Solutions
Get to what the buyer is not telling you
What a buyer tells you first is rarely the real reason. The AI plays a buyer who holds things back, so the quality of the questions is what decides the outcome.
Challenge
You find out why you lost long after you have lost
When a deal is turned down, what comes back is the easy reason — budget, timing. The real one is usually internal politics or something that went wrong before, and nobody tells that to someone they have just met. Move to a proposal without it and you leave without knowing why it did not close.
- The reason you were given stays the easy one
- Budget and sign-off never come up unless you ask
- How often a manager can ride along is set by their diary
- Practise on a live deal and a bad run costs you the deal
01
Build the buyer
Role, sign-off, and what they hold back
02
Send the practice URL
The rep picks who to face
03
Roleplay
The rep asks; the AI answers as the buyer
04
Feedback generated
What you got, and what you missed
05
The real meeting
The rep
The three shaded steps can be repeated as often as you like. Building the relationship, and closing it, stay with the rep.
Solution
What comes out depends on what you ask
The AI buyer is built from a role and a decision structure, plus a stated request and the real situation sitting behind it. Shallow questions get safe answers; only questions that go further open anything up. How far you got is there in the feedback.
- The stated request and the real reason are set separately
- Ask shallow and you get shallow, so the questions decide the outcome
- How far you got is left behind in the record
- No live deal is used, so losing one costs nothing
- Before practice, the AI can talk through product materials or the scenario
Roleplay result (excerpt)
Overall 42 / 100
Real reason not reached
Depth on the problem8 / 20
You stopped where they hedged, and never reached the real issue
Groundwork covered7 / 20
You got the sign-off route, but never where the budget comes from
Worth working on next
Where the budget comes from was never asked
The buyer said “Anything over a certain figure has to go to the board.”
What came next “So when it goes to the board, they will want to know why this has to change now — how far have you got with that?”
A question that would have worked “Is this coming out of this year’s budget, or next year’s?”
Related pages
More detail, by topic
Change the role the AI plays and it becomes interviewer practice. The column explains how scores are given.
Choose an AI interview by whether it can explain its scoring →
Four questions to check what the AI reads and the standard it scores against.
Frequently asked questions
Will the AI actually push back?
How the buyer is built decides that. One who goes along with everything is no use as practice, and in a real meeting a first proposal rarely lands as it is. Stalling on price, hiding behind sign-off, weighing you against someone else — all of that can be written into the persona. How hard to make it, while keeping it useful as practice, is something we work out with you.
How do we set up the buyer?
From an industry, a role, a decision structure and a manner, plus the request they will state and the situation sitting behind it. You can build them yourself or we can do it with you, so how much you hand over is something to talk through. Set up several and the rep chooses which to face, and their details are shown on the way in, so there is a moment to read them first.
Does this work for B2B and for B2C?
Both. The mechanism is the same; what changes is how the buyer is built and what gets assessed. For B2B that tends to be where the budget sits and how sign-off works. For B2C it is more often whether anyone else is part of the decision, and what worry is really driving it. We set that up with you, to fit what you sell.
Where can they practise?
A browser is all they need. It works on desktop, smartphone and tablet, with no app to install. Where speaking out loud is awkward they can answer by typing instead, so it fits a journey or a wait between calls.
What gets assessed?
You decide what is assessed. Most set up something like: how far the problem was probed, whether the groundwork — budget, sign-off, timing — was covered, and whether the proposal connected to what the buyer actually said. Each comes back with a score and the utterance it rests on.
Who can see the feedback?
By default, the person who practised. Beyond that, you can name who else can see it, person by person.
How much does it cost?
Pricing works differently here than for hiring interviews: it follows the number of people practising and how often they do it. Tell us roughly the scale and we will put a quote together.
Show us how you bring your reps on today
We will show you where the AI interview fits into it. Free, about 30 minutes.