AI sales roleplay: we've put CallCoach in the App Store

A phone with a solid speech bubble beside it and a faint outline of the same bubble behind, standing for the rehearsal that comes before the real call

There’s a slightly ridiculous thing about sales training. We spend a lot of time telling people what to do differently on their next call. We spend very little time giving them somewhere to try it.

You can listen to your last call with a manager. You can read a coaching report. You can do a course on objection handling and watch somebody show a beautiful close on YouTube. But in the end a real prospect picks up the phone. That’s where you find out whether you can do it.

That makes the live sales call an expensive place to practise.

We’ve spent the last few years building CallCoach to analyse sales conversations after they happen. Last month we put something different in the App Store. It is an AI sales roleplay app that lets you practise the conversation before it happens.

Call a prospect who isn’t real

The app is called CallCoach: Sales Rehearsal, and the idea is deliberately simple. Tell it about a call you want to practise, then call your AI prospect. You hear the phone ring, they pick up, and you’re in the conversation.

This isn’t a chatbot where you take turns typing. You have the conversation out loud, as you would on a real call. The prospect asks questions, interrupts, objects and changes direction. They respond to what you actually say. In tougher scenarios they can get impatient, or end the call if you’re not getting anywhere.

When you’re done, CallCoach analyses the conversation. It gives you feedback on four sales skills, plus the moments from the call that are worth another look. Tap any of them and hear exactly what you said.

The in-call screen on the left, with the prospect on the line; the coaching report on the right, with four skill scores and the moments worth replaying — The call, and the report that follows it.

Then you can try again.

That’s the part we wanted to build. Not another sales course. Not an AI that gives you twelve paragraphs of advice about objection handling. Just somewhere private to be bad at it a few times first.

Rehearse your call

You can run plenty of generic roleplays. I think the more useful one is the call you’re actually worried about.

Say you have a prospect tomorrow who thinks you’re too expensive. Tell the app who they are, what you’re selling and the objection you expect. Then practise that conversation tonight. If the first attempt goes badly, nobody cares. Make the prospect harder and go again.

The same goes if you’re new to cold calling and want to get twenty awkward openings out of your system before you try them on real people. Or if you’re a founder who doesn’t think of yourself as a salesperson but has an important customer call at 10am.

Traditional roleplay can do all of this too, of course. It just needs another person. Because it needs another person, it tends to happen when a training session is booked. It doesn’t happen at 9pm the night before the call you want to practise.

Your phone is much easier to schedule.

Why now?

Voice AI has passed an important point in the past year or two. A simulated prospect no longer waits patiently for you to finish a perfect sentence before taking a turn. The conversation can be messy. That matters, because sales conversations are messy.

You can hesitate. You can talk over each other. You can get an objection you weren’t expecting, then realise halfway through an answer that you’ve talked yourself into a corner. None of that is pleasant to find out on a live deal. It is exactly what you want from practice.

It’s also why we built Sales Rehearsal as a phone app, not another screen in the CallCoach dashboard. I don’t think practising a sales call should feel like doing admin. If you have five minutes before a meeting, you should be able to pull out your phone, make the call and put it away again.

It’s in the App Store now

We launched quietly in August. We wanted people using it before we made much noise about it. It’s been out for about a month now, and we’ve fixed the early rough edges. I’m happy to say: go and have a play.

It’s an iPhone app, available in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and the Philippines.

Your first calls are free, so don’t start with a generic sales scenario. Think of the call on your calendar this week that you’re least looking forward to. Tell CallCoach about that one and see how the first attempt goes.

Better to find out tonight.