The past couple of weeks, the Luster team partnered with renowned sales trainer John Barrows for a first-of-its-kind experiment: combining his legendary live workshop with Luster’s Predictive Enablement™ Platform, leveraging AI Roleplay platform to measure, reinforce, and prove the real ROI of sales training.
The results? Reps didn’t just learn — they transformed.
The Challenge
How Do You Prove Sales Training Works?
Most sales leaders agree that training matters, but when budgets tighten, one question always surfaces: “How do we know it’s actually working?”
Historically, enablement has relied on subjective metrics: feedback forms, attendance rates, and self-assessments. The missing piece?
A measurable way to see skill growth tied directly to real-world selling behaviors.
That’s exactly what we set out to solve.
The Experiment
Barrows Training + Luster AI Roleplay
Together with John Barrows, we designed an experiment with a clear structure:
- Baseline AI Roleplay: Reps practiced a discovery call with an AI persona, a RevOps leader, selling a CRM. Luster’s AI assessed three key behavioral skills aligned with John’s Discovery training and scored each rep objectively.
- Live Training Workshop: John led his signature “Driving to Close” with a focus on Discovery session teaching reps how to control the conversation, question impact, and connect to real business outcomes.
- Post-Training AI Roleplay: After the workshop, reps repeated the same scenario, this time applying what they learned. Luster re-measured performance across three core discovery skills:
- Prepare for the Meeting
- Question the Impact
- Confirm & Control the Conversation
The Data: Proving Skill Lift with AI
Across the group, we saw clear, measurable improvement:
Top Three Individual Reps By Growth
- Rep #1 – +39 point lift
- Rep #2 – +33 point lift
- Rep #3 – +27 point lift
These reps showed dramatic improvement not just in confidence and control, but in how they guided conversations toward measurable business outcomes.
What We Learned
1. Training Works — When You Can See It
John’s training clearly drove behavioral change. Luster made it visible, quantifiable, and actionable.
Reps who internalized Barrows’ frameworks saw immediate AI-measured improvement — especially in their ability to control conversations and confirm value alignment.
2. AI Coaching Reinforces Live Learning
After each session, reps received AI-generated coaching tailored to their skill gaps:
- Managers could instantly see where each rep needed reinforcement.
- Reps could keep practicing asynchronously with AI.
The result: continuous enablement that turns one-time workshops into lasting behavior change.
3. You Can Predict (and Prevent) Revenue Risk
By analyzing skill data, Luster revealed the biggest risk area:
- Reps were controlling calls effectively — but often failing to quantify business impact.
- That insight will allow enablement teams to focus coaching on “monetizing pain,” accelerating deals and improving forecast accuracy.
🔮 The Future of Training Is Measurable
This workshop wasn’t just a test — it was a proof of concept for how sales training and AI coaching can finally work hand-in-hand.
With Luster, you can:
- See skill growth before and after every enablement program
- Reinforce it with real-time AI coaching for reps
- Equip managers with coaching plans that drive retention and revenue
No more guessing if your training worked. You’ll know — and you’ll have the data to prove it.
“The best training doesn’t end when the workshop does. It starts to compound when reps can practice and measure those skills in real time.”
- John Muldoon
The Best of Both Worlds: JB Sales Training + Luster AI Coaching
John Barrows' Driving to Close training and approach empowers salespeople to lead with curiosity, control, and confidence. Luster’s Predictive Enablement™ Platform makes those behaviors measurable — using AI to analyze reps’ roleplays, predict performance gaps, and prescribe personalized coaching.
Together, they’re redefining what “sales readiness” means in the modern revenue org.
If your goal is to build a high-performing, consistent sales org, combining JB Sales training with Luster AI coaching is the most powerful system on the market.
👉 Get JB training for your team
👉 Bring Luster into your org
Together, they create a repeatable, scalable, measurable path to high performance.
