Organizations are spending heavily on AI-driven sales enablement — yet execution on the ground continues to lag. Industry reports show 2025 was a tough year for sales teams, with slipping quotas, longer deal cycles, and reps struggling with core skills.
Despite record investment, 84% of sales reps missed their quotas, with win rates dipping into the low 20s and time-to-close stretching longer.
The traditional playbook of static modules, quarterly workshops, and infrequent manager role-plays proved too slow and too shallow for a market where buyer skepticism is at an all-time high.
Bain & Company’s Jamie Cleghorn, global leader of the firm’s B2B Commercial Excellence group, said companies that effectively harmonize their strategic sales play approach with technologies such as AI and CRM will be best positioned for accelerated revenue growth.
“Our research shows there are actions that business leaders can take to ensure long-term growth with an added benefit of achieving significantly more productivity,” he said.
AI Widely Deployed but Poorly Executed
Bain & Company’s data, based on more than 1,200 executives, shows that 70% of companies still fail to translate sales plays into day-to-day execution. The company found that nearly all companies have begun deploying AI across most go-to-market functions, though use cases vary by industry.
A new wave of leaders is moving past content-first training toward practice-first mastery. At the center of this shift is Sam Dorison, CEO of ReflexAI, whose work is helping organizations move from passive learning to hyper-realistic, AI-driven simulations.
This approach gives reps a safe-to-fail environment to test their discovery and objection-handling before they ever pick up the phone. Dorison argues that the secret to predictable revenue is not more data, but more deliberate practice.
He noted that traditional enablement, such as learning management systems (LMS), slide decks, static workshops, and surface-level role-plays, fails to bridge this specific gap. They provide knowledge without the real-world practice needed to apply it when it matters most.
“When reps say they learn on the job, it’s because training doesn’t sufficiently represent the job. Great AI simulations allow reps to do what they’re expected to do in the field: build rapport, handle objections, answer specific questions, and manage next steps,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Training Changes Can Unlock Revenue
Managers are often the ones who simulate in traditional training. Relying on human-to-human role play creates a scalability or consistency crisis for sales teams. But the quality of human role-play varies widely based on three factors: who’s facilitating it, how prepared they are, and how much time they have in their already busy schedules. If not organized properly, this leaves much to chance.
Dorison emphasized that traditional practice is time-consuming for managers. “It also tends to be more rigid, more predictable, and more simplistic, which limits scale and impact,” he said.
Using AI simulations can be a worthwhile activity. Simulations deliver high-fidelity practice at any time of day for all team members. Doing so gives every rep high-quality training. Without simulations, most reps practice their pitch on live leads.
“When reps train on live leads, mistakes don’t just affect learning. They affect revenue, pipeline health, and prospect trust,” he explained.
Dorison urged CEOs to realize that the three drivers of revenue — contract size, win rate, and time-to-close — can all be impacted. Additionally, lower brand credibility can impact word-of-mouth marketing.
Safe Failure Accelerates Mastery
Simulation forces reps to execute rather than memorize. They make real-time decisions, adapt to dynamic objections, and handle shifting customer personas and emotional cues.
This active practice builds neural pathways tied to performance confidence and rapid decision-making, Dorison explained, because following scripts enriches short-term recall without real behavioral fluency.
“AI simulations also foster self-reflection. Reps can understand their own weaknesses and focus on improving in those areas,” he offered as a major benefit.
In a large global sales force, messaging often gets diluted as it trickles down. Simulation-based training ensures that a rep in London and a rep in Tokyo execute the same value proposition with the same level of quality.
Adopting simulation-based training improves outcomes compared with traditional methods. AI simulations standardize practice by providing consistent scenarios, dynamic objection paths, and performance scoring aligned with company strategy.
“Simulations give reps a calibrated experience and reinforce the same value proposition and behaviors, eliminating regional dilution that naturally happens when training relies on uneven human facilitation,” Dorison said.
When teams need to upskill or retrain, this can happen several times faster and more effectively, he added. For example, if a company has a new offering, messaging remains consistent.
Why Traditional Training Breaks Down in Practice
Specific sales skills, such as objection handling, discovery, and negotiation, see the most dramatic improvement when moved from a textbook to a simulation training session with co-workers. Dorison sees the biggest lift where real emotional and cognitive pressure meets complex decision-making.
“That’s exactly where traditional training falls short,” he shared about his work with sales teams across industries.
AI simulations excel at objection handling because they recreate the dynamic, unpredictable nature of real buyer pushback, creating situations that require reps to think on their feet rather than recall scripted answers.
“In the field, many deals stall not because reps lack product knowledge, but because they can’t confidently navigate concerns or reframe questions in the moment,” he explained.
Simulation exposes reps to varied personas, evolving objections, and emotionally charged responses, helping them build resilience and rapid-reframing skills that textbooks cannot deliver.
Reps also benefit from AI simulations in discovery and negotiation practice, especially as simulations become more complex. But the most dramatic and consistent improvement he observes is in objection handling, where confidence, adaptability, and trust-building have the biggest impact on win rates.
Simulation Platforms Track Sales Readiness
Traditional enablement measures success by the number of lessons completed. Now, key performance indicators (KPIs) offer managers an alternative way to reskill sales teams more effectively, according to Dorison.
Simulation platforms capture performance signals leaders can actually measure, he noted. These include practice frequency, objection-handling proficiency, rapport-building effectiveness, tool navigation, and improvement trends over time.
Managers and team leaders can turn perceived readiness into observable and coachable performance metrics. The gain is predictive insights instead of simple completion stats.
Lifting the Middle 60%
Studies show that most enablement efforts help the top 10% of sales team members perform slightly better. Simulation training helps the “middle 60%” of the sales force meet their quota more predictably.
“Practice helps everyone. While top performers will sometimes succeed regardless of training volume, the middle 60% benefit most from repeated, realistic practice,” Dorison said. Simulations help them internalize strategies and build confidence, reducing performance variability and increasing the predictability of hitting quota. He observes this happening for learners outside the middle 60% as well.
“We’ve seen this in the impact our tools have across employee cohorts,” he offered.
Why Simulation Matters
When a company launches a new product or shifts its ideal customer profile (ICP), it usually takes months to retrain the field. Simulation technology shortens that pivot-to-performance window.
Dorison explained that trainers can update simulations and roll them out in minutes with self-serve builders. That rapid rollout enables reps to practice using new messaging with realistic buyer responses before the changes go live.
“This means reps don’t just hear new content. They’ve already used it in plausible sales interactions, dramatically shortening the ramp from learning to effective execution,” he said.
Dorison contends that good sales is about human connection: confidence, empathy, and adaptability. He downplays the notion that some reps fear AI is replacing the need for intuition.
“These qualities come from practice, not rote memorization,” he maintained. “Simulations free reps from rigid scripts by giving them real conversational context and varied buyer personas to engage with.”
That translates to reps who are not just script-compliant but genuinely prepared to listen, respond, and connect in authentic, buyer-centric ways.
