419: AI Roleplay Revolutionizes Sales Coaching and Team Success

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Enjoy the show.

0:00:47 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m your host, Brynne Tillman, and I’m really excited to introduce you to Sriharsha. He’s the co-founder and CEO of hyperbound Y2S23. Not sure what that is, but I’m certainly going to ask. On AI sales roleplay and coaching and coaching large enterprise sales teams. Over 10 years of experience in conversational AI engineering, which by the way, AI over 10 years. This is going to be an interesting conversation.

0:01:17 – (Brynne Tillman): And specializing in the intersection of AI sales and marketing. You know, that’s my heart. Sriharsha is a visionary leader in the industry and we’re going to jump into his genius and how AI is affecting sales and marketing and I’m sure we’re going to get some little tidbits we haven’t been thinking about. So Sriharsha, welcome to the show.

0:01:44 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Brynne. I’m super excited and this is a long time coming. So excited to chat.

0:01:51 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I am too. And I know that we overlap a lot with LinkedIn and some other companies that we both work with directly, so I’m excited to talk a little bit about that. But before we go into your genius, we ask all of our guests the same first question, which is what does Making Sales Social mean to you?

0:02:12 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Absolutely. And I think that’s a fantastic question because I have a lot of thoughts on this. You know, I think especially as, you know, the AI starts to get better and better, I think it’s going to start to get to the point where it does start to replace some entry level roles. Candidly, you know, we’re already seeing that happen and, and I think as that happens, it’s going to be more and more important for salespeople to learn what it feels like to get back to face to face conversations.

0:02:39 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:02:39 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Meeting people where they are.

0:02:41 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:02:41 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Visiting them in person if need be. And like getting on zoom calls and not just having your video turned off, but actually turning on the video and, you know, looking at each other. And it’s interesting. I always talk about how there’s a lot of these reps that grew up in the iPhone generation these days, right? All the, all the young reps and they’re not used to, you know, calling on the phone, they’re not used to being in person.

0:03:05 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And so yeah, when I think about making sales more social, I think about face-to-face conversations. I talk about, I think about in-person conversations.

0:03:15 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. And I think one of the great things about AI and prompts is it can help you get to conversations faster through hyper-personalization and. But the goal is still to have those conversations.

0:03:28 – (Bob Woods): Right?

0:03:29 – (Brynne Tillman): And social selling for me is not about selling on LinkedIn, it’s about starting conversations. So that’s like right up my alley, that answer. So thank you for that. So I’m excited. First of all, 10 years experience in sales, marketing and AI engineering, I never heard of AI. Well, except for the movie AI by Steven Spielberg. Ten years. Tell me what that journey looked like.

0:03:57 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Absolutely. You know, it’s interesting, you know, everyone that comes to me and talks to me about ChatGPT, it’s like they’re all so excited about it and you know, it’s just this thing that everyone’s heard of just in the last year and a half.

0:04:09 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:04:10 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): My co-founder and I have been working with these AI models for over a decade.

0:04:15 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:04:16 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Believe it or not, before GPT and Claude and all of these models, there were many, many models that came before that, you know, that were stepping stones to where we are today. And I actually used to work at Sales for Einstein, you know, a couple years ago on their AI Chatbots team. And man, if we had the generative AI models we had today, it would be a completely different story. And I think my biggest takeaway while I was at Salesforce was like, there’s so much potential here and I know where these models were headed and they were light years behind.

0:04:49 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And, and so, yeah, a big part of, you know, what inspired me to go into go to market AI is like, I think we’re just on the tip of the iceberg right now and these models are going to get even better and I think the applications are going to grow as well.

0:05:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, we are in its infancy and just in two years, I’m blown away by how far it’s come and it still has capabilities I think we can’t even imagine. But I focus deeply in the sales and marketing world. You focus deeply in the sales and marketing world, and you solve a problem that I think may be one of the largest challenges inside of organizations, especially larger organizations, which is scaling good coaching, scaling consistent messaging in leadership from a sales and marketing position. Right?

0:05:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Like what I see every day in all my clients. Often, I shouldn’t say, but I often see one sales leader is coaching one way. One is a tough love, one is too mushy and is your best friend. Right. And there’s no consistency, which is a disservice to their team. Even if they think what they’re doing is kind and good, it’s not productive or efficient. So when I took a look at what you are doing and the role play and coaching platform for sales teams, I’m like, man, this guy gets it. Like, this is. So talk to me about how you land here?

0:06:28 – (Brynne Tillman): And just the effectiveness of having this consistent role playing across a team that takes the pressure off the relationship between the sales leader and the producer and keeps, in some ways even keeps that relationship more connected, right? Like, without them feeling like, oh, they’re gonna tell me everything I’m doing wrong, they’re gonna role play with me and attack me. Right? Because that’s what a lot of people feel like. This fixes that, right?

0:06:59 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): No, absolutely. Brynne. You know, I think, you know, I say this to all our prospects all the time. I say we’re not trying to prove that practice works with hyperbound. We know practice works. In fact, you know, practice works. Everyone knows practice works. We are just trying to give you a platform to facilitate that and make it scalable.

0:07:19 – (Bob Woods): Right?

0:07:20 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And again, you come back to role plays again, right? Role plays are also not a new concept, especially back in the day. You know, if you talk to any sales leader that’s been in the industry for, you know, 15 years, right? Like, like yourself, you understand 30 years, 30 years, you understand how important role playing can be and how impactful it can be.

0:07:40 – (Bob Woods): Right?

0:07:41 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): But the problem is it tends to be very awkward sometimes, right? It’s not consistent. It’s hard to get time on your manager’s calendar or, you know, maybe your PE is not going to be a consistent role player with you.

0:07:52 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:07:53 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): It’s very hard to actually find time to do an objective role play that actually improves you.

0:07:59 – (Brynne Tillman): So that’s the word, objective. That’s the key that I recognize what you’re doing is going to change the way that reps succeed because there’s no you. So. And correct me if I’m wrong, when you roll this out inside of a company, there’s a very strategic process in place, a methodology in place that is consistent across all coaching for all the reps. Right. So there’s not a human error side in that. The role playing, if they say something and they use the word guarantee, a human might miss that. But in role playing, they would say, oh, that’s a word that we don’t use.

0:08:45 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Absolutely. And REI can catch that. Right. But I think it’s also just the feedback that the AI gives.

0:08:51 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:08:51 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): When you think about, like humans, it’s. And this is not to put blame on managers, but it’s a very human thing. Humans have bias, right. Like you have, you have a favorite person on your team, whether you believe it or not.

0:09:03 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:09:04 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And that, that impacts the way you behave with them, that impacts the way you role play with them, that impacts how you give them feedback.

0:09:10 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:09:10 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And then you think about complimenting sandwiches.

0:09:12 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:09:12 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Like, how many compliment sandwiches can I give a rep before? I just want to, I’m just, I just want to get this feedback out to them. I just, I know they’re a great, great seller, but I want them to know all of these critical things that are going to help them get better. The nice part about AI, we always say, Brynne, is AI is not judging you, it’s just scoring you. There’s nothing personal about it.

0:09:35 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, wow. There’s nothing embarrassing, there’s nothing shameful. The stress is off.

0:09:42 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): I love and you know, I don’t care if you’re a top performer, if you’re a bottom performer, I will tell you, you screwed up a million times if that’s what you need to hear.

0:09:52 – (Brynne Tillman): You know, and also authentically, instead of having the, you know, the sandwich.

0:09:57 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:09:57 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s just authentic. This is the reality. I did not try to buffer your feelings because I only got it. My only goal is to make you better, is to, to get you to a better place too. I love this. It’s amazing. So what has happened in your journey that said, this is like so needed in the marketplace. What was your experience where you say, man, sure, we need this.

0:10:22 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Sure. So it actually kind of happened by accident. When my co-founder and I first started this company and wanted to work on something, we were actually working on a completely different product. And you know, during that process, we reached out to nearly 25,000 people on LinkedIn. Just cold LinkedIn messages hand personalized by my co-founder and I and on top of that, we sent 10,000 cold emails, also hand personalized.

0:10:46 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And out of those, we were able to get 2,000 of those people to actually sit down with us for at least 15 to 30 minutes just to have a conversation about some of the problems they’re running into day to day. And you know, when we’re selling this other product, like we, we didn’t know how to do sales because we’re engineers. Like we didn’t know how to run a discovery call, we know how to run a demo, we know how to negotiate.

0:11:06 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): So we built this product on the side to kind of help improve our sales skills. And we were at a conference in New York. I remember this very clearly. November 2023. One of the CROs at this conference turned to my co-founder and was like, wait, so you guys are engineers and you have all these logos in just a matter of three months? How’d you guys learn to sell so quickly? And my co founder was like, well you know, we practice on this AI, it’s not a big deal.

0:11:31 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And they’re like, no, no, that’s a big deal because it takes three months for one of my reps to like sell their first deal. You guys have multiple deals, multiple logs, right? And I think that’s when it really hit us and we realized like this is a big problem, right? It takes companies as much as like three months to almost like nine months in some cases to get a rep ramped up, right? And it’s all because that’s how long it takes for a rep to get enough conversations to feel confident, right?

0:11:59 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And confidence is the key, right? In fact we all, you know, it takes around 400 conversations for a rep to feel confident on a call, right? Imagine you’re cold calling. How many conversations would, how long would it take to get 400 conversations? Months. On Hyperbound, you get that in a week, max, two weeks. So that’s why it’s such a big game changer for these orgs because it really cuts down ramp time significantly for most of our customers, as much as 50%. And on top of that, there’s a continuous coaching element as well. Because coaching is not a one time thing, right?

0:12:35 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): There’s always things to improve on.

0:12:38 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, that’s awesome. So yeah, I’m curious, tell me what makes a good role play. For those of you listening, we just had a note taker join our session. So you’re hearing things and we don’t edit. So anyway, tell me a little bit about what’s a good Role play. What’s a bad role play? Because, you know, any of us could pretend we’re a prospect. How do you ensure that the coaching that’s happening is effective?

0:13:08 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): That’s a great question, and I particularly love answering this one because we’ve spent millions of dollars in R and D, you know, just to literally get that realism of that role play to be as good as it is today. If you try our bots, like there’s a bunch of publicly available bots on our website, try it out, you’ll find that it feels eerily realistic to a real sales call. And part of that is because we’ve ingested 2 million hours of real life sales calls into our platform to train our models to be able to have the best and most realistic conversation possible.

0:13:38 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:13:39 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And it’s the same with our AI coaching as well. So our AI reads the transcript. It reads the customer’s content. Their, whatever their product information is, their Persona documentation is. It will read through all of that and give you really detailed AI coaching feedback customized for your business. And when you, you know, in terms of like, what makes a good role play, I think it comes down to just understanding what humans are usually looking for.

0:14:04 – (Bob Woods): Right?

0:14:04 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Like, let’s say, you know, you throw an objection at me, Bryn, I handle that objection. You’re probably not going to be satisfied with the first answer I give you. You’re probably going to go one layer deeper and ask me a secondary question. Then you have a tertiary question.

0:14:17 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:14:17 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): So that’s not easy to replicate with an AI.

0:14:20 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:14:20 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And we’ve been able to crack that code, right. Have the AI go multiple levels deeper so it doesn’t feel like the surface level conversation where it’s just back and forth, Q and A. Because that’s not what makes a roleplay. That just makes role play good. And we’re trying to get into great role plays.

0:14:35 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it. And I assume it is similar for coaching. What about the different personalities? Like, for me, when I have a coach, I, like, don’t sugarcoat it. I just, I don’t have time. Tell me what I need to do. Guide me on how to fix it. And I’m good. Like, even when Chachi PT says that’s a great question, but I’m like, stop. I don’t, I don’t.

0:15:00 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Too nice. Yeah, yeah.

0:15:02 – (Brynne Tillman): Like, like, like just give me what I need to hear to fix this. Right. But there are some people that thrive in this, the softer approach.

0:15:13 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:15:13 – (Brynne Tillman): Talk to me a little bit about, like, how does your platform, I guess, adapt to personality types.

0:15:21 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Yeah, that’s a great question. And that’s actually a dial that we give our clients and they can basically up it, they could bring it down.

0:15:31 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:15:31 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): In fact, we have a feature on the platform that allows you to control the emotional state of the bot. So do you want the bot to be kind? Do you want to be rude? Do you want to be sassy?

0:15:41 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:15:42 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Do you want it to ask a lot of questions or be very guarded?

0:15:45 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:15:45 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): You can basically set it up to behave, you know, in different personalities and individual reps can also do that. Right. So maybe you just did the easy version, the kind version, and you want to practice that same conversation but with a rude prospect who’s just got to the point. I don’t, I don’t really, really, you know, I don’t want a small talk. I just want to get to the point.

0:16:03 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:16:03 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And how do you handle that?

0:16:04 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:16:04 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): How do you like to slow down the conversation and actually do proper discovery when they don’t want discovery done on them?

0:16:10 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:16:10 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): I’m sure we’ve all run into prospects like that. So you can simulate all those different scenarios on Hyperbound. Hyperbound with a click of a button.

0:16:17 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. You know, one of my favorite things that AI does in sales is pre-call planning and coming up with the discovery questions that align. So I mean, even for all my podcasts I have a prompt that I use to make sure that I’m aligning what you do with what my audience wants to hear. So that’s quite right. So I do maybe, you know, five, seven minutes worth of preparation now where it used to be, 30, 40, 50 minutes. Right.

0:16:49 – (Brynne Tillman): So in the coaching, I, I’m going to assume you’re teaching some pre call planning. How has that affected not even just doing the planning, but how do you use it effectively in the call? So talk to me about that because I think pre call planning is the most under leveraged sales tool that AI has brought to the table.

0:17:11 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Yeah, even better. Let me give you a real quick customer story of exactly this type of scenario. We had a client recently, one of their AES had a big call with a C suite leader at Nike and you know, he was super nervous for that call. Like him, he knew he wasn’t prepared for it. He had it in an hour. So he went on to hyperbound, built a hyperbound role play and he built a digital process twin of the prospect that he was about to talk to.

0:17:37 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:17:37 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Practice with that for 30 minutes, then went into the actual call and aced it. And then he came back to my co-founder and I after that, and he was like, guys, if I hadn’t built that hyperbound roleplay, I literally would have crashed and burned on that call.

0:17:50 – (Brynne Tillman): Wow.

0:17:51 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And he was like, I am so glad, because it basically gave him all the objections that came up in the real call.

0:17:58 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:17:58 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): He was able to get the marbles out of his mouth. He was way more confident on the actual call because he had practiced it beforehand. And I thought it was interesting. When you say pre call prep, it’s one thing to look at some notes and look at the past conversations and have your talking points ready in your brain. And a completely different thing to actually prepare, put it into a conversation and role play it out.

0:18:18 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:18:18 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): So we always say, like, we’re taking pre call prep to the next level.

0:18:23 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:18:23 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s great. I. That’s fantastic. I love that. Well, I mean, I can’t believe how fast time goes. And I appreciate all of the fabulous insights you brought. I mean, AI by far is kind of the. The most interesting conversation to have. But before we start wrapping up, is there a question I should have asked you? I didn’t.

0:18:43 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Yeah. No. You know, most people ask us, you know, why customers are so interested in AI roleplay right now. And, you know, I think the biggest thing for me, Bryn, is I think people really want to upskill their reps right now.

0:18:59 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:19:00 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): We live in a world where the competition is greater than ever, especially in the world of B2B SaaS.

0:19:05 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:19:05 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): And it’s no longer about volume.

0:19:07 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:19:08 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): It’s not about who can send more emails, who can make more dials. It’s about who has the better seller.

0:19:14 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:19:14 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Who. Who can build better relationships? And there’s no way to teach that at scale unless you have something like a hyperbound or something. Something like it. And so that’s the biggest shift that I’m seeing in the market.

0:19:29 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. So I’m sure I have listeners. We have listeners right now that are like, at the edge of their seat and say, okay, how can I take the next leap? Or what’s the next step if I want to explore this for my teacher?

0:19:44 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Amazing. Yeah. You know, if you have a team that you want to test out AI roleplay for, or you just want to test it out yourself and play around with some bots, if you go to hyperbound AI, there’s actually multiple free roleplay scenarios that you can test out, and there’s no limits on it. So you can do as many calls as you want. There’s 10 free bots, cold calls, discovery calls, warm calls, whatever you want to test out.

0:20:09 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): So yeah, go check it out. And actually one of the bots you can sell LinkedIn Sales Navigator to and it’s really fun so you should definitely try it out.

0:20:16 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I’m gonna hop on to that. That is going to be my evening. Fun things to do on the Internet.

0:20:24 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Awesome. They are also, I will warn you, Brian, they are some of the rudest bots on the Internet, just for the record. So they will boss you around if you don’t treat them right.

0:20:35 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m pretty nice because I’ve been in sales and I was a waitress for many, many years.

0:20:41 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Just can’t promise the bots will be nice. That’s the only thing.

0:20:43 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, interesting. Yeah, interesting. That’s fair because, yeah, I love that. Well, gosh, this was so much fun. I’m so glad we got to talk. And I’m assuming you’re well, I know you’re on LinkedIn. Where else can people find you?

0:20:57 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Yes. So LinkedIn is a great place to, you know, reach out. I’m happy to chat about Hyperbound anytime if you want to reach out directly. Founders, Hyperbound AI is going to be the easiest way to reach my co-founder and I and we’re happy to chat.

0:21:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Wonderful. Thank you so much. I’m very confident this brought lots of curiosity and some interesting ways to think about AI for sales, coaching and roleplay. So thank you.

0:21:24 – (Sriharsha Guduguntla): Thank you so much.

0:21:25 – (Brynne Tillman): And to all our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

0:21:32 – (Brynne Tillman): Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us next. Register for free resources@linkedinlibrary.com You can also listen to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleslink.com for more information.

Outro:

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