Using AI to Build Skill in Sales Conversations

Oh, thank you so much, Mark. It is such an honor to be here with you and all of the attendees here. I'd love to see in the chat a lot of engagement. And I would like to just say that this is my presentation just as much as it is your presentation. So I'll be asking for a lot of engagement over here, so get ready for that. But, but like Mark mentioned, I run the Sales Institute here at Bryant University and I'm also the Chief Science Officer at Rainmakers. And this is a way for you to practice your sales conversations, to get coaching and to get feedback as well. And that's what I'm going to focus the bulk of the conversation on today. So I thought it would be fun to start out and ask a question to get going. It's a question on the top of many minds today, looking at these jobs. Like, everyone's talking about AI and which jobs it's going to take, which jobs it's going to displace and, you know, is it going to get rid of sellers? So I'd like you to, in the chat, if you can see it there, to just write down, you know, which jobs do you think AI is going to replace? So which jobs? And Mark, feel free to chime in of which jobs you might think could be replaced as well. I know there's a little bit of delay between me and the actual broadcast itself. So we're seeing, oh, some people are saying, depends on the time frame that we're looking at. So what about over the next two years then? Right. We see some teaching, coding jobs over here in the chat. Oh, my goodness. Web developer. Oh, I hope not. Sales enablement, teaching, telemarketers. We see a lot of this, right. This is big. It's. It's on everyone's mind. I see more project management, digital marketing. Yes. And, you know, this chat thing that we're doing here, that is kind of going to be how the conversation is going to go here, where it's really interactive, where I can see what you're thinking. And yes, we're going to have a lot of displacement in some of these jobs. But, you know, AI can do a lot, right. It can do a lot to help, it can do a lot to support, but it's not able to really replace the human connection, the one that comes to be a part of a meaningful relationship, person to person. And part of that is the conversation. Right. AI is not able to be able to have that empathetic, thoughtful, caring, kind connection in the conversation that sellers can have. And so that's one place that we just are not able to replace yet. But today I'm actually going to share with you of how AI is improving human performance. And I would like to tell you that humans are actually adapting nicely. They're learning and they're aligning with AI and I'm going to tell a little bit about that. So I'm going to talk about what, what AI and science is going to be able to tell us about how people learn. And I'm going to share some data from our AI platform where you're able to practice sales conversations. You can do that with high quality coaching and feedback. It's called Rainmakers. R, N, M, K, R, S doesn't have any vowels. And that's where over 900,000 role plays were hosted with over 50,000 sellers starting in 2019. And over 150 universities have actually used it. And we've also started doing training for training companies as well as companies. All right, so first, I have a quick question. I know that we've had some excellent conversations and presentations today and even yesterday. So I'd love to hear in the chat, how much do you think you remember from the first session that you went to today? How much do you remember? And so just go ahead and write that in the chat, how much do you remember from that first session?

Do you remember, you know, 100% of the first session? Some of you say not really much from the first session, even though it could be really, really good. And we think that we're totally paying attention.

It's, it's tough to do that. Right?

Yeah. 20%.

Remembering Brandon Roderick. Yes, that's a good one, 70%. And so I'd like to just share with you here the forgetting curve. And many of you may have already heard of this. There was a German psychologist back in the 1800s that was studying learning and memory. And how do we really recall things that we've learned, like how do we retain them and what do we really lose? So he would go in and he would try to remember these letters that were bunched together and he would try to understand, okay, if I, if I learned this combination, how long is it? And I, and I want to know it, I want to remember it. How long is it before I forget this? And so what he found was that by the end of the day, he has already forgotten about 70% of what he learned. And so he was doing these studies over time to see that, you know, by the end of the week he might have forgotten about 90% of what he's learned. And then these studies of course were replicated because this was a sample of one. But it's so, it's so popular because of the name, the forgetting curve. But over and over, studies have been conducted to understand that we actually do forget a lot of what we've learned. Even though the content is good, even though we think that we're paying attention, we're interested, we want to remember it. We just don't remember it unless we're recalling it over and over and unless we're practicing it. And so now, you know, you think about, gosh, we have these sales kickoff meetings and we have these new methodologies that we're training and we have these courses that we're having people, you know, learn information through a PDF, through a video, and then they're answering questions at the end of it to test their competency. But we're not really having them do much with it later to make sure that they're adopting it. So we need to practice. And so what I'd like to ask is how much practice is really needed, you know, how much role play practice is really needed when we want to make sure that our people are remembering the things that they've learned. Right. If it's a new methodology, if we're moving from, you know, maybe a features and benefits type of a sale, and now we're moving over to some kind of like outcome selling or value based selling. So go ahead and write in the chat, you know, how much practice do you need to do if we're forgetting 70% by the end of the day and most of it by the end of the week. And if we keep going, we're just going to forget everything. How much practice needs to happen in order to get people to remember. So, oh my gosh, we have a lot here. Repetition is so important. You know, anything over an hour and a half isn't retained. Let's see what some of you are saying here. You have to hear something 12 times before it's embedded. Five times for learning times. Right. Like so, so many kind of. And one of you says 10,000 hours in order to master. Right. Yet the, the habits book. Oh my gosh, all of this taking notes helps. Practice makes perfect here in the chat. Maybe three hours a day of practice in order to master. Right? These are, these are really good, these are really, really good insights here. And it looks like we have some serious experts that are in the chat. And so looking at this, we actually are able to take data from all of these hundreds of thousands of conversations that students and professionals are practicing using AI technology in order to practice and practice and practice. So what we're seeing, when people begin to practice, in the very beginning, so, so at that part, you see where the graph increases almost instantly, maybe five or seven role plays that you're doing, you instantly get maybe 15 or 20% better. And maybe you're just getting more comfortable talking to that particular person. Maybe you're starting to understand the process a little bit. And you do, you do see a spike in improvement immediately. But what we see is that people continue to, you know, kind of bump around at that level, right? They're not seeming to get much better until this point. It's somewhere around that 30 role play mark that we see a significant improvement in performance. And again, over hundreds of thousand of role plays, over 50,000 people using the system. We're seeing this trend. And, and you might see it in your own organizations where sellers are struggling and struggling. And then all of a sudden, maybe it's six months in, maybe it's 18 months in, all of a sudden they have this epiphany and they're just like, oh my gosh, you know, and then they get it and it begins to flow. And so then you'll see, maybe it's about 85% mastery. And we're not talking about brushing up on a call before the call. We're talking about really improving selling skills here.

It takes, you can see from the graph, it takes maybe even 40 or 50 practices to really have a high level of proficiency across the board. Maybe you can call it mastery, like in the chat here, in order to consistently do good each time, and even once you've mastered it and you think you've got it, you can't just stop there. You've got to continue practicing. Right? Like if you're practicing basketball and you, you make the, the free throw and you get it right, is it the end? No. Professional basketball players continue to practice the fundamentals over and over again because in the big game, that's when it really matters. And so we have to have this environment of practice. And so I'd like to hear what you think about this then. If we know practice is so is so important and we need more practice, then what do you think? Do you agree with the statement that pract perfect? So in the chat, let me know, do you agree? Does practice make perfect? Then what do you think?

And I see, okay, we have here, yes, repetition is so important. Practice makes. Oh, perfect. Practice makes perfect. And then I see some more there's no such thing as perfect. Some of you say yes, yes, yes, perfect practice makes permanent. I think everyone's idea of practice is different. Oh, of perfect is different. So it depends. I like these insights here. No such thing as perfect pr. Practice makes progress. Yep. Practice reinforces habits. Yes. Some of you are saying yes, of course it does. Of course it does. Well, I like to challenge you for a second here on that. Then it's a bit of a paradox, I would say. Now I'd like you to. Some of you did not agree that practice makes perfect. But I think all of you can agree there are times when practice is not actually helping to move the needle forward. So I'd like you to, in the chat here is to say, okay, well when is it that practicing is not going to give us the results that we want? When is practice not going to be able to help us to get better, help us to improve, help us to have more confidence? When is practice going to maybe be bad so we can think about, you know, think about practicing with a new person. You're a new seller in an organization and now you're practicing for a big call with another new seller. Or maybe you're practicing with your manager. When does this go wrong? All right, And I see some things in here, all right, without feedback, we have challenges. Oh my gosh. I see here when you're doing the practice in front of the whole team, it can be, be so distracting and so scary to do that and just to, you know, give a little background. I've been studying how salespeople learn for over 20 years and I've done a dissertation, I've written books and so many articles on the topic. And it's true that when you're practicing in front of a team, it can be so nerve wracking and scary that you just are not paying attention to the learning and you can make silly mistakes and it can make other people have anxiety. Other people here saying the feedback that you're getting is not, is not good. Doing the same thing over and over and, and you know, no results, that's not very Good. Yes. And a.k.a. doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results is the definition of anxiety. Insanity, which we have here in the chat. If it's unfocused, you know, not enough time for check practice without feedback. Yes. I mean these are all really good examples. But sometimes what ends up happening is it almost feels like it's the blind leading the blind in some of this training. I talk to sales leaders all the time and I hear the same thing. And that's why I came up with this idea of the practice paradox. On the one hand, we feel that we need to do as much training and practice as we can because we know that if we practice well, then we can get better. But there are also instances where when we practice more, it actually makes us worse. And this is the practice paradox where you think, I need to practice more. But the practice you're doing could be creating and it could be reinforcing bad habits. And so a couple of the examples here would be when you have a very new seller or you have a seller that's been there for a while and you're transforming into a new methodology, a new way of selling. When you have someone that is new, they don't know how to give feedback because they don't really know what good looks like, and so they don't have a comparison. So if you have two people that are new to the selling methodology or new to the organization, are new to sales and they're asked to role play with each other, they're not sure A, what they're supposed to do, and they're not sure B, on how to give feedback because they're not really sure what good looks like. The other challenge is, let's say, okay, you have someone that knows what they're supposed to do. It's a manager. But maybe the manager is not prepared. Maybe the manager doesn't know how to mimic the customer. Maybe the manager is just not consistent because they're tired, they've done role plays all day. Or maybe there's a personality conflict between the manager and someone on the team, and it's making it really difficult to get in and even see the manager. So there are many reasons why traditional practice can create some problems for some of the sellers in the organization. And in order to get everybody on the right page. All right, so what do we do? I don't want to just present a problem and then say, okay, you know, sorry for the bad news. What can we do to avoid these traps? Well, the good news is, is that there is AI that is out there, and it allows sellers to have practice that's consistent. And the practice can align with the organization's goals. It can feed data back to sellers so that they're able to understand their own performance, so that managers are able to understand the performance at individual levels. But then you can also look at the performance across your whole team. And I will say, from the university setting, I used to have my sellers, my students, sending me four Role plays in a semester. And I was struggling to evaluate the role plays because I had 70 students across my different classes. I ended up actually sitting in front of a computer so long trying to evaluate role plays that I ended up having two emergency back surgeries. It was, it was stressful and it was a struggle and I wasn't doing a very good job of giving people feedback. And so now we've had this paradigm shift in how we are doing sales training. Students and learners. Sellers are able to do their training by using their phones. They can be on their phone and practice the conversations from anywhere. It's shifted how we think about training and educating. And we can look at huge displays of data, visualize to make it really easy to understand what's happening, to create leaderboards to gamify, and to use game mechanics to continue to challenge sellers as they continue to learn. So some tips on inspiring practice. How do we inspire practice for sales teams? And I will give you a few cues of how this works, just based on some of the research that's out there. So I've been researching for a couple decades and the meta analysis that I tapped into, I was looking at 1400 articles and over 600 dissertations on the topic. So I will tell you, when it comes to learning, when it comes to adult learning and especially salesperson learning, it's very important that the learning is relevant to the person. If you're forcing a salesperson to go into training and they don't feel that they need to learn that thing that they already have the skill, they're going to push back. They're not going to want to do the learning or the training. So having this relevant, customized experience for each person is very important. They have to see that it's relevant to what they need and what they want. The next element is the feedback. It is critical for a seller to get feedback as fast as they can. So some of the things that we do in the Rainmakers program for companies is that we actually offer coaching within the conversation as it's going. And this is shifting the outcome of the conversation and it's helping to shorten the cycle for learning for each of those sellers. The next thing to consider on feedback is making sure that the feedback is meaningful. You don't want feedback that an intern could deliver. I mean, that's valuable, right? Like, how much were you talking compared to the other person? How many fillers did you use? Which filler should you use? These are all things that are valuable in a sense, but an intern could do these. Anybody that doesn't have training can measure these things. You really want to make sure the feedback is going to elevate their selling skills, that it's meaningful to the salesperson or they're not going to want to practice just for practice sake. The next thing is the application. So you want to make sure that it's applied to what their work is like. So it should sound like the customer should be the kind of language that they would expect the customer to use, use the kind of challenges and making sure that it aligns with the methodology from the company. So real world type of application. And then the last element there is agency. So you want to make sure that the organization has some control over what these conversations are going to be like. But for a learner to really be inspired, the learner needs to have some control. So being able to practice on your phone from any place, while you're on a walk, while you're, you know, the passenger going somewhere, it could be any place, you could do it on the beach. Being able to give sellers some control over the timing and the location, the format, the amount of training that they're doing to allow them to practice as much as they want. All these things are critical for sellers to want to continue practicing. And remember, if it's going to take at least 30 practices to really consistently build a skill that's sticks, you've got to give sellers a way to be able to do this, to have control over that. So if we want these new results, we have to have this paradigm shift happen. It's happened already in the university setting. So we have to understand.

To, in order to get these new results of getting sellers to be, you know, prepared and ready for the kinds of conversations they need to have to be consistent, we need to be able to understand that AI is going to be a part of this and we can actually take the opportunity to get the individualized coaching and training and freedom that AI allows us to have. Now, you don't have to do all the role plays yourself. If you're a training company, you don't have to do everything. You don't have to orchestrate all of that yourself. If you're a manager, you don't have to do all of this. You can still be that hero that you want to be to give people the training and practice that they need to without running yourself ragged by implementing some of these AI tools. So you might say at this point, okay, well, you know, AI is helping sellers prepare in order to have the kinds of conversations that we want them to have whether you're a training company, whether you're an enablement leader, or whether you're, you know, with the organization itself or even a seller. Like, how do you know if you're ready, how do you know if your team is ready to start using AI in order to automate some of these role plays? Right, because like Gartner said, we are using AI as a teammate here. So what are some of the questions that you should ask? And this is what I've been asked quite a bit, especially because of my research and I've written some blogs on it too, and I'm happy to share those. So first of all, I will say that not every organization is ready to use AI. The first thing you need to think about is which conversations need improvement. And what I would do is I would start with one. Rather than trying to boil the ocean and do everything, start with one role play that you want to improve. Get some buy in from your organization and then spread it from there. But don't try to do everything. It's too much to manage, especially when you're just launching this. The next thing to think about is your methodology is, okay, let's say we get everyone on the same page for our methodology. Is that going to move the needle or does our methodology need to be refined? Do we need to update it? Because remember, with AI you're able to kind of lift everybody up and get everybody on the same standard. But is that standard going to actually help you to sell and to win? Thinking about, you know, this, this AI platform that you might be using, does it actually align with that methodology? Is it flexible to be able to align with the methodology that you've selected? The next one is looking at, can this AI platform really accurately mimic the kinds of conversations that your customers would be having with your sellers to really prepare them? And then do you have a sense of control over that? So are you able to control the actual conversation or is it going to bring in other things, other feedback that you weren't really expecting that doesn't align with how you'd like yourself sellers to actually communicate? So you've got to ask these questions and then look at, you know, how distracting is a platform? Is there a lot of lag or delay? Is it going to, you know, hallucinate some and will your sellers lose confidence in it? Another question, question number six, looking at the feedback, like I mentioned, are the, are the feedback, are the, is the insight that you're getting, is it meaningful or is it just superficial? So you want to make sure you're looking for something that's going to give thoughtful, easy to consume feedback for your sellers. The next one is the game mechanics. No one is going to do 30 of the same conversations exactly over and over again. That would be brutal. That would be really hard to do. So we actually use game mechanics where it gets more and more challenging as you grow. There's a lot of coaching and feedback in the very beginning, and then as you get better, the conversation evolves so that the skills will expand as well. The next one, and this is probably the biggest question that I get these days, is how safe is the platform? And so you want to know what's happening with your data. Is the data being used to train other role plays from other customers? How safe is it? You know, if this is going out into a large language model, what does that mean? You know, what does that mean for your team? Some customers say, you know what, we don't mind the information going out there, but some companies are saying, you know what, we need a high level of security and we can't trust information going out into a large language model. All right, so I hope this was helpful for everybody that you learned something here. I'd love to share my research if you're interested. I have plenty of blogs to make the content of my research more palatable to you, and I want to say thank you. You all did a really good job of participating. I saw so many different comments in the chat here, so I appreciate it. And please let me know how I can support you. If you'd like to come to our sales competition or sales lab, we have a new 5,000 square foot lab. I'd love to introduce you to our students. I think some of them are actually here in the chat and I look forward to Hearing from you.

Dr. Stephanie Boyer, thank you so much for what you shared incredible 900,000 conversations. I say you've done your research pretty impressive and I love the engagement, love the feedback. And people are saying, hey, training in and of itself doesn't work, but you got to match it all up together and bring it together and that's what you're talking about. And that sets up perfectly here. I want to get Gearhart in here with a few comments in just a second. But it sets up perfect for our closing keynote today from Jeff, from Jeffrey Gittamer and where he's going to talk about how we really learn with AI. So this is going to be powerful. Hey, Gearhart, jump in. I know you've got some questions. I know you've got Some thoughts. Chime in.

Well, Vital was asking, do you feel that companies should let people bring their own agents and then leave. Leave them. This was a, a comment that came from the previous session. And I want to know from you, how do you feel about AI agents doing two things? The, the first one is how. How can companies use.

AI agents for outreach and possibly replace BDRs?

It's a great question. You know, there are a lot of AI programs and tools and platforms that are able to help and support with anything else. You know, you've got some tools that are better than others. There are a lot of problems with some of these AI programs. Right. When you're tapping into a large language model, you're tapping into all of these things that are out there. You know, I was doing an exercise with my students this morning in class. I've been teaching all day asking AI to do some things for us, helping us to write outreach emails and LinkedIn and call scripts and all of these things. There's a lot of refinement that needs to happen. So if you just go and try to use an AI and you're not overseeing it, it's going to amplify what you're doing. And so if you're not doing it well, it's going to amplify that. And now you're just ruining your reputation in front of so many people. And I think at the same point, you know, some people are frustrated to speak with AI, especially if it's masquerading as a human being. Right. And so if relationships are built on trust and authenticity and we're trying to deceive people that it's us outreaching to them when it's really an AI agent, you can really diminish that trust. And so I think we have to be careful with that. But it can be used as a teammate to support you and to help you as a seller to do so much more.

So I also want to talk about the creativity that's involved to enhance learning. I read a study by the University of Heidelberg. When students were exposed to one avatar, they had a certain level of success. But when they were exposed to.

They.

Had the possibility to choose among three different avatars, then the learning went up.

And we live in an age where we embrace diversity. Yet most learning programs that use avatars for role plays, they have only one face to choose from. And I think there's something lacking that is.

It's true. I know one of the programs we use in college is, goes between five different avatars and they span different genders and ethnicities. But what you said is really important, Gerhard, is that when they can choose, and this goes back to that component of agency, and learners prefer environments and they're more motivated, they have higher performance when they have some autonomy and control agency over their own learning. So the more we're able to do that, the more we can get out of that investment in the learning and the training program.

Yeah, and that's an important word, investment, commitment. So when people are in a position to choose, then they invest more of their energies. And if they don't have that choice, then they invest less and the motivation goes down.

That is exactly right. And it just comes back to basic human behavior. We're being forced into things that we don't think that we need and we don't think we want. We're not really motivated. But if we. If we understand that it is something that we need and it is there to help us and support us, and it's not just a control activity, it's going to really help us to get better, that's when you're going to see your sellers really leaning in and understanding that all this effort that they're putting in and what the organization is doing to support them is really to support them. And that's when you're going to see the learning, the motivation, satisfaction, and then performance, it's all going to spike. And that's what decades of research tells us.

So I also, I'm curious about how do you teach your students the importance of tonality in a sales call? Because 38% of what is communicated is communicated through the tone of voice. And. And when I listen to you, I pay attention because you have a cadence.

Speaking style that's very engaging. When I listen to Mark, the same thing that I almost think that his voice is made for radio where people pay attention to when he talks. So is that part of your program?

I totally agree with you. He's got a great voice. I love it. I was like, wow, I felt like such a good introduction here. But yes, I agree. So first we need to master the conversation. My students do 50, 100, maybe 150 or more role plays in a semester. So it's very important first to be able to master the content, understand what are you supposed to do. If you don't know what you're not supposed to do, then you're not going to be able to do this right. You're going to be pausing and not knowing what to say and unsure of yourself. So first is having the competency to understand what you're supposed to do, and then the platform to be able to practice that, to be able to deliver it. And so we talk about tonality. We talk about speeding up or slowing down or increasing or decreasing your volume or the pitch of your voice. So we talk about these. We talk about the body language that goes along with it. And then we also talk about things like communication preferences. We're actually talking about that on Monday's class of how to talk to different people coming from, you know, different backgrounds and different needs and different types of buyer profiles and what they're interested in, but how they prefer to be communicated with.