The AI Batting Cage: More At-Bats, More Sales All-Stars

Foreign. Thank you everybody for being here. Hey, we're going to try to keep this fun. We're going to have some chats going on. My colleague Chase is over in the chat box. So make sure that you are, you know, interacting with us. We don't want it to be just me preaching and, and, and teaching and so thank y' all for being here. So normally I, normally I will ask for a show of hands, but we'll do this in the chat. You know, how many times have any of you said, you know, this rep or that rep just needs more at bats. They need more turns at the plate. They just need more practice, right? Especially when you get a new rep or that's either inexperienced as a sales rep or they're learning your tools and learning your learning, you know, how you do things at your company. They need those at bats, right? And it's hard sometimes to get those at bats. You know, most of us on here, probably, most of us here probably got them, you know, just by doing it, by being out there and selling and learning and growing our skills and, and that is all fine and good, but it takes a long time to get good at sales. So with AI, there's a shortcut that I want to talk about today. So just a little bit about me. My name is Josh Bird. I am the chief growth officer at Copient AI. I've been in startups pretty much my entire career. This is my seventh startup. I love to scale things. I love to solve problems. I love to build things and help people out. And where I've found my niche is in go to market strategy, expertise, bringing in all those skills to actually sell something. At the end of the day, that's what we're, we're here for, right? So, so that's, that's a little bit about me now. Now y' all make sure to hit up the chat. We're going to try to answer some of these questions in the chat. I want to know how many of you have either learned by role play or do role plays with your teams. Right now we have a survey that there's a link in the chat over there and you can click on that register to win a $100 Golf Galaxy gift card. What salesperson doesn't like golf? But we want to know about your role play habits. So the thing is that buyers report, and I was talking to Gerhard earlier about this and buyers report that 50% of the time the difference between the vendor that they chose and the runner up was the salesperson's ability. And that's pretty striking. I know that we've all lost deals. Put, put a me too in the chat if you've lost deals and wondered, what could I have done better? Losing is part of the deal. Losing is part of being an all star because you learn and you grow from that. And so the scary part is though that 70% of salespeople say they actually lack formal training. And so it got me wondering like, well, what could we do to train them? What could we do to get them at bats even faster? Well, first we got to look at the, you know, what's wrong and what's keeping us from practicing and doing role play and doing trainings with our team. And the first one, strike one, is that there's never enough time. I know that we are all pulled in a million different directions and that's just part of being a sales leader is that there's never enough time. And so I think, I believe that everybody here means well and believes that if they could role play with their teams every day, their teams would be crushing their sales goals. But the truth and the reality is there's just not enough time. Then there's competing priorities. You've got the leadership team that needs this and you've got sales enablement that needs that and you've got the marketing team trying to get you ready for a trade show. And there this is, you know, the other side of the coin to that. Never enough time. And that's competing priorities. Right? What do you put first? And what we see often is that the role play and the training of salespeople gets put on the back burner with good intention to come back to it. But often it never happens. And the reason it never happens is because until now there really hasn't been a structured and scalable way to roll out these types of trainings. It really takes ride alongs with your team or it takes doing in person role plays or it takes the sales manager listening to calls and doing coach coaching. And that takes an inordinate amount of time. So you can see that this is a vicious cycle. And then on top of that it just feels unsafe to your reps. We've all been on both sides of the role play and it can feel awkward. People are acting, you're not sure if you're the one being judged. You know, a rep is psychologically, if they're role playing with their boss or their peer, they're wondering are they being judged? And that doesn't allow a safe place for them to really practice their skills and work. On their skills. Like most of us, you know, we really find that we got our skills by falling down, skinning our knees, brushing our. Getting back up and brushing ourselves off. And the trouble is we're losing deals while we do that, and we don't want that to happen anymore. And AI can let us practice in a more safe way. So that's where AI Roleplay comes in. So I'm curious, in the chat, have any of you tried AI Roleplay? Have any of you used AI Roleplay to get ready for a call or to get ready to present something? You know, this is the first time that we've seen that you can have totally unscripted AI avatar conversations that look just like me right here on a video screen, except they're talking to you. You can get immediate feedback on empathy and clarity, and you can work on your communication skills. You can customize them to any scenario and scale them across your enterprise with consistency. You know, I love Gerhard here, but if Gerhard was doing role plays with all of us, the truth is we would all get a different experience because Gerhard is human. And so, you know, maybe he's had two cups of coffee and he's ready to go. Or maybe you're the last role play at the end of the day before he goes home and has dinner with his family. You're likely to get a different experience from Gerhardt when he's role playing. Even if he did have time because he's human. AI helps us to standardize that role play in a way that it's giving consistent experiences for the team. And that's really, really, really important here. So what happens when we practice? And I'm not just talking about AI Roleplay. I'm talking about in general. If you're a golfer, like I said, we have that, that golf gift card raffle going for filling out our survey. Chase has put that link in the chat there. But if you're a baseball player, I'm a huge Atlanta Braves fan. It's not been our season, but they were still in the batting cage. And why? Because they were getting their muscle memory. They were strengthening their neural pathways. They were reducing their stress response. You know, when it's a full count and they're stressing, they're not worried about how they're standing or how they're holding their bat. They've done it a million times. That's what you want for your salespeople when they're in that high stress closing situation. You want them to have been there before. And that's the confidence Boost. And that's what science tells us happens when we practice. So, again, why are we not practicing more? Most sales teams don't practice. And again, it goes back to the time competing priorities in no scalable way. But AI solves that. So at this point, most people say, does it really work? Yeah. We're data nerds, and we measure this stuff. We have seen 83 fast, 83% faster learning through AI roleplay. Imagine if you could get a rep to productivity 83% faster. What would that do to your revenue? We've seen a 44% increase in sales effectiveness. What if they could close or their close rates increased 44%, what would that do to your revenue? And then 91% of our users report a boost in confidence in the material. That's crazy, y'. All. That means they're out there selling on your behalf and they're not confident in what they're doing. And there's a better way. Little quote there from one of our clients. But back to that 44%. Let's talk about the middle. If you have a bell curve, and you have a bell curve of your reps, right? And you've got laggards, and you've got your rock stars, but most are in the middle, right in that bell curve. So role play may not help your laggards as much, because a lot of times they're laggards, let's be honest, because they're not putting in the work. If they are putting in the work, and there's a learning gap, role play will help them a ton. Your superstars that have been selling for you for 10 years, they're going to learn some tips and tricks. In fact, I'll tell you a quick story. I had one of our clients the other day, and he told me his first role play. He went through it and he felt great. And this is the guy that we modeled our role play after because he was so good and he thought he crushed it. And then his score came back and he got a 76. And he thought he was so angry, and he could not believe that the score was that low until he looked at it, and he was like, wait a minute. I missed a lot of the fundamentals. The things that we really need to make sure we're asking the things that we need to do to make sure we're asking for the business at the end and closing and setting next steps, he was like, I thought I crushed it. But the little things that make the difference in winning and losing a sale, that. That make the Difference from being vendor of choice to runner up. He wasn't doing well and he called us and he was so excited because he needed that reminder. And so we shifted his closing percentage. So if you could take that middle of all of your reps that are, you know, they're pretty good. They're, they're not in danger, they're not on a pip. But man, if we could just get them more at bats, if we could just get them more productive. If you took that 40, that middle and boosted it by 44%, what would that do to your revenue and your business? I can tell you what it would do. It would fundamentally change it. This is the point where I say it is fiduciary. It's your fiduciary duty, as we all know, to make your reps as, as, as good as possible. You don't have to use Copian AI. There are some other alternatives out there. But I believe heart and soul that it's irresponsible to not have your reps practicing anymore because there are very, you know, low barrier to entry solutions all the way up to fully customizable enterprise solutions like us and everything in between. And so there's no excuse to not practice anymore because it's right there in front of us. And so I'm telling you all that you have this opportunity to move your middle of your bell curve of your reps up significantly and that is huge. This is back to your AI batting cage again. I'm a huge baseball fan. It's the last week of the regular season and I'm really sad about it because we're not going to the playoffs. But I can't help but wonder, if we had more time in the batting cage, would we have gone to the playoffs? You know, as a sales leader, you don't want to have that on your conscience. Right. So we're going to end with a quick two minute video that Gerhard asked me to show because people say they want to see what it looks like. So impressive. One last. This is what it looks like. Why should companies care about Copian AI right now? That's an awesome question. AI is enabling role play at scale with deep customization for each company's unique needs. And that's a first time ever kind of thing. And so the companies that jump on this are going to have better salespeople and improve their outcomes faster than companies that don't. Thank you. Sounds like the future of roleplay training is in good hands. Absolutely. So that was Josh, if there's anything else you'd like to discuss or any questions you have, feel free to let me know. So there you go. You can see that it's generative. I didn't expect her to say that, but that was a quick look at how a role play works. And then we build out the evaluation based on your specific methodologies, whether they're spin or Sandler based or some other teaching methodology. And you can look at each individual score and how they did. They'll get real time coaching and feedback to help them get better. But also from an organizational level, you can see how each team member is progressing and where their skills are. You can identify gaps in places you need training more so that you can make sure that your training investment sticks. And then finally you can see at an aggregate level across your teams how everyone is doing. So this is really what Copian AI is all about. We are about making your teams better at what they do through AI roleplay and evaluation. All right, so there you have it. If you want to talk to us. Gerhard, I may have talked a little long for questions. I had hoped to get to some questions, but we do have that QR code on the screen that you can scan and it goes directly to us and we'll set up some time to talk.

Okay, two quick questions.

Yes, sir.

Do you integrate with any LMSs?

Yes, all of our integrations are custom, so it depends. But we're very familiar with the LMS, all of the LMSs, and depending on what you're using, we could scope that out for you.

And another question is Patrick is asking where do those numbers come from? Especially the 44%.

Yeah, great question. So those are internal numbers. We measure everybody that does role play. We have over 5,000 users right now and we measure from the second time they do role play until seven role plays passed. Lots of reasons why, but we did a co study with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And basically when we measure that, that's the improvement that they get just by doing these role plays.

I checked it on Claude and it says that there's one company that a global data resilience company saw a 33% improvement in team performance within the simulation just weeks after launching an AI simulation practice. And there are a whole bunch of data that I think people need to pay attention to. One is ramp up time is reduced by 50%. This is not copiant. That is, yeah, research by other companies. And I know that Peter Ostro is going to talk this week about revenue enablement and I will ask him what Forrester is saying about that, but I personally experienced that I've done interactive video role plays and I achieved a 37.5% lift after 90 days. So I know your stuff works and I and I saw it truck the chat and I saw a lot of people are intrigued by the idea but haven't quite made the leap. So what is the best way to learn more about what you can do for companies besides scanning that QR code?

Yeah, absolutely. So I just saw one quick thing that popped up in the chat. Can the tool be customized with specific sales methodology? Yes, absolutely. But furthermore we don't just use that sales methodology, we use your version of that. So we would they do role play until seven role plays passed. Lots of reasons why. But we did a co study with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and basically when we measure that, that's the improvement that they get just by doing these role plays.

I checked it on Claude and it says that there's one company that a global data resilience company saw a 33% improvement in team performance within the simulation just weeks after launching an AI simulation practice. And there are a whole bunch of data that I think people need to pay attention to. One is ramp up time is reduced by 50%. This is not copian. That is yeah, research by other companies. And I know that Peter Ostre is going to talk this week about revenue enablement and I will ask him what Forrester is saying about that. But I personally experienced that. I've done interactive video role plays and I achieved a 37.5% lift after 90 days. So I know your stuff works and I and I saw it truck the chat and so a lot of people are intrigued by the idea but haven't quite made the leap. So what is the best way to learn more about what you can do for companies besides scanning that QR code?

Yeah, absolutely. So I just saw one quick thing that popped up in the chat. Can the tool be customized with specific sales methodology? Yes, absolutely. But furthermore we don't just use that sales methodology, we use your version of that. So we would interview you and learn how you want your team selling and customize to that. So obviously there's Copia, that is our website and you can schedule some time to talk to us through these links. You can also fill out the survey that we dropped a couple of links in the chat. We're going to be putting together a full report on kind of the state of role play right now so that we can share that with you afterwards. We'll of course anonymize everything, but there's a number of things. And then also on LinkedIn, I would love to chat with you. Chase, who's manning our chat, would love to chat with you. And then if you can't remember any of that because you're maybe forgetful like me, reach out to Gerhardt. He knows how to get me. I'd love to talk to you.

And My email is gelhartgmail.com.

Yeah, that's.

I have a direct connection to Josh.

That's right. And my email is Josh Copia AI. So you can email me directly, too. I'm not trying to hide behind a form.

Wonderful.