reinforced. Looking down here, it looks like the sales rep did not handle it very well. But if we want to dig into this objection more, we have these bubbles as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. These are actually footnotes of the conversation where we can take a peek and see where the customer said, oh, that's too expensive. So let's actually take a peek. Looks like here the customer says a lot of people just want to put it cheaper. They don't care. What can you do for the cheapest? What are your prices? I mean, do you have a price for say, to see what I mean? So off the bat, we already have a good idea of why the deal didn't go through and we can coach in a matter of minutes. We can coach as a regular comment. Hey, Mr. Sales Rep, don't forget we can also leave a voice comment or my favorite is the movie comment. We can give feedback in seconds. Hey, what's up Jorge? How's it going man? I was just reviewing your conversation. I think you did a great job speaking to the customer. You built rapport really well. I think you could have set a better agenda. Remember why we're here. Take them through the product, the process and the value that they get. Also, I noticed that the main objection was price sensitivity. They were worried that they would not be able to sell such a high end unit to their customers. Remind them of the benefits that come with it. Energy efficiency, extended warranties. Today's prices are not tomorrow's prices. And while it may be an expensive unit, they will save a lot of money down the road by making a big upfront investment. Jorge, my man. Happy selling. And that's how easy it is to do a virtual ride along, a virtual coaching session with Rilla. Now I think a lot of you are probably wondering, that's awesome. That's so cool that I can coach my rep in under five minutes, I can leave feedback. It's like I'm actually there. But Pat, what if I want to know? You know, I want to coach over a period of time, right? Oh, I want to see how my sales rep has done over the last 20 appointments. Or maybe I want to learn more about my market. Right. Like, what are my customers saying out there in the field? What's the voice of customer? Well, I'd like to introduce you to Rilla Intelligence. Rilla Intelligence is a cross conversational analysis where you can ask questions to our friend. We call him Big Rick. Anything about your in person sales conversations? In this case, I asked him what were the most common customer objections in the last six months. And this is across some of our sample conversations, the most common that we have seen. And Rick created a little graph for us, which I think is great for, you know, you bring it into a sales meeting, you put it in the slide deck. But you can see price and cost is an objection that appears in 89% of the conversations. Product fit and need, and about two thirds all the way down to trust and expectations. So bigrec is able to give you actionable insight into what's actually happening out there in the field so you can coach and apply and get that market research that you need. So that is a little bit unrela. And let's see. I'm hoping y' all can see my screen still. But you don't have to just take it from us, right. Typically, we've seen within the first three months, a 40% increase in close rates, eight times the amount of time savings, and of course, an increase, 20% increase in average tickets. This is our good friend Mike Davis. He's the CEO of Neighborly, and he says Rilla helps you maximize conversion and ticket price. My man. Thank you, Mike. And if you guys are interested in learning more about Rila, seeing if it is a good fit for you and your business. This is a QR code. Scan it, book some time with us. We'd love to have a conversation. We need your name, email, phone number and see how you can coach in minutes. Do a ride along in three, four or five minutes. All right, I'll keep going to the main event. So here at Rilla, we are a coaching tool, but we have the largest data set of in person sales conversations in the world. I think we. We have about 8 million sales conversations. And in sales, just like in sports, the teams that dominate aren't guessing anymore. They're measuring. They're finding patterns that separate the top performers from the average ones. And for the first time in in person sales, we as sales coaches are able to do the same. So how many of y' all have seen the movie Moneyball? Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, probably came out 15 years or so ago. It's a good one. Moneyball is the story of Billy Bean. So this is the 1997 Oakland A's. He was the GM and the A's were in a bad spot when he took over as general manager for the A's. They had a really bad record. Worse in their division, Poorest team in the mlb. But Billy Beane took a different approach. Instead of trying to pack his roster with home run hitters that he couldn't afford, he decided to apply data and science. And ultimately he determined that his team needed one thing. Players that could get on base had to get on base. So he built a pretty crazy sort of unconventional roster that no one had seen before. And lo and behold, the A's broke records. They went on crazy win streaks and they pulled themselves out of the fire. So in today's world of sports, every generational team, every single sports league as a matter of fact, uses data, science. And what we found here at RILLA is that this data is able to help us determine the characteristics, traits and practices of top performers. But more importantly, how can we then apply these to the rest of our sales team? So for the first time ever, like major league sports, we can quantify methods that determine sales excellence. So I'll give you a little sneak peek. The winning talk and listen ratio, right? And we can see we have top performers up top, average performers at the bottom, top performers around that 50, 50 range, right? They are able to lead the appointment, guide the customer, show the value. Whereas average performers dominate the conversation. They overshare, they over solution. They barely give the customer an opportunity to speak. I mean imagine if you're hanging out with the sales rep and they let you speak only 28% of the time. It's crazy. Be really, really frustrating to try to get a word in. And I want to caveat here like this should not be used with your spouses. All right, you want a good 50, 50 talk ratio with your spouses, do not over share or over solution with your spouse. But we found that one of the key tendencies that drives top performers is to have those balanced talk ratios. And part of that is because they're so adept at asking questions, they tend to ask five times more questions than other reps. Open ended questions, which I think is a very insane disparity. Right? And what's important in analyzing these conversations is that we found that these top Reps were actually 41% more likely to determine the true reason why a customer was considering a purchase. So the time spent in discovery makes their lives easier when they ask for the sale to pitch value. And of course, that makes sense that they would have longer appointments, about 26% longer appointments than average reps. But these longer appointments aren't for the sake of spending time or checking boxes or just keeping them in the room, but for a dynamic dialogue. So with a dynamic dialogue, you're naturally going to have longer appointments because the customer will ultimately give you the blueprint of their pain points and why they're even looking to purchase. But of course, if you start to open up the floor to discovery questions, objections will arise. Right? I think that makes sense. But one thing that we have found is that when faced with objections, top performers actually slow down and listen. On the other hand, average performers tend to speed up. Makes sense. You know, when you're faced with objections, your fight or flight kicks in. You might get nervous, your heart rate, might even get defensive. But by slowing down, asking more questions, clarifying, unpacking, top reps maintain control. Okay, I'll give you one more. I really like this one. Higher script compliance equals higher close rates. I think this one really ties into everything that we've talked about today in this session regarding visibility. If you don't know what your team is actually saying to the customer, if they're practicing what you preach, right, and I can promise you it's affecting your close rates. And we found that those reps that are hovering around 80 to 100% script compliance, they're seeing close to 50% close rates, whereas average performers are seeing only 30 to 40% close rates. So in percentages, that's like a 10 to 20% delta. But in numbers, in revenue, I mean, that's leaving thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars on the table. So the reality is this, the sales teams who did this in 2026, 2025, and beyond, they're the ones that choose visibility, choose coaching, and choose to build systems that make excellence the default, not the exception. So Rilla will give you sales intelligence like you've never seen before. And if you all in the audience are interested in looking at additional data, connecting with us here at Rilla, feel free to scan this QR code. And with that, I think that's everything I have. Gerhardt. I'll pass it back to you, man, see if we have any questions.

Yeah, I have A question about questions said that top performers ask more questions. So the question for me is what kind of questions are more productive than other open ended questions? For example, if a salesperson said, what's keeping you up at night? It's an open ended question. But it's such a trivia question and so overused that it may actually backfire.

Sure, I agree. I think like anything asking open ended questions, you have to be careful, right? You have to have a short list of ones, you know, that work. I'll give you a good example. Working with a lot of home builders, we work closely with Jeff Shore. He's a coach for Home Build for top companies like Dr. Horton. But his guide to open ended questions is all about determining the why. So in his case, buying a new home or moving is a very dramatic thing to do. So asking questions like, what's not working about your current house? Who will be living in this house? Do you have family nearby? Like all these questions, he's able to basically gather info and tailor a solution, right? Like what's not working about your, your house? Oh, the mortgage is too high and we're downsizing and we're getting ready for retirement. That's way different from we're starting a family. So I think it's very important to gather that information so you can actually deliver the correct solution.

Have you found that top performers actually script their questions carefully for every phase of the sales call?

I have heard that. I have heard, yes. I have heard that a lot of top performers will do that when they're learning the process. Right. They worry that. I think that's every salesperson's fear is learning the process and becoming too robotic and not natural. But, but I think it's like the Picasso rule, right? Like learn all the rules so then you can learn how to break them. Like you have to be able to pivot. In a conversation on the podcast, we had the great Alan Langner. So he was the top sales rep at Renewal by Andersen for I think six years. And he would always talk about it. He said I'd follow the process. And sometimes you do the process, but you have to do it out of order. Right? You got to check the boxes. But sometimes the customer will say, well, I don't care about price. Tell me exactly about the window and how it'll save me money. Okay, all right, we're going to go to the product and then we'll go to pricing later. So I think you do have to be flexible, follow the process, but be willing to pivot.

You know, that brings up a very interesting point because I find average salespeople think they're great so that they can begin to deviate from the process. Right. I mean your statistic in terms of the talk time, the percentage of talk time, that is a real solid answer that I think any, any manager can use. No, you are not in that top performing category. You've got to stay right to that script. Very, very tight and the question flow. But you're right. When you're at the top performer, you do break the rules. But you know how to break the rules and that's the key thing. I love it.

Can you QR code up one more time?

Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah.

And I agree with you, Mark. I think the most underrated sales skill is listening. So many people forget to do that.

And that starts by asking better questions. And again, I think only the confident salesperson is really willing to ask questions because the non confident salesperson, they're afraid of asking a question that they may, may not have an answer to. But that top performer, they don't care what the answer is. They hope it's a, they hope it's a question that they don't have the answer to. It's going to force a conversation. That's what makes top performers top performers.

That's the fun part, right?

I. Matt, can you, can you share your email address as well?

Yes.

Want to get in touch with you?

I'm more than happy to. Should I put that in the Zoom chat? Yeah, sure. My email is just patrickilla.com and if you want to grab me personally, that is my phone number. Mark, you will realize that that is a 516 area code from Nassau County, Long Island.

Got you covered, man. Got you covered.

Good people out there.

Oh good people where you are because you're calling in from the island.

Geographically, I think of it as Queens.

There it is there. Hey, question for you. Because a few people you know, I asked the question in the chat. What about industries where recording calls is restrictive? How do you work around that?

Yeah, tell me more. I mean restrictive. Define that. I guess because I would say typically in the US there are two party consent states and one party consent states. Meaning in a one party consent state, as long as you are meeting with a person, only one party needs to consent to record. However, in a two party consent state, the opposing party, the other party, the customer in this case would need to be notified. So typically a sales rep, like let's say they are a roofer and they might meet a homeowner in their house, they Would knock on the door, hey, what's going on? This is Pat Umbrella. Super excited. Before I get started, I actually have an AI note taker that I'm going to use. Reason for that is I want to make sure that I get everything right. I know this is a big decision. I don't want to mess anything up.

That's great,

Patrick. What do you just showed? Is that flawed?

Oh, no, that's a. This is the Rilla product. So it's just an app that you can download.

You. You were holding up some device.

No, this is just my phone.

Oh, it's your phone because. Yeah, Bryn Tillman. Yesterday she talked about plot pl. You, you know, plot the recorder and she wears it around her neck and it automatically records every conversation.

I've heard good things about it. I've heard it's a great product.

Yeah, because at the end of the day, you know, summary and then you can dump it into your CRM solution or you, you can get the highlights and all the steps. So are you saying that when you go and have a conversation, you need to tell people that you're recording that

legally? It depends on the state, but I always recommend telling the customer. Right. So I would say, hey, you know, just so you know, I got an AI note taker. That's how I get everything right and make good on my promises.

Mark.

No, just scribe. If scribe is there.

We're just, we're just getting some voices.

Okay.

The Neverland world. So anyway, anyway.

But Mark, do you record conversations?

I don't typically record conversations because I am my own coach. I do when I'm on Zoom calls. They naturally record and so forth. But I don't typically record phone phone conversations.

So Patrick, back to your database of sales best sales practices. Do you make those available as well to. To your clients or to, to your customers or to the public?

Well, I mean, our biggest thing is data privacy, data security. So if you record conversations in Rilla, they are yours. We don't train our model with them, we don't sell them.

I thought that your insights that you shared on those few slides is probably just an example of the huge goldmine of information that you're sitting on.

Oh, very true. I mean, hey, by request we can always anonymize data, pull up statistics, analytics. Absolutely. Okay.

Yeah, because I. It reminds me of when exactly the incentive compensation management software, they aggregated the data and they came out with a mind blowing report on what incentive programs work better than others and made it easier for sales leaders to design better programs and I think that your insights from analyzing all those conversations could help a lot of sales trainers and sales enablement managers.

Yeah, I mean that's the goal. I can give you plenty of materials on one pagers on our, you know, our money ball for sales are keys to success. So if you guys are interested, feel free to throw your emails in the chat or we'll connect umbrella. But happy to show you guys some more stuff and send it your way.

Well, our time is up. Thank you so much, Patrick. I learned so much. It is fascinating what you can do with data and then use that intelligence to improve a sales organization. Mark, you have the final word in the voice of your radio announcer.

Well, you've just been listening to Pat Johnson tell us about how to make your calls more effective. Doesn't remove you as the coach. You are still the coach, but now you have the tool to coach better. And with that, we'll take a short eight minute break and we'll be back with a fireside chat with Gearhart at 50 minutes after the hour. Thank you, Pat.

That was awesome. Thank you guys.