#9 GTM AI Podcast: How AI can Actually Make Training Stick, James Pursey of Replicate

GTM AI Podcast

https://www.gtmaiacademy.com/

https://getreplicate.ai/

Here is a summary of the key points from the podcast between Jonathan and James, the CEO of Getreplicate.ai:

James discusses his background in sales enablement and the challenges he saw with sales training not sticking, which led him to start Replicate to use AI to help solve this problem. Some key points he makes:

- Replicate uses a combination of base AI technology fine-tuned on a company's actual sales call data to create highly realistic simulated sales conversations for practice. This makes the practice much more valuable than generic role plays.

- AI is good at consistently scoring and providing feedback on calls the way a human manager would, allowing it to review far more calls (99% vs 1% a human could do). This frees up managers to do higher-level personalized coaching.

- Replicate aims to improve both feedback/review of calls using AI and provide realistic practice environments. The goal is ensuring reps consistently execute the behaviors the company wants.

- An interesting finding is that on average, teams only score 51% in terms of executing the sales methodologies/playbooks the company has invested in. There is a big disconnect between leadership's perception of playbook adoption and reality.

- Some key things they've seen work well are permission-based openers on cold calls. Things like "how are you doing today?" as if you know the prospect do not work well.

- Upcoming focus areas are more integrations to fit into rep workflows and connecting passive e-learning to active practice. Long-term, highly personalized coaching approaches adapted to each rep's needs.

Some key quotes from James:

"And 51 percent is the average score any team, motion, or organization has relative to the playbooks that they think they fully adopted."

"I think that technology will allow us to hyper personalize. And help rep A improve X on their way of learning and rep B improve Y on their way of learning. And I think that's something that's really exciting."

"AI is amazing at kind of, without wanting to use the word replicating, replicating the efficacy of a specific class or person, right? What it can't do is review a call you've never seen before and give hyper-personalized, unique, extremely in-depth coaching and feedback. And even if it could, which it can't, even if it could, I would argue that is still going to be more effective and stickier and more likely to make it into someone's head if it's delivered by somebody that they know, that they respect, you know, like yourself, right?"

"If you subscribe to like the LinkedIn army of influencers, right, there's all of this, like, go and, you know, pattern interrupts, right? Like, I'm sure, I'm a hundred percent sure that they work. I think Tom Boston has one that says something like, 'Sorry, I'm just finishing a biscuit,' right? Like super weird. But that probably works for Tom, right? Now, if a hundred SDRs went out, right, or if everyone started, you start hearing that from multiple people, it loses its efficacy."

"People will use a mix of methodologies and frameworks. Some people get really worked up about the word framework versus methodology, right? But you're going to have a qualification framework, right? Whether it's BANT, MEDDIC, CHAMP, whatever. And then you're going to have your value selling methodology. And then you also get, you've got your sales process right through your CRM and stuff, and you're going, and then that's going to segment out a hundred different ways if you have a large, complex business."