- 1Dynamic Capital has used Reech AI's voice agent Ava for about a year to train and re-train reps.
- 2Ava plays a merchant in cold, warm or follow-up scenarios at four difficulty levels.
- 3Managers can review call transcripts, feedback and analytics across the sales floor.
Dynamic Capital CEO Steven Edisis says he cannot recruit 80 or 90 salespeople in his market, so his strategy is to get maximum performance from the team he has. For about a year, a voice AI agent has done much of the coaching.
Why manual training falls short
Edisis describes sales training in small business finance as constant: morning, afternoon and night sessions, some of them roleplay and some of them live calls. He sees weak points in both.
In roleplay, the trainer has to protect rapport with the person being coached. Persistent negative feedback, even when deserved, can demoralize a rep and strain the relationship, so corrections tend to fade after a few misses. The result, he says, is a rep who is not actually ready for calls but may believe he is.
Live calls raise a different problem. Give a trainee strong leads and a fumbled call wastes them. Give a trainee cheap leads and it becomes hard to judge fairly whether a poor result reflects the rep or the lead.
How Ava works
The tool is Ava, built by Reech AI and led by CEO Liran Weissenberg. Reps pick the scenario, such as a cold call, a warm lead or a follow-up, and a difficulty from easy to regular, hard or even impossible. Ava plays the merchant in real time, with human-sounding tone and emotion, and appears to grasp issues such as open balances on existing loans or MCAs, which Edisis says is key to making the practice useful.
In a live demo, Ava picked up the phone and Edisis opened with a standard pitch about a working capital request the prospect had made online. Ava replied as a busy, somewhat suspicious business owner who remembered browsing but never got a clear picture of what the company does. Edisis played the call through to a conclusion. Ava then scored his performance and listed what went well and what he could do better.
Feedback without friction
Because the critique comes from software, Edisis says a trainee cannot read it as being singled out. If Ava says a rep needs to work on tone or pacing, there is no trainer bias to blame. No real leads are spent, either. That matters for a technique Edisis teaches called the interruption, which involves cutting in on a prospect mid-sentence to keep a call on track. Done badly, it can cost a sale and draw a negative review, so rehearsing it on Ava is safer.
Weissenberg said a sales manager can view transcripts, feedback and analytics for every call when Ava is deployed across a floor, and that a team could in theory run a fully simulated call center. He said the model can be tuned to specific scenarios and specific analysis.
It's really nice to [practice it] on Ava versus blowing up and getting negative reviews from a live person.
Veterans and lead-quality complaints
Edisis also uses Ava with reps who have been with him up to ten years and occasionally slide back into bad habits. It also settles disputes about leads. When a new hire says the leads are bad, Edisis runs the same pitch against Ava. If he scores far higher, the problem lies elsewhere in the call, not in the lead. He says that keeps some honesty between the program and reality.
Source reporting: deBanked.
