5 AI Cold Call Training Use Cases (JumpCloud)

Elric Legloire (02:26) Yeah, so just before we get started, this session, yes, it’s recorded. So I’m going to send the link after this session. The topic of today, so we’re going to do like a quick, just to talk about what’s going, the topic of today. So five AI role play use cases for AdBan teams. And we have Troy to talk about this today.

He’s the SDR Enablement Program Manager at JumpCloud. So if you listen to part one, that was the intro, I would say, of enablement for SDR teams. And today we’re going to go into the ways of how you can use AI to enable your team, training or coach your team, basically. And if you don’t know me, I’m Eric, the host of this show. So for me, if we think about…

Artbound teams and building world-class Artbound teams, have three elements. You have talent, and when I say talent, mean the people who you are hiring, depending on your stage, the soft skills you are looking for might be different. Then you have productivity, and here we talk about the data you have for your team, the systems, the tools, a lot of things that you have to make your team increasing the quality and obviously the activities.

And then the topic of today, enablement. And enablement, can figure a lot of different topics, but coaching, training, how you can make your team better, basically. And we have Troy to unpack this. So Troy, I know you’ve prepped some few slides, so feel free to share your screen, and we can get started.

Troy Johnson (04:08) Yeah, yeah for sure and for those who don’t know me I’m Troy Johnson. I’m based right outside of Tampa, Florida. I’ve been in sales development outbound prospecting for over eight years coming up on nine years. I was an SCR team lead and managed SCR teams for over six years and now I run the SCR New England program for the Americas over at JumpCloud. And so we’ll talk through the topic for today. I’ll share my screen. Let me know if you can see this.

Elric Legloire (04:37) Yeah, and meanwhile, you’re showing your screen. If someone is going to listen to this or watch this and then learn one or two things, what would be the main takeaways from this session?

Troy Johnson (04:51) Yeah, I would think of this more of practical scenarios to leverage AI role play with your app on Teams. We’ll talk through like what good looks like for what we’ve tested for our teams and then ways you can easily implement this in your team this week. So I think those would be the main things to take away from this.

Elric Legloire (05:11) Perfect! Let’s do this!

Troy Johnson (05:13) Love it. So we’ll talk through this. I want to kind of set the stage why we decided to go with AI role play. So our org especially is very phone heavy. So we wanted to make sure that we were helping the reps sharpen their skills on the phones. We also, as we were launching the SDR Enablement Program, we wanted to be able to provide practice to everybody as realistic as possible, help them ramp faster, but ultimately help them

take this practice and be ready for these calls when they go live. So this is one of the main reasons we went with AI roleplay. And we’ll talk through as you’re following along what we were trying to achieve, how we ran these different roleplays, and then what we were trying to measure when we went through all these. And so, mm-hmm.

Elric Legloire (06:04) Before you go to the next slide, can you give us some context? So you said you are phone heavy, so you don’t need to give a specific number. What’s the percentage of meetings booked on the phone versus the other channels?

Troy Johnson (06:18) I would say it’s the majority. don’t have like a specific percentage, like 80 to 90 % are usually through the phone for outbound.

Elric Legloire (06:21) yeah? Okay.

Elric Legloire (06:28) Okay, yeah, yeah, cool calling, main channel.

Troy Johnson (06:29) Mm-hmm.

Yep, for sure. And then before AI role play, these were just manual one-on-one role plays with either myself, their manager, or a mentor. So we can only do so many at any given time because we’re fully remote. And so the goal was to be able to give people as much practice as possible.

Troy Johnson (06:52) Yep, and then just how to follow along with this. We’re gonna talk through what we’re trying to achieve, how we ran these, and ultimately what we’re trying to measure with all these different scenarios. So the five different scenarios that we’ve run this past year that we’ll talk through is, first one will be our onboarding certification. What we ran as a qualification competition, so we’ll talk through, it’s more of a gamified version of AI role play.

how we leverage it for AI adoption, objection handling drills, and then helping reps prepare for the next role. So these will be the main five categories we go through. Questions here, Elric, before we keep going?

Elric Legloire (07:36) No, yeah, good to go. I just have like an issue with my headphone, but yeah, yeah, you can get going.

Troy Johnson (07:41) You’re Yeah. So scenario one, when we launched this this past year, we did some evaluations of different AI roleplay tools, but we were trying to be able to leverage it first for is our onboarding. We wanted to make sure reps were able to certify on the phones that they were ready to go live. So what we were trying to achieve with this is make sure that they’ve gone through the full talk track end to end, make sure that they understand how to use the talk track, the objection healing.

guides, have the frameworks, battle cards, things like that. We wanna also help them build confidence speaking to our personas in these real life scenarios and help them get to that first meeting as soon as possible. So because we’re very phone heavy, we wanna make sure that we get them as much realistic practice as possible before they even have that first conversation.

Troy Johnson (08:35) So for the onboarding certification, the way we ran this was within, we use Hyperbound today, within Hyperbound when we go through our practice during onboarding, we have reps learn the skill, listen to what good looks like, and then they’ll go drill that skill. So if it’s something like the opener of a talk track, they’ll learn what that talk track is, they’ll go listen to what that is from a top performer.

and then we’ll have them go practice that opener. And so we have a few days of our call academy that the reps will go through and whenever they learn a topic and they listen to what that is, they’ll go practice. And this just helps with the adoption and helping them build this skill. And then we’ll run this from piece by piece all the way from the opener to the close. And then we’ll have them run this for the full call mock scenario. And so the goal by the end of their onboarding

they’ll have over practice over 100 times in different scenarios before they even touch the phones. So ultimately we want to make sure that they were certified, ready for these calls, they know how to execute and have quality conversations with prospects and to get to that first meeting over the phones as soon as possible.

Elric Legloire (09:54) Okay, I have a few questions here. You said certification readiness. do you have specific criteria to say they are ready? So is it like they need 100 repetitions or what’s the number?

Troy Johnson (10:12) So we have two things. We have one, which is a learning module where they’ve practiced their objection handling, battle cards, and full talk tracked, and they’ve passed the learning module as a first part. So they have to practice with specific bots at least 10 times. each section has three different bots that they have to go through. And then before they go live, we actually certify them on a call. So we’ll have them call bot.

I’ll actually shadow, they’ll be scored through a rubric, through the AI role play, and then I’ll also give feedback as well. And so they need to pass both of those gates and an assessment before they go live.

Elric Legloire (10:54) Okay. You were talking about the Call Academy. What’s the Call Academy? it like the training that’s the name of your training for call calling specifically or what’s in it?

Troy Johnson (11:05) Yep. Yep, exactly. It’s a three day training and it basically goes through from beginning to the end of a call, making sure that the reps learn our opener or elevator pitch, our objection handling, qualification, things like that. And we go through it with three days and then we have them practice and put this into practice every single day. And then they’ll actually start to run full role play scenarios with AI role play and then be certified a few days later.

And so the goal of that is that they learn each little part of the script piece by piece, and then they’ll go through the full call, and then we certify them at the end.

Elric Legloire (11:45) And when you join, because I know you’ve released a lot of AI training or practice for call calling specifically at Job Cloud, what was the process before implementing this?

Troy Johnson (12:01) the Call Academy or before AI role playing?

Elric Legloire (12:05) both.

Troy Johnson (12:06) Okay, so the Call Academy was actually built before I got there. My counterpart, Arpeth, and the previous SDR enablement or previous SDR leadership actually built out the Call Academy and then myself and Arpeth, who both are the enablement leaders, kind of refined it. But beforehand, it was kind of going through like slides and then you would do a couple practice sessions with your manager or your mentor or you might like.

record yourself in Slack, things like that. And so you’re really only getting like 10 to 20 attempts, like really realistic practice. And so we were able to 10x the amount of practice reps have during those first two weeks by putting in AI role-play so that they could practice at the end of our training sessions on their own and then during the rest of their rant period.

Elric Legloire (12:59) Okay, so and you mentioned that they got 10x repetitions, anything else that changed inside this process?

Troy Johnson (13:10) Yeah, so the things we’re measuring the most right now is the time to that first meeting, especially over the phone. And so that decreased, I don’t have the exact percentage, but like from all the reps who’ve gone through AI role play till their first meeting, that’s decreased quarter over quarter. So it’s very clear the correlation between how much practice you’re putting in to that first meeting.

Elric Legloire (13:15) Meeting, yep.

Elric Legloire (13:20) Yeah.

Elric Legloire (13:36) Okay. And something I remember, we were talking about Kyle just before starting the live session. Kyle mentioned something, Kyle Norton, the Chief Revenue Officer of owner.com, that mentioned that the difference of using AI with practicing versus using a real person is you can practice during the day, so you don’t need to have someone ready to practice and or…

Troy Johnson (13:48) Mm-hmm.

Elric Legloire (14:04) Book a time on the calendar of someone. So that’s, think, one of the main differences. So I don’t think it’s replacing doing it with a real person, but I think on top of practicing with someone else, that’s definitely helping with the number of repetitions.

Troy Johnson (14:19) Yeah, I think it’s better because they’re putting into like a more high pressure situation. Like a lot of times I’ll have them do it and then I’ll actually shadow and provide feedback. And so as a coach, if you’re doing the scenario and you’re trying to think of coaching it and take notes, like you’re kind of doing two things and it’s, you’re not doing either very well. But I’ve actually had reps who speak Portuguese on our team.

Elric Legloire (14:28) Yep.

Troy Johnson (14:48) go through an AI role play in Portuguese, and I was able to use AI to be able to score them and give them specific feedback based on that call and certify them on the call. So like, I think it’s really making it really a lot more realistic, especially if you have different languages, people speaking different languages on your team.

Elric Legloire (15:00) Yeah.

Elric Legloire (15:08) Yeah, that’s something else also you can do. So anything else on the onboarding certification?

Troy Johnson (15:16) No, I think just the main thing here was this is where we started. I think if anybody’s like starting with something, think onboarding is a great place because you have a lot more time to practice and your the whole purpose during the first couple weeks is to get them comfortable as fast as possible. So starting with something super specific and make sure they have time to go practice helped us. And so we started with onboarding and then we’ve kind of this is a rippled into a couple different areas of the org.

Elric Legloire (15:46) And also for onboarding specifically, how many people do you onboard per quarter?

Troy Johnson (15:51) uh… per quarter we have probably i probably on board in america is like two to three people per month so uh… around like ten per quarter

Elric Legloire (15:58) Okay.

Troy Johnson (16:04) Any other questions on onboarding certification?

Elric Legloire (16:07) Nope.

Troy Johnson (16:10) Cool. The second scenario is what we’ll call qualification competition. So this one’s a little bit more gamified. We actually did this, one of our SDRs, Rihanna, on our team actually put this together and ran it. We wanted to put together a competition that would, one, get the team using AI role play a lot more, because if you’re onboarding, it’s a lot easier to use it because you’re trying to learn. You have all the time in the world to go practice. But when you’re a ramped rep,

that you really need to get specific and creative to get people to use it on a daily basis. And so we built a competition to really help, one, improve our qualification, but two, really get people to start using AI role play. And so we ran this competition to be able to get people using it a lot more. And really, instead of just running a standard qualification reminder training on, you need to qualify these meetings, we wanted to make it a lot more engaging.

And so the way we ran this we actually did this tournament style. So kind of like March Madness we Mixed up the teams we did I think four different teams we had each round that they would go through with you compete with a different team and So you would be a group of four reps And it’d be mixed teams from people that you don’t normally work with You would practice with a bot that week and learn how to be able to navigate that objection you would then

go into the tournament so you would be competing with another team. We jump in a call and we do breakout rooms. And so we do this relay race style. So if I’m the first rep, I would call the prospect live with my peers there and then a manager who’s tracking the scoring. And my goal is to be able to book a meeting, but I need to make sure that I’m getting all of qualification, I’m handling all the objections. And then what we did was we pulled all the scoring at the end to see who had

done the best job with getting the most qualification and had booked these meetings the most efficiently. And so this is actually really low lift for us too. We didn’t need to spend any money for these competitions. We had the team who were the winner as the winning team had a Friday off and they also got to choose a manager who had to go up against a bot. And so they got to pick a manager and then pick the difficulty of that manager.

Troy Johnson (18:38) And so the way we measured how this worked and if this was a good AI role play scenario to do was one, just making sure that people were qualifying and this was improving our qualification rate, how efficiently people were booking these meetings. And so we could kind of go back and listen to these calls, see how they went. But we had a ton of participation and engagement. So this is something that was a lot of fun.

Elric Legloire (19:05) And do you run those competitions inside the… I don’t know what’s your… Actually, we didn’t talk about that. Your weekly schedule about sessions with the team. So is it part of a training session or when do you run those competitions?

Troy Johnson (19:19) So this one’s a little bit longer. We’ll do this probably quarterly. So we started it with the outbound team. We’re gonna incorporate this with our inbound team because they’re doing more calls that would be applicable to these scenarios. But this would be more like quarterly competitions because it does require like coordination, time blocked aside. You do need to like make sure that everybody is calling specific bots. So this would be more quarterly.

Elric Legloire (19:44) Okay, and so they basically they do that on their own time basically. and how you say quarterly, but do you give them two weeks for this or do you give them like a…

Troy Johnson (19:53) Mm-hmm.

Troy Johnson (19:59) Yeah, so this was a two week tournament. the time was two weeks. The first week you would get a body at the beginning of the week with your team. You would like practice with your team and at the end of the week you would go up against another team member. Sorry, another team. And so you would have an hour blocked off with a manager who’d be tracking the scoring and then coming out of that we would tally up the scores and then two teams would go on to week two. And so part of this,

Elric Legloire (20:02) Do it again.

Troy Johnson (20:28) It is tournament style, so some teams could lose, but it would be over two weeks and you’d be practicing with your teams.

Elric Legloire (20:30) Mm-hmm.

Elric Legloire (20:35) Okay. And now I’m curious about this specifically. So I know the goal with this, that the main goal was to increase the number of people on your team using AI for role play. So do you have a specific skill in mind when you’re in the competition? So what I mean by that is…

Are you focused more on the quali… if you mentioned qualification earlier, but are you more focused on objection handling or qualification? What’s the… do you have like a specific goal for each competition or?

Troy Johnson (21:08) So this one was more gamifying qualification because if, you know, most SCR teams at some point they’re gonna have a qualification struggle, like some teams just, you you have ebbs and flows where qualifications better. And so this is really gamifying that to get people like excited to do that better. But through Osmosis, you are listening to your peers book meetings and they’re actually giving each other live coaching in these sessions. So what’s really cool is,

Because we made this into a competition, you would have reps go through first in that first relay race, handle a bot scenario, and you could see reps slacking each other and coaching each other through the bot. And so part of this is, it starts with qualification as the goal, but it really was a lot of people just getting really excited and engaged and then coaching each other. And so you’re learning how to be able to handle different scenarios. You could do it with objection handling as well.

Like with us we picked specific bots that had specific objections like budget or like I’m not the right person or timing and It would get harder every every week and so you could do that as well. You could swap out qualification for objection handling

Elric Legloire (22:10) Okay.

Elric Legloire (22:25) Okay, and you said you pick specific bots. I know I used HyperBomb a few times already. So do you pick the tough one or do you pick the… Yeah.

Troy Johnson (22:36) Yeah, this is a good one. So for onboard, we used Hyperbound to be able to put everybody through. For this particular competition, we were actually using Oram. So we were testing out their AI role play inside of Oram. I think what’s really cool with that is it’s already like pre-built for you if you go through that test. And so we were able to use Oram to help the reps quickly go in and practice. And so we used that and they have a couple bots that are different difficulty, whether it’s like…

Elric Legloire (22:47) yeah, okay.

Troy Johnson (23:06) or using a competitor or it’s a technical question, you can kind of go up in difficulty.

Elric Legloire (23:14) Okay, and yeah, one last question because I know we talk a lot about clarification. Do you use bent? Sounds like you use bent or something.

Troy Johnson (23:24) We use something else. our sales team uses Medic, but our team is using a form of that, like a smaller version of that.

Elric Legloire (23:37) Okay.

Elric Legloire (23:41) Okay, what do you have next?

Troy Johnson (23:43) Yeah, scenario three is talk track adoption. So this one’s, I feel like it’s pretty easy. Like for us, we have an inbound team, we have an outbound team, we have teams over in India, in Mexico, in the US. And so a lot of the time we’re updating talk tracks. That could be the full talk track, it could be objection handling or battle cards. And so instead of just training somebody and saying, hey, here’s the new talk track.

go use it, what we’re doing now is walking them through the training, actually practicing this live with the team, and then helping them adopt this faster, so they’re not having to practice with real prospects. So this one I feel like is pretty universal. We’re just, with most teams, you’re gonna have to define and document what’s that talk track, and for us, we updated one of our new outbound…

one of our new outbound talk tracks for re-engaging with old inbound leads. And so we built a talk track for that to improve that scenario. We built a specific bot for that scenario where they previously had the knowledge that they had come inbound but weren’t expecting the call. And then live on the session, we were actually showing what good sounds like and like showing good examples from Gong. And then we had the managers and myself actually practice live.

Elric Legloire (24:44) Mm-hmm.

Troy Johnson (25:09) in front of the reps to show them how to go through this talk track with the bot. And then at the very end of the session, we’re having everybody go practice. We had dedicated time afterwards to practice in the next day. And then we even did some of these practices live, which we’ll talk about here in a little bit. Actually, instead of listening to like game tape, we’re actually practicing live and then getting immediate feedback from your peers. And so the way we measure this is really talk track adherence.

Elric Legloire (25:25) Mm.

Elric Legloire (25:33) Okay.

Troy Johnson (25:38) readiness and confidence. I think confidence is a big piece of this too. This is something we measure a lot of in onboarding is just making sure the reps, we survey them before the session to understand their confidence level with a particular scenario or talk track and then have them go through the session and then score them afterwards. And all of these have showed really good confidence scores.

Troy Johnson (26:06) questions on this one.

Elric Legloire (26:09) Yes, so I imagine you it’s more like One-offs I imagine this one so it’s mainly when you have like updates on your two tracks or a new one you want to try or what’s the… Just kidding around this. Montzé? Okay.

Troy Johnson (26:20) Yeah, this one happens probably monthly because every team has some sort of update to the talk track. Most teams, maybe not the full talk track changes, but you hear something that’s working from a different team member, you adopt that, or we had some competitive intel happen and so one of our battle cards gets updated, or we have a particular objection.

response that’s been working well and we update that for the team. Or maybe the team is struggling with their particular objection and we run that. So I think this is like a monthly thing and if teams aren’t iterating monthly on this, like I would be concerned because you should be like listening to these calls. It shouldn’t be a stagnant talk track for years and years. It should be something that’s always updating.

Elric Legloire (27:08) Yep.

Elric Legloire (27:12) Okay, you mentioned something interesting here, actually. You are talking about objection, for example. if you think about objection, you see that you have like lot of apps on the team that are struggling with one objection.

How do you approach this basically? So do you listen to what the top performers are using for this objection specifically? what’s the process to help the team who is struggling?

Troy Johnson (27:43) So you’re saying if we notice that multiple people are struggling with a particular objection. Yeah, so what we’ve done, the next scenario is actually objection handling, so I’ll talk through it more, is like if we’re hearing from the reps or if listening on calls and we notice this, like a commonality amongst a couple different people that a particular challenge like timing is a big one, especially now, if that keeps coming up, then yes, what we’ll do is we’ll,

Elric Legloire (27:46) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Elric Legloire (27:55) Mm.

Troy Johnson (28:14) we’ll listen to calls and analyze when timing comes up, who is moving that call forward and booking a meeting, or moving that and setting up a follow-up, and we’ll see if we can take any patterns from that. And then we’ll try to build a scenario and talk track for that, and then roll that out to the team. And so the next scenario I’ll walk through, actually just did this recently for our team.

for the beginning of calls because in the first 60 seconds, you deal with a lot of the same objections. So we’ll usually either anecdotally listen to this from like game tape through, we score GONG calls on a weekly basis and have a weekly game tape reviews. We’ll either hear it or the reps will like surface it to us. And then we’ll do some digging to find out who’s doing, who’s overcoming these types of objections and try to steal from that to scale that across the team.

Elric Legloire (29:08) Okay, interesting, yeah. Anything else on this one?

Troy Johnson (29:13) No, no, I think this one’s pretty standard, but I think it’s important that like when you roll out talk tracks, you’re not just getting like writing a new talk track and saying, go use this on the phones. Like you should be showing the reps what good looks like. You should be actually practicing this as a manager or enablement yourself and then having the reps go practice this. And so think if you get in that rhythm of doing that, I think the reps are more open to adopting it versus selling.

telling them to go use this new talk track.

Elric Legloire (29:46) Yeah, but it sounds like you are really focused on what the top performers are doing already. I think it’s in the past, I made the mistake, would say at some point as a manager to try new things without testing it with the top performer and the top performer is getting success from it. Because I think it’s easier for them to say, Bob is already getting success with this. So it’s easier to have the rest of the team replicate this basically.

Troy Johnson (29:52) Mm-hmm.

Troy Johnson (30:14) Yeah, I think that’s a great point. think if you think about this too, if you hear it working, you can go use AI role play and practice that scenario and see if that scenario works in a couple different bots. And so I think what’s really cool with this is you don’t have to just guess like is this talk track gonna work? You can actually test it out with AI role play before you give it to reps to go practice on real calls. And so I think if you get in that rhythm of like,

documenting it, testing it, and then rolling it out. It just sounds a lot better. And I’ve even written scripts and realized saying it out loud to the bot that I’m like, this doesn’t make sense. I gotta go back to the drawing board.

Elric Legloire (30:55) Yeah. Yep. And I forgot to ask you, because when I use HyperBun, I don’t know if it was possible, but now do you know if HyperBun is training the bots based on your real conversation with prospects or customers? Yeah.

Troy Johnson (31:15) I think it has the ability to. We use it mainly just for AI role play, but I think they also have a function to be able to analyze your real calls as well. We don’t use that right now, but I think they do have that.

Elric Legloire (31:28) Okay, so what next?

Troy Johnson (31:30) Yeah, scenario four, this one’s objection handling drills. I think this one’s a weekly thing. We’re starting to incorporate this weekly for our inbound team right now too because they’re doing a lot more proactive prospecting. And so the purpose for this is really at the beginning of calls, especially SDRs will deal with a lot of objections. Someone saying they don’t have time, they’re not the right person, they’re not interested.

And people try to like push them off in the first 60 seconds. And so what’s really cool with AI roleplay is you can Simulate those scenarios really easily and help reps Practice and build that confidence to handle that for 60 seconds. So they’re having more at bats Because if you have a bunch of reps, they’re calling and they’re getting cut off in the first 60 seconds They’re really not getting an at bat and we want to make sure that the reps are having full conversations with prospects and so what we were trying to

The way we ran this was we took a couple scenarios that kept coming up. I’ll use the scenario of older inbound leads where prospects were giving us a particular objection. And so we scripted out every single scenario. We pulled examples from Gong, from top performers where people overcame this. We had the manager actually practice this live and show how to be able to overcome that objection.

We had a breakout session where people practiced, came back, shared feedback on how it went, went and practiced again in a breakout room, came back, and then we even practiced live and they gave each other feedback. And so the way the team was responding to the objections, you could hear it on the practice right away. You could even see like scores increasing every single time on average from the team members. And they’re just getting rep,

reps on how to handle these scenarios so that you’re not hearing an objection once this week and you kind of fumble the ball. We were actually helping them prepare for these situations so that they feel confident when that objection came up.

Elric Legloire (33:41) Yeah, I think this one is also another great one because the more you practice, the better your prep and it’s easy to know how to, not overcommit because it’s not the goal of an objection, it’s how to handle the objection. Do you, earlier we were talking about the objection, so right now do you have like, you mentioned you run this weekly.

So how do you pick those objections? Is it more like, you track the goals of the full team this week, for example, and then next week you say, okay, this week I think we should focus on, I don’t know, not interested. What’s your…

Troy Johnson (34:25) Yeah, this is something aligned with the manager. So right now I’m partnering with our manager, Omged, and we’re aligning on what are those scenarios that are the most important. And so actually in Gong, if anybody’s using Gong today, you can do this. You can take your team’s calls in the AI theme spotter and actually analyze, what we did is we analyzed last year, team by team, what are the most common objections? And so it’s not like,

they won’t just be like broad, a broad timing objection, it will get really specifics. So like if someone’s saying like, I can’t give you that technical information, they want to tell you what they’re using, it will tell you how often that comes up. And so we picked the top two ones we saw in Gong and we built those scenarios. So what’s funny is like the reps had told us those were the top two, but we validated with Gong and yeah, and we just started with those. And so from there,

Elric Legloire (35:19) There’s the data, yep.

Troy Johnson (35:24) I’m continuing to work with the manager on what’s next, what’s the next one where people keep getting stuck. It might be something like it’s a competitor and we need to script out exactly how to steer that conversation to disarm that objection. So that’s ongoing, it’s really aligned with the manager, but where I recommend people start is analyze the calls and find the most common ones using the data you have.

Elric Legloire (35:54) Could you give an example of one objection you work on this month or last month that you want to share?

Troy Johnson (36:02) Yeah, yes, the one, one of the ones we had was in this scenario, the top two ones were we already had a solution and it wasn’t a priority. And so it’s not a priority, especially if someone’s come inbound in the past and they’re saying, this is no longer a priority. A lot of times you can kind of just leave it be and move on, but what we really wanna do is help the reps understand

Well, what brought them to us in the first place? What is a priority now? What are they using? What made them go with that? Is it still getting the outcome they wanted? And so we’re building a talk track to be able to gather information on what do you mean by it’s not a priority? And then how to turn that into asking for a meeting and seeing if there’s a gap we can fill and then pushing that for a meeting. And so that’s how we ran it. We like took that specific objection, built a few questions.

for the reps, built the scenario where the bot is programmed to say, is not a priority, and push back until the rep’s able to really uncover if there’s a gap there or not.

Elric Legloire (37:14) And I’m curious about the other one. you said the other objection was we already using a solution. We already using something. So I’m curious how do you handle that?

Troy Johnson (37:26) Yeah, so with that one, we have battle cards built out for all the different tools we’re using. And so the majority of the time they’re using a different competitor. And so what we’re doing right there is they’re usually saying, we already have a solution. So we’re digging into what it is and then pointing the reps to the battle cards that we’re updating every month. And so really helping them stay strong with those competitors. And so with that situation, we were really focusing on one of the top competitors we run into.

and then having the reps practice with those.

Elric Legloire (38:00) Do you, I’m curious, do you track the, if I’m say tracking in the CRM or somewhere else, do you track when they say that? For example, hey, we use X competitor and then you can capture this and then you know more or less what’s the renewal date of the competitor. So you know, for example, if they are not happy with the solution, for example, when this is a good time to contact them. Yeah.

Troy Johnson (38:27) So make sure I understand you’re saying do we track when they mention a competitor or like when they mentioned competitor and Maybe it’s a like when to reach back out to that prospect

Elric Legloire (38:39) Yeah, both.

Troy Johnson (38:41) So the first part, yes, we, in Gong, you can easily set this up where you can set up a stream to pull in all the top competitors the team runs into. And so when Rep’s onboard, we have streams already pre-built for them to listen to when a competitor is mentioned, how do people respond with the battle cards, when someone books a meeting, they can listen to that in like other different libraries. So that’s pulled up. The second part, that’s a good question.

Elric Legloire (39:06) Mm-hmm.

Troy Johnson (39:10) It’s something we’re more in the process of operationalizing that. It’s more like ad hoc right now, but we can track when a competitor is mentioned. And what we really do is we spend a lot of time in game tape. So every Thursday at 11, I run a game tape review with the team. I score gone calls for the reps as well. And I listen to calls. Their managers do this as well and other team members.

Elric Legloire (39:17) Yeah.

Troy Johnson (39:38) So we’re listening to these calls a lot and sharing feedback. And so we’ll spot things, but that’s something that we want to get to is being more proactive about spotting opportunities like, hey, reach out to all the calls where they said, call me next year. And so can we pull all those calls and build a list for the team?

Elric Legloire (40:00) Okay.

Elric Legloire (40:04) Okay. Anything else on our objections? No? Okay.

Troy Johnson (40:08) No, no. The only other one I would add here too is we did kind of like a fun thing on a Friday where the managers all took, like called the hardest bots. So like in Oram right now, there’s certain bots that will not book a meeting with you. And you can do the same thing with Hyperbound too. And so I recorded myself going through this, handling one of the really hard objections. Joey, one of our managers did it too.

And we’re trying to get in the rhythm of doing stuff like this more often where it’s not just the reps practicing, we’re doing it. And this is a good way to just make it fun. We shared it with the team and just let the team roast us because obviously they’re way better at cold calling than we are. But that’s something I would encourage like managers to do is like, don’t just tell your team to go practice in hyperbounds or in ORM or whatever AI role play tool you’re using. Show them how to do it. And then like you yourself should go practice.

and be visible with that as well.

Troy Johnson (41:13) The fifth scenario, so this one is something we’re working on right now. It is in flight, it’s not done, but it’s thinking of the next evolution of their role. So we built onboarding, we’re helping them sharpen their skills with objection handling, helping them get better at qualification, following talk tracks. Once you have seasoned reps though who are doing really well in the role, we wanna help them start preparing for the next role. And so what we’re trying to be able to do right now is,

help the reps prepare and bridge that gap between SDR to the next role like AE or other. And so we’re aligning with the managers to build out those scenarios because, know, me and you both know and I’m sure most people would agree is sometimes there is a gap between like where the SDR is and where they need to be to move to AE role. And we want to bridge that gap as best as possible by giving them realistic practice. And so they’re listening to these calls on a weekly basis.

with their AE, but now they can go actually practice these scenarios. And so, what we’re gonna be doing is taking real call scenarios, calls that the reps are already listening to and shadowing. We’re gonna build realistic practice scenarios with talk tracks that their AEs are gonna be using, aligned with the hiring manager on how to be able to best execute on those talk tracks and how to score them so that they get feedback on these calls.

and then really set this up so that the reps are building confidence on those calls. We’re identifying the areas for improvements for those SDRs so that we can really help them upskill in those areas before a roll opens up. And just helping them build that competency in all the different areas like opening a call, building a rapport, setting an agenda, setting next steps. We really wanna help them build those competencies that an AE would be using every day.

Elric Legloire (43:12) So you mentioned A is what other roles are you thinking about for this problem? Because I know every company can, you have like the carrier pair for A is the other, that can be 10 different, not 10 different roles, but maybe four or five. So A is one. Do you have other roles that you identify that you think you’re going to prep, prep build this for?

Troy Johnson (43:37) Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we’re gonna start with AE. The goal is to kind of build the skeleton in the first iteration of this and then move this into other roles. So like account management is another one I think a lot of SCRs can move into. Like it can typically be an easy transition. account management, partnerships is another one for us too. So we’re gonna start with account executive and then move into other roles like account management.

partnerships and others if applicable.

Elric Legloire (44:10) Okay, and what do you, how do you think about this problem, for example, this, because I know that’s the one you’re working on, so what do you think you are going to add to this problem? So in terms of, yeah, yeah.

Troy Johnson (44:19) Mm-hmm.

Troy Johnson (44:25) like the full program, like what it would look like outside of just like AR role-play. It’s gonna follow a similar pattern as onboarding. the way I think about this and the way we’re building it is first you’re gonna, like what is the team, you’re gonna have a mentor that you’re gonna be going through this program with, are we shadowing their calls, and then you’ll be listening to what good looks like in Gong. And so we’ll align with the hiring manager about what does good sound like, what do want this to look like, what do want them to like.

listen to and watch and observe. And we’ll have them learn the talk track, learn the company acumen and sales acumen they’re going to have to learn for the role. They’re going to be practicing specific scenarios. So they’ll listen to it, ask questions to their mentor. They’ll practice it, get feedback. And then we’ll have certifications both with the AI role play and then within our learning modules to just

Elric Legloire (45:06) Mm.

Troy Johnson (45:25) test their knowledge to make sure that they know how to be able to operate a discovery call, you know, like a high level demo. They know how to be able to manage stakeholders and set an action plan. And so it’s going to be a few pillars of like mentorship, listening to what good looks like, practicing and then certification.

Elric Legloire (45:48) And I know you are working on this, so when do you think that they will be ready for the team?

Troy Johnson (45:53) Yeah, so my goal is March. So I’ve met with a couple other teams like NetSuite and Darktrace and a couple others to learn what are some other best in class progression programs. And so we’re trying to learn what good looks like out there. And right now I’m aligning with the AE managers that they would be promoted into on those scenarios. And then in March, this is something we’re going to launch for

Elric Legloire (45:57) much.

Troy Johnson (46:23) our first iteration and then kind of let it evolve as we start to roll this out into other orgs.

Elric Legloire (46:31) Do you want to talk about something else for the SDR accelerator?

Troy Johnson (46:38) That’s the main focus right now for me is just allowing the reps to be able to have a light at end of the tunnel. For us, we wanna make sure that once they’re ramped up in the role, that they have something to be able to lean into. And so I guess for anybody using AI role play or has AI role play today and has that gap and they really wanna help reps prepare, I would start to look at it because we have AE onboarding.

Elric Legloire (46:56) Mm-hmm.

Troy Johnson (47:10) that goes through hyperbound. So it just makes sense that our reps, once they’re in the role nine plus months and in good standing, that they go ahead and start practicing this because it’s just gonna make them better at their job. And they’re excited to go practice because they wanna, all SCRs wanna move up to that next role. So this is really helping them just sharpen the ax as they’re waiting for that next role to pop open.

Troy Johnson (47:39) And just wrapping up with this, I think a couple things is like, what we did is we started with onboarding because you have a lot more time to be able to practice. It’s very specific. And so that’s where we started. So for anybody using it or thinking about using it, I would start with one scenario and like really master it. Pick what you’re trying to improve. So for us was how to be able to handle objections, these battle cards and our talk tracks. Make sure that

they know how to do these really well. And so pick that behavior, pick the drills that you want them to practice, coach them, and then move that on to the next scenario. And so that’s the way I would think about it whenever someone else is trying to use this today.

Elric Legloire (48:27) Nice. OK. So we have.

What I mean is, I have nine minutes left, so. What I thought was interesting, and meanwhile, if you want to ask any questions, feel free to add your questions in the comment section on LinkedIn. What I thought really interesting is you have definitely like some use cases for each part of.

the path of an SDR, so you have unboarding and then you have like the three main use cases for when they are indoor and then you also have the one for the transition when they are moving to a new role. I know we talk about five use cases here specifically. curious, do you have, I know you work on the transition one right now, but do you have any other AI use cases?

that you think could be interesting but also help your team working on.

Troy Johnson (49:29) Yeah, I mean, we have a slide for this, but I really encourage like the managers and the enablement teams to go use it and then like share those. And I think that’s just, I think a lot of times with AI role play or just with role plays in general, it’ll usually be the rep going and practicing. And so I think one of the things that, you know, most SDR orgs will see is if your manager’s out there calling with you, you’re more inclined to follow that manager and

and lean in more. And so it’s the same with practice. Like if you see someone practicing, you see your manager practicing or enablement practicing and like actually putting in the effort, others will do it as well. And I think it’s just, it’s that leading by example piece that I would encourage managers to like actually put themselves in the spotlight, practice, ask for feedback, because it only just gives you more credibility and helps you sharpen your skills and also understand

your talk tracks, you’re teaching your reps. And so if you’re gonna coach your reps on these different talk tracks, I really encourage you to at least do AI role play if you’re not gonna cold call because it allows you to be able to understand their world a lot better and then also build a lot of credibility and lead by example for your team.

Elric Legloire (50:47) And something else that I think was interesting when you are showing this, it’s data driven. Everything you are doing here, you are trying to use, so obviously it’s not the same tool, but here you are trying to use a gong specifically and spot the patterns where you have some gaps on the team and then you can implement that into your programs.

Troy Johnson (50:55) Mm-hmm.

Troy Johnson (51:09) Yeah, yeah, I would use, if you have Gong, like that’s what I would use it for, like especially with the theme spotter, you can pick what are the most common competitors your team comes up against? What are the most common objections? We’re trying to get even more use cases from that, but I would start with that because then you have a specific starting point, so be really specific. The other part we don’t really talk about, but a lot of when people talk about AR roleplay,

they think about just the bot, you’re creating a bot and you go practice. What is really important from this is the scorecard. So you need to have, you need to know exactly what you want the reps to say on what good looks like. And if you don’t know that, then you gotta be really specific on that first before you even build a bot and a scorecard and all these things. And so for us, for our managers, what we’re doing for like the SCR accelerator, yes, we wanna know the scenario, they need to go practice.

But once a rep practices, that’s just like they’re building confidence. What really helps them a lot is once you know the talk track and what good looks like with the talk track, they’re getting proactive feedback on where they need to improve. And so a rep may go through the whole call. What really is important is at the end of the call that they had feedback at the end on where they need to improve and they need to go again. And so I got a question the other day about this. They were saying,

won’t some of the reps just like learn how to beat the bot during onboarding in some of these scenarios? Like don’t we wanna mix it up? And we do to a degree, but to be honest, when you’re onboarding or you’re practicing a specific scenario, I want you to learn how to beat the bot. I want you to learn that process because we’ve built it in a specific way so that you go through those steps. And if you can do it really well, you’ve showed us you know how to do that.

Elric Legloire (52:45) Yeah.

Troy Johnson (53:05) And then you can start to add variety in there too if you want.

Elric Legloire (53:11) And I know we talk a lot about the those sessions with teams in general. do you use AI role play with individuals specifically? let me give you an example. Earlier we are talking about you spot a pattern in terms of objection. You say, okay, let’s work on this objection for the full team. But now if you think about the individuals on a team, because I imagine everyone has different skill sets and how do you approach that with?

Troy Johnson (53:42) So right now we’re more doing it team by team, so like onboarding team by team, or smaller groups. Like we had a small group of three team members transition to a new team, and so we actually built out specific scenarios and bots for them to practice because they’re gonna be onboarding. Going forward, what we are gonna be getting into more often, because now we have expanded our licenses for more reps, is each month getting from the manager, what is the specific

Elric Legloire (53:45) to return.

Troy Johnson (54:11) area they’re struggling with, the behavior we want them to improve, and then what does good look like. And once we know that, we’ll take that rep or that rep and others who struggle with a similar issue because our team’s 40 reps, like if one person struggles with it, someone may also run into this. And so we’ll build that scenario, have them go through that, and then track how it went and give them feedback.

Elric Legloire (54:40) We have one question actually. So we already talk a little bit about this. So we have Mackenzie Hull asking, what tools do you use for this? So I know if I use Hyperband and Oram mainly, anything else?

Troy Johnson (54:57) Yep, so we use HyperBound right now, especially for onboarding. Like it runs all over onboarding. We’ve just recently moved it to the full team. And then we use ORM as well. So those are two main tools. You can also build these, if you have Chat GPT, Chat GPT and Voice Mode can easily build these. I’ve built it for people just to practice with outside of work. And you can easily build something like this where people can get feedback too. But we use HyperBound and ORM.

Elric Legloire (55:27) Yeah, I think you make a good point. Yes, if you don’t have tools like ORM or Hyperven, you definitely can use ChessGPT. Definitely you need to give them more context about your company and your prospects. So you train the ChessGPT model to be more focused on your company. But yeah, definitely agree on that. I know if I didn’t mention that here, but you said Gong too. how do you, maybe not for workplace, but how do you

Troy Johnson (55:47) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Elric Legloire (55:57) So you said use AI for spotting patterns too?

Troy Johnson (56:02) Yeah, so two ways right now. The first one is spotting patterns. This is something we’re kind of early days with, but deciding if we are gonna go do a training. Like one of the things we’re trying to update right now is our battle cards for specific competitors. We’re gonna analyze how often these competitors come up, what are the ones that come up the most, and then see how the team handles those competitors, and then build talk tracks.

The second one we use, they have a function for scoring that allows you to identify did they or did they not do certain things on the call. And so if you look at Gong scorecards, you can have a list of questions that will say did they or did they not do these things. And so it’ll do initial pass and score the calls for us. And then we just need to come in and provide subjective feedback in written form to the rep.

and score the overall score at one out of five, but it will do like a full pass on how they handle objections with our framework, battle cards, all those different areas, and it will score it for them.

Elric Legloire (57:08) Okay, so now we have the full process. So you use Gung to the patterns, then use that for creating your programs, and then you have the scorecards also to measure if they’re implementing the improvement.

Troy Johnson (57:22) Yeah, with Gong, again, that’s for real calls. So that would be for like spotting real calls, scoring real calls, it’ll be through Gong. And then for Hyperbound, they’ll be all through AI role play. And so within Hyperbound, what’s really cool is it gives you proactive feedback. Like if you messed up, it’ll say next time, say this. And so I think that’s what’s really cool. If you do use Hyperbound, that it has a really cool function that if the rep struggles in a particular area, it will say next time, say this, this will be, you’ll have a better outcome.

Elric Legloire (57:52) Okay. Well, Troy, we already at the end of the session of today. So thank you again for joining us for part two. Hope for everyone listening, that was a really interesting session and gave you like a few ideas on how you can implement role plays with AI specifically for your team. So Troy, thanks again.

Troy Johnson (58:15) Yeah, thanks for having me. If anybody has questions or has ideas with AI Real Play, feel free to reach out to LinkedIn.

Elric Legloire (58:21) Yep, obviously I will share the recording and your LinkedIn profile and the presentation also so people can grab it and then start implementing that with that teams. Thank you.

Troy Johnson (58:33) Awesome. Thanks for having me, Alert. See ya.