How to Choose the Best Sales Roleplay Tools in 2025: A Buyer's Guide That Actually Works

Since 2023, AI roleplays have become a core part of every sales team's tech stack. The numbers tell an impressive story: companies adding AI to their sales training achieved 3.3× higher year-over-year quota attainment growth compared to others and new hires become productive 37% faster - a clear business advantage. 

When exploring different tools, the nuanced differences between products can be overwhelming. In this article, I will give you a detailed breakdown of how you should evaluate AI roleplay offerings based on your organization's specific needs. 

Before we start - a disclaimer 

My name is Chase Meredith, and I am the founder of Replay (a company that sells AI roleplays). I decided to write this article after learning how much time our prospects spend evaluating AI roleplay tools: hours of calls with vendors, testing in practice environments, and filling out complicated excel sheets. 

We've been building our AI roleplay product for almost three years now - and have seen every AI roleplaying tool on the market. This guide should cut the decision making process in half by equipping you with the right mindset and questions to ask. 

Start by qualifying yourself

Before you start evaluating different AI roleplay tools, make sure you are clear on why you need a roleplay tool and how you would like to use it:

Common problems AI roleplays solve

The core problem that an AI roleplay solves is the inverse correlation between scalable and impactful training: the more "automated" your training is, the less likely it is for it to be impactful for the students. This problem leads to the following business impacts for sales teams:

• Large time investment in onboarding

• High turnover rate for new reps 

• Struggling to hold reps accountable to training

Best use cases for AI roleplays

Making sure your team does their roleplays is half of the equation. Here are the best ways we've seen teams use AI roleplays: 

• Automating onboarding process

• Training on new products/scripts

• Daily/weekly training session homework

• Performance improvement plans (PIP)

• Interview screening

• Preparing for important conversations

If these problems and use cases resonate with you, then you’re probably ready to start looking for an AI roleplay solution.

Questions to ask AI roleplay vendors (and the answers you should look for)

Specific features help you pick the best AI roleplay tool for your sales team. Let's get into the key capabilities that separate top platforms from the field. Below is a list of questions (Q:) you should ask your vendors, as well as a list of answers you want to hear (A:).

Roleplay building process

There are three core parts to every roleplay: a customer profile, a scenario, and a scorecard. Generally, each of these parts can be re-used across multiple roleplays (ex: you re-use a customer on a cold call customer and an objection handling roleplay). Here are important questions to ask about the roleplay building process: 

• Q: How long does it take you to build a high-quality roleplay entirely from scratch? 

  • A: Emphasis on the "from scratch" part. I would say 10-15 minutes is the industry standard to build a customer, scenario, and scorecard from scratch (but Replay customers can build roleplays in as little as 30 seconds).

• Q: Can I build my own, custom scenarios, customer profiles, and scorecards from scratch?

  • A: Make sure you can customize EACH of these three parts. A roleplay is only as valuable as it is realistic, so it is important that you are able to build custom scenarios, customers, and scorecards. 

  • Some vendors don't let you build your own scenarios, which can be extremely limiting to what you can train on.

• Q: Can you use internal training documents to build roleplays? 

  • A: Answer should be yes

Roleplay experience 

Realism is really important for an AI roleplay. While you should always try the roleplay yourself, here are a couple questions to ask to make sure the roleplay experience is as realistic and capable as possible: 

• Q: Does the AI follow a script?

  • A: No, the AI should not follow a script. If the AI does follow a script, run. This is not using AI realistic and does not reflect a real conversation with your customers. 

• Q: What voice models do you use? 

  • A: Eleven labs and Cartesia are great, Open.AI is good, and Azure is bad. You can also judge the quality of the voices by listening to a roleplay. 

• Q: What is the average response time of the AI customer? 

  • A: Anything under 500 miliseconds is good.

• Q: Can you interrupt the customer? 

  • A: Answer should be yes. Bonus points if you can toggle this feature on and off.

• Q: Can the AI understand your video? And can you screenshare with the AI?

  • A: Answer should be yes. 

• Q: Can you roleplay with a live avatar? 

  • A: Answer should be yes.

• Q: Can you chat instead of voice? 

  • A: Answer should be yes.

Scoring

High quality, instant feedback is very important. Make sure to ask the following questions to make sure you have high quality scoring: 

• Q: Can I customize the scorecard? How much? 

  • A: Repeat question from the building process section, but super important, so it's worth asking again. Your roleplay is only as valuable as how custom it is to your training. You should be able to build a completely custom scorecard from scratch.

• Q: How long does the analysis take to load? 

  • A: Should be 5-10 seconds or less

• Q: What para-verbals can you measure (Tone, pitch, volume, pace, enunciation, filler words, sentiment/emotions, pauses, and laughter)?

  • A: Filler words, volume, and pace are the minimum expectation. Sentiment/emotions are slightly more impressive. Great tools can also measure tone, pitch, enunciation, pauses, and laughter

• Q: Can you measure facial expressions and body language? 

  • A: Should be yes, but depending on your sales process, this might not be important.

Conclusion

Your sales team's success depends on picking the right AI roleplay tool. Great sales performance comes from quality training. You need to evaluate key aspects like scenario building speed, roleplay flexibility, para-verbal scoring, non-verbal feedback, and how naturally it works with your current systems.

Smart AI roleplay investments lead to real results. Teams onboard faster, win more deals, and close sales in less time.

If you liked this article and want to learn more about an AI roleplay tool that checks all these boxes, check Replay out at www.replay.sale or book a meeting with me here.