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 your questions decides the outcome.
The problem
You find out why you lost long after you have lost
When a deal is turned down, the reason you hear is the convenient one — budget, timing. The real reason is usually internal politics or a bad past experience, and nobody tells that to someone they have just met. Move to a proposal without it and you never find out why the deal did not close.
- You only ever hear the convenient reason
- Budget and sign-off never come up unless you ask
- Ride-alongs depend on when a manager is free
- 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 which buyer 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
Led by the rep
The three shaded steps can be repeated as often as you like. Building the relationship and closing the deal stay with the rep.
Solution
What comes out depends on what you ask
The AI buyer is built from a role and a decision-making structure, plus a stated request and the real situation behind it. Shallow questions get safe answers; only probing questions open anything up. The feedback shows how far you got.
- The stated request and the real reason are set separately
- The depth of your questions shows directly in the result
- The record shows how far you got
- No real deal is at stake, so a bad run 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
Budget, sign-off and timing 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
Switch the role the AI plays and the same setup becomes interviewer practice. Our article explains how scoring works.
Choose an AI interview tool that can explain its scores →
How to check what the AI reads and the standard it scores against.
Frequently asked questions
Will the AI actually push back?
That depends on how the buyer is built. A buyer who agrees to everything is no use as practice, and in a real meeting a first proposal is rarely accepted unchanged. Stalling on price, hiding behind sign-off, weighing you against someone else — all of that can be written into the persona. We work with you to decide how hard to make the buyer while keeping the session useful as practice.
How do we set up the buyer?
Each buyer is built from an industry, a role, a decision-making structure and a communication style, plus the request they will state and the situation behind it. You can build them yourself or with our help, and we agree with you how much of the work we take on. If you set up several, the rep chooses which one to face and can read that buyer’s profile before the session starts.
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 into a commute or a gap between calls.
What gets assessed?
You decide what is assessed. Most teams choose something like this: 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 words it is based on.
Who can see the feedback?
By default, only the person who practised. You can also give access to other named individuals.
How much does it cost?
Pricing works differently here than for hiring interviews: it is based on the number of people practising and how often they do it. Tell us the rough scale and we will put a quote together.
Show us how you train new reps today
We will show you where AI roleplay fits. Free, about 30 minutes.