FEGA & Schmitt is an electrical wholesaler and part of the Würth Group. Around 1,450 employees serve customers from approximately 60 locations across central and southern Germany.
As the business grows and roles keep changing, employees need to develop beyond their initial training. The challenge was never a lack of expertise. It was making practical, company-specific development available at scale.
The challenge
The sales teams work across a large network of local branches. Individual locations rarely have enough participants to justify their own classroom training, so practical sessions had to be organised centrally or regionally — which meant travel, fixed dates and time away from customers.
The knowledge required for high-quality training also sat in relatively few places. Experienced trainers understood the company's structure, terminology and customer context, but transferring that across dozens of locations was difficult. Bringing in additional trainers did not solve it quickly, because building the same level of company context takes time.
Traditional group roleplay was equally hard to scale. Employees had limited opportunities to practise, and performing in front of six, ten or twelve colleagues did not bring out the best in everyone. More reserved participants sometimes held back, or performed below their real ability, because the training situation itself felt uncomfortable.
What was needed was a way to make the company's best conversation knowledge available to more people — while giving each of them enough space to practise independently and learn from immediate feedback.
The solution
FEGA & Schmitt introduced Sleak as an on-demand practice partner for its distributed sales organisation.
Employees train from their own location and fit practice around the working day. They speak with a realistic virtual counterpart, work through a relevant business situation, and get structured feedback immediately afterwards. Difficult moments can be repeated until a better response feels natural.
The private format removes much of the pressure that comes with group roleplay. People can experiment, make mistakes and improve without performing in front of colleagues or waiting their turn in a classroom.
Just as importantly, the training sounds like FEGA & Schmitt. Short briefings were enough to incorporate the company's terminology, organisational context and typical conversation patterns — turning internal expertise into repeatable practice without every trainer first needing years of company knowledge.
What surprised me was how quickly Sleak picked up our terminology. After only a few short briefings, it felt like speaking with someone from our own company.
Martina Skibowski, Head of HR, People & Culture, FEGA & Schmitt
The realism became clear during an internal leadership meeting. A short excerpt from a practice conversation was played, and it initially sounded like a recording of a real exchange rather than an AI simulation: the virtual counterpart listened, responded, asked relevant questions and adapted naturally to what was said.
Results
Practical training reached more than 100 teams
What began as a focused sales initiative has grown to more than 900 employees across over 100 teams. People practise relevant conversations wherever they work, without travelling to a central location or waiting for a scheduled group session.
Participants rate the experience at 4.83 out of 5 on average. What they value most is the chance to try a difficult conversation before it happens, get immediate feedback, and apply it in the next attempt while the experience is still fresh.
Other functions adopted the same model
As the sales use case expanded, other parts of the business recognised that the same platform could prepare their teams for important conversations of their own. Sleak is now used across sales — for customer acquisition, offer follow-up and reactivation — as well as procurement for supplier negotiations, leadership for feedback and development conversations, and HR for faster onboarding and early employee conversations.
The expansion reflects a broader lesson from the rollout: practice is valuable wherever someone has to navigate a consequential conversation. The setting changes; the underlying need does not. People perform better when they can prepare, practise, get feedback and try again before the real moment arrives.
What's next
FEGA & Schmitt plans to keep scaling Sleak across teams while broadening the range of conversations employees can prepare for.
To make training more adaptive in the moment, it is also exploring Sleak's AI-assisted authoring tools: sales representatives creating practice scenarios for upcoming customer conversations, turning a specific challenge into a realistic simulation and preparing for it while the opportunity is still live.
