Fuel Sales Academy’s Secret to Better Sales Hires? Hyperbound Reps Are 20% More Likely to Succeed

About Fuel Sales Academy

Fuel Sales Academy is a mission-driven sales training and placement organization that helps early-career and transitioning professionals break into B2B software sales, especially within the education and edtech space. Through a paid training program, participants test into sales roles by completing an immersive curriculum that blends instruction, repetition, and real-world practice.

Each month, 70–80 trainees move through Fuel’s live or self-paced onboarding experience, and over 1,000 individuals pass through the academy annually. With a growing number of client accounts and a large internal coaching team, Fuel needed a way to maintain training quality without burning out their managers.

This story features Lonnie Hansen, one of the first coaches at Fuel and a long-time leader in the development of their scalable training operations.

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🚧 The Challenge: High-Volume Hiring and Increased Quality?

Fuel Sales Academy isn’t your average sales training program. It’s a full-stack hiring engine; one that screens, trains, and places aspiring SDRs in SaaS companies across the country (with an emphasis on education and edtech). But as they scaled, a critical problem emerged:

Too many applicants, too little time.

“We were manually evaluating dozens, sometimes hundreds, of candidates each month. We have a high bar. But the process to test for raw talent, soft skills, coachability… it was time-consuming and resource-heavy.”
- Lonnie Hansen

Fuel Sales Academy’s team ran monthly live training cohorts with 50+ participants, layered on top of a hands-on onboarding process and 4–5 coaching sessions per manager. New candidates had to “test into” the program, but keeping that bar high was starting to drain bandwidth.

“Our managers were spending 10+ hours per month just trying to assess whether someone was ready. And even then, it wasn’t always predictive.”
- Lonnie Hansen

The challenge wasn’t just speed, it was hiring the best people, faster.

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💡 The Breakthrough: Scalable Skill Assessment with Hyperbound

Fuel Sales Academy turned to Hyperbound to help screen candidates through real-world simulations, giving every applicant a chance to prove themselves in action.

Instead of relying solely on shadowing or subjective assessments, the team could now assign candidates Hyperbound bots designed to test the specific qualities they look for: professionalism, adaptability, empathy, and SaaS fluency.

“We don’t care if someone sounds polished. We care if they can think on their feet. The bots let us evaluate that at scale.”
- Lonnie Hansen

The practice calls weren’t just one-off tests. Fuel Sales Academy used Hyperbound to track improvement over time, see how reps handled increasingly complex calls, and compare candidates with objective scoring.

Even better? The simulations mimicked the tone of Fuel Sales Academy’s actual buyers (realistic, but not combative) so the experience matched the sales environments reps would later enter.

“It’s not one-size-fits-all. We were able to design the bots to reflect our sales approach. And when something didn’t feel quite right? The team helped us tweak it fast.”
- Lonnie Hansen

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🚀 The Transformation: Higher-Quality Reps in Less Time

Hyperbound became a core part of  Fuel Sales Academy’s interview funnel and the impact was immediate:

✅ 33% faster candidate evaluation, cutting the hiring cycle from 60 days to just 40.
✅ 20% higher chance of long term success
✅ 10+ hours/month saved per manager, giving coaches more time to invest in high-potential reps.
‍✅ 13% increase in first-month meetings, showing stronger performance right out of the gate.

But the stat Lonnie kept coming back to?

“Reps who train in Hyperbound have a 15–20% higher chance of long-term success. We’re not just moving faster, we’re picking the right people.”
- Lonnie Hansen

Candidates who struggled often opted out early, saving Fuel Sales Academy time and ensuring companies only saw reps who were genuinely ready. And candidates who succeeded? They had already proven they could handle real sales conversations.

“We’re building salespeople who can stick. Hyperbound helps us find those people, not just the ones who look good on paper.”
- Lonnie Hansen

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🌟 Feature Highlight: Custom Bots Built Around Fuel’s Sales Philosophy

One of the biggest unlocks for Fuel was how tailored the bots could be.

“We gave the team a huge doc with our process, tone, philosophy, and they built a bot that felt like us. It wasn’t robotic. It was dynamic, with room to adjust based on what the rep said.”
- Lonnie Hansen

That flexibility was key. Fuel Sales Academy needed to test a candidate's ability to: 

• Discover pain
• Show empathy
• Demonstrate coachability
• Handle nuance

Hyperbound made that measurable and scalable.

“And when we need to change something, add a new objection, adjust the tone, we don’t wait weeks. The team helps us update it in real time.”
- Lonnie Hansen

The Fuel Sales Academy team also praised Hyperbound’s customer support, especially Keshav, who’s become a trusted partner in shaping their hiring workflows.

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For Fuel Sales Academy, Hyperbound isn’t “some training tool.” It’s a candidate quality engine, one that screens for potential, sharpens skills, and scales hiring without sacrificing rigor.

“We’ve got 70–80 people going through the system every month. Every single one gets real practice. And we get real signals fast.”
- Lonnie Hansen

In a world where sales talent is hard to spot and even harder to scale, Hyperbound helps Fuel Sales Academy do both.