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One hundred branch managers who had never sold pest control. Twenty-five thousand conversations they couldn't hear.
16 hours
Of recorded role play per rep in under three weeks — without taking a single rep off the road
About
Rentokil Terminix is the North American arm of Rentokil Initial, the world's largest pest control company. Its residential and commercial teams sell and service pest control, termite protection and related home services through a branch network across the United States.
Headquarters
Memphis, TN, USA
Industry
Environmental Services
Employees
10,001+ employees
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THE CHALLENGE
The coaching happened in a truck. Nobody else was in it.
A pest control sales rep spends the day alone. They pull up outside a house, walk a crawlspace, find termite damage under a porch, and then sit at a kitchen table with a homeowner who has already decided this is going to be expensive. Whatever happens next happens with no one else in the room.
Rentokil Terminix runs that scene thousands of times a week. In one market alone, Regional Sales Manager Ryan Bueler was responsible for the skills of 258 residential colleagues reporting to around 100 branch managers. Most of those branch managers had come up through operations. They ran routes, fleets, technicians and P&Ls. They had never carried a sales bag.
So the company had a structural problem, not a training problem. It had plenty of people accountable for sales coaching and very few who had ever done the job. “There's a huge gap between sales knowledge and the people that are required to deliver sales knowledge,” Ryan says.
The gap showed up as silence. Managers could see a dashboard. They could not hear a conversation. “We just don't know what our reps are actually saying when we're not riding with them.”
The obvious fix — ride along, or run role play at the branch meeting — broke in a specific and human way. Ricky Adams, a sales manager in Region 58, described what happened when he sat next to one of his reps: “When I'm sitting right beside them, they're a nervous wreck... I'm not hearing what they're saying when I'm not around.”
Jason Black, who runs a region, said the quiet part out loud. His reps froze in front of the group at the sales kickoff. Everyone had always read that as stage fright. Jason read it as a preview: “The same thing they're doing in front of us at a group is the same thing they're doing in front of a customer at a home, and that's the reason they're not selling business.”
The nerves weren't the problem. The nerves were the report.
And the company's own numbers said the cost of that blind spot was not small. Across more than four hundred reps with comparable deal volume, the reps who proposed more than one line of business earned roughly two and a half times the median revenue of the reps who proposed a single line — despite closing a lower share of their proposals. The metric a manager could see on a dashboard, close rate, pointed at the wrong reps. The behaviour that actually drove revenue — what a rep chose to put on the table at that kitchen table — was only visible inside the conversation nobody could hear.
To coach a sales force it could not listen to, Rentokil Terminix turned to SecondBody.
THE SOLUTION
Practice where nobody's watching. Coaching where everybody can see.
Ryan Bueler ran the build himself. He had already looked at the off-the-shelf AI role play tools and rejected them for one reason: he could not control how the AI talked to his reps. He needed to design the customer — the objections, the triggers, the moment the homeowner goes quiet — so that a rep practising against it was practising against Rentokil's customer, not a generic one.
The first real test ran in Jason Black's region: roughly 35 reps and 15 managers across eight or nine branches, over about a month. Reps practised in short bursts — 13 to 17 minutes a day — in their trucks, between stops. No classroom. No travel. No manager sitting beside them.
That was the whole design point, and it came from the reps, not from us. Shirley Riddle, a branch manager, put it the way her team understood it: “This is a way you all can sit in your truck and role-play back and forth without eyes on you.”
What her reps got wrong in the truck stayed in the truck. What they learned came out of it. “They know they're not getting picked apart by the management or other members on the team, and they can back up and maybe restart.”
Then the second thing happened, and it was the thing that changed the account.
Every practice conversation was recorded, transcribed and scored against the standard Ryan had built. Which meant a branch manager who had never sold anything could open a rep's session, read what the rep actually said, and read what good would have sounded like — side by side. The manager didn't need to know sales. The manager needed to know what to repeat.
“The tool kind of gave the branch managers the ability to say, look, I don't know sales, but I can look at this tool and what it said about the last role play. And I can echo that and maybe build on that... over time you get the sales process through osmosis.”
That inverted where Ryan spent his week. His problem had never been advice. His problem was distance. “90% of my job is, I could give great advice all day long to the direct field people, but the daily coaching is what they really need from their branch manager that's with them every day.”
We've seen measurable improvements in objection handling and demo transitions after just a few weeks using SecondBody.
Ryan Bueler
Regional Sales Manager - Residential, Rentokil Terminix
The trial also surfaced something the company could not have found any other way. When the AI hit reps with a price objection, most of them reached for the same escape hatch — go ask the manager for a discount. Not one rep's bad habit. A pattern, visible across a team, coachable in a single meeting.
THE IMPACT
The managers who knew least about sales used it most
The prediction going in was that the strong sales managers would take to it and the operations-background managers would resist. The opposite happened, and Jason Black watched it happen across his region: “The ones that were weak, average, or whatever else, they were more involved with getting their team to go through it, engaged in it, and more excited with the potential of a platform, helping their team show them what good looks like.”
The managers who already knew how to coach didn't need a new way to coach. The managers who didn't had been carrying that gap privately for years. Ricky Adams named it: “We've got a lot of branch managers that have never coached or managed sales departments before... how do I push them to do it if I don't even know how to do it?”
That reframed the product inside Rentokil Terminix. It stopped being a rep training tool and became a manager tool that reps happened to use.
Every manager in the trial said they would back the investment. Ryan took it up the chain. The company bought it, and moved from a single region's trial to a market-wide rollout, starting with the top performers — brought in first not to be trained, but to record what good sounds like so the platform could teach it to everyone else.
Ryan's own case for the money was a capability argument, not a software argument: he believed reps producing at a given level were capable of close to double it, and that the difference was daily coaching he could not personally deliver.
Every manager
In the trial said they would back the investment when asked directly
16 hours
Every rep recorded a role play in under three weeks.
Where it's time to mess up is on this — not when we're sitting down in front of the customer.
Jason Black
Regional Director, Rentokil Terminix
Ricky Adams landed on the analogy that stuck with the room. “Have you ever been to an NFL practice? You get all your different positions practicing together. But then on a field far away from everybody, you get the kicker and the placeholder... when game time comes, muscle memory sets in.” The kicker doesn't practise in front of the team. He practises alone, so that the one moment that counts is boring.
The reps who leaned in practised more than anyone expected — enough that Ryan asked for usage caps, because some of them would rather spend another hour with the AI than another hour with a customer. That is a strange problem to have. It is also the first time in the account that the constraint on coaching was appetite rather than access.
WHAT’S NEXT
From practising the conversation to coaching the pipeline
The next phase moves from rehearsal to reality. Rentokil Terminix is piloting Rory — a coach that reads a rep's live pipeline and calls them on WhatsApp — starting on the residential side, where the data is cleanest.
The reason is arithmetic. One residential rep's export covers 296 leads. Of those, 145 sit at “proposed” and have not moved. 62 are flagged overdue. No branch manager reads 296 rows for one rep, let alone for a branch, and then works out which three conversations to have on Monday morning. Rory does that first, then talks the rep through it.
The relationship has held because the product kept bending to the account. The Socratic coaching style was scrapped when it proved too hard for reps and rebuilt around tell-show-do at Ryan's direction. Scenarios were re-grounded in Rentokil's own objections. Reps asked to be told who they were talking to before a session started, and that was built. “I've been part of several trials of new technology... you guys have been far and away one of the most responsive groups we've worked with in terms of solving issues right away, jumping on with the reps.”
Residential leadership has now asked for its own pilot, deliberately designed with a matched comparison group so the result can be attributed to the coaching rather than to the attention. That pilot is being scoped now.
“I want our sales team to be so good at their craft that we just oust everybody in revenue.” — Ryan Bueler, Regional Sales Manager, Rentokil Terminix
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