How Equity Trust Company cut the time managers spend coaching new hires by 3x with EasyCoach

William Salm is a Learning and Development Specialist at Equity Trust Company, and he works primarily with the sales team. His job is to get new hires in sales and support roles ready for real client conversations, and quickly. 

Before EasyCoach, getting new hires ready for real conversations meant live roleplay with sales leadership, and there was only so much of that leadership’s time to go around. Every new hire needed real practice and feedback, and that put pressure on managers’ calendars and made onboarding expensive and inconsistent. 

Today, William has built more than 70 roleplays in EasyCoach, and the time managers spend coaching new hires has dropped by 3x. “Leadership stopped being asked to run every single repetition of roleplay,” William said. “Instead, what they got to do is review the outputs, look at the data, and that’s a fraction of the time and a much higher value use of their attention.” 

William was being asked to get new hires ready for real client conversations, and quickly. “I’m not able to sit on each roleplay, have each conversation, do each roleplay over and over again,” he said. “There’s only one of me. There’s a lot of new hires.” 

Running roleplay well also called for deep sales expertise, and that expertise sat with sales leadership, not with William’s training team. “I am not an expert when it comes to having our sales conversations,” he said. “I’m more of an expert when it comes to building the training.” That meant the real bottleneck sat with leadership. “We needed them to be having these conversations with our sales reps, with our sales support staff. Real practice, real feedback,” he said. 

The process also had a consistency problem. The handoff from training to live calls was informal and depended on which manager a new hire was assigned to. Two new hires with the same training could end up with different coaching and different outcomes. 

William brought the problem to Easygenerator and used EasyCoach as an AI roleplay partner that could run scenarios repeatedly without a manager’s calendar being involved. 

Building a roleplay starts with a title and an AI character, then traits, context, interaction rules, and evaluation criteria. “It was really easy to use the software,” William said. “The structure is very simple.” The real work, he found, happens before he opens the tool. It means gathering real scripts, common objections, and examples of what a good conversation sounds like. “The real lift with getting these off the ground is getting them to have good source material to provide me before I put it in the tool,” he said. Once he has that material, building the roleplay itself is fast. “I can probably stand one up now, when I have source material, in less than an hour,” he said. Working that way, he has built more than 70 roleplays over the past couple of months. 

William also built a process to bring colleagues into roleplay creation, so momentum would not depend on him alone. He created a reusable template that lets colleagues build their own roleplays for their teams, and he sequences each new hire’s practice by complexity. “We start off with our simplest and easiest conversations, and then we layer in objections, resistant callers, edge cases,” he said. “We build up the confidence.” Before any roleplay goes live, he and the team write a rubric together, because otherwise, he said, “I’m just guessing.” To keep the conversations realistic, he pulls language directly from top performers. “I’m stealing real language from my sales and support staff,” he said. “I want to know what my top representatives are saying. I want dialogue. I want the AI giving me feedback that’s very real.” 

The time managers spend coaching new hires dropped from roughly 15 hours a week to about 5, and new hires now reach call-ready status in almost half the time. 

“Manager coaching time for us has gone down significantly,” William said. Sales managers used to spend close to 15 hours a week drilling new hires, and now that number is closer to 5. Ramp-up time improved too. “Ramp up time is faster,” he said. New hires used to need about 8 weeks to move from onboarding into the early stages of being call-ready, and today that takes about 4 to 5 weeks. 

Those two numbers, the hours back on managers’ calendars and the faster ramp-up, are what William used to bring leadership on board. He was deliberate about how he framed the shift. “I made a point of leading with how this was a win, not a limitation,” he said. “I framed it as context, not a constraint.” Rather than asking leadership to take his word for it, he gave them the numbers directly. “I gave them visibility. I gave them admin access into the reporting, into the performance data so they could see,” he said. Once leaders could see the time coming back to their own calendars, buy-in followed easily.

William uses EasyCoach to diagnose training gaps, not only to run practice reps. 

One benefit William did not expect was data. As he began grading roleplays and reviewing results over time, patterns appeared that pointed to gaps in the training itself. One example stood out. Equity Trust has a process for setting up limited liability companies (LLCs) that involves several complicated forms, and new hires kept struggling to explain it. “I noticed that people were really struggling when describing this process to the AI roleplay bot,” William said. “That was able to inform me, okay, training needs to be improved in these spots and give us that visibility on it.” 

That insight changed how William uses EasyCoach day to day. “We use the tool to diagnose, just not as practice,” he said. “We go in there, we look at the data and say, where are the gaps for this learner? Where are the gaps for this role? How can we get better? What do we need to practice more?” Today, William and his colleagues keep 40 to 50 roleplays in active rotation across new hires and current reps, and the library keeps growing as new gaps surface. “I’m really grateful for the software,” he said.