E38: How Role-Playing with AI Creates Super Sellers with Sriharsha Guduguntla

If you think about the thing that's common with a lot of the world's top-performing athletes is that they, they practice. And that's what really has me excited about HyperBound. It gives them a framework to be able to sharpen their sword and get better at what they're doing that they wouldn't be able to get without having to do a live interaction with somebody in a way that's going to give you that feedback, that scoring. There's really nothing else out there that does that, and it's really an innovative thing that has me excited about what Hyperbound is doing.

Having the team before anything else is they have to master our core personas. If you guys have ever heard of like the Jill Konrath Buyer's Matrix, so that's where I'm looking at this. It's like, what value can this bring to that experience where once you start to learn these things, now let's go try to apply it with, you know, a real/fake CIO.

My guest today is Sai. He is the co-founder and CEO of Hyperbound.ai, which is a virtual sales gym and an AI-based role-playing model for GTM functions— sales, customer success, pre-sales, and a lot more. It is absolutely mind-blowing, and sales leaders and sales experts around the tech world are absolutely raving about it. He has come out of the prestigious Y Combinator summer cohort in 2023, and this company is absolutely going places. So let's jump right in. Sai, welcome to the conversation today.

Thank you so much for having me, Pri. Really excited to chat.

So Sai, what inspired you to create a virtual AI sales gym? I love the sound of it. I've loved what I've seen. Tell me more.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, it isn't one thing for sure that inspired us. It's been a long journey to get here. We started the company. So for people listening to this out there, we started Hyperbound actually a little over a year ago. And Hyperbound, we actually started out as an email automation platform when we first started. And my co-founder and I, we're both conversational AI engineers by background. And in fact, we've been working on these AI models for over— a decade now. And my co-founder in particular has a lot of experience building these models from day one, right? And so interestingly, we were in the email automation space. We were using generative AI to basically generate personalized emails. And it was almost like a consultancy that we had built. And our consultancy, what we would do is we'd go company to company and basically build them personalized email algorithms that would be custom for their business, right? And we did a really good job. Like every company loved the emails we were generating. And at the end of the day, we realized no matter how good our emails were getting, they weren't actually converting like they used to. Right. And I'm sure you've heard your fair share of that, right? You've probably heard the email deliverability rates are going down right now. Cold emails aren't really as effective as they used to be. And so we started noticing, even though the quality of the email was high, the responses were just not there. And so we started asking our customers like, What actually, like, why do you want to like have AI write your emails? Why not just train your reps better so they can write better emails? And they just laughed at us and they were like, that's an impossible task, right? Like we had 300 salespeople. I can't go around teaching every single person how to do that. So the natural question from our side was, well, how would you train them on the phone then? Because ultimately they have to jump on the phone at some point, right?

Yeah.

Right.

And plain face. That's what, that's the response that we got. You know, people, they just had no answer to that. And we realized there's a pretty big gap in the market at that point. And so we had started digging a little deeper into this. You know, we're not salespeople. My co-founder and I, we start, we have been engineers for the last 10 years. So there's a lot of missing puzzle pieces. And as we dove deeper, we identified that, you know, role-playing was a pretty strategic part of training a salesperson. But the reason why people don't do it enough is because it's just not scalable and it's usually awkward. You know, people don't enjoy doing that with their managers and peers because it's just like not natural.

Right.

And so that's a big part of what we're solving with Hyperbound is we finally found a way to have an AI actually roleplay with the rep. Right. And that really allows the rep to do this on their own time. It makes it more objective and it just makes the process more streamlined so that the manager can actually go into the data and figure out what they need to coach better on. So, um, This was the process that took us nearly 2,000 user interviews to get there. And yeah, it was a long process, but here we are, and it's really been taking off.

I can just see why, because there is a huge need to train and upskill people with real-world simulations rather than sell me the spin and every variation of You know, misguided role-playing, which I see out there from people giving them slide decks to— and then there's no feedback. And people usually end up with a really negative perception around that, as against a learning mindset where they're actually getting helpful feedback on how to improve. So, that's really impressive. So, How is this helping SDRs and AEs, you know, and what can they expect from this experience?

Yeah. So, you know, the experience is actually pretty straightforward. In fact, if you go to our website, it says, it says fast as literally clicking one button and you're in a role play with an AI, right? So the idea is like, let's say, let's just say I'm an AE at, and, you know, I just, my company just launched a new product and I have to get up to speed on this topic. And I have a big call with a VP tomorrow, right? And I'm super nervous for that, right? Right now what happens is the AEs will actually go in there, they'll do some pre-call prep, they're gonna do some research, figure out what they can use to be the most effective possible on that conversation, right? But imagine you can take that to the next level, right? Pre— imagine you can actually go onto Hyperbound, you build a bot for that VP, right? And literally practice that conversation as many times as you want until you feel comfortable. So that you can go into that call fully prepared, right? So it's like taking pre-call prep to the next level so you can actually feel what it's like to be part of that conversation. And the reason why that is a game changer and why it's resonating with so many people right now is because there's, you only get so many conversations, right? With these types of people, like that company, it's gonna be a huge account. It could be a 6-figure deal, a 7-figure deal. So you cannot screw it up, right? So why would you not spend a little extra time preparing for that meeting in the best way possible, right? And so in fact, we have a customer recently and, um, you know, he had a big call with the decision maker at Nike and he actually went onto Hyperbound, built a bot 30 minutes before that call, prepared for it, jumped on the call, and he came back to us and he was like, guys, if I hadn't built that Hyperbound bot, I would've crashed and burned on that call. Right? And so that was a crazy revelation for us. Like he, he was so happy he did that cuz he, he was definitely not prepared for it. So, you know, those are the types of use cases we're seeing. That's obviously the AE use case, but a lot of different use cases outside of that, even for SDRs and so on and so forth.

So that just is so next level from what we have right now that my brain's just blowing up. So I've got a couple of questions. So first of all, not only do you have generic buyers, you also can create specific bots for an account or a situation that you're gonna go and pitch for. Is that it?

Exactly. So there's a couple different use cases, right? Like one is the one, the situation I just described where an AE can actually go in, build a specific scenario to plan for a meeting that's coming up soon, right? So that's one way, but also we have customers who maybe, you know, your enablement team is going into Hyperbound, building out all the possible scenarios that the reps might be running into. And building out scenarios for those. We have customers that will basically do a full call review, right? Go through all the calls that reps struggled on, figure out exactly where the gaps were, and they'll go build scenarios for those exact types of situations so that every rep is prepared for it. So those are a couple. Obviously onboarding is a huge use case, right? Imagine you're a brand new rep, you've got 3 months to ramp, right? Why are ramp times so long today? Because it just takes that much time to get that many conversations in. But with a tool like Hyperbound, you get those conversations in a matter of weeks. So that's really been the game changer for people. It's like, I don't need to spend time burning prospects anymore and worrying about what I'm going to sound like on the phone, because I can just do that as many times as I want in my own comfort. So, so yeah, that's how Hyperbound is being used today, at least.

That's amazing. And I can just see that being used from your initial onboarding to people who have performance-related issues. They're not getting the results they want through to people who want to move from SDR to AE and SMB to mid-market and mid-market to enterprise. It just goes on. So what are you seeing in terms of the various situations where this could be a game changer?

Yeah. So a couple of things, like I mentioned, like the onboarding piece is huge, right? Like imagine I'm an enterprise company. I have 500 sellers, right? I just, let's say like I have an attrition rate of around like 30 to 50%, right? That's, and it's super high, but it's what we see every day, right? And it's these days, the lifetime of a rep, that, that time is start— is dropping rapidly, which means companies are having to spend more time backfilling and more time training than actually delivering results, right? So we're, that, that's a big part of what we've been trying to solve is really like, can we reduce that time to ramp? Which all of this ultimately, it just affects CAC, right? The more time you spend on backfilling and training and onboarding, it's just contributing to CAC. And so that's been a huge focus for us. But even beyond that, let's say I'm a company like— let's look at Databricks, for example, right? Databricks recently launched their own large language model, DBRX, right? If I was a revenue leader at Databricks, I would be scared out of my pants right now. Because I have a huge team of sellers, right? Most of them are still trying to wrap their heads around what an LLM even is or what even machine learning is, right? And suddenly now I have to send them out to talk to machine learning engineers and position against like OpenAI, position against, you know, Anthropic, right? Like, how do I, how can I trust that my reps actually understand what they're talking about on the, on the, on these calls? Right. And so that's also a huge focus. It's like, how can we get every rep on the same page? Uh, and as a revenue leader, how do I get that confidence that every rep is, is doing their job?

Right.

That's amazing. So, like I said, it's not only onboarding, it's not even performance. It's not only progression, but it's also in terms of cross-platform and being able to handle new You know, a competitive situation.

So, so we like to, we like to call it change management, right? So I think that's what it boils down to. So when, when we say change management, we're talking like new products being released, new competitors entering the market, new features, right? Maybe the economy is shifting, right? When COVID happened, that was a huge change. Sellers had to adapt to that really quickly. Right. Um, and, you know, these things are constantly evolving, right? And that's why like sales teams are always trying to evolve their tech stack. They're always trying to find the next best thing, because unfortunately you can't just stick to one thing. You're always moving to the next. So, you know, that's why like there's the long-term use case really for Hyperbound has never been an issue for us. It's, you know, there's enough change constantly that companies are willing to adopt this year over year.

So we've talked about AEs and SDRs. Who else within the organization will find it useful?

Yeah, that's a great question. So we really target anyone in the organization that is customer-facing. So think like, so obviously the SDRs and AEs, but also we target customer success, right? We target solutions consultants, sales engineers, solutions engineers, right? Anyone that would be on a call with the customer, we have the ability to train and make sure they fully understand their talk tracks and fully understand the product and fully understand how to position according into your product direction. That's usually our target market, and we're purely focused on go-to-market right now just because we feel like that's where we can have the most impact, at least starting out.

Understood. Then I'm assuming, and this might seem like a very basic question, but if they've got 5 different personas, you can get a bot for every different persona. With flavors of personality. Yeah. Yeah.

No, that's a great question. So on Hyperbound, it goes even beyond that. So it's, it's obviously you can build some basic personas, right? But we have customers that have like 500, 600 different bots. Right. And the reason why is because when you really look at all the possible combinations of scenarios that your reps run into, it ends up being actually way more than you realize. Like take the number of objections, take the different competitors, take the different like industries and market segments and Person job titles, right? Once you put all the combinations together, you realize like how many different situations your reps actually have to be prepared for right now. Add like human factors to that too. Some people are nicer than others. Some people might be in a good mood versus not in a good mood at certain times, right? So different regions, right? People and people outside of the, uh, outside in a different country might behave a different way from someone else in a different country. So these types of things are, there's so many variables. And so there's like an endless amount of scenarios that your reps really have to be prepared for. So it's not like people are being coming onto here, just building a couple personas. They're, they're usually building like hundreds of them and we make it really easy to build those bots.

Right. Yeah. Wow. So I love it. I'm just, yeah.

No, it's, it's exciting, man. I mean, I, you know, as, As an engineer, you know, I've seen this technology evolve over the last decade and I don't think anybody expected it to get to where it has this quickly. And it's just really cool to see it in production. It's really cool. Every time we demo this thing, the way people's faces light up, the way they get excited about it. And you know, when you think about sales tech too, like when was the last time, Pri, when was the last time you've been in sales tech for, I think, you know, at least a decade and a half at this point, like When was the last time you saw a new product that was doing something you've never seen before?

Right?

It's almost like it's hard to even remember. Maybe people are going to go all the way back to Outreach, right? When Outreach first came out, that was revolutionary. These days it's really hard to find that. So we, I feel like we're almost a little lucky that we were able to find a little bit of greenfield and find a problem that wasn't fully addressed. And it's really resonating with the market right now.

Yeah. Oh, look, in truth, I'm going to date myself here, but this feels like Steve Jobs, you know, with the Apple, you know, the phone and your brain's just going off because you're like, wow, just the number of possibilities that I can envisage. Because that's really how you end up creating super soldiers, right? Or super sellers.

No, that's how I think about it. Like, you know, everyone's, it's funny, like, you know, a lot of people ask me all the time, like, you know, what, what are you guys gonna do once AI starts replacing salespeople? Like, yeah, like, how will your business survive? And, you know, it's really funny because I think that whole narrative that AI will replace salespeople has actually helped us more than it's hurt us for 2 reasons. One, Everyone that's tried those things have realized that it just doesn't work and they end up coming to us. And reason 2 is literally that when you start thinking about, okay, if I'm going to get replaced, I just got to get better, right? I can't just be like a bum, just sit around, do my thing. I actually have to get better. And so that's when you start looking towards a tool like Hyperbound to really upskill yourself. You know, you can't go hire a sales trainer and, you know, do like one-on-one training. Not everyone has that luxury. And so we, uh, I think that's where we really come in. Like self-enablement's a big piece.

Yeah. And look, like every other major technology that's on demand, you know, we went how quickly from Blockbuster to Netflix, right? Uh, finite one. Look, it's the same with sales training, right? You're going to go from finite one-off events to on-demand as and when you want it. And I was actually, you know, I was hosting a group of sales leaders not long back, 2 hours back actually. And when we were talking about AI and I look at other sellers, my view is that at least in the near foreseeable future, you know, you're not going to be replaced by AI, but you're going to be replaced by a sales leader or a sales rep who knows how to leverage AI, who is Enabled by AI, who is smarter with AI.

You totally said it right. You totally said it right. That's exactly the message that we've been trying to get across as well. And every time someone comes to us asking us if our AI can replace the rep, it's almost like a disqualifier for us, cuz we're like, you're just not thinking about this the right way. It's not, it's, I mean, I'm telling you from a technical perspective, Pri, The AI is nowhere close to it, especially in the B2B world, right? First of all, AI cold calling is illegal for the record in the US at least. Outside of the US, it's debatable, but in the US it is illegal. So that's one hurdle to get across. And the other piece is just, I can't imagine an AI selling a 6-figure deal anytime in the near future. Right. I know what it takes. I mean, I've done, I've done it a couple of times and I know, I know what that takes and the amount of relationship building and the effort and the time. And I just can't imagine an AI doing that with a human anytime soon.

Yeah, I definitely think that if you put, you know, SDR versus SDR without the training and SDR with the training, of course the SDR with the training is going to get 3 to 5x more appointments, you know, the AE with and the AE without. Yes. You know, so I'm sold. I'm sold. No.

And it's just, it's just so unfortunate that so many revenue leaders just overlook that right now. Right. If you, especially the larger, like more old school orgs, you'll find all the time, like, you know, recently, uh, it's a little funny little story. We had a, we were talking to a CRO recently. And we were presenting our business case to him for Hyperbound. And he told us, he was like, why can't I just give all my reps a bottle of wine with that money? Right? He's like, it would do the work. Right? And I was like, this was after 2 months of working this deal. This is the first thing he said when we presented the business case. I just basically shut it down. Shut down the entire deal right there and close the books. Because I'm like, we're not going to work with someone with that type of mentality, right? And so it's really, it's funny. And it's crazy how many people are in that boat, you know, that don't fully realize the power of enablement. And it is what it is. Yeah, it's the world we live in.

And yet we are with all the sales leaders, CROs, SVPs, sales VPs that I'm talking to, Every quarter is a traumatic experience because somebody is calling a deal that is not real. Somebody is, uh, you know, uh, you know, has not qualified it and they're losing their jobs and their income because the people on the front lines don't have the training, the skills, the motivation. And, um, yeah, so It just blows my mind.

No. Yeah. The amount of time and money spent into forecasting, if only some of that time was actually spent into developing the reps, like, I feel like that we'd be looking at a totally different landscape right now. Uh, so yeah, it's the, it's the, it's the brick wall we always run into every time.

So you've talked about change management, you know, what about, you know, um, experienced sellers and experienced leaders who are dealing with a very specific level of challenge, right? So we're not talking about I'm not talking about beginner or intermediate. I'm talking about advanced sellers and advanced leaders. How can they benefit?

Yeah, that's a great question. So definitely that's a trickier use case, right? Because one, most experienced or top sellers don't feel like they need to practice. And, but there, I won't generalize and say everyone is that way. Right. Some of the top sellers always want to find ways to get better. So they're willing to take whatever, do whatever it takes, like practice and role play and all that stuff. So we have, we have 2 main use cases for them. One is the account planning use case, right? Like being able to build different decision makers ahead of time, practicing those important calls. But the other piece that we do basically is we allow them to, we essentially allow them to record their actual live calls as well. See exactly where they're struggling, and then our system automatically figures out what their gaps are and recommends what role plays they need to do to get better, right? So we have this, like, imagine like this positive feedback loop, like you're doing the call, identify— Hyperbound identifies your gaps exactly where you're struggling, how many times you've struggled on those, right? And then goes and builds you a role play scenario automatically on the fly that's personalized for you so you can go practice that skill. On your own time. Right. So that's the type of thing, cuz most top sellers, the, the biggest problem is they don't know where they need to get better. Right. They just, they've done it. They've been in it for so long. Like they don't know where the gaps are. And most, you know, most managers also are like, oh, you don't need coaching. Like you're closing deals. So, you know, but at least having this thing like by your side, telling you exactly where those gaps are, like it's a great way to just keep getting better. Yeah.

Right. So what are you hearing back from customers in terms of both little wins and big wins? What are the improvements that they're reporting back to you?

Yeah, that's an excellent question. So for one, ramp time and time to productivity are 2 of the biggest metrics for us, right? We're seeing a massive reduction on both sides. We particularly, like we had a customer recently that they run an outsourced SDR agency, right? And their entire business is basically like hiring, training, hiring, training, right? And they help place SDRs at different companies at the end of it. And they have seen a massive reduction in ramp time, right? From before, just because of the amount of at-bats that the reps get to do. And so, yeah, that's a big one. In fact, we just had our first mid- cycle renewal with them as well. So it's been a pretty awesome experience. We've also had customers just reporting just the level of confidence increased across the board, right? Like reps in the past, like, you know, let's say I'm a rep selling a cybersecurity product, right? I must be scared outta my mind to talk to a CISO. Like, I feel like I know a good amount about security, But I can't imagine myself talking to a CISO trying to sell a security product anytime soon. So like, I just can't imagine like an SDR having to go through that experience, but you know, it's all about confidence. And so we, we've seen like massive levels of confidence increase across the board too.

Yeah. I really liked that, you know, what you told me about the 600 different bots, because for every level, every situation, every flavor and variety, regional, international, you've got something in there. Tell me, how does that, how does the feedback loop work, you know, for ongoing improvement?

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. So think of it almost as, so let's say I'm a manager, right? And day to day, like my reps are making, like, you know, I have some reps making discovery calls, right? Let's say I'm an AE manager. My reps are making discovery calls, right? I'm actually going and shadowing on some of these calls, or maybe like postmortem, I'm going through my Gong calls, trying to listen to a couple of them to try to figure out where the reps are struggling. Maybe I set a couple like keyword trackers to be able to see what keywords correlate to success and whatnot, right? So that's like the state of the art. That's what's happening today, right? The missing piece though is, first of all, like most managers, they're seldom listening to those calls, right? As much as they want to, There's just often no time. And honestly, it's pretty unscalable. Like if I have a team of 10 reps, like I, I just don't have time to go sit down and listen to hours of call recordings. Right. So, so the way the, the, what our system does, it's basically acting as that manager, listening to every call, figuring out what those gaps are.

Right.

And also instead of just reporting that to the rep, like a manager would during a one-on-one, it's even telling the rep like, here's exactly what you need to go do to get better, right? Like it's giving them like actionable feedback, right? And they can do that on their own time without any involvement from anyone. So think of this, like, this is what the loop is. It's like, it's like call, feedback, role plays, call, feedback, role plays. It's just like a circle. And that's the idea.

All right. Well, how do people get in touch with you? Because, you know, from the times and the challenges I've had leading sales teams, I would be running with my, you know, contact, wanting to contact you saying, hey, how do we get a pilot or a test going? Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. So if, you know, if you're interested in reaching out or if you're interested in trying out Hyperbound, honestly, the best way is to just go to hyperbound.ai and just try out some of our free demos on our website. And just essentially it's really simple. You just go cold call one of our bots. They are very rude. We have about a 15% book rate on those bots. So, and this is across like thousands and thousands of calls that people have done on the platform. So I would definitely challenge you all to go try those out. And if it sounds interesting to you, feel free to book a demo with us. There's a book a demo link right on there. I'm happy to get you access. Or if you want, if you just wanna test out what a, what a bot looks like and you want me to customize it, I'm happy to do that. If you just shoot me a DM, happy to.

Fantastic. Sai, you have, you know, used your conversational AI to take on an incredibly huge problem. And I know that you're going to be so successful. So thank you. Thank you for spending this time.

You know, it's crazy, Pri. Like the reason why we know it works is because we used it to get better, especially in the early days, because, because Atul and I are not sellers, but you know, like 10 months ago, if you reached out to me, like I knew nothing about how to even run a discovery call, much less a cold call. And here we are every day. And now I'm jumping on these discovery calls and I'm negotiating like big 6-figure deals with large public enterprise companies. Like I never thought I'd be here. And the only reason why I have that type of confidence is literally because I get to, I get to not only build a tool that trains salespeople, I get to practice on it myself. And, you know, I am very grateful for that.

And that comes through because you, the way you have hand, you know, you understand every situation that you're customers are going through and the problems that they're going through. Clearly, you've had a little help with your training, drinking your own champagne, right? Yep.

We love dog food.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Appreciate it.