Why Rilla Beats Every Copycat in AI Coaching for In-Person Sales

AI coaching for in person sales - a little history

AI analyzing sales conversations is not a new concept.

It’s been tried since the 1990s in the call center whenever businesses started recording calls for “quality and training purposes.”

Back then, the process of analyzing calls was a bit manual.

Then in 2012, AI got good enough at transcribing human speech.

Then it got okay at analyzing transcriptions of human speech.

And around 2015 and 2016 companies like Gong and Chorus, started doing what we now know as conversation intelligence for sales.

A sales person talks to a customer, they record their conversations, an AI transcribes, analyzes, gives them feedback on how to improve, and gives companies insights.

Companies like Gong scaled this concept across thousands of companies, tens of thousands of sales people and they’ve done amazing. Genuinely. Gong does about 500 Million of Annual Recurring Revenue now.

The thing with companies like Gong, is that they focused almost exclusively on selling to tech companies like LinkedIn, and Rippling, and many other tech startups.

And they built their product exclusively for online sales. Where sales people talk to customers over Zoom or Google Meets.

That’s odd, because most sales people in the world still sell in person, not over zoom.

In most industries - like home building, multi family, home improvement, medical devices, retail, telco, and many more - sales people have to go out and talk to customers in their home, in a store, or in their office. Face to face.

And up until Rilla, nobody had really scaled this whole concept of AI coaching for in person sales….

Why?

This is a very hard problem

On the face of it, doing what Gong did, but for in-person sales sounds very simple.

Instead of recording with a Zoom bot, just record with an app on your phone, then everything else the same. Right?

Wrong.

In order to do this for in-person sales, every part of the problem becomes 100 times more difficult.

That is why, before Rilla, every company that tried to do this for in-person sales failed.

That’s including companies like Microsoft, Gong, Genesys, Call Miner, and many more.

Rilla had to figure out all the technology problems and product problems to actually make this work.

Technology problems

In order to do this properly, the product has to be able to: record, transcribe, analyze, give feedback to sales people, allow managers to coach quickly, and give insights to enterprises about their customers.

So let’s go into every one of these parts.

1. Recording

Recording sounds like the simplest part of the puzzle.

But we found it’s one of the hardest.

If you run a business where your sales people are talking to customers in-person for hours every day, you have to have a system that can record for hours every day.

Consumer phones and tablets — iOS and Android alike — were never built to record audio for hours at a time, let alone stream it live, so managers can give reps real-time feedback and coaching.

Doing that reliably across thousands of devices, in the field, with spotty connectivity is one of the most complicated engineering challenges we’ve had to face.

If you try to use any of the Rilla copy cats, even if you try to use Voice Memos on your iPhone to get your sales people to record their meetings, you’ll see that you’re going to lose about 40% of your recordings.

The apps will crash, the recording will stop any time there is a phone call, or the sales person uses their camera, or they simply keep the app in the background for too long.

And that’s not even including streaming. You’ll find that no other app can actually stream the audio in real time.

2. Transcription

Transcription for zoom meetings and phone calls is a solved problem. You can get up to 95% accuracy in some cases.

Transcription for in-person meetings is a completely different story.

In-person meetings are long, noisy, and contain multiple speakers speaking into the same microphones.

In order to transcribe accurately, you have to: clean up the noise, separate the speakers from each other, identify the sales person from the other speakers, and THEN transcribe the audio.

Before Rilla, there was no large dataset to train AI models to transcribe this audio.

With Rilla, we’ve been able to capture over 20 million hours of in-person sales conversations, and we’ve been able to fine tune our models to solve all these complicated audio issues.

If you use any other product that is not Rilla for this, you can expect your transcription accuracy to fall anywhere from 50-70%.

With Rilla, you can expect to get transcription accuracy above 90%.

3. Analysis

Once you have clean transcription, you can start the analysis. In order to do analysis quickly over hundreds, if not thousands of conversations your people are having, it is not enough to use off the shelf models like Claude or ChatGPT.

Rilla built proprietary systems to analyze thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of conversations quickly where you can actually get insights into all your customer conversations.

The copycats claim that their analytics are better than Rilla’s, but when you talk to their customers who switched, they often complain that they don’t trust the data, that they can’t fine tune their analytics to their own sales process, and that the other tools simply don’t work at getting them true insights into their conversations.

Getting sales people to use the product is insanely hard

When you do a recording of a zoom meeting, the zoom bot just joins automatically.

When you record an in person meeting, the sales person HAS to press the record button.

There is no way around this.

You might be thinking: How can I possibly get my sales people to press the button every single time that they talk to customers?

Exactly.

The short answer is sales people will not press the button consistently, even if you try to force them, if they are not getting immediate, consistent, and incredibly high value from the tool.

So far to this date, Rilla has been the only software that gets sales people to not only record their meetings but use the product consistently, every day, because we actually figured out how to give them immediate and long term value.

“But Rilla is Manager First… We Are Rep First”

You’ll often hear our copy cats saying this.

But that’s just because they’re still stuck on part 1 of the problem.

In order to build this product properly, you have to build three products.

1. One for the sales rep
2. One for the manager
3. One for the enterprise

If you don’t build those three products, the product doesn’t work.

You have to start with the sales person because if they don’t use the product, you don’t get any recordings, any value, or any ROI.

So you have to start with the sales person.

Rilla solved the sales person product back in 2022.

And we’ve since built the manager product and the enterprise product.

Look anywhere online and see what sales people actually say about Rilla vs the copycats.

With Rilla, you have some sales people who were at first hesitant to try the product, then after using it for a while, they become addicted.

With the copycats, sales people are proven right about their hesitations because the products don’t really work.

1. App crashes and doesn’t record
2. Transcription is inaccurate
3. There is no real time feedback
4. No way to do roleplays
5. The AI coaching is mediocre

So then they feel like it’s just a recording tool, not a coaching tool, and they stop using the product, and the implementation dies, and the product becomes shelf ware.

Rilla is the only tool with deep enough CRM integration to save reps hours of note-taking, deliver automatic feedback, power role-play practice for reps before and after real conversations, offer a hands-free option so reps can get coached while driving, let managers coach live with Rilla Live, and automate follow-up and pipeline management with Rilla Intelligence — plus a lot more features our copycats simply don't have.

Why Rilla is winning so much

While our copy cats are trying to figure out how to get sales people to use the product, over 50,000 sellers are using Rilla today every single day, and driving value for themselves, their teams and their companies.

Rilla now works with over 2,000 customers in the United States and across the world.

Which include the leading companies in every market we’ve gone after.

Home remodeling. We work with The Home Depot, Pella Windows, Kohler, Groundworks, and all the leading home remodeling companies.

Home services. We work with Apex Service Partners, Neighborly, Turnpoint Services, American Residential Services, Redwood Services, and all the top companies in Home Services.

Home building. We work with 50% of the Top 10 builders in America.

And we work with many Fortune 500s in many other industries including dental replacement, medical devices, and more.

Every single one of these large enterprises did a full side-by-side evaluation between Rilla and a competitor.

And every single time they picked Rilla.

The reason is not that Rilla was a little bit better than everyone else.

It’s that Rilla was the only solution that worked, while the others ended up becoming shelf-ware.

Tech is a winner take all market

This is not a coincidence, it’s a repeating pattern that happens across most technology markets.

The reason you probably found this article on Google and not Bing is because Google has 90% of the search market, Bing has 5%.

While Google has mastered search, ads, AI search, video search (with Youtube), map search (with maps), enterprise search (with Google Docs), and many more.

Bing is still stuck on trying to figure out the core search product.

Salesforce is the largest CRM in the world by something like 20x more revenue over its nearest competitor. These aren't close races.

In technology, the leader doesn't win by a little — it wins by an order of magnitude.

The reason is that software isn't a perfectly competitive market. Whoever has the most market share has the most resources — the most revenue, the most data, the most engineers — to keep making the product better. So they make it better, faster, while everyone with less share falls further behind. The lead compounds. The gap widens every year instead of closing.

That's exactly what's happening in AI coaching for in-person sales. This is not a situation where one tool is a little better and another is a little worse. Rilla is the only one that works at scale. The copycats bring headaches — recording that crashes, transcription that's wrong, analytics that don't work, and rollouts that end in disaster.

Rilla brings results. And because we have the share, the data, and the resources, that gap is getting wider, not smaller.

You can see it on the websites. Go to Rilla's site and nearly every customer tells you the same thing: their sales went up. Go to a copycat's site and all they can talk about is how they're supposedly better than Rilla — not the results they delivered for real customers, because there aren't many to point to.

The value that you might be missing

Here's where the winner-take-all gap becomes concrete. Because we have the market share, the data, and the resources, we've built an entire platform on top of the core product — while the copycats are still trying to make basic recording and transcription work. They sell a recorder. Rilla sells a system that records, coaches, trains, and turns thousands of conversations into enterprise insight:

• Rilla Live — real-time coaching and transcription that helps reps close the deal while the conversation is still happening, not days later in a post-mortem. See the Rilla Live case studies.
• Rilla Roleplay — lets reps practice on their own time, running through real scenarios and getting scored before they're ever in front of a customer.
• Rilla Intelligence — gives enterprises insight across the thousands of conversations their reps have with customers, so leaders can spot patterns, personalize workflows, and make decisions off what's actually being said in the field.
• Rick Copilot — an AI assistant coach that learns from all the feedback your managers give and then coaches reps automatically, so coaching scales without adding headcount.

No copycat offers this, because none of them has finished building the layer underneath it. You can't ship real-time coaching, automated AI coaching, and enterprise-wide conversation intelligence when your recording still crashes the app and your transcription is unreliable. They're playing catch-up on step one while Rilla is several products ahead.

This is the trap with buying a "cheaper version of Rilla." For enterprises looking for a discount alternative, the copycats won't give you anything more than you could build yourself for free — Voice Memos on your iPhone plus a ChatGPT subscription. A recording and a chatbot is not a coaching platform. Rilla is.

Bottom Line

Rilla is the market leader in AI coaching for in person sales. By far.

Going with anyone who is not the market leader is a very risky bet, because the product might not work as expected, and that causes a lot of pain and suffering.

Think of businesses who built their SEO strategy on Bing instead of Google back in the mid 2000s 💀.

So thank you for reading this. And I hope this was helpful.

If you have any more questions, reach out to your sales representative at Rilla, and if you really want to see which product is best for you, just literally test them out side by side on a pilot, so you can see for yourself.