Adolf Würth GmbH & Co. KG is the largest individual company in the Würth Group and a market leader in assembly and fastening materials. Its nationwide sales organisation serves trade and industrial customers through a large network of field sales representatives and branches.
Few companies in Germany are as closely associated with professional sales as Würth. The company continuously invests in the people, methods and technology behind its sales organisation, including new AI tools that help employees perform at their best.
For Würth, the question was therefore not whether practical sales training mattered. It was how to make high-quality practice available at the scale of the organisation.
The challenge
Würth already had effective phone-sales training. A specialist trainer worked with individual sales districts on how to approach customers, conduct better calls, and bring more customers into local branches.
The format worked for the teams it reached, but it depended on one trainer moving from district to district. Its reach was determined by a person's calendar, not by the number of sales representatives who could benefit from the training.
That made the model difficult to scale across a nationwide organisation. Classroom workshops could only reach a limited number of people at a time, while e-learning could explain an approach but could not recreate the pressure and unpredictability of a real customer conversation.
Würth needed to preserve the practical value of its phone coaching while removing the limits of location, scheduling and trainer capacity. Every representative needed a way to practise relevant conversations repeatedly, receive useful feedback, and improve at their own pace.
The solution
Würth introduced Sleak through an initial pilot with around 80 participants. Instead of learning only through a workshop or watching a model conversation, sales representatives could now speak with realistic virtual customers and practise the situations they encounter in their daily work.
The scenarios reflect Würth's real sales environment, including conversations with inactive or at-risk customers, customer acquisition, cross-selling and upselling, and price discussions. The virtual counterpart responds dynamically, raises objections, and adapts to what the representative says rather than following a fixed script.
After every conversation, Sleak provides immediate, structured feedback based on criteria defined with Würth. Representatives can see what worked, where the conversation lost momentum, and what to change in their next attempt. They can then repeat the scenario while the feedback is still fresh.
This turned phone training from an event delivered district by district into an on-demand practice environment. Representatives can train when it fits their schedule, repeat difficult situations as often as needed, and build confidence before speaking with a real customer.
For the first time, we have a training format that scales with our field sales organisation and meets every employee at their individual level.
Felix Roll, Project Lead, Würth
Results
From an 80-person pilot to more than 5,000 employees
The initial pilot demonstrated that realistic conversation practice could be delivered without tying every session to a trainer. Würth subsequently expanded access, with more than 5,000 employees across sales and leadership now able to use the platform.
This gives Würth a consistent way to translate internal expertise into individual practice across districts, branches, roles and experience levels. The same quality criteria can guide every session, while each employee can focus on the situations most relevant to their own development.
Realistic, useful and engaging
Participants rate Sleak an average of 4.76 out of 5. Their feedback consistently highlights three aspects of the experience: the realism of the scenarios, the value of the feedback, and the confidence they build for real customer conversations.
I really liked the highly realistic conversation flow with different customers.
Würth sales representative
For participants, the training combines serious development with an experience that is easy to engage with. One described the greatest benefit as "feeling more confident in conversations". Another compared the experience to being "a bit like a computer game".
Expanding into leadership and other business functions
The success of the sales initiative showed that other parts of Würth could benefit from the same combination of on-demand practice and immediate feedback.
Würth is now expanding Sleak into leadership development, with training for conversations such as feedback, reflection and employee development. Leaders can prepare privately, receive structured guidance, and repeat the conversations that help employees grow.
Leadership is an important next step in a broader expansion. Würth can apply the same model wherever employees benefit from practising high-impact conversations, turning internal standards and expertise into development that is available when people need it.
A partnership built around co-creation
Würth has played an active role in Sleak's development from the beginning. Rather than buying a fixed solution, the teams worked together to adapt the product to the realities of a large, distributed sales organisation.
Würth's feedback helped shape Sleak's leadership-training capabilities, which are now available to other organisations as well. Its requirements around security, compliance and enterprise deployment also helped strengthen the platform for use at scale.
This design partnership continues as Sleak develops an upcoming phone-based training experience for field sales teams. Built with input from Würth, it will let representatives start practice directly from their mobile phones, reducing the distance between a real customer situation and the training that prepares them for it.
What's next
Würth plans to deepen the use of Sleak across both sales and leadership development, giving more employees regular opportunities to practise the conversations that matter most in their roles.
The mobile experience will bring training even closer to the daily rhythm of the field sales organisation. A representative will be able to practise before the next customer call, revisit a difficult situation between appointments, or work on a specific skill without returning to a desk.
For Würth, this is the next step in a long-standing approach to sales excellence: combining proven methods with new technology so that practical development can move at the same scale and speed as the organisation itself.
