Sales & Marketing Playbook: Unleashed

AI-Powered Sales Coaching: Revolutionizing Practice for Better Results

• Evan Polin & Craig Andrews

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What if your sales team could practice their pitches, objection handling, and closing techniques with an AI that looks, sounds, and responds just like a real prospect? On this episode of Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed, we dive deep into the revolutionary world of AI-powered sales training with special guest Mike from Colleva.

Perfect practice makes perfect—but most sales professionals only get real-world practice once or twice a week with actual prospects. Mike reveals how Colleva's photorealistic AI creates face-to-face conversation opportunities that allow salespeople to practice extensively without the risk of costly mistakes in front of real customers. "Making a mistake on a call could be a $25,000 mistake, could be a $100,000 mistake, could be a million-dollar mistake," notes co-host Evan Polin. "I'd much rather get the reps and feedback with the AI."

The conversation explores how this technology bridges the persistent gap between marketing and sales by ensuring consistent messaging. Sales teams can practice with their actual products, services, and company-approved language rather than generic scenarios. Most impressively, the AI doesn't just evaluate what salespeople say—it analyzes their tone, facial expressions, and body language, providing comprehensive feedback on both content and delivery.

Beyond sales training, we discover applications for talent acquisition, performance reviews, and even customer satisfaction surveys. The AI can conduct interviews with team members or customers, gathering insights that might otherwise be dominated by the loudest voices in traditional settings.

Whether you're a sales manager struggling to provide consistent coaching, a marketing leader frustrated with messaging inconsistency, or a small business owner wearing multiple hats, this episode reveals how AI-powered practice can transform your team's performance without adding to your workload. Listen now to discover how face-to-face AI might be the missing piece in your sales enablement strategy.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed, the premier podcast for innovative growth strategies hosted by two seasoned experts. Meet Evan Polin, the president of Polin Performance Group, a master in sales coaching with over two decades of experience. Evan is not just a consultant. He's a force in sales, focusing on mindset planning and skill development. He's also the co-author of Selling Professional Services, the Sandler Way. Joining him is Craig Andrews, partner and CEO of Beholder Agency. An expert in growth marketing With 20 years under his belt, craig blends marketing creativity with strategy to propel businesses forward, making Beholder Agency a leader in effective marketing solutions. Together, evan and Craig are here to share their wisdom on winning strategies, best practices and transformative insights that will fuel your growth. Get ready to revolutionize your sales and marketing approach right here on the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed.

Speaker 2:

Evan, welcome. This is the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed and I want to target a little bit on that playbook line because the guests we have today, man, let me tell you it's going to be amazing and I'm excited for you guys to get started and to hear this. But let me tell you it's going to be amazing and I'm excited for you guys to get started and to hear this. But let me ask you something real quick, evan. You have clients who come to you all the time and go. I use ChatGPT to do X, right. I have clients who goes. I have ChatGPT that created this new ad campaign and I know that you have a reaction to it, but my reaction to it generally is okay, congratulations. Like, what do you want me to say to you? What is your reaction to it?

Speaker 3:

Welcome to 2023. Welcome to 2024. So, but if people aren't using technology, they are going to fall behind. Technology is a great tool, but it's just that it's a tool, it's a starting point. So when people tell me that, I tell them it's a great start, but that it's just the start and that it still needs to be driven by us and in a minute or so we're going to invite our guest on. But there are more and more technology tools out there for people who are getting cutting edge. You know, craig, I know with you with marketing, a lot of times it's data, data, data. It's metrics, metrics, metrics.

Speaker 3:

For me, from a sales perspective, a lot of times there is a challenge because you can read about skills, you can go through training, you can get coaching, but there is absolutely no substitute for practice, for actually doing it, and I work with a lot of professionals who maybe are in front of a prospect once or twice a week, don't actually have a lot of time, don't have time to get those real time reps in.

Speaker 3:

Don't have time to get those real-time reps in, and up until recently, there hasn't really been a lot of tools to be able to help them with that perfect practice makes perfect and to get them better, and the guests that we're going to bring on in a second. Besides knowing way too many secrets from my past, we'll be able to share with all of you and hopefully he won't share too many of those I promised him if he didn't share that I wouldn't share the pictures, but he's going to be able to, I think, share with everybody a set of tools that up until a year or two ago, weren't really available to be able to help folks get in those reps when it comes to building up their sales skills and their sales aptitude.

Speaker 2:

And so let me tell everybody, before Evan goes through his, before we bring our guests to the table here, is that this is the playbook we are giving you answers that allows you to perform better, and this is another tool to add to that tool chest. So I'm going to bring him to the stage right now, evan. Hey, mike, how are you today?

Speaker 4:

Good, how are you doing? Thanks for having me, craig.

Speaker 3:

Good to see you, Ed. Good to see you, Mike, and welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook. Mike and I have known each other since I had hair and that hair was brown, so it's been a long time. But, Mike, you want to share with everybody a little bit about your background and what you're up to now, and a little bit about your company.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, absolutely so. I spent a long time in the financial services industry and senior roles in really kind of high performance environments and what I realized and the guys were just talking about it is kind of the ability to get reps, the ability to get practice to develop those skills and be able to do your job better in really short supply and particularly in sales not for lack of intent, but having a way to learn and practice at scale was sorely missing, and so that's what Kaleva enables.

Speaker 3:

I'm sorry. Go ahead, Greg.

Speaker 2:

And so the reason why we were made more, was excited about this is because we deal with, for the most part, a lot of small to medium-sized businesses and I think that ultimately, you know the plight of a small business is making sure that people are getting the information the appropriate way, the way I want them to display it or I want them to speak about it. And I know Evan and I have worked together when it comes to the sales training and generally it's hard to replace the guy who started the company right, so your tool is very effective there. Can you give kind of a brief overview about the software before we get into a deeper?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, absolutely so. The way you should think about it is we've enabled face-to-face conversations with AI, where the AI is photorealistic, it looks and sounds basically just like a human. That's kind of how far the world has evolved in the last couple of years, and what that enables is the AI to be with the sales rep at every point in their journey. It can help with hiring, it can help with onboarding, so it can play the role of an instructor to let them out learn the materials, and it can play the role of practicing the lab, making sure that they're doing the myself approach, and then it can help them as they go into the field. I won't go into a lot of it, but that's the basic idea. Think about having a personalized co-pilot sales coach that's with you to reinforce. You know all the type of training you know that a human coach like Evan would provide.

Speaker 3:

So and the one thing, mike, that really excites me about what you have that I think that is different than some general platforms out there is folks can upload their sales presentations. People can upload, you know, I teach a consultative selling approach, but different people. There's a challenger model, there's all kinds of different sales approaches. People can actually upload their approach, technical information, presentations and then, because you're using AI, the system learns the AI so that the role play and the salesperson can actually be judged on.

Speaker 3:

Okay, this isn't just some general random. You know, pretend that you're selling a pen to somebody, but this is, these are our products, these are our services. Everything's uploaded. The AI knows what you're supposed to be selling and it can now be a very realistic role play to give folks feedback on everything from how well you engage to technically, how well you know the material and, again, does things that even 12 to 18 months ago, I don't think was even possible for folks to do. And, mike, maybe you want to share a little bit in terms of what you've seen from your clients how it helps sales managers that are stressed because they have way too many salespeople, or how it would help a small business owner that's doing so many different things that they can't possibly also spend the time to coach their salespeople in terms of how the tool can be helpful there.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, absolutely. Let me just react to a couple. You made some great points.

Speaker 4:

Um, most sales coaching, in terms of the things that we would do, like you know, kind of the role plays. They're either very, very um, it's called bland, right, so it's, how fast did you speak? They're very impersonal, they're not really actual insights, or there's something like a gong which is really great, but it's kind of after the fact. So the way we help the managers, you know, is before your sales team starts failing in the field, we can help you evaluate them in flight and, most importantly, we can help you triage if there's certain challenges. Maybe they don't ask for the club, they don't, they don't ask for next steps very well, or they don't listen the way they should.

Speaker 4:

They always have a one-size-fits-all approach. We can help you triage that as a manager, basically instantaneously, but also without hand-holding, because they can do it asynchronously. They can work in their five minutes because the sales team is also very busy, but they do that it asynchronously. They can work in their five minutes because the sales team is also very busy, but they do that, you know, at their convenience. I think that's really important. It's meant to be kind of in the flow of work and it's meant for the manager again the human in the loop to really be able to get the information they need quickly. Jump in, figure out what's working, what's not working in terms of the sales approach, get the team up to speed, get them certified and have them, you know, do the best they possibly can.

Speaker 3:

Great. And Craig, I actually want to loop you in for a second in terms of the importance of this Craig's approaching things from the marketing side. Craig, it probably never happened here, but I just want to check. Have you ever worked with the company, the marketing team? The company puts together all of this great marketing material and the sales team just didn't really spend the time to review it. If you were to ask the sales team questions, they would get half the questions wrong and they just had no idea what they were doing with the collateral. Have you ever come across that before?

Speaker 2:

Just a little bit, just a little bit, and so one of the things that we've talked about in past episodes, Evan, was how sometimes the sales team would go create their own materials right, which is bound to, you know, at least 80% of the time, be the wrong information that we're trying to push across as a company wide but.

Speaker 3:

But it was based on accurate information that we're trying to push across as a company wide but it was based on accurate information.

Speaker 2:

Yes, but we talked about ChatGPT before. That's what's so exciting about this system here is right, it's already fed, it's already learning. So, from our perspective, on a marketing perspective, the time it takes to train a person, to learn, to then disseminate the information to everyone else, what if that one person got the information wrong? Now, theoretically, the person is given the direct information that came from the top and now is disseminated to the audience the way it should be. And now to Mike's point. The changes are made in flight. So before they hit the road, we would have right I'm assuming that's correct, mike we would have information from the executive procession to see who's saying what and how they're performed in it.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, absolutely, and I think you know the ability to have and you mentioned this kind of consistent coaching is really important because, when you know, when I was basically working with our teams, the different managers had different viewpoints of roles, working, all their biases, and they all would also kind of really kind of, you know, micro focus on one thing. What we could do with Kaliva is when you're doing these interactions it's looking much more holistically, but again, every rep is getting the same type of feedback on the metrics and objectives that you think matter. I think the you can think of this almost like a practice field and the first part of practice if we're going to. I know Evan loves sports analogies. You got to learn the playbook. You got to learn the playbook right. It's this thick. So what can we do?

Speaker 4:

Our AI takes your materials that marketing teams spend all this time on and can literally coach you up on those materials before you even practice. You know whatever challenge or medic approach you want, let's just make sure you freaking know the material is cold, so it's at the top of your tongue and then we can quiz you on it, or the AI can, so you really kind of have it down cold. I think that is the platform to do everything else. And then I think we mentioned this, but also, really importantly, you want this to kind of go into the field and make sure that what you're actually training on is working. We can take the transcripts of real conversations in the field and give you feedback with the exact same objectives that you've decided matter. That's really important because obviously a GOM can give you feedback, but it may not be aligned with what the actual objectives are of the call.

Speaker 2:

Now it's-. Let me interrupt you, Mike. Let me interrupt you just to make sure my audience hears this. You're telling me I can take the transcripts from a Zoom call, load it into your system and, based off the parameters that was set in the beginning, give me feedback on how I did it from a sales perspective.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, but I could do one better. What we can also do is we take the transcripts of your best performers, figure out with you and these are typically for larger engagements what is working and not working, and that can become the basis for the actual training. So, as you start figuring out what you know, what defines success, we're, in essence, learning with you. So that's like one of the main things that it's not meant to be a static platform. It goes back to what Evan said earlier. You know it's fine for traditional role plays to everyone, sell widget apps, but ultimately you want to graduate from that. You want to feel more impactful and more real, and this is how we're able to close a loop by loading the materials up, making sure you learn it, making sure the personalities of the people you're talking to are appropriately reflected.

Speaker 4:

Maybe there's someone who is constantly doing objections. You know someone who just is always focused on price. That's all they care about. Practice against whoever's causing you the most difficulty. So you're not practicing with them in the field Because, as we all know, that's crazy expensive to practice on prospects. Crazy expensive to practice on prospects.

Speaker 3:

So, and Mike, as folks are practicing, is the owner, vp of sales, sales manager, sales training able to get feedback based on how people are doing in their role play, to know how their people are doing, and is there any way for that feedback loop to go back to the management team so they can see how their people are performing when they're doing the role playing? So we have two?

Speaker 4:

yeah, absolutely, we have two versions. Version one is it's a complete safe space, and if you're the type of firm that you just want to make sure and you want to encourage people to practice all the time, great safe space. If you want just to be able to track usage as a manager, great. If you want to track in more kind of summary level stats of how your team is performing so you know where to call someone like Evan in to help, great. And if you want full access to everything as managers, we can enable that as well. It's manager-led or owner-led, and we just turn the knobs to make it be what you need it to be.

Speaker 2:

So just to be clear for everybody listening, is this limited to sales performance or is there other applications for this beyond sales in a corporation?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, absolutely so. We do talent acquisition, so we're basically a co-pilot wherever you need us. That's the advantage of that face-to-face it makes it feel much more real and come alive. So we do. We can help with interview screening. We can help with general presentation practice. Maybe just have a workplace challenge. You wanna talk with a coach, cause you know Evan is driving you crazy and, you know taking all the credit for everything.

Speaker 4:

When we can do that as well, we can help with performance reviews. You wants to write a review about me? It takes forever all that wordsmithing. Wouldn't it be easier just to have a 10-minute conversation with AI, let it probe me, let me ask me about myself and then write it for me for a self-review or again, obviously, for a peer review, so I don't have to. And then the final thing is we can actually interview, actually interview.

Speaker 4:

If you have a bigger team let's say you have 50 people on your sales team we can interview everyone on the team, almost like a pulse survey. It's where they can tell you kind of what's working, what's not working, beyond just the numbers, as opposed to getting everyone in a room, which is obviously hard. But also the person with the loudest voice is the one who's going to dominate that conversation. They may not actually have the best answers. We can do a pulse survey. We can also do a voice of a customer, so we could interview your customers to figure out what's working, both from a sale perspective but also relationship management, customer success. We can take your questions and then use those questions to have our AI ask everyone, all of your customers.

Speaker 3:

Mike, that's great, but I think you buried the lead, Craig. Were you complaining to Mike about me taking all the credit for the success of the podcast?

Speaker 2:

Listen, like we said, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens right between me and Mike in your past stays between me and Mike in your past. How about?

Speaker 3:

that. So, mike, all of this is awesome in terms of the application, the broad application, moving forward. How do you see Kaleva fitting into the broader landscape of AI of sales enablement over the next couple of years?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I mean great question. I think the goal for Collibra is to be more and more kind of embedded in the day-to-day flow of work for the sales team, where really you get those let's call it real-time feedback loops so the sales team knows what's working and not working, making that as frictionless as possible. The managers have incredible visibility in what's working and not working. Making that as frictionless as possible. The managers have incredible visibility in what's working and not working. So that way everyone feels empowered and I think we haven't talked about this. But it's also making sure that this is very much a human led experience and a levering and magnification experience. So, for example, taking Evan's programs about what works and doesn't work and making sure those are the goalposts for what success looks like as opposed to AI for AI's sake, defining success, defining good and bad and continuing to work along that to make sure that the impact is actionable and we can make the amount of time we need to spend to show real impact kind of as short as possible, because, again, we know everyone's so busy.

Speaker 2:

That's awesome. That's awesome. So, mike, I'm going to give you a quick breather here and I want you to come up with three things that people should know about your product and your program. Right, and Evan and I are going to talk briefly here about the kind of things coming down the pike, but the thing I want everybody to recognize if there's any part of this information that's attractive to you, by all means reach out to us, contact us, email us. We'll put the program up on LinkedIn, we're up on YouTube, we're up on all the major podcast platforms.

Speaker 2:

But again, I'm going to stick home. This is the playbook. We're telling you answers that's coming down the pike and answers you should be doing right now. You have two great consultants I like to plug myself a little bit Two great consultants who can help you from the sales and the marketing perspective, and Mike is bringing a platform that kind of blends between the two of us, which is beautiful, because, at the end of the day Mike touched upon it at the end there is that we always look for data, data, data, right, and so the data that comes from this allows us to market better, and the guest that we're going to have coming in the next few weeks.

Speaker 2:

Here is another person who sits beautifully between the two of us and we'll introduce him when he comes down the pike. But I want you guys to make sure you're liking, subscribing and making sure you're giving comments and feedback, because, at the end of the day, we're here to serve you better and we can't serve you if we don't know what you like. We know what's good, we know what works off of all of our years of experience, but I think it's important to make sure that you guys are addressing us and giving us feedback in terms of what you want to hear and what you want to see.

Speaker 3:

Evan, you want to add anything to that? Yeah, craig, before we bridge back over to Mike, you mentioned data, data, data. We talk about data all the time. It's a lot easier on the marketing side, sometimes On the sales side. My guess is a lot of you who are working with salespeople have salespeople tell you how much they hate role play and oh, I'm doing it in front of my manager, so it's artificial. Or they give you weather reports. They think the appointment feels good, or, you know, I think I was partly sunny over here, maybe partly cloudy over here.

Speaker 3:

Mike's tool can give you actual, real, hard data. This is what your salespeople are doing well, this is what they need help on, this is what they need to tweak and, rather than going based on a gut feeling or hearing second or third hand four days after somebody had an appointment how they thought it went, being able to feed that Zoom transcript in and get that real-time feedback, what did your people in real time on a real appointment, do well? What do they need help on? That is the quickest way to get the best out of your sales force and get the results and, as Mike said, for some of you out there, making a mistake on a call could be a $25,000 mistake, could be a $100,000 mistake, could be a million dollar mistake. I'd much rather get the reps get the feedback so that I'm making my mistake with the AI, so that I am ready to go when I'm in front of a real live prospect, rather than making the mistake there.

Speaker 2:

And so, before we get into your three points, mike, can people demo this by any chance?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, absolutely so I was gonna mention that. So have them reach out to you or reach out to us. I'll give you the wwwkalevacom. They can click and they can see the video of it. By the way, they can see what face-to-face conversations with AI for sales look like. But yeah, they can. Also, we can do free trials as well, cause it's kind of seeing is believing and we wanna make sure that, or the sales teams.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. So if you guys didn't hear that, it's wwwkalevacom, right, correct, okay, so you're up, mike. The top three things that are my three things are.

Speaker 4:

I think, with all due respect to Allen Iverson, which I know is one of Evan's boys, being from Philly, it really is all about the practice.

Speaker 4:

And by the way, it's not the practice with your manager or your colleagues who are all going to pull punches. You need to practice in a place where you get consistent and actionable feedback. You're going to get scores. You're going to get the why, you're going to be able to reflect and actually have a follow-up conversation with your coach to really absorb. That's the only way you get better and, as Evan mentioned, you sure as heck don't want to do that with prospects. Besides that being an expensive proposition, you know it also is going to make you look bad if your close rate is lower because you're wasting time on prospects.

Speaker 4:

The two other things I mentioned that are related is face to, because there are other tools out there. Face to face really matters. That's the way we learn to communicate. That's the way we sell With Khalifa. I should have mentioned this earlier. We can track your voice and body language, so if you're saying the right words with the wrong tone and the wrong facial expression, you're going to get called out on that. People buy from people they like. People buy from people they relate to. This will help you get there.

Speaker 4:

And the final thing is again, you can look after the fact and see how you did. In a tool like Gong, you can see if you talk too fast or too slowly. Those things aren't probably what's to define whether you made a sale or not. It's all the much more specific objectives. That's what will define your success and with Kaleva, we can help you work through those objectives. You can get coached up on it and you can also do it in the flow of work, so you can literally say, hey, I'm about to talk to Bill. This is Bill's challenge, this is what I'm trying to sell Bill. This is his personality. You can literally define exactly your situation, so make it super actionable and super realistic and then go. So you're in the right headspace and I think that's how I would leave it. It's like practice, you know, really does make perfect. I think that's what differentiates, you know, a salesperson that feels out of their depth and one who feels like they're about to go crush it.

Speaker 2:

See, I can tell you guys are friends because you made an Allen Iverson reference. You do business with people you like. Is there anything else in there that indicates you guys have known each other for years? I don't know. It sounds kind of suspect to me. But anyway, Evan, anything before we close out.

Speaker 3:

Again, go ahead and find Collable online. I think it's a tool that will really help empower and help you speed up how quickly you can get results and just like, follow, share, and you can find us on YouTube if you want to see our pretty faces, or you can find us on Spotify, apple, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2:

Awesome, and so, as we say on the playbook, keep winning. I'm Craig Andrews, that's Evan Polin Over, there is Mike, and we'll talk to you guys next time. Keep winning, go.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us on this exhilarating journey through the world of sales and marketing. Remember, the playbook is in your hands and the possibilities are limitless. Keep exploring, experimenting and innovating, and watch as your business reaches unprecedented levels of success. Don't forget to subscribe to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed on all major podcast platforms and follow us on YouTube, facebook and LinkedIn for even more exclusive content. Until next time, keep hustling and keep winning.

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Craig Andrews

Host
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Evan Polin

Host