Video: How an AI-Driven Pitch Contest at Cisco Saved Managers 38 Weeks

What are interactive role plays?

Interactive role-plays are training simulations where reps can practice their pitches, objection handling, and other sales skills in a safe, controlled environment. These role-plays often involve AI-driven scenarios that mimic real-life conversations with buyers, allowing sellers to refine their skills without the pressure of a live sales situation.

Key aspects include:

• Sellers can engage in simulated conversations that resemble real-world interactions with customers, allowing them to practice and improve their techniques.
• These role-plays use AI to provide feedback on the seller’s performance, highlighting areas for improvement and helping them fine-tune their approach.
• By incorporating AI, companies can scale role-play sessions across large teams without requiring significant time from managers.
• Interactive role-plays can be used in various scenarios, including onboarding new reps, practicing for specific sales calls, and certifying sellers on new products or sales methodologies​

Key highlights

• Cisco ran a sales pitch contest involving around 3,500 sellers. The winner received a lease for a Porsche. The contest was designed to drive adoption and engagement among the sellers.
• They used Mindtickle Copilot to help sellers practice their pitches. The AI provided feedback, allowing sellers to refine their pitches in three parts before submitting a final version.
• AI was crucial in reducing the burden on managers. Reviewing all pitches would have taken an estimated 38 weeks of manager time.
• Analysis revealed that sellers who continued to practice and refine their pitches were more successful. These sellers moved up in the competition brackets and generated larger sales opportunities than those who practiced less.

Video transcription

[For our] “Sales Superstar” pitch contest – the winner actually won a lease of a Porsche. It was a big deal, you could say. That got a lot of attention. And there was a good way to drive adoption.

[There were] some good rewards. It was a little bit shocking for all of us. Obviously, there were other rewards for being nurturers for coaching. And I’ll explain a couple things.

With the pitch contest, we started by targeting our technical sellers. The goal was to have a 10-minute pitch that was decided by an EVP and targeted at a specific customer. The goal was really to make it focus on the customer. As we were rolling it out, we got a lot of other teams interested in participating as well, so we had to come up with different alternatives.

One of the things that Leah Madson, our senior PS consultant from Mindtickle, worked with Cameron to calculate, okay, how the heck are we going to get all this done? And it came out that it would take 38 weeks of manager time to do the reviews, because earlier, you talked about manager time and reduce. And that’s a real number. Part of the decision was how can we use AI to reduce that burden on the managers.

We did a couple of things. We used the traditional AI already built into Mindtickle, but then we also used Copilot. We allowed the sellers and technical sellers to do practice pitches and get feedback. Because the pitch has three different parts, they had three different options. They could practice each and finally submit a final pitch once they were done.

We’ve found some interesting behaviors by the sellers. In the data analysis, some of the interesting things we found were that those sellers who continued to practice would get better. If they moved up as far as moving in the brackets, we got on the outcome side that they created larger opportunities than those who were lower down. So it does show that practice does make perfect.