Transforming Sales Training and Coaching Through AI Clones

And to talk with you and show you a little bit about the wonderful possibilities for supporting sales teams with an AI powered clone. Now I want to show you a little video excerpt of myself talking to my clone, Barbara AI, so you can get an idea of how this works. First of all, I want to let you know that if you were interacting with Barbara AI, you would be in the position that I am in in my red sweater in this video. And also let you know that it wasn't scripted in any way and that the only editing I did was to reduce the short two or three second latency between the end of a question in the startup for response. So if you would run the video now, I'd be ready. Good afternoon, Barbara. I'm here at the sales 3.0 conference on with a group of sales leaders and experts. I want to demonstrate to them your capabilities as a sales coach. So please keep your answers concise and I'll ask you a few questions. Okay?

Of course I'm ready to help. Ask away and I'll keep it concise for your audience.

Thank you. My first question is when I get an objection from customers that the price is too high, what's the best thing I can do to handle that objection?

When a customer says the price is too high, it's often a signal that they don't yet see the full value of your solution. Start by asking questions to uncover their specific needs and pain points. For example, can you share more about what you're comparing this to? Or what outcomes are most important to you? This shifts the focus from cost to value. Then connect your solution directly to the outcomes they care about. For instance, if your solution saves them time, reduces risk or increases revenue, quantify those benefits. This helps them see the return on investment rather than just the upfront cost. Finally, ask if they'd like to explore options to adjust the scope or payment terms to better align with their budget. This keeps the conversation collaborative and solution focused.

That's great. So what if they say, you know, we like you just fine, but we don't know who's going to be actually working with us. Us. We're kind of afraid that sometimes sellers wind up sending the B team. So how would you respond to that objection?

That's a valid concern and it's one you should address head on. Reassure them by introducing the actual team members who will be working on their account. You can say something like, I completely understand your concern. Let me introduce you to the team who will be dedicated to your success. They're not just skilled, they're the A team and they're fully briefed on your goals and challenges. This builds trust and demonstrates your commitment to delivering excellence.

That sounds great. Thank you. Now here's another one. I have a client that I've just made a proposal to. There are actually seven members of this team. Buyers, influencers, and now I can't get anybody to respond to me. So what should I do in this situation? What's my best move?

When a team goes silent after a proposal, it's time to re engage strategically. First, identify your internal champion, someone on their team who has shown interest or support before. Reach out to them directly and ask for insight into what's happening behind the scenes. You might say, I'd love to understand where things stand and how I can help move this forward. Next, consider their fears. Are they worried about cost, implementation or internal alignment? Tailor your follow up to address the potential concerns. For instance, you could share a case study or a new insight that aligns with their goals, showing you're still invested in their success. Finally, make yourself useful. Send them something valuable. An industry update, a white paper, or even a brief note about a relevant trend. This keeps you top of mind without being pushy. Silence often means they're deliberating, so your job is to stay visible and helpful without overwhelming them. Does that make sense?

Yes, that makes sense. Perfect sense. Thank you so much. I appreciate all your help this morning.

You're very welcome. I'm glad I could help. Best of luck with the rest of the conference. Sounds like an exciting group to be with. Let me know if you need anything else.

Okay? Well, I hope you enjoyed that little vignette. Anytime someone interacts with my clone in the video format, they get an instant video copy that they can keep of the conversation. So there are two other ways you can communicate with my clone. One is typical way you would with ChatGPT. Just type a question and get a typed answer and that answer would be annotated with sources. You can also.

Call it on the phone and talk to it that way. Or if you had a clone and you gave it SMS capacity, then your salespeople, wherever they are, could interact with the clone by phone or by text. So what if your sales team could have access 24, 7 to a coach like Barbara AI, who never forgets, always has the right answer and is ready to help close deals and at a moment's notice.

Why have a clone? Let me just give you a few reasons why. Clones are extremely valuable for salespeople and sales team. So therefore sales leaders and company leaders.

There are a lot of challenges that sales teams and sales individuals face that really need to be addressed through sales training or personalized coaching. And I did some research on the average amount of sales training that a salesperson gets in a year. And kind of on the high end it's about three and a half days of sales training. The rest of whatever training is going to happen is usually in the form of product training or, or admin, things like learning how to manage the CRM and how to make reports and things like that. So I know that you don't have time if you're a sales leader to really do the kind of job coaching your team that you would like to. Also, there are so many kinds of failures in a sales process, many things that can go wrong that coaching really can help. One that I'm really very attuned to and Anthony mentioned it in the last session. A salesperson who is very high on product knowledge but not very well attuned to business acumen. Patient AI clones can do wonders with helping a person in that situation or someone who's not good at preparing for a meeting or preparing from a presentation and they just need to talk it through with someone.

Here's just an example of some of the things that an AI sales coach can do. Things that I want to call your attention to. It is an intelligent being.

And it remembers all the users. So it gets tailored answers and is scalable, which I think is one of the most important things for business people to know.

Here are just examples of a wide range of support that a clone can provide for your team that supports excellence. So I'm just going to let you read some of these ideas. It's very good at asking questions my coach is designed to answer. Every time it gives an answer, it gives another question to help to promote the conversation and to keep the just to keep the conversation going.

The coach can coach your sales team on real sales situations as they happen. So it's not, it's not like reading a textbook or some kind of theoretical sales methodology. It's designed to help them in the moment or while they're thinking about what they need to do next. It's very good at helping them deal with objections, answering questions. It can locate prospects for them. It can help them with any stage of a deal. Now my particular coach is a large account sales coach, but it can answer a very wide range of sales oriented questions beyond large account selling. It can also ask really good probing questions to get the person thinking deeper about the topic.

How could you use a clone Coach with your team in your company.

Well, first of all, it's easy to train a clone. I trained my clone myself, so I can really attest to the fact that it's not hard and it's not excruciatingly long process. You can upload it unlimited amounts of information and it will accept any formats. You give your clone a mission, a background, a purpose and a function. So mine is a coach. It could be a teacher, it could be an advocate. There are lots of different functions that it could have.

You train its voice and train its video presentation. It's important to me that I have a clone of me, but you might want a clone of someone else or you might want a clone that's more generic, that was still doing all the same things.

It will accommodate continual uploading of new material. So whenever you have new information, you can augment or replace previous materials, which is really good for things that have to be standardized.

Here's some things your clone should know. By that I mean things that you should provide to your clone.

Information about your company value propositions are really important. All kinds of information about your messaging, your products, your brochure, sales, training materials, videos, all your recorded training sessions, PowerPoint decks, white papers, case studies, books, ebooks. You'll think of so many more things. You can give it a live blog feed and it will always be updating with every new blog post.

The clone lives where you embed it. For a clone that's going to work with the sales team would want it someplace behind some kind of firewall. Mine lives in my website, inside of the member site, which is an online learning environment. That's really helpful because the clone can point people to specific courses that are on the site or help them through the courses as well as helping them apply it to unique situations. You can put it inside of Slack or other community workplaces and as I mentioned, you can let people.

Interact with it by phone or texting.

The clone is always under your control. You can give it a list of prohibitions. I keep a list of phrases that I, that I gather when I'm interacting with ChatGPT that are kind of like.

Word usage that I don't want my clone to ever use. Also, I, I don't use the term pain points. I have other language that I use for that. So that's the kind of stuff that I would give it a prohibition. You can tell it how to handle certain kinds of circumstances. I just kind of assumed that people might want to mess around with it. Although I've never had that experience, but I wanted the clone to know how to handle it. And here's really an important thing. The clones what they call creativity. You can set your clone to have no creativity, which means that it will only draw answers from the exact information that you have provided to it and nowhere else. Or you can provide it with some amount, some percentage of creativity. It's just on a little sliding scale. So my clone has 80% fidelity to my own material and 20% opportunity to augment answers from the Internet, which helps it to be able to serve a broader audience than it could if it was only using my material or to answer questions that are really outside the scope of just large account. Selling.

The clone gives you an enormous amount of meaningful feedback. I have access to all the conversations, who asked the question, and how the clone answered. If I'm not satisfied with an answer, I can rewrite it. Now, I know this is time consuming, so you wouldn't want to all do this yourself, but you have people who can do that for you.

You can rewrite the question or augment it in some way, and instantly you can hit one button and it will send the answer back to an improved answer, back to the person who asked it. And at the same time, the clone is learning from these improved answers. Every week I get an AI.

Report from my clone which talks about what? What are people asking? What are the themes this week of what people are asking the clone? And then it recommends, here are some things you might want to add to your clone's repertoire to handle these questions.

Your AI clone is an author. I interact with Barbara AI constantly to get new materials from my stuff. If I want to have an outline for a presentation like this one, I can get it from the clone. I get training agendas or messaging sequences or any kind of reuse of material. Now think about this. If your team, instead of getting their messaging from chat, GPT, is getting it from your own clone. So the clone is an author for you as a leader as well as for your team as a leader, you can use the clone to design new training materials.

Your clone is up to, always up to date. If you keep feeding it new information, it is learning from its interactions with people and from any corrections you make. You can quickly update your product services, strategies, tactics ensure that the sales teams remain up to date. And you can train the clone to prioritize current client or current information or to forget it entirely.

I mean to forget the old information entirely, not the new information. So.

Just to wrap this up, I've tried to give you Just a kind of a.

High level overview of what a clone can do and how you can get it to do that. And I've tried to do it in a really positive manner because I hope you can tell how enthusiastic I am about this whole topic and particularly about my clone Barber AI. I hope that you will give a lot of thought to possibly making an AI powered sales clone available to your team.

I would love to invite you to try Barbara AI. You can go to that website, Delphi AI Barbara Weaver Smith. Or you can learn more about Delphi Clones at this Bitly.

URL. Bitly CloneSource and feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Barbara at the whale hunters and we may have a couple minutes left if, if there is a question, I can't see them, but you could read one.

Thank you so much, Barbara. This is exciting. I know what I'm doing later. I'm going to go hang out with you while you're with your AI. We did have some questions here. The first one is can you suggest a change of tonality?

I guess that would come from the recording of the clone's voice. Mine is a, is made up of a bunch of recordings of my voice. You can have it in any voice.

Okay, let's see. What's the difference between traditional sales coaching and AI driven coaching?

There are several differences. I mean, one is that.

This kind of leaves out the, the sales leader as the coach. It's substituting the AI for a lot of the coaching, certainly not entirely.

The clone knows some things about the person with whom it's interacting, but not the kind of knowledge that a sales leader would have. So they're might be specific things that you would want the, the salesperson to be working on that the coach doesn't know. Although I have, you know, one version of a coach that does certain things. You can have a coach that is much more engaged with the life of the salesperson than mine is. Mine is really just dealing with them on specific sales.

Situations. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. There's more here. This was a very popular session to ask questions and people seemed to like it. They thought it was very fun. Which tool did you use to build.

Your clone coach use Delphi AI. That's D E L, P H I. I highly recommend them. Wonderful people, very creative. Moving this whole process forward rapidly.

Now, do you think it's going to help people feel more comfortable asking questions? You know, so I know sometimes people don't want to ask questions if they're gonna feel like they're Embarrassed or they're.

Gonna look bad and boss, that hasn't been my experience. As I said, I get to see all the questions and all the answers. And people are constantly asking questions. The more they use it, the more they get into it because they get really good answers. I couldn't give you a big idea of how that works, but I tried to give you a small idea of what the quality of the answers that you get. It's really good. So, you know, there's nobody there but you and the clone. I mean, you're. You're either you're on your phone or you're sitting in front of a laptop.

Sure.

Now, do you ever feel like people get stuck in the beginning? They're not really sure what to say or what to ask?

You know, what happens if they show up and they're just not even sure how to get started?

Clone, you mean?

Oh, if they, if they go in and they. They go to interface with the clone and then they say, gosh, I don't know where to begin.

Clone has a whole bunch of questions. It derives questions from previous conversations with people. And so it has a whole list of questions that will scroll there. If you don't ask one, you can just click on a question.

Now, do you. Do you think that if we clone ourselves, that our clones are going to be so good, so smart, they're never going to forget anything? They're not going to make mistakes? Are people going to be disappointed when they talk to us?

Could be. It's hard to say. My clone certainly can answer complex questions faster than I can.

But of course, there are certain things that clones can't do.

Barbara, have you ever experimented with hey Gen, the video creation tool where you can create a clone of yourself as well?

I've tried several of those. Yeah.

Most of the ones that I've tried are designed to be more like avatars that deliver scripted messages.

Right.

Whereas this one is creating new messages all the time.

Exactly. Yeah.

When it comes to voice, your solution seems to be a lot more accurate. I could hardly tell the difference between you and the clone. So how much volume of voice did you have to upload to clone your voice?

Probably 20.

60 second messages. It doesn't take a lot, and I could always add more if I wanted to get it closer and closer. And I did it myself using the tools. If you wanted a perfect replication of your voice, you could have that professionally done also.

Right? Yeah. There's also a company called 11 Labs and they do voice cloning. You upload about 30 minutes of your speeches or narration and then they feed you back. But there's a verification step where you actually have to read one of their scripts to make sure that the voice matches and that's really you. Because a lot of people want to create a fake voice. So I find it very fascinating. And we have taken your advice at sales 3.0 and we went to your tool and we created an AI agent and we will launch that and people will be able to speak to the agent and get some answers. So we are putting a lot of content in there from master classes we have created. And we also going to put the information from this conference into that clone so that people can interact with that material.

I look forward to seeing that and interacting with it.

Right. And thank you. And it's almost like, Stephanie, what I think is really amazing is that you can have, you know, you a PhD, and in two years from now, you are going to be able to create a clone of yourself that has the information of 100 PhDs.

That's right, yeah. And you know, some professors now are taking their content and they're putting it in and they're using it as a study guide. So students can ask us questions at any time. A popular one is loading your syllabus in because nobody reads the syllabus. And then you get emails asking questions about what's in the syllabus. And this way there's no problem they can answer. They can get answers at 1:00 clock in the morning.

Absolutely.

Isn't it incredible that students are so lazy that, I mean, it's human nature? I know. We cannot read every email or study every brochure and read all the details. And that's what AI agents are really good for, to give the answers to frequently asked questions.

Yeah, I mean, and that's the thing, you know, even if you do read something, are you going to remember that one thing you read one time?

No.

You probably have forgotten it by the end of the day. That's what we know about.

That's right.

So yeah, you know, it's such exciting times that we're in now.

So Barbara, how do people get in touch with you?

Barbara? The whale hunters.com love to hear from them.

Wonderful. Do we have any more questions, Stephanie?

I don't.

People were just really excited about this and someone was saying, you know, it's so futuristic and what if the clones begin selling to the clones?

And that's what's happening. Also, Gartner predicts by 2026, 25% of all sales are purchased by machines. So machine buying is is a new discipline and we need to learn more about it.

Right.

Well somebody just said I've experienced with AI voice cloning, that's Mark Bergman and I had a hard time distinguishing my own voice from my AI voice.

That's when it's really well done.

And Lee Smith is asking what are your concerns about impersonation being used for nefarious purposes?

I think that's all about security.

And you know, there's always a downside that somebody's going to find. I'm not particularly worried about that. I know that the Delphi people have really, really high end security in place to prevent that from happening.

So also The Is the AI coach available 247 on your website?

Yes.

So would you say this is a great substitute for and not a replacement for Barbara?

A substitute for what?

A substitute for. For Barbara. For the real you?

I think it is, yeah. In certain contexts, of course it's not as much fun as I am. You can tell that. Laughter.