How Qlik Scaled Sales Readiness with AI Role Plays

Overview

Founded in 1993, Qlik is a global leader in data integration, analytics, and AI-powered data solutions. Headquartered in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, Qlik helps organizations turn complex data into actionable insights, enabling teams to make faster, more informed business decisions. Today, the company serves more than 40,000 customers across over 100 countries, including many of the world's largest enterprises.

With approximately 3,700 employees worldwide and a global customer-facing organization spanning sales, presales, partner, and leadership teams, Qlik places a strong emphasis on seller readiness and continuous learning. As the company has evolved its go-to-market strategy, the enablement team looked for new ways to help sellers build confidence, practice critical customer conversations, and translate training into real-world execution.

The Challenge

Qlik had onboarding, training, and certification programs in place for its sellers, but those programs alone couldn't fully prepare sellers for real customer conversations. While traditional training and one-time certifications helped build product knowledge and validate understanding, they offered limited visibility into how sellers would handle objections, navigate difficult discussions, and apply what they had learned in a live selling environment.

As Nicholas Gregory, Global Head of Sales Enablement at Qlik, evaluated the team's coaching and readiness strategy, he recognized another challenge. Managers had limited time to review every practice session, deliver personalized coaching, and help sellers continuously improve at scale. The team needed a more efficient way for sellers to practice realistic customer conversations, receive immediate feedback, and build confidence before speaking with customers, while allowing managers to focus their coaching where it would have the greatest impact.

With a globally distributed sales organization, creating a consistent learning experience across regions was equally important. To close these gaps, Nicholas’ team introduced Mindtickle's AI Role Plays, giving every seller a scalable way to practice, refine objection handling, and improve customer conversations while helping managers coach more effectively and make better use of their time.

Solution

Traditional Practice Sessions vs AI Role Plays

Qlik wanted to move beyond traditional sales practice sessions that were difficult to scale and often depended on manager availability. While knowledge-based certifications helped assess what sellers knew, they did little to prepare them for the pressure and unpredictability of real customer conversations. To bridge that gap, Qlik introduced Mindtickle's AI Role Plays, giving every seller a safe environment to practice, make mistakes, and refine their approach before engaging with customers.

The rollout began with a creative James Bond-themed role play that encouraged sellers to step into realistic customer scenarios and experience AI coaching firsthand. What started as an engaging introduction quickly evolved into a core part of Qlik's sales enablement strategy, with AI Role Plays supporting sellers across regions and languages.

The experience resonated strongly with the sales team. As one Country Manager shared, "I felt nervous like the real world, but pre-preparation gave me the confidence to overcome the objections." By recreating authentic customer interactions, AI role plays helped sellers build confidence before entering high-stakes conversations.

Personalized Feedback and Smarter Coaching

Rather than providing generic scores, AI Role Plays evaluated sellers against predefined competencies, identifying specific strengths and areas for improvement after every practice session. Sellers could immediately apply the feedback, revisit challenging scenarios, and continue practicing until they felt confident in their delivery.

The impact was especially clear among top-performing sales reps. They preferred practicing with AI Role Plays over coaching sessions with their managers more than lower-performing reps did, showing how AI became a trusted coaching companion for the organization's top sellers.

The flexibility to practice repeatedly also helped sellers refine their communication and build stronger customer-facing skills. One Account Executive noted, "I enjoyed being able to run more flow sessions and improve my delivery." Another shared, "It certainly forced me to take detailed notes, which I'm now grateful to have at my disposal for future conversations."

Saving Managers Time to Coach

AI Role Plays also transformed the coaching experience for managers. Instead of manually reviewing every practice session, managers received structured assessments and AI-generated insights that highlighted where each seller needed support. This allowed them to spend less time evaluating recordings and more time delivering focused, high-impact coaching.

Mindtickle Copilot reviewing more than 3,000 AI Role Plays, saved approximately 850 hours of manager review time while ensuring every seller received consistent, objective feedback regardless of geography or team.

Embedding Continuous Learning into the Sales Workflow

Over time, AI Role Plays became part of Qlik's everyday sales workflow. Rather than treating certification as a one-time milestone, sellers regularly return to practice conversations, sharpen objection handling, and improve their performance before meeting customers.

This culture of continuous learning led to more than 9,000 completed AI Role Plays across 860 go-to market professionals, demonstrating sustained adoption across the organization.

The evolution of the AI experience was equally noticeable to sellers. As one team member reflected, "The AI is getting stronger. This felt like a stronger customer conversation than the ones before. I felt like he was genuinely calling me out when I just tried to save myself when I didn't do enough research." That realism helped make every practice session more valuable, reinforcing learning through repeated, authentic customer interactions.