What AEs really want

The best salespeople aren't just motivated by commission. They want to get better. They see every role as an opportunity to hone their craft, and they're hungry for feedback that helps them do it.

Whenever I ask an AE about their best manager, the answer almost always includes some version of "they gave me great feedback on my calls." The best AEs actively seek this out - "could you look at this recording and tell me where I could have done better?" or "I didn't nail the close on that one - how would you have handled it?"

And yet, in nearly every organisation I've worked with, there's a persistent gap. AEs want more coaching than they get. Managers want to give more coaching than they have time for. Both are frustrated by the same constraint.

Can AI help close that gap?

Yes - very effectively, but with caveats.

The most immediate application is call analysis.

• AI can give accurate, detailed summaries of what happened in a call, identify specific strengths and weaknesses for the rep, and flag patterns across an entire body of calls.

• A manager can run the same analysis across a whole team.

• All of it can be automated - feedback delivered after every call, successes highlighted, errors flagged - and customised to reflect your specific sales methodology.

Beyond analysis, there are AI coaches designed to support rep development over time, including role play practice. They're not perfectly realistic and they're not entirely comfortable - but they're genuinely useful. The more times you practice responding to a difficult question or explaining a complex challenge, the clearer and more confident you become.

There are also tools that provide real-time in-call coaching. A prompt that says "the prospect just mentioned competitor X - try asking how concerned they are about Y" or "you're moving towards a trial - make sure you've agreed success criteria first" can be the difference between a good call and a great one.

None of this is experimental. These tools exist, they work, and they're widely available.

So why aren't more people using them?

That's the more interesting question. The technology isn't the barrier - the habits are.

As an AE, the commitment is modest: fifteen minutes a day reviewing automated feedback, going back to the moments you got wrong, and thinking concretely about how to handle them differently. The reps who do this consistently improve faster than those who don't.

As a manager, the job is to set the system up properly (see point re RevOps below), make sure your team is actually using it, and create the space - even thirty minutes as a team, one learning point each - for it to become a habit rather than a chore. And as things change, the coaching needs to change with it - which means reviewing and updating your prompting/config roughly once a month.

And crucially, having capable RevOps support to put this in place makes all of this significantly easier. AEs and managers should be focused on the content and the conversations, not the technical setup.

The gap between the coaching AEs want and the coaching they get is real - but it's closable. The tools are there. The question is whether you use them.