What's really holding sales reps back — and what can be done about it?
enalio152
Interviews completed
35h
DSR conversation
4 days
Launch to report
4
Parallel studies
About M-KOPA
M-KOPA is a leading fintech and connected devices platform serving underbanked consumers across Africa. Its Direct Sales Representatives (DSRs) are the frontline of the business — and understanding what helps or holds them back is central to growth, training, and retention.
The challenge
M-KOPA partnered with Learn.ink to understand the real barriers its Direct Sales Representatives face: not only from manager observation or performance data, but directly from the people doing the job.
The team wanted to hear from both new and experienced reps, including Swahili-speaking DSRs, to understand what training works, what gets in the way, and how support needs differ by experience level, gender, tenure, and sales background.
They needed the depth of open-ended conversation, but at the speed and scale required for operational decision-making.
The solution
Enalio ran four parallel AI-powered interview studies with DSRs across experience levels and languages: new and experienced reps, in both English and Swahili.
In total, we completed 152 in-depth interviews, representing 35 hours of DSR conversation, collected across four days.
Running interviews in both English and Swahili allowed M-KOPA and Learn.ink to hear directly from reps who might otherwise be underrepresented in traditional research.
What the client received
Live results dashboard
As interviews completed, our AI annotation pipeline surfaced themes automatically across all 152 transcripts, with quotes and evidence linked back to individual DSRs. The team could explore patterns by experience level, gender, tenure, language, and prior sales experience, and use virtual group chats to examine respondent perspectives by theme — interrogating the data, not just reading it.
Interactive intelligence report
M-KOPA and Learn.ink received a structured synthesis comparing new and experienced DSRs, men and women, and other relevant groups, with key themes, demographic breakdowns, and strategic recommendations grounded in the full dataset.
The report was not a static document. The team could ask it questions and get answers drawn from the evidence: what new DSRs struggle with most, how support needs differ across groups, what helps reps perform better, and where training delivery could be improved.
Why it mattered
152 real DSR conversations. 35 hours of interviews. 4 days from launch to finished report.
Enalio gave M-KOPA and Learn.ink the depth of qualitative workforce research at a speed and scale that fit how operational decisions actually get made — helping the team identify where training, support, and field enablement could become more targeted.
“Enalio is an incredible tool that gathers data, like interviews, in a scalable and accessible way. It allows us to assess people's skills at scale, with participants able to answer questions in their native language using either text or voice notes. I also love how interactive the analysis is — the chat feature lets you ask questions and instantly surfaces the relevant insights. On top of that, every analysis includes references, so you can easily go back to the original responses and verify the findings.
“This research gave us something we'd been missing — the frontline truth, straight from our DSRs rather than filtered through managers or performance dashboards. It gave us genuinely new knowledge and confirmed things we'd long suspected but never had the evidence to act on.
We've already started. Our onboarding and wider training materials are being rebuilt around what reps actually told us — above all their appetite for practical, immediately usable training, which came through as the single strongest theme across 152 interviews. That clarity lets us design training that is bespoke and genuinely high-impact, rather than one-size-fits-all.
What impressed me most was the speed: 152 conversations, collected, processed, and turned into a clear report in four days. And the report isn't static — you can interrogate it directly and it answers straight from the evidence, which makes engaging with the findings genuinely interactive.
Sincere thanks to the team. This has set us up to serve our frontline better than ever.
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