Capturing what your top salespeople know

You can capture what your top salespeople know by interviewing them about real deals: the difficult questions they are asked, the objections they hear and how they pitch and win business. Their recorded answers can then become a searchable source of knowledge for the whole team and the material for practice conversations.

This guide is for sales directors and for people who buy learning and development for their company. It covers why this knowledge is hard to pass on, what the interviews cover and how the answers become something the whole team can search. It also explains how the same material gives people conversations to practise. The last section covers the consent and confidentiality points to settle first.

Inner Leader trains B2B sales teams and is working on this now with a specialist AI partner. This is current work, so the evidence in this guide comes from published research.

Why top performers' knowledge is hard to pass on

A top performer can handle a price objection well and still find it hard to tell you exactly how they did it. Much of what a top salesperson knows is tacit knowledge, which means knowledge a person uses without being able to explain it fully. The philosopher Michael Polanyi put it in one line in The Tacit Dimension in 1966: “we can know more than we can tell”.

Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi built on this idea in The Knowledge-Creating Company in 1995. They described tacit knowledge as personal, tied to its context and hard to communicate, and explicit knowledge as knowledge that has been written down. Their argument was that an organisation creates knowledge when the two kinds interact. Capturing what your best people know means turning some of the first kind into the second.

What the interviews with top salespeople cover

The interviews cover three things. It helps to ask about each one through real, recent deals.

• Difficult questions. Ask which questions from buyers are hardest to answer well and what your best people say in reply.
• Objections. Ask what buyers push back on, what sits behind each objection and how the top performer responds.
• How they pitch and win business. Ask how they open, what they choose to leave out and what they do to move a deal to a decision.

Three habits make the interviews more useful. The first is to ask about one specific deal at a time. The second is to keep prompting with questions such as “What did you say next?” and “What made you decide that?” The third is to interview more than one top performer, because each is likely to leave out different things.

Objections are worth extra time. Many of them point to an earlier part of the conversation that was not finished, which our guide to sales methodologies and qualification frameworks explains.

How the answers become a searchable source of knowledge

The aim is that a salesperson can type a question in plain English and read how your best people handle it. Work of this kind usually follows the same outline. The recordings are typed up, checked with the people who gave them and organised by situation.

They then go into an AI assistant, which is software a person can ask a question in plain English. It is set up to answer from your own team's material. You can think of it as the team's own GPT, which here means an AI assistant built on your own team's answers.

This is especially useful for a global sales team. The colleague who knows the answer may be in another time zone, and a new starter in one country may never meet the top performer in another. A shared source gives everyone the same answers at any hour.

There is some evidence for this from customer support. A study of 5,179 support agents by Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond was published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025. It found that novice and low-skilled workers gained most from an AI assistant. The authors found suggestive evidence that the tool was passing on the best practices of the more able workers. The study did not cover sales teams.

Someone in your business needs to be responsible for what the assistant says. AI tools can give a wrong answer confidently, which is known as hallucinating. A study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies found that legal research tools built to answer from trusted sources “each hallucinate between 17% and 33% of the time”. We suggest you name one person who checks what the assistant says about prices, contract terms and product claims. The same person can add new material when your products or competitors change.

How the same interviews become practice conversations

The interviews also give you the material for practice. The difficult questions and objections your buyers raise become the script for an AI that plays the buyer, and your top performers' answers show what a good response sounds like. A salesperson can then practise the conversation between training sessions.

Practice needs feedback to work. In a study presented in 2026, novice counsellors who practised with patients played by an AI and received feedback improved their skills. Those who practised alone showed less empathy afterwards than before. Our article on how to use AI in sales training goes through that research and where a trainer fits.

Consent and confidentiality in recorded interviews

A recorded interview contains personal data, so UK data protection law applies before anyone presses record. This section is general information and is not legal advice. Your data protection lead should make the decisions.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) says in its guidance on AI and data protection that you should identify the purpose and an appropriate lawful basis for each processing operation. A lawful basis is the legal ground that allows you to use someone's personal data.

The ICO's guidance on what counts as valid consent says freely given consent is more difficult to obtain where there is an imbalance of power, and it names employers as an example. It also says people must be able to withdraw consent easily at any time. The ICO notes on both pages that the guidance is under review because of the Data (Use and Access) Act, so it is worth checking the current version.

These are the points to settle with your data protection lead before the first interview.

• Tell each person what the recording is for, who will be able to use their answers and for how long.
• Ask each person whether they want their name attached to their answers.
• Take customer names, prices and contract details out of the material, or agree in writing what can stay.
• Ask the AI supplier where the data is stored, who can see it and whether it is used to train an AI tool that anyone else uses.
• Decide what happens to a person's answers if they leave the business or ask for them to be removed.

How captured knowledge supports sales training

A source of knowledge tells a salesperson what a good answer is. Being able to give that answer under pressure, in their own words, takes practice with feedback, and that is the job of training.

In our consultative sales training, people practise PEPITA®, our six-stage consultative selling model, in role-plays built on their own products and buyers. The captured knowledge and the simulation support that training.

Inner Leader is working on this now with a specialist AI partner. The work starts with interviewing the top talent in a sales team, which can be a global sales team. Their answers become the team's own source of wisdom and knowledge.

This is current work and we do not have results of our own to share yet. If this is something you are exploring for your own team, you can tell us about your sales team and we will reply within one business day.