AI Roleplay Rewrites Sales Training

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video, cleaned for punctuation and names. Speaker labels are not included.

[0:06] Welcome to the GTM Vault Podcast with your host, Rick Koleta. I want to know how AI is changing sales efficiency. Today we're exploring the future of sales efficiency with AI with Sri, co-founder and CEO of Hyperbound. We'll discuss how Hyperbound's AI roleplay technology is changing sales training and improving team performance. Sri will share insights on the convergence of marketing, sales, and offer strategies for startups to leverage AI. Let's get started. Thank you so much for inviting me over, Rick. I'm excited to be on. Of course. This is the first episode of GTM Vault, and thanks to all of our listeners wherever you are for tuning in and hanging out with us, whether you're at home or at the office or working out. We plan on putting this on weekly for everyone interested in the go to market space to learn about what's going on.

[1:10] Now, without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to you to give us a brief introduction of who you are and what you're building. Awesome, thanks Rick. Happy to be on here. My name is Sriharsha. I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Hyperbound. So Hyperbound, we are basically building an AI sales roleplay solution. What is that? Because this is a very hot space right now. It's growing. You might not be familiar with it, but what that really means is we're building AI bots that can essentially personify different types of ICPs that you target, right? And we can have your salespeople practice with these personas. So let's say you're going after customer success leaders. We could build customer success AI bots and your reps can practice their cold calls, warm calls, discovery calls, gatekeeper calls, any type of sales call. We can simulate it entirely full end. So it's a great way for your reps to get

[2:11] practice and get enough at bats before they jump on the real thing. Awesome, awesome. Sri, how do you envision the future of sales evolving, especially with the integration of AI technologies? 100%, yeah. I mean, I think you've probably heard this more times than once. Right now, AI is here to stay, right? And every sales rep out there needs to learn how to use AI as part of the daily workflow, right? And a big part of that is that it's not just about automation and using AI to do prospecting and sequencing and all these usual sales tasks that we think of, but also upskilling yourself, right? And that's exactly what we're focused on, because for the longest time, salespeople didn't really have a way to practice, right? Or a safe environment where they could actually hone their skills. And that's exactly what AI is finally giving these reps, the chance to

[3:14] actually practice in a simulated environment where they don't need to be afraid of burning real leads, right? So I think really AI is not just doing automation, but it's also helping current reps actually upskill and get better at their craft. So I think it's often something that people don't talk about enough, and that's exactly what we're focused on. Got it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what strategies do you recommend for startups looking to enhance their sales efficiency using AI? So, sorry, what are some of the apps that you would recommend, the new AI apps that are coming on to the market? Yeah, 100%. I mean, there are so many different applications out there right now. And the thing is, even if I did recommend something right now, tomorrow there's a new one that's gonna pop up and try to come and play. But personally, at Hyperbound, right, we've been using a

[4:17] variety of different tools. One of them is Apollo. Their AI strategy has been amazing. They've introduced a lot of different personalized email solutions. Same with lemlist, which is what we use for sequencing. Highly recommend lemlist if you haven't tried it out yet. They're definitely at the top of their game right now. And there's a lot of other tools that are trying to integrate AI in right now, and personally I'm not the best person to recommend because they are changing constantly. But definitely do check out AiSDR. It's another company too that I think is worth checking out. They're basically just trying to automate the entire email pipeline, right? And it's very ambitious, but it's working, I hear. So Hyperbound is changing the landscape of sales training with AI roleplay. Can you explain how AI roleplay works and its benefits for sales organizations? For sure. So a lot of you might have done some sales role playing

[5:20] in the past. You might have heard of it, right? At the end of the day, role playing, the idea is you get in a meeting with your manager or maybe a senior sales rep and you role play back and forth with them, where one person pretends to be the customer and the other person pretends to be the buyer, sorry, the seller. And you have a conversation and basically you're role playing the entire sales call scenario, right? So we've automated that process. So now you can actually, instead of getting time with your manager or a real human sales rep, you can do that with our AI instead, and you can get as many at bats as you want on your own time. So you could be sitting on your couch at home and you can role play with this AI, practice all your sales skills, and you can do a thousand of these without wasting anyone's time. And you're just getting value all the time. Got it. And how do you see AI roleplay impacting the overall go to market function and the effectiveness of sales

[6:25] teams? 100%. So the way I like to think of this is, today, right, when you think about how leaders think about enablement, right, it's very hard to quantify, right? Let's say you have a team of 200 salespeople. You have to figure out what each person is struggling with at any point, right? Figure out how you can build a training plan that works for each and every rep. And if a rep is underperforming, you have to figure out how to get them up to speed or maybe replace them with a new hire and onboard that new hire very quickly, right? So there's all these challenges, and it's really hard to quantify how quickly you can do these things, right? And that's where we come in, right? We come in and give you a solution where you can onboard a rep where normally it might take you three to six months to onboard them, but we can onboard them in two weeks, right? Because we can get them all those at bats in such a short period of time, right? And then even after you've

[7:26] onboarded them, let's say you're launching a new product or you're launching a new feature, right, and you need to go retrain all your reps on the new messaging, the new competitive landscape. Right now you can use Hyperbound to get them all those conversations in a short span of time, right, versus relying on them to get enough conversations to be comfortable selling that new feature or product. So from a leadership perspective, this is an amazing way to get your sellers prepared no matter what shifts you're seeing in the market or the product or whatever it may be. As a first mover in AI roleplay software, what significant pivots did Hyperbound go through to reach its current solution? That's a great question, and it's funny because this wasn't an easy journey. We had a lot of pivots along the way. Initially we started this company around a year ago and we started out as an email automation software, almost akin to one of your AI SDR companies these days. And you

[8:31] know, I think the biggest realization that we had was that replacing your SDR is not an option, not yet at least, right? The technology is not quite there. So the second best option you've got is to upskill your current reps, right, and figure out how to do more with less, right? And that's where we came up with the solution, where we were telling a bunch of leaders at some conferences that we met, like, hey, what makes training so hard, right? We were asking them this question, and a lot of them were saying, well, it's really expensive to hire trainers, it's really hard to quantify if that training is actually reinforced in my reps, right? And so we suggested, well, why not have your reps train with an AI, right? And the way people's eyebrows went up, their eyes lit up, it was just very exciting to see. And so we built our first MVP last November and showed it to many sales leaders, and people were just very excited about the technology. And we just

[9:35] kept on improving the product, and here we are. We launched it in January and it's been a blast of a time. We've gone viral a couple times on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, all the different platforms, and now we're seeing a huge uptick in training right now. That's got to be very exciting. What are your thoughts on the future of the revenue function? Do you see marketing, sales, and customer success converging into a single unified team? That's a hard question. I think at the end of the day, right, all three teams are striving for the same goal, and that's revenue, right? And the difficult part is that every team is responsible for talking to different stakeholders. They're responsible for talking about different priorities, managing different KPIs. And I think that's what makes it so tricky today to combine all three of those teams into one big function, right? But so personally, I don't think it's

[10:39] going to be as simple as combining all these three teams into one function and having a single leader being in charge of all these different KPIs. But rather, I think we're definitely going to see more of a symbiosis between sales and marketing for sure, because we're seeing those two roles evolve more over time. When you think about it, they're doing very similar activities in terms of, when you think email outbound or outreach, right, at the end of the day they're just trying to reach customers. The difference is just volume. Like, salespeople are trying to reach the closest contacts, the ones that they want to prioritize the most, and marketing is usually trying to go after nurturing and going after larger volumes of people. So at the end of the day the goal is the same, and I think we'll see sales and marketing converge. Customer success is definitely slightly different, in my opinion. I would not be comfortable throwing customer success into that. Yeah, success is traditionally in more of, not a revenue generating department, right? More of a

[11:44] retention focused function. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out, right? I mean, at the end of the day, you can also argue retention is going to become revenue generating, right? Like, that's a big part of what we do at Hyperbound, is customer success and keeping our customers as happy as possible. It's the number one priority for us. And that's actually why we are actually hiring our first customer success hire very soon, who's going to be helping manage all these customers and make sure they're very happy with the product. So I think ultimately that's what it takes to start to be successful. No matter how much marketing you do, how many customers you sign, it's the retention that matters. Absolutely, absolutely. And as AI plays a larger role in sales, what skills should sales professionals focus on developing to stay relevant? For sure. Yeah, I think as AI becomes more and more

[12:49] prevalent in sales, we're going to see reps starting to learn how to do prompt engineering. So my co-founder and I, we both are conversational AI engineers. We're very familiar with prompt engineering, using all these different open source LLM models. We've been working on some of the foundations that were laid long before to make these models possible. So very familiar with that, how to get these technologies to behave the way we want them to. And you're going to start to see more and more reps start to develop that type of skill set, right? Learn how to get the most out of all these different models. And it's going to be a matter of who can leverage all these different technologies, build the most powerful workflows and automations, rather than who can reach out, who can message the most people in a given span of time. It's more about who can set up the best workflows that reach out to people

[13:51] in the most personalized way, right? Can you tell us a little bit about some of the success stories that you've seen on the Hyperbound platform? Yeah, 100%. So, for example, recently we had a customer. Actually, we had leading indicators for us initially, this is one of our earliest customers actually, that we're really building something that's going to be very impactful for reps moving forward, right? Even recently we saw a customer, they are basically shifting their entire outbound messaging strategy at the moment, right? And the way they do that traditionally is they run a two week boot camp, they bring in some outside trainers, and then they just let their reps loose to go apply the skills that they learn, right? But then they have no way of actually tracking any of this, right? They have no way to check if the reps are actually applying the skills that they're taught. So we actually proved through Hyperbound that their reps are in fact

[14:54] applying the skills that they've been learning from all this training, right? And then for leadership, this is a way to now be assured that, okay, my reps are learning and the investments that we are making to enablement are working. What are some of the metrics leadership would look at to identify the improvements? For sure. So that really depends on every company, right? Each company has different KPIs, different definitions of what good looks like on these calls, right? So that's part of what we offer. Every company that we onboard, we actually have them design these very complex and specific scorecards, right, that define what good looks like for them, right? For example, some companies like to follow certain sales methodologies. I don't know if you're familiar with the AAA framework, the Ask, Acknowledge, and Answer framework, right? So if you've taught that to your reps, right, but now you want to check if your reps are actually applying that skill, and you want to

[15:55] reinforce that, how do you do that? Well, if you go into Hyperbound, build a scorecard that can actually check if your reps are using the AAA framework as part of their objection handling, and verify that they actually are doing what you taught, right? So that would be a way to measure that. And then if you're trying to go more macro, we're talking about figuring out what the exact skill gaps are for each rep. We're talking about building personalized training plans to get them up to speed on those skill gaps. Got it. And in your perspective, what is the speed of adoption of AI roleplay in sales, and which industries do you think it will displace, and to what extent do you think it will go mainstream? Yeah, roleplay, yeah. Will it go mainstream? I 100% think it will go mainstream, because the sheer, so the thing is, right, selling is becoming harder and harder and sadder right now,

[16:59] right? Every rep needs to kind of think out of the box and deliver the value props in a different way, because especially, let's take sales tech for example, right? Every sales tech company talks about accelerating revenue. They talk about generating more pipeline, right? All the same value props, right? But what actually makes one company stand out from another, what makes one company's seller stand out from the other? Well, it's the way they position it, the way they talk about those value props, right, the way they deliver it, right? I think especially as you start, you're seeing sales teams really cut down on their SDR teams. They're keeping their best performers and getting rid of the low performers. So that really puts pressure on every single person to upskill themselves and get better. And guess what? The only way to do that at the speed at which AI is moving right now is through a product like this, through AI roleplay. Absolutely. So I think it will definitely go mainstream, not just in sales. We're also seeing tools like this come up in customer service and customer

[18:02] success, right, which we also support. You're going to see it in leadership training, all kinds of different scenarios. It's going to become a part of our daily life. Got it. Well, thank you, Sri, so much for sharing your insights, and for our listeners for tuning in to this episode of GTM Vault. I hope you found our discussion with Sri insightful and inspiring. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. For more updates and resources, visit our website at WR gtm.com and follow us on social media. Stay tuned for more episodes where we will continue to explore the latest trends and strategies in go to market. Until next time, this is Rick Koleta signing off.