Using AI to Build Skill in Sales Conversationsyer

Today, of course, we're going to take a peek into what we've learned after analyzing over 750,000 role plays using AI, with feedback, with coaching. And we're going to understand, you know, what does that mean for how salespeople learn? How do we inspire salespeople to actually practice and get the repetitions in that they need? And the whole idea of forgetfulness, you know, what can we do if we're investing money in training so that our people are not forgetting the training? And big, big thing here is the chat. So I would love for everyone to help me in this presentation. It's kind of like we're all doing the presentation together. You can put that on your resume that you've just done a presentation with me. So please use the chat. I'm going to ask you some questions. It should be pretty engaging. And then I just wanted to see, like, could you write yes in the chat? You know, will you help me out with this presentation? So I'm just waiting to see everybody here in the chat who's willing to help out with the presentation today. Oh, good, good, good. Oh, very good. I have some. I have some helper. So put it on your resume. All right, so here in this slide, we see. We see this robot, right? Everybody seems to be talking about this right now, and AI is beginning to take jobs, and it's going to maybe displace or replace some of the sellers. And so in the chat, I would love for you to tell me, which jobs do you think that AI is going to replace in the next two years or maybe the next year even? I see a lot of people in the chat. Thank you. Okay, we have the BDR role that it's going to replace. Some of you, some of you saying, no, none. There's nobody that's going to be replaced by AI. SDRs, teachers. No, don't say that. Sales executives, customer service reps. Okay, we've got some. We've got some good engagement here. All right? So we think that maybe it can take over some of these roles. But, you know, AI can just do so much to help us and support us. But, you know, it can't really create that human connection that Gerhard and I were talking about in the very beginning in the opening here, right? And, you know, the. The one really that the humans can. Can perform the best is. Is that meaningful, that empathetic conversation to really establish trust and be. Build up some mutual understanding. So AI may be doing so much to be able to help us to get people on the phone and Support us when we're on the call, all of these things. But really, humans should be having a lot of those conversations. All right, and so today I'm going to talk a little bit about how AI is improving human performance and talk a little bit about how humans are actually adapting nicely to using and aligning and learning with AI and with the platform that we've created where sellers can practice. It's an AI platform. They can practice having sales conversations and they can get coaching and they can get feedback. We've had over 45,000 sellers training on the platform. So we're going to talk a little bit about how that's going and what that looks like and what AI and what science can tell us about how people learn. So sharing this data, 750, 000 role plays, it should be a lot of fun. Now, I do have a question, though, and I want to preface this by that first session that we had today was really good. All of these sessions are really good. We're paying attention, we're thinking through what's being said. But I want to know in the chat here, how much do you remember from that first session that we were in today?

How much do you remember? 100% of what you heard? 90%, 80%, 50%. How much do you remember from the beginning of the day, that first session or whatever session that you, you've been a part of? So I see some hesitation in the chat, you know. Oh, with your notes or memory, your memory here I have some people thinking, hmm, I don't know. Right, let's see. Probably around 50%. I'm seeing so much. A hundred percent. But ADHD, oh, my gosh. Necessitated detailed note taking. Oh, another person's calling someone out in the chat. Liars. Right? I love this. I love the engagement here. You know, it's, it's, it's tough to think about this because we are paying attention and we think when we're hearing something that we're going to remember it, but it just, it doesn't typically work out. So what do we know about memory and learning how to. And I think we had a presenter earlier today talking about the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. So there was a German psychologist who actually was studying this over well over a hundred years ago and just trying to understand hearing, seeing, content, and, you know, how much he would actually forget over time. And he would chart this out over time, how much he actually forgot and sit. Since then, there have been a variety of different studies that have been conducted and they're corroborating that research. And I wrote a little blog about the forgetting curve. But long story short, in the beginning of the day, as soon as we're exposed to information, we are retaining a lot of it immediately. But by the end of the day, we are forgetting. It's a very steep forgetting curve. And so by the end of the day, we may have forgotten 70% of the things that we've heard. Right. And a lot of this depends on, like, how much were we paying attention, how much did we care about the things that we learned? But we forget 70%. And by the end of the week, you may have forgotten as much as 90%, maybe even more of what you've been exposed to. So the idea here is that when we're exposed to information, let's say you're spending $300,000 to bring, you know, part of your company in in order to do some kind of a training. You don't want that training to be forgotten. So what do we need to do? We need to make sure that people are practicing, people are recalling this information that they've, that they've heard, that they've learned. Especially if you're talking about, you know, changing the direction, maybe going from a features and benefits approach to more of a value selling or consultative selling or any kind of. You can't just train sellers and expect that they're going to make that shift. You really have to reinforce and you have to do that with practice. So the question in the chat then is how much role play practice is enough? So maybe you have a new methodology, maybe you have somebody that you're onboarding. How much role play practice do you think is enough? So we have someone here that probably heard what I was saying earlier this morning with Gearhart. We have maybe it's 30. Any other guesses here? I don't know. We'll see Some, some thumbs up. I appreciate that. No, you know, I, I. 20. 20. That's, that's a good one. All right, so I'll just go ahead. 40%. Lots of role plays as a steady diet. I love that. That, that's, that's something new. I haven't heard that before. Well, if you look at this graph that I'm showing here, this is a graph of some of the data that we collected from role plays. Now, in these role plays, there is a score that you can get. It's, you know, no, zero, all the way up to 10,000. And on the, and so that's on the left hand side. And on the bottom, you're looking at the Actual number of these practice conversations going through. And what you'll see here is that we have a gap. Right. And let me see if I can share it on the screen. When you initially begin the role play conversation, you right away you get better because you build up a little bit more confidence. You start to understand the expectations of you. So you do, you have an immediate boost. Right. But what we see is that sellers need more and more practice and they're getting a little bit better. You know, some things work, some things don't. It's trial and error. If they have great feedback and they have great coaching, then we'll actually see them to get better faster. But it is around the 30 practice mark with great coaching and feedback that we see this significant boost in performance. And again, it's not every single person where it's exactly 30. Maybe if you're really well trained, it's going to take less. Some people that are new, maybe it's going to take more. If you've built bad habits over a long period of time, it might take a little bit longer because you have to unlearn some and then you have to relearn some new. Yes. And that is 30 practices. Thank you for that question. So what's happening then? If it's taking 30 practices roughly, with great coaching and feedback to really begin to master skills and maybe 40 to 50 to, to completely match these skills so that your sellers are having the kind of conversations that you want them to have, then what's happening? If sellers need the practice and it takes some time to get better, then what we see is that sellers are now practicing on customers. Right? And what Mary Shea was talking about is, you know, trying to build up revenue that's predictable. How can you have predictable revenue when your sellers are churning through leads? And even over time, your sellers need to reinforce their training because they forget they have a long weekend, they go on vacation. Sometimes we just stumble over our words or we get lazy or we cut corners. And it's important to continue, not just learn the skill, but continue to reinforce some of these skills. All right, see, we have this idea then, right? If it takes practice to get better. How many of you agree with this phrase that practice makes perfect? So what do you think? So I see a lot of like, oh, practice makes perfect. Practice makes perfect. Some say, no, no. Yes. Oh my gosh. We have some different opinions here in the chat. I love that. Um, well.

I actually wrote another blog about something that I call the Practice Paradox. And it talks about the type of practice that People are getting so quickly. I just want to write in the chat here because I see this. Practice makes permanent. I see Practice makes perfect. Only perfect. Practice makes perfect. Oh my gosh, there, there are so many great things here. So those of us who are saying, like, okay, well, no, it's not just having more practice. Well, what's wrong with practice today? The way that we practice, what do you see as the challenges that people are facing?

So go ahead and write in the chat.

When is traditional role play just not ideal? Okay, so we have this. It's, it's inconsistent. They're practicing bad habits. Maybe you're reinforcing bad techniques. People are teaching who are not competent. Yes. Practice takes time. Nobody has enough time to practice. It doesn't really mirror real life scenarios. Oh my gosh, you guys really are doing this presentation for me. It's great. It's not suited for their real life circumstances, all of this. Oh my gosh, they are just flowing in. Thank you, thank you for all of this. So, so, yes, yes, I agree. And I wanted to talk briefly about the idea of the practice paradox. Right. Practice alone isn't enough for all of these reasons that you've just written in the chat. And to keep in mind that not all practice is created equal. In fact, some practice can actually do you harm. And I see it over here in the chat and I really, I call this the practice paradox. Right? We think, okay, we need more and more practice and with more practice we're going to get better. But that's the paradox is that if we're practicing the wrong things or the practice is not high quality, then it's not going to go well. Right? So we have trainees that come in and they're role playing together. I used to do this in my classes, in fact, and my students would just role play together and they're like, what are we supposed to do? They don't know how to role play. They don't know how to be the buyer, they don't know how to be the seller. They don't know how to give feedback when, when they're beginning. Right? So maybe they're wrong about how it's supposed to go. They're just not informed yet. And so what this is doing, it's, it's creating and it's reinforcing bad habits. I even had some students that would role play with their grandparents. You know, they. Someone sold shoes for 40 years and would teach the students how to sell in that way. But it was completely different from the enterprise type of selling. Selling that I was trying to teach my students. So it was, it's kind of like the blind leading the blind in, in this example. And of course, when trainees are training with their manager, there are a whole host of challenges that come with this. I completed a study with a group of researchers last semester and we, I mean, last summer and we were actually looking at salespeople at all, you know, all levels of experience. And we found that the relationship with the manager in the feedback that they were giving to sellers were creating things like depression, depersonalization of work. It was creating a negative impact on mental health. Not all sellers can get access to their managers. Not all sellers, you know, have great relationships with their managers. It can be very distracting when, when you're trying to role play with your manager and you're not sure if you're going to get put on a pip or something is going to happen and the outcome is going to be bad and you're so distracted that it's hard to really lean in and learn. And so it goes. Along with my background, I've spent the last 22 years studying how salespeople learn. I completed a dissertation on the topic. I've written many articles, a few books on the topic. And we have to really think about, with all these AI tools that are available to us is really understanding how can we get sellers to lean in and how can we help and support them. So a little bit more on the practice paradox, just to kind of put it out there on the screen, is that new or novice sellers, they just don't know how to give feedback to each other. They don't know what good looks like. Managers are often just not prepared. These are so great. I mean, I need to download the comments and, and get them later. These are, these are incredible that you've put together here. Managers are pulled in so many directions. They can't be expected to know exactly what that customer call is going to be like and then be able to simulate that and then being able to go through all the different categories to provide some detailed feedback. You're going to miss things. Just like when I'm evaluating my own students role plays. I have 70 students and I have to go through and watch the role plays. And so, yes, you end up cutting corners. You end up not giving the kind of detail. You miss things as you're writing notes, going through the role plays. It's a challenge. And managers just struggle to be consistent because they get fatigued. Maybe they have personality conflicts, maybe they have other things going on. It's the beginning of the day, it's the end of the day. And so these inconsistencies, managers that are not prepared to support their people, it impacts the mental health of those sellers. And that relates to drops in performance, motivation, satisfaction. And it actually increases how likely someone is to leave if they're not really feeling like they're getting the support that they need. So what can we do? How do we avoid some of these traps that are out there? You know, what do we know? What can we do? How can we work through this? And we know that AI really creates this opportunity to have practice that is consistent. And AI can give feedback right away. It can give feedback as we're role playing, it can give feedback after we're done role playing. It can keep track of our progress. Managers can see it later. And I know in the classroom we serve customers who are training with their companies, but we also serve over 60 plus, you know, colleges and universities who actually use rainmakers for free. And now the teachers that are using rainmakers in their classes are able to inform their teaching with the data and the insight so they don't have to watch all these role plays. They can actually look at the role plays and say, you know what, I really need to focus a little bit more on helping the underground, helping the students understand, you know, asking questions about timeline motivation, because they seem to be skipping this step. So we're able to use AI to do this. And like I said, we have over 45,000 people that have trained using our system. So sellers are adapting to this paradigm shift that we're seeing in sales training in, in our program. You can use it on your computer, but you can also use it on your phone. So we're mobile first. We see that people able to practice and learn on their own in a safe space, they can do it while they're walking the dog or, you know, on a train, somewhere, anywhere. When you have that phone right in your hand, you can train, you can see your feedback. And so a lot of people ask us, okay, well, you know, we want to do this, but how do we make sure that people are actually going to use it? And salespeople are finicky salespeople. They need to make sure that whatever you're doing to train them is relevant. They feel like it's relevant, it's valuable, and it makes sense. Right? We've all been through some of that compliance training where we're just checking the boxes and we don't want to do it. We don't see the value our organization is making us do that. But we don't really see that it's, you know, relevant to what we're doing, our jobs. The feedback needs to come right away. So sellers want to see feedback. The longer you wait after a role play, practice or any kind of feedback that you're giving to a seller, the less likely they're going to actually.

Care about that feedback because too much has happened. So when I had 70 sales students before and I had to watch all their role plays, I, I would take a week to get back to them and, you know, my kids were trying to climb on my back trying to get my attention while I had my nose in the laptop trying to watch all of these role plays. And so by the time I sent it, I spent so much time, so much effort, back surgeries, just trying to help everybody and nobody really cared about the feedback because it was delivered too late. So that's one of the challenges. That feedback component and then the application, they have to see how it applies really to that work. It has to simulate what does the buyer sound like, what is the situation like, you know, the, the methodology, everything has to align so they feel like the time that they're putting in away from being customer facing is applicable to their work and giving seller's agency some control over this, control over the timing, control over how much they're practicing, control over some of their performance that is critical to success. So AI helps by offering consistent practice. And you can get so many repetitions, you can get instant and you can get thoughtful feedback and it really gives learners so some control. And with this new mindset, this paradigm shift of how we see sales training, we're also seeing new results. So for the managers out there, you don't have to do all the role plays and try to prepare yourself and try to be everything to any, everybody in the organization, because you can't. But you can actually allow AI to support all of your efforts and be the hero, still the leader that you really, really want to be and not get bogged down by all the, the role plays and the practice and, you know, missing that coaching opportunity with your team and you don't have to run yourself ragged anymore. So you might be thinking, all right, well, AI helps sellers prepare for better conversations. But how do I know if my team is really ready to do something like this? So I have some questions about automated role play tools. Some things you should think about before getting started. You should really think about which conversations need the most improvement. I would not start out and try to fix every conversation at once. Your sales team has to ease into using these tools, getting used to practicing, understanding the value of that. So find out what that critical conversation is and which ones need the most improvement. That if you could move the needle on those conversations, that it would really be meaningful for your organization. Think about your methodology that you're using, and do you need help refining it? Because if you're reinforcing a methodology, if you're reinforcing a conversation that is not going to drive the results you want, then you're also wasting your time. So you have to make sure that you have that in place, you know what you want, and then understanding if the platform can really adjust and shift to your own methodology. Thinking about, you know, how does this mimic real conversations? Is it accurate in the kinds of conversations that sellers are going to have? Because again, has to be applicable. It has to be relevant. Thinking about the learning platform. When we talk about learning research, we do as much as we can to avoid distracting the learner. So think about any latency, think about any other distractions. Is something happening in any of these role plays that would get the seller to focus on that thing that's happening instead of actually having the conversation that you want them to have? Thinking about the feedback, does the feedback provide or does the platform provide feedback in the form of actual meaningful insights? So you don't want to just have something an intern could do, right? You don't want to just say, how many fillers did you have in this conversation? How much were you talking versus the other person? Those things are important. But you need to have real meaningful insights that an expert would provide. That is the kind of training that a seller would appreciate and would lean into. And then think about things like adaptive game mechanics. Does the platform have adaptive game mechanics in order to inspire repetitive play, you don't want a seller to have the same exact conversation over and over again. That would be infuriating if I had to have the same conversation 30 times. But what we're doing in Rainmakers is our entire team is built with game designers in the video game industry, where they create addictive types of tools to play on. Right. Thinking about how addicted are people to video games? I know my son would love to play video games for an entire day if he could. So we take the addicting nature of these games and try to, you know, bake that into our system so that as learners get better, it gets more challenging and it grows with them. So that's, that's a real key there is to create meaningful conversations that People want to continue to play.

And by now I think we're all ready to embrace AI. So I say let's do it. And if you have some questions here, I. I'd love to see it. Oh, I see some people in the chat here. Rob Peterson. Yes. Rob Peterson says all of your future sellers in my class are learning through rainmakers. Thanks, Rob. Yes. Yes. It's in so many universities and the students are getting better. If you look on my LinkedIn or if you search me up, a bunch of my students have been tagging me. They did an elevator pitch competition where they have to learn to tell a star story about themselves instead of meeting an employer and saying, like, oh, I'm a junior, I'm this major and this is the job I want. Instead, they have to tell a story about how their skills are relevant. Let's see. Oh, okay. Gerhard's coming on soon. That's great. We'll see you soon, Gerhard. Let's see. How long do you think it will be before there's no human involvement in any more. Oh anymore in selling, in other words, buying AI? Well, I don't know. I mean, I think that there's always going to be involvement. But we do see AI taking over some of these, you know, buying and selling roles. But it just, you know, these are some of the, like, medial tasks. So I don't think. So I agree with. I think that's Laurie Richardson's picture there. I don't think that we're ever going to see salespeople go away. I hope not. I run the Bryant University Sales Institute, and we just received a donation to create a 5,000ft sales lab. So there's a lot of investment in training people how to sell. So I don't think it's going to go anywhere.

Let's see, how is this implemented? Customization training, application, measured results. Sure. That's a lot. So we customize to the conversation, the setting, the, you know, avatars that we use, the conversation, the product. I mean, everything is completely customized to the kind of conversation that the company wants to have.

And with a very small group, we're able to train measured results. Typically, how we think about success is the first thing we see is that people are using the system. And then we look at, are they using the system enough to actually get better? Right. Because we're hearing a lot, you know, that it's addicting. And the people are, you know, they keep coming in because they have buttons to just play again when they don't like their scores. So we see Are they playing, Are they playing enough? And then are they getting better? And so then we have to look at, okay, where are they struggling? Can we step in in some way? There's coaching of course too. And then we're starting to look now at some of those results, the impact that it's having. We're seeing initial results or some more conversations are actually being held by people that are training versus other people that are not training in the same organizations. And we're also seeing initial results that deal sizes are going up. So those are some of the.

What do you think about what Bill Gates said? That AI is running too fast without regulations.

It is moving fast. I mean we've seen so many reports, right where AI was hyped up so much and there was a lot of over promising and under delivering there. Right. So it is kind of like the wild west right now. And it's important to talk to companies and work with companies that are going to do what they can to make sure that they're making the right choices. They're going to protect your data, they're going to protect your people. And so it is left up to, to an extent the companies right now. So make sure you're vetting the teams that you're working with and that their platforms are not just built on AI because of AI. It should have a foundation. We use a foundation of learning science and game design for ours. So think about, you know, how it's, how it's built.

Stephanie, I want to go back to you experiences with students. To what degree does the belief of the student in themselves impact the performance? Do you have any data on that?

Sure. I actually published in the Journal of Selling. Rob Peterson runs that journal out of Northern Illinois University. And we were looking at.

Sellers that were in my classroom and we were looking at sellers that I was doing training with and we noticed that there were differences. Women came into sales conversations and their confidence levels were lower. Men came into conversations and their confidence levels were very high. And we actually did improv training in order to help. This was, you know, before we had brain makers in the classroom and we saw a huge spike in performance for the women where we're able to really boost up their confidence levels. And they started winning all the sales competitions as well. So we do see that. Right. And for women, they are coming in with lower levels of confidence. And so as managers we need to give them a lot of coaching and feedback and support because what they can do is amazing. But we need to give them the kind of feedback that they want and they do want more feedback than men want.

So what you're saying is that what people believe about themselves, their self concept, if it's not nurtured or if it's not guided or if those people don't have a good mentor that can help them restore their confidence and up their confidence before their performance, then they're not reaching their full potential.

They're not. And the research that we did last summer supports that. Instead of working harder, they start second guessing themselves. They think about other things. So in their mind you only have so much capacity to think about things. And so now their mind is getting filled up by self deprecating thoughts. Right. And, and worry and not sure if they're going to be able to keep their job, not sure if they're going to be able to go in and you know, make the deal. As soon as they hear an objection, then they think, oh gosh, you know, the sale is over, it's going to work for me. So we have to boost our people up and if we don't, then we see that impact on mental health in a very negative way.

And shifting back to AI. Oh.

Rob just posted the article in the chat.

In the chat, chat. Yeah. Jose is asking how long does an average program take?

Do you recommend a certain period of time? For instance, six months or one year or maybe forever?

I think that people should always come in and practice. But there is a ramp up time.

It takes time to build up proficiency with AI you can have someone do 30 role plays. If you're trying to submerge them, you could probably take them within a week and get them up to speed on that conversation with tons of coaching, tons of feedback, tons of time to really think and reflect and then, you know, come back prepared to purposefully practice. So you're, you're going to significantly reduce your ramp time so long as the program that you're training on is going to be effective.

We're a little bit over time. But I'm intrigued by one more data point that we discussed yesterday. When Alex Khetichin with Fuel Inc. Came up with a graph and showed the average hourly salary of a salesperson as a key performance indicator. And when they learned more, then their average salary went up. What do you think of that metric?

Well, that actually inspired my research from the beginning. When I was gosh, in the early 2000s, I wanted to understand what was the difference between a typical seller and that seller that was like your all star. And the research showed us that it was this trait of self directed learning and if you were somebody that was going to constantly be out there and learn and grow, and it doesn't matter how much money you make that you're always out there trying to understand how to better serve your clients and then absolutely, it has a major impact. So what we saw on that data was the people that were not self directed, that were not out there trying to learn, they would hit about six digits, about 100,000, and then they would just take their foot off the gas and they would go to wine tastings and play golf. And instead of hunting, they became farmers. And then the people that were continuing to learn were making 300,000, 500,000 more.

And it didn't matter how much they made, they were constantly thirsty for new information.

So yes, I think that we have. The old way of thinking was there were hunters and farmers. And actually with AI, you have a third.

Analogy, which is the trapper. Because if you have great information at your fingertips, then you can trap more customers. Imaginations.

That's right. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone for being a part of this presentation. Please put it on your resume.