Based on what we see and measure

The Replicate Labs blog

Pieces on AI sales coaching, performance drift, methodology, and the gap between what reps know and what they actually do.

Latest

Field notes on coaching, methodology and execution.

Sales Coaching
Your AI Buyer Was Built From a LinkedIn Profile. Ours Was Built From the Deal You're Actually In.

The best-funded AI roleplay tools build their practice buyer from a LinkedIn profile: title, tenure, a few posts. It is a believable stranger. Here is why a persona built from your rep's actual pipeline is a different, harder, more useful thing to argue with.

3 July 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
A $300M AI Coach Can Tell Your Rep Said 'Um' 40 Times. It Can't Tell You They Never Asked About Budget.

The best-funded AI coaching company in the category scores how reps speak: pacing, filler words, clarity. It does not score whether they ran the methodology. That distinction is about to matter a lot more than most buyers realise, and almost nobody is naming it plainly.

1 July 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
The Coaching Desert: What Really Happens to Reps in Months 2-6

Every sales org invests heavily in onboarding, then the coaching cadence collapses the moment the new-hire window closes. Here is what happens to reps in the six months after onboarding, why it is the real driver of ramp time and early attrition, and what actually closes the gap.

30 June 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
Your AI Can Tell You the Deal Is Slipping. It Still Can't Save It.

Deal-risk scoring is everywhere now, and the whole category is quietly admitting the same thing: a flag is not a fix. Here is why detection without execution changes nothing, why risk scores get ignored, and what actually closes the gap between knowing a deal is at risk and doing something about it.

27 June 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
The First Three Days Decide Whether Your Sales Team Ever Uses the Tool

Sales tool adoption is not won over a quarter. It is won or lost in the first 72 hours. Here is the activation signal we found in our own data, why it predicts retention almost perfectly, and how to engineer for it instead of hoping a rollout email does the work.

25 June 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
The AI Sales Manager, Not the AI Buyer

Every AI sales tool builds a fake buyer for your reps to practise against. That problem was solved two years ago. The unsolved one is that there aren't enough good managers to coach the practice. So we built the manager, not the buyer.

23 June 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
How to Use an AI Sales Coach on Live Deals (Not Just Roleplay)

Most AI sales coaching tools whisper lines in your ear mid-call. The move that actually wins deals is coaching the opportunity itself, before and after the conversation. Here is how reps actually use an AI coach to move live opportunities.

20 June 2026 Read article
Competitors
What the Seismic/Highspot Merger Means for Your Coaching Stack

The Seismic and Highspot merger creates an 18-24 month roadmap freeze and near-certain price hikes. Here is what methodology-first sales organisations should do right now.

8 June 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
When not to expand an account

Not every account should be expanded. Push it on the wrong one and you lose the deal, often the account. Knowing when to hold is a skill in its own right.

17 May 2026 Read article
Product
What can an AI sales coach actually do?

An AI sales coach diagnoses stuck deals, preps you for calls, reviews recordings, drills objections, runs roleplays, and rewrites emails. Here's each job.

14 May 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
The QBR is not a status update

The QBR is the most misused meeting in customer success. Run as a status update, it's tolerated. Run as an expansion conversation, it's your best hour.

11 May 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
Ten ways expansion deals die

Expansion deals rarely die for exotic reasons. They die from the same ten avoidable mistakes. Learn to spot the pattern before your next pipeline review.

8 May 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
Single-threaded accounts churn

One warm contact isn't a relationship. It's a single point of failure. Multi-threading predicts both renewal and expansion rate, and most reps skip it.

5 May 2026 Read article
Sales Enablement
We'll buy it and nobody will use it

Why sales tools die at adoption, and what an activation motion looks like week by week. The buyer's real fear isn't the price tag. It's the graveyard.

29 April 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
How to Spot an Account Ready to Grow

Most account managers read expansion signals too narrowly. Healthy and expandable aren't the same. Here are the four signals an account is ready to grow.

26 April 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
Prepping for Your First AI Coaching Session

The biggest mistake reps make in a first AI coaching session is bringing a hypothetical. Bring a real deal. Here's how to get value from your first 60 minutes.

23 April 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
Why NRR Is a Sales Coaching Problem

Net revenue retention now decides whether a SaaS company lives or dies. Expansion is a distinct skill most reps were never coached on. Here's the fix.

20 April 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
Expand before the renewal, not at it

When you raise expansion matters as much as whether you raise it. Stack it onto a renewal and you hand the conversation to procurement. Here's the timing fix.

17 April 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
AI sales coaching: the complete guide

What AI sales coaching is, how it differs from call recording, roleplay sims and an LMS, what good looks like, and how to evaluate it for your team.

14 April 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
Hello, Sales Team. Meet Your AI Coach

Your best sales coach used to be whichever manager was free on a Tuesday. That era is over. Here's what an always-on AI coaching layer actually looks like.

11 April 2026 Read article
Article
In defence of the donkey

Horses get the parades. Donkeys get the work. What sales leaders can learn from the most underestimated animal on the planet, and the rep who does the same.

8 April 2026 Read article
Article
Top Sales Enablement Platforms (2026)

A fair, category-by-category guide to the top sales enablement platforms in 2026: content, readiness, revenue intelligence, and in-workflow coaching.

5 April 2026 Read article
Article
The Honest Guide to DIY Sales Coaching

Most DIY sales coaching guides are sales pitches in disguise. This is the honest version: what it takes, where the five paths break, and the hidden cost.

2 April 2026 Read article
Article
Why Raw Frontier Models Fall Flat at Outbound

GPT-5 writes clean sentences. Buyers still bin its emails in ten seconds. Why a frontier model is not an outbound engine, and what to build around it.

30 March 2026 Read article
Sales Enablement
The Great Enablement Collapse

The enablement industry is consolidating because the model is broken. Training-first doesn't work. Coaching-first does. Here's why it matters.

24 March 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
The Coaching Crisis Is a Manager Crisis

Sales managers have 8-12 reps and are told to coach each one weekly. The maths doesn't work. AI coaching gives managers back the hours they lost.

18 March 2026 Read article
Sales Enablement
The Agentic Enablement Lie

Every enablement vendor is slapping 'agentic AI' on their marketing. Most of it is chatbots with better branding. Here's how to spot the real thing.

15 March 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
Reps Want Performance, Not Practice

The training industry built for practice. Reps want performance support on live deals. Here's why the distinction matters and what to build instead.

12 March 2026 Read article
Product
We Removed the Paywall

We removed the paywall from AI sales coaching. Here's what happened when anyone could sign up and talk to Keenan free for 60 minutes.

9 March 2026 Read article
Industry Analysis
Know-Do Gap vs Performance Drift

Mindtickle and Replicate Labs see the same problem. But the name you give it shapes the product you build, and the solution your reps actually get.

6 March 2026 Read article
Industry Analysis
Gong Just Entered Sales Coaching

Gong owns conversation intelligence. But coaching and analytics are different products, and building one on the other produces analytics-shaped coaching.

3 March 2026 Read article
Sales Enablement
Gartner Says You Need What We Already Built

Gartner says in-workflow coaching will drive 40% faster velocity by 2029. We've built it since 2023. The research caught up to what reps already knew.

28 February 2026 Read article
Sales Enablement
Gartner Said In-Workflow, Not Sidebar

Gartner says coaching must happen in the workflow. Every vendor built a browser sidebar. That's adjacent-to-workflow, not in-workflow. Here's the difference.

25 February 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
The Coaching Quality Collapse

As sales teams scale, coaching quality collapses invisibly. Everyone measures frequency, nobody measures quality. AI maintains quality at scale.

22 February 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
AI Coaches the Deal. Humans Coach the Rep.

The AI coaching debate is framed as AI vs human. Wrong frame. AI coaches the deal. Humans coach the rep. The best model uses both.

19 February 2026 Read article
Sales Enablement
The Accepted Lie Has a New Costume: AI

The accepted lie in enablement, that training leads to performance, is being repackaged as AI-powered enablement. Same broken model, new technology label.

16 February 2026 Read article
AI Strategy
The 5% of AI Pilots That Don't Fail

Most AI sales tool pilots fail because they measure adoption, not outcomes. A framework for evaluating the 5% that actually work.

13 February 2026 Read article
Industry Analysis
Why 45% of Reps Rate Coaching Below Average

MySalesCoach's State of Coaching 2026 report exposes a perception gap between reps and managers. The problem is not quality, it is frequency and relevance.

10 February 2026 Read article
Product Insights
What 34,000 Coaching Sessions Taught Us

Real platform data from 34,000+ coaching events reveals what reps actually want from AI coaching. Spoiler: it's not roleplay.

7 February 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
81% Say They Use AI. 19% Actually Do.

81% of sales teams claim AI adoption. Only 19% of reps actually use it. The gap is not the AI. We measure completion, not deals. A better scoreboard.

4 February 2026 Read article
Sales Coaching
Your Reps Are Building Their Own AI Coach

85% say training lacks relevance (Docebo, 2026). So reps are building DIY AI coaches with ChatGPT prompts. Here's why that's a signal, not a solution.

29 January 2026 Read article
Article
The Duolingo Trap in AI Sales Coaching

I gave 300 people a free AI coaching tool. 100+ came back on their own, 40 hit the usage cap, 10,000 real interactions. The tool worked. The rollout didn't.

23 January 2026 Read article
Sales Enablement
12 Sales Tools and Zero Execution

Sales teams spend $1,200 per rep on tools, yet 67% of features go unused and only 43% hit quota. The problem: your stack measures activity, not execution.

20 January 2026 Read article
Article
5 Best AI Roleplay Tools for Sales (2026)

A working operator's look at the best AI roleplay tools for sales in 2026, where each one stops, and the line between testing reps and coaching deals.

17 January 2026 Read article
Sales Enablement
Sales Training Works. The System Doesn't.

Selling Power, Gartner, and your last three prospects keep saying it. Good training does not translate to field behaviour. The system around it is broken.

14 January 2026 Read article