Why AI Is Making Human Selling More Valuable, Not Less

0:00Welcome back to Retail in America, and I'm Ron Thurston. For two seasons, this show has been about the people, the stores, the technology solutions, and the operators reshaping how America shops. Season three is sharper. It's about the human edge of selling, what it actually takes to win a customer in a world where algorithms handle the easy part, AI agents handle the decisions, and the only thing left worth paying a premium for is a human who actually knows how to sell. Every guest this season has built something, run something, or figured out how to do that. I'm excited to get started with this today because my guest is Ben Rodier, who's the CEO of Frontline IQ.

0:47And full disclosure up front, I recently joined Frontline IQ as an advisor, and I'm only telling you that because I want you to trust in this conversation. And I joined Ben because I believe he's building something that the industry actually needs, which is a way to coach the humans who sell face-to-face in stores, on showroom floors, on counters, and across the entire industry. The places where the sale is won or lost in the first 60 seconds. And it's why he's the right guest for season three. So Ben, welcome to the show. Thank you, Ron. Great to be here. Great to have you here. So I want to, I'm going to give you the opportunity to speak more about what Frontline IQ is and how it operates, but I want to start first setting up the problem.

1:36So what did you see through your industry experience? And I know we will agree on much of this, but what did you identify as the problem that you wanted to solve?

1:49Ben Rodier:I think that when you go back to the last two companies that I've been a part of, we've always focused on the in-person sales team. And we were always the technology partner coming in and delivering something that never existed before. Last company was Salesforce. We created the concept of clienteling from in the store to the digital customer and breaking down the wall between the two worlds of online and in-store. And I think that over the years, what I came to appreciate was that working in a store can be incredibly hard when you're constantly being asked to learn this new way of selling, to combat this new way of buying.

2:30Ben Rodier:And so what it really boiled down to for me was, it's really easy to coast through a career in retail and not get the same kind of development, the same kind of investment in your future that I think a lot of us in office work take for granted. And so when we looked at the frontline IQ opportunity, to me, it really drilled down on the nucleus of what it means to be a human being in a job. And in this case, on the sales floor. And so better coaching, proper training, operationalizing the accountability of what it means to be a good manager and to get the right coaching. To me, that's really the problem that we're solving.

3:12Ben Rodier:And it's so easy to get it wrong because of how distributed a sales team is across a retail organization with a lot of stores. Which is at the speed, again, of the accountability and the desire for exceptional results. There isn't a brand that's just doing this for fun. Everyone wants to deliver great results. Everyone needs business built over business. I think this kind of conversation of developing soft skills versus operational skills, I think we don't have that luxury anymore. We have to say we're developing skills that also deliver exceptional results. Absolutely. I look at it and I learned this when I transitioned away from sales floor and into frontline IQ, which instead of more customer engagement focused work at Salesforce, we started really focusing on training, HR best practices, and obviously coaching.

4:08Ben Rodier:And one of the things that I really came to appreciate was when you're operating in a live environment where at any moment, two customers can walk in, one can leave, you have to go fetch something in the back. It's organized chaos and it has to obviously work. But what ends up happening is you end up focusing on the metrics that are a result of the leading metrics. We call them lagging metrics and leading metrics. We look at store sales. We look at comp versus last year. We look at average ticket or average order value. And these are all things that happen after you've either done things well or not so well when it comes to the leading behaviors.

4:49Ben Rodier:And so what we really focused on in frontline IQ is what are the leading behaviors that lead you to a better conversion rate or a higher average value or average order value or more sales. And if you can figure out if these things happen, then those things will happen in the lagging metrics, then you start to basically change the news before the result. And that's really where I think the nuance is in getting coaching right in these distributed sales environments. Yeah. And I know what's been very important to some of the conversations you and I have had together with brands is that it's unique to that brand.

5:29The culture that when you talk about leading indicators and the KPIs, but also the language, the expectations are individualized for that particular brand. So this is not a generic coaching tool. This is built for you.

5:47Ben Rodier:So Dalton, I got that. I spend a lot of time talking with sales leaders and vice presidents of sales who really like to talk about how different they are or how their culture is so important to how their sales team drives their business. And what's very different about Frontline IQ versus other companies that we've built in the past is it's the same common set of functionality, but as you move from business to business, it really is so different. We work with some apparel customers that call their shoppers by a name, right? They have a persona for her or him. And I remember it being in some of these meetings where they were talking about her.

6:29Ben Rodier:And I was like, wait, who's her? And then I realized they all have gathered around this persona of who she is. She is 34 years old. Her name is Jennifer. She has likes and dislikes. And she represents the customer that they in that business might not call a customer. They might call her Jenny or they might call her the guest. Right. And this needs to translate every time we deliver coaching in a business that's focused in a certain way in apparel, which might be completely different in home furnishings. And that's completely different in like wireless. Right. How you sell and how you build the culture around selling in each of these companies, it's like a snowflake.

7:12Ben Rodier:It's completely unique as you move from one to the next. Yeah. Which is, it makes the opportunity that much more relevant for the front line because it feels like this was built for you and a language that you may already know. Maybe you're a new hire and you're also learning the culture and the language of that brand. But when it feels like it was built for you, customized for you with your own individual goals in words, and you're right, some use customers, some use client, you know, everyone has their own terminology. and rightly so. But I do think the opportunity for use or adoption at the front line, which has been the challenge often for technology, certainly at Salesforce, the better the adoption, the better the results here.

7:59Ben Rodier:If the product works and it delivers happy users, more money, more commissions, whatever that carrot is, then the engagement's always going to be high. I remember when we launched new customers at sales floor and it took off like a rocket ship because within 24 hours, we were turning like a million dollars in sales and people were making real money from that. At that point, you don't have to worry about the engagement strategy. You just have to keep up with the growth. HR, training, coaching, nobody's jumping up and down to get more coaching. What they're jumping up and down about is the idea that if I do this one thing and it's reasonable and it's it's a reasonable amount of time and it delivers$2 ,000 in more sales per week.

8:48Ben Rodier:Well, okay, tell me more. I want to know more. So we get a 91 % weekly active usage rate in the tool. It's not because people love to get more coaching. I think we both know that that's not the driving force behind it. What's driving it is that we show you how you're improving. We show you how much more money you're making or your store is making and what it means to you and it's in the discrete kind of concept of your own phone, right? I think one of the challenges with coaching and training is that it's awkward. It's delivered in a classroom. It's delivered in a role play or in front of your manager or in front of your colleagues.

9:31Ben Rodier:Or a pre-recorded video. Yeah. And I think that there's a bunch of just really icky ways that people have come to be very standoffish when it comes to how they're trained. And so what we've done is we've just taken a step back and said, what works? And we know Apple fitness works. We know, you know, the Oura rings work like, or whatever fitness tools, you know, have become extremely popular. And I've experienced this myself. I love closing my rings in Apple fitness. It feels good. Confetti falls from the bottom of my Apple watch. Why doesn't that work when we're in sales? And, And, you know, that's the whole concept behind gamification.

10:11Ben Rodier:So that's the approach that we've taken that really seems to be working to get engagement and adoption very quickly. I love it. And walk us through just a little bit more about just the role play aspect of this. If we kind of go back again, like the role play is only as good as the leader or the volunteer of that morning meeting. And just my experience, just spending my entire career in stores, I couldn't tell you that everyone walked away from that morning meeting feeling like they now had a different skill set and could go into the day. They may have some words, but I think that there are inherent behaviors that are only as good as the role play.

10:55Ben Rodier:You know, I'll answer your question a little backwards because we didn't set out to build a tool that reinvents the way role play drives learning and how learning drives performance. It was kind of a byproduct of where we started. We started by building an AI agent that can understand people's sales data and identify the areas where each individual salesperson can get better. And then because that worked, we built a tool that, you know, similar to Apple Fitness, keeps you really interested in how you're progressing towards a quantitative goal. The next evolution in the product was really natural.

11:35Ben Rodier:It's like, OK, well, if a goal requires a leading behavior to be improved, then how do you improve that behavior? You go and practice it. And then we started to listen to these morning meetings like you just described. and the awkwardness of role play or some people call it scrimmaging or skill practice, it was mind boggling. And so we're like, we can totally solve this with just a better mousetrap. And a lot of people, you know, when we first meet them say, can't I just build this in chat GPT or in clode or whatever? And the amount of nuance and sophistication that has gone into how to make a role play realistic, number one, but then two, give feedback that makes sense, that will be sticky and remembered and effective at helping you improve your score, your sales.

12:27Ben Rodier:It's pretty amazing. And it's only been, I would say, eight to nine months of this concept of coaching tied to quantitative improvement and the soft skill that you develop and role play, these two things fit so well together that, you know, to your point, like we didn't set out to solve role play, but it's a really important part of the equation. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. I think some of that terminology we made up because we were trying to ease the pain. Like skill practice, if you say role play, you know, we have a skill practice today. You may get a bit more of an attention from the audience, but the reality is this is about you're right, developing the actual skills that deliver the results.

13:15And if I'm not mistaken, the first part of the industry that really adopted this concept quickly was furniture. Right.

13:26Ben Rodier:And if you could share some success of what you've already seen. Of course. You know, home furnishings for me has always been an industry that's big enough to stand on its own, but also from the outsider, it seems small as like a part of retail. But when you think about how people, first of all, everybody sleeps, that's something that I've just come to appreciate in the last years. Everybody sleeps, everybody buys a mattress every few years. And that's why, you know, the foundation of the home furnishings industry, a lot of it revolves around sleep, whether it's the accessories, the mattresses, and everything that goes with it.

14:07Ben Rodier:Our first customer was Ashley Furniture, which is a huge company, multi-billion dollar like they own not only the stores, but the supply chain and the manufacturing. And so we learned an awful lot. And I think, you know, just talking about business in general, you get extremely lucky sometimes when you work with the right partner at the beginning. And so what we learned from Ashley was coaching is a science. It really is. They've broken it down into so many very specific pieces of their playbook that it almost became impossible to scale without some form of solution that helps them move from each individual person's need for coaching to being able to share that across the business and leverage what's working and what's not.

14:53Ben Rodier:And so home furnishings for me was a really eye-opening experience because they take coaching and they call it scrimmaging so seriously and they measure it and they write it down on paper. And I remember when we first started, I have these pictures of these cardboard cards that salespeople, they call them RSAs, retail sales associates. They would walk around in their jacket pocket and they would pull out this card and they would say, okay, the thing that I'm supposed to practice this week is, you know, selling more financing sales. And I did it once today. And then they come back an hour later, or I did it twice.

15:26Ben Rodier:And I remember sitting there looking like, oh my God, they're writing it down on cardboard. They're not using the data that they're writing down to inform what happens next. Like this is exactly where AI can help. And so, you know, when we first started out and we started building these AI agents as analyst tools that help the manager, it was never to replace the manager and it was never to take someone's job on the sales floor. It was always in the name of how do we help sales teams get stronger and managers stop worrying about being data analysts, expert recruiters, and expert interpersonal like managers and supporters.

16:08Ben Rodier:Let them focus on what they're good at, which is being a human being who's great at selling and coaching their team. Yeah. And to your point on that card, who identified that that's what you need to work on this week? It was a manager. It was the manager. There's probably no data behind that. But that's it, is that they have these lengthy reports. You know, I think Tableau and Power BI do great jobs at kind of assimilating a lot of information in one place. But what you're left with is still a lot of numbers. And if I'm the average, you know, GSM, general sales manager or store manager, and I'm picking up one of these reports and I've got, like you said, five to 20 people that work for me, how do I figure out what Ron really needs to do to get better?

16:52Ben Rodier:And so what we really simply did was we used some, you know, I call it simple algorithms, but it's advanced mathematics, linear regression, machine learning that basically within a couple of seconds can analyze your performance, analyze it compared to a cohort or someone who's comparable to you, and then figure out two things for you very personally. Where is your biggest upside? And how probable is it based on other people's patterns that you can actually achieve that upside? And if you think about what that solves for the average manager, I can assign you a goal, right? Blindly, are you going to be able to hit it?

17:32Ben Rodier:Is it really where you have the most, you know, I would call it grass to grow? And for the best managers in the world, it was a guesstimate. It was an informed guesstimate, but it was, they were estimating with guesses. on where their people could improve. Now we've created a system out of that. We have, you know, a lot of people say we've codified the art of getting better. Yeah. And because inherently that takes some of the risk off of losing top performers. It's always this game of, oh my gosh, what if this guy all of a sudden left the business? What would happen? And so you're right, shrinking that gap is also a massive just business investment in your team.

18:15because you're protecting yourself and your business. And a lot of what you're describing, Ben, is also commission-based because there's individual performance, but frontline IQ isn't just for that model. Correct. It could be for store performance, team performance. Tell us the different ways that it can integrate into a business.

18:39Ben Rodier:You know, we've always, because we're in the game of, you know, basically motivating a human being to use a tool to get better. It's very natural to think that, oh, this is going to work great for commissioned salespeople, but I don't know how it's going to work for those that work in an apparel store that work as a team to hit some kind of goal. I think the trick is regardless of how the tool works, so long as you're able to tap in on what motivates people, the engagement follows, right? So it's the same carrot and stick thing, but the reality is, is if you earn commission, yes, figuring out how to kind of gamify more commissions is always going to bring you back.

19:20Ben Rodier:But if you work as a team and as a team, you can see where you're at and you can cheer each other on and you can help each other by learning from each other in a solution like ours, that will keep you coming back as well. And one of the things that we're starting to look at right now is there's a bunch of like promotional companies and incentive companies that spend a whack load of money with retailers and employees helping them earn points. You know, my wife has a corporate job and she earns these spark points when someone basically pays her a compliment. And these points rack up to the point where you can buy something at Best Buy or you can go in a marketplace.

19:59Ben Rodier:Very similar to how the loyalty programs work with credit cards. Well, imagine you worked at like Walmart or Target, where obviously commissions are just not part of your incentive to do better. But imagine you were able to earn points by improving the skills that help drive those businesses. Now it's not a question of how much money are you going to make, but it's going to be what incentivizes you to improve. And if we can gamify that, I think that's the, that's the Holy grail. Right. Have you seen just maybe through Ashley furniture or some of the earlier bigger customers, maybe some hesitancy of like how AI is integrating itself into my work and the tools and how have you overcome that?

20:45And is there an example of like, they were very hesitant and now they're like all in?

20:51Ben Rodier:I think there's two camps of hesitation when it comes to AI adoption. The first is the hesitation around, this thing's going to take my job. It's going to learn how I think and how I do, and then it's going to replace me.

21:12Ben Rodier:Those concerns are real. And I think that as builders of AI products, we almost have a responsibility to do this in the right way. And I think that there are a lot of companies out there that are building AI that are built to take over, built to remove the visual designer or the visual merchandiser from the equation, built to remove the contact center agents, right? When it comes to what we've done is instead of saying, hey, we're going to build an AI to listen to everything that you say and then learn how to do it better than you. We approached it in, you know, kind of like crawl, walk, run. First, it was a data analysis tool for coaches to find the one thing that salespeople could get better on and help them to stay accountable for that goal, kind of like a personal fitness trainer for sales.

22:07Ben Rodier:The second thing that we did was we said, if you want to improve the skills that help you hit those goals, we're going to help you by building an AI agent that through voice and through real interactions, you can practice overcoming objections. You can practice dealing with a customer that says, thanks, I'm just looking and how to engage. And then the last bit, the last kind of mile of our product vision is once you've gotten comfortable with using AI, and that's the most important thing is once people have gotten comfortable that, okay, this thing is not here to take over. Now you're ready to take it anywhere and have it listen to you and give you advice and be your co-pilot in terms of getting better.

22:48Ben Rodier:I think that's extremely different than saying, hey, Ron, I want you to wear this AI pin all day long. It's going to tell you what you did right and wrong. And it's going to learn everything it needs to know about making you better. That is a very friction-oriented experience of being introduced to AI. Right. I absolutely agree. And so much of what we're hearing and seeing now is this adoption of technology is pushing us into more human experiences. Yeah. And so I think what the opportunity then has often been in our industry is that, great, technology has pushed the customer into the store, but now what happens?

23:32Right. Where does that first 60 seconds start? Does this person, is it just about being nice or is it about selling? And this is where I think the massive opportunity that I see is exactly that. For a decade more, we've said, just be nice, be friendly, be kind, do all. And when all of the effort has come into putting the customer walking through the front door, then I think our responsibility then is to continue to train and develop teams to be more than just nice. Because this is their career. And the more you're learning, the more you're investing, your commitment to staying in the industry just continues to grow.

24:17Oh, no. That's why I'm obsessed with this, because you are operationalizing the emotional and skill set that has been so difficult to do. And we're at a breaking point, right? I believe this. We're at a breaking point in the industry of customer wants it, customers coming in saying we want human experiences, and we have not always put the investment to make that dream come true. Yeah.

24:45Ben Rodier:We've come too far to have really crappy experiences in that moment. I read something the other day that customers make up their mind whether they might not know what they want to buy yet, but when they're in a selling experience with a salesperson, within 60 seconds, they know whether this is someone that they want to continue with or not. Right. And the thought of people practicing on their customers in real life when some of those skills aren't there yet. I think we've come too far to not to not fix that. You know, who are the most kind of relevant parts of our industry that you would like to meet and how do people do that?

25:26Ben Rodier:Sure. I mean, we're building what I believe to be something that anyone who sells in person, face to face, this is a game changer. And we've seen it by the numbers. We've seen it by the feedback that we're getting from our customers. We work with anyone that is managing a sales team, whether it's stores, branches, kiosks, dealerships or showrooms. So our website is frontlineIQ.ai. We've got a pretty good description of each of the different use cases and how coaching impacts car dealerships or retail stores or quick serve restaurants. is a segment that's really starting to light on fire. So Ben, as we wrap up, who are some of the parts of the industry and the segments that you are most interested in meeting and how do people find you?