Scaling Your GTM Playbooks Using Avatars with Rob Yuen & Matt Huang

Julia Nimchinski:
And we are for a real special treat here. Welcome to the show, Tim Abara. And I think it’s the first one, where we feature a customer. Matt, you’re on mute. Welcome, welcome Rob from Honori.com, and welcome to the show, Matt. How are you doing?

Matt Huang:
Great, thank you for having us. Yes, and this will be a session where we have a customer that has a lot of experience in implementing various AI stuff, and especially working with avatars in a collaborative, blended workforce with humans.

Julia Nimchinski:
This is amazing. Talking about marketing and the transparency in the age of AI. So, super excited for this one. Take it away, Matt. Let’s get into it.

Matt Huang:
Awesome. Thank you. Let me share some slides here to help us with this. This will be a very fun session. We’ll do some demos and explain where we think we are with the State of Union here. So just a bit about ourselves. So, I’m Matt Huang, I am a co-founder and head of product for Avara. We are building an enterprise avatar workforce for GTM.
We started with training and simulation using our avatars, and we’re expanding that to experts and other co-workers that you have in your workforce to enhance scaling expertise across your organization in GTM. With me is, Rob Yuan from Owner.
Rob is the head of enablement at Owner, but one of the very, very few peoples that I found that has extensive experience in working with all kinds of AI tools and methodologies, driving that across the Owner.com org, especially working with various AI agents and avatars. So, Rob, I’ll let you say hi, introduce yourself.

Rob Yuen:
Hello, it’s a pleasure to meet y’all and be with you. Thank you for having me. Honored to be the maiden customer in this HSE journey. So, and I should have wore black, since this is the dress code. So I’m in blue, slightly off, but, good to be with y’all.

Matt Huang:
Our avatars will address something different, but we’ll see if we can change their clothes right now, Rob. So we’ll be talking about using AI avatars to scale your GTM playbooks. This is quite a fun topic, and something that’s very new, but we’ve implemented these across many, many large and small organizations that are scaling very, very quickly.
So this is the state of play today. So, you know, AI adoption is everywhere, as we see. All this conference is mostly about that, but we see today’s use case mostly being focused still on task automation, right? They are helpful in productivity and efficiency.
But they’re still very limited in scope in that they really just do one task quicker or faster, right? But we think the defining shift will happen when AI becomes your collaborative co-worker, when you have collaborative execution where humans are working alongside avatars in a natural environment like this, right?
If we have co-workers over Zoom like this, that they can then infinitely scale that across the organization and what they’re good at, and can still co-work and brainstorm collaboratively with us. That’s the direction that we think the world will move to. And why do we think this? The reason is, well, true competitive advantage, right?
If you think why you’re… your company is winning, it’s not in task automation, right? Nobody really wins because they automate tasks better, right?
It’s really scaling the expertise that you have, the human insight and expertise that you have, that your leaders have, that, you know, the approach, the strategy that they believe will win, that will really, you know, scale the organization to a winning place, right? This is scaling expertise. And behavior of the organization.
And this has traditionally been really a bottleneck, because it’s really hard to capture that tacit knowledge out of your human leaders or your top performers, and really capture that and govern that knowledge and behavior across the organization.
But if you could do that, and if you could do that in a very quick way, then that really defines how future companies sell, support, and manage to a winning strategy. And so, if you then go deeper into this, you’ll realize that, well, the hardest thing is behavior expertise just doesn’t scale very well, right?
Because, well, knowledge and behaviors, they’re not just very well documented. Your leaders are constantly learning on the front lines, as are your people, right? So, every time that, you know, they learn, they’re experimenting, they find a new strategy, they’re testing it out, it’s all in their head, right?
And so, by the time that, you know, the traditional enablement teams have a chance to put that into playbook. you know, 4 or 5 months later, they’re already outdated. And so it’s really hard to get from these undocumented knowledge into then a playbook, you know, very quickly, and then, try to scale that across the organization.
And you also can’t do that just generically. with generic, you know, foundational models, because those LLMs are, you know, not company-specific. They don’t know your playbook. And so that’s the challenge that we set out to solve, and that’s sort of the demo that we’ll have today.
And so our belief is that the major shift will be a blended workforce. This will be the new default, because we think you know, there are certain things that AI is good at, and there’s certain things that humans are good at, right? So, the AI is uniquely good at, you know, being always available 24-7.
They can scale infinitely, they’re much lower cost. But humans have a lot of knowledge and insight that allows us to make the better strategic decisions, decide on the trade-offs, right? The complex, high-stake things that we want human involvement, because we’re built with thousands of years of human evolution.
that seek for, you know, trust and empathy and influence and leadership and things like this, right? That will truly affect the org in a lot of cases in buying decisions, right?
People are looking for that human connection and trust, and people are looking for that unique sort of value with connection, and I could give an example in this where, you know, likely the buyer may you know, want to connect with me and do a favor for a rep, whereas they would never do that for the AI.
So we don’t believe that, you know, the AI avatars will take over the world and replace all people. Our purpose here is a blended workforce where we believe that AI can help scale, up-level the human, scale expertise and their behaviors across the org, so that we can all, you know, really elevate and perform and When… as a blended workforce.
And that’s what we, that’s what we did. We built a platform that can really capture those kind of tacit knowledge and expertise, and then proliferate that into practice and change behaviors of your organization. So.
Our avatars are built in a way that they join over Zoom like this, have conversations with your leaders, are in conversations with your teams, and they can then create, you know, training programs, practice sessions, simulations, experts that then can work together with your teams on whatever that your leadership wants them to do.
And they can also collaborate with the leadership on identifying where the gaps are. And so the product is really built for that kind of rapid learning, quick involvement, kind of high speed of growth in mind. And so, we’ve really invented this approach of the avatar-led interview, where the avatar joins over Zoom.
Talks to your leadership or your top performer, and guide them through, you know, identifying what are the key things that the leaders want to change in behaviors or strategies or tactics that they want to execute at this point in time.
And then collaboratively work with them, even, you know, through a simulation, or a training or building an expert, for example, a competitive pricing expert, that then Then you can work with their teams and scale that knowledge. And all of this after that interview. Oh, and you can also upload documents, right?
So if you have other training assets, documents, transcripts, the AI obviously can take that. But the unique approach here is to quickly extract out what the minds of the top performers or your leaders are thinking into then quickly generating avatar experts or trainers or simulation.
And all of this is done in a Zoom-native way, so folks just basically join over Zoom to collaboratively work with these avatars, or to get trained and practice with these avatars. And, of course, avatars can, in traditional role-play sense, play the prospect for your reps to practice. And this can all evolve over time continuously.
You can track performance, you could update, and evolve these, simulations or trainers or experts, depending on, you know, how the scenarios change the market’s dynamic. We’re always there to, to continuously update, these scenarios. So that’s a very quick overview of, what, Avara is. I’ll pass this over to Rob to describe a little bit about Owner.
Owner has been our pilot customer from day one. They have lots of experience with this, and so I’ll hand it over to you, Rob.

Rob Yuen:
Cool. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, I’ll just introduce quickly maybe what Owner is and our journey through not only just our time with Avara, but also our AI journey. Just kind of to start, it’s funny that, like, as Matt’s talking about the evolution of how all of these AIs work.
And this, like, joint workforce is a concept I love, because Kate, and if anyone uses Avara, y’all know Kate, she’s got a new voice recently, has kind of become part of our team, and we make fun of, like, this in our culture, where, like, we’re gonna get Kate on you, and Kate’s gonna, like, interrogate you, she’s gonna grill you, like, etc, to extract the information that we need.
Aside from that, like, early on, we created an avatar named Joe, and as you learn more about owner, like, he is a crusty, like, Brooklyn pizza owner. And he was hard, hard. We still talk about Joe today, even though we’ve retired him as a part of our team. He’s an emeritus member of Owner Forever.
So, As we look at owner, just a quick introduction of us. So, we are a restaurant tech company, and our whole mission is Based on the fact that local owners, we work with independent restaurant operators and owners, they don’t have jobs, they have livelihoods, right? Like, this is their whole world.
Their kids come to their shops at the end of the day. They stay up at night trying to balance the books. It is their existence, and our mission, why we exist, is we… because we arm restaurants and their owners to take on their Goliaths?
Because they’re remarkably disadvantaged, they’re single-owner operators, and most of tech, most of everything is built for enterprise large scale.
So we give them the same tools to slay their Goliaths and compete against all of the behemoths that are far more advantaged than they are, and we do what we do every day, before the, like, the Sandys from Cyclo Noodles, and we always talk about customers in this way. We never name a restaurant, like, oh, you know, Cyclo Noodles is the account.
It’s… no, Sandy at Cyclo Noodles is our customer, and that’s exactly what we drive to, that’s why we wake up in the morning, that’s why we put in all of the time and effort. We are a high-growth company. We just crossed $1 billion of sales driven for the customers that we serve.
10,000 plus restaurant owners now use Owner as their sales-driven and online sales system. And from a headcount and revenue perspective, we’re also growing massively. Like, I look at Slack every day, and I’m like, I just… I used to know all these people, and now I have no clue.
And so what that means is a ton of new reps, that means a ton of confusion. We have an EPD team shipping faster than, like, anyone could ever imagine, like, or understand change. And so, AI is… is, like, what we’re trying to get to from, like, the… like, truly native, is what we, like, keep saying over and over.
It’s what everyone keeps saying, right? But, like, if we go back to our journey with Avara, like, 18 months ago, our concept, like a lot of folks, was just, like, so nation. We’re like, oh yeah, like, coaching is… hard, and we only have one Yusuf, our XCR manager, and that’s not a lot of Yusufs. AI?
And, like, Matt and team, like, kind of, like, opened our world and, like, helped us understand this greater avatar landscape, and now it’s driven, like, more and more innovation. And, like, Kyle and Norton, our CRO, is, like, really pushing us hard every day to say, like, okay, what can we do to make it so Humans shine doing their best work.
And the AI does the rest. And so, this is owner, like, just to give you the lay of the land and what we’re working on. Next slide, Matt, if you will. And what we’re cooking with is we have a full go-to-market. In my role, personally, we run, CX enablement, so this is, like, all customer lifecycle.
And one thing that we use with Avara in this AI landscape with avatars is this is the solution that I’ve worked with, and we’ve tried almost all of them, that works end-to-end. Like, everything is hyper-focused on sales right now. We use Avara across all of our personas.
So, if you don’t know how to fix your tablet, or the new kiosk that we rolled out, or etc, like, Avara Sim, whether that’s Krusty Joe, the pizza guy, or a million of the other personas that we’ve created, across all of our customer bases of… through our lifecycle.
We are having our team and reps run these simulations to replicate real work, and this is, like, one input that we’re taking to fuel our overall AI and intelligence agent of how ready is a person, a team member. To talk to a customer, to articulate our value.
How does this affect win rates, and launch activation, and churn saves, and ticket resolution? And across all of these motions right now, we’re using this for onboarding, for certification, so can I… can you look me in the eye and say, hey, Rob, is Is Claire ready to talk to customers and express the value of owner?
And I can tell you, yes, absolutely, without a shadow of doubt in my mind, she is, and here’s why. This is very important to us. the overall motion of, like, ongoing coaching that I’m gonna show you guys. Especially with this conference, we want to really drive the… the line through of, like, systems to action.
I’ll show you how we take action over and over, repeatedly. And then change adoption, because this is hard. Like, truly, truly hard. We say daily, if you’ve seen The Matrix, and she’s like, I need to know how to fly a helicopter. It’s like, you would know how to fly a helicopter.
We say, like, oh my god, like, this is the dream, and, like, this motion is the closest we’ve ever gotten to it, and it’s still not, like, it’s not the Matrix, but it’s pretty good. So, alright, next slide.
You can see this in our Avara library, where we’re not only catering to AEs and BERs, but we have a CS Academy that handles, and even beyond this, support and success, and retention, and resolution. And then beyond this as well, we also have things that are, like, new initiatives, new products, new, etc, that we’re also running through this motion.
And just below this, we also run all of our manager and leadership coaching. with Avara as a major pillar of our motion. Next, please.

Matt Huang:
And we’ll show some of this.

Rob Yuen:
Yeah, and we’ll show… we’ll show you how. And, like, one thing that I think, like, brings this all to life is, like, that we have, built in-house, and, like, really using AI. Like, we vibe-coded this with a lot of love and attention, a platform that we call the Skills Intelligence Center.
Because, like, it’s really hard to marry, like, there’s not a platform out there that does this. Human performance, so, like, how often is someone getting coaching? Well, once a week. Well, can you prove it? Like, what are we coaching on? how often are machines happening? We use AI, call scoring. We do a human QA against calls as well.
Like, how does this all marry together? Are they doing these Avara SIM practices? Are they doing these Avara SIM learnings? Right? Because Coach Kate doesn’t just run prospect simulations, she also sits you down and explains a concept with you, and makes sure that you understand it.
And then, how does this all tie into what are they saying on the phones? Is there a difference in people who have received different training and coaching on how they show up for customers? And what are we seeing in, like, is our training effective?
Because as he… as Matt drawed out earlier, as we run a closed-loop system, where all of the outputs and the information that we receive from these simulations and these other pieces, we put back into refining our training process to ensure That we are getting reps mission ready. So… This is our Skills Intelligence Center. If you go next.
Why this matters is we can actually see, truly. what time people are spending on their development, and who is investing in it, and what are those topics. We have a very strict coaching curriculum that we also drive with Avara. and then monitor, like, through AI adherence on phone, live human scoring, etc.
But we understand, then, all of these inputs and outputs, so that we can really trace to, like, what is working, not working. Next slide. And we can also say, okay, I am now a doctor, and I have a full shelf of prescriptions to give you. A lot of these are Avara. In your next 30 days, I know you want to become an inbound AE.
I am so dedicated to your growth. I’m gonna write you a prescription that we call a coaching plan, and I promise you, if we execute all of these pieces, like 50 of our sims in these pieces. You will obtain the skills to make it to the next level. And then we feed it all back through.
What’s cool is, like, as we’ve done this, is that we’ve seen 3 main signals come through from using avatar, like, AI avatars in Avara in particular. The first one was behavioral predictors. This was really surprising to us, okay? So, like, we were like, alright, yeah, coaching, good. Coaching good, coaching, good.
Human not involved in coaching, time, good. Like, one Yusuf, good. But there’s more that we understood and uncovered that was very surprising, and it’s like, actually, just even how they approach the avatar and this whole situation is such a predictor in culture fit, because owner is not for everyone. And it can be a grind. We’re an SMV sale.
We need… we need people who are crashers. And also, call reluctance, like, all of these show up against the datasets of completion and passing grade against Avara. And you can do this at scale.
The second is tenure equalization, because we were hiring a lot of reps that were from, like, POS companies or other restaurant tech, like, you know, like maybe a shift or workforce adherence in restaurants. This comes with an advantage. It comes with a price tag. And what we saw early was there was a huge difference.
You put someone on the phone who has sold restaurant tech, they would crush early and fast. We’ve now closed that gap, as I’ll show you, to almost nothing. And a large part is through this coaching model. So, you can take untenured reps, and you can reach parity overall very quickly.
And then the final piece is, when we have Avara portions in our… like, we rolled out a sales methodology, we roll out new product pieces. When there is an Avara piece present, and I won’t go in depth on this for time. Adherence and adoption, though, is… is 30-40% more. Let me touch real quick, and I’ll bring this home. Next slide.
is that… The behavioral predictor thing is, if you just look at the metrics, and on the right, you have our head of sales development, he leads all of our XCRs, he’s awesome, top shelf guy, look him up. Brandon says, like, I love that XCRs have to tell Avara, like, I want to do another rep, because we have this office in Toronto.
And so he hears constantly, like, okay, I need to do another rep, Kate, I need to do another rep, Joe. And… and, like, if you look at, like, the behavior piece that we didn’t really expect. is, like, hearing them on this, it’s building that, like, growth mindset, like, I want another. Like, give me another, like, load it up.
And what that translates to is, like, we’ve really seen, like, 20% in effort metrics, so if you’re in the top percentile of Avara takers, and you’re gonna see, like, the number in the next slide, it’s pretty insane, you’re also 20% more likely… oh, sorry, go back real quick.
you’re, like, 20% more likely to deliver the highest call volume, the highest connect rates, you’re 34% more likely to achieve quota, and you’re 2 times as likely to make it an owner, meaning you’re here at 1 year.
Last slide, and I’ll bring this home, is if we look at these pieces, like, you see Nancy, who is also amazing, she leads our XDR enablement. This group of 7 did 168 hours. That’s 168 hours that they’re not practicing with customers, between 7 of them. One rep did 37 hours.
And everyone’s like, wait, did I read 37 hours of articulating our message, like, in their first week or two weeks of owner, not with customers? And, like, the… the truth is this, is that we hire mainly reps now out of great feeder schools. This is mostly their first job.
Anytime, like, we do a company event, I always joke about whether we can serve alcohol or not. Like, these are young, young reps.
And, like, the truth is that, like, now using this system and driven by AI of our avatars is that we can close that gap between tenured reps and getting folks, any folk, ready to deliver our message on the phone with efficiency. So…

Matt Huang:
Awesome. Well, thanks, Rob. So you can see that the actual metric of folks using this, right, from usage to improvement to, you know, actually matching this in an intelligence dashboard of high-performing reps who spend a lot of time in VARA, starting from, you know, the initial score all the way up.
do actually, you know, perform much better out in the field, and there’s a culture fit element to this, which is awesome.
We spent a lot of time, but I do want to show you a bit of a demo so that you get to get a sense of this, and I think we’ll have to cut this a little bit short, but just to set the stage, and I’ll stop sharing, right now so that it could… call our avatars in for you guys to see.
I wanted to show you a work-in-progress thing, and this is a real scenario that we had with the owner, maybe about 6 months ago. And I got a call from the learning manager saying that, hey, you know, they just heard a talk on this new methodology. It’s called plus-profit methodology.
And, you know, they don’t yet have all the elements, they don’t have all the playbooks, they have, like, a Notion doc, and, they’ve recorded the talk, and, but wanted to translate this very quickly into training and simulation, with us, and potentially an expert, on this plus-profit methodology.
And so I said, sure, she was a new learning manager, I think all Rob’s teams could do it themselves, and so I’ll just show you and take you through, very quickly. The journey, how we would do that. So, let me, share my screen here again, and then we’ll pull the avatar in.
Yeah, so the first thing that I got was, it’s just a Notion doc, and it has this methodology, it just had some notes. The second thing that we got, is, this is… Oh, and what we did was, we just threw that in Claude and turned that into slide format. Of course, our avatars could coach in this.
this format, but it was just easier to coach on the slide format, so we just, had, clock generate that into PowerPoint, and that will be available in the product in the future as well. And then we also saw the talk. This is a video, and we just took transcripts of that, and, what we will… what I’ll show you right now is how we would build this.
So, this is, our avatar builder, and so we’re gonna build a trainer coach to this, and we’re gonna build a learning module. This has both a trainer that will coach you, and then also a prospect where they can practice this with. So I will call this the HSB Demo 1. And, this is just for a demo.
I’ll give it some information by uploading the deck and document, but you actually don’t need this. You could actually just talk through it with our, avatar coach. And our avatar coach, you can imagine, and I’m gonna stop share right here.
you can, and I’ll call the app to our end, but you can imagine that they’re, just expert coaches, that can, that know everything about how to best coach, and, also know about your vertical. And, they will extract knowledge out of this conversation interview. And I’ll play the, the owner person here, just for time.
So I’ll invite our avatari in here.

Avarra – Coach Cate:
Hey, Matt? Kate here, ready to co-build something awesome with you. What situation are we preparing your reps for?

Matt Huang:
Yeah, so Kate, do you see, do you see the slide on this plus-profit methodology? It’s a new methodology, and, we’d like to coach our folks on it.

Avarra – Coach Cate:
Got it, yeah, I can see the deck. So this is your plus-profit framework for customer communication. Tell me about how you want to use this. Are we training reps on running actual customer conversations using this methodology, or is this more about teaching them the framework itself?

Matt Huang:
Yeah, so firstly, we want to coach our managers first. So this is not training the reps, this is coaching our managers first so that they get this, and I think we should teach them, like, you know, the why first before we coach them, right?
So, and just for time, Kate, let’s go to the plus section of this, and let’s talk about how we want to do that.

Avarra – Coach Cate:
Makes sense. So we’re teaching managers the framework first. Starting with the why, then coaching them on how to use it. And you want to focus on the plus section specifically for now. Alright, looking at the table setting slide, this seems like the foundation piece where reps set the tone and introduce owner’s POV.
Walk me through how you want managers to coach their reps on this opening. What’s the pattern you want them teaching?

Matt Huang:
Yeah, Kate, do you have some recommendations for me? Like, what’s the best way to coach this?

Avarra – Coach Cate:
Yeah, totally. For coaching managers on table setting, I’d break it into two parts. A first, teach the concept. Make sure managers understand what good table setting actually sounds like. Have them listen to a call recording where a rep nails the agenda, drops the POV positioning naturally, and sets expectations. Then debrief. What did the rep do?
Why did it work? What would happen if they skipped it? Then, practice coaching it. Run a scenario where the manager is coaching a rep who’s struggling with one specific piece. Maybe the rep rushes through the agenda, or they’re not confident introducing trade-offs early. The manager practices giving feedback and roleplaying… Yeah, that sounds so…

Matt Huang:
That sounds like a good plan. Just for time, I think we won’t go over this. I think what we’ll do is really focus on the POV, coaching, right here. And then roleplay with them directly and correct them on the spot if they didn’t roleplay correctly. Just for time, this is all we have, for today, Kate. This is great.
Please go ahead and build that trainer and simulation. One last thing, this is really for AEs, and not for XDRs. So Rob, you got, your coaching correct. Great, thank you, Kate. Please go ahead and build that in the next few minutes. Goodbye.

Avarra – Coach Cate:
Perfect. So we’re zeroing in on POV positioning coaching for AE managers. They’ll practice coaching their reps on introducing owners POV early, then we’ll roleplay and correct in real time. Got it. Thanks for walking through it.

Matt Huang:
Great, so that’s sort of a quick example. I won’t be able to show you the sim that’s built in the next 2-3 minutes, but you get a very good idea, and she’ll coach exactly like what we said, and we can easily call her back to modify anything that we want. I can ask her how the reps are doing, and things like that.

Julia Nimchinski:
Phenomenal. Thank you so much, Matt and Rob. Really appreciate the transparency yet again. You brought your agent right at the call, you brought your customer, and I think it’s really so important in the age of AI Because everybody can show beautiful, you know, websites and concepts and experiments, but… It’s really cool to see it in production.
We had so many questions from the community. The one question that keeps reappearing here, just quickly to address this, is how does it capture the attributes of the successful sales folks?

Matt Huang:
Yeah, so obviously they are, they are built with a lot of methodologies on, sort of how to best coach and what attributes are.
But there is a whole sort of scoring and training section that she will co-work with me if we head on through that build, and you can tune and tweak to any sort of methodology and scoring and attributes that you want, but you can brainstorm with her. She’s truly a colleague that you could co-work with, and so that can be built.
And in fact, this works also very well. Owner.com is targeting SMBs, but for those really complicated. long cycle, medical, other, like, complex product applications. This works really well, as well, because we could get into any customization that you want through these kind of conversations or materials that you have.

Julia Nimchinski:
And more ideas for you. One more second here. Depender, we will extend this session. So, idea, has owner tried to use Devara Avatar with customers versus for training, onboarding, certification internally?

Rob Yuen:
Yeah, we had a conversation about this yesterday. We’re kicking off a pilot, actually. We want a solution engineer from Avara that we’re gonna experiment with. Yes, they’re very, very close to having this.

Matt Huang:
Yeah, we have a whole section, we had a section on what does the future look like, and the answer is yes. They are your colleagues, both internal and external facing, and Rob is doing an SE, a ride-along SE, that could work with your sales folks, that’s customer-facing.

Julia Nimchinski:
And last question, what’s the best next step? Where should our community go? How can we test drive this?

Matt Huang:
Yeah, www.avara.ai. If you Google Avara, there’s something that’s on the website that you could try. Just send us a request through the web form, mention the HSE conference here, and we will get with you. You can actually try our avatar. We have Alex, on our website. And you can talk to him and, and try it out. Thank you so much again. By the way.
Thank you for having us.

Julia Nimchinski:
I’m pushing you.