Pedagogy
Science behind VendAce
VendAce is built by the rare trifecta: elite educators, ML experts, and people with deep sales knowledge - with pedagogy as the piece almost everyone else is missing. Most products only combine the last two; without educators, they cannot cause learning. Every learning mode exists because of a specific principle about how skills are actually acquired.
Never overload the learner
Working memory is severely limited. A learner who is asked, all at once, to understand a new skill, decide what to say, and work out how to phrase it will learn none of the three.
All at once
Three demands, zero learning
- Understand a new skill
- Decide what to say
- Work out how to phrase it
One demand at a time
Every learning mode isolates as few demands as possible
New demands are introduced one at a time, and never before the previous one has been trained. A few examples:
Less is more
The same principle that governs practice also governs feedback. A wall of commentary after every turn - or after every short roleplay - is as fatal to learning as no commentary at all. For learning, nearly always: less is more.
What the market does
Endless paragraphs after every call
A three-to-five minute roleplay is followed by endless paragraphs of summary and bullet after bullet of advice. Do not be impressed by the volume - more text is worse for learning, not better.
What the market does
Twelve to twenty times an hour
Practise for an hour and you might face that wall twelve to twenty times. Nobody can absorb that volume. You would barely give that much advice once in an hour - let alone after every short drill.
What the market does
A summary of what they already lived
Much of it restates what just happened. The learner already knows: they were on the call.
What VendAce does
Deliberately pick only a few
Even when a call has countless things worth flagging, VendAce deliberately picks only a few - on purpose - so the learner can actually take them in.
What VendAce does
Short. Few. Actionable.
Summary feedback stays short and sweet: a small set of positives and a small set of improvements. Explanations in-mode are a sentence or two - short, but precise.
What VendAce does
How - not merely what
Every note tells the learner how: which words, at which moment. Not slogans like "ask more discovery questions."
What VendAce does
New learning lives at the front of the brain
When you are learning something new, it sits in working memory - the front of the brain - before it becomes automatic. That capacity is tiny. Flood it with a page of advice and almost none sticks. Until a move is muscle memory: less is more.
How VendAce phrases it
Not this
“Ask more discovery questions before you pitch.”
This
Rather than jumping to price, begin with: “Before we go there - what happens today when a deal stalls after the first meeting?”
The brain must struggle to learn
This is not a VendAce invention. Retrieval practice is proven, top-tier learning science - the kind elite educators use in the best schools in the world. Reading a model answer off a screen builds nothing, because the brain never has to work. Skills form when a learner is made to retrieve, reconstruct, and perform under some difficulty.
Retrieve
The brain has to pull the framework back - not read it off a screen.
Reconstruct
The response is rebuilt under some difficulty, not copied from a model answer.
Perform
Effort at the point of performance is what converts a model answer into muscle memory.
A few examples in VendAce learning modes
Learning mode: Recall
The text disappears
Recall hides the text the moment you begin to speak - so delivery comes from memory, not the screen.
Learning mode: Coaching
Re-attempt, don't reveal
Coaching makes you re-attempt a failed response rather than showing you the answer.
Effort at the point of performance is what converts a model answer into muscle memory. Without retrieval practice - and without returning to it over time - the large majority of new training is lost within days.
Little and often - inside the product
Retrieval once is not enough. Without return, almost everything you train will be forgotten within a week. And we are sure you have felt that yourself - we certainly have in our own lives. That is Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve - and the scary version is what happens when you never come back.
Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve
Without spaced return, almost everything is gone within a week
How VendAce counters this
The algorithm spaces practice so skills do not sit untouched until they are gone. Two simple ideas drive it:
Focus
Up to three skills at a time
We typically believe up to three skills is optimal to hold in active focus at any moment - enough depth to improve, not so many that attention scatters. The algorithm decides which ones, and when to rotate.
Maintenance
Everything else still gets touched
Skills not in the active focus slot sit in maintenance. As long as a rep is logging in and using the product, the algorithm brings previously covered content back at spaced intervals - so nothing sits idle long enough to rot.
How focus and maintenance are routed in detail lives on the algorithm page.
Why each return matters more than the last
Reset to 100% - then the decline gets slower
Spaced practice is not just “do it again.” Each return lifts retention back to full - and the next fall is shallower than the one before. That is the pedagogy: small returns beat one-off blasts, and VendAce is built to cause those returns.
With spaced practice
Same axes: knowledge retention over days. Watch each practice spike back to 100% - and how the next fall gets shallower (and greener).
Each return resets retention - and the next decline is slower
From the founder
Why spaced return is not a product gimmick - it is how elite teaching actually works.
Nathan Salter Perez
Founder · former Deputy Head of Maths, Eton College
“As a teacher, spaced return and retrieval practice were the main things that got my students top grades. Most educators - even strong ones - teach a topic, test it, then move on, with maybe a catch-up every few months. By exam time, work from nine months ago has been untouched for nearly nine months - so students are almost starting from scratch. What I did instead: still teach topics in sequence, but every two weeks run mini-tests with a question or two from everything covered so far. Looking at the forgetting curve, the topic never had time to die. By the exam they had been touching it every fortnight for nine to twelve months. They did not need hours every two weeks - small touches, once it was understood the first time, were enough.”
The algorithm covers spacing inside the app. Showing up at spaced intervals is on the learner - that half of the story is how often to use VendAce.
Correct at the moment of error
Feedback delivered in a summary, long after the mistake, arrives too late to matter. In the learning modes Recall and Coaching, a response that falls short is corrected there and then.
01
Error
A response falls short - while the moment is still live.
That immediate loop of error, explanation, and corrected attempt is where the durable learning happens.
Generic - not this
“Ask a discovery question”
Generic advice is useless - if you don't know which question to ask or how to ask it in that moment, you have been told nothing.
Specific - this
Hints address the how
And the correction is always specific. VendAce hints address the how, not merely the what.
Teaching is the test of understanding
To find out whether someone truly understands a topic, have them teach it - any small misunderstanding surfaces immediately.
01
Review a flawed call
Critique mode puts the learner in front of a deliberately suboptimal sales conversation.
02
Find the departure
They must articulate where the rep departed from the elite move - not just that something felt off.
03
Explain why
And why that departure matters. It cannot be done without genuine mastery.
And for any salesperson looking toward management: Critique is a coaching skill in disguise. Learning to spot the elite move - and explain why a departure failed - is exactly what strong managers do on the floor.
Measure honestly
A training system that lets learners inflate their Ability Score on easy exercises is lying to them, and to their managers.
What an Ability Score is
Per skill. Not a vanity level.
Each skill a rep practises carries its own Ability Score. That score drives which learning modes they see, how hard those modes feel, and how ready they look - for that skill.
What must not move it
Training modes do not inflate it
Scaffolded practice is for learning. If easy drills moved the score, the number would flatter the ego and lie to the manager. So they do not.
Ability Score moves only on
Examination
No hints · no pausing · real time pressure - the closest thing to a live call.
Score the real thing
The Ability Score exists to answer one question honestly: how would this person perform on a live call for this skill? Examination is the only mode that is allowed to change that number - so the score stays realistic instead of drifting upward on training wheels.
Science is only useful if the setup can carry it.
Most training programmes fail before the science ever gets a chance.