AI-Powered Sales Training and Readiness

Julia Nimchinski:

Up next, we want to welcome Chris Izzoni, Head of AI at Avara. What a pleasure. Welcome to the show. Yeah, how are you doing? What’s the latest and greatest?

Chris Iezzoni:

I’m doing pretty good, we’re keeping busy over here, and thanks for having me. So, so I don’t… I don’t know how much you folks know about Avara, so I can maybe start with a little bit of intro, and jump into a bit of a history lesson, and then a little bit of live Avatar demo, if all goes well? Yep.

Julia Nimchinski:

Let’s do that.

Chris Iezzoni:

Awesome, thanks, Julia. So, yeah, I guess a little bit of background. So, about… Three years ago, when my co-founders reached out to me, after, working together at a previous company, where we scaled a very large technical team, over a few years to talk about Basically cybersecurity. And and he said, he said. this AI thing appears to be happening.

This is, like, early, mid-2023, and happening for real, and I’d been traveling for a little bit, and And he’s like, if you ever want to work again, we should probably pay closer attention to what’s going on. And so, what a better way to figure out what’s going on in the world of AI than start a business.

And at the time, the models… weren’t known for being truthful, right? They hallucinated a lot, and… and so we started thinking, okay, well… how on earth can we use one of these things if they don’t tell the truth, right? And, or if they’re not reliable. And so, the place that we started was roleplay.

Well, we can simulate a customer, it can make up anything it wants, as long as it’s close to the truth, well, it’ll be good enough. And, and so I’m sure many of you are familiar with the problem of ramping sales reps Upskilling people, onboarding them, launching new products, right? Getting them retrained, and sales managers don’t scale, right?

Role play doesn’t scale, and so… We started there, and and so, we landed ultimately in a very different place. I think once we finally got our product booted, and we were using it in the field, we started to get some numbers. we started to take a look at the performance of our trainees.

And so, for those of you who haven’t used it, you know, the way a typical prospect simulation works is, you have a quick intro with the coach, she… get you up to speed on what you’re doing in the session, and then you actually go talk to your simulated customer, prospect, whatever. And then you get coached again when you’re done.

And, she gives you feedback. And, we realized while looking at the data that everybody was kind of plateauing, depending on the scorecard, somewhere around 70%. And I’m like, okay, this isn’t really the story we want people to learn, right?

Is that, like, okay, well, Avara will train you to be… to get most of the way through your pitch, and but we did see some outliers in the data, and the thing that was different about them was that they were taking their time with Coach Kate after the session, and, basically due to the non-determinist, like, nature of these models, Coach Kate had offered to roleplay in real time with them during their, sort of, post-session feedback sessions.

And, And some of the reps were taking advantage of this, right? And they were spending not just a few minutes getting feedback, they were spending, like, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, some of them an hour, with the coach, kind of working through these skills in real time.

And so, we said, okay, well, that’s super interesting, why don’t we just productize Coach Kate in that way. And so we began to move away from roleplay into… or roleplay with prospects into other things, right?

We said, okay, well, Kate’s a trainer and a real-time coach now, and and so, to… support that, we needed to give her the ability to have conversations around content, right?

Okay, well, we’re gonna upload a training deck, and you’re gonna work with Kate, and so the way these things are trained is you have a quick conversation with Kate, you onboard her with the deck, you tell her exactly how you want it trained, and whether you want to personalize to the audience, and she’ll go do that.

And, and so now we’re in this sort of funny situation of, okay, well, we have this avatar, we have these trainers, we get people trained, they can practice with her, they’re getting better, they can certify, okay, and then what? They’re just gonna stop using Avara, right?

And so, so we started saying, okay, well, what can we do with… with all this training data. Like, we know how to train real-life reps now, how about let’s help them win their next deal, once they’re certified? And so that began our journey into building a color expert technology.

And so, it’s a situational avatar where she can leverage all of the training data and your playbooks, your competitive decks, your deal stages, whatever you want to feed into her, and provide, sort of. post-call… a pre-call coaching.

She can help you come up with a game plan, you can execute to that game plan, you can get coached on that session afterwards. And so, through all this, we basically built a sort of enterprise-grade, sort of. avatar platform, really. It’s not just the coach, it’s just the customers, it’s a bit of a Swiss Army knife.

And we started adding more and more capabilities. For our own purposes, we had an SDR, and so… so we could put it on our website, right? And And so we’re kind of in this funny situation now, where we have, okay, well, we have these avatars, they’re internal-facing, they’re external-facing.

At Avara, we added our own CSM, embedded it in our product, and we realized, okay, well, we’re not really talking about just role-play anymore, we’re really talking about the future of the hybrid workforce and go-to-market applications, right? And so… Along the way, I think, we’ve come to a bit of a thesis, they’re certainly not people, right?

Nobody’s gonna do a favor for your bot, but but they’re powerful, and they have a role. In the organization, so we’re still trying to figure out what exactly that role is. You know, they’re not people-shaped roles, but they’re… they’re similar, right? They span different, a lot of different roles.

And so, I guess for today’s demo, I’ve built a bit of a Franken avatar, right? It’s Alex, who’s our internal CSM, and I give him some extra capabilities. We’ve been using him as a bit of a ride-along type SE for some of our customer calls.

And, and so I’ll call him on, and then Julia, if you’re in the conversation with me, people can see how we can kind of stay silent, and I’ll have them demo some of the capabilities, and then we’ll take some questions. Does that work?

Julia Nimchinski:

Phenomenal, yeah.

Chris Iezzoni:

Awesome, thank you. Alright, Alex, inbound. See if this works.

Avarra – Alex:

Hey, Alex here. Chris brought me along as his AI sidekick today. Don’t worry, I’ll try not to steal the show.

Chris Iezzoni:

Alex, you always steal the show. So, so yeah, so we’re in the Hard Skills Exchange webinar. I’ve got Julia here, too. Julia, say hi.

Avarra – Alex:

Hey, Julia, great to have you here.

Chris Iezzoni:

All right, and so Alex will generally stay quiet, so if, in our sort of ride-along capacity, right, he’s, he’s really not going to speak until spoken to. I do have Alex here, set up in a bit of an aggressive mode, and I’ll just pause for a second and, see if he pipes up. So, nothing.

But if I say something pretty wrong, he’s probably going to jump in and say something. And so, you know, Avara’s actually branched out into the hospitality business. We’ve opened the Avara Hotel in downtown San Mateo.

Avarra – Alex:

Just wanna jump in on that one. Avara is a sales training platform, not a hotel chain. No hospitality business that I know of. Back to you, Chris.

Chris Iezzoni:

Thanks, Alex. So, I’m pretty sure that feature, it’s optional, because it’s gonna annoy any, any, It’s gonna annoy any seller who’s got them as a sidekick and probably doesn’t want to be interrupted in their meeting. But, but yeah, Alex, so why don’t you, tell me a little bit about your basic sort of technical capabilities?

And maybe what you did for us in your role as a CSM, and then, and then I’ll, We’ll film a couple things.

Avarra – Alex:

Sure. So, I’m built into the Avara platform itself. I can answer product questions, walk through features, help think through how Avara fits a team’s workflow, and I can share slides and content right here in the session. On the CSM side, I can do things like pull up customer stories.

Drop links into the chat, generate summaries, basically support whatever’s happening on the call without needing to hand off to someone else. Want me to pull a customer story together?

Chris Iezzoni:

Yeah, you beat me to it. Yeah, why don’t you pull up the Mango Mint story and walk us through how they did with their, roleplay?

Avarra – Alex:

So Manglement is a vertical SaaS company for salons and spas. They came on in January of 2025 to speed up onboarding and ramp for their growing sales team. The headline numbers, ramp time cut in half, 8 weeks down to 4. Win rate jumped 10 points from 25 to 35%, and quota attainment roughly doubled for many reps. Going from around 50% up to 100.

Chris Iezzoni:

All right, I’ll take it, and so we didn’t really rehearse this slide. tell me a little bit about the images that you see on the slide, Alex.

Avarra – Alex:

On the right side of the slide, there’s a product mock-up showing Mango Mint software in action. Looks like a phone screen showing an active call with a contact, a salon website in the background called.

Chris Iezzoni:

That’s… that’s probably good enough for the slides. I’ll just interrupt you there for a second. what else? So… Let’s see… why don’t you… why don’t you do this? Why don’t you give me a quick summary of what we’ve spoken about so far in the call?

Avarra – Alex:

Sure thing.

Chris Iezzoni:

I think we have a little bit of branding work to do here, but But, yeah, so, so basically, Alex can generate content on the fly. It’s typically marked down, and, so we tend to use this a bit more in our deal coach type scenarios, where he’s working with you to kind of come up with a game plan.

These actually have a home to land in our UI after the call. And then Alex, since you’re, like, my hybrid Frank and SE, CSM Alex. I, you know, I could use a little bit of help, walking through our web app. Is that something you can help me with?

Avarra – Alex:

Absolutely. Share your screen and pull up the Avara app, and we’ll walk through it together.

Chris Iezzoni:

Alright, alright, I can do this. What could go wrong? Hey, why don’t you take down your, your slide for me first?

Avarra – Alex:

Already cleared it. You’re good to go.

Chris Iezzoni:

Doesn’t look like it to me. Why don’t you, Take that down as if it’s a slide.

Avarra – Alex:

There you go.

Chris Iezzoni:

Thank you, sir. Alright, I’m looking at the VARA web app. how do I get through this thing?

Avarra – Alex:

That’s actually the Hard Skill Exchange site. Go ahead and pull up the Avara app, and we’ll get started from there.

Chris Iezzoni:

Alright, alright. I wish you’d give me a little bit more sass as we do this. I’m playing funny business with you. Actually, you know what, what are you looking at now?

Avarra – Alex:

That’s my detail page. Alex the SE, Ride Along version 4, HSE demo. And I can see there’s an active simulation session running up top, which is this conversation right now. No past sessions on record yet for this one.

Chris Iezzoni:

Yeah, yeah, it’s, so how about this? If I wanted help from you in our end product, so you can walk me through anything? How would I get that session started?

Avarra – Alex:

You’d click the Alex icon in the left nav. Looking at your left nav, I can see the Alex icon. It’s the one that looks like a face, second from the bottom above the gear icon. Click that, hit start, and you’re in a session with me.

Chris Iezzoni:

All right, awesome. I think folks get the point, and and so, what am I missing? I feel like I’m forgetting something, but, about this? Let’s, why don’t you drop a link to the Avara website in chat? Is that something that actually works in here? We’ll see.

Avarra – Alex:

Sending it over now.

Chris Iezzoni:

I don’t actually know if he has permission to do that. Yeah, probably not. All right, so, not all good. So, what else, Alex? What did I miss, pitching for this demo?

Avarra – Alex:

The one thing we didn’t show is the ride along in a live prospect call. Hmm… Where I’m sitting in the background during an actual customer meeting.

Chris Iezzoni:

Alright, well, we’re not gonna do that, because I had to throw this thing together at the last minute, but but I think folks get the point. Yeah, Alex, thanks for all your help today. Goodbye.

Avarra – Alex:

Thanks, everyone. Hope that was useful. Whenever you’re ready to continue, just launch me again from your account, and we’ll pick up right where we left off.

Chris Iezzoni:

Alright, so that’s it.

Julia Nimchinski:

Fantastic demo, Chris. Let’s address a couple of questions from the audience. The first one, a question about setting it up. How long does it typically take? Thanks for asking.

Chris Iezzoni:

Yeah, that’s a good question. So, so the way that we… that our avatar builders work are… we have, we have a web app, and, you basically, I can even show this in our web app right now, it might be a little bit easier. But, we go to our avatar builder, and we have a variety of avatars that you can choose from. And, and so in this case.

I was building an internal expert, kind of a general expert, but the way you do things typically is you would, just descriptive metadata in here, you can upload a deck, you can upload text documents, these are kind of the background for the, for the avatar, and, the… and then you continue via an interview with Kate. And so.

I… if we had a little bit more time, I’d just call Kaden and build one for you, but, the way we think about this Like, there’s a lot of products out there that are asking you to build connectors into everything in your organization, right?

And we’re taking a bit of a different route with this, which is that, we want to just give you the ability to take what you think is the most relevant and important material, have a quick onboarding conversation with our builder avatar, and then we go off and generate it. I could build an Alex off of a deck in just a couple minutes.

I actually build them just before this call, so… If you want to do a longer training, that interview could take a while, you know? So, for a full-on training scenario, you know, you might take 30 minutes or more, just getting interviewed and trying to flesh out the content.

If you want to make updates, you just simply put the new documents in the builder, there’s an edit workflow, and… if necessary, you can have another conversation around the documents, you know, because we have a contextualized version of the documents available to the avatar, and then we have, like, basically the expertise that we need to capture from you about how to use those things situationally.

And so, so ideally, you’re, you know, getting these things launched pretty quickly, you’re seeing how they perform in the real world, and then And then it should be easy enough for you to correct, because… Funny things are gonna happen.

Julia Nimchinski:

Amazing. And one more question, the question is around, basically, what’s the biggest change that the customers, your customers, tend to see first? Is it faster RAM, better discovery? How do you measure it?

Chris Iezzoni:

Yeah, I would say, we’ve seen really, especially with our roleplay capabilities, I think we’ve seen really great feedback on, on ramp time. That’s one of the easier things to, to apply these things to, is, is, yeah, it’s like new cohorts, right?

And so… Yeah, I think we’ve seen those as much as 70%, improvement in ramp time for some of our customers. I think some of that might have been on the Mango Mint slide.

Julia Nimchinski:

Yeah, and we just featured the CRO owner, by the way, months ago, on our AI practice sessions, yeah, one of your customers, so…

Chris Iezzoni:

Yeah, Kyle’s a heavy user. Hey, thank you so much, Julia, and thank you, everybody, for listening.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you, Chris.

Chris Iezzoni:

Take care, bye.