Onboarding: Train the Agent Like an SDR

Guests

• Yuri Vela Tulopov -- Co-Founder and CEO, ShowMe
• Quique Gomez -- Co-Founder and Lead Product Engineering, ShowMe

What we cover in this episode:

• How ShowMe builds AI digital workers that function as inbound sales reps
• The origin story: spotting the conversion gap at a previous company and realizing AI could fill it
• Why the first MVP was a voice agent with product videos and a simple RAG knowledge base
• Adding a realistic avatar via HeyGen and how it changed user engagement through better affordances
• Decomposing a single sales conversation into multiple specialized sub-agents (greetings, qualifying, pitching)
• The three agent types: conversation agents, evaluator agents, and creator agents
• How deterministic workflows manage the lead-to-close journey across days
• Building toward a smart orchestrator agent that breaks out of rigid workflow paths
• Ingesting sales transcripts and training materials to teach agents company-specific sales skills
• Customer-driven evaluation loops that start at 100% review and taper to ~5% over time
• Creating automated tests from customer feedback to prevent prompt regression
• Confidence scoring and frustration detection for real-time human handoff decisions
• Treating the agent as a coworker: onboarding via Slack, weekly reporting, CRM integration
• Future plans: self-serve PLG motion, smart orchestration, and expanding to customer success

Resources & Links

• ShowMe - AI digital sales reps for inbound teams
• HeyGen - AI avatar platform used for ShowMe's video calls

Chapters

00:00 Meet the Founders: Juri & Kike Introduce Show Me 00:45 What Show Me Builds: AI Sales Reps as Digital Coworkers 02:17 Why Inbound-First Sales Agents (and Not Outbound Spam) 03:51 Origin Story: The Website Conversion Problem That Sparked the Idea 08:11 MVP Launch: Voice + Video Product Demos in Two Weeks 10:45 Bootstrapping the Knowledge Base: Videos, Docs, Scraping & RAG 11:54 Beyond Demos: Multi-Stage Buyer Journeys, Follow-Ups & Orchestration 14:34 Building Trust: Avatars, Video-Call UX, and AI “Affordances” 20:18 Whiteboard Architecture: Agents, Workflows, and the Orchestrator Layer 29:43 Where Agents Run: Creators, Evaluators, and Breaking Deterministic Flows 32:18 Sales Is High-Stakes: Personalization vs. Hallucinations & Revenue Risk 33:35 Conversation Agent Evolution: From Q&A Bot to Guided Sales Discovery 34:10 Why One Agent Becomes Many: Decomposing Stages for Latency & Memory 36:36 Orchestrator + Tooling: Routing Between Greeting, Qualify, Pitch, Next Steps 38:46 Teaching Sales Skills: Generic Prompting vs Company-Specific Playbooks 42:52 Ingesting Real Calls & Onboarding Like a Teammate (Transcripts, Training Docs) 45:05 Real-Time Voice + Avatar Demos: Latency Tricks and Video Clip Libraries 47:33 Creator vs Evaluator Agents: Data Cleaning, Custom Fields, Sentiment & Confidence 49:15 Human Handoff Guardrails: When Confidence Drops or Users Get Frustrated 50:15 Proving Quality in Production: POCs, A/B Rollouts, Dashboards, and CRM Logging 53:21 Evals at Scale: Customer Feedback Loops, Regression Tests, and the 5% Review Set 58:19 What’s Next: Smarter Orchestration, Self-Serve Setup, and More Digital Workers 01:02:07 Closing Thoughts: Customer Insight as the Moat in a Fast-Moving AI World