Sales Role Play

Sales training is defined as the process of equipping your sales people with the product knowledge, selling skills and positive mindset to successfully close profitable deals.  Role playing is an excellent way to ensure all your salespeople are ready. Here are 4 role playing scenarios to consider including in your sales training session.

Overcoming objections

Sales people generally hear the same objections time and time again. They often relate to cost, budget cycle and the incumbent vendor. There should be a common rebuttal to every objection. A good way to role play is to choose 3 objections, provide the “approved” rebuttal for each objection and then have the sales team present their own personal version of the rebuttal.

Utilize External Resources

In a competitive sales market, having access to an outside point of view can be priceless. Whether it’s attending a conference or workshop as a group, or bringing in an outside speaker, the list of topics is endless: 

  • Writing better emails
  • Social media use for prospecting and sales
  • Getting the most out of your sales enablement
  • Motivational speeches about overcoming adversity
  • Planning each day to be purposeful and effective

Elevator pitch contests

Having the elevator pitch ready to share at any point is important. Using this framework, have each sales person present their elevator pitch to the entire team. The pitch should be: 

  • Understandable: The pitch should leave everyone with a clear understanding of the company, product, or service. There should be no tech talk at this point.
  • Concise: It should be brief and straightforward. Ideally, it can be presented in in under a minute.
  • Irrefutable: Be certain that the claims cannot be refuted or questioned. State clearly who you are and what you do in such a way that no one can refute or deny your claims.
  • Attractive: Briefly walk through the risk and reward equation for the end user.

Dissect Success Stories

What are the top sales people doing differently? It’s natural to want to know who is doing it and how they are doing it. Sales meetings are a great environment for sharing these stories.

Pick the top (recent) sale and have the rep present how they did it – in great detail. 

  • What objections did they have to overcome? How did they do it? 
  • How did they position value?  
  • Did they try a new tactic that worked well? 
  • Share the case study

These exercises are often a catalyst for other team members to try a new approach in their next sales call.

<h2>Impact of Sales Training</h2>

Impact of Sales Training

Effective sales training has a direct correlation to business results. In fact, McKinsey confirms that strong sales training directly relates to strong sales performance. Because of its impact, it’s important to choose the right training for your sales organization.

Choosing and executing the best sales training ideas for your sales organization can result in higher opportunity win rates, claiming top value through profitable pricing and sales volume, and a boost in abilities to both fill pipelines and grow accounts.

The right training will make your sales team more effective and efficient in pursuing their goals. Your sales people will come to understand how to stand out from the rest, how to attract customers, and how to build support for your business initiatives. They will also gain the skills to locate new customers and get great results. The best sales training ideas can help your team better prepare and successfully execute your sales plan.

What is the importance of sales enablement?

In many organizations, sales training falls under the umbrella of sales enablement. What is sales enablement? In a nutshell, is is equipping sales people with the right resources to shorten the sales cycle, increase win rates, and sign bigger deals. Sales enablement, as a function, evolved in response to the evolution of the enterprise buyer. With so much information available online, enterprise buyers are in more control of the buying process than ever before. In many cases, buyers can be more than halfway through their journey before they engage a seller. 

The essence of sales enablement is ongoing sales training and coaching.  Because sales enablement is providing customer insights, content and coaching to your sales team throughout the enterprise selling process. Sales enablement is the process of providing your enterprise sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers. 

Ultimately, the goal of sales enablement is to align the interdependent elements of sales, marketing, customer support, product management, brand management, legal, and human resources to boost seller productivity and improve the buyer experience. In a nutshell, sales enablement strategy is to provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

What are the Advantages of Showpad’s Sales Enablement Software?

Simply stated, Showpad’s sales enablement technology makes selling easier. The Showpad platform streamlines onboarding, training, and coaching, helping get new sales hires selling quickly. With scalable training materials available on any device, new hires can access what they need anywhere, any time.  Showpad can reduce the onboarding time for a new salesperson by 25%.

Showpad puts the right information at every salesperson’s fingertips. The platform saves sales reps time by making relevant content easy to find, personalize and share on any device. Your sales team will get more effective, too: with Showpad, sales reps have the training, content, and support they need to exceed buyer expectations every time. Showpad can lead to an increase in sales of 10% or more. 

Showpad helps sales and marketing teams collaborate efficiently to produce the content buyers need. Our platform centralizes all sales collateral so it’s easy to access, update and share materials. Powerful analytics identify the most impactful content so marketing can focus on producing only the best, most relevant content for sales. This can result in a 25% increase in productivity. Forrester analyzed the costs associated with Showpad (including licensing, training and implementation) against the platform’s benefits over the course of three years. They found the platform shows a return on investment of 516%. 

The Showpad Sales Enablement Platform is ideally placed to guide companies through the challenges they face by leveraging a unified platform that combines content and coaching. Digitization of content and continuous access to training will help companies scale quickly while providing experiences that delight their customers and win business.

With Showpad’s Sales Enablement solution, marketers can centralize, organize, and distribute content intuitively, ensuring all content is consistent and compliant with messaging and branding guidelines. Salespeople and distributors can quickly pull up the right information at the right time to present or share with prospects. All content is updated in real-time, so your sales team always has access to the latest information in the field, reducing errors and miscommunication. 

Showpad also offers security and content control features that allow marketers to lock down confidential information and ensure presentations meet requirements, such as the mandatory inclusion of potential harmful effects and usage instructions. Through Showpad’s in-depth analytics dashboard, marketers can see how their content was used by salespeople, and engaged with by prospects, in order to optimize content creation. Sales managers gain insight into top performers’ best practices so they can achieve maximum results. Showpad supports your enterprise revenue teams so they can be prepared better than ever before, create engaging experiences your buyers will always remember, and make your company generate more revenue.

Want to learn more about Showpad?

Contact us for a personal assessment of your enablement journey.