What is Sales Role Playing?
Sales role playing is a means to develop and coach your sales team. Sales role playing is based on real-life sales situations that closely replicate what your sales people may experience in actual selling. Sales role playing allows your sales reps to interact with other sales reps who are playing the role of different customer types. Sales role playing gives your sales people an opportunity to ask questions and learn how to navigate objections and other roadblocks they may come across in selling and negotiating deals.
Sales role playing is effective because quizzing oneself on new material, by reciting it aloud from memory or trying to explain it to a coworker, is a much more successful way to learn new information than re-reading it, according to research.
What are Sales Role Play Scripts?
Sales role play scripts should be based on real-life scenarios of what your sales team is likely to encounter. By making use of sales role play scripts that address real-world sales challenges, you’ll be on your way to developing a successful sales team. Here are 4 general scenarios for sales role play scripts:
Scenario 1 – The “I’m-interested-but” customer. This script raises the common objections your sales people are likely to hear day in and day out, and helps your reps learn how to deal with those common objections. Common objections pertain to lack of understanding of value, price, authority to make a decision and timing of a decision.
Scenario 2 – The argumentative customer. Not all customer experience is positive, so it’s critical that you test the patience of your sales people. You do so by bringing an unpleasant conversation in one of your sales role playing scripts. The argumentative customer role play script can include complaints about delivery times, product attributes and pricing – all typical.
Scenario 3 – The detail-oriented customer. This role play script should test how much your sales team knows about your company and its products. The script must include very specific questions that require extensive product knowledge – and a need to do further research to find all the information this customer demands.
Scenario 4 – The comparison customer. Your sales people will likely encounter prospective customers who know all the details of both your products and your competitors. These customers demand detailed comparisons to be convinced that your offering is best.To ensure your reps’ preparedness, show them in your sales training role playing scenarios even the smallest differences of your product from its competitors.
What is the impact of Sales Role Playing?
Effective sales role playing has a direct correlation to business results. In fact, McKinsey confirms that strong sales training and role playing directly relates to strong sales performance. Because of its impact, it’s important to choose the right training for your sales organization.
What is 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. Enterprise 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, enterprise buyers can be more than halfway through their journey before they engage a seller.
The essence of enterprise sales enablement is ongoing sales training and coaching. Because enterprise sales enablement is providing customer insights, content and coaching to your sales team throughout the enterprise selling process. Enterprise 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 enterprise 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, enterprise 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.
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