Bausparkasse Schwäbisch Hall helps people finance, build and protect their homes. Its field sales organization advises customers on home savings and mortgage financing, supported by the Schwäbisch Hall Academy.
The Academy develops sales talent and supports both field sales representatives and partner banks. Its job is not simply to share knowledge, but to help people turn that knowledge into confident action in real customer conversations.
The challenge
Schwäbisch Hall had consolidated proven approaches for important sales situations. The challenge was getting them into active use across a large, distributed field sales organization.
The Academy already supported representatives with digital learning, sales playbooks, best-practice videos, classroom training, field experience and local learning partners. Those formats could introduce an approach and show what good looked like. But knowing a method is not the same as being able to use it naturally when a customer raises an objection or takes the conversation somewhere unexpected.
Roleplay provided that missing practice and was difficult to scale. In a typical group session around ten participants trained with one coach: while one person practised, everyone else watched, and each might get a single attempt with little room to apply feedback and try again.
The format also created pressure. Roleplays happened in front of the group and were sometimes recorded. Participants often spent the morning anticipating their turn in the afternoon — an exercise designed to build confidence becoming the most uncomfortable part of the training day.
More roleplay would have meant more trainer time or displacing other essential content. Without it, representatives had to build fluency in live customer conversations.
The solution
With Sleak, the Academy turned its sales approaches into realistic practice scenarios that could be made available across the whole field sales organization.
The virtual customers respond to the conversation, raise relevant objections at natural moments and stay in character rather than following a rigid script. Representatives experience how an approach holds up when the conversation does not go to plan, instead of only reading about it or watching someone else demonstrate it.
They train independently, without a camera or an audience. Difficult moments can be repeated until the method feels natural, and mistakes happen in private rather than in front of a customer.
After every conversation Sleak gives immediate, structured feedback against consistent criteria — what worked, where it went wrong, what to change — which participants can apply in their next attempt.
For the Academy, simplicity mattered just as much: new scenarios can be created and adapted to Schwäbisch Hall's own sales context without a lengthy IT project. That gives it a repeatable way to take an approach from central guidance to hands-on practice across a large organization.
Results
The rollout has already produced more than 1,800 completed practice conversations.
To test whether practice actually improved execution, Schwäbisch Hall compared two groups with similar levels of sales knowledge. One completed a digital learning course; the other completed the same course plus two practice conversations with Sleak. Both then took part in the same final simulated customer conversation.
Better performance after just two practice conversations
The group that trained with Sleak scored 72.5% on average against 61.4% for the course-only group — an improvement of 11.1 percentage points after only two conversations.
The gap between what participants knew and what they could actually apply fell from 32.9 points to 13.9. Adding practice more than halved the distance between learning and doing.
Immediate feedback turned into immediate improvement
Progress was visible from one conversation to the next: scores rose by 14.1 points between the first and second practice conversation, then by a further 6.5 points in the final one. Participants were not simply receiving feedback — they were applying it in their very next attempt.
Strong user response
More than nine out of ten users said the training was useful and that they wanted to continue, or could see themselves continuing, to train with it.
Sleak turns a sales approach from something people are told about into something they can actually experience. The roleplays are highly adaptable, the feedback is direct, and participants can put it into practice in their very next conversation.
Johannes Skibowski, Head of Sales HR Management and Head of the Schwäbisch Hall Academy, Bausparkasse Schwäbisch Hall
What's next
The Academy sees AI-powered practice as a repeatable way to move sales approaches from central guidance into confident execution across the organization.
It is now exploring Sleak for customer service teams, who speak with customers every day and increasingly take on sales responsibilities — extending the same private, repeatable practice environment to more of the conversations that shape the customer experience.
