Virtual Sales Practice with Real People

And when things are in contrast, black and white, night or day, there's a subtle bit of tension on it. Right. And we can feel that when we're reading it in a story or hearing it in a dialogue, such as a screenplay, or maybe it's being acted out in a TV or film. And Virtual Instinct is a play on artificial intelligence. It's virtual. And instinct is certainly an intelligence. You, it's inherent to you and us as humans. And it also can be developed, such as in sales practice and AI role play, like we're going to talk about here today. And I'm so pleased you were able to join us here because I thought of a double O name for you. Yeah. And it's consistent with the way you opened your. The very first comment that you and Gerhardt had there in the 10 minutes. Is you ready for your double O number? I am, James.002K.002K. Yeah, we added. Still a double O number. We just added the K there because you talked about the Y2K scale.

Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, when I thought of that, I was like, well, that'd be great to open up with that because that's, that's good. And you know, your British accent was excellent. So must be, must be working on that.

Oh, you're too kind, mate. I'll do it. Nausea. That's Australian nodding, not British.

Yeah, yeah. It's close though. Yeah. Well. And even the name of your company. Acorn, you know, a mighty oak tree grows from an acorn. And an oak tree doesn't grow without the wind. It needs the resilience to stick its roots in the ground. Right. And the same is true with sales. Sales is an experiential skill. It's an iron sharpens iron approach to professional development in the thought that, hey, we're not hammering hot metal to forge it into a weapon or a skill. The iron sharpens iron analogy works well where you have emotional opposition in sales and you need to work through it emotionally to find agreement, to reach agreement and really, as you said elegantly earlier to arrive at the state of agreement. Right. So a professional salesperson should be both guiding intellectually and guiding emotionally. Right. And there were some really good presentations here this morning and even yesterday where I jotted down eight pages of notes and this will help spark my conversation here. And I can deliver my piece in five minutes with the most impact we can possibly deliver it with. So Jennifer said yesterday, the art and science of sales. Absolutely true. The art of sales is the professional communication ability of the professional Salesperson, how crafted, how elegant, how carefully designed is that conversation from the words you choose, your vocal tone, the way you deliver it, and then more importantly, how carefully are you listening to what you're seeing and what you're hearing? Right. That's a human skill. And AI can give us that in practice and it can do it literally. And we can follow a logical way of conducting a conversation. However, the concern was in Jeff's conversation was that will that desk kill us? Will we lose a little bit of our humanity? And one of the gifts we have is our creativity and our empathy. Right. And empathy is a human skill that we will always need to work on. Specifically, as we get more resistance to technology, more resistant to outreach, we're just inundated with so many messages that we become resistant to it. So go. So it's going to take a real, professionally skilled salesperson to soften that resistance and begin guiding effectively.

By the way, I'm going to back out and give you full screen. So. Yeah, continue.

Yeah, Geard went somewhere too. Yeah. So here we go. I'm going to share my screen with you. Yeah. Virtual Instinct is a sales practice agency. So think of us less like a software company and more like a creative firm, more like an advertising agency. And what we do is develop virtual sales practice environments for you by understanding exactly what challenges you have in the market, where you're experiencing the most resistance, or what skills you need, your team needs to develop based on market objectives, going into new channels, introducing new products, structuring new agreements, maybe even restructuring your pricing. All those are skills in order to position to the market and then move those client relationships forward. Our engagements are specifically drawn to drive results. They can even be performance based or success based. And really their creative, immersive experiences with real or virtual actors. And we really like the idea of real actors. Now, to tie back to Jennifer's comment yesterday about art and science. Well, there's two ways to look at being. There's two ways to look at the sales profession. You're either a performing artist or you're a professional athlete. And those two professions we love to watch. We love to watch a football team win a championship game or more likely a hockey team win the gold medal. There's no greater feeling than closing a deal. Or you're a performing artist. You're standing in front of a stage, you're writing your songs and you're working on your lyrics. Those professions rehearse and they practice. So therefore sales should too. So what Virtual Instinct does is we provide the stage the supporting cast and the script. We provide a platform for you to work on new skills, work on challenges, work on your objection handling skills or even your closing ability. Or we're going to provide the field, the team to scrimmage with, the practice field and even the plays to run. So we're going to consult with you very closely to design a practice plan for you, what's called a constraints led approach. And this is a sports methodology where we are creating constraints more emotional resistance than physical constraints. However, designing a practice plan where your teams get repetition in patterns biodynamics where more they're working through the emotional resistance of the sales process itself to where they soften it, overcome it, become adaptable, become more emotionally acute to it, and then move the conversations forward from start to finish. So we're creating the environment that mirrors real performance by understanding where you are experiencing the most resistance, where your team needs to skill to improve and get better outcomes in that area. And then we also provide a video gallery of clips that are one to three minutes in length, which is the specific skill or challenge that they're, that they're working on. So we use a constraint slit approach to develop a practice plan or rehearsal plan for your team to develop their skills. And there's really four main components to it. There's the interaction between you and the customer Persona. There's the coupling, I mean the perception of you're hearing something, you're adjusting to it emotionally, you're calling from your intellect to use an explanation or a technique or a method. And then now you're exploring that concept, either learning more about it, qualifying, discovering really understanding what your client's requirements are. And then you're moving the conversation forward from the thought of building an agreement. So, so there's four main components that we would incorporate in the constraints led approach. Here's why you want to practice. All the other companies talked about this as well. This is so consistent teams that consistently do see a 30% increase in sales and a 75% higher retention rate on any specific methodology or let's say regulated talk track such as pharma, insurance, finance. And I have one more minute here. And we use both real or virtual actors. We like to cast real actors to play your customer Persona. We cast them specifically for the different companies and the different positions or job functions in that company, who you are targeting, who's your icp. And then the transcript from that meeting helps us create the virtual actor. And we complement AI role play platforms, we work with them. It's the transcript that Drives the Persona on the AI side. And the development of the scenarios and exercise in that cla approach works very well to program those scenarios and exercises on the AI platforms as well. So hey, I'm right at 10 minutes here. I don't know if I have another thought here, but from there we build a video library. We call it the sales film room. I'm toggle out right here. And this is a video library of proven and demonstrated sales techniques and methods that work specifically for your company. And all of sales is a model of communications behavior. So when you get video evidence and you have this video gallery, it becomes a resource for your company to model your sales organization, model your sales methods across your organizations and that al becomes replicable and repeatable. So we create this video gallery for you. It becomes your sales film room. Okay, I just see that I'm right up on the 10 minute mark here. I'll pause and bring you guys back.

Well, Michael, what is the feedback mechanism? Can you explain that process when it's the role plays virtual versus with a human?

Yep. The feedback from the real actor. Human led sessions are five scripted observations that the actor leaves in a recording or the salesperson to go back and watch. And that's going to be on whether they softened the resistance, they overcame the objection, the provided a clear and precise answer to a technical challenge or if they were listening effectively. So it's going to be more human conversation based feedback from the actor providing those comments that are available in the video gallery. On the AI side, everything can be measured. We look at the transcripts. We run against, run that against the report to measure how well they handled certain skills like objection handling or closing or qualifying. So that can be measured as well in a report provided back to the company that measures the overall performance of the engagement.

So let me, let me give you a specific example. Will AI pick up on little ticks like some salespeople say, you understand or

know what I'm saying? Know what I'm saying?

Yeah, what I'm saying? Right?

Yeah, gotcha.

Right.

You know, I think we get into a pattern and develop a bad habit with hey, does that make sense? Does that make sense? You know, we're looking for an affirmation that the customer heard what we're saying or really we're kind of saying we didn't hear you. So yeah, we see that in the transcriptions. That's also indicated in the clips themselves and would be something that the actor can leave feedback on because they're, they're practice communication communicators they're working on their communication skills to be on set and on camera all the time. So bringing these two worlds together and letting them practice with each other is very dynamic in terms of.

I picked this up automatically.

It does. From the transcript. Yes. Okay.

You know, the beauty of that is it eliminates emotional resistance on the part of the coach. If you're the manager or the trainer and you, you know that they've got this tick of always starting their sentence with I mean, or so you know, or whatever it happens to be. It's awkward to bring that up. But if it's brought up through a system then it's, it's non threatening data. You know, it's fed back to. It's kind of like look in a mirror if you don't look good today. Not my problem. I didn't cause it. That's the, that's the truth. So either accept it or. Or deal with it. Right.

Objectivity. That's right. Absolutely. That was a theme in some of the other presentations as well, is getting objectivity to coaching and having proof for having video evidence of that and then going back and watching that so that we can improve how we are.

Early in my sales career, I was told by a veteran trainer the single most overlooked part of sales training is role play.

Yeah.

And you own that. That's your lane.

Yeah. I mean every sales leaders know that role play is important, that the challenge has been scale. And I will, if I have a few minutes here, address that most common question like Michael, how does this scale actors or avatars? And here's the answer is we're not going to be for everybody. We are going to be for those elite teams. I would say that you are special forces minded and you want to train and you want to practice in a realistic environment that mirrors real performance. That's going to be a good fit for you. We're going to cast professional actors to bring those customer Personas to life and they are going to be immersive. You're going to feel that emotion and we are coaching and directing the actor to bring that to life in these shorter interactions where the salesperson needs to feel that they really need to have that in their body. And I call it a sensation to be able to work through that and have the emotional acuity to conduct the sales process. And I'll close with this thought here. Related to that is that the most emotionally acute salesperson will win the deal and even in the future too. Of all the things we're doing with AI and it's remarkable technology. We love it. Our emotional acuity is going to be most important. That we continue to work on that and we continue to develop that, and we hone it and we sharpen it. And we do that through practice, and we do it through resistance.

So that's the door that trust emerges through. You know, people talk about building trust. You can't build trust. It's not within your control. The other person owns, whether they trust you or not. So all you can do is be worthy of it. And if you're worthy of it, only on a technical credentials kind of a basis, you don't get much trust. But when you've got the emotional acuity, you're talking about what Daniel Goldman called emotional intelligence. Pretty much everybody understands what that means. That's where trust finds a portal and grows.

Yeah.

And it.

You're absolutely right.

Resistant ever, like any strength, any growth is going to require, as you said earlier, resistance in order to. To develop.

So here's the new formula. EI plus AI equals roi.

There you go. I like that. That's a key.

I love that.

Take it. Take it to the marketplace, Michael.

All right, we need to stop. Thank you, Michael, for joining us. And I recommend that anybody who listen to this go to Virtual Instincts dot com. Right. AI Virtual Instincts AI. Sorry about that. Y Direct URL. Go and visit and get a. Ask for a personal demonstration.

Yes. Double Agent 2K, Jared Gerhard. We'll see you.