Corporate Connections cut ramp time in half with Sunnyside.
100+ hours of AI buyer roleplay for every new hire, before they ever touched a real conversation.
- Industry
- Business networking
- Customer
- Nihar
Co-founder, Corporate Connections
About Corporate Connections
Corporate Connections is a business networking organization based in Hyderabad. They run events that bring professionals together, build real relationships, and grow a tight community of business leaders. As the team scaled, new-hire ramp became the bottleneck. New reps were spending weeks learning the pitch on real members and partners, and the cost of getting it wrong was high. They brought in Sunnyside to put every new hire through serious practice before any real conversation.
The challenge
New-hire ramp was the bottleneck. The team was growing, but the way reps got ready was the same as it had always been:
- Shadowing senior reps for weeks before going live.
- Role-play in standup that nobody really committed to.
- Inconsistent feedback. Different managers coached differently.
- Real members and partners became the training ground, and conversations got burned.
“The simulations feel like actual buyer calls. Same objections and curveballs you'd get from a real prospect.”
Why Sunnyside
- Voice roleplay against AI buyers with realistic backstories, accents, and objections. Not chat-only or scripted decision trees.
- Every practice call automatically scored against a configurable rubric, with transcript-backed feedback the rep can review on their own.
- Per-rep competency tracking across discovery, objection handling, closing, and rapport, so managers see who needs help where without auditing every call.
- Set-up that fit how the team already works: calendar prep, Slack alerts, and CRM context out of the box.
How they rolled it out
Onboarding took about a week. Sunnyside's team helped shape the rubric around how Corporate Connections actually qualifies and closes. The rest was plugging it into the existing workflow.
- Built scenarios for their two core conversations: partnership pitches with brands and venues for events, and member-acquisition calls with HNIs.
- Used recordings of their top reps as the seed. The AI buyers picked up the same nuances, objections, and decision-making style the best closers actually face. The playbook stopped living in their heads.
- Set a "sim before real" requirement for new hires: practice the conversation a dozen times before walking into a live one.
“Sunnyside cut our ramp time in half. My reps walk in more confident, and they're closing more deals.”
Results
- New reps started holding partnership conversations at the level of senior closers. Same questions, same comfort with the nuances.
- Member-acquisition calls with HNIs improved. Reps walked in prepared for the specific objections and decision-making patterns the best reps had been navigating for years.
- The team's best-rep playbook stopped living in 1:1 ride-alongs and started living inside the simulator. Every new hire trains against it from day one.