Unlocking Mid-Funnel: Making Every Rep Perform Like Your Top 10% With AI

So today I will be talking about how AI should help you essentially capture the mid-funnel, where everybody's focusing on the top of the funnel, where you would see that AI SDRs are kind of taking over social media. You would see that AI SDRs unfortunately do not work in complex technical sales. These deals just run on trust and the trust is built by in-person conversations. And I think the tell is the companies that are actually selling AI SDRs are actually hiring humans to sell them. And that's the small version of the big problem. So since there is a lot of noise, so many tools promising you to find buyers, reach them faster, book meetings, everybody's focusing on the top of the funnel, which is super important. But I think teams are optimizing for the wrong thing. And today my goal is to show you how targeting and optimizing the mid-funnel is where deals die. And at the end of it, I will show a 2-minute demo of what that looks like and how people can get more confident and actually optimize that mid-funnel. So I'm gonna share my screen really quick and then we'll jump right in. Okay, so this is something very personal to me, Jill and Gerard. So everyone knows how hard it's to get in front of buyers today, right? So we do the rational thing, we optimize for the top of the funnel every single time. And think about this, everybody in the last 18 months has spent spent time optimizing agents, intent data, sequence signals. Everyone here has spent the last 18 months and a ton of money doing that. But a rep that gets 30 minutes with a buyer, that meeting alone costs hundreds of dollars, thousands in enterprise. And that meeting is the most expensive thing that the company has bought that week. So I want to be specific about what happens next because mid-funnel is where it gets used a lot and it's a vague— as a vague word, but it's not vague at all. The mid-funnel is where everything between meeting booked, proposal sent, disqualification, qualification, multi-threading, objection handling, everything is in that mid-funnel. And that is the only part of the sales funnel that actually runs on human judgment in real time with no safety net. And the way that I look at it is I break it down into 4 things. The handoff when the SDR actually books the meeting and the AE walks in the calendar invite with just 3 lines of note and spends the first 10 minutes just rediscovering everything with the potential prospect and unfortunately downgrade themselves before even saying a single word about the product or about why they're on the conversation. The second biggest thing that I think Jill and Gerard, you would agree, is the context keeps leaking, like the SDRs to AE handoffs or the AE to a solutions engineer or even to the legal. Every handoff, unfortunately, there's a big drop-off. And the third biggest thing is discovery. Like most reps just earn the permission to present instead of actually really being in the moment, understanding the buyer and understanding their current situation. And we have changed. And I would say I am also part of the problem where this is the most expensive one. I think nobody disqualifies because reps right now just get measured on pipeline creation. So bad deals just flow through and they just sit in the pipeline and then they just don't close in 5, 7 months also. And what I've seen over the course of, I would say, multiple years is when sales leaders say that they're going to fix the mid-funnel, what usually ends up happening is a new deck, a new discovery framework in the LMS, or a new medic field added to Salesforce. And those are just artifacts. They are not what actually run the mid-funnel. To me, the mid-funnel is getting reps practicing before the conversation in multiple ways. So they are kind of prepped for every type of Conversation that's about to happen, and they are not practicing on live pipeline. They are not practicing on prospects. So I think I really like the way that somebody put this is you know exactly how the movie is going to end if you have watched it enough times. You know if you're talking to a CFO, if you're talking to a neurosurgeon, depending on what product you're selling, you know exactly the conversation. And Now, this is what we have tried to solve and we solved it in a good way. But I really want you to look at the people looking at this presentation. If you look on the left, this is how we've built reps for the last 30 years. And I want to be careful, none of this is bad. I think role-playing with your managers is a great idea. Shadowing senior reps is great. The content in your LMS is probably okay, but I can guarantee 100% that it is outdated. And nobody went in and kind of updated that. One manager, 20, 30 sales reps, touchpoints maybe once or twice a year. That's not really a coaching program. And rest of it just gets learned on the live deal.

Hmm.

And on the right side, when you see is if there's a way when a rep can actually have the real conversation before actually talking to a prospect, A buyer that is built from your actual customer profile, not something generic like, hey, I'm just going to talk to this random AI persona, or I can spin up a roleplay scenario on ChatGPT and then say that, hey, just ask me a few questions. I have this upcoming meeting. A conversation with a surgeon who just has 4 minutes between cases behaves nothing like a CFO in procurement. So a rep needs to figure out the objections that push back, Talking to somebody who interrupts you in a different flow. So all of that ending with a post-moment at the end where the rep kind of remembers what they were thinking during the live call. And this is— these are some real-life stories or quotes that our customers have given us that you would see 2 different customers that we picked deliberately because they're nothing alike. One is a publicly traded med device company. Their rep sells to neurosurgeon, interventional pain specialist, orthopedic surgeons, some of the most complex and technical buyers, highest consequence conversations in sales. And their director of sales enablement said that Sellable has been the most impactful thing that they have done for sales training in their entire tenure. So this sales leader has been in sales for over 20 years. And something that was super exciting to us was their reps asked for more sessions. So that's kind of unheard for, like somebody, a sales rep saying that, hey, give me more instead of leadership kind of pushing conversations. And the second quote that you see is a company called Legion Hub, enterprise B2B sales motion, high-volume teams. And the CEO of that company said that ramp time was reduced by 80%. So those kind of results are kind of unheard of. And 2 different industries, different motions, amazing results. So yes, this was sellable.

This—

thank you for listening. I know Gerard and I wanted— and Jill, please. I would welcome questions. And at the end of our brief conversation, I have a short video to present that will show you what am I talking about? What the hell am I talking about? Yeah.

All right.

One thing that, one thing that came to mind that as you're speaking is, you know, that we don't rise to the occasion, we fall to the level of our preparation and our training. And what an amazing opportunity because, you know, when, when the sales reps can be practicing, um, when they need it, you know, like you said, on the 50th time or, you know, at 11 PM the night before they're going into some big ones. So that just really allows them to get the reps to build that confidence that we're talking about, right?

And do it at their own time. I mean, right now it's hard for folks to just— you can't call upon folks in a Zoom meeting and say, hey, we are doing a role play. That time has passed, unfortunately. The different demographic that's in sales right now. So if you give them a safe environment to fail and then show up sharp when it really matters, I think that's our goal.

Yeah, and with my psychology background too, I think what I'm hearing or what I'm observing here is it is a safe environment. It's a psychologically safe environment where they can fail and learn, which is so important, which is different than being called out on a Zoom call call or twice a year with a manager at a sales meeting. So it feels safe so they can keep practicing and getting better.

Exactly. Exactly.

So, Preet, you spent your career as an engineer and you worked for JPMorgan and for Goldman. So you transitioned from the world of engineering Which is numbers.

Oh, where did he go? So you moved from engineering with numbers and now you moved to doing this. So tell us about, tell us about this transition. How, how did you end up here?

In sales? I think I really enjoyed my time as an engineer. I'm still an engineer at HeartGel. I still write code. But I think that transition happened when I was heading the engineering at a startup. And then accidentally just fell into sales. And I just love the process of saying that, hey, building is really fun, but taking something commercial and actually selling it to people who don't know you, seeing the actual value of something that you've built, that's a different skill completely. And that's when this all started. And the biggest gap that I saw between the two is coding is very tangible. So engineering is very tangible. You write code, you see it right in front of you.

Mm-hmm.

You see something, you build it, and you feel happy about it. Sales can go in different directions. You get on a conversation with a prospect and it's silence for 2-3 weeks. At that point of time, you're just inventing things in your head and saying that, hey, what happened? Maybe somebody switched jobs. Maybe, I don't know what's going on internally. Somebody went through an acquisition. And I think you would agree that it's so variable. There's so many moving parts in sales. That it's hard for you to, with 100% certainty, say that, hey, this deal is closing in the next 3 days. I mean, at least that's what I feel, the biggest difference between the two.

That's awesome. So I've got a couple more questions for you.

Please.

So number one, if I was a sales leader and I'm like, okay, this sounds great, kind of walk me through what it looks like because, you know, let's, Let's say I'm a financial services company or I'm a pharmaceutical company. So what is the process so that your platform learns everything about what my avatar, my customer profile is, and then also about all the things that my reps are trained on delivering and what objections? So help me understand how—

Sure.

Your technology makes it seem realistic. So when they're practicing, it's like they're in front of an actual customer instead of, you know, something that is, you know, kind of surface level. So kind of walk me through, like, what is that process so that as a sales leader, I feel confident that this is actually gonna help my people get better?

That's a great question. And one of the key things that we've, we've done on the platform is we've gone through that because we are sellers who have created a product for sellers instead of engineers creating just solutions for sellers because we've seen that sales leaders don't have the energy and the bandwidth to actually sit down, learn a platform, go through the whole prompt engineering and setup. All you need to do, Jill, is upload your sales deck or your product information. Even if you don't have a sales deck, you're an up-and-coming company, you can just point it to your company's website. Our data pipeline behind the scenes figures out everything about your company, pre-creates selling scenarios, figures out your ideal customer profile, your target market, and then just throws it into different situations. So you can do anywhere from cold calls, warm calls, in-person networking events. So if you're meeting somebody in the office or at a conference, you can simulate that conversation also. You can time it based on 3-4 minutes. And then the other part that you said, how real is it? We try to do a great job with making it as realistic as possible. Of course, there are situations where it won't be real, where we ask sales leaders to give us the feedback and tell us, hey, what went wrong with this particular conversation? And then we retrain our AI to get better. And because of that constant feedback loop, our AI engine is smart enough to figure that out. So yeah, so that's why we have some happy customers doing that. Yeah.

Well, and you said too, you had a quote there and said, all right, this is the best thing that we ever did. So Do you have a story of maybe, like, I'm going down to the individual sales rep, like, what does this do to an individual sales rep? Because so many times when we roll out new things, and again, I've spent so much time in sales leadership, so you roll out another thing and it's like the sales team seemed a little resistant. But tell me about maybe an example of one person, like, what this does, because you said they're asking for more. So you've got me on the edge of my seat here. You've got sales rep asking for more. So tell me about kind of more the user experience for, you know, an individual sales rep and why they're asking for more.

I will preface that by saying that nobody likes role plays. Let's be clear. Like, if you tell somebody, a sales rep, to practice, they would say, hey, I would rather just go and talk to a customer.

Right.

I think that is totally fair.

Right.

But what we've learned is tenured sales reps especially spend a lot of time prepping for a meeting. a lot of time prepping for a meeting.

Right.

So we took that insight and said that, hey, why don't you actually do a meeting prep with an AI clone of an actual prospect? So they can put somebody's LinkedIn profile, they can type in their email address, we find everything about that person, and then they do a meeting prep on the conversation. So they know, hey, I'm talking to a neurosurgeon, these are the 3 questions that based on all the caseloads that they have done, where they went to school, any kind of white papers that they've published. We find all that information and create a simulation for them to run. And that has changed it. So they're in their parking lots sitting in between travel time and doing that on their phones.

Wow.

And that just changed it. And we said, hey, this is where we need to double down, create an awesome experience and actually help them move towards conversion. So it's great you practice, what happens next? Can we actually tie the conversions of that practice They secure a demo. Did they secure a next meeting? And then we, we, we talk through the sales reps directly and say that, tell us what's wrong, how we make it better.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And it really ties into what that story I shared at the beginning. Using sellable is going to help increase their confidence.

It will. 100%.

All right.

And Gerhard's back. I've been, I've been monopolizing the conversation. Gerhard, I know you have more questions.

Quite all right. It really reminded me the first time I did role plays as a sales trainer. For a French construction equipment company. We had 1,600 salespeople in 41 different countries. And I felt that role play was absolutely needed. And I couldn't sell it in the beginning because salespeople don't want to role play.

They don't.

Especially with video. And it was so intimidating. So I came up with a different idea and I said, why don't we have fun and record ourselves? And we took a newspaper, divided it in different sections. And said, well, Preet, you read the political news, Jill, you do the weather and I do sports.

Yeah.

And let's create a podcast. And then people realize that they're actually pretty good. They're better than what they thought they could do. And then I led them to the next thing and I said, you know, when I gave them an analogy. When they train pilots for to fly a 747.

Yeah.

They're not gonna put them on a, on a $400 million plane. They're gonna put them in a simulator. And now with the video roleplay, we have a simulator and you can try anything you want. And by easing them into the roleplay, they became addicted. They roleplayed until 10 o'clock at night, like your people do it in the parking lot.

Exactly, exactly. And speaking of that, why don't I show you this in real time? This is just me doing a role play and selling Sellable to a VP of sales enablement. So you can see me doing a role play and just failing.

Cool.

Okay.

Hello, who is this?

Hi, this is Preet from Sellable. Is James, the person in charge of sales enablement, available?

You're speaking to him. What's this about?

Hi, James. So we help sales teams cut ramp time by over 50%, uh, and boost close rates by letting your reps role-play with AI clones of your prospects.

How do you actually do that?

So the way this works is you upload a PDF of your sales deck or common objections, and we instantly turn them into AI role-playing sessions. Reps can practice anywhere on desktop or mobile and get instant feedback after every session.

What's the proof that this actually works better than Gong or Chorus AI?

A great question, uh, James. So unlike Gong or Chorus AI that focus on post-call analysis, Sellable empowers your reps to improve before the call through role-playing and instant feedback. And this actually leads to faster ramp time and improved close rates.

Okay, what's your data backing that?

So we helped companies like LeadGenHub increase their close rates and reduce ramp time by 50% within 2 months. More than happy to share the full case study with you and also would love to show you a quick 15-minute demo later this week.

All right, I'm willing to see a demo. What time do you have available?

How about Thursday at 2 PM Eastern?

Thursday at 2 PM works for me. You can send the details to james.williams@innovaten.com.

Awesome, James. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Hey, Preet, great job on this call. Your opening hook was strong, especially mentioning the 50% ramp time reduction and improved close rates. You also handled the competitive question well by positioning Sellable as a tool that helps reps improve before the call, unlike Gong or Chorus, which analyze after the call. The lead gen example added credibility and helped move the conversation toward the demo. One improvement: add a little more rapport up front before jumping into the pitch. Also, bring in a discovery question earlier, like, what are the biggest challenges your team is facing around ramp time or sales rep productivity? Overall, strong call, clear value, good differentiation, and a positive next step.

That is amazing.

What do you think? You know what I love is I loved that there was the attitude of the guy picking up the phone. So it seemed realistic, right? It was like, what do you want?

That's a typical New Yorker from Long Island.

How did you— was that a real person or was that a, a, a, a HeyGen voice?

I mean, I can't do it with real people, Gerard. I mean, that's the whole point, but it's as real as it gets.

I love it. I love it. It's, it's very realistic. Well, we are running out of time. Preet, you did a fantastic job. Anybody who wants to know more, go to sellable.ai. It's a wonderful destination, especially for today where the competition is killing you if you don't have salespeople train and rehearse And be better. And that's what we are all about. That's what Sales 3.0 is all about, to share ideas like the ones that Preet just shared with director-level sales leaders across the world so that we can help improve and elevate the profession of selling. Thank you so much, Preet.

Thank you for having me. See you guys.